A muddy trail led beside the narrow, surging waters of the Sihl. A handful of windows in buildings on both sides of the river gave the only light. Jason kept his Sig in his hand. He passed under the low stone overpass of a pedestrian bridge, where the concrete footings were painted over with graffiti. He heard voices, but when he illuminated the bridge wall with his flashlight, he saw only two drug addicts shooting up, their pale faces frozen like deer in a car’s headlights.
Bourne knew where he needed to go for answers. He remembered what the man in Paris had told him. Vandal needed a cleaner for a particularly bloody scene—apparently a man you’d used yourself in the past.
Gabriel Wildhaber. He lived here.
Beyond the bridge, a series of apartment buildings rose over the river. Their ground-floor windows, peeking out through stone foundations, were covered with bars like jail cells. A black drainpipe led down one of the walls to the grassy riverbank. Jason shimmied up the pipe, bracing his feet on the brackets, then climbed a chain-link fence and dropped onto the small patio adjoining the first apartment building. It was drab, with a few picnic tables covered with foil ashtrays and half-empty beer steins. A couple of umbrellas dripped rainwater. He crossed to the wooden door that led into the building. It was locked, but with a shove of his shoulder, he forced it inward.
He found himself in a corridor that smelled of mildew and weed. The beige carpet under his feet was damp. In the hallway, a series of doors led to river-facing apartments, and a stairwell led to the upper floors. Slowly, with the wooden stairs groaning under his feet, he climbed to the topmost floor of the building. Directly opposite the stairs, he saw the door to apartment 37.
Gabriel Wildhaber lived in that apartment. Bourne didn’t remember it. He just knew it.
No sound came through the door of the flat. It was late, almost three in the morning. Silently, he tried the handle and found it open, which surprised him. He kept himself behind the adjacent wall for cover, then kicked the door inward with a tap of his boot. The hinges squealed, giving him away.
From the darkness, he heard a man’s voice. “Cain. Bitte komm herein.”
Bourne entered the dark apartment and leveled his Sig at a sofa underneath the tall, narrow windows. A man sat there, nothing but a shadow barely distinguishable in the lights from the other side of the river. He had his hands up, his fingers spread wide. Bourne approached him, making the man squint as he shined the flashlight into his face. Wildhaber wore nothing but boxer shorts on his tall, scrawny frame, and the sofa cushions hid no weapons. Slowly, eyes on Jason, the man lowered his arms. Then he reached forward to the table in front of him and retrieved a hand-rolled joint.
“They have men out front,” Wildhaber said, taking a long drag. “Did they see you?”
“I came from the river side.”
“Smart.”
“You were expecting me,” Bourne said. “Who told you? Was it the wine steward at the Drei Alpenhäuser?”
“Ja, Helmut said I could probably expect a visit. But if I know that, then they know it, too. We don’t have much time.”
“Who are they?”
“You think I know? Cain has plenty of enemies in his past. Take your pick.” He eyed Jason from behind heavy black glasses. “Ah, but you don’t remember any of it, do you?”
Bourne grabbed a wooden chair and sat down in front of the man. He lowered his Sig but kept it loosely in his hand. In the dim light, he could see the injuries that Wildhaber had suffered. One leg was in a cast from the knee down. The scars of burn marks littered his chest, and his smile underneath a wispy mustache was missing a couple of teeth. Worst of all, the fingers on his left hand were bloody nubs, missing beyond the knuckles.
“I’m sorry about what they did to you.”
Wildhaber shrugged. He put down the joint and shook his head back, tossing long, greasy black hair out of his face. He was in his forties, but he looked sixty, with skin hanging gray and wrinkled on his frame.
“Thank God for Vandal,” he said. “I’d be dead if she hadn’t showed up when she did. She warned you?”
“I got the message.”
“Well, you’re wasting your time with me, Cain. I don’t know anything that will help you. There were three of them who worked me over, but I don’t know who they are or why they want you. Only one of them did the talking. His accent sounded Bavarian, for what it’s worth. Beyond that, they were too busy with their work.”
“I’m not interested in them,” Bourne said.
Wildhaber cocked his head. His eyes shot nervously around the apartment, drifting toward the kitchenette. “No?”
“I’m interested in you. I want to know why you’re lying to me, Gabriel.”
The man paled. “Lying? I wouldn’t—”
Bourne raised the gun again and pointed it at the man’s face, cutting him off. “They came to you because you know me. But I don’t know you. You’re a cleaner, but I don’t remember ever using your…services. If I did, then the odds are that the job has something to do with the men who are trying to find me. You’re clever, Gabriel. You’ve certainly made the same connection. So why are you hiding it?”
Fingers trembling, Wildhaber reached for the joint again. He closed his eyes as he inhaled, and then he stubbed it out in the ashtray. “Yeah, okay, I did a job for you. Ten years ago. It was messy. Ugly.”
“What was it?”
Wildhaber hesitated, and Bourne pushed the barrel of the Sig into the man’s forehead. “What was it?”
“Fuck, Cain, don’t you get it? You’re not supposed to know!”
“What are you talking about?”
“You came to me ten years ago with a job,” the man said, “but it wasn’t just you. Nash Rollins was with you.”
Nash.
Jason wasn’t surprised.
“The job,” Bourne said.
Wildhaber held up his hands as Bourne’s finger curled around the trigger of the Sig. “Look, look, listen to me. Ten years ago, I knew Nash. Everybody did. But you were new. Smart, fucking talented, but green. You were on edge over what you’d done. Jumpy, pacing back and forth. You kept talking about a girl.”
“What girl?”
“Do you think I asked? I don’t care about shit like that. Nash told me to take care of the scene. Clean it up. So I did. End of story. You were in and out of Zurich for years after that, but I didn’t deal with you again. I heard you got a new identity. Jason Bourne. Except then the word was, you got shot. You lost your memory. Crazy, right? I didn’t know whether to believe it. I figured maybe it was some kind of op you were running. But then Nash showed up at my door again.”
“Nash did. Why?”
“He confirmed what happened to you, about that bullet that cleaned your clock. You didn’t remember anything about your past. Thing is, Nash wanted to keep it that way. He said if you ever showed up here asking about that job I did, I should play dumb. I should pretend I didn’t know you and I never worked for you. He gave me ten thousand dollars to make sure I told you nothing.”
“For God’s sake, why? Why keep me in the dark?”
Wildhaber shook his head. “He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask. I was just as happy not to see Cain again. People who deal with you tend to get dead. So I made sure I stayed clear. That’s the way it was until those boys showed up looking for you.”
Bourne got up and went to the windows. He could barely see the dark ribbon of the Sihl below him. “Tell me about the job.”
“Hey, Nash said—”
“I’ll deal with Nash.”
Wildhaber sighed. “I need more scotch for this.”
The man pushed up from the sofa and dragged a crutch under one of his shoulders. He limped to the kitchenette on the other side of the apartment, where half a bottle of Johnett Swiss Single Malt sat on the counter, with a shot glass already beside it. Wildhaber poured it to the rim and drank it down in a single swallow.
“There’s a chalet in the mountains near Engelberg,” Wildhaber told him. “It’s located up a crazy steep road.”
Jason squeezed his eyes shut. The chalet!
He felt the rush of adrenaline again, the pounding in his head. He was back on the mountain road, dirt scraping under his tires, glass shattering.
You are not David Webb! You are Cain!
He saw the woman tied to a chair. Monika.
And he saw more. He saw everything. The events at the chalet rushed back into his mind like Niagara pouring over the cliffs.
“I went down to Engelberg,” Wildhaber went on. “It was a fucking slaughterhouse. Four dead bodies. One was a professor at the college. The other three were kids. Not one of them older than twenty. You—”
“I killed them.”
Wildhaber reached for the scotch again. “Yeah. You remember that?”
“I remember now,” David Webb said.
“I am here to swear my life and loyalty to the cause,” David announced.
He placed his hands on either side of Monika’s head and prepared to break the neck of the woman he loved. The chair rattled as she struggled against the bonds that held her in place, and her muffled screams filled his ears. His blood pulsed, a pounding in his skull.
Five men.
Five threats to kill.
Gavin Wright was closest, two steps away. The three boys were spread around the room, all of them with rifles pointed at him. And the leader sat in a chair by the stairs, hidden by the shadows and a cloud of cigarette smoke. David had no weapon, no gun, no knife, just his hands pressed against Monika’s soft face.
But he was Cain. This was what he’d been trained for.
Turn your disadvantage into an advantage.
Treadstone.
He tightened his grip on Monika, feeling her fear at what he would do next. He didn’t look down at her; he removed all expression from his face. Soldiers felt nothing. He let his gaze travel coldly from one man to the next and then finally to the man in the corner, the man he couldn’t see.
Below him, where Monika’s legs were tied, he braced his left foot against the rear left leg of the chair and positioned the side of his right foot against the other leg.
Noise. Noise was a distraction.
Cain shouted. His voice was like the bellow of a fierce beast. He swung Monika’s head sharply between his hands, but he used his elbow to twist her shoulders, softening the blow and making it harmless. Simultaneously, he kicked out the right leg of the chair with his foot and drove both Monika and the broken chair to the ground.
For an instant, to the men watching, it looked as if he’d killed her so ferociously that the chair had collapsed.
An instant was all he needed.
“Stay down,” he whispered in Monika’s ear.
Then he grabbed the broken chair leg from the floor. Gavin took a step closer to examine the scene, which was what Cain expected him to do. The man loomed above him, and Cain swung the chair leg, nails protruding, into the side of Gavin’s head.
The professor screamed. The man’s finger was on the trigger of the rifle, and Cain shoved the barrel away and squeezed his own finger into the trigger guard, spraying wild automatic fire around the chalet. The burst struck one of the students—the math prodigy, Lukas—and nearly decapitated him with a dozen bullets through his neck.
The other two boys began firing back with roars of fury. Cain jerked Gavin in front of him, letting the professor absorb the impact of round after round, eviscerating his body. Grabbing Gavin’s rifle, Cain launched the dead body into the air, then threw himself to the ground and laid down a steady rain of hate. He’d never been so calm, so focused. Bullets laced the air around him. The walls behind him erupted in stone and dust; windows exploded over his head. Cain simply fired, arcing the barrel back and forth. He took out the first threat—they were threats, not people, not teenagers—with a tight circle of fire to the chest, then the second threat with a round between his eyes, and then the third threat as the boy charged him, firing and firing, his youth and adrenaline making his aim wild. Cain let the bullets fly like shrapnel, then shot him in the knee and watched him fall. As he landed hard, Cain drew a knife from a scabbard on Gavin’s body and lifted up the boy’s head and opened up his throat with a single deep slash.
They were all dead.
Threats neutralized. Targets down.
Monika lay face down on the floor, vomiting into her gag. But she was alive.
Cain got to his feet and focused on the last man. The leader. The man with that strangely familiar voice that he couldn’t place.
He knew that man!
But he was gone. The chair was empty.
Cain ran to the chalet window and saw the Ferrari 458 Italia already racing away down the mountain road.
Bourne had closed his eyes as the memory stormed over him.
Mistake.
He heard movement on the other side of the apartment. His instincts kicked in just as Gabriel Wildhaber unleashed fire from a B&T A1 that he’d yanked from a drawer in the kitchenette.
“They’ll pay for your corpse!” Wildhaber shouted. “After what they did to me, I deserve something! Le Renouveau will pay!”
But Bourne knew—how did he know?—that Wildhaber was left-handed. That meant that his gun hand had been chopped to nothing by the men who tortured him. The man used his right hand to shoot, but his high, drunken aim missed repeatedly. A bullet took out one of the windows over the river. Another landed in the sofa. Another nicked the coffee table and sent up a spray of razor-sharp splinters, and Bourne felt blood on his cheek. He stayed where he was, a tree rooted to the ground as Wildhaber missed again. Then he feinted left and took a step right, raised his Sig, and fired a single round.
On the other side of the room, Wildhaber clutched at his throat. His gun dropped from his hand. The bullet severed his spine, and he fell forward, choking. Dying.
Bourne didn’t wait for the end. He was already out the door. If killers were outside the building, they’d heard the shots. They’d be coming for him up the stairs.
As he made his escape, Wildhaber’s last words chased him all the way back to the river.
They’ll pay for your corpse.
Le Renouveau will pay.