“If we’re going to find your sister, we have to start here,” Jason told Johanna. “This is where it all began ten years ago.”
He drove a white Audi sedan along a narrow road that led into the mountain town of Engelberg. On his left, deep green hills rose sharply into the trees. On his right, A-frame log homes dotted the meadows, and beyond them, a saw-toothed line of rocky, impossibly beautiful mountains rose over the valley. The highest of the peaks, Mount Titlis, still wore a white cap of snow even in the summer.
Engelberg.
He’d lived here for almost a year in his twenties, and he’d taught in the classrooms of Stiftsschule Obwalden. Everything about the town was familiar to him. He could map out all of the streets in his mind; he knew the vista around each turn. He could rattle off the names of the hotels, bars, and cafés and describe them down to the last detail. And yet he also didn’t know the town at all. When he tried to remember his life here, his memory descended into a fog like low clouds obscuring the mountains.
“Did you ever visit Monika here?” Bourne asked. “Do you know anything about her life in town?”
Johanna shook her head. “Only what she told me. I was living in Chicago then. I saw Monika in Zurich during my trip that spring. We traveled a little bit around the country, but she didn’t take me here. She didn’t even want me to meet you until I pestered her about it. Honestly, I thought that was a little strange.”
“How long did she work at the college?”
“Not long. A few months, I think. She arrived midterm. That was right before the summer when she disappeared.”
“How did she happen to find a job here?”
“I don’t really know. I remember her talking about sending out dozens of applications. Literature majors can’t exactly be choosy about jobs. I figured she found a place that was willing to hire her, so she said yes. Anyway, she must have met you pretty soon after she got here, because she started talking about you right away.”
Jason said nothing. He kept an eye on the rearview mirror.
“Where did she live? At the school?”
“Yes. She said all the teachers did. There wasn’t much privacy. I remember her saying the two of you had to find a hotel when you wanted to have sex. Or a mountain field if the weather was good. I thought that was kind of hot.” Johanna glanced across the Audi and pinned him with her blue eyes. “It’s so strange. I can’t believe your mind could just…erase her like that.”
“The bullet erased everything,” he told her. Then he studied the familiar mountains through the car windows and clarified, “Actually, that’s not true. It was more like a neutron bomb that killed the people and left everything else standing. I remember places, politics, history, all of those things. But myself? The people I knew? The things we did? That’s almost all gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
Quickly, Johanna reached across the car and caressed his leg with her fingertips and then drew her hand back.
“I’ve learned to live with it,” Jason added, enjoying the warmth where her fingers had been. “For better or for worse, it makes everything that I experience now more intense. My senses are sharper. I have to wrestle with my emotions to keep them controlled.”
“Why does that matter?” Johanna asked. “Why can’t you just feel what you feel?”
He didn’t answer because no one from outside his life could understand the rules. The rules were about staying alive.
Emotion kills.
Treadstone.
When the silence dragged out, Johanna turned away to watch the mountains outside the car. Her mouth puckered, as if she wanted to say something more but didn’t dare cross the line. He sensed a kind of intimacy between them, a growing attraction, but he’d been burned too many times to let anything happen.
Then he saw her eyes shift to the side-view mirror on the Audi. Her body stiffened with concern.
“Jason, there’s a car back there.”
“I know.”
“I think it’s been there a while. I saw it before.”
“Yes, we’re being followed. A black Mercedes picked us up outside Wolfenschiessen.”
Johanna swung back sharply. “Oh my God! Is it them? Have they found us?”
“I’m not sure. The driver’s good. He mostly hangs back out of sight, but every now and then, he pulls close enough to make sure we haven’t turned off the road. If it’s the ones chasing me, they had plenty of opportunities in the last ten miles to run us off the road. But they haven’t done that. That makes me think it’s someone else.”
“Who else could it be?”
He frowned. “I don’t know.”
“What do we do?”
“We set a trap for them,” Bourne said. “Hold on tight.”
He checked the mirror. The Mercedes had dropped back again, and he couldn’t see it behind them. Immediately, he leaned his foot into the accelerator, and the Audi jumped forward with the growl of a cheetah. They were close to town, where the road was barely wider than the car. Smoothly, Jason navigated a series of tight turns and then shot down a wooded straightaway past the crowns of evergreens rising out of the valley. As they cleared the forest, the granite cliffs became a blur. His speedometer crept to eighty miles an hour.
“We’re close to a hotel,” Jason said. “The Waldegg.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do. When I pull off the road, go into the hotel and straight through to the restaurant on the other side. Get a table and wait for me there.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Find out who’s in the Mercedes.”
He shot around the next curve. Ahead of him, he saw the letters of the hotel sign looming over a building that hugged the cliff on the right side of the road. He stood on the brakes, dragging the Audi to a stop and jerking off Schwandstrasse into a parking place near the hotel’s porte cochere. He glanced in the mirror. The Mercedes hadn’t caught up with them yet, but they only had a few seconds.
“Quickly, go into the restaurant,” he told her.
Johanna climbed out of the car and hurried through the hotel’s glass door. Jason shut off the engine, then got out and ran to the end of the building’s flagstone wall. He took cover around the corner in a gap between the wall and a wooden balcony that hung over the cliff. Mountain peaks encircled the horizon, and the houses of Engelberg filled the green valley below him. He waited. Less than a minute later, the roar of a car engine cut through the cool air. A vehicle approached, going fast, then peeled off the road with a screech of rubber when the driver spotted the Audi at the hotel.
Bourne drew his Sig.
For a long time, two or three minutes, the Mercedes engine idled in the porte cochere. Then he heard the click of a car door opening and closing. A strange singsong tap of footsteps, slow, not fast, headed for the hotel entrance. One man. Jason took a step toward the corner of the building, but drew back as the engine of the Mercedes raced again. He pushed against the wall and watched as the car sped away from the hotel and down the hillside.
Someone had gotten out of the car.
Someone was in the hotel.
Jason hid his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, fingers still curled around the Sig. He checked the road and made his way to the hotel door. Inside, the lobby was empty. The man from the Mercedes was already gone. Bourne continued to the back of the hotel, where a café overlooked the broad vista of the valley and mountains. A few tables were filled, but he didn’t see Johanna. He checked the shadows of the doorway that led to the rest of the hotel, but she’d disappeared.
His gaze went to the outdoor patio, and he saw a man being seated at a table near the railing. The man propped a cane on the chair next to him as he sat down heavily. He was in his fifties and small, with deeply tanned skin that looked as tough and inflexible as a leather hide. His nose was long with a prominent bump, his eyebrows bushy, his hard face dotted with lines and liver spots. His wiry, greased-back gray hair struggled to cover his head.
It was a man David Webb had met at the Drei Alpenhäuser ten years ago when he learned about an organization called Treadstone. It was a man who limped with a cane because he’d been shot on the boardwalk in Quebec City.
Jason knew that because he’d been the one who shot him.
It was Nash Rollins.
“Jason,” Nash said as Bourne took a seat across the table from his Treadstone handler. “Don’t you love the mountain air? It makes me feel years younger.”
Bourne noted that the other tables on the patio were empty, giving them privacy. They sat on fur-draped chairs with a cool breeze billowing up from the valley. The town of Engelberg spread through the flatland below them, and green fields rose into the craggy peaks that encircled the area. He could see the towers and cables of chairlifts that brought skiers up the winter mountains.
“It’s a beautiful place,” Bourne agreed.
A waiter arrived at the table with a bread basket and two cups of double espresso, and Jason realized that Nash had been expecting him. Nash thanked the man in flawless German, then admired the view and sipped his coffee.
“We met here once before,” Nash told him when the waiter was gone. “I suppose you don’t remember that.”
“Ten years ago?”
“That’s right. You reached out and said there was an emergency. You needed a cleaner.”
“Because I’d just killed four men,” Bourne said.
Nash eyed him over his coffee mug. “Correct. Did the memory of that incident finally come back to you?”
“It did, but I had help.”
“Gabriel Wildhaber?” Nash said.
Bourne nodded.
“I brought Gabriel with me from Zurich that day. He’s kind of a dick, isn’t he? Most cleaners are a little twisted, but I suppose you can’t really blame them.”
“I had to kill him last night.”
Nash spread butter over a crusty slice of bread. “Yes, I heard.”
“He was trying to kill me.”
“Well, Gabriel was always something of a mercenary, selling himself to the highest bidder. No great loss.”
Bourne leaned across the table. “Can we get down to it, Nash? How did you find me? And what’s really going on?”
Nash settled back into the fur-draped chair. He wasn’t a big man, and he had the gnarled look of a cypress tree battered by coastal winds. He was fifteen years older than Jason, but what he’d lost in physical stamina over the years had been replaced by his wily intelligence. Bourne never underestimated Nash. They had plenty of history together, but he also never fully trusted him. And he never told him everything.
“I was in Paris yesterday,” Nash replied. “Although not to see you.”
“Then why?”
Nash’s voice softened to a raspy drawl. “Treadstone is keeping a close eye on the French elections. This Raymond Berland? He’s the most dangerous man we’ve seen on the European political front in a long time. He’s more extreme than Jean-Marie Le Pen ever was, and les violences urbaines shows that. The difference is that Berland and La Vraie seem to stand a real chance of winning. If this EU dark horse Chrétien Pau doesn’t widen the gap soon, we may need to get involved.”
“By eliminating Berland? All that will do is inflame his supporters even more.”
“That’s a risk, but the alternative is a Nazi takeover of the French government.”
“So how does this involve me?” Bourne asked.
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe it’s all a coincidence of timing, but I doubt it. When Vandal reported that Gabriel was assaulted by men looking for you, that raised red flags. I’ve had our Zurich assets on alert ever since. Naturally, I got a call about an incident at the Drei Alpenhäuser and then about Gabriel’s death. So I flew to Zurich this morning.”
“That doesn’t explain what you’re doing here.”
Nash chewed on his slice of bread. “I’m pretty good at what I do, Jason. Almost as good as you. There are only two or three Treadstone contacts you’d use in Zurich to get a car. I knew you were in a white Audi with smoked windows ten minutes after you were behind the wheel. And if you talked to Wildhaber, that meant you knew about the deaths in the chalet. I assumed your next stop would be Engelberg.”
Bourne frowned. He didn’t like being predictable, particularly with someone like Nash. That was the kind of basic tradecraft mistake that got agents killed. It reminded him that he’d been off his game since the death of Nova and the breakup with Abbey Laurent. He was alone. Distracted. Consumed by regret. He’d spent much of the past year in a dark place, and he wasn’t sure how to climb back out.
“Why not reach out to me yourself if you were in Paris?” Bourne asked. “Vandal’s message came from outside the Treadstone network.”
“If the message came from me, I wasn’t sure you’d listen.”
“Maybe that’s because you’ve been lying to me for years.”
Nash sat in silence, not denying it. He waited for Jason to continue.
“After I was shot, after my identity was erased, you’re the one who told me about my history,” Bourne said. “We sat in that meeting room on 57th Street in New York, and you described every mission I’d had. Every contact. Every location. You filled in the gaps of what I’d lost. And yet somehow you forgot to mention my very first mission. Here. Four men killed in those mountains within weeks of my joining Treadstone. You left that out of the story. Why?”
Nash leaned forward, jabbing a finger at Jason. “After you were shot, you were a wreck. You were questioning everything about yourself. I didn’t tell you about the mission in Engelberg because it was a fucking disaster. The last thing you needed at that point was a blow to your confidence. It could have pushed you over the edge. I talked to the Treadstone shrink who vetted you, and we concluded that the best thing to do was leave it out altogether. You didn’t remember it, so why bring it back?”
“Well, I remember it now. What happened?”
Nash’s face hardened. “I didn’t come here to take a stroll down memory lane, Jason. I came here to tell you to let it go. Go back to Paris. Go into hiding until this blows over. We don’t need you. I have other agents working this assignment, agents who won’t be recognized, agents who aren’t compromised.”
“And yet you told me about Wildhaber,” Bourne pointed out. “You had Vandal send me that message in Paris. You pulled me in, and you knew I’d come back here eventually. I’d ask you why, but we both know the answer. You wanted to use me as bait. You wanted to draw out whoever was coming after me so you could figure out who they were. Right?”
“Right,” Nash admitted.
“Wildhaber mentioned Le Renouveau. He said Le Renouveau would pay for my corpse. Is it them?”
“That’s my suspicion.”
“Who are they? And what does this have to do with the mission ten years ago?”
Nash frowned, as if reluctant to continue. “All right, but first things first. What do you remember about David Abbott?”
“Only what you told me about him. He was my father’s best friend. He raised me after my parents were killed. I lived for years at the home he kept in Paris.”
“He also founded Treadstone,” Nash said.
“I know.”
“Abbott’s goal was always to have you join the agency. Your raw skills were off the charts, and he wanted you in the field as soon as possible. Me, I thought you were still too young. You needed seasoning, and we needed more time to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses. But Abbott didn’t want to wait. He had a mission that required a man like you, multilingual, educated in Europe, but with enough trauma in his past that he could be perceived as alienated. Disaffected.”
“In other words, a recruitment target,” Bourne said.
“Yes. That’s right. You see, we’d heard rumors in Brussels. Soft intel we couldn’t confirm. There was a far-right Nazi group forming in Europe. That’s not exactly news, but this one appeared to have some sharp minds behind it, and they were pursuing a sophisticated long-term strategy. Build a grassroots network. Recruit young adults out of European colleges and indoctrinate them with extremist ideology—not for immediate action, but to lay the groundwork for a far-right takeover. Create a network of influential sleepers, elites who eventually would be in position to support their ideology in government, media, tech, the military, whatever. The Nazi danger isn’t from hotheads in the street. That’s just the cover. It’s the shrewd minds behind the scenes who are the real threat.”
“And this was Le Renouveau?”
“Exactly,” Nash replied. “The trouble was, we knew almost nothing about them. We got a lead that they were planning a summit in Ibiza, and we sent in a Treadstone agent to spy on the meeting. But they’re slippery. Word must have gotten out that they’d been burned, and the summit broke up early. We had hundreds of names of people on the island, but no way to tie any of them to the summit or to Le Renouveau. Our agent walked away with almost nothing. Just a possible location.”
“Here,” Bourne concluded.
“Yes. Our agent was in an Ibiza bar and heard someone tagging Stiftsschule Obwalden as one of the recruitment centers.”
“Who was the leak?”
“An economics teacher. Man named Gavin Wright. He was one of the people you killed in the chalet. We could have taken him out after Ibiza and squeezed him, but we didn’t know much about the broader organization. We wanted bigger fish. So Abbott had the idea of placing you inside the college as a teacher, with the goal of having you infiltrate Le Renouveau as a mole.”
“Except he never told me that.”
“No. He got you the job, and all he wanted at first was to have you observe. Attract no attention. Act innocent because you were innocent. After a few months, he asked me to go in and tell you what was really going on. To recruit you to Treadstone. To train you. And then to encourage you to become a spy inside the organization. It was a good plan, but I argued it was the wrong place to get you started. You were impulsive. Inexperienced. Abbott thought that would be an advantage. It would make you seem more genuine. If we used someone who was too smooth, they’d be suspicious. And at first, it seemed to work. You got an invitation to meet one of the higher-ups. A formal recruitment ceremony. You were in.”
“But I wasn’t,” Bourne said. “They smelled a trap.”
“Yes, and you were nearly killed, and the operation blew up in our faces. Le Renouveau knew we were onto them. They went underground. In the ten years since then, we’ve had no success breaking into the organization. All we do know is that their long-term plans seem to be reaching the first big turning point.”
“You mean the election?” Bourne asked.
“Yes. There’s no way the emergence of La Vraie right now is accidental. Guess who was ‘vacationing’ on Ibiza the weekend of the aborted summit? Raymond Berland. Le Roi Raymond.”
Bourne frowned. “The riots in Paris aren’t organic. They’re being carefully orchestrated.”
“Yes, that’s what we believe, too. Orchestrated by Le Renouveau.”
“If that’s their agenda, why come after me now? After all these years?”
Nash eased back in his chair. His gaze drifted to the mountains. “Partly revenge, I imagine. They’ve been looking for you for years. You killed four of their assets. They don’t forget that. Plus—”
“Plus someone else was in the chalet,” Jason said.
Nash nodded. “That’s right. We don’t know who, but it was definitely someone higher up in the organization. In ten years, who knows how far that person has come? He may be concerned that you can identify him.”
“Except I can’t.”
“Which they may or may not know. Given the way your memory is returning in fits and starts, it’s also possible that you may remember eventually. They’re not going to take that chance. Either way, these people are not going to give up. You’ve got a target on your chest, Jason. Like I said, the best thing for you to do is go into hiding and let us deal with them. If you’re out in the open, they’re going to find you.”
Bourne stayed quiet for a long time. “You’ve avoided one name, Nash. Monika Roth.”
“Forget about her.”
“I already have,” Jason replied. “I don’t remember her at all because you never told me about her. You hid her from me. Why?”
“Because she’s irrelevant,” Nash said.
“Not to me. Who is she?”
“An outsider. A goddamn English teacher.”
“I fell in love with her,” Bourne said.
“That’s true. In other words, you violated our first rule from the beginning. You got involved with someone. I told you when I recruited you to Treadstone that relationships are deadly for people like us. Monika Roth had no part in any of this—but you put her in the crosshairs for Le Renouveau. They kidnapped her. They demanded you kill her. And as a result, you blew up the entire operation.”
“What was the alternative?” Jason asked cynically. “Did you expect me to go ahead and break her neck?”
“I expected you not to get involved with anyone in the first place.”
“Well, it’s too late for that. I have to find her. If I’m a target, so is she. She was in that chalet, too. Where is she?”
Nash shook his head. “I have no idea. You sent her away. You gave her a new identity using outside resources. Even back then, you didn’t trust us, Jason. By the time you came to me and told me what had happened, she was already gone.”