No name and no number came in with the call. Bourne dug the phone out of the dead man’s pocket, then silenced Johanna with a finger over her lips. He tapped the button to take the call, then put a hand over his mouth and used a breathless, muffled tone to answer with the phone at his ear.
“Yeah?”
There was a long silence on the other end. Jason heard nothing in the background, no clues as to where the caller was located. The only noise was in the field around him as mountain air whipped into a frenzy and made a whistle through the trees.
Finally, a voice responded, low and calm, barely louder than a whisper. “Is it done? Do you have David Webb?”
In the pause that followed, the voice went on.
“Or is he dead?”
Jason squeezed his eyes shut.
He knew that voice. He remembered it. Was it from his past? Or was it from the present? Maybe it was both. His mind raced back to that night in the chalet ten years earlier and to the man in the silver glasses orchestrating the action from a chair in the corner of the room. He knew him. This was the man on the phone, and he was still in control, still stage-managing the scene like a director.
Who was he?
Bourne tried to pair a face in shadow with the voice in his mind, but forcing his brain to remember brought stabs of pain behind his eyes. He only knew one thing. When he thought of that voice, he thought of Monika. It wasn’t just about the chalet. This was something else. Somehow the two of them were linked in his memory.
How? Why?
“Justin?” said the voice, now with faint suspicion.
Bourne said again, “Yeah.” Then he added, “Webb’s dead.”
The empty silence stretched out, but he checked the phone and saw that the call hadn’t dropped. When the man finally spoke again, Jason heard a dark smile in the voice, and he knew he hadn’t fooled him at all.
“Well, well, well. Cain.”
Jason shrugged. “That’s right.”
“And Justin?”
“Dead. I killed him.”
“I assumed as much. That’s impressive. He had a similar background to yours and similar skills. Well, I warned Justin not to underestimate you, even with greater numbers. He was talented, but sometimes too arrogant.”
“He shot a confused teenager in the head,” Jason snapped.
“And didn’t you do the same ten years ago? Three of my men were your own students at the college. You’re not so different from us.”
Jason didn’t take the bait. “So it was you back then. In the chalet.”
“Yes, it was. You’re right. We have history, you and I. I’ve been trying to hunt you down for a long time.”
“You got away from me ten years ago. Don’t count on it happening again.”
“Brave talk. I respect that. I respect you. Actually, I suggested to Justin if we took you alive, maybe we could persuade you to join our organization. You might find that our values aren’t so misaligned as you would think.”
“Or maybe I wouldn’t.”
“Oh, surely you don’t condone the chaos in the West. The U.S., France, Germany, Britain, all of them weak-kneed democracies letting their own cultures be erased by outsiders. Inviting their enemies in by the millions. Don’t you think China is laughing at us? Our goal is to stop the decline. We intend to restore the values that built Western civilization in the first place.”
“I’ve heard speeches like that before,” Jason replied. “Thank you, next.”
“That’s a shame. Because we will win in the end. It’s inevitable. Our philosophy cannot be stopped. I’d rather have you on our side because you’re a formidable adversary. But you should know that we are formidable in our own right.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“You were able to defeat Justin, but don’t think you’re safe with him gone. There are many more of us to follow. We will meet again, Cain, and I don’t think it’s likely to end well for you.” He added with what sounded like a wicked grin, “Or for Monika.”
“I’m the one you want, not her,” Bourne snapped. “It’s been ten years. She’s no threat to you now. Monika had nothing to do with any of this.”
His forehead creased with puzzlement as he heard the man chuckling softly on the phone.
“Oh, David. Do you mind if I call you David? After all, that’s still who you really are. All these years, David, and you’ve learned nothing. I know what happened to your memory, but trust me, it wouldn’t help you to remember everything about your past. You see, even back then, you had no idea who Monika Roth really was.”
Vandal used her trauma kit to stitch up Bourne’s chest.
They stood outside in the darkness, with Jason holding a flashlight to illuminate the deep wound caused by Justin’s knife. Her movements were quick and skilled. When she was done, her fingers lingered for a while on his chest, tracing his other scars. Then she seemed to realize what she was doing and pulled her hand away.
Close to them, Johanna sat in the back seat of the Mercedes. She was visible through the open window. Dirt smeared her face and hair, and dried blood made a ribbon from her temple onto her cheek. Jason hadn’t wanted her to go back inside the chalet, which was strewn with bodies, so he’d carried her here from the mountain fields, with her arms around his neck. Her eyes had the shell-shocked emptiness that came in the wake of violence.
“You like her,” Vandal said, noting his fixed stare on the woman in the car.
Bourne shrugged. “It’s nothing.”
She wiped a red smudge from his face. “Her lipstick tells a different story.”
“Stress, adrenaline, sex. It all gets mixed up. You know that.”
Her eyes were dark in the glow of the light. “I do know that.”
Briefly, Jason had a flashback of their mission in Barcelona. He thought about the night before the assassination and how Vandal had come up behind him in the shower and molded her naked body against his. He remembered her hands reaching around to caress him, teasing out his arousal with sharp fingernails. The memory, hot and vivid, began to work its magic on him again.
But for now, Vandal was all business.
“I checked the bodies. They’re clean. There’s nothing to give us any leads on Le Renouveau.”
“What about Justin?” he asked.
“Facial recognition came back with a hit in our own records. His name was Justin Ely. He spent a decade working for the CIA in Eastern Europe.”
“That must be what the man on the phone meant,” Bourne said. “He said we had similar backgrounds. But if Le Renouveau methods haven’t changed, the odds are that Justin was a mole from the beginning. They probably recruited him in college. That’s what makes this whole operation so insidious. Most of the assets in the group won’t have any red flags in their background that we can use to ferret them out.”
“Well, I can use my sources and see what else I can find about Justin. We might find clues to other recruits.”
“Okay, good.”
“And you? What do you do next?”
Bourne hesitated. “I have a lead on Monika.”
Vandal glanced at Johanna in the Mercedes. “You’re still a target, Cain. Le Renouveau is still after you. If you can get a lead on Monika, so can they. Tracking her down might put all three of you at risk. Why not go underground for a while? Find a beach somewhere. Take the girl with you, and the two of you can swim and drink and fuck for a few days. You know she wants it. I’m pretty sure you do, too.”
He heard a twinge of jealousy in her voice. Or maybe that was his own ego telling him what he wanted to believe.
“Monika’s her sister,” Bourne replied. “Johanna’s not going to give up looking for her, even if I back out. And the fact is, I want to know who Monika is. I’m beginning to wonder if she’s connected to this in ways I didn’t understand.”
“How so? You think she’s part of Le Renouveau?”
“I don’t know. I can’t believe that, but at this point, anything’s possible.”
“Maybe that’s how they got onto you in the beginning,” Vandal suggested. “I mean, someone gave you up.”
Bourne didn’t answer, but he had been wondering the same thing.
He thought about the warning from Yanis Lorchaud. You’ve been betrayed.
“Regardless, I need to find her,” he said. “Whatever her role is in all of this, Le Renouveau are looking for Monika, too. She’s not safe.”
A frown creased Vandal’s face. “Just to be clear, Nash wants you to stand down. My job is to make sure you do.”
“Nash isn’t telling us everything he knows. He never does.”
“I still have my orders.”
Bourne retrieved his shirt, which was slung over Vandal’s shoulder. He shrugged it onto his chest, buttoned it, and left it untucked. He glanced toward the nearest hill that led to the chalet, but there were no lights inside the house. They’d switched off the power again, letting the interior grow cold with the overnight temperatures. Then they’d dragged the bodies from outside back into the chalet.
“You can try to stop me if you want,” he told her.
“Or?”
“Or you can help me.”
Vandal glanced up at the dark sky. Her face began to glisten with dampness as cold mist fell from the clouds. “I have to stay here and wait for the cleaners.”
“Okay.”
“Go ahead and take the Mercedes. I’ll catch a ride back to town when the job’s done. That will be hours from now. Plenty of time for you to get away.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you going to tell me where you’re going?” Vandal asked.
He knew what the question meant. Did he trust her? Would he tell her the next step in his plan? Cain had been betrayed by Treadstone too many times to trust anyone, but he also knew that Vandal couldn’t help him if he wasn’t willing to share intelligence with her. Either she was an enemy or she was an ally.
Or she was both.
“We’re going to Germany,” Jason told her, fighting his own instincts. “That’s where I sent Monika ten years ago. I set her up in an apartment in Hamburg.”
“Do you think she’ll be there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, if you need me, say the word.”
“I will.”
Vandal slid her phone out of her back pocket and dialed. The man on the other end answered immediately, and Jason recognized Nash’s raspy voice. As Vandal talked to him, her eyes never left Bourne.
“It’s me,” she said. “Sorry for the delay. Yeah, I’m still alive, but I’m on a fucking mountaintop in the rain, and I’ve got a bunch of dead bodies in a chalet. Send a crew. We need to clean this up and keep it quiet.”
Bourne heard Nash say one word. His own name.
“Cain?” she replied. “Yeah, Cain’s alive, too. But the bastard lost me. I don’t know where he is or where he’s heading next. I only know that you were right. He’s going after this woman, Monika. He’s going to find her sooner or later. You’ll never stop him.”