“Kick the gun to me,” the woman snapped.
Bourne used the toe of his boot to slide the Sig across the floor, and it came to a stop halfway between them. Meanwhile, Johanna struggled in the woman’s arms, her eyes wide, her lips trembling. The blood at her throat looked cherry red against her pale white skin as it dripped down to her chest.
“Now the rest. I’m sure you have other weapons.”
He did. He had a dagger sheathed at his belt and a Glock in a holster on his ankle. The woman cupped her hand, waving with her fingers for him to disarm himself and push the weapons toward her. Slowly, Bourne knelt, raising the cuff of his pants and disengaging the Glock, which he pushed away on the floor. He did the same with the knife.
She nodded at the armory at her feet. “That’s a good boy. Thank you. Wow, the intel on you was dead-on, Cain. Your weakness is always the woman. It’s like having a tell in the poker game. Justin was right. It’s too bad he made the mistake of using brute force to take you out rather than something a little more subtle.”
“Where’s the real Greta Bauer?” Jason asked.
“Downstairs in her apartment. She’s still breathing for now. I thought we might need her, but as it turned out, you swallowed my act.”
“And Monika?”
The woman shook her head. “No fucking clue where she is. Some lesbian engineer has lived here for the last four years. I asked if I could borrow her apartment for a couple of days until you showed up, and she said no. Weird, huh? So I strangled her with my belt. I put her body across the hall with the married couple from the other flat. The husband heard me doing the engineer and knocked on the door to see what was going on. Dumbass. I cut his throat and then drowned his wife in the bathtub.”
“Jesus!” Johanna gasped.
She struggled to get away, but stopped as the knife cut her again.
“Oh, don’t worry, honey. I’ll come up with something even nicer for you. And I’ll make sure your boyfriend here watches me do it.” She yanked hard on Johanna’s blond hair, pulling her head back to expose more of her throat, and she grinned at Bourne. “Or you could make it easy and tell me where Monika is.”
“I have no idea.”
“That’s too bad. Justin told me about your memory issues, but I wasn’t sure whether to believe him. But even if you don’t know where she is, I’m sure you’ve got a way to contact her. Agents like you always leave a back door.”
“Not this time,” Bourne said. “There’s no back door. Not with her.”
“No? Sorry, Cain, but I don’t believe you. I think you’re lying. But that’s okay. When you see what I do to your girlfriend here, you’ll have plenty of incentive to tell me what I want to know.”
The woman bit down hard on Johanna’s ear, making her cry out and drawing a new trickle of blood. With her tongue, the woman licked the blood away like it was fine wine. “This one feels like a screamer. She’ll be fun to play with.”
Jason watched a flush of panic cross Johanna’s face. Their eyes met, and he knew she was about to do something foolish. He tried to send her a message—Don’t! Don’t do it!—but he didn’t have time to stop her, only to help her. In the next instant, Johanna flinched. She reached over to the arm locked around her waist and snapped the woman’s index finger with a sickening crack. Caught by surprise, the woman howled in pain.
Bourne had barely a second before the woman dragged the blade across Johanna’s neck. He shot forward. His fingers closed around the woman’s forearm and jerked the knife away. Suddenly free, Johanna leaped to the floor, leaving Jason and their assailant intertwined. As Bourne twisted the woman around, she spun with him and piled her shoulder into his chest. They both toppled backward, and she landed on top of him. The knife clattered out of her grasp, but she rolled free, crawling toward the blade a few feet away. He took her foot and hung on, then delivered a heavy boot to the middle of her face.
Cartilage smashed, and her nose erupted in blood.
“Fuck!” she screamed, wriggling out of his grasp. “Fuck you, you son of a bitch!”
She scooped up the knife and came for him. With a sweeping arc, she swung it toward Bourne’s thigh. He pushed away just as the point of the knife shot downward. It missed him by an inch and shuddered into the wooden floor, where it stuck hard. He kept rolling. He scrambled to his feet, but the woman was waiting for him and jabbed a kick deep into his stomach that sent him reeling backward. As he gasped for breath, she kicked again, her body a blur of motion. His knees buckled. A second later, her foot shot straight upward like a chorus line Rockette, connecting with the bottom of his chin and snapping his neck back with an impact that felt as if his teeth had rattled into his brain.
He staggered away, colliding hard with the glass door of the balcony.
“Never send a man to do a woman’s job, Cain,” she hissed. “Justin should have known that.”
She reached under her black Lycra top to a holster, and her injured hand reemerged with a Beretta 92. The barrel pointed at his chest from ten feet away. She held the gun awkwardly, her middle finger grasping for the trigger because her index finger was broken and useless. Even so, she was so close that she couldn’t miss. Bourne stared into the black hole of the barrel, expecting a spit of flame.
Then a flurry of gunfire erupted from a new direction.
Johanna stood on the other side of the room, Bourne’s Sig cradled between her hands. She fired wildly, a shot in the wall, a shot in the ceiling, two shots in the floor, two shots piercing the glass of the patio door. She didn’t come close to hitting her target, but the assault forced the woman to duck, and Bourne took two dizzy steps and kicked the Beretta out of her hand.
The woman came off her knees with a growl and launched her body at him, her head like a battering ram. The collision took them both full speed into the cracked patio door, which shattered outward under their combined weight. Amid a field of glass, they landed in each other’s arms against the balcony railing, five stories above the street. The woman, her face a mass of blood, snapped her teeth at him. Her fingernails came like claws for his eyes, but he slammed her chest hard with the heel of his hand, breaking a rib in a sick pop and forcing her backward. With insane energy, she shook off the blow and drove at him again. This time he tagged her chin with a sideways blow from his fist, and once more she fell back, just out of reach.
Standing by the shattered patio door, she paused, catching her breath. He saw her eyes flick past him to the open air beyond the railing, and he guessed her next move. Kill them both, or die trying. She charged toward him again, and she was all speed, no chance to stop. He barely managed to throw himself out of her way just as she hit the railing hard. Her momentum catapulted her over the edge, and her body made a somersault, flipping twice as she crashed to the street below. He looked down in time to see her land on the pavement headfirst with a cracking force that drove her skull deep into her neck.
He was still holding on to the railing when Johanna rushed up beside him from inside the apartment. She peered at the street and then reared back and slapped a hand over her mouth when she saw the body.
“Holy shit,” she said. “Holy shit!”
“Yeah, she’s done.” Bourne steered Johanna from the railing and took her face in his hands. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, but what about you? Look at you! Jesus!”
“Don’t worry about me. We need to get out of here.”
He put an arm around her waist to help her, then realized that he was the one who needed help. His weight felt as if it were pushing him to the ground. Johanna let him lean on her, and the two of them limped across the apartment toward the door. He retrieved his weapons and managed to stand on his own when they made it to the stairwell. He used the wall as leverage, leaving streaks of blood on the paint as they headed downstairs.
At the ground floor, he saw the crushed body of the agent from Le Renouveau where it had landed outside the building door. Three people already stood over her, filming the scene with their phones. More people were running toward the building from both directions.
“Not that way,” he told Johanna.
He tried the door to Greta Bauer’s apartment. It was unlocked. He led Johanna inside and closed the door behind them. Hopefully, there was a door or window that would let them slip out the rear of the building. He headed down a hallway toward the back of the apartment, but Johanna tugged on his arm.
“Jason, wait. What’s that noise?”
He listened.
Somewhere in the apartment, he heard a muffled cry, and he followed the noise into the master bedroom. Someone was inside the closet, beating against the door and struggling to call for help. When he pulled the door open, he found an older woman hog-tied on the closet floor, a gag taped securely over her mouth.
Greta Bauer. The real Greta Bauer.
Bourne used his knife to free her, and he and Johanna helped her to the bed. Sweat bathed her limbs, and she choked as she tried to suck air through her nose. He eyed the bedroom window, where he could see more than a dozen people outside gathering around the dead body. Time was short.
“You’re Mrs. Bauer?” Bourne asked quickly. “The building manager?”
Tears and streaks of makeup streamed down her face as she nodded. She was in her sixties, heavyset, with thinning blond hair. A lilac housedress fell to her knees. He carefully cut away the strips of tape that were wound around her head and removed the gag from her mouth.
“You’re safe now,” he told her. “The woman who did this to you is dead. The police will be here any minute. They’ll get you to a hospital and make sure you’re okay.”
Greta Bauer cleared her throat and spoke raggedly. “Oh my God! That woman—she was going to kill me!”
“I understand. I know how terrifying this experience was. But I need you to answer a few questions for me. Time is critical. This woman may have associates in the city that we need to track down.”
“Who are you?” she asked, her eyes dazed. “What is this all about?”
“My name is Larousse. I’m with Interpol. We’ve been after this woman and the group she’s part of for a long time. These people are ruthless and dangerous, as you saw. Can you tell me what she wanted? What did she say to you?”
“Well, it was crazy! Madness! She asked me about some woman who booked an apartment here ten years ago. Ten years!”
“Ella Graf,” Johanna murmured.
Greta touched the raw skin on her face and winced. “Yes! Yes, that’s right. That was the name.”
“Did you know Ella Graf?” Jason asked. “Were you the manager here ten years ago?”
“I was, but I didn’t recall anyone named Graf living here. But she made me check my records, and of course, I remembered it then because it was so strange.”
Bourne heard a wail of sirens drawing closer outside the building. Johanna glanced over their shoulders toward the apartment door.
“Why strange?” he asked. “What was strange about Ella Graf?”
“Well, it wasn’t her really, but what happened. It was all in the file. I kept notes about it because I didn’t know what to do.”
The sirens were nearly at the building.
“Go on,” he said, impatience creeping into his voice. “Quickly.”
“Well, I got a booking for the top-floor apartment ten years ago. It came in long distance, a full year paid in advance under the name Ella Graf. This woman showed up a few days later to move in. No furniture with her, just a small suitcase. She was pretty. There was something very distinctive about her. Honestly, she didn’t look like the kind of woman who would be living in a place like this. She seemed higher class, you know? Anyway, she introduced herself as Ella Graf, and I remember she had a man with her.”
Mrs. Bauer stopped.
Her stare went quizzically to Bourne’s face, and he knew from her expression that he was the man who’d shown up at this place. He’d taken Monika Roth to this apartment building to begin her new life. But the building manager squinted at him, then shook her head, as if it were too long ago to make the connection.
“The man took her upstairs to the apartment,” she went on. “Then he left later that evening.”
“What about Ella Graf?” Johanna asked.
“Well, that was what was so strange,” Mrs. Bauer replied. “The next day, she left, too. She took her suitcase with her, and she disappeared. She never moved into the apartment, and she never contacted me to tell me what to do. The apartment sat empty for an entire year, all paid for, but with no one in it. I never saw her again.”