Elaborate street paintings adorned the foundations of the bridge that led across the canal near the park called La Villette, in the far northeast part of Paris. Aztec ghost masks. Wild multicolored giraffes. A graffiti-style Mona Lisa with a blue face and yellow headscarf. Between the bridge columns, near the dark green water, Bourne saw a homeless man under a Mexican blanket.
Or was the man really a scout guarding the entrance to the park?
Jason drew his Sig and watched the man’s eyes blink open as he stood over him. The stranger, the gun, elicited no reaction, and the drugged eyes fell shut again.
The man was no threat.
Bourne stayed at the water’s edge. He headed east through the glow of streetlights on Quai de la Marne. Low apartment buildings butted up to the canal, and houseboats were tied up at the pier. Ahead of him, more graffiti covered the girders of an old railway bridge. He walked with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. The area around him was quiet but not deserted. An Asian prostitute strolled in the opposite direction, clutching a black purse. A bulky teenager smoked near the bridge; he had a knife dangling on his belt, but the kid took the measure of Bourne and let him pass. In a nearby doorway, he heard the masculine grunts of two men having sex.
“Do you see anything?” he murmured into his radio.
“Nothing yet,” Vandal replied.
“What about Monika?”
“No sign of her, either.”
Bourne checked his watch. The rendezvous was scheduled in fifteen minutes. He closed in on La Villette from two blocks to the west, and Vandal approached from the east, making a pincer as they zeroed in on the mirrored dome known as La Géode. He was prepared for a heavy reception, but so far, he saw no one other than the usual Paris night creatures.
He crossed into the huge park itself, which was a maze of museums, concert venues, and children’s rides tucked among trails and trees. An elevated walkway called the Galerie de l’Ourcq bordered the canal, and he climbed the steps, listening to the scrape of his footfalls on the metal. There were no other sounds around him. A few lights glowed on the opposite shore, but the park was mostly dark. Over the railing, he spotted shadows moving near a carousel, but none had the look of killers.
“I’m crossing the canal,” he told Vandal. “I’m five minutes from the sphere.”
A footbridge led over the water. Bourne crossed quickly, feeling exposed if anyone was watching him through night vision goggles. On the far shore, he took steps back down to the quai that led along the canal. He passed a children’s park, where a multicolored dragon towered over his head, its tongue forming a giant slide. Beyond the slide, he veered from the canal sidewalk to a path that led through a small cluster of trees, where it was almost impossible to see anything around him.
Again he stopped to listen, but he heard no voices, no radios, no ambush waiting.
He thought about texting Monika. I’m here. Where are you?
But he kept his phone in his pocket.
Bourne took out his gun and leveled it as he moved forward. The path through the trees wasn’t long. Where the trail ended, he saw a wide expanse of green grass dotted with LED lights like a field of candles. The canal was on his right, the metal beams of the science and industry museum on his left.
“Are we still clear?” he murmured to Vandal.
“So far.”
He left the trees and moved into the center of the lawn. The grass was wet under his feet. An arc of concrete, like a huge wing, bent across the grass. He walked beside it, and something huge and bright, as unreal as a silver planet, crept into view. The mirrored dome of La Géode towered in front of him, its luminous panels reflecting the sky and the shadows of the park. He could see himself in the gleaming metal, a lone figure standing near the concrete arc in the middle of the grass.
Then he wasn’t alone anymore.
“Someone’s coming,” Bourne told Vandal.
Footsteps made a distinct noise not far away, the tap of heels on stone. He swung his gun, aiming for the sound. Immediately adjacent to the sphere, a silhouette rose into view on the steps that led from the lower level of the museum. At first, he couldn’t see who it was, male or female. The figure was in darkness, but when it cleared the stairs, he knew it was a woman. She took the walkway beside La Géode and stopped in front of the huge dome, its shimmering reflective panels making her thin shape look absurdly tall and large.
Was it her?
Bourne took a few steps forward, leaving twenty yards between him and the woman. He still had his gun level, pointed at her, and she must have spotted it, because she spread her arms wide, her fingers apart. Without saying a word, she sent a message: I’m not a threat. But he didn’t believe that. Not yet. She was too far away, too lost in darkness, for him to identify her.
Slowly, Bourne closed the distance between them.
His gaze locked on her as he tried to pick out the details of her features. With each step toward her, she became real, not a ghost, not a phantom from the mists of his memory. She was very tall, nearly his own height, but pencil thin. She wore a black coat, long, draping to her ankles. Her hair, wavy and blond, cascaded to her shoulders. Her skin glowed white where the lights by the canal shined from the mirrored dome. And her mouth. Her mouth was the smallest flash of deep cherry red against that white face.
She wore no smile. But that was typical, he remembered now. She almost never smiled; her lips always turned downward. She still bore the weight of some sadness that never went away. Just as she had in the past. Ten years ago.
He knew her.
Jesus, yes, he knew this woman!
This was the woman in the photograph Johanna had given him. The woman from his past, so beautifully distant and lonely. His feelings came back, complicated and strong. As a young man, he’d wanted to erase the sadness of this woman. Save her. Rescue her.
From what?
He didn’t know. He’d never known.
But it was her. It was really her.
Monika.
And with that, memories tumbled out of the shadows. A kaleidoscope of images rushed madly through his brain, hot and fast like an explosion. Monika in his Swiss apartment, reading Goethe to him in German and Baudelaire to him in French, her accents perfect. Monika asking endless questions about his parents, his childhood, his dreams, his desires, his fears, and then ducking every question he asked about her own past. Monika, naked under him in bed, impossible to reach even when they made love, unhappy even when her climax rippled through her body.
His fiancée.
I think we should get married.
He could hear it; that was his voice on the parapets of Mont Saint-Michel.
Yes, all right, came her strangely casual, careless reply. As if even then she had no intention of going through with it.
He remembered more and more details, like a dam giving way and flooding his mind. But these weren’t memories he wanted back. He could have left them in the mist. These were terrible memories.
Monika, tender and loving one moment, cold and cruel the next, like a split personality.
Monika, introducing him to a friend outside the Drei Alpenhäuser.
An old friend from Paris.
But this man was more than a friend. David Webb had known it at once, had seen it in both of their eyes. This man was her lover. He could still feel rage twisting his stomach, raw jealousy at the thought that the woman he loved, the woman he was going to marry, was sleeping with another man.
Who was he?
You must remember! It’s urgent!
Somehow he knew it was vital that he see who that man was. But the face of his rival, his enemy, refused to emerge from the shadows, and searching for it only brought pain behind his eyes.
One more memory stormed back to him. An empty apartment. Her apartment. It had been that same day! That awful day of death and blood at the chalet! He’d gone to Monika’s apartment, and it had been empty, stripped of everything, her life, her possessions. She hadn’t just run away after the violence in the chalet, after he’d given her a new identity in Hamburg. She’d run before. She’d already been running away from him when Le Renouveau kidnapped her.
Monika.
There she was. She stood in front of him, only ten yards away. He knew her, and yet he didn’t know her at all. His face darkened with everything he remembered, and he was close enough to see cold recognition cross her beautiful features. She could read his mind. That had always been her special talent. Her superpower. She knew the veil had been lifted from his eyes.
Bourne called to her, his voice as bitter as smoke.
“Who are you?”
Vandal heard something. Or saw something. Or smelled something. Her instincts reacted to the sensation before her brain did. That was how Treadstone trained their agents—to listen to the things that weren’t there.
She slowed as she walked through a concrete plaza beside the ground floor of the museum. Its huge wall of glass glowed with lights. A handful of trees rose from planters in the stone, dead leaves scattering across the plaza in the wind. Ahead of her, the giant dome rose several stories tall, as high as the building next to it. She heard a voice near the sphere, echoed in her radio. Cain’s voice.
The woman, Monika, was with him.
But something else was going on. Vandal felt it, just as she had on Île Saint-Louis.
“Cain, I don’t like this,” she murmured, but she got no response.
She swung her gun in a circle, watching everything around her and absorbing the silence. The museum. The bright dome. The stone benches. The black superstructure of an old French submarine on display, the Argonaute. No one was here. If there was a threat, it was in the park above her.
Where Cain and Monika were.
On her left, Vandal saw a series of slanted concrete walls, where fountains typically ran during the day. The fountains were turned off now, and the sharply angled walls led up to a fence at the upper level of the park. She went to the low railing beside the fountain, climbed it, and jumped to the base of the wall. With her fingers and boots clutching for seams, she made her way up the slimy, slippery surface to the top, then climbed the six-foot chain-link fence and dropped to the ground.
She found herself on the edge of another plaza. Close by, she saw the black hull of the old submarine, with the top of the mirrored sphere glowing behind it. Ahead of her was a cluster of trees built into a berm near the open grass.
She sensed danger very close. Someone was here. Her gaze went to the trees, picking out each individual tree trunk in the shadows.
There!
A dark figure floated from one tree to the next like a spirit. Someone was stalking Bourne and Monika.
Vandal sprinted across the plaza. She knew the slap of her boots on stone gave her away, but she couldn’t help that. Hearing her coming, the person in the trees vanished, as if melting into the ground. Vandal reached the berm and skidded to a halt. Her gun was level, her eyes and ears pricked up for clues.
“Cain, we’ve got an intruder.”
Still no answer.
She moved into the trees, and her boots sank into the soft earth with each step. The stranger couldn’t be far from her. A few feet away, no more. But where? Her eyes scanned each tree trunk for the telltale silhouette of someone hiding behind it. She studied the up-and-down ground of the berm, like a black shroud in the darkness. If someone was stretched out across the dirt, she couldn’t see them.
Another step.
She heard something behind her, but when she spun, she saw nothing. She stood like a statue, alert for any disturbance, any clue as to where the person had gone. But her foe was good. A professional, like she was. Dead silent, giving nothing away.
A rustle of wind made its way through the trees. Was that what she’d heard?
Where are you?
Alarm bells exploded in her mind, red flares of warning. Somehow she knew—she knew—that whoever had kicked that door into her face on Île Saint-Louis was here with her now. Inches away. Waiting. Watching.
A gun in hand, a suppressor threaded onto the barrel.
She took another step. Her finger slid over the trigger of her Glock. She couldn’t see; the world inside the trees was black on black. But all she needed was the barest sound, a breath, a finger, a knee, a foot moving in the dirt. Pinpoint the noise and fire.
I’m Vandal. I’m fast, you fucker. Try me.
Then the noise came. Not behind her. It came from in front of her, a crackling like a footstep near one of the trees. Vandal swung her arms, aimed the gun, but she realized at once that she’d been fooled by the oldest trick of all. There was no one! Nothing! Someone had tossed a rock toward the grass.
The noise was a ruse, a split-second distraction to break her concentration.
The stranger was behind her, leaping off the ground and separating like a ghost from the darkness.
Vandal corrected, lurching away, twisting around. Yes, she was fast, but not fast enough. She had a vision of a horrible caricature, of a Guy Fawkes mask grinning at her as something hard and metal whipped through the air. A length of pipe crashed into the side of her skull. The night turned to day inside her head with a blinding explosion of pain and light, and she wasn’t even aware of crumpling to the ground.