Dawn was still an hour away when Bourne arrived back at the apartment in Pigalle. He found Johanna sitting up in bed, the white sheet nestled around her. Half a bottle of white wine sat on the nightstand; she’d been drinking. He said nothing at first, and neither did she, but they both knew what they wanted. He took off his clothes, showered, then climbed into bed with her and pulled her body against his. Their kisses grew from soft to hungry, and they made urgent love in the darkness.
He tried to keep Vandal’s words out of his mind.
Now you’re fucking Johanna and pretending you don’t care about her, which is so obviously a lie.
When they were done, she poured Chardonnay for them. They drank it, although the wine was warm. The apartment was warm, too, and he got up and opened the window, letting in the wet-dog morning smell of Paris. He got back into bed and lay on his back next to her, their hands intertwined.
Finally, Johanna broke the silence and asked what she really wanted to know.
“Was it her?”
Jason didn’t answer right away. He pictured Monika in his head, standing before La Géode, the woman from his past come to life again. Her elegant features. Her burgundy-red lips. A woman who kept a cool distance from him, who kept herself hidden behind a wall of puzzles and mysteries. And here he was in bed with her younger sister, who wanted no distance from him at all.
“Yes,” he said. “It was her.”
Johanna’s hand flew to her mouth. “You saw her? You talked to her?”
“Briefly. But it was Monika. No question about it.”
“Where is she? Can I see her now, too?”
“She disappeared from the park. Someone tried to kill her.”
“Oh my God! Fuck! Was it the assholes from Le Renouveau? How did they find you so quickly?”
“No, I don’t think it was them. They may not be the only people going after Monika. I think—I think it could be my people, too. I have connections to an organization in the American government. They have resources they use in these situations.”
“Resources,” Johanna said, frowning. “You mean people like you. Killers.”
“Yes.”
“But why would they want to kill Monika?”
“To cover up something from my past,” Bourne said. “I don’t know what. Not yet.”
Johanna kissed him and caressed his face with her fingertips. “It must have been strange for you seeing her again.”
“It was. It was also a trigger, sort of like watching your life pass before your eyes. I remembered things.”
She heard the darkness in his voice. “Things? Like what?”
“None of it was organized. It was just a rush of jumbled memories. But my relationship with Monika was more complex than I realized. She was more complex. I don’t know what to think about her now. She told me I already know who she is, or who she was. But I haven’t been able to put the pieces together into anything that makes sense.”
“Tell me,” Johanna said. “Maybe I can help.”
He stared at the ceiling and let the images wash over him again. Thinking about Monika brought it all back.
“That day when everything went to hell, when I went to the chalet, when I found that Le Renouveau had kidnapped her…I’d forgotten something. Her apartment was empty. She was gone. She’d already left me.”
“What? That can’t be right.”
“Did she say anything to you? Did she talk about being unhappy with our relationship?”
Johanna looked shocked. “No. Not a word. As far as I knew, you were the love of her life.”
“I don’t think so. Something had gone wrong between us. Maybe it was wrong from the beginning.”
“Well, if that’s true, then she was lying to both of us,” Johanna said. “But I don’t get it, Jason. Afterward, when she was running, she told me I could find you if I ever needed to reach her. She kept the back door going, too. Why would she do that if you weren’t important to her?”
“I’m not sure. I’m still missing something.” Bourne shook his head and added, “But she isn’t hiding from me anymore. She’s not running away. She wants me to chase her.”
“What do you mean?”
“She left clues behind about her location, which she knew I’d find. They all point to a place called Holy Island on the British coast. It’s remote, rugged, sparsely populated. I think that’s where her home base is. Where she’s been hiding. Do you know if that place had any special significance for her?”
“Holy Island?”
“It’s also called Lindisfarne. There’s an old castle there and a ruined priory.”
Johanna closed her eyes. “I’m not sure. There’s something, but it was long before I was born. Before my father remarried. I remember Monika telling me about a trip she took when she was a girl. It was the last trip she took while her mother was still alive. I don’t know where it was, but she talked about a castle on a hill by the sea.”
Bourne nodded. A castle on a hill by the sea.
“That’s where we’re going,” he told her.
“We? I’m coming with you?”
“If you’re willing. But I don’t know what kind of reception to expect when we get there. Le Renouveau may already be waiting for us.”
He thought: Or Treadstone.
“I’m not worried about that,” Johanna said. “You’ll keep me safe. If Monika’s on that island, I want to see her again. I don’t care if she’s not the person I thought she was. She’s still my sister.”
“Okay, let’s get dressed. We’ll meet Vandal at Gare du Nord and take the Eurostar to London.”
He got out of bed and went to the window. Johanna came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. They stared out the window at the shadows of Pigalle, which were lightening with the dawn.
“You don’t have to tell me this if you don’t want to,” Johanna murmured, her head leaning into his shoulder. “I mean, it’s probably not fair of me to ask, but I sort of want to know what to expect. Am I going to lose you to her?”
“What?”
“Well, it’s not like you owe me anything, and I’m not looking for promises. But when you’re together with her again, are you going to want her and not me? What if Monika wants you back? What will you do?”
He turned around. Their bodies pressed tightly together as if they were made that way. He took her face in his hands. “Actually, I was just thinking about how much I like you. I haven’t been involved like this with anyone since Abbey. And I told you, whatever I had with Monika isn’t what I thought it was.”
“You can’t be sure about that,” Johanna said.
“I’m not sure of anything in my past.” Jason stroked along the soft line of her jaw. “There’s one other thing I haven’t mentioned. This is very important. Back then, did Monika talk about anyone else?”
“Anyone else? Like who?”
“Another man she was involved with.”
Johanna’s blue eyes widened with surprise. “Monika? No, of course not. She told me about you, and that was that. I mean, the two of you were engaged. Why would you think she was seeing someone else?”
“A memory came back to me in the park. I remembered Monika introducing me to someone at the Drei Alpenhäuser. It was just a casual thing at the door of the café. But I knew. I could see it in both of their faces. The two of them were lovers.”
“This man,” Johanna said. “Who was he? What did he look like?”
“I can’t see him in my head. All I remember is—”
Jason stopped. In the warm morning air, his skin went cold.
“What is it?” Johanna asked.
“I remember his voice,” Bourne said. “I remember, because I heard it again a few days later. Back then, I couldn’t place who it was or where I’d heard it. Now I know. It was him. His voice. He was the man in the chalet.”
Vandal knew Cain was right. She should have seen a doctor.
Her head throbbed with pain, making her dizzy whenever she turned too quickly. The swelling above her temple felt like an alien pushing its way out of her skull. Her vision kept blurring, and the brightness of the morning sun made her squint. For all she knew, she was bleeding into her brain.
She sat on the ground near Gare du Nord, and across the street was a hospital. She could have gone in there to be checked out. Do an MRI, a CT scan. But she knew what would happen then. A doctor would pull her out of the game, and she needed to be there at the end. On the island.
With Cain. With Monika.
Vandal checked her watch. She knew what she had to do. Make the call. Cain and Johanna would be arriving soon, and once they were together on the Eurostar, the risk of making contact would be far higher. Cain already didn’t trust her. He’d be keeping a close eye on her as soon as they were together.
And if she said nothing?
What would happen then?
She squeezed her eyes shut against the bright light and the hammering inside her head. Then she forced herself to open them again. Focus on the mission! She was the advance scout, the one who had to surveil the people at the train station and make sure it was safe to make the channel crossing by Eurostar.
Were the police monitoring the station, matching photos? Was a team from Le Renouveau watching the trains, expecting Cain might try to leave the country that way?
Was Treadstone?
But so far their escape route looked clear.
Vandal closed her eyes again. She covered her ears to quiet the persistent ringing, but that didn’t work. A wave of nausea rose in her throat, and for a moment, she thought she’d have to get on her hands and knees and vomit. Then the wave passed. She was okay.
No. She wasn’t okay.
As she sat on the ground, she found herself thinking about Lloyd. Her husband. She could still picture the scene in her head, four sadistic bullets in the man she loved, his agonized screams before she gave him the mercy shot between his eyes. And the look in those eyes. Pleading, disbelief—and, despite everything, love. He’d still loved her at the end even as she killed him.
My God!
What had she done?
She told herself that she wasn’t the same woman she’d been back then. She was different. The drugs were gone. Her anger was gone. But none of that mattered. She still had to live with the memory.
Unlike Cain.
She couldn’t believe she’d told Cain the truth about herself. She’d exposed her real identity to him, made herself vulnerable. He could have found her with a simple Google search. Every rule in Treadstone said not to let any of that happen.
Never give away who you really are.
Treadstone.
“You aren’t that woman anymore,” Vandal murmured aloud to herself.
She wasn’t Sylene Jasper of East Los Angeles, addict and murderer. She wasn’t staring at two decades of her life behind bars. Nash Rollins had taken her from that life and given her a fresh start. All she had to give up in return was everything—her whole fucking identity!—but she’d decided that there was nothing from her past that she wanted to keep with her. Sylene Jasper was dead.
Now she was Vandal.
That meant walking a moral tightrope every single day. All Treadstone agents did that, balancing the evil with the necessary. Right now she felt like she was on a wire strung between two high buildings and the wind was blowing hard.
Vandal stared at her phone. She punched in the digits.
“It’s me,” she said when she heard the voice on the other end. “Cain’s found her. She’s on an island off the northeast British coast. Lindisfarne. That’s where he’s going next. You better move fast.”