Bourne knew with a single glance at Johanna that he’d been fooled.
Chrétien Pau had played Monika. Johanna had played Jason.
He stared at the woman with the gun, and he didn’t recognize her anymore. The vulnerability, the innocence, the flirting, the fear that had all been a part of Johanna’s face was gone. She was now mature and hard, her firing stance in perfect balance, her gun as comfortable in her hands as her skin was on her body.
She was a professional. A killer.
But who was she?
Monika, leaning heavily against his shoulder, her forearm and leg leaching blood, pushed away from him and stood awkwardly on her own. Strangely, she didn’t look surprised to see the woman in front of her.
“Storm,” Monika said.
“Hello, Shadow,” Johanna replied.
“I should have known it was you. I told Nash something else was going on, that we were missing a piece of the puzzle. But we thought you were dead.”
“Yes, that was the idea. If you knew I was still alive, you would have sent people after me. It was much easier to hunt you as a corpse.”
Monika shook her head with what looked like admiration. “Half a dozen witnesses saw you get on that boat in Cyprus. We found the gun on the deck. Blood. DNA. But no body. Our forensic people concluded you’d shot yourself and fallen overboard. You staged the scene well, but I’d expect that from you. Storm is nothing if not an expert at whatever she does. You even convinced Nash that the suicide was real. He’s normally a cynic, but he told me not to worry. He was sure you’d really killed yourself.”
“And you?”
“I wondered,” Monika said with a cock of her head. “It seemed too easy. I was surprised you’d kill yourself with me still alive.”
“You’re right about that. I tried to kill you once, and you got lucky. The car bomb missed you. But I wasn’t going to give up.” Her voice rose higher, becoming sharp and shrill. “Not after what you put me through. Not after what you did to me, you fucking monster.”
Shadow showed no response to the outburst.
Shadow. Not Monika Roth.
That was who she really was. Jason realized now what he should have guessed in the beginning. Monika had never existed at all. Everything about her, including her identity—including her sister—had been a lie.
Cain. Shadow. Storm.
All Treadstone.
Bourne took a step toward Johanna—he still thought of her as Johanna—but she instantly shifted the gun toward him. He found himself staring at the barrel of the Ruger from twenty feet away. Her aim and grip were solid. He was certain she wouldn’t miss.
“Please don’t move, Jason,” she told him, her words clipped. “Please. I’m sorry about this. The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but if you get in my way, I’ll kill you. Don’t think for even a second that I’m bluffing. I’m not.”
“I believe you,” Jason replied.
“I’m not a liar, you know,” she went on. “Not like she is. I meant the things I said. I really do feel something for you. Hell, I may even be in love with you. We’re kindred spirits, you and me. We’re both Treadstone, but neither one of us can turn off our emotions the way they want us to. We still feel things despite everything they’ve done to us. But that won’t stop me from putting a bullet in your head if you get between me and Shadow.”
“Do you think killing me will bring you peace?” Shadow asked in a calm monotone that barely rose above the wind.
Bourne watched Johanna’s eyes burn to life like two fiery suns. “Jesus! After everything you’ve done, you’re still trying to manipulate me. Get inside my head with your poison. Here’s a little tip, you heartless goddamn robot. I’ll never have peace, never again. You stole that from me. You messed up my mind forever. Now I have to live with that. The only thing that kept me half sane for the past year is the thought of getting revenge for what you did.”
“Then shoot,” Shadow said. “This is your moment. This is what you want.”
Johanna’s finger twitched on the trigger.
She was a fraction of a pound of pressure away from firing, but she held back, and she looked angry with herself for hesitating. Jason understood. He’d been there himself with the assassin known as Lennon. It was hard to kill in cold blood. When a soldier was coming at you and killing meant survival, that was an act you could justify to yourself. But when your adversary was unarmed, helpless at the end of your barrel, you couldn’t always bring yourself to take a life. Not even someone you hated.
Bourne put his body in front of Shadow, blocking her from Johanna’s gun. This time, Johanna pulled the trigger without the slightest hesitation. She fired a bullet with perfect accuracy, the trajectory so close to his head that he felt the sting lace across his scalp.
“Get out of the way, Jason.”
“Tell me what this is about,” Bourne said.
“What is this about? Do you really need to ask me that? You know who Shadow is now. She’s not your lover, not your fiancée, not the girl who got away. She’s a predator. She’s Treadstone. You know what she did to you ten years ago. My God, even as Monika, even in the midst of the mind games she was playing, she cheated on you. She betrayed you with this piece of shit on the ground. That’s why I used you to help me hunt her. Because I wanted you to understand what kind of a devil she is. I wanted you to see how Treadstone destroys people like us.”
“Johanna, what did she do to you?”
“Get out of the way, Jason,” she said again.
“What did she do to you?”
“Goddamn it, move! Move! I will kill you!”
Behind him, he felt Shadow’s hand on his shoulder. She limped around him, squarely back in the crosshairs of Johanna’s gun.
“It’s okay, David,” she murmured. “You don’t need to be a hero for me. Shall I be the one to tell him, Storm? Would you like to hear the story from my own mouth? Everything I did to you. All of my lies.”
Bourne watched Johanna’s finger on the trigger. He felt her yearning to shoot. But Shadow knew her target well. A confession from her enemy was too tempting for Johanna to pass up.
“Tell him,” she snapped. “Tell him everything.”
“Okay. I’ll say anything you want except to apologize. I never apologize.”
“Talk. Tell him what you did to me. Show him who you are.”
“Storm worked in Europe designing AI systems,” Shadow said, keeping her focus on the girl and the gun. “That’s what she was doing when I met her. We’d begun noticing artificial intelligence interfaces that were an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything coming out of Big Tech yet. It was dark web stuff. Bad players—arms dealers, human traffickers—were already making use of the technology. So Treadstone went looking for the person behind it. I found this twentysomething girl in Salzburg. A tech genius, American expat, a loner. My mission was to kill her. But I saw potential in her, so I encouraged her to come work for us instead. She proved to be even better than I expected. She took to the physical and tradecraft training with an extraordinary skill. You know, I told Jason you were the best agent I’d worked with since I met him, Storm. That wasn’t a lie. You were brilliant and capable. You had an unbelievable ability to put on a legend like it was a new set of clothes. I’m not surprised you were able to fool Cain with your story.”
“Fuck the flattery,” Johanna said. “Tell him what you did.”
“Fine. Like I said, you were good. Exceptional. But at the same time, I was worried that you were hiding something from me. That deep down you had a weakness that you were desperate to conceal. So I dove into your childhood, and I found some incidents. A classmate called you a name, and you beat her so badly you put her in the hospital. A cousin put a hand on your breast. You broke his arm. I began to realize you had a capacity for rage that I didn’t think you could control. That was dangerous. That would wreck Treadstone if it came out at the wrong time or on the wrong mission. You hid it well, you hid it so well, but I got a taste of it when I observed you secretly.”
“Observed,” Johanna shot back. “That sounds so sterile. So innocent. You tracked my computers, my phones, my car. You had cameras on me everywhere I went. You watched me twenty-four seven.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you get off on it, Shadow? Is that the perverted fun for you, getting inside people’s private lives like a voyeur? Watching me shower? Watching my boyfriend fuck me?”
“Interesting that you should mention your boyfriend,” Shadow said, the monotone in her voice not changing at all. “That was the first time I witnessed what you were capable of. You see, David, Storm’s boyfriend made the mistake of choking her in the midst of intercourse. He didn’t stop when she struggled. A poor choice on his part. Perhaps he watched too much porn and thought she would like it. But you didn’t like it, did you, Storm?”
“No.”
“It made you angry.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to tell Jason what you did?”
Johanna said nothing, but Bourne saw an explosion simmering in her face. Her hand tightened around the gun.
“She threw her boyfriend across the bedroom,” Shadow went on, “and I watched her stab him one hundred and forty-six times.”
Johanna fired.
She drilled a bullet into Shadow’s leg in almost the exact place where she’d already been shot. The new wound forced out a long, keening wail of pain, and Shadow clung to Bourne as she collapsed to the stone floor of the battery, clutching her thigh, blood pulsing between her fingers.
“He deserved what I did to him!” Johanna shouted at the woman writhing on the ground, her voice rising to drown out the wind. “Nobody treats me like that! Nobody! But watching me kill him wasn’t enough for you, was it? You couldn’t just send me away. Fuck, you didn’t even care what I’d done to my boyfriend. Murder wasn’t disqualifying for Treadstone. I read all of your notes, remember? I needed to discover what would happen if I forced Storm’s unstable emotions to the surface in an operational context. All that fucking shrink mumbo jumbo. The fact is, you were only concerned about what I would do on a mission.”
She took a step closer. Bourne took note of the shrinking distance between them. A couple more steps, and she’d be close enough for him to bridge the gap with a well-timed leap. But he’d be jumping—weak and wounded—into the path of the Ruger, and he’d be up against an agent who was every bit as skilled as he was.
“What did she do?” he asked her.
“She sent me on a mission,” Johanna said. “A fake mission. But I didn’t know that. She used an AI-generated scenario. My own code. She used my own code to fuck with me. To trigger me. My instructions were to investigate a college professor in Berlin. He was suspected of producing and distributing child porn. I was supposed to gather evidence against him but take no action. Do nothing. Once I had enough evidence, they’d turn it over to Interpol to arrest and prosecute him. And I found evidence. Jesus, the evidence. It was all over his computers. Except I didn’t know Treadstone had manufactured it. That it was all AI bullshit. That Shadow wanted me to find it. The man was completely innocent, and they set him up. They put a fucking target on his chest.”
“Your instructions were to take no action,” Shadow said from the ground.
“But you knew who I was!” Storm hissed, taking another step forward and aiming the Ruger at Shadow’s head. “You knew my weakness! The whole scenario was designed to break me! That’s what you wanted!”
“Yes. It was a test. You failed.”
“I burned down his house!” Storm screamed. “I killed him and his three kids! The deep fakes you made, the evidence you made me find, included his own kids! What the fuck was I supposed to do?”
“Take no action,” Shadow said again.
Bourne saw his one chance. Johanna’s entire focus was on Shadow. Her body went taut, her muscles winding up like a spring, ready to uncoil. He tensed, timing his assault; he had a split second in which to shunt the gun aside and bring her down. But then it all changed. The violence washed over her like a wave and left calm water in its wake. She took a step back, and she actually laughed.
“God, look at you, you bitch, doing it to me again. Baiting me. Trying to give Cain an opening while I’m distracted.” Her stare shifted to Bourne. “And you. I saw what you were planning. Quick thrust, grab the gun. Do you really think you can beat me, Jason? I’m good, I’m fast, I’m years younger than you are, and I’m not wounded. Don’t make me hurt you. I don’t want to.”
Jason shook his head. “Why me, Johanna? Why this whole twisted plan?”
She shrugged. “I had to find out where Shadow was hiding, and I needed an ally to do that. I hacked into all of the Treadstone files before I staged my death. I read Shadow’s bio and background, her notes, her reports on every agent she worked with, everything she did to them. That’s how I found out about you, Jason. When I read about what she’d done to you, how Treadstone had hidden the truth about your past, I knew you were the one to help me. I could bring Monika Roth back into your life, and you’d lead me to wherever she was. You see, whatever else she may be, Shadow is smart. She didn’t have a whisper of her current identity anywhere in her files. But I was sure you could find her. Shadow’s notes about you were very clear. You respond to danger. Danger toward someone you care about is your most powerful motivator. So I needed a threat. A real threat, nothing fake. You’d see right through that. But I had the answer right in front of me. Shadow’s files told me what had happened in Switzerland, and I knew Le Renouveau was still looking for you.”
“So you reached out to them,” Jason concluded.
He heard Yanis Lorchaud in his head again. You’ve been betrayed.
“That’s right. I gave them a tip about how to find you and Monika. The tip was me. I invented a legend for Monika’s sister, someone who might know where she was. They came after me, like I knew they would. Then I came after you. I helped you remember how much you cared about Monika, because I knew you’d need to protect her.” She stopped, and her face darkened. “But truly, I didn’t plan for us to get together. That just happened. It was genuine. But I won’t deny that the feelings between us helped my plan.”
“Paris. La Villette. That was you in the woods. You went after Vandal, and then you tried to kill Monika.”
“Yes.”
“You told Le Renouveau about the island.”
“Sure. And after you left the house, I texted them again to let them know you and Monika were both here. I needed them to keep coming after you. I needed you focused on the danger, not on me. You were beginning to suss out who Monika really was, and if you analyzed all of it, I knew you’d realize that her identity had to be fake. A cover. That would mean her sister was fake, too. So I had to keep you off balance.”
“All to kill Shadow,” he said.
“All to slay a dragon,” Johanna replied.
“Except I can’t let you do that.”
Johanna shook her head. “You’d give up your life for her? After the way she betrayed both of us? Fuck, I almost told you the truth half a dozen times, because I figured you’d help me. Don’t be a fool, Jason. Stand back and let me throw this piece of shit off the castle wall.”
“Put down the gun, Johanna.”
“No. I can’t do that. I love you, but I’ll kill you.”
“If you don’t put down the gun, you’re going to die.”
An arrogant confidence crept into her voice. “Really? How does that work? You think you can get the drop on me? You’re unarmed, and you’re way too far away.”
“Yes, but Vandal’s not,” Jason said.
“What?”
“Vandal’s in the doorway behind you. She’s got an Astra pointed at your back. Even with a concussion, I don’t think she’s likely to miss.”
Johanna shifted the gun and aimed at his forehead. “Seriously? That’s weak, Jason. Is that really the best gambit you’ve got? Vandal’s at the cottage, probably crying over Nash’s dead body. That was a nice bonus, by the way, being able to shoot him, too. He’s almost as much of a devil as Shadow. Now I’m going to count to five. I swear, if you’re still standing there, I’ll put a bullet in your head.”
“Five,” Vandal announced from behind Storm.
She fired.
She fired high, as Jason knew she would, not wanting to hit Bourne or Shadow with an errant shot. But the distraction worked. Johanna twisted with unbelievable speed; he had never seen an agent move so fast. She spun toward Vandal and let three bullets fly in the time it took Bourne to close the distance between them. But Vandal was already gone, taking cover behind the stone doorway at the castle steps.
Jason focused on the Ruger. He hammered Johanna’s wrist as he collided with her body, and the pistol clattered away as they both tumbled to the ground. She struck back so fast he could barely react. Her elbow shot toward him, missing his windpipe by a couple of inches but hitting his upper chest with enough force to make him choke. She jumped—jumped—to her feet, and as he pushed himself off the ground, her knee connected with the underside of his chin and threw him backward. He tried to shake off the blow, but the sky over his head went into a crazy orbit. In those few seconds, Johanna scrambled across the battery floor and had her Ruger back in her hand.
From the doorway, Vandal fired again.
She aimed directly at Johanna this time and missed, but the sizzling round forced Johanna sideways. Bourne charged, and Johanna fired back at Vandal just as Jason wrapped an arm around her neck and clenched his fist around the hand that held the gun. The barrel of the Ruger went high; two bullets flew wild. Jason hung on. They wrestled in each other’s arms. Johanna wriggled as he tried to contain her, and their bodies did a crazy dance, crashing into the castle wall. He had the strength, but she had the endurance, and he knew he was running out of time. With his shoulder, he threw all his weight into a single shove that drove her against the stone. Her head hit hard, and her body went limp for an instant. He used that moment to peel away the Ruger and stagger backward.
Bourne pointed the gun at her face from three feet away.
In front of him, Johanna’s eyes focused again. She stared at the Ruger. “Nice. I knew you were good, but that was nice.”
“Get on your knees,” Bourne told her. “I’m going to tie you up and take you in.”
“No. You’re not. Kill me or let me go, Jason. There’s no in-between.”
“Get on your knees,” Bourne told her again.
“I’m nobody’s prisoner. If you want me, you have to shoot me. That’s the choice. What’s it going to be?”
Bourne tightened his grip on the Ruger.
“Vandal,” he called sharply. “Check on Shadow. She needs help.”
That was true. Shadow was losing blood fast. Slowly, the other Treadstone agent limped past them to tend to the woman on the ground. But now there was no one blocking the steps out of the upper battery. Johanna glanced that way, and he could see the calculations in her mind, doing what good agents did. Anticipating each of the next moves like a chess player. Figuring out how to get off the island.
If he let her go, she’d melt away. But he couldn’t let her go.
Johanna studied the barrel of the gun with a strange curiosity. “Can you do it, Jason? I really wonder. Can you kill a woman you’ve made love to? Has that ever happened to you before?”
He knew he had to fire.
He didn’t want to, but he had to fire. Johanna couldn’t stay free and stay alive. This amazing woman, this irresistible girl who’d bewitched him and deceived him, had to die. He had no choice. It would be merciful and quick, a single shot as fast as suicide taking the life out of her pretty eyes.
“I have to do it,” he told her.
“Yeah. I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, Jason. I still love you.”
His finger curled around the trigger.
His mind took a photograph of Johanna’s long blond hair, her blue eyes, her lips. He knew how those lips felt; he knew what it was like to kiss them. He could feel the warmth of her skin; he could feel her legs wrapped around him and remember everything about her body that was hard and soft.
“Goodbye, Johanna,” Bourne said.
“Goodbye, Jason.”
Then, accepting who he was, he cocked his arm and lowered the gun.
“Go,” David Webb told her, and that was it. Like a deer bolting, Johanna was gone.