As he leaned on the railing, Jason turned over the card from Abbey in his hand. The lights of Paris stretched out below him, the city skyline mostly flat except for the sparkling spire of the Eiffel Tower. Behind him loomed the white domes of the basilica known as Sacré-Cœur. It was almost ten o’clock in the evening, but there were still plenty of people gathered in the courtyard of the church. He heard half a dozen different languages being spoken, most of which he understood. Automatically, he eavesdropped on the conversations, making sure there were no threats nearby.
As it was, he’d already spotted three Treadstone agents taking up position. One stood in the shadowy doorway of the church. That man was in his twenties, wearing a loose Jim Morrison T-shirt, but Bourne had spotted the bulge of a weapon tucked in his belt. Another was a thirtysomething man talking on his phone at the railing no more than twenty feet away. There was nothing overtly suspicious about him, but Bourne had been around enough agents to recognize the physical characteristics of a fighter.
The third agent stood below him on the sharp steps leading down from the basilica. She had kinky brown hair partly covered by a beret. He recognized her from a confrontation they’d had in the Tuileries the previous year. He stared at her until she broke cover and looked back at him, with a frown creasing her face that he’d spotted her.
All of that meant that Nash Rollins was coming soon.
As he waited for his Treadstone handler, he opened the card from Abbey. She had terrible handwriting; it was childish and almost illegible. And yet just the sight of that scrawl brought her face into his mind. The messy red hair. The flirty lips. The dark eyes that stared at him—at a killer!—with no fear. He hadn’t seen her in two years, since he’d left her behind on the boardwalk in Quebec City. They’d slept together only once, in a motel outside Amarillo. They’d spent no more than a few days together while he was hunting the Medusa group, but she was still a woman he couldn’t forget.
Part of him realized that Abbey was in love with him and that he was in love with her. Even if that was true, it changed nothing. He couldn’t afford to be close to her. Bringing Abbey into his life was like signing her death sentence.
He read what she’d written on the card, and he could feel the heat behind her words.
Fuck you, Jason. Say something to me.
He wished he could do that. He’d kept up their secret correspondence even when he knew it was a risk. He’d allowed himself to believe that keeping thousands of miles between them was enough. But almost a year ago, everything had changed. He’d confronted the assassin known as Lennon on a beach in Northern California, and Lennon had said a name that turned Jason’s blood cold with fear.
Abbey Laurent.
Lennon knew about her. He knew who she was. He knew about Jason’s relationship with her.
So when Lennon escaped, Bourne decided that he had to cut Abbey out of his life completely. Immediately. No delays, no farewells. He couldn’t continue to put her in jeopardy, not when Lennon might decide at any moment to use her as leverage against him. Just like that, he shut her out. He stopped writing. He ignored her letters, hoping that she’d get the message to forget about him.
Don’t you understand? I don’t want to get you killed!
But ten months later, she was still sending him notes. The tone of her latest letter made it clear that she was getting angry and frustrated, running out of patience with his silence. That was good. He needed her to be angry. He needed her to hate him. Then she’d finally walk away, and she’d be safe.
Bourne took a cigarette lighter out of the pocket of his jacket. He put Abbey’s note back in the envelope, and with a flick of the lighter, he set it ablaze. He held the envelope aloft until the flame burned down to his fingertips, and then he dropped it on the ground and kicked away the black fragments of ash.
“Goodbye, Abbey.”
He looked up and saw Nash Rollins leaning on his cane with a crooked smile on his face. The white façade of Sacré-Cœur was framed behind him. The senior Treadstone agent made the smallest gesture with his hand, a signal to the nearest member of his support team to give them space. When they were alone, Nash came up to the railing and stood next to Bourne. He used his phone to take a picture of the imposing cathedral, as if he were nothing but a Paris tourist out for a stroll.
Nash was a small man, knocking on the door of sixty years old, with the weathered exterior of ripe fruit left out in the sun for too long. His wiry gray hair was combed back over his head. In his prime, he’d been a great field man, but now he was like a chess grandmaster pushing pieces around the board. He left the wet work to his younger agents. Bourne’s relationship with Nash went back years, to a time long before a bullet had erased Jason’s memory. As a result, he only trusted Nash so far, because he had no way of confirming that the things Nash told him about his history with Treadstone were true. They were more than colleagues, but less than friends. Even so, they needed each other.
“I was surprised to get your message, Jason,” Nash told him. “In December, you said you were out.”
“I’m still out.”
“And yet here you are looking for my help.”
“It’s a project for our mutual benefit,” Bourne said.
Nash turned around, facing the glow of Paris below them. “I hope you appreciate that I’ve kept my end of the bargain since then. No minders. No missions. We’ve left you alone. But I assumed you weren’t looking for retirement on the Riviera.”
“I’m not retired, but I do things my way now.”
“That includes hunting Lennon?”
“Yes.”
“Fair enough. We need the help. We’re no further than we were before. And if you catch him?”
“I’ll hand him over to you.”
“After you squeeze him for information, you mean.”
Bourne shrugged. “I want answers. Lennon claims to be part of my past.”
He didn’t add the rest: He claims to be part of Treadstone.
“Jason, I told you before that Lennon is playing with you,” Nash said. “He’s using your past as a weapon. That doesn’t mean any of it’s true.”
Bourne said nothing.
There had been too much water under the bridge for him to take anything Nash told him on faith. In the end, the senior agent’s loyalties were always to the shadowy people above him. If Bourne became a liability, if the government wanted him gone, Nash wouldn’t hesitate to have him eliminated. He’d proven that more than once.
“However, I appreciate the update about Iceland,” Nash went on. “I had an interesting time explaining to the minister of justice in Reykjavík why she shouldn’t worry too much about a remote cottage being taken out by an explosive round fired from a helicopter. The police turned the investigation over to Interpol, but there wasn’t much left to find.”
“I think that location was Lennon’s headquarters. He ran his European operations out of there. I’m not sure for how long, but regardless, now he’s moved on. That means I’m almost back to square one.”
“Almost,” Nash said. “In other words, you want to find the woman.”
“Yes. I sent you her photo. The blond woman I saw at the lava fields in Búðir was making a payoff. I’m sure she was just a cutout, but she was scared that she was going to be killed once she handed over the money. That tells me she knew who Lennon was and may know what the job was. Either way, if I can find her, I can follow the chain to the higher-ups and hopefully find my way back to Lennon again.”
Nash was quiet for a while. He took a tin of hard candies from his pocket, selected one, and popped it in his mouth. His breath began to smell of butterscotch. “My help isn’t free, Jason.”
“Except you want Lennon as much as I do.”
“In normal circumstances, I might say that’s enough, but the situation has grown more complicated than that.”
Bourne hesitated. He had reason to distrust Treadstone’s hidden agendas, but in this case, he knew Nash was holding all the cards. He needed his help. “First things first. Did you find the woman?”
“I did.”
“Okay. What’s the price for her name?”
Nash had the smug look of the cat who’d snatched a bird out of the tree. “If Lennon has uprooted his base of operations, it may be because he’s changed employers. He’s working with a new client.”
“Lennon always worked directly for Putin,” Bourne pointed out. “It’s hard to believe either one of them would walk away from that.”
“I doubt that it’s a permanent divorce, but for the time being, Putin is focusing his craziness elsewhere. He’s got his hands full. So Lennon is on hiatus from the Russians. But like you, he’s not retired. We believe he’s developed new affiliations. The payoff you saw was probably part of that.”
“Who is he working for?” Bourne asked.
Nash’s face took on a dark cast. “That’s the problem. We don’t know. Whatever group it is, they have to be extremely well funded to afford the services of a pro like Lennon. And obviously, if they have an assassin on the payroll, it means they’re engaged in wet work. Maybe it’s another government. Maybe it’s a terrorist organization. There’s a lot of chatter, but nothing that specifically ties Lennon to anyone’s plans and no indication of who they’ve used Lennon to hit. Up until now, our attempts to find a connection have come up empty.”
“Until I found the woman,” Bourne said.
“Yes. That’s our first lead.”
“So while I’m chasing this woman to Lennon, you want me to figure out who Lennon is working for.”
“Exactly,” Nash replied. “Quid pro quo, Jason.”
Bourne shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. The evening air was cool on the Paris hilltop. He knew the smart thing to do was walk away. Tell Nash what he’d told him six months ago: I’m out. Find the woman some other way. But he didn’t know how long that would take, and by the time he did, the trail to Lennon would be as cold as the Iceland glaciers.
He had no choice.
He had to say yes. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t fully escape Treadstone’s web. The agency always pulled him back in.
“All right, who is she?” Bourne asked.
Nash smiled, knowing he’d won. “Her name is Kenna Martin. Twenty-nine years old. She works as a publicist at the Forster Group in Manhattan.”
“And you’re sure it’s her?”
“It’s her,” Nash told him. “Kenna’s passport clicked at JFK five days ago. She cleared customs on her way back from Reykjavík on an Icelandair flight. Happy hunting, Jason.”