Kenna Martin lived well. Too well.
When Bourne arrived in New York two days later, he staked out the Chelsea high-rise in which the public relations agency called the Forster Group was located. At almost seven o’clock that night, he spotted Kenna leaving the building. She was dressed in a conservative gray pantsuit and had her long hair tied in a ponytail, but he had no trouble recognizing the willowy blond he’d first seen handing a leather daypack to Lennon on the Iceland coast.
He followed her uptown to the Upper East Side, where she lived in a six-floor condo building only four blocks from the park. When she was inside, he saw lights go on in a top-floor unit, and Kenna came to the windows with a glass of white wine in her hand. Zillow told him that she’d purchased the unit for nearly two million dollars one year earlier. That seemed an unlikely transaction for a twentysomething publicist, unless she had resources from somewhere else.
Less than half an hour after arriving home, Kenna left again. She hadn’t changed out of her pantsuit, but she’d loosened her hair. He tracked her on foot to a brasserie called Orsay five minutes away on Lexington. Inside, she met three other women of similar age, and Bourne arranged to get a table that was close enough for him to hear their conversation. Listening to the women talk over the next hour and a half, he concluded that none of her friends knew anything about Kenna’s double life. She made no mention of her overseas travel the previous week. As far as her friends were concerned, she’d been home sick in New York for several days, not in Iceland.
When the party broke up, Kenna returned to her condo, and she didn’t leave again.
The next morning, Bourne waited outside the building on 79th until he saw Kenna leave for work. He assessed the building security and noted that there was no doorman, but that the condos worked on a key-lock elevator system unique to each unit. To defeat it, he’d need a sample of one of the keys. So he waited until another resident left the building, then followed the man and pocketed his wallet while he was waiting in line at a coffee shop. Using a Treadstone device about the size of a credit card attached to his phone, he read the data off the magnetic stripe on the man’s keycard and reconfigured it into a master key that would give him access to any of the units in the building.
Half an hour later, Bourne let himself inside Kenna Martin’s luxury condo.
Somewhere in this woman’s life was a connection to Lennon. It might be in her business life, her personal life, her family, or boyfriend. To the outside world, she looked like one more single New York professional, a woman right out of Sex and the City. But Kenna had a big secret, and judging by the fear he’d seen on her face in Iceland, she was a pawn in this game, not a professional. She was in over her head, and that made her vulnerable.
Quickly, Bourne searched the apartment. He saw family photos on a digital frame that made her parents look middle class; they weren’t the source of her money or connections. He found condoms in her nightstand, but saw nothing to suggest that she had a steady boyfriend. In her closet, he saw expensive dance-wear, and hidden inside the toilet tank in her bathroom, he also located a small supply of cocaine. Kenna liked to party.
Was that how she’d been recruited? Had Lennon found a vice or crime he could use to manipulate her?
Everyone has a weakness to exploit.
Treadstone.
He located her suitcase under her bed. She’d removed the airline bag tags, and she’d destroyed any papers related to where she’d stayed or how she’d traveled, but he found a single fifty-krónur coin at the bottom of one suitcase pocket that she’d missed. That seemed to be the only evidence left of her illicit trip to Iceland. Otherwise, the condominium was clean. The gold coin Lennon had given her was probably already in a safe-deposit box somewhere.
This was the home of Kenna Martin, publicist, not Kenna Martin, spy.
Before he left, Jason checked the condo living room and found a vase filled with multicolored stones on a high shelf near the outside windows. He secreted a miniature camera inside the vase and positioned it so that it was invisible unless someone physically climbed to the shelf and took the vase down. On his phone, he checked that the app was receiving video and audio from the camera. The battery would last for a few days.
Then Bourne left the building, dropping the wallet he’d stolen inside the elevator.
His next stop was at the tower on 26th where the Forster Group was located. He found a table at a Starbucks that gave him a view of the tower entrance, and as he watched the people coming and going, he did research on Kenna’s employer. The Forster Group had been founded twenty years ago and was still owned and led by Darrell Forster. The man was a longtime New York Times reporter who’d traded in his journalism credentials at age forty for the more lucrative business of helping corporations and nonprofits manage their media reputations. He now led a team of more than one hundred communication specialists. That included Kenna Martin, but based on her website bio, she was a low-level publicist, not one of the firm’s account managers.
A website summary of the agency’s credentials also drew Bourne’s attention. The Forster Group handled projects for an eclectic range of clients, including Exxon, Tesla, the Varak Foundation, and a Russian software giant called 4Bear. Bourne had heard of 4Bear. They were cloaked in respectability, but they’d been rumored to be the brains behind a series of recent hacks of U.S. government agencies. Scratch the surface, and that meant 4Bear had ties to Vladimir Putin, and Putin in turn had ties to Lennon.
He didn’t know exactly how Kenna Martin had found herself in the middle of the assassin’s operations, but he suspected that the connection originated with her employer.
Bourne watched the building all day. Once again, Kenna left the office at seven o’clock. This time, she lingered outside long enough to smoke a cigarette and deflect come-ons from a few men on the street. Then Jason followed her back to her Upper East Side condo. After she went inside, he returned to the room he’d booked at the Carlyle Hotel three blocks away. There, he ordered Chinese food and booted up his computer to observe Kenna Martin at home.
She was attractive but not in an intimidating way. Her smile still had a girl-next-door innocence. The blond hair came out of a bottle, but she didn’t hide the dark roots. After she took a shower, she wandered back into the living room wearing only a lace bra and panties, and she stretched out on the sofa to watch TV, drink wine and eat popcorn, and snuggle with a stuffed koala bear. Her body was skinny, her legs long and smooth. If this had been a cheap apartment in Brooklyn, she would have looked right at home, but this was a multimillion-dollar condo, and Kenna was up to her neck in death.
During the evening, he expected something to happen to give him a clue to her other life. A call on a separate phone, a conversation about a secret meeting. A delivery of papers, drugs, or information. Instead, the only thing that happened was a call from a girlfriend in which Kenna talked about a club in a Tribeca warehouse, where there was a party coming up the next night. She giggled in a high-pitched voice, sounding even younger than she was, and described the hot new outfit she was planning to wear.
That was all.
At midnight, Kenna turned off the television and the apartment lights and went to bed. She took the stuffed bear with her. Bourne stared at a black screen streaming from the camera and tried to get inside her head. This was a girl who compartmentalized her life. In Iceland, she’d looked terrified about meeting an assassin, but in this safe compartment, she was relaxed, happy, and normal.
If Bourne was going to get her to talk, that had to change. He needed Kenna Martin off-balance.
He needed her scared.
On Friday, Bourne arrived in the Tribeca neighborhood at midnight. Far down the cobblestoned street, he could see the lights of Jersey City on the other side of the Hudson. The location of the club was a four-story redbrick building with high metal doors covered with graffiti. There was no sign to identify it, but a bass drumbeat thumped through dark windows on the other side of the walls.
Bourne stayed in the shadows of a loading dock doorway as he examined his surroundings. The street was quiet at this hour but not empty. He kept an eye on a man walking the sidewalk by himself; he was tall, with a dark buzz cut, but Bourne saw no weapons. There was a group of women hanging out at the corner with drinks in their hands. A homeless man huddled near a building wall. An old man walked a miniature schnauzer. When he was satisfied that there were no threats, he crossed the street and went inside.
The club was crowded, lit by whirls of red and white strobe lights mounted on the high ceiling. A mix of dance music played through speakers at a staggering volume. He pushed through the crowd of twenty- and thirtysomethings, keeping an eye out for Kenna Martin. Bourne knew she was here; he’d watched her dress and leave on the spy camera from his hotel. But one blond girl in the chaotic crowd was hard to find.
He went to the bar and ordered a shot of Teeling whiskey. Then he turned around and studied the faces. He wore a leather jacket and a tight black jean shirt, plus caramel-colored sunglasses hiding his eyes. Standing by himself, he got plenty of attention from the women coming to order drinks, and he deflected them with a tight smile.
There!
There she was.
Kenna danced with two other girls not far away. He recognized the outfit she’d worn, a glittering aquamarine dress that showed off her legs and made a deep V over her breasts. In her heels, she was taller than most of the other women here. Her blond hair flew as she spun ungracefully on the dance floor. Her face had a loose, happy smile, and Bourne suspected that she was already a little drunk and that she’d tapped into the supply of cocaine hidden in her toilet before leaving for the party.
His eyes never left her, and he didn’t hide his interest. That was a deliberate move. He was sending the unmistakable club signal that she was the one he wanted. It didn’t take long for that sensation of being watched to penetrate her mind. Kenna glanced at the bar, spotted him, then looked away without catching his eye. A few seconds later, she took another look, as if to confirm that he was really focused on her, not one of the dozens of other women dancing close by. At that point, her gaze found his with interested blue eyes. Her innocent smile turned smoky, and he smiled back at her. Then, playing hard to get, she ignored him for a while, but he saw her whispering to her friends, and they both checked him out, too. They obviously approved.
Ten minutes later, her face flushed from dancing, Kenna finally came up to the bar. She ordered white wine, but before she could take money from her purse, Bourne signaled to the bartender that he would pay for her drink. As she sipped it, her head swiveled to stare at him, and she gave a little toss of her blond hair.
Thanks.
She had to mouth the word. They couldn’t hear each other in the tumult of the club. So she leaned close, her lips brushing his ear.
“I’m Kenna.”
Bourne leaned in, too. “Payton.”
“Nice to meet you, Payton.” She fluttered her hand near her cheek, as if she could dispel the warmth of so many people pressed together. She didn’t bother with small talk or games; the drink and drugs had made her direct. “It’s hot in here. I was going to head up to the roof for some fresh air. Wanna join me?”
“Why not?”
“Good.”
She took his hand. Her long fingernails grazed his palm. They navigated the crowd, then climbed three sets of metal stairs to the roof, where they found the heavy door propped open. Outside, cool air washed over them, and the Manhattan lights glowed in the taller buildings on every side. A few other couples had already made their way up here, but there were plenty of isolated spots. Kenna went to the edge of the railing that looked down at the street. She drank her wine, and Bourne sipped his whiskey.
“Let’s get the awkward stuff out of the way,” she told him.
She put a hand around his neck and kissed him slow and hard. Her lips moved sensually on his mouth; her tongue played with his. When she was done, she giggled. “I find doing that breaks the ice and saves time.”
“Yes, it does,” Bourne replied.
The girl leaned against the railing, looking pleased with herself. She closed her eyes dreamily as the wind mussed her hair.
“Kenna,” he said.
“That’s me.”
“Kenna Martin. Publicist with the Forster Group. Lives in a two-million-dollar condo when she should be struggling to pay the rent on a basement apartment in Queens. Makes overseas money drops to professional assassins.”
Kenna’s eyes flew open with terror. “Fuck!”
She turned to get away, but Bourne grabbed her wrist and held her where she was. “We need to talk, Kenna.”
“What do you want? I can scream. If I scream, people will come running.”
“You don’t need to scream. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Who are you? FBI?”
“The bigger question is, who are you, and what the hell are you involved in? I know about Iceland, Kenna. I was there. I saw you.”
The wineglass fell from her hand and shattered on the stone rooftop. Kenna’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God, I’m going to die. They’re going to kill me. What do you want?”
“I want you to tell me about the man in the lava fields.”
“I don’t know anything about him!” Kenna hissed. “I don’t know who he is or what he does! I don’t know what was in the pack! I gave it to him, that’s all. All I do is make drops. That’s it!”
“You’re going to have to do better than that,” Bourne told her. “I need to find that man, and you’re going to help me.”