The rain stopped, and the night turned sticky and warm. Jason didn’t go back to his hotel until almost three in the morning. In between, he walked the streets of New York, tormented by one of those stretches of blackness that periodically descended on his mind. When he thought about his missing past, he didn’t typically obsess about memories that were gone. He could live with that emptiness. He knew about the things he’d done, the places he’d gone. His skills were still there, like motor instincts that never went away. What he’d lost more than anything else was a sense of who he was.
His real identity.
Two years ago, on the boardwalk in Quebec City, Abbey Laurent had asked him that same question. Who do you think you are?
He’d answered her without hesitation. A killer.
This was one of those nights when he had to face that truth about himself all over again. He was what Treadstone had made him, and Kenna Martin had paid the price for it.
But he couldn’t change, and he couldn’t stop.
When Jason finally returned to the Carlyle, he revived himself with a couple hours of sleep. Long before dawn, he slung his backpack over his shoulder and went back out onto the streets. He caught a cab and gave the driver an address near Roosevelt Park in the Bowery. He found the storefront he was looking for, with its door protected behind steel mesh and its windows protected by a roll-down metal panel painted over with garish graffiti. With a quick look up and down the street, Bourne removed a prybar from his pack and twisted away the lock that held the steel mesh in place. After sliding it up, he forced the door inward with a hard shove from his shoulder.
This was Wolf Man Travel.
He spent an hour searching the agency’s files, but they’d covered their tracks well. He found nothing to suggest that it was anything but an aboveboard travel business catering to an elite corporate clientele. But it wasn’t. He knew that. The documents that Kenna Martin had passed along at her drops had come via a bicycle messenger from this agency. And among the agency’s largest clients, based on what Jason found in their files, was Darrell Forster and the Forster Group. That wasn’t a coincidence.
Afterward, Bourne waited in the owner’s office at the back of the agency. He took a chair in the corner and sat in the darkness with his Sig on his lap. At six thirty, with a gray dawn filtering in from the street windows, he heard the noise of someone arriving. An unhappy voice muttered a curse, finding the broken door. A man’s heavy footsteps thudded toward the back of the storefront, and his wide frame appeared in the doorway.
The office light went on. Bourne extended his Sig, pointing it at the man’s chest.
“Fuck!” the man said, throwing his hands in the air as he spotted Bourne and the gun. “Who are you? What do you want? If you’re looking for cash, there’s nothing here.”
Bourne sized the man up. He was small, with an overweight build. He was in his fifties, and he did look a little like a wolf man, with a bushy shock of brown hair and a full beard. Jason noticed the bulge of a weapon inside the man’s sport coat, and he gestured at it with the barrel of his gun.
“Take your gun out slowly and put it on the floor. Kick it toward me.”
The man scowled but complied.
“Who are you?” Bourne asked, retrieving the gun.
“Ray Wolfe. This is my agency. I told you, we don’t keep any money here. You’re wasting your time.”
“I don’t care about money. Sit down, and keep your hands flat on the top of your desk.”
Wolfe did. The man’s dark, nervous eyes bounced back and forth from Jason to the Sig, and his face flushed. His desk was messy with travel brochures stacked in piles around his computer. The walls were crowded with posters and calendars from exotic vacation destinations. The man knew how to keep up appearances, but Jason knew the truth. Wolfe was more than an ordinary travel agent.
“You gonna tell me what you want?” the man asked.
“Kenna Martin is dead,” Bourne said.
“What? Who? I don’t know anybody by that name.”
“You sent her on a drop last night, Ray, but the drop was fake. A setup. They shot her. I want to know how it went down and who you sent there to do the job. I know it was a woman, and I want to know how to find her.”
“Shit, man, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Drops? Setups? People getting shot? You got the wrong guy.”
Bourne shook his head. “Stop wasting my time, Wolf Man. I know about the bicycle messenger. I know about Darrell Forster. I know about Lennon. Do I look like I’m with the police? Do you think I’m here to arrest you? There are only two ways this ends. You alive, or you dead. Take your pick.”
Sweat gathered on the man’s forehead. “I swear—”
“The papers you gave to Kenna were blank!” Bourne said angrily. “You knew that, and that means you knew they were going to kill her.”
Jason bolted out of the chair and pinned the middle of the man’s right hand against the desk with the Sig. His other hand squeezed the man’s jaw like a vise. “People think the knee is the most painful place to get shot. Trust me, the hands are worse. All those nerve endings? A lot worse. You feel like your entire body is on fire.”
“Fuck!” Wolfe said, trying to spit out the words. “You’re crazy, man!”
“I’m going to count to three.”
“Jesus, I’m telling you, all I do for Darrell Forster is book his fucking plane trips!”
“One.”
“I don’t know who this Kenna Martin is! I don’t! I run a fucking travel agency!”
“Two.” Bourne pushed down hard with the barrel, crushing bones and veins.
“Come on, man, don’t do this! Fuck, please, please, you got it wrong!”
Jason’s finger slid around the trigger. “Three—”
“All right! All right! Shit, man, okay! I didn’t know they were going to kill her! You have to believe me, I didn’t know!”
Bourne removed the gun from Wolfe’s hand. He pointed it into the man’s forehead, between his furry eyebrows. “Talk. Tell me about the drops. What’s in them?”
“It’s travel documents, mostly. I swear. Plane tickets. Cars. Hotels. But the identities are all fake. Fake driver’s licenses, fake passports. I’ve been in the business for years, so I’ve got contacts. It’s what I do.”
“And Forster?”
“I’ve never met him. Never talked to him. I can’t give you anything on him, man.”
“How did you get involved?”
“A couple of years ago, a guy came in here. A lot like you, you know? The sort of guy who means business. He knew all about my work with fake IDs, and he said he had a deal for me. A lot of new jobs, a lot of money. And along with it, some big corporate accounts for my agency, too. All legit, easy to launder the money I get from the other shit. That was the carrot. Stick was, if I didn’t play ball, the feds would find out about me and I’d go away for years. So I played ball. You bet I did. And they held up their end. A week later, the Forster Group started sending me a lot of their agency travel biz. You think they’d look twice at a Bowery shop like mine otherwise? Yeah, I knew they were connected somehow, but I wasn’t going to ask any questions.”
Bourne gestured at the man’s arm. “Roll up your sleeve.”
Wolfe’s eyes widened. “You know about that? Yeah, okay, they made me get some fucking tattoo. A pyramid.”
“What does it mean?”
“It’s an ID. It means you’re in. Beyond that, I don’t have a clue.”
“How do you know what arrangements to make before the drops? IDs, travel, whatever. Who tells you what they need?”
“Phone call. I don’t know who it is. They give me the specs, I set up all the docs, and when it’s ready, I put the envelope together. Then I get another call with a time and location to write on the envelope, and they tell me which shipping store to send my messenger to. I don’t even know who picks it up. One time my guy came back, said he saw a woman there. That’s all. I swear, I didn’t know what was going to happen last night.”
Bourne’s finger slid onto the trigger again. “You’re lying. The papers in the envelope were blank. There were no documents. You knew it was a trap.”
Wolfe squeezed his eyes shut. His breath was sour. “I didn’t! I didn’t know!”
“You said you put together the packages.”
“Not last night! Last night was different, man!”
“What happened?”
“I did travel docs, same as always. I had it all ready to go, I did. But instead of a phone call with info about the drop, they said there was a change of plans. Somebody was going to come to the office in person, and I was supposed to do whatever they asked. I didn’t like it, but you think I was going to say no? So an hour later, this scary bitch shows up in my office. I don’t know who she was! It’s not like she gave me a name.”
“What did she look like?” Bourne asked.
“Small, skinny, but really in shape, you know? Hispanic, long brown hair.”
Jason nodded. It was her. The killer. Then he remembered words spoken by Lennon in a cottage in Iceland. The new Yoko. A fiery little girl I found in Barcelona.
Lennon had sent his #2 to do the job.
“Then what?”
“She asked for the envelope, and I gave it to her. Then she gave me a second envelope and said to proceed with the drop. The time and location were already written on there. Somewhere on the High Line last night. That’s all. I didn’t ask questions. And shit, man, I had no idea the thing was a setup. None! I swear! I didn’t know they were going to kill this woman. I’m telling you, I don’t even know who she was.”
Bourne still had the gun against Wolfe’s forehead. He was ready to fire.
The man was telling him the truth. He was sure of that. And it made sense. The switching of envelopes. The trap. It didn’t smell of an arrangement made by Darrell Forster or whatever organization Forster controlled. This one was Lennon. It was the assassin sending in one of his operatives to tie up loose ends. And that told him that Lennon knew that Cain was still on the hunt.
Jason stared at the fleshy face of the travel agent in the chair. Wolfe was a low-level cog in a chain of death. He felt a desire to squeeze the trigger, to blow the man’s head open, to get some kind of payback for what had been done to Kenna Martin. But it wouldn’t solve anything. If Wolfe died, Forster and Lennon would both know that the operation had been blown. They’d be on their guard, watching for Bourne.
He needed them to think they’d gotten away clean.
“If you tell anyone about me or this meeting, either they’ll kill you, or I will,” Bourne told him. “That’s a guarantee. The only way you stay alive is to stay quiet. Understand, Wolf Man?”
“Yes! Yes, I understand!”
“The envelope you gave the woman. The real one. What was in it? Travel documents?”
“Yes, yes, a plane ticket and hotel reservations. The plane was booked for this morning, check-in to the hotel this afternoon.”
“Where?” Bourne asked. “Where was she going?”
“Washington,” the man replied. “The Melrose Hotel.”