“We can’t stay here,” Jason told her. “Gather everything you’ve got. Quickly.”
In a daze, Abbey got to her feet, then collapsed into his arms, her knees buckling. He held her steady. She reached out to touch the blood that was all over his face, and then she stared at the dead woman sprawled on the floor of the hotel room. Her voice fluttered, rising and falling. “That woman. She was going to kill me. Who was she?”
“As soon as we’re safe, we’ll talk, but we have to go now. I need to wash up, and you need to pack.”
“But who was she?” Abbey repeated, her mind convulsed by shock.
Jason guided her to the bed and sat her down. He took her by the shoulders and spoke softly. “Abbey, it’s okay. It’s over. You’re alive, and I’m going to keep you safe, but we can’t stay in this hotel. The man who sent this woman here will be expecting a report soon, and when he doesn’t get it, he’ll know something went wrong. That means there will be more killers arriving in a few minutes.”
“But the woman—the body—”
“I don’t think they’ll want anyone to find her. They’ll take care of the scene themselves. But if not, I have a contact in DC. A cleaner. I’ll send him over here in the morning, and if necessary, he’ll make sure the body is taken care of. No one will have any idea what happened here.”
Abbey just shook her head over and over. Her eyes were glazed.
“Sit here,” Jason told her. “For now, don’t move. I’ll take care of everything.”
Bourne found her travel bag, and he checked the dresser and closets in the hotel room and repacked her clothes. She hadn’t brought much, which was good. He found a few toiletries in the bathroom and shoved those in a pocket of her case, and then he washed his face and hair in the sink until the blood from his fight with Yoko was mostly gone. Unless someone looked closely, they wouldn’t see anything amiss in his appearance.
Back in the main part of the hotel room, he checked Yoko’s pockets. She had a fake ID, which he took with him; otherwise, there was nothing to tell him who she really was or to point him back to Lennon. He could wait and watch for the killers who would follow her, but he knew they would be no more than hired drones, knowing nothing. The trail to the assassin had gone cold again.
But for the moment, he didn’t care about that. He had Abbey with him. She was back in his life.
When he had everything ready, he took her hand and guided her to her feet. “We need to get out of here. Can you do this?”
She stared at him blankly. “Yes. Yes, okay.”
He led her to the door, put on the do not disturb sign to keep the maid out, and guided her down the hallway with a hand around her waist. He had his gun in his other hand, coat slung over his arm to hide it. He didn’t think that reinforcements would be on their way yet, but he was taking no chances. They stopped at his room, where he grabbed his daypack; it was always ready to go. Quickly, he shoved Abbey’s things into his pack, then broke the zipper on her case and left it by the trash. A maid who found it wouldn’t think twice about a damaged suitcase left behind.
They returned to the elevator, but he took them off one floor above the hotel entrance. He found the stairs and guided her down to the ground floor, then checked to make sure the lobby was empty before they emerged.
“Try to smile,” he told her. “Act natural. Nothing’s wrong.”
She wasn’t able to smile, but she did manage to walk on her own. He could feel her body trembling, and he was afraid she might collapse again. Jason held her hand tightly, squeezing her fingers for reassurance. They headed through the lobby, and he nodded at the desk clerk, who didn’t seem to find it unusual that two lovers were heading out in the middle of the night. His daypack attracted no attention. When they got to the street, Bourne steered her past the church next door. Traffic was light, but he kept an eye on the nearby cars and on the park where he’d maintained his surveillance. At the corner, he took her arm and steered her diagonally across the street and led her northward on 25th.
“I have a car in a garage a couple blocks away,” Bourne said. “It’s not far.”
Abbey said nothing. She just clutched his arm more tightly.
They walked past rows of upscale Georgetown condo buildings, with Jason forcing Abbey to go faster. Parked cars lined the street, and he stayed alert, his gun ready under his coat. When they reached the garage, they found his rented black Jeep Wrangler, and he threw his bag in the back. Abbey stood next to the car, her arms wrapped around herself. Even when he opened the door for her, she didn’t get inside.
“Do you need help?” he asked.
“No.” Her voice was stripped of emotion.
“Are you okay? Should I get you to a doctor?”
“No.”
“Are you in pain?”
She touched her neck and grimaced. “A little, but it’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
Her lovely dark eyes found his in the shadows. They were wide open, in shock, as her brain began to grasp the reality of what had just happened. When he looked at her, there was something in her face now that he’d seen in others many times. Fear. Fear of him. He’d seen it in Abbey’s eyes before, but he’d hoped she was past that. But he didn’t blame her for feeling that way.
“What you did—” she said. “That woman—”
Jason nodded. “I didn’t have a choice.”
He understood the images that were replaying in her mind. When they’d been together two years ago, she’d known what he was. He’d told her what he was. A killer. But she’d never seen it happen; she’d never actually witnessed the things he had to do. Now she had. She’d seen it up close, right in front of her. She’d seen a knife jutting out of a woman’s throat, her dead eyes open in agony. That was his life.
“You saved me,” she murmured. “It was just so—brutal.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “Don’t be sorry. Fuck, don’t ever be sorry, not with me.”
“We need to go,” he told her again.
“Yeah. Hang on.”
Abbey wet her lips and swallowed hard. She inhaled loudly and took a couple of steps from the Jeep down the row of parked cars. She braced herself with one arm against a concrete support pillar in the garage. Then she bent over at the waist and vomited across the hood of a gold Mercedes.
The only light in Rock Creek Park came from the glow of the Jeep’s headlights. It was still dark, and the park was closed. The densely forested refuge felt a million miles away from DC, although they were barely twenty minutes north of the Melrose. He found a picnic area on the road that paralleled the creek, and then he bumped the Jeep over the curb onto the grass and parked inside the trees. Bourne turned off the engine and shut down the headlights. They were only inches away from each other, but they were largely invisible.
“Seems like you’ve done this before,” Abbey said.
“I have.”
Always know where to run. Always know where to hide.
Treadstone.
“We’ll be safe here until sunrise,” he went on. “You can sleep if you want.”
“I’ll never sleep.” She added a moment later, “I’m not sure I’ll ever sleep again.”
They were quiet for a while. Feeling her next to him, he remembered things about her from the brief time they’d spent together. Her perfume. The way she breathed. The softness of her skin. She’d changed her hair and her look, but in the darkness, that didn’t matter. She felt intimately familiar to him, even after two years apart.
“How, Jason?” she asked him finally. “How did you find me? How did you know I needed you?”
“I didn’t,” he admitted. “I had no idea you were involved in any of this until I saw you get out of the cab at the hotel.”
“But why were you even there?” Then, in the next instant, she put it together. “Her. That woman, that killer. You were following her.”
“Yes.”
“Who was she?”
“She worked for an assassin I’ve been tracking around the world. He calls himself Lennon. This woman was his latest number two. Yoko.”
He heard a sour laugh in the car. “Lennon and Yoko? Seriously?”
“He thinks it’s funny.”
“And this Lennon. Are you after him for your bosses? For Treadstone?” He heard the part of her question that she didn’t say out loud: Are you still working for them? Are you still part of that world?
“Partly. I’ve put distance between me and Treadstone, but Nash Rollins knows how to keep me from escaping the web entirely. You remember Nash, don’t you? But this chase is also personal. Lennon claims to be a part of my past.”
Abbey’s voice was hushed. “The past you can’t remember.”
“That’s right.”
“Why does that matter now, Jason?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. I don’t even know if what Lennon says is true. But there’s something in my past that’s still a threat, and I’m pretty sure Lennon knows what it is. Until I find it, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to move on.”
“So you were following Yoko, hoping that she would lead you to Lennon,” Abbey concluded. “Except now she’s dead, and she can’t help you.”
Jason smiled. Abbey was always smart. “Pretty much. But I do have one lead that I didn’t have before.”
“What’s that?”
“You. The people Lennon is working for obviously sent him after you. I don’t know why, but they want you dead, Abbey.”
“I know why,” she replied bitterly. “Or at least, I think I do. You obviously haven’t spent any time online recently, have you? I’m a nonperson now. They made up vicious lies about me, and that was enough to destroy my career. I’m sure they figured no one would question that I’d hung myself. If you hadn’t been there, the story would have been Disgraced Journalist Commits Suicide.”
Jason reached for her. “Jesus, Abbey.”
Then he thought about the short black hair. The downscale clothes. The lack of makeup.
“You’re in hiding, aren’t you?” he asked. “You’ve been trying to disguise yourself.”
“Yeah, but they found me anyway.”
“Do you know who they are? Or what made them come after you?”
Abbey sighed, and she told him everything. About the girl named Iris—now dead—and her conspiracy theories. About the murder victim called Deborah Mueller who didn’t seem to exist at all. About a group operating in the shadows that goes by the name the Pyramid. Jason listened to the whole story, and his mind worked feverishly to connect what had happened to her with what he knew of Kenna Martin, Darrell Forster, and Varak. And Lennon.
“The tattoo,” he murmured. “This tattoo on Deborah Mueller that they tried to hide in the media photographs. I’ve come across people who have it, too. It’s obviously some kind of brand for people working for the Pyramid.”
“So the Pyramid is what ties this all together,” Abbey said. “We’ve been working the same story from opposite sides.”
“I think so.”
“Well, where do we go from here?”
Jason heard the way she phrased it. We. The two of them together. Just like two years ago, Abbey wanted to stay with him. The risks didn’t matter to her, and this time, he didn’t object, because she was right. If she had any hope of getting her life back, it lay in exposing the Pyramid.
“The kid in Hyattsville told you that Deborah Mueller was meeting someone,” Jason said. “Older man, vintage car. We need to find him.”
“How?”
Bourne thought about it. “He came back to the park two days after the murder. Even if the Pyramid was able to eliminate video evidence from the night that Deborah Mueller was killed, they probably didn’t think to erase security camera footage from later on. Maybe we can find him that way.”
“Security there is handled by the park police, right?” Abbey asked. “Will they let you see the footage?”
“Nash has contacts. Treadstone has its fingers everywhere. I’ll call him in the morning, and he’ll find a source for us. Until then, you really need to get some sleep. Even if you don’t think you can.”
“Because sleep is a weapon?” she asked with a smirk in her voice.
He smiled, hearing her throw his Treadstone rules back in his face. “Yes, it is.”
Jason eased Abbey down across the seats into his lap. He couldn’t see her face in the darkness, but he stroked her hair and ran the back of his hand along her cheek. It felt natural to do so. Too natural. Too easy. He was already breaking the first of the rules again. The one Lennon had used to mock him. Never get involved.
“Hey, Jason?” Abbey murmured. Her voice already sounded thick with exhaustion.
“What is it?”
“I’m sorry about my note. You got it, right?”
“I did.”
“Well, I’m sorry for what I said. I was pissed that you were cutting me off. Not staying in touch.”
“I was trying to keep you safe.”
“By keeping me away from you?”
“Yes.”
She was quiet for a long time, long enough that he wondered if she’d already drifted into sleep. Her breathing grew steady under his hands. Then her fingers curled tightly around his, and she whispered to him.
“Don’t do that again. Don’t shut me out. I’m a big girl, Jason. I know what it means to be with someone like you. And I’m all in.”