The Hamptons did not appreciate strangers in their neighborhood, especially at night. The police were very protective of their wealthy enclave. Bourne couldn’t simply drive a stolen car along the Old Montauk Highway and park it on the shoulder of the road, not without being discovered and prompting a house-to-house search. Instead, he’d turned to a New York executive in the defense industry who’d needed his help in the past. So now he drove a Bentley convertible that the police were unlikely to challenge.
It was a clear, fiercely windy night. Gales twisted the woods on both sides of the beach road. He’d left the more populated towns behind him as he neared the far eastern end of the peninsula, and all that was left were unmarked trails leading to uber-rich estates hidden deep inside the trees, with views looking out on the Atlantic waters. He knew where he was going. For the past week, while Abbey slept, Bourne had stayed up, memorizing maps and satellite photos of the East Hamptons, analyzing where each road went, researching the elaborate houses and who owned them.
He’d found an estate half a mile along the ocean bluff from Varak’s compound, owned by a pop singer who was on tour in Australia. Its access road was separate from the road that led to Varak’s mansion, which meant the billionaire’s security wouldn’t cover that area. That was his jumping-off point. That was his way in.
Bourne watched the narrow road through his headlights, alert for men and vehicles. If he could analyze the area and come up with that plan, then Lennon could, too. There was at least a small chance that he was walking into Lennon’s staging ground, so he needed to be cautious. But he saw no indication that the road was being guarded.
Ahead of him, the singer’s estate loomed in the moonlight as he broke from the trees. There were no lights on in the two-story house. It was after midnight, and if there were staff living there, they were asleep. He didn’t bother hiding the Bentley. He parked it outside the front door the way any rich person would, and then he got out and went to the trunk of the convertible. He removed the supplies he’d gathered for the mission, and then he shut the trunk with a quiet click.
Bourne headed for the water.
Not far away, the thunder of ocean waves crashed against the base of the bluff. The wind was loud, covering any noises around him. He found a grassy trail through the trees, and the trail led him to the very edge of the cliff, where steep wooden steps led down to the beach. The Atlantic stretched out in front of him, angry and vast, surging with whitecaps. He saw no boats or lights anywhere on the water.
The bright night, under a clear sky and three-quarter moon, left him visible, so he stayed close to the woods as he followed the cliff westward toward Varak’s estate. Where the trail ended, he dived back into the trees. The tumult of the wind allowed him to go faster, unconcerned with being heard. He used a penlight pointed at his feet to guide him, despite the risk that it might be seen. He kept an eye out for night vision cameras surveilling the woods, but if they were there, they were well hidden.
He didn’t have to go far to reach Varak’s estate. The trees led him to a huge stretch of green grass and a sprawling Cape Cod–style home, with two perpendicular wings, several turrets like in a castle, and a back porch stretching from one end of the home to the other to take advantage of the ocean views. He saw an empty helipad at the rear of the lawn, not far from the bluff. There was a pool with its own separate guest house adjacent to it, but both looked closed for the season. Multicolored Adirondack chairs lined the cliffside, but the wind had blown them over.
He saw something. A body lay in the green grass just in front of him.
Bourne took his Sig Sauer in his hand—Abbey had insisted that she didn’t want the gun anymore—and he curled his finger around the trigger. He approached the body, feeling exposed in the moonlight. The man on the ground had a red slash across his throat; he’d been killed silently and professionally. He was dressed all in black and had an empty holster around his shoulder. A guard. One of Varak’s guards, monitoring the border of the compound.
The defenses had already been penetrated.
Lennon was here.
Jason hesitated, just for a moment. One part of his brain told him to leave. To walk away. Whatever secrets Lennon was hiding, they were part of Bourne’s past, and the past was dead. Nash was right. He could forge a new life for himself with Abbey. She wasn’t far away, just on the other side of Long Island Sound, staying the night with Walden Thatcher before she headed west to meet up with Peter Chancellor. Jason could join her. He didn’t have to fight old battles.
But he could also hear Lennon’s voice in a small cottage in Iceland.
I was Treadstone.
Pistol in hand, Bourne sprinted across the lawn toward the house. With each step, he expected gunfire to chase him. But there was a strange silence about the estate. The only thing he heard was the roar of the ocean gales. If there were other guards from Varak, they were already dead.
He reached the base of the wide wooden porch, where tall steps rose toward the house. Crouching, he slid an M4 carbine off his shoulder and secreted it under an overhang at the base of the steps. He didn’t know if he’d need that kind of firepower, but he wanted backup if things went wrong.
Things always go wrong.
Treadstone.
Bourne continued to the house. He followed the ground-floor wall, keeping below the level of the picture windows. He had a heavy backpack slung over his shoulder. That was the second part of his plan, for which he’d been gathering components for days. Where the perpendicular wing jutted off the main house, he found a stone patio extending into the grass, with an elaborate brick kitchen built for parties, including multiple grilling stations.
A gas line at the wall fed the grills.
He slipped the backpack off his shoulder, unzipped the pocket, and armed the electronic switch on the IED. The little red light went on, indicating that the receiver was active. He left the backpack under the gas line, then removed a small plastic radio transmitter from his pocket. It didn’t have much range, but it didn’t need to go far. The button inside was covered by an acrylic flap on hinges.
Lift the flap. Push the button.
That was all it took.
Backup.
Bourne kept the transmitter in one hand and his Sig in the other. He continued along the edge of the wall, and as he did, he heard a muffled noise behind him from the other wing of the house. A crack that he knew had come from a gun. He ran, finding a locked door that led inside the estate, and he kicked it in with two blows from his boot. He rushed into the house, where the air was dusty and cool. There were no lights on, but the outside moonlight lit up his path through the rooms. Everything was decorated and furnished to the tastes of a billionaire, like a European museum.
He found a hallway leading toward the other wing, which faced the ocean. It was papered in heavy red wallpaper, with chandeliers overhead. At the end of the hallway, a shadow appeared, then stopped as the guard spotted him. Bourne threw himself down an instant before a bullet coursed over his head, and he had no choice but to extend his arm and fire from the ground. Even with the suppressor, the noise was loud in the quiet house. The man fell.
But they knew he was here now. Lennon knew.
Above him, he heard the creak of the floors. Someone was upstairs. He continued through the dark mansion until he reached the foyer with its double doors and high ceiling. A staircase with a brass railing wound upward, and he ran up the stairs two at a time, his Sig leading the way. Up here, he smelled the cordite of a gun that had been fired. It led him down another hallway to a sunroom facing the Atlantic. The room was huge, with floor-to-ceiling windows leading out to the wide porch over the lawn. There were modern, colorful paintings on the wall. Bouquets of fresh flowers in vases. Italian marble on the floor.
In the middle of the floor, bleeding all over the stone, was Varak.
Jason knelt over the billionaire. He recognized the face. The man lay on his back, eyes open. His skin was still warm, but he was already dead. But Bourne wasn’t alone. A man sat in a wicker chair in the far corner of the room, almost invisible.
“Hello, Cain.”
Jason jumped to his feet and pointed his gun at the man. He walked slowly toward him, his eyes making out the image in front of him. The killer sat with his long legs casually crossed. His right hand loosely gripped a semiautomatic, but the gun was angled downward, not pointed at Jason. The shadows made the man’s face difficult to distinguish. High cheekbones. Slim, eaglelike nose. Jutting chin. A shock of black hair. This man looked very little like the killer he’d confronted in the cottage in Iceland, but that didn’t matter. Disguise was the man’s specialty.
It was Lennon.
Jason trained his Sig on the assassin. From this distance, he couldn’t miss, but he remained cautious. Something was wrong. If Lennon had wanted him dead, he could have taken a shot when Bourne first entered the room, but he hadn’t. The killer’s face looked oddly smug. As if he still held all the cards.
“Go ahead,” Lennon said. “Shoot. That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here.”
Bourne held the gun steady in his hand. His finger was on the trigger, but he didn’t fire.
Lennon smiled. “No. We both know that’s not what you want. You’ve come here for the truth. You’ve risked everything to find out what I know. But obsessions like that come with a terrible price, Cain. Are you ready for what it will cost you?”
Again Jason hesitated. His eyes flicked around the dark space, illuminated only by the moonlight, but he saw nothing. No threats. It was just the two of them. One of the doors to the patio was open, and cold, ferocious wind whipped inside.
“You told me you were Treadstone,” Jason said.
Lennon tilted his head, a dismissive gesture. “And I was. Just like you. We were friends back then, you and me. As much as people like us can be friends. Too bad you don’t remember. But they lied to you. They manipulated you. They made you think I’d turned, and then they sent you to kill me. Does that sound familiar? You of all people should know how they twist the truth for their own ends. I knew too much, so I had to be eliminated.”
“What did you know?” Bourne asked.
“What does it matter, Cain? You won’t remember any of it.”
“Tell me.”
The killer shrugged. “They sent me on a mission. A mission that went horribly wrong. A mission called Defiance.”
Bourne blinked. The gun grew slippery in his hand with sweat. That word—it erupted in his head like fireworks! The roaring filled his ears, a wrenching pressure in his skull that he felt whenever the memories tried to come back. Defiance. He knew that word. It was not a lie. But he didn’t know what it meant!
Or did he?
Yes. It meant death. Vengeance. Betrayal. And yet wherever that mission was in his mind, there was nothing but blackness. Everything about it had been wiped clean. He remembered nothing.
“It must be strange,” Lennon said, as if reading his mind. “To look back into a blank space.”
“What was Defiance?”
“Sorry, Cain. If you want to know any more than that, you’ll have to go looking for it. Or who knows? Maybe the truth will find you. We both know the past is never really over. Not for us.”
Bourne tried to hold the gun steady, to not let himself lose focus. Lennon was taunting him. Playing with him, a cat with a mouse. The assassin had no intention of giving up his secrets. He was dangling the truth in front of Jason like a shiny object, but all the while, he was really stalling. For what? What was going to happen next?
Kill him now.
That was what he needed to do. Forget the past. Shoot!
“You see, that’s your weakness,” Lennon said, watching his hesitation. “You can’t let go, can you? You know the past is coming back to haunt you, to steal away anyone you love. And yet you can’t stop. You could have walked away tonight, you could have been free, but here you are. I knew you’d come. I told them you’d come, no matter how much they threatened you, no matter how many times they told you to stay away. That’s why we’re ready for you. That’s why this was the perfect place to spring the trap.”
Jason felt a cold, clammy horror work its way up his back. It brought him back to where he was, in an estate owned by a billionaire who was lying in a pool of blood on the floor. Varak was dead. Genesis was dead.
But why had they used Lennon to kill him?
Why do a deal with the devil?
“The Pyramid hired you,” Bourne said, suspicion filling his voice. “Why would you agree to betray them? That’s not like you, to turn on the person paying the bills. An assassin can’t afford that reputation. Particularly one who does work for the Russians.”
Lennon shook his head. “The Pyramid didn’t hire me. Genesis hired me.”
“But you killed him. You shot him.”
“I shot Varak,” Lennon replied calmly.
Jesus! Suddenly, Bourne understood. He recognized the illusion they’d created. The theater, the art of deception. They had a billionaire to take the fall. Kill him, and pretend the Pyramid had been destroyed. But the Pyramid was not destroyed, not over. With Varak dead, it could go underground and create a new identity. It could stay in the shadows, manipulating events the way it had for years.
“Varak wasn’t Genesis,” Bourne said.
Lennon shrugged. “No.”
“He never was.”
“Of course not. Varak was a loyal servant. He played his part, but he knew the end would come for him sooner or later. He always said he would gladly give his life for the cause, just as his father did.”
“Then who is? Who is Genesis?”
A voice spoke from the shadows of the doorway behind him.
“I am.”
Bourne spun, knowing it was too late, knowing Lennon was pointing a gun at him now, knowing he had nowhere to run. He’d risked everything for this moment, and he’d lost.
Obsessions like that come with a terrible price.
Walden Thatcher walked into the room. The old man held a gun, which was pointed at the head of Abbey Laurent.