The man gave her a bland smile and repeated his question. “You are Abbey Laurent, aren’t you? The reporter?”
“What’s this about? Who are you?”
“We had a meeting. I apologize for being late.”
“You?” She reacted with surprise. “You’re the mystery man?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, where the hell were you?”
“I’m sorry. I was detained. It was unavoidable.”
Abbey relaxed a little, but she studied him with a faint disappointment. He wasn’t what she’d expected. He was tall and solidly built, with thinning blond hair and gold-rimmed glasses that pinched the bridge of his nose. He wore a brown raincoat over a neat, expensive beige suit and tie. He looked like a middle-aged accountant, not a spy, and she’d pictured her intriguing mystery man as more Chris Pine than Jonah Hill.
“I’m glad I was able to find you,” he added in a voice that was almost sugary in its politeness. “Obviously, I went through a lot of trouble to meet you.”
“How did you find me?”
“Everyone leaves a footprint online, Ms. Laurent. Routines are easy to track. We know a lot about you. We’ve followed your reporting for some time.”
“We?”
“I’m a member of an influential group. You said you wanted a story, didn’t you? They’re part of the story.” He gave her another of his bland smiles and waved toward the end of the street. “Shall we take a walk?”
“Yes, okay.”
The two of them headed side by side to the intersection where Rue Sainte-Angèle met Rue Saint-Jean. They walked down the middle of the cobblestoned street past trendy shops and restaurants that were closed for the night. There was no traffic and no other pedestrians. Her mystery man kept his hands in the pockets of his raincoat, and Abbey noticed that he never looked directly at her. However, his eyes moved constantly, examining the shadows around them.
“Looking for someone?” she asked.
“Just being careful.”
“Are you expecting trouble?”
“I always expect trouble.”
“I heard there was an incident near Château Frontenac,” she said. “People were killed.”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you were late?”
“Yes.”
“Was this because of our meeting? Was I in danger?”
“There were dangerous men near the hotel,” the man replied, “but they were looking for me, not you. They were hoping you would lead them to me.”
“And did you kill them?”
This time he stopped and looked at her. She saw that he had icy blue eyes behind his gold-rimmed glasses. “Is that what you think I am? A killer?”
“I don’t know what you are. I don’t even know your name.”
“Names are unimportant.”
“Except you know my name,” Abbey said.
“True enough, Ms. Laurent.”
They reached the old stone wall at Artillery Park, part of the city’s fortifications that had been built three hundred years earlier when the British and French were battling for the land. Without asking, the man led her down the stairs into the park, and then he stopped near the grassy hill under the wall. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the air. He smiled at her again, and she decided that she didn’t like his smile. The location where they’d stopped was hidden from the view of other buildings in the area. Alarm bells went off in her head.
“What does this have to do with the murder of Congresswoman Ortiz?” she demanded impatiently. “You said you’d help me get answers. I want to know why she was killed. And who shot her.”
He held his cigarette delicately between two fingers. “That was a terrible night.”
“Yes, it was.”
“You were near the congresswoman when she was shot, weren’t you?”
“That’s right. I was. Do you know who did it?
“The American government thinks it was Cain,” he replied.
“Who is Cain?” Abbey asked. Then she added with an undercurrent of horror, “Is it you? Did you kill Sofia Ortiz?”
The question seemed to amuse him. “Me? Hardly. I’m not in his league. Cain is a ghost. A legend. I’m simply flesh and blood.”
She realized he was playing with her. Toying with her, the way a cat plays with a mouse before it bares its claws. This whole meeting felt off. He’d promised her a story, and now he was dancing around all of her questions. The way he looked, the way he talked, the way he acted, none of it felt like the same man who’d texted her.
And then she remembered.
She hadn’t used the code phrase the mystery man had given her. She’d never confirmed that he was the man she was supposed to meet.
Abbey summoned a casual smile to her face. “So what do you like most about Quebec?”
He stared at her, his brow creased with puzzlement. “I’m sorry?”
“We ask that of all the tourists. Canadians are very polite, you know. What do you like most about Quebec? I mean, I know there’s so much.”
She needed to hear him say the words. Those wonderful little maple candies. She held her breath, waiting.
Say it!
He threw his cigarette to the ground and crushed it under his foot. He took off his gold-rimmed glasses, wiped them carefully with a handkerchief from his suit pocket, and repositioned them on his face. His hands returned to the deep pockets of his raincoat. “I guess the lower town,” he said. “So picturesque.”
She tried to stay calm and not give anything away. She reminded herself to keep smiling and to keep the terror she felt off her face. It wasn’t him. This wasn’t her mystery man. He was a stranger, and more than that, she knew he was a killer.
He was here to kill her.
“I could use a cigarette, too,” Abbey said, unlatching her satchel purse so she could reach inside.
But he wasn’t fooled at all.
Her hand dove inside her purse, her fingers clawing for the plastic grip of the Taser. As she drew it out, the man with the gold-rimmed glasses slipped his own hand out of his raincoat pocket. He held a black pistol with a long barrel, and his blue eyes had the sharp gaze of a hawk. Abbey squeezed her eyes shut and yanked the trigger, and the wires of the Taser ejected, filling the man’s body with fifty thousand volts. His arm lurched; he fired his gun into the air, making her scream. She pulled the trigger again, delivering more electric shocks. He collapsed to the ground, wriggling and jerking in fits, the gun spilling from his hand.
Abbey threw the Taser down.
She ran blindly from the park, making a zigzag path around dark corners to get away, losing herself in the deserted old streets of the city.
THREE
JASON didn’t know if he was remembering or dreaming.
Bits and pieces of a life buzzed through his head like the clickety-clack of film in an old projector. He saw children lined up in formation, a dozen boys in gray uniforms being scolded by a stern old man who marked all of their demerits on a clipboard. He saw a gravestone at his feet, blue marble, with two names that were blurred by a kind of fog. He could only read the year of their deaths: 2001. He heard explosions that made him cover his ears. Gunfire. He heard words coming out of his mouth in foreign languages. He saw places that were unfamiliar to him, and yet he knew he’d been to all of them. Cities around the world. Streets and monuments at night. Churches, not to pray, but to meet people in secret. Boats on the water, borders, checkpoints. Walls to be climbed and buildings to be infiltrated.
The hazy images raced in and out of his brain. Through it all, he saw one face. A woman. She kept reappearing, kept interrupting the movie to whisper in his ear. Stay with me, my love, stay alive. She had flowing black hair, a nose hooked like an eagle, dark passionate eyes, a wicked laugh, olive skin. He could feel her body wrapped up hungrily in his own. Her mouth, teasing him. The fullness of her lips, the softness of her skin.
She was in his arms, and they were happy.
&
nbsp; Then she was in the arms of someone else, being carried away. Her eyes were closed, her face lifeless, her blood spilling to the ground. He heard himself screaming.
No!
His eyes snapped open from unconsciousness. He was awake, but lost in a cloud of confusion. Everything that had been in his head scurried away, like cockroaches afraid of the light, leaving behind an empty place.
Bourne lay in a twin bed. The sheet under him was damp from his sweat. He must have thrown off the blanket sometime during the night, because his body was uncovered. He was naked, on his back. The room was small and unlit, but he could see a crack of light around the blinds that covered the double window, which let him examine his surroundings. There was a single door that led to the outside; a small bathroom, barely larger than a phone booth; an empty closet. Two watercolor paintings hung on peeling burgundy wallpaper, showing sailboats on the water. A lamp sat on a desk near the window.
He felt disoriented, trapped in the middle of a strange dream.
He tried to get up, but pain knifed through his body like a flaming arrow. He collapsed back to the mattress, breathing hard. His head pounded, and his vision made a cartwheel, turning upside down before righting itself. When he looked at his torso, he saw a bright white bandage below his left shoulder, with a large circle of red where blood had seeped through the gauze.
He needed to think, to remember. He pushed his fists against his head, ignoring the pain. His breath thundered in his chest, and a whole new sheen of sweat formed on his skin.
The sweat of panic.
The sweat of fear.
Jason tried to get up again, gritting his teeth against the agony in his muscles. When he swung his legs off the bed, he managed to push himself to a sitting position, with his feet on the hardwood floor. He waited until the next wave of vertigo passed. The pain he felt wasn’t just in his chest. It was in his head, too. He put his hand to the base of his skull, and the barest touch felt like a lightning bolt. He felt a gauze bandage there.
His senses fed him information that his brain tried to process. Outside, he heard the trill of songbirds, along with a whistle of air squeezing through the door frame. It made the room cold. He smelled the dankness of his own body, but he also smelled brine, as if from the sea. He stood up, propping a hand against the wall near the bed to keep himself from falling. He went to the window and separated the aluminum blinds. He was in a vacation cottage, looking out on a wooden porch. The pale blue water of a small bay lapped against a rocky beach only steps from where he was. Evergreens dotted the green grass near him, and he could see a heavily wooded promontory on the far shore of the inlet. The tide was out, leaving much of the basin exposed, with seagulls picking at the mud. The bay opened into a much larger body of water, where no land was visible.
He knew this place. The St. Lawrence estuary.
He remembered now. He was at a beachside inn in Saint-Jean-sur-Mer, two hours northeast of Quebec City. Les chalets sur la rivière. A hideaway with access to marine traffic in the Seaway, where he’d slipped aboard ships to break apart smuggling rings. Contraband. Drugs. Human trafficking. But there was more to remember in this room, so much more. He’d been here with Nova. They’d made love in that twin bed, her voracious appetite leaving him sated and exhausted.
Yes, he knew where he was.
The events of the recent past crept back slowly, sluggishly, like escaping from quicksand. The violence in Quebec City. The confrontation with Nash Rollins.
And prior to that, New York. The assassination. The riot.
It happened that way to Bourne sometimes, those paralyzing moments of forgetting. He’d learned to live with it. He was a man with a fractured history, a man without identity. Only a few years earlier, he’d lost his memory to a bullet in his head, which left him with no past, just fragments of who he once was and another name from another life that meant nothing to him. That life belonged to a stranger. He’d had to start over in his early thirties. Make new memories. And to this day, he still occasionally woke up in a fog, with no idea where he was, terrified that he’d lost everything again.
Barely able to walk upright, Jason staggered to the bathroom. He yanked on the string that turned on the bulb overhead. Under the dim yellow light, he propped himself with both hands on the porcelain sink and stared at the face in the mirror.
It was a square, handsome face, but pale and drawn now, lacking color. His hair was dark, so deep brown as to be almost black, and it was cut short and swept back on a high forehead. He had intense blue-gray eyes, and the bags under his eyes reflected a chronic lack of sleep. He hadn’t shaved in days; his stubble was forming a beard. He was more than six feet tall and athletically built, but he saw a web of fresh cuts and multicolored bruises all over his skin, the product of his fall from the boardwalk. This wasn’t the first time. His body was riddled with the scars of previous injuries, including one over his right eye and another below his ear.
When he peeled back the bandage on his chest, he saw fresh stitches closing up the small, tight hole of a bullet wound. Stitches. A doctor. He remembered that part, too. He’d staggered from the cliff in the old town and nearly bled to death while he drove half an hour outside the city to find a discreet man whose steady hands he’d used in the past. And then he’d paid the doctor’s daughter an exorbitant amount of money to take him here while he slept in the back seat. He needed rest, time to recover, but he couldn’t stay long. There were only so many doctors in a radius around Quebec City, and soon enough they would find a retired surgeon named Valoix and his daughter. They would trace Bourne here. Hunt him down. Kill him.
For God’s sake, why?
But he knew why. They thought he’d become Cain again. A name from the past, a name from his past. An assassin.
In the other room, a loud bell jangled, startling him. His hand twitched, his fist opening and closing. His first instinct when surprised was to reach for a gun, but he’d lost his gun on the boardwalk. He glanced at the nightstand and saw a hotel phone. He limped across the room and picked up the receiver, but said nothing. He waited to hear who it was.
“Bonjour, monsieur,” said an old man’s voice. “Comment ça va ce matin?”
He understood the language, but he let the silence stretch out. Then he replied quietly in a gravelly voice: “Who is this?”
“C’est moi, Monsieur Bernard, bien sûr. Avez-vous faim? Voulez-vous le petit dejeuner?”
“I’ll eat later.”
“D’accord. Avez-vous besoin de quelque chose?”
He thought: Yes, I need something. I need to know how I was set up in New York. I need to know who framed me for murder.
“I’m fine,” Jason replied. “What time is it?”
“Nearly eleven o’clock,” the hotel owner told him, switching to accented English. “You told me to wake you earlier, but the young woman who brought you here said le médecin was very insistent. You needed sleep. I hope that is all right.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Your clothes are clean and ready for you. Shall I bring them over?”
“Please.”
“If I may ask, will your beautiful wife be joining you on this trip?” the man asked.
“My wife,” Bourne murmured.
The hotel owner heard his hesitation. “Oh, I hope I didn’t speak out of turn. That lovely creature with the black hair and the eyes that always dance. You are a lucky man. Even an old man can feel his heart race seeing a woman like that.”
That lovely creature.
Nova.
No, they weren’t married. That had been their cover when they first came here. But cover stories had a way of blurring with reality, and at some point, they’d realized there was a genuine attraction between them. They made an unlikely pair, the half-Greek, UK-based intelligence agent and the Treadstone operative with no past. For two years, they’d enjoyed stolen moments in places around the world, whenever they could get away from their other lives. They’d even dreamed about a time w
hen they could be together for good, but making plans was a foolish game for people like them.
“It’s just me this trip,” Bourne replied.
“Ah. Quel dommage.”
“Has anyone asked about me?” Jason inquired. “Does anyone know I’m here?”
“Of course not. Your presence here is confidential, per your standard instructions. You can always count on my discretion.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Well, you are always most generous, monsieur. I will see you shortly.”
Bourne hung up the phone.
He stood in the darkness of the hotel bedroom, momentarily paralyzed with inaction. He was still thinking about Nova, still remembering her, but he couldn’t afford that luxury. Nova was gone. She was dead.
Treadstone had killed her in Las Vegas.
Jason had a new employer now, and he needed to make contact with them. They’d be wondering where he was and what had gone wrong. He went to the small table by the window that overlooked the bay. His phone was there, a pay-as-you-go phone he’d purchased with cash in Albany as he made his way north out of New York. He reinserted the battery, which he’d removed to make sure the phone couldn’t be tracked or remotely accessed, and he powered it on and waited for the phone to acquire a signal.
The contact number was supposed to connect him with a woman named Nelly Lessard. She would answer with the words “Carillon Technology. How may I direct your call?” The extension Bourne asked for would send one of several messages: Call me back. I’m being followed. Requesting a meeting. Everything is fine.
There was one extension that was like a 911 call. Human Resources, seventh floor.
It meant: Emergency, need immediate extraction.
He dialed the phone and waited, expecting to hear Nelly Lessard’s voice. Instead, a whistle whined in his ear, and he heard an electronic recording. “Your call cannot be completed as dialed.”
Jason heard a roaring in his head. The wound in his shoulder throbbed.
Had he misdialed? No.
He tried again and got the same message. And again. And again. The number was supposed to be monitored 24/7. Nelly was always supposed to be there to take his call. Instead, the number had been shut down. Taken away from him, taken out of service. He knew what that meant.
Robert Ludlum's™ The Bourne Evolution (Jason Bourne Book 12) Page 3