There was no time! The past was irrelevant! The past didn’t exist!
“Come on,” Bourne said, pushing Kotov along the street. “We need to keep going.”
“Who betrayed me?” the Russian asked. “Who gave me up?”
“It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that Putin knows you’ve been plotting against him. You can never go home.”
Kotov shrugged. “When you do what I’ve done, you know there will be a price to pay eventually.”
“He’ll stop at nothing to find you.”
“Oh, believe me, I know his methods. When we were both in the KGB, he was my mentor. Later, I ran missions all over Europe that helped him build his power base. But now he stands in the way of change. He has to go.”
“Not as long as the siloviki and the oligarchs support him,” Bourne pointed out.
“They’re creatures of self-interest. Many of them think as I do.”
“Maybe, but they’ll never say so openly. Anyone who knows you is at risk now. Do you have family?”
“My wife is dead. My daughter will disavow me. Denounce me.”
“That may not be enough.”
Bourne saw the first and only glimmer of emotion on Kotov’s face. “Trust me. As of this moment, I’m dead to her.”
Bourne raised a hand to silence him. Where the street ended, they reached a walkway that led past the grounds of a medieval church called St. Nicholas and climbed the hill toward the city’s medieval wall. The church tower rose above snow-covered trees. There were no signs of life around them, and he saw no footprints in the fresh powder. Even so, his instincts told him that a new threat was close by.
“Do you hear that?” he murmured.
Kotov stopped. “Music?”
“Yes.”
Somewhere nearby, a radio broke the silence. A loud burst of pop music soared over the wind. Bourne tried to pinpoint the source, but the song echoed around the buildings before it stopped altogether. It didn’t come back.
Oddly, he was sure it had been a Beatles song. “Nowhere Man.”
“Let’s go,” he told Kotov impatiently. “We’re almost there.”
Two minutes. They were two minutes from the Nevsky Cathedral. They climbed steep steps into the Danish King’s Garden near the wall. Up here, they were high enough to see the lights of the city skyscrapers, and beyond them, the dark stain of the Baltic Sea. Fierce wind howled across the garden, and Bourne saw several ghostly statues of monks stalking the wall, their cowls turning white as the snow fell.
His instincts screamed at him again. Threat!
This time he saw dents of footprints that the snowfall hadn’t completely covered up. Someone was waiting for them.
One of the bent-over monks near the wall seemed to move. A man stepped from behind the statue and fired, but Bourne had already dropped to one knee, and the bullets whistled over his head. He raised his own gun arm and fired back. The man fell, but as Bourne stood up again, he realized that the assassins had merely sacrificed a pawn in order to position a knight right behind him.
The barrel of a gun pushed into the back of Jason’s head.
“Cain,” a voice said. “Drop your weapon, please.”
Bourne let his gun fall into the snow. He raised his arms and turned around slowly. The man in front of him, whose gun was inches from Bourne’s face, was young, probably no more than twenty-five. He had scraggly hair tied in a ponytail, and his face still suffered from acne. Despite his youth, the killer carried himself with smart maturity, the product of intelligence training. And yet he didn’t look like a member of the FSB—the Russian security service—and he didn’t even look or sound Russian. In fact, he didn’t look like any covert operative Bourne had seen. There was nothing governmental about him.
“Lenin,” the man murmured into a microphone. “I have them. You were right, Cain is with Kotov. Orders?”
Bourne watched the man’s face as the killer listened to the reply. Jason knew his own death warrant had just been signed. He stared into the barrel of the man’s gun but felt no heat from the weapon and smelled no smoke. This man hadn’t been one of the FSB team waiting in the square. He was new to the party.
So who was he?
And who was Lenin?
There was no time for answers. In another second, Bourne would be dead.
He saw the young man’s finger twitch on the trigger. Then the explosion of a gunshot rippled across the garden. The man’s expression changed; it grew surprised, then blank, and his eyes closed. He slumped sideways to the ground, where the blood from the gunshot in his head made a bright red stain against the snow.
Nova joined them from the city steps. The wind threw her long black hair across her face. “Do I have to rescue you every time, Cain?”
“Apparently so.”
“We need to move. Holly’s waiting for us.”
The three of them hurried through a gateway in the stone wall. They climbed a snowy sidewalk toward the white-lit towers and black onion domes of the Nevsky Cathedral. Beyond the church were the pink walls of the Estonian Parliament building. Bourne stayed on one side of Kotov, and Nova stayed on the other, their guns moving constantly. He knew someone else was out there, and it worried him that he didn’t know who it was.
Lenin! Who was Lenin?
But he saw no ambush at the rendezvous point.
Ahead of them, a woman in her forties sat on a bench across from the cathedral steps. It was night, but she wore dark glasses, and she had a white cane stretched across her lap. She had a birdlike frame and an Audrey Hepburn bob in her dark hair. A yellow Lab stood at attention in the snow next to her. As the dog spotted them, it let out three short barks.
Three people approaching.
“Thank you, Sugar,” the woman said. Her head turned as they joined her at the bench. She heard them, but she couldn’t see them. Holly Schultz, associate deputy director of the CIA’s Russian analysis team, was blind.
“Ms. Schultz,” Kotov said. “It’s been a long time since our first meeting. St. Paul’s Cathedral, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was. Hello, Grigori. My apologies for the sudden intervention, but we couldn’t afford a delay.”
“So it would seem.”
“You know what needs to happen now?” she asked.
Bourne saw an odd reluctance—almost grief—on Kotov’s face, as if the reality of never returning to his homeland had begun to sink in. “Yes, of course.”
The Russian turned to shake Bourne’s hand in a crushing grip. He did the same with Nova, but his eyes lingered on her face with a long, strange curiosity. Nova’s beauty did that to men. “Thank you both for your help.”
“Good luck,” Bourne told him.
“Dixon will take care of the next steps,” Holly continued from the bench. “Everything is ready.”
As if on cue, two vehicles sped into view from the rear of the cathedral. The first was a dark sedan with smoked windows; the second was a white panel van with an advertisement for a Helsinki-based commercial painter. Ladders were mounted across the van’s roof. The two vehicles drew to a stop in front of the bench where the CIA agent was sitting, and an athletic black man emerged from the passenger side of the sedan. He was thirty years old, with a handsome face that narrowed to a sharp point at his chin, and he was dressed in a dark suit. Bourne knew him. Wherever Holly Schultz and Sugar went, Dixon Lewis wasn’t far behind.
“Minister,” Dixon murmured to Kotov. He gestured at the back of the panel van. “Shall we go? We only have a few minutes. I’m afraid this part of the journey won’t be very comfortable.”
“It’s fine. Lead the way.”
The two men disappeared toward the rear compartment of the van. Bourne heard a scrape of metal and the sound of doors opening and slamming shut. A couple of minutes later, Dixon returned alone, smoothing
the creases of his suit. He offered a polite salute to Bourne and Nova and then returned to the sedan.
The two vehicles peeled away again at high speed.
“The car ferry to Helsinki?” Bourne guessed. “Is that how you’re getting him out?”
Holly smiled but didn’t confirm or deny Bourne’s suspicion. She stood up from the bench and stroked Sugar’s head as she unfolded her cane. “I’m grateful to the two of you for your assistance tonight. I’ll be sure to tell Nash Rollins that you did good work.”
That was all. The mission was over.
Holly tapped the ground twice with her cane, and Sugar led her away toward the Parliament building through the snow. Bourne watched the agent in her tan trench coat until she’d disappeared around the corner of the cathedral. He was alone with Nova again.
“So we’re done,” Bourne remarked with acid in his voice.
“Holly and Dixon play it close to the vest,” Nova reminded him. “You know that.”
Bourne took another look at the empty park. Amid the darkness and the quiet hiss of the snow, his instincts still warned him of danger. They were being watched. He and Nova headed down the walkway away from the church, but he stopped as he heard another pulse of music, loud at first, then fading away. He only caught a snippet before it was gone.
It was another Beatles song.
No, wait—he was wrong. This was a John Lennon solo. “Mind Games.”
Automatically, his brain filled in the lyrics, and as he thought about the words, a new thought flew through Bourne’s head.
Not Lenin. Lennon.
* * *
—
Half an hour later, Bourne stood at the windows of their hotel room, which overlooked the Tallinn harbor. From where they were, he could see a car ferry slouching out of Terminal D on its way across the Gulf of Finland toward Helsinki. Somewhere on the lower decks, he was sure, was a white panel van with Grigori Kotov hidden behind a false wall.
Nova came up beside him. She carried two wineglasses in her hands. She’d already undressed, and her naked body was a tapestry of wild tattoos, ranging from roses and feathers to Greek gods and South American tribal masks. A gold chain dangled into the hollow of her full breasts, with a pendant made from an ancient Greek coin encased in a round bezel. Jason knew the necklace had belonged to her mother. Nova never took it off. Not ever.
She stood on tiptoes and teasingly bit his ear and planted kisses on his neck. Her tongue traced circles on his skin. The woman who’d calmly put a bullet in a man’s head a few minutes earlier was a coquette now, ready for sex.
That was one of the many things he found attractive about her. She traded identities so easily, a spy and killer one moment, a lover the next. He was falling in love with her. That was dangerous for both of them.
Rule number one. Never get involved. Treadstone.
“Let it go, Jason,” Nova murmured, because she knew he was still obsessing.
He shook his head. “We’re missing something.”
“The job’s done. Kotov is safely away.”
“Is he?”
Bourne’s gaze followed the lights of the ferry into open water. A moment later, he got his answer. Night turned to day in a brilliant flash. The harbor lit up like the sun, an explosion of fire. A shock wave rippled from the sea, shattered the hotel windows, and made the ground liquid, throwing them off their feet. The noise of the bomb hit like a cannon, and he felt as if his ears were bleeding.
Long seconds of darkness passed.
Dizzy and deaf, he finally pushed himself to his knees. Beside him, Nova was unconscious, her tattooed skin sparkling with a rain of broken glass. Bourne checked to make sure she was alive, and then he stood up and stumbled to the window. Even at this distance, he felt heat on his face and smelled gasoline and char.
Out in Tallinn Bay, there was nothing left of the ferry but smoke and flame.
PART ONE
1
London
Present Day
Vadik Reznikov smelled tear gas floating from Green Park across Piccadilly. Even the faint remnants of the cloud made his eyes burn. He could hear angry chants and rhythmic drumbeats from hundreds of protesters outside Buckingham Palace, where the WTO delegates were dining with the queen. Some of his English scientist friends had invited him to join the protest to tell the poisoners and polluters that they were raping Mother Earth, but Vadik had chosen to stay away from the demonstration.
“Putin is always watching,” he told them. “If I get arrested, I’ll never get back home.”
That was true, but in fact, Vadik had more important work to do while he was in London.
It was a late evening in June, nearly dark. Vadik stood outside the Green Park Tube station and sipped a takeaway cup of Americano he’d purchased from a Costa Coffee several blocks away. He’d given his name at the counter as Peregrine, using the signal they’d provided him. When the black girl with the numerous piercings handed him his drink, he’d found the name “Richard Branson” written under the lip of the cup.
He had half the code. Now he needed the other half.
Nervously, he watched agitators dressed in black coming and going from the underground. There were plenty of police in the area, too. He had no reason to believe anyone was watching him, because he’d taken all of the necessary precautions. Even so, he felt the sweat of worry on the back of his neck. Once his plan was put into motion, there was no going back. He had been on missions to set fires and plant bombs in Moscow, but those were merely assaults against the fossil fuel infrastructure. He’d never actually killed anyone, never put a gun to someone’s head and executed them in cold blood.
Soon that would change.
Only death would get the attention of the elites.
Vadik had turned thirty years old a week earlier. He wore a tattered white crew sweater and loose black cargo pants. He was skinny, almost emaciated, bones showing through his skin and his jaw jutting out from his chicken neck. His black hair had a short, spiky cut, because his wife, Tati, liked to cut it herself. His eyes and thick dark eyebrows looked close together, and his mouth was small and hard.
He danced impatiently on his feet. He had to find his contact in the park. That was job number one, the next link in the chain. The contact would give him the location of tomorrow’s meeting, and the meeting would finally connect him with the London members of the Gaia Crusade. But he was stuck here. Tati was late, and he couldn’t leave until he had her safely back in their rented flat.
How long did it take to have dinner with a bunch of incredibly old, incredibly boring climate scientists? All of them salivating over his wife, as if any of them would last ten minutes in bed with her before having a heart attack.
“Hello, Vadik.”
He exhaled with relief as he saw Tati gliding toward him through the crowd leaving the Tube station. His wife always walked as if her mind were somewhere else and her feet weren’t really touching the ground. Her black glasses slipped down her face, and she pushed them back, like a nervous habit. She was taller than he was, and when she wore her stiletto heels like now, she made him feel like a dwarf. Her long blond hair was colored in streaks of lavender. She had full pouty lips, gray eyes, and she sported a single gold earring through her long, slim nose. To Vadik, she looked like an Instagram model, but she was actually a climate researcher who’d spent six months analyzing core temperatures at Russia’s Vostok Station in the frigid isolation of Antarctica.
“What took you so long?” he asked his wife, pulling her down a side street away from Piccadilly. They were staying in a small guest apartment in Mayfair, courtesy of Tati’s family money, but he didn’t like advertising his ties to the privileged world that he was trying to destroy.
“I met a friend at the dinner,” she said. “He and I talked for a while.”
“What, a man? Who is he?”
<
br /> “You don’t know him.”
“Is he a scientist?”
“No, just someone I met during my doctoral program.”
Sometimes Vadik thought Tati made up these stories to torment him. They’d only been married for a year, and he was insanely jealous of his beautiful wife. Tati, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to her appeal.
“I want you to stay in the flat tonight,” Vadik told her. “It’s a riot out here. It’s not safe.”
“I’m fine, Vadi.”
“Not in this area, you’re not. Not now.”
Sirens blared through the intersection behind them, and a gang of teenagers in masks ran along the sidewalk as he hustled Tati down the street. Two blocks away, they got to the four-story red-brick building where they were staying. His wife climbed the steps and took out her key, but Vadik stayed on the street. She turned and stared at him.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“I’m going to have a drink first.”
“Well, let me come with you.”
“No, I won’t be long. You should go inside. Take a bath and get naked for me.”
Tati shrugged and adjusted her glasses again. He was sure that when he got back, she would still be dressed, her nose buried in a research journal. For her, sex was nothing but an afterthought compared to science.
Vadik waited until she was inside the building. Then he retraced his steps to the chaotic street. He dodged the stalled traffic of red buses and black cabs and made his way into Green Park. Under the trees, the lampposts made halos through clouds of smoke, and the protesters became hundreds of ghostly silhouettes. He hurried across the green grass, his head down, one hand in his pocket, one hand still gripping his coffee cup.
Briefly, Vadik wondered if he was making a mistake. Maybe he was walking into an Interpol trap. Or worse, an FSB sting. They were always infiltrating the Russian expat community in London, looking for traitors. He’d been careful in reaching out to the Gaia Crusade through his friends in Moscow, but online, you never knew who you were dealing with. The easy thing, the smart thing, was to go back to the flat and get into bed with Tati, but he couldn’t quit now. The cause was vital.
The Bourne Treachery Page 2