The Bourne Treachery

by Brian Freeman

  Change couldn’t wait anymore. The earth was dying.

  There! Under the park lights, he spotted a kiosk selling tabloid newspapers. The headline written on the kiosk sign read: protests lead to buck house choas, with the word chaos deliberately misspelled.

  That was the signal for part two.

  That was his contact.

  Vadik approached the kiosk vendor, an Indian kid who didn’t look more than twenty years old, with greased black hair and a thick beard. He wore a short-sleeved shirt that showed the London Underground map, and on the smooth skin of his forearm was a tattoo of the Bill Murray Chive portrait, made out of rows of tiny gray squares.

  “Good evening, friend,” Vadik said.

  The kid’s face broke into a wide smile. “Good evening to you, sir.”

  “Are you a fellow Earth lover?”

  Vadik watched the vendor’s eyes dart left and right. “I am, sir. I am indeed.”

  “Gaia needs our help.”

  “Yes, she does. If we love her, then she will love us.”

  “What’s your name, friend?”

  “Pranav, sir.”

  “This is my first trip to London, Pranav,” Vadik said. “I want to remember everything about it, so I’m taking selfies with all the people I meet. Do you mind if we take a photo together?”

  “Oh, not at all, sir.”

  Vadik stood next to Pranav and took his burner phone from his pocket. The vendor smoothed his T-shirt and raised his forearm, making a V for Victory sign with his fingers. Instead of focusing on their faces, Vadik used the camera to zoom in on the man’s Bill Murray tattoo.

  With a small beep, it read the QR code embedded in the tattoo.

  “Thank you,” Vadik told him. He put down a pound coin on the counter and grabbed a paper. “Stay safe, Pranav.”

  “Yes. You, too, sir.”

  Vadik folded the paper under his arm and walked away from the kiosk. With a slight uneasiness, he looked around at the shadows of young people coming and going from the protests. Somewhere there were fires; he smelled smoke. He had the uncomfortable sensation that someone was nearby, that someone had been listening to his conversation with Pranav. There were too many places to hide in the darkness of the park and too many eyes that might be watching him.

  He walked until he found an empty bench. Then he sat down, threw his coffee cup into the bin, and opened up his phone. The QR code he’d scanned from the vendor’s tattoo took him to a web page for online gambling, but he ignored the odds on upcoming football games and scrolled to a search box at the bottom of the screen. There, he typed the name “Richard Branson,” and when he tapped the button, the browser flashed multiple times and took him to an entirely different site.

  This page would not be found among the indices of Google. It was unsearchable. Anonymous. Nothing on the page identified what it was. All Vadik saw was a line of text in a chat box that told him the when and where of the meeting tomorrow:

  Friday. 22:00. The Lonely Shepherd.

  This was what he’d waited for. The Gaia Crusade.

  Their assault in London would be a historic day. The elites would finally see that no one was safe. Vadik had information that would allow them to strike at the very power center of Putin’s Russia.

  The oligarchs. The billionaires.

  He typed out a message to the board:

  Praise Gaia! Gennady Sorokin is coming to London!

  * * *

  —

  Hours later, the newspaper vendor named Pranav got off the train at the London Fields station. He headed down an alley toward the park that led to his family’s Hackney flat. It was almost two in the morning. He was dizzy from the pints that the out-of-town protesters had bought him at the pub, and his eyes watered from tear gas that had drifted his way. His irritated lungs made him cough, which reminded him of his battle with Covid the previous year.

  The alley was deserted, other than a few cars parked on the sidewalk. Everyone in the nearby apartments was asleep. Once the train rattled away from the station behind him, the neighborhood was quiet.

  And yet he heard something.

  He stopped to listen.

  Music. It was music, a staticky snippet of a song from a radio. He recognized the song, which was “Revolution” by the Beatles. Pranav shrugged with disinterest. One of the radicals in town for the WTO was probably dreaming about taking over the world.

  Pranav didn’t care about revolutions. Saving the planet was fine, but he cared about making money for his family. The Brit with the red hair had paid him a thousand dollars to get that weird Bill Murray tattoo and to let Earth lovers come and take a picture of it. What was the harm in that?

  As far as he was concerned, it was all just silly games.

  Pranav stopped at the Martello Street entrance to the park. As he crossed through the gate, he heard the music again, much closer now. Definitely “Revolution.” He looked around, but he didn’t see anyone in the darkness. With a shrug, he headed diagonally across the grass toward the tall apartment building on the far side of the park. His parents lived there; so did his four brothers, as well as his oldest brother’s wife and baby daughter. They’d all lived in London for fifteen years, since Pranav was a boy. He barely remembered his childhood days in Mumbai.

  There it was again! The Beatles.

  Where was it coming from?

  Pranav looked around in the darkness. This time, he saw someone standing near the fat trunk of a tree. The man was difficult to distinguish, just a tall shadow with his hands in his pockets. The muffled music was definitely coming from him, but then the song stopped, and the stranger stepped away from the tree and called out.

  “Hello, Pranav.”

  This man knew him?

  “Who’s there?” Pranav called, squinting to see better.

  “I want to talk to you, friend.”

  Pranav hesitated. It was late and he was alone. The radicals didn’t usually find him so close to home, but if someone wanted a picture of his tattoo, so be it. He wandered toward the tree, but stopped when he got close enough to see that the man was wearing a hood that covered everything except his eyes.

  “Who are you?” Pranav said, suspicious now. “What do you want?”

  “I need what you gave the man in Green Park. The man with the coffee cup.”

  “You want information, you have to give me the code. Those are the rules.”

  “Ah.”

  The tall man stepped closer. In the glow of the lamppost, Pranav could see that the man’s blue eyes were fierce and scary through the slit of the mask. He wore a bulky jacket that was too warm for the summer night.

  “Stop playing spy, Pranav, and tell me what I want to know.”

  Pranav felt something in the pit of his stomach. Fear. “Yeah, sure. Okay. I’ll tell you what you want.”

  But instead of talking, Pranav ran. All he needed was to get across the park and get home, and then he’d be safe. Except the man in the hood was unbelievably fast. Pranav hadn’t taken two steps before he found himself flat on the ground, his body wet from the damp grass, the air knocked out of his lungs.

  The man shoved him over and jammed a knee into his chest.

  “Please,” Pranav begged, his lungs squeezed. “Let me go.”

  “Talk, and I will.”

  “I know nothing! I’m paid, that’s all!”

  “The contacts come to you. Where do you send them?”

  Pranav choked for breath. “Please!”

  The man loosened the pressure on his chest, and Pranav sucked in air.

  “Talk,” the man hissed again.

  Pranav did. He’d never talked faster in his life. The words poured out of him, tumbling over each other, and the man kneeling over him simply listened and absorbed all of it. Pranav told him everything. About the Brit with the
red hair, about the people who came to him, about the strange tattoo on his arm.

  “That’s all!” he gasped when he was done. “I swear that’s all! I don’t know anything else! I’m not one of them!”

  “And the names on the coffee cups?”

  “I don’t know anything about that!”

  The man in the mask nodded with pleasure. “Thank you, Pranav. You’ve done well.”

  “Yes, yes, now let me go!”

  “First show me this tattoo.”

  Pranav held up his forearm. He heard a low, sarcastic chuckle from the man above him as he ran his fingers over Bill Murray’s face. “A QR code embedded in the design. Well, isn’t that clever.”

  “If you say so! I don’t know! Now let me go!”

  “Well, I have a problem, Pranav.”

  “No, there’s no problem! None!”

  The man in the hood slid a hand into his jacket pocket. “You see, I don’t carry a phone with me, so I can’t scan the code. You need to tell me the URL of the website. How do I find it?”

  “I don’t know!” Pranav insisted, which was true. “Please, I don’t know!”

  “I was afraid of that. That’s too bad.”

  The man’s hand emerged slowly from his jacket pocket, and it now held a knife with a wide, sharp blade that had to be nine inches long. Pranav’s eyes grew so wide he thought they would burst out of his head.

  “Unfortunately,” the man went on, “that means I’m going to need to take that tattoo with me.”

  2

  On Friday, Jason Bourne did what he did every day at exactly nine in the morning. He took a walk beside the Seine near the Pont des Invalides. The Bateaux Mouches came and went on the water, carrying crowds of tourists. He drank strong black coffee, inhaled the river smell, and took in the sights of Paris: the lovers by the water, the Eiffel Tower on the horizon, the limestone faces of the buildings, and the crottoir left by dogs on the pavement. As he walked, he studied each face by habit and made a mental calculation.

  Threat. Not a threat.

  Paris was his home base when he wasn’t on a mission for Treadstone. He didn’t really know why he came here, but Paris always drew him back. After he’d lost his memory, this was where he’d come to find answers. He knew who he was—he knew what he was—but nothing about his past felt real to him. The details about his background, his family, his life, were simply facts he’d memorized.

  Even the name he used now—Jason Bourne—wasn’t his own. They’d told him it was the name of a killer he’d executed years ago. A bad man. A monster. He’d taken over that name for himself when he joined Treadstone, and now it was the only identity he had.

  Regardless, Paris was where his life had begun again, so in the downtime between assignments, he lived an anonymous life in a small flat in the Latin Quarter. He exercised fanatically for hours a day, honing the skills that kept him alive. He visited the museums and studied the impressionist paintings. He walked through the parks. And he waited for a day he knew would come, when someone from his past—wearing a face he wouldn’t even recognize—would show up and try to kill him.

  The past is never over. Treadstone.

  Bourne had an angular face, tough but not smooth. Its imperfections were what made him memorably attractive—the small scar near his temple, the dent in his jaw, the way one blue-gray eye seemed to narrow a little more than the other. His dark brown hair had a messy look, cut short above a high forehead. His intense stare missed nothing. He had pale lips, and his mouth typically showed no expression, other than the occasional ironic smile. He was tall and strong, with a body that expressed a quiet potential for violence.

  He kept to himself in Paris, making no friends, avoiding women for anything but the occasional brief, anonymous affair. He wasn’t a loner by choice but by necessity. He’d fallen in love before, but his lovers had paid the price for having him in their lives. Now, whenever he found himself getting close to someone, he shut it down. A year earlier, he’d allowed himself to be drawn into a relationship with a Canadian journalist named Abbey Laurent, but he’d walked away when they began falling for each other. Bourne didn’t want her ending up like the others.

  Marie.

  And Nova.

  Both casualties of the world of Jason Bourne.

  If there was one woman who still haunted him, as a spy and a lover, it was Nova. He had no pictures of her—agents never took photographs—but he had no trouble picturing her in her mind. That small, taut body almost completely covered in tattoos. The lush black hair tumbling to her breasts. The smoldering way her green eyes stared at him. He could still feel the touch of her skin and still remember the agony he’d felt two years earlier, watching her limp body carried away by Treadstone agents after she’d been killed in a mass shooting in Las Vegas.

  Stop it! Don’t do this!

  For a man with no memory, Bourne sometimes wanted to erase the few memories he did have, because they were mostly of death. He also realized, walking by the river, that he didn’t have time to think about his past. Not that day.

  Treadstone was back.

  Ahead of him, Bourne spotted a canal boat tied up on the bank of the Seine. It was always there, the same boat every day, its long, narrow hull needing a fresh coat of green paint, its windows covered over with plywood. Most days, the boat’s flat deck was empty, not even a picnic table or a pot of wilting flowers.

  But today he saw a rusted bicycle, tied with a chain to the houseboat’s gangplank. Nothing else, just the bicycle.

  That was why he came this way every morning. Sometimes weeks or even months would go by before he saw the bicycle again. When it wasn’t there, he had another day of living a solitary life in Paris.

  But the signal was waiting for him today, and that meant one thing: Nash Rollins was in town.

  * * *

  —

  From the Seine, Bourne walked down the allée centrale through the heart of the Tuileries. He was on edge now. Nash never came to town alone. Men from Treadstone were here in the gardens, theoretically to keep both of them safe, but more likely to watch Bourne and make sure he hadn’t been compromised during his time on his own. He had a deal with Nash: No surveillance while he was in Paris. No watchers. No minders. So far, Nash had kept up his end of the bargain, but he knew that there were others in Treadstone who still considered him a security risk.

  A man who’d lost his memory couldn’t be trusted.

  He found Nash sitting near the boat pond and feeding the ducks that clustered in the water. Bourne sat down two chairs away. He pulled a paperback book from his back pocket and pretended to read. As he did, he registered the other agents around them. There was a total of six. New recruits, easy to spot. He didn’t know any of them.

  Nash said nothing for several minutes. He was a small man in his fifties, with a tough, hardened shell like a Brazil nut. His face had the weathered wrinkles and age spots of too much time in the sun, and he had a scraggly, thinning head of gray hair greased back over his head. He wore a tan sport coat over a white shirt with the top two buttons undone, along with summery white pants and red loafers. His eyes were covered by a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses.

  A cane leaned against the green chair. Nash’s limp was the result of a bullet wound he’d suffered the year before on the boardwalk in Quebec City. Bourne was the one who had shot him. That was when Nash and everyone else at Treadstone thought Bourne had become an assassin out for blood and revenge over Nova’s death.

  “Hello, Jason,” Nash murmured finally, brushing birdseed from his hands.

  “Nash.”

  “Hot today. Damn global warming.”

  “It’s also summer in Paris,” Bourne said.

  “How are you? I haven’t seen you in three months. Anything new to report?”

  “Everything’s stable.”

  “No visitors fr
om your past?”

  “Did you have someone in mind?” Bourne asked.

  Nash shrugged. “Just wondering. After last year, I was content to let people think you were dead, but the CIA knows you’re still around, and they leak like a sieve. It’s an open secret in the intelligence community. As far as I know, no one knows where you are, but it pays to be cautious.”

  “I always am.”

  “Anyway, I got a request from an old friend of yours. She asked for you specifically.”

  “Who?”

  “Holly Schultz,” Nash replied.

  Bourne’s thin lips tightened into a frown. His eyes hardened like two sapphires. “Holly’s not what I’d consider a friend.”

  “I understand that.”

  “She let Nova and me take the fall for Kotov’s death in Tallinn. Never mind that her own aide was the one who put him on the ferry.”

  “Politics is about shifting blame. You know how the game is played.”

  “What does Holly want with me?” Bourne asked.

  “I assume you’re aware that the World Trade Organization is having their annual meeting in London this weekend. There’s a lot of unrest on the streets. Protests. Riots. A lot of terrorist chatter is popping up on the dark web.”

  “That’s not news,” Bourne replied.

  “No, but in this case, there’s a specific threat that the CIA is concerned about. That’s why Holly wants you.”

  Bourne was silent for a while. He thought about Tallinn, and he remembered the sight of Holly walking away in the snow with her guide dog, Sugar, leading the way. He remembered Nova in the hotel, naked. He remembered the impact as the bomb went off on the water, knocking both of them unconscious.

  Most of all, he heard the echo of a Beatles song playing in his head.

  “Lennon?” he guessed.

  “That’s right.”

  “Interpol has been trying to catch him for three years. They’ve never gotten close. Why does Holly think I’ll be able to find him?”