The Bourne Treachery

by Brian Freeman

  “The information will be in your room within an hour,” Dixon replied.

  “I also want London CCTV footage in a six-block radius around the Russell Square area from Friday evening. It’s possible we got Lennon on camera.”

  “All right. We’ll get that done, too.”

  Bourne nodded. “You’re taking a considerable risk going ahead with the meeting.”

  “Understood.”

  Jason turned to leave, but Holly put up a hand to let him know that the conversation wasn’t over.

  “I hear you’ve teamed up with Nova again,” she pointed out. “I wonder if that’s such a good idea. You and Nova had a personal relationship, didn’t you? It might be better if you had a different Interpol contact. Someone with less emotional baggage.”

  “Our relationship was in the past. It’s not relevant.”

  “I’m worried she could prove a distraction.”

  “She won’t.”

  “All right. If you say so, then I’ll believe you.”

  “Is that all?” Bourne asked.

  Holly steepled her fingers in front of her face. “You don’t trust us, do you, Jason?”

  “No.”

  “I assure you, we’re on the same team.”

  “Are we? You’ve been keeping things from me. I don’t like working a mission with a blindfold on.”

  “Well, I’ve spent my whole life that way,” Holly replied with an ironic smile. “After a while, you learn to turn it to your advantage.”

  “What’s in California?” Bourne asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nash told me you’re sending him to California. I assume it has something to do with the meeting between Sorokin and Cafferty.”

  “That’s not your concern,” Holly replied blandly.

  Bourne shook his head. He headed for the door of the hotel room, but then he eyed the two CIA agents again. “If you want me to trust you, tell me the truth. What really happened in Tallinn? How did Lennon find out that Kotov was on that ferry?”

  “We were betrayed,” Dixon said. “Obviously.”

  “By who? Who knew the plan?”

  “It was a very short list. Believe me, we’ve looked at all of them closely over the past three years. I’m satisfied that no one I recruited was involved in sharing the escape route. Lennon didn’t get it from us.”

  “And yet he knew.”

  Dixon nodded. “Yes, he did. Which means that if the leak didn’t come from us, it could only have come from one other place. Treadstone.”

  * * *

  —

  Nash Rollins emerged through the doors of the Humboldt County Airport north of Eureka, California. He had sunglasses over his eyes and a baseball cap pulled low on his forehead. He was dressed casually, in an untucked button-down shirt, tan slacks, and loafers. He leaned on his cane, and he had a garment bag slung over his shoulder. Holly hadn’t told him what to look for, but he assumed he’d know it when he saw it.

  As he waited at the doors, he spotted a food truck in the parking lot across the road. He hadn’t eaten in hours, so he wandered to the oversized trailer, which sold pastries made from fresh California fruit. The truck was painted bright red and adorned with caricatures of strawberries, which reminded him of the dancing raisins he used to see in television commercials. He bought himself a skewer of fresh chocolate-dipped strawberries from a sour old man in a jean shirt, who wasn’t much for small talk and didn’t reflect the whimsical décor of his truck. Nash ate the strawberries one by one. When half an hour passed and no one had arrived to collect him, he returned to the truck counter, told a joke that the old man didn’t laugh at, and then bought a strawberry tart.

  He had just finished the tart when an unmarked black SUV pulled into the parking lot. The vehicle flashed its headlights at him. Nash took his garment bag and limped to the SUV, which had impenetrable smoked windows. The back door clicked open, and Nash climbed inside. The driver, a young man with a faint southern accent, turned around in the front seat and introduced himself.

  “Mr. Rollins? Deputy U.S. Marshal Craig Wallins.”

  Nash nodded. “Deputy.”

  “Can I have your phone, sir?”

  Nash shrugged and handed it over.

  “Also, if you could take off your hat and lean forward, sir, I’m afraid we have some uncomfortable headwear for you.”

  Nash removed his hat from his scraggly gray hair and slid forward in the seat. Deputy Wallins produced a black hood, which he placed over Nash’s head and then secured with a lock that made it impossible to remove. Nash felt claustrophobic.

  “Is all of this really necessary?” he asked. “I know we’ve gotten used to masks recently, Deputy, but this is a little much.”

  “Sorry, sir. Our destination is confidential. I’ve been on this duty for almost six months, and you’re the first outsider I’ve taken in there, other than Ms. Schultz, Mr. Lewis, and Mr. Cafferty.”

  “Well, don’t I feel special,” Nash replied. “What about my phone?”

  “You’ll get it back after you leave. For what it’s worth, we jam the signals anyway. But we’re pretty sensitive about any pictures being taken, or about any kind of recording devices. I apologize, but my men will run you through a pretty invasive search at the guardhouse, too.”

  “Something to look forward to,” Nash replied.

  “That’s funny, sir.”

  “All right, Deputy, let’s get moving. How long will it take to get there?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but that’s—”

  “Confidential. Got it. Okay, off we go.”

  Nash settled into the rear seat of the SUV. Its obscured windows meant no one could look in, and now he wore a hood so he couldn’t look out. All he knew was where he was at that moment, which was in the northernmost part of the state. They’d flown him by helicopter out of Sacramento.

  To go where? He didn’t know.

  To do what? He didn’t know.

  As the marshal drove away from the airport, Nash felt the vehicle take a series of sharp turns. Wallins was deliberately driving in circles to disorient him. At the same time, classical music—a loud symphony by Mahler—filled the interior of the truck. It was so loud that Nash almost asked the marshal to turn the music down, but he realized that the music was part of his sensory deprivation. They wanted him receiving no clues from outside, nothing he could follow later to retrace his route.

  Wherever they were going, they were very serious about keeping it secret.

  For a while, the road beneath the vehicle felt smooth. However, they soon turned off the main road, and at that point, the SUV traveled more slowly and made another series of disorienting turns. The one sense they didn’t block was his sense of smell, and the salty brine of the Pacific occasionally made its way into the SUV. They were close to the water.

  Finally, the vehicle made a sharp left. The paved surface disappeared under their tires. The SUV rocked over a dirt road, and even Mahler wasn’t enough to block the agitated barking of a dog close by. The marshal made another turn, and the road got worse. The SUV bucked through potholes that tossed Nash from side to side. Then the truck stopped. The engine turned off, and the music went silent. He heard the crunch of footsteps on gravel outside the SUV, and the door beside him opened.

  “Let me help you, Mr. Rollins,” the deputy said politely, unlocking and removing the hood. He let Nash climb outside and then guided him to a guardhouse located at the gates of a high barbed-wire fence. Inside, two other armed deputies said hello without introducing themselves, and then they gave Nash the invasive search he’d been promised. He was wanded, stripped, and each orifice checked for foreign objects, before he was allowed to get dressed again.

  Nash returned to the rear seat of the SUV. Wallins drove them through the gates and along the bumpy road for what must have been ano
ther half-mile, with the tree branches close enough to scrape against the doors. They parked in a clearing littered with pine needles, outside a large log-frame estate. Wooden steps led up to a large porch that bumped against a forest of tall redwood trees.

  The marshal climbed the steps with him and unlocked the front door, letting Nash into a lushly decorated foyer. A grandfather clock ticked nearby. His feet sank into the lushness of deep-piled carpet.

  Nash shook his head in disbelief at what was in front of him. “I’ll be damned.”

  * * *

  —

  Leon Becker shut and locked the window of his fruit truck outside the airport, and he got ready to drive home.

  Becker lived in a small house that bordered Highway 101 near the town of Westhaven. He’d lived there for nearly twenty years since he quit his job as a pastry chef in Dresden. He and his German American wife, Susannah, had moved to California, because she wanted to grow old on the ocean where she’d been born. That was fine with him. Leon didn’t really miss Germany. Many of his friends had suspected him of being an informant for the East German police before reunification, and they’d never really embraced him after the wall came down.

  In fact, they were right about him being a Stasi spy, so he was just as happy to leave his hometown, in case anyone got curious and started to dig into the things he’d done.

  He’d led a fairly dull life since then. The food truck gave him a chance to keep making and selling pastries, and he grew most of the fruit himself in his back garden. He had never needed much sleep, so he was up and in his kitchen every morning by four o’clock, making the day’s selection for his bakery on wheels. He played Beethoven on his AirPods as he baked. In the evenings, after dinner, he took walks on the Pacific beach with his two spaniels. Every day was pretty much like every other, with few surprises.

  But that had all changed three years ago.

  Three years ago, he was in his food truck outside the airport when a black SUV that smelled of government security picked up a blind woman who was being led around by a golden Labrador retriever. A similar SUV picked up a black man in a suit the next day. For the next couple of weeks, the same two people came and went multiple times. It was unusual enough that he took notice of it, and he began to keep an eye out for them. Since then, he’d spotted the black SUVs at the airport with odd regularity. It made no sense. There were no federal facilities up here, no military bases, no prisons, no reason for the U.S. government to be sending people to this lonely part of the state.

  Leon mentioned this phenomenon casually in a letter to one of his Dresden friends. An old informant, like him. He didn’t do anything other than that, but about three months later, while his wife was away in San Francisco—almost as if they knew she was away in San Francisco!—two men with Russian accents showed up at his front door. They were very curious about those government vehicles, and they asked him lots of questions about what he’d seen. So Leon told them what he knew. And then they offered to pay him a thousand dollars a month if he would keep a log of the vehicles whenever he saw them and pass the information along to them on a special website.

  A thousand dollars! A month! That was the difference between a meager retirement and a much more comfortable standard of living. So Leon said yes. Since then, he’d been watching for the black SUVs while he sold his strawberry tarts. It became a kind of game for him. He’d offered to follow the trucks when he saw them, but the Russians had told him in no uncertain terms not to do that. Just keep an eye on them and tell us what you see.

  That was what he did.

  That Sunday afternoon, there was another arrival. A newcomer this time, someone he didn’t recognize. When he got back home, he clicked over to the website they’d given him and filed his latest report. Time, license plate. Black SUV. He described the passenger they were picking up as a fifty-something man with a baseball cap and a cane.

  Leon was even able to snap a photograph of the man without him noticing.

  He sent that along, too.

  11

  Bourne noticed the clock. It was almost midnight.

  He’d spent hours with Nova, squeezed together in front of side-by-side laptop screens in his room at the Radisson Blu. They reviewed hundreds of WTO delegate profiles one by one, memorizing faces and isolating those where the background information was difficult to confirm online, or where the physical characteristics of the delegate had any overlap with what they knew about Lennon. In addition to the WTO ministers, they had a separate list of climate scientists who’d been granted credentials to the Naval College speech. As Bourne pulled up each name and photograph, Nova hunted through the Interpol database for additional information.

  After hours of research, they had fifty names that couldn’t be definitively crossed off their suspect list, and they still had nearly a hundred files left to review. It was going to be a long night.

  Bourne got up to stretch his legs. He went to the window that looked down on the dark water of the Thames. Standing here, in a hotel room with Nova, made him think about the parallels with Tallinn. When he saw a boat on the river, he expected it to explode in a maelstrom of fire and smoke. He realized that Holly Schultz had been right with her concerns. Being with Nova was a distraction. But now that he knew she was alive, being without her wasn’t an option, either.

  He turned from the window and saw Nova watching him.

  “What if we’re wrong?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  “What if Lennon’s not on the list? If he’s using the Gaia Crusade as cover, maybe he’s planning something flashier to take out Cafferty and Sorokin together. He used a bomb in Tallinn. He did the same thing with a car bomb in Berlin. A bomb’s easier to blame on terrorists than poison. After all, poison smells of the FSB. If he does that, everyone will know the Russians were behind it.”

  “Maybe that’s the point,” Bourne replied. “Putin wants to shove it in our faces. Cafferty went after the Russians, and now they’re paying him back in kind. Plus, a bomb in the middle of the WTO meeting takes a lot of planning. He’d be going up against waves of security, and he hasn’t had time to get around it.”

  “Unless someone’s helping him.”

  “Like in Tallinn,” Bourne said with a frown.

  “Yes.”

  Tallinn.

  He heard Dixon’s voice in his head again. If the leak didn’t come from us, it could only have come from one other place. Treadstone. That comment had been eating away at Jason all day. He knew exactly what Dixon was suggesting. There had been only two Treadstone agents on the ground in Tallinn.

  One was Bourne.

  The other was Nova.

  Nova, who had been working with Interpol for two years on the hunt for Lennon. A hunt that had gone nowhere, that had gotten them no closer to finding the assassin. Almost as if Lennon knew their every move before they made it.

  He remembered what Gunnar had told him in Stockholm. Lennon has moles in all of the intelligence services.

  “Jason?” Nova asked, with a strange, curious look on her face.

  “I don’t think the Gaia Crusade is focused on Cafferty,” Bourne went on, shrugging aside his doubts. “Ethan Pople was clear that Sorokin is their target. I think that means Lennon is going after Cafferty himself. He’s daring us to catch him.”

  “How do we do that when we don’t have a clue what he looks like?”

  Bourne ran his hands through his thick hair and thought about their options. “Let’s switch to the CCTV footage around the Lonely Shepherd.”

  “That’s a needle in a haystack.”

  “Except we know that the Gaia Crusade was meeting there on Friday night, and we know that the bartender in the pub was murdered. Sounds like Lennon tying up loose ends. If he was there, maybe a camera caught him.”

  “All right. Let’s see what we can find.”

  Bourne sat
down next to Nova again. Their thighs brushed against each other. Her hand fluttered on his knee, and he was conscious of the touch. He wondered if she was deliberately seducing him. Seeing how long he could resist her. Nova was the most carnal woman he’d ever known, and she wielded her sexuality like a weapon.

  The leak could only have come from one other place.

  Treadstone.

  Jason started the CCTV video feeds on his laptop screen and synchronized all of them to nine o’clock on Friday night. “We don’t have video outside the Lonely Shepherd itself, but we’ve got coverage near the Russell Square Tube station and along Southampton Row. We’ve also got Grays Inn Road to the east. If someone was going to the pub, odds are they’d pass by on one of those routes.”

  “Or via about a hundred side streets,” Nova pointed out.

  Bourne shrugged. She was right, but there was nothing they could do about that. He ran the video feeds, and they watched them in real time for the next half-hour. The feed was from Friday night, in the dark, and they struggled to make out faces with any degree of clarity. When they were done, he ran the video again, in slow motion, using Russell Square as the likeliest entry point. This time, he paused the feed and pointed at the screen.

  “Is that Trevor? The bartender?”

  Nova squinted. “Could be.”

  He let the video roll, and the man turned left down the side street that led toward the Lonely Shepherd.

  “He’s heading in the right direction. If he came via the Underground, then he probably left that way, too. If he left at all.”

  Bourne fast-forwarded, stopping the feed whenever someone emerged from the side street. He kept going until the time stamp showed two in the morning, and the man they suspected was Trevor never appeared again.