The Bourne Treachery

by Brian Freeman

  “Nova! No, stop!”

  She walked purposefully up the shallow beach toward the dark shadows of the cliff. Kotov saw her coming but had nowhere to go. He knew what this confrontation was about. Bourne tried to run, but he was losing blood fast. He pushed through the rocks, scanning the darkness for a gun. His gun. Lennon’s gun.

  And there it was, just beyond the surf, a silver Glock. He bent down and scooped it into his hand, but he couldn’t point a gun at Nova, and she knew it. It didn’t matter what happened next. He was not going to kill her.

  “Nova, don’t do this. Let him go!”

  She stopped in front of Kotov. He was still smoking a cigarette. His eyes were distant, focused over her shoulder. He was watching his daughter—the daughter who’d betrayed him—disappear on the water.

  “So now you kill me?” he asked Nova. “You get your vengeance? Is that the plan?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Don’t do it!” Jason pleaded with her. “You won’t solve anything by killing him. This won’t get you what you want. This won’t bring them back.”

  “It will bring them justice,” Nova said.

  She aimed the gun at his head. Kotov stared down the barrel, his eyes dark and cold. His cigarette had a long plume of ash, and he took it out of his mouth after sucking in one long drag.

  “If that’s what you need to do, then shoot,” he said.

  Jason saw Nova hesitate. Her finger wasn’t even on the trigger. Caught in a torture of indecision, she glanced at him, taking her focus away from Kotov only for a split second. That was enough. Kotov flicked the hot ash from his cigarette into her eyes, and as Nova flinched, he twisted her wrist hard. With his other hand, he pushed on her chest, making her stumble backward. He stole the gun as she did.

  Kotov flipped the gun around and pointed the barrel at Nova’s face. As her eyes teared and she blinked furiously to see, he gave a little chuckle. “You should never count out an old spy. We always have one last trick up our sleeve.”

  “Put down the gun, Kotov,” Bourne said. “It’s over. You’re safe.”

  Kotov made no move to do so. “With this one alive? No, I’m not safe. She’s a spy and a double agent and a killer, and I’m going to put her down. That’s what I should have had my people do years ago. Shame on me for being sentimental. I told them not to kill the little girl.”

  Jason aimed his gun at Kotov’s head. “Put it down. Now.”

  The Russian gave him a dismissive glance. “You won’t shoot me, Cain. You’re a company man. You’re what they made you. Your mission is to keep me alive, and you always follow the mission.”

  “Lower your weapon,” Bourne told him, ice in his voice.

  “I think not.”

  Nova stared at the barrel that was pointed at her face. As she did, Jason saw all the women she was in that single look. The scared little girl. The uninhibited lover. The stony killer.

  “Go ahead,” she hissed at Kotov. “Finish what you started on the yacht.”

  Kotov’s finger slid onto the trigger. “As you wish.”

  Bourne fired. He fired four times, one after another, but he didn’t need the other three. The first bullet hit Kotov’s skull between the eyes and drove into his brain and killed him instantly.

  The others simply sent a message. I’m not what they made me.

  Kotov’s lifeless body crumpled to the beach. The gun fell harmlessly beside him. Jason went and picked it up and shoved it into his belt. Nova hadn’t moved. She focused on Kotov’s face, the bullet holes in his head, the blood and brain that had sprayed over her. Her hard shell melted away, and for the second time in as many days, he saw her cry. She knelt next to Kotov and closed her eyes, but she kept crying, like rain falling.

  Finally, she wiped her face and looked up at Jason. “You should have let him kill me. After what I did to you? You didn’t owe me anything.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “I’ll turn myself in. I’ll tell Nash it was me who shot him.”

  Jason shook his head. “You’re not going to do that.”

  “They’ll crucify you, Jason.”

  “No, they won’t. They’ll sweep it under the rug and cover it up. That’s the way they do things, and they’re very, very good at it. Kotov died in Tallinn three years ago. A ferry exploded. That’s the only truth anyone wants.”

  Nova stood up. “What about you and me?”

  “There is no you and me.”

  She bit her lip with regret. “I’m sorry, Jason.”

  “You need to go.”

  “And leave you here? I won’t do that.”

  “Run, Nova. You don’t have much time. They’ll be coming soon.”

  Nova glanced across the beach at the tall rocks. Freedom was that way. She knew he was right, but she couldn’t seem to leave. Jason stared into her face at that moment. He’d lost so many memories that he knew the ones he wanted to keep. He had to lose himself in those emerald eyes for one more moment.

  “Go,” he told her again.

  Nova stepped forward, took his face in both of her hands, and kissed him. It was the soft kiss of someone who was in love. He kissed her back the same way. “Maybe one day you’ll walk away,” she whispered.

  “Maybe.”

  “And then who knows?”

  “Yes, who knows.”

  She put a hand softly on his cheek to say goodbye. Her lips parted as if to tell him something more, but she stayed silent. Instead, she ran across the beach, graceful and athletic as she always was. When she got to the rocks, she splashed through the water and disappeared toward the slope that led to the high ground. He followed her with his eyes the whole way, but she never looked back.

  Bourne was alone.

  He took off his shirt and pressed it against the wound in his shoulder, grimacing as he did. He eased himself to the cold, wet ground and propped his back against the cliff. Then he sat with the dead body on the beach and waited for rescue.

  42

  It was a cold December in Paris.

  Jason awoke before dawn, as he usually did. His new one-bedroom flat was located on the third floor over an alley in the Seventh Arrondissement, a few blocks from Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides. He got out of bed and showered, and while it was still dark, he checked the overnight video feed from the camera he’d mounted above the street. The high-def resolution allowed him to zoom in on the cars and motorcycles and on the faces of any pedestrians who lingered near the building.

  He fast-forwarded through the video and saw nothing unusual. He was safe for another day.

  The tall window in the main room was open, letting in winter air and the smells of the city. Someone in the opposite building was already awake and had burnt the toast. His own apartment had a lingering smell of Roquefort, which he’d had for dinner the previous night, along with a baguette and slices of jambon d’Auvergne. Even the open window hadn’t been able to drive out the pungent aroma of the cheese.

  Smell always gave him the first clue. Whenever he returned to the flat, Jason inhaled the smell of the place from the doorway. Before he saw or heard anything wrong, he’d smell an intruder. For six months, he’d come back to the flat expecting a distinctive floral perfume lingering in the air.

  Nova’s perfume. Like a message. I was here.

  But so far, there had been no clue that she’d found him. Or maybe she wasn’t looking for him at all.

  Jason got dressed and went down to the street. It was still early, and he had the alley to himself. He walked past the closed shops until he reached the wider street across from the small park at Place Salvador Allende. A few other early risers joined him. He reached his favorite coffee shop and bistro as they opened at seven and took a seat at one of the small tables by the window.

  The pretty young waitress, Dominique, greeted him with a smile
and a hand on his shoulder. She was here every day. “Bon matin, Monsieur Washburn.”

  George Washburn. That was his name in Paris now. Canadian expatriate working for a French bank. His latest identity.

  Dominique brought him his usual breakfast, which included a double espresso, a croissant with orange marmalade, and a copy of Le Monde. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but the sky was beginning to lighten. He drank his coffee by the window, studying each face who walked by the bistro or who came inside. He read the entire newspaper from front to back, taking his time.

  There was one article that particularly interested him. The story was about the collapse of a large Antarctic ice sheet, an event that scientists were comparing in size and speed to the disintegration of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002. What drew his attention was a quote about the phenomenon known as hydrofracturing from a Russian scientist named Tati Reznikova, formerly of the Vostok Station in Antarctica, now a lecturer and researcher at the Russian State Hydrometeorological University in St. Petersburg.

  Bourne smiled. Tati had gone back to her life. That was good.

  Two pages later, he found another article, which outlined the dismantling of the year-long climate riots in Moscow, including the arrests of dozens of leaders in what the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs described as terrorist cells funded by western instigators. The paper noted that the violent uprising, once thought to pose a threat to the stability of the government, had now been ruthlessly neutralized.

  Jason finished his espresso, which was cold now. He took the last bite of his croissant.

  Making another check of the bistro, he spotted a man sitting at one of the other window tables. The man looked at him, gave a polite nod, and then glanced away to study his phone. He appeared to be around fifty, tall and thin, with a high forehead and black hair swept back over his head. He wore a gray business suit and tie that needed laundering. There was nothing particularly noticeable about him, except that when he lifted his coffee cup to his lips, his right arm moved stiffly.

  Almost as if he was recovering from an injury there. Like a gunshot that had shattered his elbow.

  Bourne’s pulse accelerated.

  He checked the street for indications that others were standing guard outside. Sean. Yoko. Ringo. Whoever was part of Lennon’s team these days. But Jason saw no one who looked out of place, no one in the doorways or in the park across the intersection. From behind his newspaper, he stole another glance at the man. He hadn’t seen him enter, hadn’t seen the walk. But there was no other hint of a disguise in his face.

  Jason decided that the man was what he appeared to be, a French businessman getting ready for another workday. He wasn’t Lennon.

  He wasn’t the man who claimed to be the original Jason Bourne.

  Since Jason had come back to Paris over the summer, he’d spent days in the library at the Sorbonne trying to solve the riddle of his own identity. Who was Jason Bourne? But his research had turned up nothing. No birth records. No employment records. No obituaries. No social media posts or newspaper articles. The only reference he’d found to a man named Jason Bourne was an American commando in Vietnam who’d gone rogue and been executed by members of his own covert unit near Tam Quan. That had been long before the man known as Lennon had even been born.

  So maybe the story was another trick. Another game.

  Even so, Jason kept hunting. He’d find the truth one day. Regardless of whether Lennon was who he claimed to be, the killer was right about one thing. Bourne’s past was still out there. And sooner or later, it would be coming for him.

  He put cash on the table for Dominique. When he left the bistro to go back to the street, the man at the other table didn’t look up, or gaze at him through the window as Jason passed by outside. Half a block later, Bourne stopped and waited, eyeing the doorway to see if the man emerged from the café.

  He didn’t. No one did.

  It was nearly nine o’clock. Drizzle fell on the gray morning. He headed north to the bridge that crossed the river, and followed the walkway along the bank of the Seine, as he did every day at this time. Nearly six months had gone by since the death of Grigori Kotov in California. Six months without any contact, without a word from Nash Rollins, without any indication that he was being watched. For six months, he’d passed the houseboat on the river every morning without seeing the signal that announced a meeting.

  They’d left him alone with his life in Paris. It had been so long that he wondered if they’d cut him loose.

  But Bourne knew the rule. Sooner or later the call always comes.

  When he got to the houseboat that morning, he saw the rusted bicycle chained to the gangplank. Treadstone was back. Nash was back, waiting for him in the Tuileries near the boat pond with a new assignment.

  Jason continued on the walkway by the river. He followed it until he rejoined the city streets near the Place de la Concorde. Around him, the city was getting busier as the day wore on, cars and tour buses flowing around him, bicyclists and scooters dodging the pedestrians. He strolled into the huge, crowded plaza, stopping near the wrought-iron fence surrounding the Obelisk. Ahead of him, he could see the gardens of the Tuileries.

  Someone would be waiting for him. The first of Nash’s watchers, ready to broadcast the alert on the radio. He’s here. It took him only a few seconds to spot her, a twentysomething woman pretending to be a tourist, taking pictures of the fountains when she was really taking pictures of him. She was pretty, with a floppy red hat over kinky brown hair, jeans, and a long plush coat.

  Jason walked toward her. She ignored him, the way she’d been trained to do. She went up to the fountain and took another photograph with her phone. He came up immediately beside her, and she still acted as if he didn’t exist, but he could tell that she was nervous now. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He wasn’t supposed to make contact.

  “Bonjour,” Jason said, not looking at her. “Il fait froid aujourd’hui, n’est-ce pas?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  She gave him a confused smile.

  Always maintain your cover. Treadstone.

  “Is there something I can do for you?” she asked.

  Jason took a quick look around the plaza. He confirmed that there were no other watchers nearby, and then he smoothly slid a hand inside the pocket of the woman’s plush coat and removed the gun that he knew he’d find there. He tucked it away inside his leather jacket. It was done before she could react, and when she realized what had happened, she flushed with anger. She’d get a dressing-down from Nash for allowing herself to be spotted and then disarmed.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Cain?” she hissed under her breath. “This isn’t protocol. You’re not supposed to talk to me.”

  “Give me your phone,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Give me your phone. I’m camera shy. No pictures.”

  With her jaw clenched, the woman handed over her white phone, which Jason dropped into the water of the fountain. She swore again.

  “I have a message,” Bourne said. “I need you to pass it along for me.”

  “What kind of message?”

  “Tell Nash I’m out.”

  “Out?” she said, disbelief in her face. “That’s not how it works. You can’t just decide you’re out.”

  “Yes, I can. I’m on my own. From now on, I do things my way. And tell Nash if I see any Treadstone or CIA people following me in the future, I’ll be talking to the New York Times about what really happened to that ferry in Tallinn. I don’t think Holly Schultz wants to see that in print.”

  Jason walked away, leaving the woman open-mouthed behind him.

  The rain got harder, and spray kicked out from the tires of the cars. The people around him scrambled to open their umbrellas. He headed out of the plaza into the gardens that bor
dered the Champs-Élysées, with the Arc de Triomphe ahead of him in the distance. Nearby, he smelled the sugar of a kiosk selling crepes. He bought himself one, and then he headed north from the park and lost himself in the streets of Paris.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Brian Freeman is the bestselling author of more than twenty novels, including the Jonathan Stride and Frost Easton series. His Audible original, The Deep, Deep Snow, hit the New York Times audio bestseller list. His novels have won the International Thriller Writers Award and the Macavity Award and been finalists for the Gold Dagger, Edgar, Anthony, and Barry Awards.

  Robert Ludlum was the author of twenty-seven novels, each one a New York Times bestseller. There are more than 225 million of his books in print, and they have been translated into thirty-two languages. He was the author of The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Chancellor Manuscript, and the Jason Bourne series--among other novels. Ludlum passed away in March 2001.

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