He didn’t have to wait long.
Headlights shot down Rue d’Auteuil. An SUV stopped outside the building where The Fort had its offices, and three men jumped out. They all wore beige raincoats. One man headed for the side street and the exit where Jason had just left, and another charged toward the front door with the broken window.
The third man, who was obviously in charge, hung back. He was tall and sleek, with a neat, polished look that Bourne recognized from long experience. It was the look of a killer. The man wore gold-rimmed glasses that he took off and cleaned as he stood outside the building. Then he examined the area around him with the eyes of a hawk, as if he could sense that Jason was still close by. His eyes were so intense that Jason sunk lower into the grass to make sure he couldn’t be seen, even under the shroud of night.
Almost a full minute went by before the man with the gold-rimmed glasses joined his colleagues inside the empty building. The street was deserted again.
Bourne pushed himself off the ground and ran.
EIGHT
ABBEY used a pair of ceramic chopsticks she’d bought in Hong Kong to scoop lo mein noodles out of a white Chinese take-out container. With her other hand, she bit into an egg roll dipped in spicy mustard. Nervously, as she ate, she got out of the wheely chair near her computer and went to the apartment window, which she’d done dozens of times since getting home. The blinds were closed, but she pushed them aside and peered out at the fire escape and the narrow alley called Rue Saint-Flavien. The streetlight showed nothing but a bicycle chained to a drainpipe. She saw no one in the alley, but that didn’t make her feel less paranoid.
She paced on the worn carpet of her second-floor studio apartment. The space wasn’t large. She had a mattress on the floor where she slept and a tiny bathroom that consisted of a toilet, shower, and sink. Her dinette table doubled as her desk, where she kept her laptop. Her garbage overflowed with fast-food wrappers, because the only kitchen appliance she ever used was the microwave. Her refrigerator was mostly empty, and so were the light blue walls. She traveled more than she was at home, so she didn’t have much time to shop or decorate. She never liked to be in one place for very long.
The radio was off, leaving the room quiet. Normally, she played loud jazz, at least until the downstairs neighbors pounded on the ceiling to complain. But tonight she didn’t want to drown out any noises. Footsteps in the hallway. Cars in the alley. If the killer in the gold-rimmed glasses came back, she wanted to hear him before he got to her door.
She wished she still had her Taser.
Abbey checked her phone. No messages. No emails. She swore under her breath, because she felt cut off from her sources of information. She’d left four messages for the lawyer in New York who’d fed her the story about the data hack and the suspect in the Ortiz assassination, but he wasn’t calling her back. The Quebec police had nothing to say about the shooting at Château Frontenac. Neither did her contacts in the intelligence agencies. No one was talking to her. She didn’t have any answers.
She knew who she had to call next, but she didn’t want to do it.
His name was Michel Marciano. He’d been her on-again, off-again lover for three years, but over the winter, she’d called it quits with him for good. Michel hadn’t been happy about losing her. They’d known each other since college at McGill, where she was a journalism major and he was a law student. They couldn’t have been more opposite in nature. He was the buttoned-down bureaucrat with his eyes on government work, and she was the free spirit planning to go around the world chasing stories. She suspected that each of them saw in the other a little bit of what they were missing in life.
They’d dated a few times in college, but it hadn’t turned into anything serious. Then they’d reconnected three years ago in Ottawa when she was digging into a bribery scandal on export licenses and he was a mid-level lawyer working in the department of global affairs. Michel hadn’t given her any confidential information—he would never do that—but he’d pointed her to people who could help her, and eventually she’d broken the story wide open. Not long after that, she’d invited him to dinner as a way to say thanks, and that night they slept together for the first time.
Within a year, he’d asked her to marry him. She’d been tempted. Michel was kind, smart, and successful, and he bought her nice things, took her to nice places, and always knew what kind of wine to order with dinner. Married life with him would have been stable and pleasant, making stable, pleasant friends and raising stable, pleasant children. She would have had a big house overlooking the Ottawa River with a maid, a swimming pool, and not a take-out container to be found in the kitchen.
Even so, she told him no. That wasn’t the life for her. She liked her greasy lo mein and her mattress on the floor. That should have been the end of their relationship, but Michel wasn’t the kind of man who gave up easily. He kept pursuing her, and she let herself stay on the hook for two more years. It was convenient to keep him in her life, because she could tell her father that she had a boyfriend, and she could have stable, pleasant sex from time to time. But around Christmastime, she’d decided that the status quo wasn’t right for either of them, and she’d finally told Michel that it was over.
She knew what would happen if she called him again. He’d want her back.
But Michel also had contacts throughout the Canadian and American governments, and he could get answers for her. If she waited too long, she knew she would chicken out, so she picked up the phone and dialed. He answered on the first ring, and she could imagine his heart racing as he spotted her name on the caller ID.
“Abbey,” he said breathlessly. “It’s so lovely to hear from you.”
“Hello, Michel.”
“Where are you? Are you in Ottawa?”
“No. I’m home in Quebec.”
“I’ve missed you.”
She didn’t answer right away. His voice sounded the same, that cultured private school accent that always said the right thing as if he were reading it out of a book. She could picture him in her head, his neat black hair in a stiff pompadour, his face handsome and mostly expressionless, his silk tie making a tight knot under his chin.
“I’m—I’m not calling to talk about us, Michel,” she murmured.
“Well, can’t we do that anyway? I mean it. I’ve missed you.”
“I know. Part of me misses you, too. But we decided—”
“You decided,” he interrupted her. “This was you, not me.”
“Yes. You’re right. It was my call.”
“My feelings haven’t changed,” Michel went on. “If anything, not seeing you for months has made them stronger. I’ve followed what you’ve been doing. I read your stories from New York, and I can’t tell you how worried I was, thinking of you in the midst of that violence. I was immensely relieved to see that you were safe. I just wish it would make you change your mind about things.”
“Michel, please, let’s not do this. Not now.”
She heard him sigh.
“Fine. All right. What do you want, Abbey?”
“Information.”
“About what?”
“Something’s going on,” she told him. “There was a shooting near Château Frontenac last night. No one in the government will talk about it. The Americans are involved. Have you heard anything?”