She tried to stay calm and not give anything away. She reminded herself to keep smiling and to keep the terror she felt off her face. It wasn’t him. This wasn’t her mystery man. He was a stranger, and more than that, she knew he was a killer.
He was here to kill her.
“I could use a cigarette, too,” Abbey said, unlatching her satchel purse so she could reach inside.
But he wasn’t fooled at all.
Her hand dove inside her purse, her fingers clawing for the plastic grip of the Taser. As she drew it out, the man with the gold-rimmed glasses slipped his own hand out of his raincoat pocket. He held a black pistol with a long barrel, and his blue eyes had the sharp gaze of a hawk. Abbey squeezed her eyes shut and yanked the trigger, and the wires of the Taser ejected, filling the man’s body with fifty thousand volts. His arm lurched; he fired his gun into the air, making her scream. She pulled the trigger again, delivering more electric shocks. He collapsed to the ground, wriggling and jerking in fits, the gun spilling from his hand.
Abbey threw the Taser down.
She ran blindly from the park, making a zigzag path around dark corners to get away, losing herself in the deserted old streets of the city.
THREE
JASON didn’t know if he was remembering or dreaming.
Bits and pieces of a life buzzed through his head like the clickety-clack of film in an old projector. He saw children lined up in formation, a dozen boys in gray uniforms being scolded by a stern old man who marked all of their demerits on a clipboard. He saw a gravestone at his feet, blue marble, with two names that were blurred by a kind of fog. He could only read the year of their deaths: 2001. He heard explosions that made him cover his ears. Gunfire. He heard words coming out of his mouth in foreign languages. He saw places that were unfamiliar to him, and yet he knew he’d been to all of them. Cities around the world. Streets and monuments at night. Churches, not to pray, but to meet people in secret. Boats on the water, borders, checkpoints. Walls to be climbed and buildings to be infiltrated.
The hazy images raced in and out of his brain. Through it all, he saw one face. A woman. She kept reappearing, kept interrupting the movie to whisper in his ear. Stay with me, my love, stay alive. She had flowing black hair, a nose hooked like an eagle, dark passionate eyes, a wicked laugh, olive skin. He could feel her body wrapped up hungrily in his own. Her mouth, teasing him. The fullness of her lips, the softness of her skin.
She was in his arms, and they were happy.
Then she was in the arms of someone else, being carried away. Her eyes were closed, her face lifeless, her blood spilling to the ground. He heard himself screaming.
No!
His eyes snapped open from unconsciousness. He was awake, but lost in a cloud of confusion. Everything that had been in his head scurried away, like cockroaches afraid of the light, leaving behind an empty place.
Bourne lay in a twin bed. The sheet under him was damp from his sweat. He must have thrown off the blanket sometime during the night, because his body was uncovered. He was naked, on his back. The room was small and unlit, but he could see a crack of light around the blinds that covered the double window, which let him examine his surroundings. There was a single door that led to the outside; a small bathroom, barely larger than a phone booth; an empty closet. Two watercolor paintings hung on peeling burgundy wallpaper, showing sailboats on the water. A lamp sat on a desk near the window.
He felt disoriented, trapped in the middle of a strange dream.
He tried to get up, but pain knifed through his body like a flaming arrow. He collapsed back to the mattress, breathing hard. His head pounded, and his vision made a cartwheel, turning upside down before righting itself. When he looked at his torso, he saw a bright white bandage below his left shoulder, with a large circle of red where blood had seeped through the gauze.
He needed to think, to remember. He pushed his fists against his head, ignoring the pain. His breath thundered in his chest, and a whole new sheen of sweat formed on his skin.
The sweat of panic.
The sweat of fear.
Jason tried to get up again, gritting his teeth against the agony in his muscles. When he swung his legs off the bed, he managed to push himself to a sitting position, with his feet on the hardwood floor. He waited until the next wave of vertigo passed. The pain he felt wasn’t just in his chest. It was in his head, too. He put his hand to the base of his skull, and the barest touch felt like a lightning bolt. He felt a gauze bandage there.
His senses fed him information that his brain tried to process. Outside, he heard the trill of songbirds, along with a whistle of air squeezing through the door frame. It made the room cold. He smelled the dankness of his own body, but he also smelled brine, as if from the sea. He stood up, propping a hand against the wall near the bed to keep himself from falling. He went to the window and separated the aluminum blinds. He was in a vacation cottage, looking out on a wooden porch. The pale blue water of a small bay lapped against a rocky beach only steps from where he was. Evergreens dotted the green grass near him, and he could see a heavily wooded promontory on the far shore of the inlet. The tide was out, leaving much of the basin exposed, with seagulls picking at the mud. The bay opened into a much larger body of water, where no land was visible.
He knew this place. The St. Lawrence estuary.
He remembered now. He was at a beachside inn in Saint-Jean-sur-Mer, two hours northeast of Quebec City. Les chalets sur la rivière. A hideaway with access to marine traffic in the Seaway, where he’d slipped aboard ships to break apart smuggling rings. Contraband. Drugs. Human trafficking. But there was more to remember in this room, so much more. He’d been here with Nova. They’d made love in that twin bed, her voracious appetite leaving him sated and exhausted.
Yes, he knew where he was.
The events of the recent past crept back slowly, sluggishly, like escaping from quicksand. The violence in Quebec City. The confrontation with Nash Rollins.
And prior to that, New York. The assassination. The riot.
It happened that way to Bourne sometimes, those paralyzing moments of forgetting. He’d learned to live with it. He was a man with a fractured history, a man without identity. Only a few years earlier, he’d lost his memory to a bullet in his head, which left him with no past, just fragments of who he once was and another name from another life that meant nothing to him. That life belonged to a stranger. He’d had to start over in his early thirties. Make new memories. And to this day, he still occasionally woke up in a fog, with no idea where he was, terrified that he’d lost everything again.
Barely able to walk upright, Jason staggered to the bathroom. He yanked on the string that turned on the bulb overhead. Under the dim yellow light, he propped himself with both hands on the porcelain sink and stared at the face in the mirror.
It was a square, handsome face, but pale and drawn now, lacking color. His hair was dark, so deep brown as to be almost black, and it was cut short and swept back on a high forehead. He had intense blue-gray eyes, and the bags under his eyes reflected a chronic lack of sleep. He hadn’t shaved in days; his stubble was forming a beard. He was more than six feet tall and athletically built, but he saw a web of fresh cuts and multicolored bruises all over his skin, the product of his fall from the boardwalk. This wasn’t the first time. His body was riddled with the scars of previous injuries, including one over his right eye and another below his ear.