Tracy had shivered against him, as if she had been exhaling for the last time. “Jason, I don’t want to be alone.”
“You’re not alone, Tracy.”He remembered his lips pressing against her forehead. “I’m here with you.”
“Yes, I know, it’s good, I feel you around me.”Just before she died she had given a sigh, akin to a cat’s purr of contentment.
The curtains in Noah Perlis’s flat twitched and shivered as if alive, and a harsh, flat laugh escaped his pulled-back lips. Had Holly whispered to him as Tracy had: “It’s in our darkest hour that our secrets eat us alive.”Little did Tracy know that every hour of his amnesiac life was his darkest hour, that the secrets eating him alive were secrets even from him. He missed Tracy, missed her with the sharpness of a stiletto slipped between his ribs so that he gasped out loud. The curtains shivered in the wind through the sash and it was as if Tracy were here with him again, looking at him with her huge blue eyes, her wide megawatt smile so like Suparwita’s. In the wind he heard her laugh, felt the back of her hand brush against his cheek, cooling his flesh.
He had only known her a very short time, but those days had consisted of the compressed time in battle, when staying alive became the be-all and end-all of existence, when every moment contained the taint of death, when company mates become lifelong friends.
Tracy had touched him in a place both heavily defended and starkly tender. She had wormed her way inside him and now remained there, coiled and breathing, even after death.
And then, so close to her, hearing her voice in his mind, he remembered something she had said the night before she’d been killed: “I live in London, Belgravia. If you saw my flat-it’s a tiny thing, but it’s mine and I love it. There’s a mews out back with a flowering pear tree that a pair of house martins nest in come spring. And a nightjar serenades me most evenings.”
He caught his breath. Was it really a coincidence that both Tracy and Perlis lived in Belgravia? Bourne didn’t believe in coincidences, especially not with this group of people: Tracy, Holly, Perlis, the Hererras, Nikolai Yevsen, Leonid Arkadin. Perlis and Yevsen were dead, as were Tracy and Holly, and Arkadin was God only knew where. That left the Hererras as the living tendons that held this constellation together.
Only the photo of the handsome young man with the mocking half smile was left unexplored. Where had he seen that face before? It was maddeningly familiar and yet subtly changed, as if he’d seen the man when he was younger… or older!In a sudden frenzy he slid out the cardboard backing and discovered a small key taped to the back of the photo. He peeled it off. The size indicated that it was from either a public locker at one of the airports or the train station or… There was a paper tag attached by a small piece of thin wire that had a series of numbers handwritten on it in ink. Safe-deposit box. He turned the key over. Imprinted on its obverse was a logo consisting of two tiny interlinked letters: AB.
Everything clicked into place. This man was Diego Hererra, son and heir of Don Fernando Hererra, who had dealt in illicit gun trafficking with the late great Nikolai Yevsen, the legendary arms dealer whom Bourne had killed last month. Don Hererra’s legitimate business was the Aguardiente Bancorp: AB. He had given Diego the job of running Aguardiente’s London office.
Noah Perlis was friends with Diego Hererra, and they both knew Holly. Picking up the photo of the three of them at Holly’s birthday, he looked from one face to another and saw the identical complicit look in their eyes. Perlis had been friends with Holly and he had killed her. That complicit look of friendship… and then murder.
And then it hit him with the force of an express train. He was part of this constellation. According to Suparwita, Holly had been given the ring by her father, Perlis had killed her to get it, and now he had it. Slowly, he took out the ring and rolled it between his fingers. What did the engraving mean?
The photo of the three of them-Perlis, Diego, and Holly-mocked him. What had been the basis of their friendship? Was it a sexual three-way, a physical attraction that in the end had meant nothing to Perlis, or had he become Holly’s friend for a specific reason? And how did these three relate with Tracy? Something was going on here that Bourne didn’t understand, something intimate and at the same time repellent. One thing he knew for certain, however: Understanding their connection to one another was vitally important to discovering the secret of the ring.
The man known to CI Ops Directorate as Coven had arrived in Bali just in time to turn around and follow Bourne to London. Now he sat in his rental car, binoculars to his eyes, watching the second-floor window of the late Noah Perlis’s Belgravia flat. The curtains moved again, and he tried to make out who was in the apartment. On his lap was a PDF of the Perlis file he had requested. He now knew everything CI knew about Perlis-which admittedly wasn’t much, but it was enough to make Coven wonder why Perlis had come to Jason Bourne’s attention. Though his original mission had been to incapacitate Bourne and bring him back to CI in cuffs, this was changed after he’d asked for the file on Perlis. Directly following his request, DCI Danziger had come on the line and quizzed him mercilessly about why he was interested in Perlis. Normally Coven didn’t stick his nose into executive matters, preferring to infiltrate, accomplish his wet work as quickly, cleanly, and efficiently as possible, and get out, no questions asked. But in a way he couldn’t define, this situation was different. The moment DCI Danziger himself seized control of the operation, his hackles rose. Then DCI Danziger confirmed his suspicion and fueled his curiosity by changing the mission midstream: His orders were now to find out the connection between Bourne and Perlis before Coven brought the rogue agent in.
Darkness at noon. The lowering clouds let go the first stuttering spurt, then the rain started in earnest, pocking the sidewalks, running in the gutters, hurling itself onto the car’s roof, against the windshield, turning the world smeary, draining it of color.
Coven had been an agnostic when it came to the changing of the guard at DCI level. Wet work was wet work; he didn’t think that his job, a universe away from the district, would be jeopardized no matter who was running the show. But that was before DCI Danziger had issued new orders, which he considered unprofessional at best, a potential disaster at worst.
Now, squinting through the rain as Bourne emerged from the building, Coven found himself wondering at DCI Danziger’s hidden agenda. It wouldn’t be the first time a DCI had one, but this man was new, hadn’t come up through the ranks, had hardly earned loyalty from people like Coven who risked their lives in the field every hour of every day and night. The thought that this interloper might be running him as part of his own designs pissed Coven off royally. So the moment he spied Bourne exiting the building, he decided to handle the assignment his way and screw DCI Danziger and his secret agenda. If Bourne had something he wanted that badly, Coven would do well to take it for himself.
My family’s entire history is on that laptop,” Jalal Essai said.
“That would hardly be a reason for Black River and the NSA to be after it,” Moira countered.
“No, of course not.”
Essai sighed as he sat back against his chair. They were seated at a corner table in the heart of the terrace restaurant at Caravanserai, a small, exclusive boutique hotel in Virginia, which Essai owned. Ivy-covered brick walls rose on three sides, the fourth being taken up by a row of enormous French doors that led to the restaurant’s interior section.