Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Shadow

1

The Present

Jason Bourne watched the hot Paris summer get even hotter.

The protest in the Place de la Bastille began to descend from unrest into violence. Soon there would be rocks and bricks thrown. Fights in the square. Cars on fire. It had been happening that way for weeks. The young people, sweat pouring down their faces in the blazing August sun, hurled threats at the police in their riot gear. At least fifty students had stormed the plaza and the Colonne de Juillet, as if it were the year 1789 again and they were launching another French revolution. The rest of the crowd, hundreds strong, spilled into the surrounding streets. They chanted and marched and waved flags bearing the words La Vraie.

True.

As in True France. That was the name of the far-right political party that was threatening to shock the world by winning the next French election.

Bourne sat in an outdoor café on Boulevard Henri IV, directly across from the plaza. The restaurant had been crowded when he arrived, but the other tables were mostly empty now. As the protesters filled the square, the paying customers had scurried away to the nearby Métro station, leaving behind half-eaten cheese plates and cold cups of espresso. Everyone knew what was coming.

He studied the crowd with an analytical eye. Automatically, he looked for the instigators, the hidden hands directing the mayhem. These kinds of protests rarely turned into riots organically. Someone was always there to light the spark with a well-timed knife thrust or a Molotov cocktail. He spotted at least six of them working the crowd, dressed in black robes and wearing Guy Fawkes masks. Bourne could see the wires of radios leading to their ears as they fed instructions back and forth.

Fomenting chaos.

Maybe they were truly part of La Vraie, trying to unleash populist anger that would sweep them into power. Or maybe they were agents of the ruling party, hoping to stir a backlash against the violence spreading around the country.

Or maybe something else was at work.

Truth is what you can make people believe.

Treadstone.

It was Thursday afternoon. Bourne always came to this café on Thursdays. He sat at the same table, ordered steak au poivre, and left an hour later out of the Bastille station to return to his apartment on the north side of the city. He spent the hour watching the street to see if anyone was watching him, but most of all, he kept an eye on the Métro sign above the escalators. If there was a hashtag symbol on the sign in orange chalk, that meant he had a message waiting at a boutique hotel two blocks away off Rue Saint-Antoine.

A message from Abbey Laurent.

But no.

It had been seven months since Abbey had said goodbye to him in Quebec City, and there had been no message since then. Not that he expected one. Abbey had moved on with her life and left the world of Jason Bourne behind her. Their affair was over. And yet he kept coming back to the café.

Every week, as he sat over his fiery pepper steak and a cold bottle of Kronenbourg 1664, Jason thought about sending her a message. He'd set up the communications protocol-the back door-so that it worked in both directions. If he scrawled the hashtag on the Métro sign himself, then someone-a lawyer, but he didn't know who-would collect a note for Abbey at the same Rue Saint-Antoine hotel.

Jason rubbed his fingers over the orange chalk in his pocket. He always had it with him, but he'd never used it. The only thing he could say to Abbey was that he was still in love with her, but that was the worst thing he could tell her. He needed to let her get on with her life, and he needed to do the same thing.

Forget Abbey Laurent!

But he couldn't. That was the terrible irony for Jason. The things he wanted to forget were burned into his memory, and the things he wanted to remember were lost in the mists of his brain.

A few years earlier, he'd been shot in the waters off Marseilles. The injury had robbed him of his identity. His memories of who he was had been erased, and all that was left behind were the skills of a killer. His whole past was lost in shadow. Only a few fragments had begun to come back recently, isolated bits and pieces like snippets from a movie. Missions. Deaths. Places. People. For months, strange things had triggered him. Smells, sounds, and faces brought unexpected recollections. But none of it felt real; it felt as if those things had happened to someone else. He didn't know what to believe.

Bourne smelled smoke drifting his way. In the plaza, he saw an arc of fire as a police car erupted in flames. Paving bricks crashed through windows. From the opposite side of the square, where the police gathered, water cannons blew people off their feet. He heard a series of loud bangs, and tear gas rose like a cloud, blowing toward him and stinging his eyes.

Amid the bedlam, he saw the men in the bone-white Guy Fawkes masks calmly moving among the crowd, seeding pockets of disruption. Wherever they went, blood trailed in their wake.

It was time to go.

But before he could stand up, a voice interrupted him.

"Les enfants, eh?"

He glanced sideways. The table on his left was no longer empty. A man sat there, heavyset, about fifty years old. His age didn't make Bourne let down his guard. He wasn't Treadstone-Cain knew the look-but with a glance, Jason assessed the man's upper-body strength and realized he was formidable. The man made no attempt to hide the pistol that was holstered under his gray-checked sport coat. But he kept his hands on the table, fingers spread wide, an obvious signal that he intended no harm.

The man nodded at the chaos unfolding steps away from them. "C'est toujours les enfants."

"No, it's not the children," Bourne replied in English. "They're just the foot soldiers. Someone else is orchestrating this."

"You mean our friends in the Fawkes masks?" the man said, also switching to English, although his accent remained French. "Ah, well, they could be children, too, n'est-ce pas? It's hard to tell without faces. But I get what you're saying. The orders come from elsewhere."

Formidable and smart.

"Who are you?" Bourne asked.

"A woman who goes by the name Vandal sent me to find you," the man told him. "I'm supposed to give you a message."

Vandal.

That wasn't a name Bourne was expecting.

Unlike this man, Vandal was Treadstone. She was an attractive Black woman, tall, lean, and tough. They'd done a mission together in Barcelona three years earlier, and he'd crossed paths with her again the previous summer outside a house in Maryland.

The house where an agent named Nova had died.

Yes, Bourne knew Vandal. But why was she sending him a message? And why was she going outside the Treadstone network to do it?

"If Vandal sent you, she knows I'd ask for confirmation that the message came from her," Bourne said. "She'd also want to be sure you're talking to me."

Another firebomb in the Place de la Bastille rocked the street. Neither man flinched or took his eyes off the other.

"Yes, of course," the man replied. "She said I should ask to see the coin."

Jason knew what coin he meant. He kept it in his pocket-a Greek coin encased in a pendant that Nova had worn her whole life. He'd taken it from her body when he found her in Maryland. Vandal was the only person-other than Abbey Laurent-who knew he'd done that. So asking about the coin was her way of letting Bourne know that the man in front of him was genuine.

Vandal was also smart enough to know that Bourne would have the coin with him. He always did. He dug for the chain inside his pocket and opened his palm long enough for the man to identify it.

When the man nodded his satisfaction, Jason tucked the coin away again.

"How did you find me?" Bourne asked. "Vandal doesn't know where I am."

"Not specifically, but everyone knows Cain's home base is Paris," the man replied. "I have my own sources. It only took a few days before someone spotted you. You're not as much of a ghost as you'd like to think."

Bourne frowned. "Why did Vandal want you to find me?"

"To deliver a warning. You're being hunted, Cain."

"By who?"

"She does not know. She also does not know why, although I imagine there could be any number of people who would like to track down Cain, yes? But it doesn't appear to be the usual suspects. Russia, for example. There's no chatter from that direction, despite what you did to their assassin Lennon last year. Oh, yes, my friend, I know about that, too."

"How did Vandal discover the threat?" Jason asked.

"By accident, it seems. She needed a cleaner for a particularly bloody scene-apparently a man you'd used yourself for similar services in the past. When she got there, she found him in his apartment, almost dead. He'd been tortured for information. She was able to save his life, and he told her that the men who'd done this to him were looking for you. He didn't know where you were, so he couldn't tell them anything. But they weren't going to leave him behind to talk."

"Who was this resource?"

"His name is Gabriel Wildhaber."

Bourne shook his head in puzzlement. "That makes no sense. I've never used a cleaner by that name. I don't know him."

"Are you sure?"

It took Jason only a moment to understand what the man meant. He didn't remember anyone named Gabriel Wildhaber, but his memory only went back as far as that moment in Marseilles that had stolen away his life. It was possible he'd used Wildhaber on a job in his forgotten past.

If that was true, then the hunters might be part of his past, too.

"Where is Wildhaber based?"

"Zurich," the man replied.

Zurich.

Jesus!

Yes, Zurich had been a part of his life before and after he'd lost his memory. It drew him like a magnet; it was the first place he'd gone after Marseilles to find his identity. But even years later, the time he'd spent in Zurich before his injury remained a mystery. And all he knew of Zurich afterward was death.

The Gemeinschaft Bank! A killer in an elevator! Wherever he'd gone in Zurich, assassins had been hunting for a man known as Jason Bourne.

Just like now.

Who are they?

Across the heat of the street, the violence of the protests crept closer. The riot spilled out of the square, young people screaming and running, the burn of the tear gas getting thicker. Bricks flew. He saw unconscious bodies in the street, blood pouring from head wounds. At the café, a window shattered inward, spraying them with glass. He spotted knives in the hands of people escaping toward the Seine.

And guns, too. Some of the masked men had guns.

"We should go," the man said. "Chaos can be a cover. The danger isn't just in Switzerland, Cain."

"What do you mean?"

"I believe men are looking for you in Paris, too. I told you, I have sources. One of them made the mistake of using your code name. Twenty-four hours later, the police pulled him out of the river."

"And Vandal has no idea what this is about?" Bourne asked.

"No, but Wildhaber mentioned a Zurich café. The Drei Alpenhäuser. She said that would mean something to you."

Jason felt a pounding in his head, a sharp pain exploding behind his eyes. The Drei Alpenhäuser! A restaurant only steps from the lake! The café had practically been his Treadstone headquarters when he'd operated in Zurich. He'd been there countless times; he'd used it for contacts and drops. He'd gone there after Marseilles, and they'd recognized him at a time when he didn't even recognize himself.

They knew him as Cain.

They knew him as Jason Bourne.

"Wildhaber said someone at the Drei Alpenhäuser had been asking about you," the man continued.

"One of the killers?"

"He didn't think so. He said a woman had been at the café several times looking for anyone who knew you. She said she needed your help. Vandal went to the café to see if the woman showed up again, but she got called away on a mission. That's when she reached out to me and asked me to find you."

"Did Vandal get a name for this woman? Or a description?"

"No name. Young, late twenties, blond hair-"

The man suddenly stopped talking.

He stopped because he was dead.

What looked like a fly landing on his forehead was the hole left by a bullet tunneling soundlessly into his brain. As the man slid off the chair, more bullets hit the windows behind Bourne and ricocheted off the metal table with sharp pings. He threw himself to the ground, drawing his Sig Sauer into his hand, and rolled onto his stomach, arms extended. Near the escalator leading down to the Bastille station, a killer in a Guy Fawkes mask fired his handgun, emptying his magazine at Bourne, bullets kicking up concrete shrapnel that flew like razor blades. Jason drew a bead on the man, but panicked people flooded the sidewalk between them, and he had no shot.

When the killer's gun was empty, Bourne scrambled to his feet and charged. The masked assassin jumped down the stairs toward the Métro. At the station escalator, Jason leaped the fence and landed hard on the moving stairs. He shouldered his way through a crush of people into the underground and swung left and right, trying to find the killer among hundreds of bodies.

But he was too late.

At his feet, he saw a black robe and cowl, like something a monk would wear, plus a white plastic Guy Fawkes mask being kicked and trampled by people running for the trains. The killer had shed his disguise. He was gone.

Bourne hiked back to the street. He wiped blood off his face where it had sprayed from the gunshot that killed the man. Outside the café, police had already begun to gather around the dead body.

The body of the man who'd come to deliver a warning.

You're being hunted, Cain.

Jason melted into the crowd. He needed to be gone before someone pointed him out to the police. He didn't bother heading to his Paris apartment. If that man could find him, then others could, too. His apartment was blown. Instead, he marched south on Boulevard Bourdon, leaving the madness behind him.