neutralized?”
“No, it seems that he’s still alive.”
“That’s unfortunate,” the woman lectured him coldly. “You assured us that you’d deal with this. Director Shaw is concerned. If Bourne is linked to the assassination in New York, it puts the whole Treadstone resurrection in jeopardy.”
Rollins grimaced as pain stabbed through his leg again. The pain was going to make him collapse soon, but he didn’t care. “Don’t worry, tell Shaw that I’ll find Bourne. He’s wounded, and he can’t go far. I’ll find him, and I’ll kill him myself.”
TWO
LATE-NIGHT drinkers packed the pub on Rue Sainte-Angèle at one in the morning. Abbey Laurent sat at the bar in the semidarkness, under a low ceiling studded with rough-hewn beams. Her clothes and her mahogany-colored hair were still damp, making her shiver. Her fingers tapped on the keyboard of her laptop, in a tempo greased by the rhythm of the jazz quartet playing a few feet away. She owed her editor, Jacques, three thousand words for the next online edition of The Fort. The article was due first thing in the morning, but she’d waited until now to write it, hoping that the mystery man would give her a story.
Instead, he’d left her standing alone in the rain.
Every few sentences, she took a swig from the bottle of beer in front of her. She found it hard to concentrate on her work. Her problem wasn’t the noise or the crowd; she thrived on those things. She could bang out a story in the middle of the World Cup final. No, she kept thinking about the man who’d stood her up.
Who was he? Where was he?
Why had he gone through an elaborate series of secret contacts to meet with her, only to not show up?
Abbey grabbed her phone and did what she’d already done half a dozen times since she got to the bar. She scrolled back to the very first contact he’d made with her, one week ago, three days after the murder of Sofia Ortiz in New York. It was a text message sent from an unknown phone number.
We need to meet. I can help you get the answers you want.
As a journalist, she received cold calls like that all the time. Most were hoaxes, sent by conspiracy nuts or men who wanted to meet the woman they’d seen in the photograph next to her byline. But something about this man was different. Intriguing. He knew things. He provided her with details about the shooting that the police and FBI had never released. When she checked it out, she discovered that everything he’d said was true.
Her reporter’s radar was pinging.
But Jacques had told her that the meeting was too dangerous. Her editor was nervous by nature, and he was still hyperventilating about the Ortiz assassination and the Washington Square riot. However, Abbey had never been one to let fear stop her from doing anything.
Okay, she’d written back to the mystery man. Your place or mine?
They’d agreed on her place. Quebec City in three days.
She didn’t know his name, or what he looked like, or anything about who he was. He was obsessive about protecting his anonymity and cautious to the point of paranoia. He’d sent her elaborate instructions for making sure she wasn’t followed, and he’d given her an exchange of code phrases so they would know each other in person, like they were spies in some Cold War rendezvous.
She’d say: What do you like most about Quebec?
He’d reply: Those wonderful little maple candies.
And after all that, he’d been a no-show. It didn’t make sense. She checked her messages again, hoping he’d sent her a text to explain, but all she saw were the unanswered texts she’d sent him from the boardwalk.
Abbey sighed with defeat, because she wasn’t getting anything done tonight. Jacques would have to wait for the story. She shut down her laptop and turned around at the bar to finish her beer and listen to the music. The boys in the band all waved to her. This was her place, her neighborhood. Her office at The Fort was four blocks away, and her studio apartment was six blocks away. She traveled constantly, but when she was home, she typically wrote her stories here at the bar until closing time. As a writer, she made almost no money, but the bartender slipped her the occasional drink for free, and in return, she threw a mention of the bar into the magazine whenever she could.
The bar door opened, letting in cold damp