Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Vendetta

Book 20: Jason Bourne

by Brian Freeman

Genres: General Fiction; Thrillers; Spy Thrillers; Political Thrillers; Terrorism & Assassination Thrillers

Synopsis

The hunt for a trove of secret information forces Bourne to decide who lives – and who dies – in this latest installment in the #1 New York Times bestselling series.

A hacked database known as the Files has upended the intelligence community. Careers are being destroyed. Dirty deals are showing up on the front page.  Assassinations are spreading from Europe to the U.S.

The new head of Treadstone sends Jason Bourne on a mission to find out who has the Files and get them back – or destroy them.  But Bourne isn’t alone in this race.  The Chinese want the Files.  So do the Russians.  And the only woman who may be able to help him is a treacherous spy known as Johanna – Bourne’s former lover – who sees the Files as the key to her own vendetta against Treadstone.

Bourne has a rule for friends and enemies alike: Trust no one.  That rule may be the only thing keeping him alive, because the hunt for the Files soon takes Bourne inside a twisted labyrinth of murder and betrayal, where everyone has a hidden agenda.

Including Bourne himself.

Release date: January 14, 2025

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Print pages: 400

Sample

You're being watched!

Johanna glanced across the street from the top of the Las Vegas parking garage and knew why that strange prickling sensation on her neck was warning her about surveillance. The Sphere arena, barely one hundred yards away, had taken on the look of an enormous green eyeball across its metal skin. The feminine eye, with long delicate lashes, stared right at her, winking a couple of times, as if it knew she was there.

She shivered despite herself.

Jesus, that thing gave her the creeps.

It was three in the morning, and for now, Johanna was alone. The nearby office buildings were empty, and so was the parking garage. She'd used a Banish 22 suppressor on her Ruger Mark IV Tactical pistol to silently dispatch the lights over her head, leaving her mostly in darkness. But the whites of the eye on that goddamn Sphere still made her feel like the spotlight of a prison watchtower was zeroing in on her.

A December breeze-cold for Las Vegas-blew desert dust in her face. Johanna's spaghetti-straight blond hair hung down to the middle of her chest, and a wool Golden Knights cap was pulled low on her forehead. She wore black jeans, tight on her skinny legs, plus a white tank top and a gray zipped jacket with extra-deep pockets to accommodate her gun and suppressor. Her aquamarine eyes, as pale blue as Caribbean water, surveyed the quiet corporate campus below her.

Nothing stirred. No one moved in the shadows, and no headlights lit up the street.

Two minutes passed. Then five minutes. Then ten.

Callie Faith was late.

Or was this meeting a trap? Johanna took precautions wherever she went, but these days cameras and scanners were everywhere, and facial recognition technology could peel away most of her disguises. She knew Treadstone was still looking for her. Shadow was still looking for her, and she wouldn't stop until Johanna was dead.

Come on, Callie, where are you?

Finally, on the street below her, she spotted the twin high beams of an SUV turning off Howard Hughes Parkway. The vehicle stopped short of the garage, using one of the handful of outside parking places. Moments later, the driver's door opened. With a Zeiss monocular, Johanna watched Callie Faith climb out from behind the wheel. No driver for her tonight. No congressional town car. Callie was using a Hyundai Santa Fe that Johanna had left on Clark Avenue two blocks from her downtown office. If anyone happened to run the license plate, the DMV records would show the owner as Martin Reynolds, who was currently away on a fourteen-day cruise through the Panama Canal. There would be no way to connect the SUV to Callie Faith.

Neither Callie nor Johanna wanted a record of this meeting.

The congresswoman's high heels clicked on the asphalt as she walked into the lower level of the parking garage. A couple of minutes later, Callie appeared at the garage's stairwell door and scanned the empty parking places. When she spotted Johanna in the shadows, she headed toward her.

Johanna's hand tightened on the Ruger. Her finger curled around the trigger. She waited until Callie was ten yards away, and then she removed the pistol from her pocket and pointed it at the woman's head.

"Stop."

The congresswoman did. She raised her hands in the air. Her face was expressionless, and she said nothing.

Johanna closed the distance between them until they were face-to-face. Callie wore a black trench coat down to her knees, and Johanna searched it, finding nothing. Then she undid the belt, which was tied loosely at the woman's waist. With her gun at Callie's temple, Johanna reached inside the coat and did a thorough, intimate pat-down of the woman's body, making sure that the congresswoman carried no weapons or listening devices.

Callie finally spoke.

"I didn't realize this was going to be a Tinder date."

Johanna backed away without smiling and replaced the Ruger in her pocket. "I don't trust anybody, Congresswoman."

"Call me Callie. And you're right. God knows I wouldn't trust anyone in Congress, either. So what do I call you? In Treadstone, your code name was Storm, but obviously, you're not in Treadstone anymore."

"Obviously. The most recent identity I used was Johanna. Let's stick with that."

"All right. Johanna."

Callie removed oversized amber sunglasses from her face and slid them into the pocket of her trench coat. Her steely eyes were dark, her smile wolfish and icy. She was small, barely five feet tall, and in her early forties, although she was trying like hell to look younger. As the wind mussed the thick strands of her shoulder-length hair, which was the color of milk chocolate, she brushed the loose strands away with manicured fingernails. Her makeup was perfect despite the lateness of the hour.

They'd had months of electronic communication back and forth between them. Even so, Johanna took an immediate dislike to Callie Faith in person. She sized her up as the kind of ambitious, manipulative narcissist that women wanted to slap and men wanted to fuck. But it didn't matter whether she liked her. The enemy of her enemy was her friend.

"It's your meeting," Johanna said. "Let's not waste time."

"Of course. Thank you for agreeing to see me face-to-face. You've been very useful, Johanna. Until recently, the House Intelligence Committee has been mostly toothless. Your tips on clandestine operations have been a big help in finally putting the DNI on the defensive. Everyone on the committee is jealous of my sources. I'm grateful. Someday I hope I can find a way to pay you back."

"Destroy Treadstone. Let Shadow rot in jail. That's all the payback I need."

"That's my plan," Callie agreed. "I want to yank out the deep state by its roots, and that starts with its spy ring. Without Treadstone to back them up, they're deaf, dumb, and blind. But we're also talking about smart, resourceful opponents. They won't go down without a fight, and they have no hesitation about using dirty tactics to win. That's why I wanted to see you."

"What do you want?" Johanna asked impatiently. "You said in your message that you needed my help, but you couldn't risk any record of what we talk about. I assume you're looking for more than information this time."

"That's true. I need your skills. Your Treadstone skills. Because everything we've been trying to accomplish is suddenly at risk."

"Why?"

"Why do you think?" Callie replied. "Shadow."

Johanna's whole body heated up like a fire. She glanced at the Sphere again. For a moment, the huge woman's eye on the metal ball became Shadow's piercing eye, studying her like a psychiatrist, examining her and tormenting her. Shadow. She was the woman who had turned Johanna's life upside down. The woman who had given her a mission that haunted her dreams whenever she closed her eyes. An innocent man died. Children died.

Shadow.

The new head of Treadstone.

"What has she done?" Johanna asked, her voice frozen.

"It's what she's trying to do," Callie said.

"Go on."

Callie shoved her hands in her coat pockets. "My position has always been very clear. The intelligence community is hopelessly corrupt, from the FBI through the entire alphabet of secret agencies. I want to defund them and start over. Salt the ground and build something new. For Shadow, that's an existential threat. I want to destroy her, so she wants to destroy me. I'm also sure she suspects that you're the one who's been feeding me operational details. That means you're on her list, too."

"Shadow may be many things, but she's no fool," Johanna agreed. "I've been on her list for a long time. If she finds me, I'm dead."

"In other words, we both have a vested interest in stopping her plans. This is a race. We need to win."

"A race to do what?"

The congresswoman glanced at the Sphere. The huge green eye seemed to be watching them closely. "Have you heard about something called the Files?"

"No."

"There's a kind of database on the market in Washington. Hacked information. Secrets. Corruption. Shadow is after it. Needless to say, if she got her hands on something like that, no one would dare move against the deep state again. They'd have too much power."

"What's the source of this information?" Johanna asked. "Where did it come from?"

"I don't know."

"Who has it?"

Callie hesitated, and her lips squeezed into a frown. "I don't know that, either."

"Does Shadow?"

"I don't think so. Not yet anyway. That's what makes it a race. You need to get to the Files before she does."

Johanna gave a hollow laugh. "In other words, you want this mystery database for yourself. Right?"

"Well, I wouldn't complain if it came my way," Callie admitted. "Politics is war. The ends justify the means. I expect a lot of different people, including other governments, are chasing this information. If they get the power, they'll use it. So will I. I'm not going to apologize for that."

Johanna was silent for a while.

She was sure Callie wasn't sharing the whole truth, but no one ever did. That was the intelligence world. In Treadstone, she'd been fed nothing but lies, and those lies had nearly destroyed her.

"Will you help me?" Callie asked, watching Johanna's face. "I know I'm sending you back into the lion's den."

"If it means fucking over Shadow, of course I'm in," Johanna replied. "If she kills me, she kills me. Those have always been the stakes. But I have an advantage over her that no one else does."

"Which is?"

Johanna pictured him in her head.

She could still see his features so clearly, that imperfect face that always seemed perfect when she stared at him. His dark brown hair messy and swept back. A small scar near the line of his forehead, an indentation in his jaw. Pale lips, a mouth that rarely showed any expression. And those blue-gray eyes, hot and cold at the same time. When he stared at you, you felt it deep into your blood.

Months had passed since she last saw him, but the memory of their bodies wrapped together still brought a flush to her pale skin. She hadn't met him in order to fall in love with him. She'd met him only to deceive him.

In the end, she'd done both.

"I know the agent Shadow will use," Johanna told Callie. "His name is Jason Bourne."

PART ONE

1

A cold midnight rain fell on Grosvenor Square. The dampness made the fifty-degree temperature feel as if London were freezing. Jason Bourne took what shelter he could under the gnarled branches of one of the park's plane trees. He sat astride an X-PRO street bike, a full-face blackout helmet covering his head, a black rain jacket and waterproof black pants over his clothes. The rain and the darkness made him almost invisible.

The bike sat in the wet grass near the statue of FDR, which gave Bourne a vantage on the entrance to Gordon Ramsay's Lucky Cat restaurant across the street. Flipping up the visor of the helmet, Bourne retrieved his phone from a zippered pocket in his jacket. He opened an app that synched with the spy camera he'd hidden inside the restaurant earlier in the day. Immediately, the screen gave him a 4K view of the late-night activity. It was Friday, and the Mayfair hot spot was alive with people feasting on monkfish tempura and duck leg bao. Every table was full to the max.

No, not every table.

The two booths closest to the kitchen, which would normally seat eight to ten people squeezed together, included just two men, one at either booth. Bourne zoomed in the camera. He assessed the men: both Middle Eastern with short black hair and trimmed beards, both dressed in white sport coats over royal-blue silk turtlenecks, both armed with machine pistols positioned discreetly in their laps.

Faisal al-Najjar always traveled with protection.

Focusing the camera beyond the guards, Bourne took a close-up look at al-Najjar himself. The Saudi banker sat at the square chef's table, enjoying Asian dishes fresh from the clattering kitchen woks and washing them down with expensive white wine. Al-Najjar wore a dark pin-striped suit that looked as if it came directly from Savile Row, but his head was covered by a red-and-white-checkered kaffiyeh. He wasn't alone at the chef's table. Two girls sat with him, both Russian, both blond, both barely more than teenagers. Their cleavage spilled out of glittering thigh-high cocktail dresses.

With a buzz of vibration, a text message crossed Bourne's screen. It was from Shadow.

Is he there?

Jason texted a quick reply. Yes.

Shadow wrote back moments later. Let me know when you have him.

Bourne didn't bother answering. This was a kidnapping, and kidnappings were always a delicate business.

On the video feed, he took note of the empty plates and the three empty bottles of wine. It was almost time. Al-Najjar would be leaving soon. According to the assistant concierge at the London Hilton, the banker had a set routine whenever he was in London. Two or three fresh-faced young escorts, always Russian and blond. Live rock music at a Soho club. Dinner at one of the city's trendy restaurants. And then a limousine back to his top-floor suite after midnight with the girls in tow. By morning, the concierge reported with a sniff, the maids needed hazard pay to clean up the room.

Outside the restaurant, gauzy headlights cut through the rain. Bourne watched a limo glide down the street from the direction of Park Lane and come to a stop near the steps of the building. He checked the camera and saw al-Najjar getting up from the chef's table, one stunning girl on each arm. The Saudi thanked the men in the kitchen in a booming accented voice, thanked the tuxedo-clad maître d', who was there to bow in gratitude, and then took up position between his two guards. The men made no effort to hide their weapons as they led the banker through the maze of tables.

Moments later, Jason watched the Lucky Cat door open across from the park. One of the guards came through first, machine pistol level and ready to fire. The banker followed with his companions. The driver of the limo greeted al-Najjar with a huge umbrella, and the Saudi and the girls descended the steps, safe from the rain, and climbed into the back of the town car. One guard took the passenger seat to the left of the driver. The other climbed into a black Mercedes parked behind the limo at the curb. The engines of both vehicles purred to life.

Bourne flipped down the visor on his helmet. Time to go.