Winter Bourne

Chapter 16 “Meetings”

Nicky Parsons

It was the shoes that gave him away.

A jolt of fear made Nicky’s fingers tremble. She been working the outside stand all day, keeping a wary eye on the crowds that drifted up and down the wide pedestrian walkway. Despite the sun shining down on the shoppers outside City One mall, a piercing chill flashed along her nerves when she realized that she’d seen this same man walk by too many times for it to be a coincidence. He’d changed his clothes, his hair, the way he walked – but his shoes – he hadn’t bothered to change his shoes. Averting her eyes to avoid betraying her recognition of a tail, Nicky smiled she handed the teenager a Belgian waffle dipped in syrup. She took his money, and then held the bill up to her fellow worker as if she needed to get change from inside the restaurant. Two steps inside and she was running. Not straight out the back. That would have been predictable and stupid. Instead, she brushed past the line of customers at the candy counter inside, past the seated customers and ran up the two long flights of stairs at the back. As Nicky reached the top step, she heard raised voices complaining and protesting. It was enough to let her know that her stalker was chasing her.

Nicky had worked out different scenarios during the long nights when she couldn’t sleep. As she’d practiced, she ran full tilt along the hallway that led to the bathrooms. The maze of passages up here was sure to slow her pursuer. Nicky darted to a storeroom, locked the door behind her, and then squirmed out a window. On the tiny roof outside, she scrambled the few steps to the next building with its flat roof. With the buildings jammed side by side, it was easy for Nicky to run across it to the third building. This building had an outdoor restaurant that had been closed for at least a decade. She’d broken the lock weeks ago and re-hung it so that it looked like it was locked. Hidden in the pantry behind boxes coated with thick dust, she’d put a backpack ready for an emergency. Money. A passport in the name of Adrienne Geinhart from Austria. A change of clothing, toiletries and other essentials. That was all she had to start life somewhere else. That is, if she made it out of Belgium.

With her hands shaking, Nicky stripped off her uniform and changed into an outfit that turned her into a teenager. She tucked a t-shirt promoting Brussels’ national soccer team, the Red Devils, into worn jeans. She slung on a short black leather jacket with a dozen useless but trendy straps over the t-shirt, stomped into combat boots and tied a kerchief decorated with violent green and yellow flowers over her hair. She stuffed her uniform into the knapsack and sped down the stairs to the ground floor. The building had been chopped into a mini-mall of different shops. Trying not to pant, Nicky walked into a shop selling trendy woman’s clothing.

She bought a cheap blouse just to get the pink bag as a prop. After all, nobody on the run takes time for shopping, right? Pausing at the street entrance, Nicky told herself that she was just another kid shopping, having a great time on a Saturday afternoon. With her heart pounding and her mouth dry, Nicky took out a cell phone and stepped out the door, chatting to an imaginary friend in French as she strolled toward Plaz Rogier and its maze of subterranean walkways and the subway terminal. It took all of her self-control not to dart panicked looks around the street, wondering if they’d found her again.

She’d left most of her belongings at her apartment, but she wasn’t going back. Another rule from her CIA training at the Farm, ‘If you’ve been made, never go back. If you go back, you’re dead’. Pushing through the crowds, Nicky crossed the street. She paused before a mini-pyramid of blue glass panels to check behind her. No one appeared to be chasing her yet. Her heart was pounding and her breath was too short. Taking deliberate breaths, she eyed her choices and walked toward the Sheraton Hotel complex. Less direct, less obvious, this route also gave her more choices. A huge underground walkway extended between the hotel and Plaz Rogier and then ran all the way back to City One plaza two blocks behind her. Gangs of chattering teenagers roamed the underground mall, and she tried to move as if she belonged among them. Inside the building, she caught an escalator down and trotted along the long walkways until she made it to down to the subway. Sweat trickled down her back as she waited for the next train. It was torturous to stand there, acting as if nothing was wrong, when all she wanted to do was crawl somewhere dark and hide. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a man walk deliberately toward her. Acting casual, Nicky moved away. He followed, walking faster.

Her gut said to run and she did, weaving between people, trying to lose him.

A hand reached out from the crowd to grab her arm, hauling her off balance. Nicky fell to her knees, grunting in pain. Before she could look up, a gun fired behind her. Must be the guy chasing me. The hard hand released her and he fired a gun right above her head.

Jesus! The sound was so loud Nicky jumped even as her ears rang from the sound. People around her screamed. Panic washed over the crowd and everyone ran away from the gunmen, pushing and scrambling to get away. As the firefight got more intense, Nicky crawled as fast as she could move, keeping her head down. Without a weapon, she was just a liability. The best thing she could do was hide.

At least three shooters. No, make it four. Then Nicky couldn’t think anymore because a panicked man ran into her, driving his leg into her side. A woman stepped on her hand, a boy’s kick glanced off her head. Nicky lurched up, snagging a flap of a man’s raincoat. She pulled hard and got to her knees. As the man swung around to knock her away, Nicky reached for the flailing arm and used it to haul herself up. The man stumbled off balance and she darted between two women, turned a corner and ran for an exit. Her side hurt like hell. The guy would kicked her must have had pointed shoes.

“Nicky!”

Not gullible enough to fall for that trick, she kept right on running, brushing past an elderly couple. The firefight subsided behind her. For some reason though, she couldn’t run very fast. Her side hurt as if she’d been stuck with a knife.

Someone grabbed her hand from behind and dragged her to a stop. Terror laced with resignation made her sink against the cold concrete wall, her face turned away from the stranger whose was going to kill her. Odd that she die in some grubby subway station, four thousand miles away from home.

“Nicky, it’s Tom Cronin. Don’t you remember me? We met in Berlin.”

“Tom?” She flicked a look at him, then straightened as she recognized his face. Hope flared. Maybe she wasn’t going to die today after all. “Did Landy send you?”

Something dark shifted in his eyes and his face tightened. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”

Captured was much better than being dead, even if it did mean a lifetime in Federal prison for treason. Struggling was pointless. He had a gun. She was unarmed, hurt and exhausted. She let him drag her along with him. “Who’s shooting at us?”

“Bourne.” He tightened his grip. “Come on. Let’s get out of here before the cops come.”

He’s lying. A sick spike of fear thrust through Nicky’s gut. She kept her mouth shut instead of pressing for details. It’d only be more lies. Eyes darting around, Nicky tried to think of way to escape and failed.

“Damn.”

She could hear the fear in Tom’s voice. His hand on her arm tightened so much it felt as if were clamping his fingers directly on the bone. She clawed at it with her free hand. “You’re hurting-”

A shot as loud as an explosion interrupted her. Tom’s whole body lurched backwards, pulling Nicky along with him as he fell. She tumbled down to the filthy concrete platform, half on top on him. The fall had jarred her injured side so much that Nicky could barely breathe from the pain of it. Tiny white sparks flickered at the edges of her vision as her body threatened to faint. Blinking to restore her vision, Nicky pried the loose hand away from her arm and sat up.

A bullet had punctured a hole through Tom’s head, exposing a mass of pulpy red and gray. Her gorge rose and she turned her face away. Nicky looked up at the sound of running footsteps coming closer. Something purposeful warned her that this wasn’t another panicking commuter. A stranger, gun in hand, was racing toward her. A too familiar expression; cold, determined, told her he was Blackbriar and she knew she was dead. When he stopped to take aim, Nicky stared up at him, knowing pleading would be useless, hoping it would be quick.

Thuft, thuft, thuft.

Nicky recognized the sounds of a silenced gun firing. The Blackbriar killer collapsed with his own head a bloody ruin.

Standing behind him, lowering his own gun was the man Nicky thought she’d never see again. Jason Bourne. A Jason who was staring at her with the same determined expression as the man he’d just killed. Nicky’s stomach turned over. As glad as she was not to be dead, as happy as she was to see Jason alive, she knew that the man hurrying toward her was not her lost lover, not her Jason. At the same time, she didn’t care.

He was alive.

He’d come back for her.

Jason stripped the gun down to its separate parts in seconds, then tossed them down into below the platform where subway tracks ran. He stripped off plastic gloves and tossed them as well. As he did, he kept his head moving, checking out the rest of the platform. At the first shot, the few people nearby had started running away from the sound. Now they were alone. Nicky staggered to her feet. Already was ashamed that she’d been caught so easily, she couldn’t bear for him to think she was overwhelmed and weak.

It was a mistake.

He caught her before her knees completely buckled. Nicky stared up at him, wondering if she were imaging the feel of his hard arm supporting her, his scent, now overlaid by sweat and gunpowder, the warmth of his breath on her cheek as he set her down and ran his hands over her. When his fingers came back bloody, she heard his sudden indrawn breath.

Jason shoved up her blouse. A knife sliced away the top of her pants. It hadn’t been the kick. A ricocheted bullet had hit her. The wound, a fingertip wide, was right above her left hip. Through the ebbing adrenaline, waves of fierce pain were now radiating from her side, cruising toward agony.

“We need to get out of here.” Jason’s voice was all business. His hand dipped into a pocket and removed a black case slighter larger than his hand. “You’ve got to keep yourself from going into shock. Take deep breaths. Calm down. I’m going to give you something for the pain.”

Nicky bit her lip to keep the cry in as the needle jabbed her. Jason cut material from her blouse, then wadded it together and pushed the rough bandage against her hip. “Keep your arm pressed against it. Now get up.”

He slid an arm around her back and helped her stand. Then he knelt down to rifle through Tom’s clothes, then did the same for the dead assassin, stuffing things into his pockets as he returned to her. Stealing from the dead roused old superstitions, making her uneasy, but she ignored the feeling, knowing that Jason was being practical.

He checked his watch. The familiar gesture gave Nicky a pang. Her Jason had done that, with that same calculating expression on his face as he worked out his next moves.

“He was the last one after you,” Jason said. He shoved the last papers and a wallet into his coat pocket, then took her arm. “They’ll have called for backup though. We don’t have much time.”

The words beat against her like blows. He was the last one after you. How many more men had Jason killed to protect her? Guilt like a distant storm was waiting to sweep over her. The pain in her side was dwindling now, making her feel as if she was watching everything from a distance. “What did you give me?”

“Liquid Oxycontin.”

Oxycontin? Otherwise known as legal heroin. No wonder the pain was fading. Course when she crashed, she’d have a steep price to pay, but it was so much better than being dead. She had a thousand questions to ask Jason, but distracting him to satisfy her emotional needs would be idiotic. She settled for a practical question. “Where are we going?”

Jason had taken them back to the escalator that went straight up to the main platform, where there was police sub-station. That couldn’t be right. They’d be trapped. Despite her fears, Nicky didn’t argue. Jason never did anything without a plan.

“Put these on,” Jason said.

Two rings were in his hand. A plain gold band. Another ring heavy with diamonds. Blinking, Nicky slipped them on, refusing to let her tears loose. Of course they fit. Grief throbbed through her that the rings were a lie.

“We’re honeymooners from France,” Jason said. “You’re name is Ami Lournez. Ami Lournez. I’m Pierre.”

“Ami Lournez,” Nicky repeated. “My husband Pierre.”

They were almost to the top of the escalator. Nicky could hear the commotion of the aftermath of the firefight. People yelling, people crying, official voices blaring through loudspeakers trying to get control of the situation. They were walking into chaos.

“Nicky.”

She looked up at him. Jason had a new scar at the edge of his hairline above his right eye. Her hand twitched as her instinct to touch it, to reassure herself that he was all right was overruled by her common sense. “Yes?”

“I need you to start screaming.”