Who is Nicolette Parsons?
She frequently ponders this question now; has for almost a year since she last saw Jason Bourne. Or more specifically, since he allowed her to see him. She knows he's been following her, keeping track of her. You don't do what she did without recognizing certain patterns, seeing the subtle ripples in her daily routine when he shows up. She never sees him, but she knows when he's around or when he's stopped in while she's been out. Things get moved around on her desk, items only she notices because she deliberately places them in a particular way to catch him. The brusque scent of him lingering in her room – does he not know that she could never mistake that smell for anything other than him?
Will she ever be Nicolette Parsons again?
She misses her blond hair and red lipstick, the Parisian-chic casual clothes and swingy earrings. She's been a brunette with pale features and grungy, nondescript clothes for over a year now. Baggy linen pants, loose tunics, simple shoes. One because it's as far away from Nicolette as possible, and two because it's so freaking, bloody hot here in this city. The summer months are the worst and she finds respite by going out to a little seaside town called Phan Thiết in the coastal region, the capital of Bình Thuận Province. She takes a job as a massage therapist at one of the many resorts that have sprung up there making this sleepy little village, formerly known for its pungent fish sauce production, a favored destination. During the day, she tends to guests, most of them Russian and Eastern European. She speaks fluent Vietnamese and French, and it is easy to sell them the story that her parents were an ex-patriate French couple that moved to Vietnam decades ago.
At night, after the guests have gone off dancing or eating or drinking, or whatever it is that those free of encumbrances do, she goes to the shore, avoiding the trash that washes up on the white sand beaches, and she traverses into the warmth of the South China Seas. It is her daily baptism, reaffirmation of the she who is no more. She eats whatever simple meal the resort's kitchen has to offer its workers and retreats to her small room shortly thereafter, never one to linger and talk to the other staff. No. Talking leads to familiarity. She's not allowed to have friends.
So she wraps her loneliness about her when she strips bare to lay down on her single bed.
Bourne comes to her one night when she sleeps sprawled on her stomach on that thin mattress, skin dewy from the humidity, damp hair clinging to her shoulders.
She knows he's there. He knows she's awake.
They simply pretend.
She lay with eyes closed, naked and vulnerable. He stands silent and confused, the anger roiling off of him in waves, that fine, fine Swiss cheese of a brain trying to understand why her nakedness is not new, why those graceful curves and lines are familiar to his eyes and lips and hands…
Why are you helping me?
It was difficult for me, with you.
She weeps a little after he leaves. Just a little.
Is Nicolette Parsons dead? On hiatus?
She yearns for the pretend life she had as a student. The apartment in the Marais, just a stone's throw from Mariages Frères, where she soothed her soul with a cup of Marco Polo tea every day. Where she made quiet deals with God to forgive her many trespasses, prayers which never came to fruition. The walks along the Seine, ignoring the overly romantic Americans, swept up with recreating Doisneau's portrait of the kiss at the Hôtel de Ville. The late nights in Montparnasse, eating the fish at Closerie des Lilas, and long hours reading over a gin and tonic at the American Bar. The staccato echo of her boots along the cobblestones as she marched in and out of the Sorbonne, the sounds of vendors hawking wares, the myriad foreign languages that fluttered like butterflies in the Parisian air.
From that moment in Tangier when she cut and dyed her hair, she knew that her love affair with Paris was at an end.
At the bus station where he warned her that they'd come after her, she'd been hard pressed not to laugh and send him off like Simone de Beauvoir waving farewell to Jean Paul Sartre: "You've been a witness to my life."
If only the bastard could remember any of it. But maybe it's fitting that the witness to the whole and sum of Nicolette Parsons is an amnesiac.
From Tangier she went to Egypt, and from there to India, briefly passing through Qatar. She's been on the move, culling resources from private accounts hidden all over the world and managed by the – God bless their amoral, banking souls –Swiss firm she's had on retainer for years. From India there were stints in Singapore and Thailand before she finally came to Vietnam.
At one of the internet cafes on Catena Boulevard that first night in Ho Chi Minh City, she found a note sent to the scrubbed and cleaned email account that Pamela Landy had been using: "Do not come in. I can no longer protect you."
And on the TV she learned why: Pamela, now indicted for violating national security. God, those bastards found a way to box in Pamela, tough, smart, hard-as-nails Pamela.
She generally stays far from District 1, the capital where tourists and foreigners teem. Too easy to be discovered there. Too many cameras and images that are uploaded daily to Instagram and Facebook and other platforms that the CIA and other agencies are scanning and studying daily to find people. Good guys, bad guys, dead people. Like her.
The note that appears on her iPad earlier this week startles her, nearly sends her running. How had they found her?! It had been sent to the same email address Pamela used, and contained one word:
Foxtrot.
Friendly.
She probably should delete the message. Only Pamela knows this email address; this person didn't used the other woman's protocol so it can't be Landy. But it doesn't read like a trap. And frankly, after a year on the run, it makes her more than just a little curious.
Does she have a death wish? Why respond? But she does.
Olivier, Guichard and Ferret.
Bourne will be so pissed.
Maybe that's why she's doing it. Who will she encounter at the Saigon Opera House – built by architects Félix Olivier, Ernest Guichard and Eugène Ferret? The "friendly" the mystery writer declares himself/herself to be? Or something else?
She's soon to find out because here she is.
The opera house rises before her, a pink and white bijoux of a building, its flamboyant style a reflection of the French Third Republic influence all the rage in 1897 when it was built. The terribly ornate reliefs and decorations make it look like a confection out of step and out of place with this city.
Just like her.
Had she ever really been Nicolette Parsons to begin with?
"Nicolette Parsons?"
Her name is spoken softly, the voice resonant and low. She turns. A couple stand two steps below her. The man stares up at her with purpose, the woman with hesitation.
The man reminds her of Bourne immediately and it's not just that particular alertness that she recognizes on sight. (He's one of theirs, but not from Bourne's program. Which one, then?) The physical attributes are nearly the same: he's as tall as Bourne, with short brown hair in a spiky flat top and blue eyes. Pointed chin, broad nose. Jesus. Superficially they're the same when you try to describe them. But they look totally different. When last she looked at him, Bourne's eyes were haunted and enraged. This man's eyes are narrowed, squinting as if trying to piece her together, but he glances briefly at the woman by his side, and those eyes linger, they soften.
And the woman. She's beautiful, with a heart-shaped face and melancholy, green-hazel eyes. That auburn hair is color from a bottle; the woman's skin is too flawlessly pale for anyone other than a brunette.
She sees in this other woman a mirror of her own life: a palimpsest with every move. New name, new story, written and overwritten.
And then she knows.
She will never be Nicolette Parsons again.
Oh God, she thinks. What the fuck have I done?