Nicky pulls the bedside table directly under the vent and pushes it against the wall, checking it for stability. She hauls herself up, and uneven table teeters. Bourne comes up behind her but Nicky shifts her weight until the table stops shaking.
She extracts a Leatherman tool from her jacket, opening the flathead screwdriver implement, swiftly loosening the screws holding the vent in place. Yanking the slatted cover off the wall, she hands it to Bourne and lifts on her toes, reaching deep into the hole. At first, her hand sweeps across a thick layer of dust and emptiness; but then her hand encounters a package. She exhales with relief and pulls out a plastic bag which houses a thick brown accordion folder.
Nicky turns to hand the envelope to Bourne. The nightstand wobbles and she curses as she totters unsteadily. The package hits the ground and Bourne grabs her off the table before she falls, his chest hard against her back, his arm tight under her breasts. For a moment, her body relaxes in his embrace, everything in her remembering his warmth, his smell, the past which binds them. Then comes the present, and she jerks hard out of his hold, snapping to her feet, her slender frame stiff and unyielding. She stoops to grab the folder, turns away.
"Let's go," she says.
"The vent?"
"Fuck it."
She won't turn around to look at him as she leads the way out of the apartment, keeping her eyes stonily fixed on the door, never allowing herself to glance at the living room.
In a debriefing there is an elicitor and a source. Unlike interrogations, debriefings generally involve a cooperative or willing subject providing details to the Human Intelligence – known by the shortened HUMINT – specialist. Information collection is one of the CIA's chief capabilities and it's one at which Nicky excels. At its simplest, a debriefing is an interview, but the quality of information that gets accumulated is based on a variety of factors including the subject's willingness to disclose, and the specialist's skill at directing and redirecting the line of questioning. A vital component in any debriefing is the rapport between subject and specialist.
Nicky sits across from Bourne at the dining room table in the Montparnasse apartment, realizing that for the first time in years – since the initial weeks when she'd been assigned to work with him – she has no familiarity with this man. There is neither bond nor affinity. She feels disoriented. Normally they'd start with mission brief and walk chronologically through every step. The folder lays open on the table before her, all but useless. His story doesn't start with the mission. It starts with his failure.
Bourne sits quietly, spine straight, hands loosely clasped as he watches her quiet struggle. Disconcerted by that steady gaze, she turns to look out the window, the Paris night laid out in sparkling lights and dusky hues.
From the Marais, it is less than twenty minutes by car to the Montparnasse flat, but Nicky had the cab driver drop her and Bourne off at Rue Écoles; from there, they had walked part of the way, first together, then separating to take other transportation back to the flat. Nicky had back tracked, establishing random routes before making her way back to Montparnasse, where she'd sprinted up the stairs to find Bourne waiting for her in the landing. It was an echo to a few days earlier and she was as unsettled now as then to find him outside the home they'd once shared.
"Nicky."
Nicky blinks. From the hint of impatience on his face, she gathers she must have called her name more than once.
"What's wrong?"
Nicky sighs. "Do you even know what a debriefing entails?"
"You ask me questions, I answer."
"Yes and no. It's more complicated than that." Her lips press together. "In a normal debrief, there's a specific plan and any collection of information is intended to meet that plan. It's not just about obtaining intelligence, but assessing the interviewee's character and personality, figuring out how much psychological pressure I can use, challenging details you provide to me, introducing new information or stimulating responses based on what I know about you and the mission." She gestures helplessly. "I don't have a baseline read on you. I don't know what you look and sound like when you're telling the truth, when you're lying, or when you're withholding information."
She doesn't know what triggers this Bourne, what carrots or sticks he'll respond to, how far she can push. It reiterates how much has changed, how much has been lost.
"Just ask me the questions. I won't lie to you."
Do you remember anything – anything AT ALL – about me? The question flies to tip of her tongue, but Nicky forestalls, recalling a conversation and a similarly phrased question in a Madrid café:
Why are you helping me?
It was difficult for me…with you. You really don't remember anything?
No.
Nicky takes a breath, composes herself. "What's the first thing you can remember?"
His answer comes swiftly: "Water. Water and pain."
Nicky mirrors his posture, her fingers lacing together as she waits. Only the kitchen light is on, and its ambient light casts shadows across his face.
"I was fished out of the Mediterranean by an Italian fishing trawler. They thought I was dead. I should have been. I'd been shot twice in the back. One of the fishermen – he pulled the bullet fragments out."
"That must have hurt."
"Probably like a motherfucker," Bourne agrees. "But I was passed out cold. Until he cut into my hip."
Nicky frowns. "Cut?"
"He sliced in and dug out the cylinder that had been implanted in my leg with the Swiss bank information."
Nicky nods, encouraging him, but her pulse is rapid.
"When I regained consciousness, I was lying on a table, I was in pain, I couldn't remember anything. I thought he was trying to hurt me, so I grabbed him."
Bourne tells her about his shouted conversation with the fisherman, demanding to know what was happening, what the man was doing. How the man had shown him the bullet fragments, then asked for his name.
"I didn't know my name," Jason says dully, the memory clearly still bewildering.
"How did you feel?"
"How the fuck do you think it made me feel?"
Nicky pushes. "I meant: did you feel that you really couldn't remember –or that you didn't want to?"
The blue eyes are blazing. "I couldn't remember anything. Not even what I looked like."
"Clarify that," Nicky requests gently. "What does 'anything' entail?"
His brows are furrowed. "I didn't know who I was. I couldn't remember my name. I couldn't remember anything about me. Who I was, where I'd come from. Nothing about my family, where I'd grown up – literally everything was a blank from the moment I came to while he was digging out the capsule in my hip."
"How long before Switzerland was this?"
"A little more than two weeks."
Nicky looks down at the mission memo, puts her finger on that moment in the timeline, then gestures with her hand, indicating that he should continue. He frowns.
"Don't you need to take notes?"
She shakes her head. "Method of loci. I have a mental filing system."
It's why every memory scars. She can recall details almost perfectly.
"I could make coffee, shuffle cards, set up a chess board. Play chess. I could do hundreds of push ups and sit ups five days after being fished out of the sea with bullets in my back and do it without feeling pain." His eyes take on a faraway cast. "I could…fish. I knew how to fish. I liked…fishing." His voice trails off, then he picks up again. "We were at sea for two weeks. Then I was back on land. The guy who'd saved my life – Giancarlo - gave me some money to go to Zurich."
Zurich.
When Jason Bourne rose from the dead.
Then
"Get your ass in the situation room now," shouts Conklin.
Nicky's head snaps up. Conklin looks fit to be tied, his face drawn with fury. Zorn is behind him, equally as agitated.
"NOW!" snarls Conklin.
Nicky hurriedly gets up from her desk and follows after him. Conklin's pace is at a near run as he orders three other analysts to join them. There's soon a small group following him and Zorn, expressions of confusion and concern mirrored on every face.
They're all like lemmings, thinks Nicky. She wonders if they're all heading over a cliff.
They filter into the pristine rectangular room, fanning around the long oval table that faces a situation wall. The table is flanked on either side by windows, one wall providing a view of Paris, the other looking out at the Treadstone cubicle farm. One of the analysts pushes a switch by the door and the electrochromic glass of both walls go opaque.
Conklin snaps his fingers and points at a Com Tech. "Pull it up."
The tech is already on his computer, hooking it up to the overhead projection system. The white background flashes, blips, then a frozen video appears on screen. He clicks the space bar on his computer and the image unfreezes. It's security footage, black and white, showing a man standing in front of a car, a drawstring bag thrown over one shoulder.
All the air leaves Nicky's lungs. She's grateful all of her cohorts are staring at the screen, that none them are looking at her because there's no way she can hide her reaction. It's David!
He's alive!
Wild hope careens through her, filling the dead spaces with impossible joy. He's alive!
But then bewilderment sets in. If he's alive, what the hell is he doing? Why hasn't he checked in with them? With her
"This was an hour ago," Conklin informs them. "Bourne's alive and he's just cleared out the Zurich account."
Nicky blinks. What?
"What's he doing?" wonders an analyst out loud.
"Doesn't matter," Conklin says flatly. "Everyone's been activated. Bourne's going in a body bag by the end of the day."
And just as swiftly, all hope is replaced by black despair.
Now
Jason takes her verbally through his foray into Switzerland, the bank, the U.S. Consulate altercation and his escape from Zurich to Paris, following the address listed on Jason Bourne's passport.
She refers to the timeline of Jason's movements from the time he surfaced at the bank. She follows along with his story, retracing certain routes, asking for a deeper view of other events.
"Just a moment," Nicky interrupts. "You said you secured a ride from Zurich to Paris. How? With whom?"
His eyes are sharp with pain, although his expression remains slack. Nicky braces herself.
"Marie was at the consulate…she was having trouble with her visa. She didn't have…money. I had a bag full of it. I asked her to drive me to Paris for $10,000. I promised her another ten grand when we got there."
Nicky keeps her body still. She can't impose the same moratorium on her brain or her heart though; both organs are sliced with a thousand exact little cuts as Jason recalls his conversation with Marie on the drive to Paris, how they'd planned to part once they got to the Paris apartment, but then Marie followed him inside, sealing her fate to his. Bourne recounts the fight with Castel where he'd defended himself with a pen; Marie's shock and fear when they saw the wanted posters with their faces in Castel's bag; Castel's suicide. How they'd fled.
Behind Jason, on the foyer wall is an ornate, gilded half mirror. Nicky has been staring at her reflection since he began talking about Marie, the better to keep her expressions neutral, passive.
"I kept telling her to leave, go to the police and tell them I'd coerced her into driving me. I told Marie it wasn't safe to be with me. But…she wouldn't leave me. Marie stayed with me. Helped me."
There is a softening in his tone, a flutter of emotion every time he says Marie's name, like a vocal caress. This time, it's Nicky who's the spectator, listening to someone else's love story unfold.
As an interrogator, it's in Nicky's best interest to commiserate, to offer Jason empathy, to agree that Marie was an extraordinary woman and a true friend to him when he needed one. She finds herself unequal to the task, so she remains silent, her eyes focused on her image in the mirror. Occasionally she glances down at the mission file.
The debriefing is not without benefit however; for the first time, Nicky is seeing the other half of the story, the one invisible to Treadstone as they'd hunted Jason Bourne during that frantic week. She can now juxtapose the chaos and mystification at Treadstone over Bourne's behavior with Bourne's explanation and confirmation of his amnesia.
He describes a mad chase scene in Paris in Marie's car until they were able to escape the authorities and find a cheap hotel. "The next day we went to the Hotel Regina and got John Michael Kane's records."
Nicky's antennae are up. He's skipped over a sequence: the night between their flight, and going to the Hotel Regina. Every instinct tells her what happened that night; but the professional in her demands precision, even if it means committing emotional seppuku.
"Go back and start from when you got to the cheap hotel." Her voice is calm.
Bourne blinks, nonplussed. But then his face hardens. "No."
"Jason –"
"No." Unequivocal. Possessive. The inference: That's my memory.
She stares at him, a thousand conflicted feelings reflected in the turmoil of his blue eyes. He looks away, mulish.
She may not know this man but she knows that expression. That night is his private domain and he won't share it. And frankly, she doesn't want to know. She's not going to protest his refusal to hand her the knife for her own disembowelment.
Her eyes flick up to the mounted clock. Forty-five minutes have passed. Already? According to the event timeline, this is the halfway point to Jason's story, the ending of which was the assault on the Treadstone safe house.
"Go on." Her tone is inert.
He continues with the pursuit by the authorities and Marie's decision to take them to the country home owned by her former boyfriend, who showed up unexpectedly with his kids and dog.
"I was talking to her that night…and I decided I didn't want to be who I'd been before, do what I'd done. I wanted to be with Marie. We had the money. She thought we could just go away and hide and I could be free."
Nicky's nod is curt, just a slight drop of her head.
He describes the following morning, when the dog disappeared. "I knew it had to be Treadstone. I also knew where the assassin was waiting."
"The Professor."
"That's what you called him?"
"That's what he actually did for a living when he wasn't called up to serve Treadstone. Owen taught in Barcelona."
"The phone lines were dead so I ordered everyone into the basement. We'd been in the same program. It served that we thought similarly. If I were attacking the house, what would I need to do? Where would I go and set up for a kill shot? I had a shotgun and I needed to get closer to him, so I blew up the fuel tank. I figured it would draw his attention and I could leave the house for the woods. He took a shot, exposed his position, so he had no choice but to clear the area and find a new vantage point. He took the field. I fired a shot and sent birds into the air to cover me while I worked my way in. He knew he'd been caught and tried to get out. I shot him. Twice." Bourne's voice is hollow, matter-of-fact, as he recites the summary of the Professor's death. "He was still alive when I got to him. He told me about Treadstone. The headaches. The lights. He said that we worked alone. Then he died."
There is genuine sorrow on Nicky's reflection in the mirror. She can't stop it from blooming across her features, from the droop of her mouth to the downcast eyes.
"He was someone to you?"
"No. He was to someone I cared about." She closes her eyes, wills away the memory of a woman's melodic laughter and bright green eyes. She opens her eyes. Her voice is flat. "Go on."
"I kept some of the money and gave the rest to Marie. I sent her off with her friend and his kids so she'd be safe."
Then he'd taken the Professor's cell phone to set up the meeting with Conklin at Pont Neuf where he'd planted the tracking device and uncovered Treadstone's safe house in Paris.
Then
"Where's your field box?" shouts Conklin.
Nicky maintains her calm. "It's right there!"
She looks at the display which is flashing red. "The system's gone haywire." She points to the window next to her. "That's this window right here." She knows he's near. She can feel it. He's coming for her at last. She's been so scared by the near misses along the way, how he's nearly died repeatedly despite her quiet efforts to sabotage Treadstone, but she doesn't understand what David's doing. Who is this woman he's been travelling with? Is this David's elaborate scheme to get her out of Treadstone as he'd promised? God she wishes he would call her, give her some sort of heads up about his baffling behavior.
Conklin is freaking out. Nicky feigns confusion as she quietly shuts down the security locks and the power grid, and blocks Treadstone's primary network from zeroing in on their safe house set up. To them, it's as if the safe house no longer exists. It's a blank on their screens.
Right on cue, the safe house goes dark, power rendered inoperational by Nicky. She picks up the phone. "Dead. The phones are dead."
Jesus, sound more convincing. She can't inject fear into her voice though; she's too elated and relieved to manage the pretense more carefully.
It doesn't matter though; Conklin is distracted and agitated. He racks the slide on his CZ-83 9mm pistol.
Outside, multiple car alarms are wailing.
"It's Bourne, isn't it?" Nicky says.
Now
"You know the rest," says Bourne.
Nicky steeples her fingers. "Walk me through what you saw."
Bourne's recall is perfect: entering the room, effectively ambushing Conklin, and his confused demands for information about Treadstone. Conklin slapping away the Walther P5 compact that Bourne had taken from the Professor. Conklin's enraged diatribe. Bourne recites it nearly verbatim. Jason winces, recalls the flashbacks that hurt his brain before he declared to Conklin:
"I told him I didn't want to do this anymore."
Nicky's finger rests on the last paragraph in the brief.
"Jason, there was a moment when he was talking to you and you hesitated. Conklin thought you remembered what happened on Wombosi's boat. Did you?"
Jason's eyes are dark, moody. He's swallowing hard, his throat working. He's been talking for nearly ninety minutes.
Nicky stands up. "I'll get you some water."
In the kitchen, she grabs a glass and fills it with water. Jason is immobile when she returns, his breath strangely labored. There are shadows on his face, something so tormented in his eyes she pauses. Is this where the mystery of Jason Bourne's failure is finally solved?
She hands him the glass when he starts to talk again.
"I was ready to go. I'd walked into the private quarters. I had my Glock to Wombosi's head. Then…" Jason's eyes are faraway, his expression haunted. "…There was a little kid lying on his chest. Probably one of his children. His…wife and another little kid were…they were sleeping nearby."
Nicky's indrawn breath is swift.
"…And the kid on his chest…she looked up at me. Wombosi, too. They were both looking at me, and Wombosi was trying to push her down, get her away from him. This little…brown-eyed kid."
The glass of water falls from Nicky's nerveless fingers, shattering across the floor. Nicky hears a loud rushing noise, feels her vision narrowing, pinpricks of black clouding her mind. Her body is numb.
No.
No.
No.
She sways, hears Bourne's exclamation of her name as her knees buckle and the ground rushes up to meet her face.
Then
"Brown eyes are dominant," David says with a sigh. "What do you think, Nicky? A posse of little brown-eyed kids running around? White picket fence?"
Such a pretty fantasy. But she protests: "No white picket fences."
David nods swiftly. "Okay, then let's get a boat and sail away into the sunset with the kids."
The alarm on his watch beeps. They both freeze, then David gives her a quick kiss before he gets out of bed.
Nicky rolls onto her back, watches as David goes to the bathroom. He'll be gone soon. He'll have a final check in before departing. His mission cover as John Michael Kane is intact; she and the analysts have accounted for every possible variance. David doesn't think the mission should take more than a week to execute; then he'll be back.
There's a knot lodged in her throat, in her chest; she can't breathe. It hurts so much to draw air into her lungs. Tears are welling in her eyes. Wrapping her arms around her midsection, she rolls away from the bathroom and faces the windows, considers how the opaque sheers float in the breeze.
A moment later, Nicky hears David come out of the bathroom, but she doesn't turn, keeping her eyes fixed on the windows.
"Nicky?" His voice is soft.
When she doesn't respond, David steps around the bed and crouches down in front of her. He fills her field of vision, lean, broad-shouldered, handsome, blue eyes holding her gaze with steady intent.
Jason holds up a capped white stick. Nicky's eyes focus on the white window with the dark blue cross in its center.
"…Brown-eyed kids, Nicky," David says, his voice low, holding out the positive pregnancy test.