The days between reading the Scenario details and the System pulling him in were the most useful days Roger had spent since getting back from the ridge.
He'd read the briefing twice in the Sanctuary - the System Assistant had given him the selection stage exactly as promised, a clean interface showing three options, no pressure, no countdown. He'd made his choice in under a minute. Then he'd asked for twenty-four hours to prepare, which the Assistant confirmed was possible, and he'd gone back to his room and started working.
The Bourne Identity. Contemporary Europe. An amnesiac black-ops asset being hunted by the organisation that built him, a civilian woman caught in the crossfire, and an intelligence apparatus with the resources to put operatives on every major hub from Zurich to Paris. Roger had watched the film four times over the years, argued about its action choreography on at least two separate forums, and had a fairly detailed working knowledge of Treadstone's operational structure.
What he'd never done was actually be in it.
He spent the first day going back through everything he remembered about the film's timeline, not the emotional arc, but the mechanics. Entry points, threat profiles, the specific moments where things went wrong for people in Bourne's orbit. The second day he thought about his own skill set and where the gaps were. Ballistic Proficiency at LV4 transferred cleanly to modern firearms, the M1911A1 he'd carried on the ridge was a different era than a Glock but the underlying proficiency was hardware-agnostic. Sound Localization was going to work differently in an urban environment than it had in open terrain. He ran through the Tier 2 adjustments in his head and noted what he'd need to actively compensate for.
The third day his uncle came over.
Uncle Jack had driven back from the Harlow lot that afternoon and dropped by with a bottle of whiskey for Roger's father, and the two of them spent the evening at the kitchen table in the way of men who'd been friends for long enough not to need an agenda. Roger sat with them for an hour, eating his mother's cooking and listening to Jack describe the production's final pickup days with the generous embellishment of someone who had lived a good story and knew how to tell it. His mother beamed at every mention of Roger's name. His father refilled both glasses without being asked.
Normal. Ordinary. The kind of evening that was exactly what it was.
Roger went to bed and lay on his back staring at the ceiling.
The people in those Scenario worlds are real, he thought. Not in the way Desmond Doss had been real, Doss was a historical figure translated into fiction, and the ridge had been a fictional war wearing a real one's clothes. Bourne's world was different. Contemporary, grounded, no scope for the kind of unreality that a WWII battlefield made easier to accept. Marie Kreutz was a twenty-six-year-old woman from Hanover with a complicated family history and a terrible run of luck, and Treadstone would kill her without a second entry in the log.
He closed his eyes.
I'll keep her alive, he thought. That's the job.
The System pulled him in on the fourth night.
Not dramatically - the room just went quiet in a way that rooms don't, and then the Sanctuary opened around him like a breath.
The starry void was the same. The System Assistant's voice was the same - calm, precise, the specific warmth of something designed to be helpful rather than ornamental.
"You've reviewed the Scenario details," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes." Roger looked at the ambient light of the void. "I'm going in physical. I need whatever the physical upgrades produce to stay."
"Confirmed. Secondary Identity is available for this entry. Do you wish to enable it?"
"Explain the full parameters first."
"The Secondary Identity constructs a complete legal persona within the Scenario world. Your physical appearance will be altered to match the profile, different enough to defeat facial recognition and visual identification by Treadstone's database. Your records in that world, travel documents, financial history, immigration records, will be pre-constructed and verifiable. As long as you maintain the cover and don't expose your real profile, no intelligence agency in the Scenario can trace you to your actual identity."
"What happens to the identity when the Scenario ends?"
"It dissolves with the Scenario. It exists only within that world's infrastructure."
Roger turned it over. A clean proxy persona meant that any heat generated by his actions fell on a fictional person. The moment he left, that person ceased to exist. Operationally it was close to ideal. "Enable it."
"Secondary Identity constructed. Logistics pre-set."
The interface updated quietly:
[SECONDARY IDENTITY: ACTIVE]Cover profile: American backpacker, late twenties. No fixed address. Low digital footprint.Entry documents: valid.Pre-constructed history: three months traveling Western Europe. Prior contact with Marie Kreutz established, met in Biarritz, shared temporary accommodation.
Entry mode: Physical Incursion
Warning: Physical entry carries genuine mortality risk. Proceed?
"Yes," Roger said.
He thought about the ceiling of his room back in Oakridge, the ordinary evening, his mother's cooking. He thought about Doss kneeling in the pre-dawn light with his Bible, the silence of the company waiting without being asked to.
The countdown ran.
Zurich. Winter.
The cold arrived before everything else - a dry, biting cold that came off the Alps and found every gap in clothing with the methodical patience of something that had been doing this for a long time and had no intention of stopping. Roger pulled his coat tighter and leaned against the stone wall of a building across the street from the American consulate.
He'd been here for four minutes. He'd arrived exactly where the pre-constructed history placed him, a backpacker killing time in Zurich before the next leg of whatever vague European circuit he was supposed to be doing. He had a pack, a coat, a money belt, and underneath the coat a M1911A1 in a shoulder holster that the Secondary Identity's document set apparently considered none of anyone's business.
His face was different. Not unrecognisably so, the System had described it as sufficient to defeat facial recognition, which he took to mean a collection of subtle alterations that added up to the wrong person for any database looking for him. He'd checked his reflection in the hostel window when he'd arrived and found something plausible looking back at him. Good enough.
He was waiting for a woman with a red MINI Cooper and a parking ticket.
He heard her before he saw her - Sound Localization picking up the specific frustration of someone tearing paper off a windshield, muttering under their breath in a way that crossed language barriers cleanly. He turned. Dark hair, practical coat, the particular posture of someone whose day had been happening to them rather than the other way around. She crouched to retrieve a spilled bag from the snow and came up defensive, catching him watching her.
"What are you looking at?"
The language arrived via Universal Language, German-accented English, defensive edge. Roger opened his mouth to answer, then stopped as he registered the second figure: a man in a brown knit sweater standing about ten metres away, watching the same scene with the focused attention of someone running calculations.
Jason Bourne. Already out of the consulate. Already looking for an exit.
Roger read the geometry in about two seconds. Bourne needed transportation. Marie had a car and was clearly the most accessible option. The pre-constructed history said Roger knew her from Biarritz.
He walked over.
"Marie," he said, as if continuing a conversation they'd been having all along. He picked up the last of her spilled papers and handed them over. "Bad day?"
She blinked at him, the brief recalibration of someone seeing an unexpected but welcome face. "Roger. What are you doing here?"
"Passing through." He glanced at Bourne, who had clocked both of them and was doing the rapid assessment that even an amnesiac Treadstone operative apparently couldn't turn off. "Friend of yours?"
"No," Marie said, pulling her bag strap back over her shoulder. "He just- he said something about needing a ride."
"To where?"
"Paris."
Roger looked at Bourne. Bourne looked at Roger. The cold moved through the street between them.
"How much is he offering?" Roger asked Marie, keeping his voice casual.
"Ten thousand," she said, slightly embarrassed by the number. "Twenty if we make it to Paris."
Roger looked at Bourne again. The man had the specific stillness of someone whose body was fully operational and whose mind had just hit a wall it couldn't see past. He knew what was under that stillness. He also knew that Bourne, right now, was the most dangerous thing in this street, not because of active threat but because of the magnitude of what was behind him.
"I'll do it," Roger said, "for a cut."
Marie looked at him. "Roger-"
"The take is twenty thousand. That's enough for both of us." He shrugged. "And frankly, Marie, if this man has a reason to pay that kind of money to get to Paris by car instead of taking a train, you probably want someone in the back seat who can handle whatever that reason turns out to be."
Marie gave him the look of someone who had known him long enough to recognise when he was right and was annoyed about it.
She turned to Bourne. "He's coming with us."
Bourne evaluated Roger for a long moment - the rapid, involuntary scan that his body ran on anyone it hadn't cleared. Roger let it happen, standing comfortably, presenting nothing that required a response.
"Fine," Bourne said.
Roger picked up his pack and fell in beside Marie as they walked toward the car. He leaned down to her ear just before they reached it.
"If things go sideways, my job is keeping you breathing. I don't owe him anything. Make sure you remember that."
Marie gave a tight nod.
The three of them got into the MINI Cooper, and Zurich began to recede behind the rear window as the cold settled into the car's small interior and the alpine road opened up ahead.
Roger pulled out his headphones, pressed play on something that wasn't music, and let the pre-dawn dark of the Swiss highway carry them toward whatever the next twelve hours were going to cost.