Excerpt – ROBERT LUDLUM’S THE BOURNE REVENGE by Brian Freeman:
Bourne sat behind the wheel of the Camry and waited. Four o’clock passed. Then five. Then five thirty. The after-work drinkers began to arrive.
At six o’clock, he spotted a white F-150 pickup pulling into the lot near the rear of the building. The man who climbed down from the truck was short and stocky, with an almost completely round face. His hair had thinned to a black crown at the back of his head, and he kept a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache. His large wire-rimmed glasses would have been in style back in the 1970s. Despite the Miami heat, he wore a weathered leather bomber jacket over worn blue jeans. He was smoking a cigarette, which he crushed on the pavement before disappearing into the bar.
Bourne checked the area for other surveillance and saw none. He left the shadows of the overpass and crossed the street. Inside the bar, most of the tables were already full, and a stage was being set up for evening music. He spotted Kodak sitting by himself at the counter, pawing at a bowl of mixed nuts and chatting up the attractive bartender, who treated him like a regular. He had a lowball glass of what looked like vodka on the rocks in front of him.
The chair next to Kodak was empty, and Bourne sat down. The Polish pilot gave him a sideways glance and then did a double take, recognizing him. His mustache wriggled as he let out a loud sigh. When he spoke, his voice still had a thick Eastern European accent. “Ah, shit. You. I figured you were dead.”
“Nice to see you, too, Kodak.”
“What do you want, Cain? I work with you two times, you almost get me killed both times. Do you remember? First time, a flight into the Everglades. Gunfire forced the plane down into the swamp, and I had to run for my life from fucking gators. I hate gators.”
“You live in Florida,” Bourne said.
“Yeah, well, I fucking hate orange juice, too. So what?”
“I need your help.”
“What, you want to fly somewhere? Call JetBlue.”
The young bartender, who sported a curly pile of flaming-red hair, wandered down the bar and leaned her elbows on the counter in front of Bourne. Her green eyes twinkled at him. “You want something, hon?”
“How about a Coke? Lots of ice.”
“You got it.” She smiled at Kodak. “What about you, sweets? Top you up?”
“Yeah, sure, why not.”
Bourne put a hand over Kodak’s glass. “Actually, he’s done for the night. Pour this one out, and give me the bill.”
“Ah, shit,” Kodak said again.
Jason waited until the bartender brought him his Coke and then left them alone. He checked the other tables with a casual glance around the bar and spotted a young Asian woman, dressed for salsa dancing, concentrating on her phone. She had a half-empty cosmopolitan in a martini glass in front of her. He stared hard at her, waiting for her to feel his gaze, but if she was aware of him, she didn’t look up.
That was a tell. They’d already found him.
Bourne turned back to Kodak. “What about the second mission we ran together? Tell me about it.”
“Why tell you what you already know?” the man asked, his tone crabby.
“Humor me. When was it?”
“Do I look like a fucking calendar? Long time, seven, eight, nine years, who knows.”
“What happened?”
“You know what happened. You call me. Right here, you leave a message, and I call you back. You say, Kodak, I need you. I tell you, get fucked. You say, no gators this time, no guns.”
“What did I want?” Bourne asked.
“You gave me a tail number on a Gulfstream. Wanted to know if I could get its flight plan from Opa Locka.”
“And could you?”
Kodak snorted. “Who you talking to? Of course I could. Jet was on its way to Green Bay, Wisconsin. Must be a load of Packer fans, huh? Why the fuck else would anyone go to Wisconsin?”
“I hear it’s pretty up there,” Bourne said. “October. Leaves changing.”
“Do I look like I fucking care about leaves?”
Bourne chuckled. “I asked you to fly me up there. Right?”
“Right. All I could find was a twin-engine Beechcraft that I borrowed off a lawyer who likes me to fly packages for him from Port-au-Prince now and then. Took hours to get there. Had to refuel in fucking Kentucky. We didn’t land until midnight.”
“What about the Gulfstream?”
“It was still there. But no one around. Is this some kind of test, Cain? You were there. You know what happened next.”
“Just tell me,” Bourne said.
Kodak sighed heavily. “All right, all right. You went off and found ground crew, paid them to find out where the passengers went.”
“Where did they go?”
“You think you fucking tell me? No way. And I don’t care.”
“Then what?”
“Then we find a motel outside the airport. I try to sleep, you don’t. You sit in a chair, watching the door, like you expect something to happen. And guess what? Something fucking happens. Guy picks the lock, comes in all quiet, gun, silencer. I wake up, and the two of you are tearing up the place. Gun goes off, practically blows my fucking head open. You break the guy’s neck, drag him into the woods behind the motel. Me, I’m not happy about any of this, you know?”
“I’m sure.”
Kodak shook his head. “Five in the morning, I go fly the Beechcraft back, you go wherever the fuck you go. Never figured I’d see you again, and I didn’t, not until tonight.”
“You didn’t fly me back to Florida?”
“No.”
Bourne frowned. Kodak didn’t take him back to Florida—and yet he did go back to Miami. He checked out of the Mandarin Oriental on time the following Friday. He had room service charges on the fifth and sixth days.
But nothing on days two, three, and four. Why?
The answer was obvious now. Because he was in Wisconsin. But why was there nothing in the Treadstone reports? If he’d stumbled onto a Chinese spy operation, he would have written it up, and yet he let Treadstone believe he’d been in Florida the entire time. This was long before he was shot in the Med.
Long before he lost his memory.
Wasn’t it?
Bourne took another look around the bar. The Asian salsa dancer had finished her cosmopolitan and was gone. The clock was ticking.
“Come on, Kodak, we need to get out of here.”
“Why the fuck do I need to go anywhere with you?”
“One, because I need you to fly me to Green Bay again. Now. Tonight. Two, because I figure we have less than five minutes before a heavy assault team arrives outside. If you’re still here, they’ll grab you to find out what we talked about, and then they’ll put a bullet in your head.”
Kodak made a noise like a cat hacking up a fur ball. “Ah, shit.”
Excerpted from Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Revengeby Brian Freeman. Copyright © 2026 by Brian Freeman. Excerpted by permission of G.P. Putnam’s Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
ROBERT LUDLUM’S THE BOURNE REVENGE by Brian Freeman
The identity of a deadly Chinese spy lies hidden in Jason Bourne’s lost memory in this latest entry in the #1 New York Times bestselling series.
Shadow – the head of Treadstone – has found evidence of massive Chinese espionage activity in the U.S. The spy running the operations is a shadowy American known only by the codename Bai Ze. No one knows who he is, but when Shadow consults the Files – the hacked AI database she stole from the Chinese – she discovers that Jason Bourne encountered Bai Ze during an operation eight years earlier.
The trouble is, Bourne doesn’t remember him.
As Bourne hunts for the elusive spy, he meets a reporter named Laney Reese who shares his strange affliction: eight years ago, Laney lost her entire memory, too. For Bourne, that can’t be a coincidence. He’s convinced that whatever happened to both of them is at the heart of the Chinese espionage operation.
With Laney at his side, Bourne follows a zigzagging trail of clues to a quirky billionaire and his ex-wife, both of whom may have ties to Bai Ze. As he gets closer to his shadowy adversary, Bourne begins to suspect that he’s walking into a trap. But it’s a trap with an almost irresistible bait – the chance to recover his forgotten memories.
Now Bourne must decide how far he’ll go to get his life back.
Thriller [ G.P. Putnam’s Sons, On Sale: January 20, 2026, Hardcover / e-Book / audiobook, ISBN: 9798217046218 / eISBN: 9798217046225 ]
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About Brian Freeman
Brian Freeman is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than two dozen psychological thrillers, including the Jonathan Stride series and multiple popular stand-alone novels. He was also selected by the Robert Ludlum estate to take over Ludlum’s iconic Jason Bourne series. He has since published five Bourne novels and brought the series back to the New York Times bestseller list for the first time in many years.
Since 2005, Freeman has sold books in 46 countries and 24 languages. He was an Edgar Award finalist for his novel THE DEEP, DEEP SNOW, and his novel SPILLED BLOOD won the award for Best Hardcover Novel in the ITW Thriller Awards. Kirkus Reviews named his novels among their Best Mysteries and Thrillers of the year in both 2020 and 2021 (for THE BOURNE EVOLUTION and INFINITE). He is a two-time winner of the Minnesota Book Award.
All of his books are available in audio editions. His novels THE BONE HOUSE and SEASON OF FEAR were both named finalists for the Audie Award for Best Audiobook in Thriller/Suspense.
Freeman’s writing has been praised by critics and bestselling authors alike, including Michael Connelly, Nelson DeMille, Jeffery Deaver, and Lisa Gardner. “A master of psychological suspense,” Gardner said of Freeman. London’s Daily Mail called Freeman “up there with Harlan Coben in the psychological crime stratosphere.”
Freeman lives in Florida with his wife, Marcia. They have been married for 40 years.
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