The Bourne Evolution

by Brian Freeman

  Hey, where are you?

  You’re late.

  I’m here getting soaked and you don’t show up?

  Seriously? I’m not going to wait forever.

  And she didn’t. At ten-forty, he watched her lips form a loud swear word. She stamped out of the gazebo into the rain, past the old cannons and into the wet grass of the park beside the Château Frontenac. When she disappeared from view, he sprang into action. He slipped his gun into his jacket pocket and hurried to the base of the Citadel hill, where Quebec City’s old stone buildings faced each other across narrow, hilly streets. He jogged down Rue des Grisons for one block and waited in the doorway of a small guest hotel, where he couldn’t be seen.

  At the end of the street, the redheaded journalist crossed the intersection. She walked with purpose, not looking back, not concerned with being followed. He ran to the next corner and saw her hike past the art conservatory into the cobblestoned paths of the Parc du Cavalier-du-Moulin. He accelerated, falling in behind her, closing the distance between them. She was half a block away, unaware of his presence.

  This was how he’d been trained. Always let the first meeting go by. Let anyone who is watching assume it’s a bust, and then intercept the contact afterward for the real meeting.

  But the ones who had trained him were also the ones who were looking for him now.

  They knew his every move.

  As he climbed toward the park where Abbey Laurent had disappeared, he saw that the streetlight ahead of him was broken. His instincts screamed a warning, but he was too late to retreat. A man appeared from the shadows in front of him. It was the tall man with the scar from the boardwalk, and the man held a Beretta with a suppressor on the barrel, aimed across the twenty feet between them.

  He didn’t have time to pull his own gun. With a grunt of exertion, he shunted sideways and dove to the wet ground, rolling until he slammed against the brick wall of the nearest building. The low pop of the Beretta and the splash of bullets on the asphalt chased him. He pushed off his knees and ran, bent over, then threw himself behind a blue panel van parked on the sidewalk.

  The van provided cover as he drew his pistol. The rain poured over his face and drained loudly through the gutters, making a flood down the street. There was no light. He couldn’t hear or see. Slowly, cautiously, he crept around the rear of the van. As he spun into the street, he pulled the trigger three times in quick succession. The man with the scar was there. One of the bullets tore into the man’s gun arm, causing him to fire back wildly. Bleeding, the would-be assassin lurched away behind the other side of the van.

  He only had a few seconds, and he knew what he had to do.

  Get away! Get to the car!

  Quebec had been a mistake. The meeting with Abbey Laurent had been a trap from the beginning.

  He backed away with his gun trained on the van. There was an alley behind him where he could run. He blinked, trying to clear rain from his eyes. The wind tunneling between the buildings roared in his head. His senses were focused on the van as he waited for the man with the scar to unleash another round of gunfire. Only at the last second did a breath of motion alert him to a deadly new threat behind him.

  The young woman with the pink-and-blond hair pounced from the alley. She swung a long-bladed knife toward his neck, and he jerked back in time to avoid having his carotid artery cut open. He lashed out with one leg, kicking her in the stomach, driving her backward. She shook off the blow, bared her teeth, and charged again, leading with the knife aimed at his throat. He had a split second to grab her wrist and twist hard. The bone broke; the knife fell to the street. Before he could bring his gun around and fire, she uncoiled like a spring, driving her skull into the base of his chin with a loud crack. His head snapped back, and he tasted blood in his mouth. He let go of her, momentarily dizzy.

  More pops, like muffled fireworks, exploded around him as the man with the scar leaped from cover and fired again with his injured arm. One shot shattered a window in the stone building on the other side of the street; another ricocheted off the sidewalk. He grabbed the young woman by her broken wrist and yanked her in front of him. She screamed in pain, but the scream cut off as the next bullet, which otherwise would have landed in the middle of his chest, burned into the back of the woman’s head.

  The man who’d been kissing her on the boardwalk a few minutes ago had just killed her.

  Still holding on to the woman, who was deadweight, he raised his own gun and fired a precise shot that struck the man with the scar under his chin. A kill shot directly through the throat.

  Just like Sofia Ortiz.

  He stood there, the pungent smell of smoke filling his nose. The dead woman dangled at the end of his arm like a grotesque doll, and he lowered her body to the wet street. Her eyes were open and fixed, staring at him. Blood pooled behind her head, but the rain quickly washed it away into the rivers that flowed along the curb.

  Get away! Get to the car!

  The jaws of the trap were springing shut.

  He saw the shimmer of the boardwalk lights at the east end of the street. He headed that way, staying close to the stone walls. At the next corner, he surveyed the cross street and assessed the trees scattered like soldiers through Governor’s Park. He wasn’t alone. He felt it. But he couldn’t see where the threat was. He measured out his breaths one by one, then burst from cover, sprinted across the street, and dove into the muddy grass of the park.

  Bullets spat at him from two directions. As he slithered through the grass, he spotted one man on the steps of a guest hotel behind him, another in the darkness of a parking tunnel under the Château Frontenac. He got up, zigzagged as the cross fire zeroed in on him, then swiveled and fired four shots into the blackness of the tunnel. The assassin in the parking garage collapsed, but the man on the hotel steps continued to fire. When a hot spike burned in his upper chest, he knew he’d been hit. He dragged himself to the shelter of an ash tree and ripped open the flap of his shirt to see the bloody ring of the bullet hole.

  More fire rained down from the man on the steps. He waited until there was a pause as the man emptied his magazine, and at that moment, he broke from cover and fired back, six more shots.

  The other shooter rolled down the hotel steps to the street.

  There was no time to tend to his wound. More men would be here soon. He swapped his gun to his left hand and applied pressure to his chest. He was numb, but that wouldn’t last long. Marching through the park, head down, he passed the Château Frontenac and hurried down the steps to the boardwalk. Lights gleamed on the far shore of the river. The rain and wind assaulted the cliffside. He limped to the far side of the boardwalk and clung to the metal railing to steady himself. The rock of the cliff face went down more than one hundred and fifty feet below him, with a nest of bare trees climbing toward him from the old town. He closed his eyes, feeling faint, knowing he was losing blood quickly.

  “Jason Bourne.”

  The words hissed at him from a few feet away.

  And then another word. “Traitor.”

  His eyes shot open. He lifted his gun with a jolt of pain. He wasn’t alone; he’d missed someone hiding in the shadows. A man in a gray trench coat and fedora stood near the gazebo, and he had a gun, too, pointed at him through the downpour. The other man was older by fifteen years, shorter than Bourne but as tough and weathered as a husk dried in the sun. He knew Nash Rollins well. In another life, he would have called him a friend, but not anymore.

  Not since Las Vegas.

  And now this man was here to kill him. Or be killed. Those were the only two options.

  Bourne had kept count. There was one cartridge left in the magazine of his gun, but one was all he needed to kill an old friend. Pull the trigger. Watch him die. His brain weighed his options and assessed his strategy. His heart debated whether he could really kill the man in front of him.
/>   Rollins had obviously wanted to be here personally for the takedown. That was a mistake. He hadn’t been in the field in years. Showdowns were about concentration, about not being distracted, and that was hard to do when your skills were rusty. As the staredown continued between them, Bourne waited for the older man to give him an opening, because he knew it would come. A surge of wind whipped into the man’s body and made him flinch. The lapse in his attention lasted barely longer than a blink, but that was enough.

  Bourne fired. He shot into the flesh of Rollins’s thigh, causing the man’s leg to collapse under him. His friend toppled, unleashing a bitter wail of pain, but in another second, the old man would realize he was still alive, and he wouldn’t bother to wonder why he’d been spared. He would simply raise his own gun and fire back.

  With nowhere to run, Bourne dropped his empty gun, took hold of the boardwalk railing with both hands, and threw himself over the cliff’s edge. The agony of his chest coursed through his body. Gravity grabbed hold of him, but he hovered in the air for a microsecond like a skeet target. His old friend, writhing on the ground, found enough strength to bring up his gun and fire. One shot.

  One shot that grazed a burning, bloody path across his skull.

  Jason Bourne fell into darkness. He was a meteor streaking through a cold universe, a tiny fragment lost in empty space. The ground far below him was like an alien planet, new and unexplored, roaring toward him at what felt like light speed. At the moment of impact, everything went black.

  * * *

  —

  THE Canadian ambulance crew wanted to take Nash Rollins to the hospital, but he refused to leave the boardwalk. He wasn’t going anywhere until they’d found the man on the cliff. He leaned on a cane that one of the paramedics had given him and bit his tongue to try to take his mind off the pain that pulsed through his leg.

  Below him, the lights of searchers bobbed in the cobblestoned streets of the Basse-Ville, hunting for the wounded American killer. Rollins knew he’d hit him as he fell. He’d seen the red cloud spray from his head. It seemed impossible to think the man had survived the gunshot and the fall, but so far they’d found no body, only a blood trail that came to a sudden stop on the Rue du Petit-Champlain. The man had simply disappeared.

  Bourne was a ghost. Impossible to kill.

  But then, that was what they’d trained him to be.

  Rollins felt no guilt about what he’d done. He’d brought his team to do a job, and the job wasn’t finished. His prior relationship with the man didn’t matter at all. The fact that the man had spared his life by shooting him in the leg, not the head or the chest, also didn’t matter. The only thing that was important was to stop him!

  He took his phone out of his pocket. When he dialed, a woman answered on the other end with a single word.

  “Treadstone.”

  “Go secure,” Rollins requested.

  “You’re secure,” she replied after a moment of dead air on the line. “What’s the situation in Quebec? Were you correct? Is it Cain?”

  “Yes, it’s him. Just like I told you.”

  “Has he been neutralized?”

  “No, it seems that he’s still alive.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” the woman lectured him coldly. “You assured us that you’d deal with this. Director Shaw is concerned. If Bourne is linked to the assassination in New York, it puts the whole Treadstone resurrection in jeopardy.”

  Rollins grimaced as pain stabbed through his leg again. The pain was going to make him collapse soon, but he didn’t care. “Don’t worry, tell Shaw that I’ll find Bourne. He’s wounded, and he can’t go far. I’ll find him, and I’ll kill him myself.”

  TWO

  LATE-NIGHT drinkers packed the pub on Rue Sainte-Angèle at one in the morning. Abbey Laurent sat at the bar in the semidarkness, under a low ceiling studded with rough-hewn beams. Her clothes and her mahogany-colored hair were still damp, making her shiver. Her fingers tapped on the keyboard of her laptop, in a tempo greased by the rhythm of the jazz quartet playing a few feet away. She owed her editor, Jacques, three thousand words for the next online edition of The Fort. The article was due first thing in the morning, but she’d waited until now to write it, hoping that the mystery man would give her a story.

  Instead, he’d left her standing alone in the rain.

  Every few sentences, she took a swig from the bottle of beer in front of her. She found it hard to concentrate on her work. Her problem wasn’t the noise or the crowd; she thrived on those things. She could bang out a story in the middle of the World Cup final. No, she kept thinking about the man who’d stood her up.

  Who was he? Where was he?

  Why had he gone through an elaborate series of secret contacts to meet with her, only to not show up?

  Abbey grabbed her phone and did what she’d already done half a dozen times since she got to the bar. She scrolled back to the very first contact he’d made with her, one week ago, three days after the murder of Sofia Ortiz in New York. It was a text message sent from an unknown phone number.

  We need to meet. I can help you get the answers you want.

  As a journalist, she received cold calls like that all the time. Most were hoaxes, sent by conspiracy nuts or men who wanted to meet the woman they’d seen in the photograph next to her byline. But something about this man was different. Intriguing. He knew things. He provided her with details about the shooting that the police and FBI had never released. When she checked it out, she discovered that everything he’d said was true.

  Her reporter’s radar was pinging.

  But Jacques had told her that the meeting was too dangerous. Her editor was nervous by nature, and he was still hyperventilating about the Ortiz assassination and the Washington Square riot. However, Abbey had never been one to let fear stop her from doing anything.

  Okay, she’d written back to the mystery man. Your place or mine?

  They’d agreed on her place. Quebec City in three days.

  She didn’t know his name, or what he looked like, or anything about who he was. He was obsessive about protecting his anonymity and cautious to the point of paranoia. He’d sent her elaborate instructions for making sure she wasn’t followed, and he’d given her an exchange of code phrases so they would know each other in person, like they were spies in some Cold War rendezvous.

  She’d say: What do you like most about Quebec?

  He’d reply: Those wonderful little maple candies.

  And after all that, he’d been a no-show. It didn’t make sense. She checked her messages again, hoping he’d sent her a text to explain, but all she saw were the unanswered texts she’d sent him from the boardwalk.

  Abbey sighed with defeat, because she wasn’t getting anything done tonight. Jacques would have to wait for the story. She shut down her laptop and turned around at the bar to finish her beer and listen to the music. The boys in the band all waved to her. This was her place, her neighborhood. Her office at The Fort was four blocks away, and her studio apartment was six blocks away. She traveled constantly, but when she was home, she typically wrote her stories here at the bar until closing time. As a writer, she made almost no money, but the bartender slipped her the occasional drink for free, and in return, she threw a mention of the bar into the magazine whenever she could.

  The bar door opened, letting in cold damp air. A few people left; a few others pushed their way inside. She examined the faces of the new arrivals. As comfortable as she always felt here, tonight she had an odd sense of unease. It was the same sensation she’d had on the boardwalk, that multiple sets of eyes were watching her. This was more than the usual attention she got from guys looking for a hookup. No one in the bar looked suspicious, but the feeling didn’t go away, and her lips pushed into a frown.

  She felt paranoid. Just like the mystery man.

  Where are you?

  Even
the mellow jazz music didn’t calm her nerves. The bassist was a slinky Spanish woman named Emilia who had magic fingers. On most nights, Abbey loved listening to her play. The trouble was, when she saw her face now, it wasn’t Emilia she saw. It was Sofia Ortiz in Washington Square Park. Her memory replayed that awful moment over and over, when the woman’s neck exploded in a shower of blood, when she pitched backward to the stage, when the screaming began, when the crowd surged out of control. An assassin had murdered a congresswoman right in front of her.

  Her source said the killer was a former U.S. intelligence agent code-named Cain.

  Who was Cain?

  She hadn’t told Jacques the truth about how bad the night had been. There was blood on her shirt after it happened; that was how close she’d been to Ortiz. Then, in the riot that followed, she’d nearly been killed herself. There was gunfire everywhere, craziness, madness! She’d seen one of the anarchists aiming a pistol at her, and she’d only survived because someone in the crowd had run into her at that exact moment and they’d both tumbled to the ground. By the time she got up, the shooter had disappeared, but she could still remember his black hood and the gun pointed at her head.

  With her hand trembling slightly, Abbey finished her beer. She got up from the bar, but at that moment, over the noise of the band and the crowd, she picked out two words from someone’s conversation.

  “Château Frontenac.”

  And then two other words. “Dead. Shot.”

  Abbey tried to isolate the conversation. Who was it? She grabbed her laptop and shoved it in her bag. As she waded into the crowd, her ears pricked up to eavesdrop on what everyone was saying. She picked up snippets of talk about sports and drugs and drinks and sex, but nothing about the hotel castle on the cliff. Nothing about murder. And yet she knew, she knew, that something had happened.