The Bourne Evolution

by Brian Freeman

  Jason and Abbey sat down next to each other under the awning of a shipping store across the street, where they had a vantage on the bar. The place was packed. As the door opened and closed, they could hear piano music. Jason put an arm around Abbey’s shoulders and nudged her head against him, so they looked like lovers taking a respite from the rain. From where they were, they could see the One World Trade Center tower jutting into the sky.

  “Do you think he’s meeting someone?” Abbey said under her breath.

  “It looks that way.”

  “Medusa?”

  “Most likely.”

  She saw the concern on Jason’s face. “You don’t look pleased. Isn’t this what you wanted?”

  “He’s alone,” Jason said. “Nobody followed him. Just us. He isn’t being watched. I don’t understand that. If he’s meeting anyone from Medusa, they’d make sure the area’s secure.”

  “Do you think it’s a trap? For us?”

  “If they wanted us, this place would already be surrounded. It’s not.”

  “What do you want to do?” Abbey asked.

  Jason shot his gaze across the narrow street toward the wine bar and its flashing neon sign with the name Villiers. The lights were bright inside, and a crowd of twenty- and thirty-somethings made the place standing room only. Several high cocktail tables dotted the floor and a railing circled the perimeter for people who were standing up. He could see Carson Gattor near the rear wall, his coat over his sleeve. The lawyer had a glass of white wine in his hand, and he closed his eyes as he drank. He looked relaxed now. Relieved.

  But he was still alone. No one had approached him. The size of the crowd squeezed into the small bar made it impossible to tell whether Gattor was being watched.

  “Take a walk outside the place,” Jason told Abbey. “Both directions. Don’t stop or look through the windows, but have your phone out and do a continuous burst of photographs of the interior. I’d like to see who’s in there with him.”

  “You think someone from Medusa is already there?”

  “I don’t know, but Gattor’s not here for the chardonnay. Do you feel comfortable doing this?”

  “Sure.”

  Abbey got to her feet and dodged a couple of cars as she ran to the opposite corner of Tenth near the wine bar. She wandered past the blue-painted walls of Villiers and pretended to be having a conversation on her phone as she fired off multiple photographs of the people inside. Then she acted as if she’d gotten lost and retraced her steps, repeating the process from the other direction. Bourne smiled. She had good tradecraft.

  She rejoined Jason and huddled close to him again. Rain dripped from the awning.

  “Carson is at the back. He’s not talking to anybody, and I didn’t notice anyone paying attention to him.”

  “Do you know if he lives near here?”

  “No. Other direction. He told me he has a place in Chelsea.”

  “I don’t like this,” Jason said.

  They waited as time ticked by, first half an hour, then an hour. Nothing changed inside the wine bar. Periodically, Jason kept an eye on Gattor, and he noticed that the man’s relaxed demeanor evaporated as the evening wore on. The lawyer grew anxious, checking his watch and his phone. He was being stood up, and that obviously unnerved him. When the clock passed eleven, Gattor made a call to someone but obviously got no answer.

  Still, he made no effort to leave.

  “Jason!” Abbey whispered urgently. “Across the street. Under the scaffolding.”

  Bourne shifted his gaze that way. Two men had arrived on the corner, with eyes glued to their phone screens. Both were young, probably not even twenty-five, dressed completely in black. One was tall and skinny, with messy brown hair streaked with neon green. His companion was a squat Asian with a chin beard and dark buzz cut.

  When Jason looked the other way up Seventh Avenue, he saw a third man, also in black, his head shaved bald and his neck covered in tattoos.

  Then, only seconds later, an Uber car pulled up to the curb on the far side of the street, and two muscular young women emerged from the back seat. Also in black. One slipped a Guy Fawkes mask over her face, but her friend spoke to her sharply, and she removed it and secured it in the pocket of her black jacket.

  The five of them stood in the rain up and down the street, not communicating directly with each other but obviously together.

  “What’s going on?” Abbey asked. “Are they looking for us?”

  “I don’t think so, but something’s going down.”

  Bourne leaned back and checked inside Villiers with his binoculars. Gattor had his phone in his hand now. He tapped out a text. The lawyer waited, and a few seconds later, his face broke into a smile of relief. He took his trench coat and slipped his arms into the sleeves. He shook out his umbrella on the floor.

  “Gattor’s getting ready to go,” Jason said. “He got a text with new instructions. I want you out of here, Abbey. Right now, before Gattor leaves.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Things are about to get violent. I don’t want you in the middle of it. I want you safe.”

  “These kids? They’re Medusa?”

  Bourne shook his head. “No, they look like street thugs, but them showing up now isn’t a coincidence.”

  “I’d rather stay with you,” Abbey said.

  “That’s not an option. Listen to me. There’s an apartment complex near Gramercy Park that Nova and I used once. We can stay there tonight. A block away, you’ll find a twenty-four-hour bistro on Park and Twentieth. Take a cab there, and wait for me.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Get some answers for us. Now go. Please.”

  Abbey hesitated, obviously reluctant to leave, but then she got to her feet and walked with her head down, back along Tenth the way they’d come. He kept an eye on her until he saw her flag down a cab and head safely away. Then he returned his attention to Villiers, where he saw Carson Gattor walk out of the wine bar into the rain. Jason slumped against the shop wall. Through slitted eyes, he watched what was happening at the intersection. Gattor crossed the street, his umbrella up, heading down Seventh. The lawyer paid no attention to Jason, who was sprawled on the sidewalk like one of the city’s homeless. As Gattor passed him, Jason saw the two men at the corner checking their phones and signaling to the others.

  Gattor was definitely the one they wanted.

  All five of them followed. The three men on the west side of Seventh stayed half a block behind the lawyer, while the two women kept pace on the east side of the street. Jason sprang to his feet and fell in a few steps behind them. Halfway down the block, Gattor veered to the other side of Seventh, and the three men did the same. The lawyer never looked back, not seeing the five thugs in his wake. In a gap between the traffic, Gattor hurried past the Stonewall monument and disappeared down the steps into the Christopher Street subway station.

  As soon as the lawyer was out of sight, the five young people who were following him donned black bandanas and masks. Two produced knives from their pockets; two had chains; one had a length of lead pipe. They ran for the subway. Jason held back until the five of them had reached the steps, then ran to catch up. Rainwater poured down the stairs into the station, and a dank smell billowed from the underground. As he entered the station, Jason could see Gattor heading through the turnstile toward the northbound tracks. Four of the five masked attackers took off in the same direction, but the fifth was slow. Jason slid out his gun and came up behind him and cracked the barrel sharply over the thug’s skull. The bald man with the neck tattoos crumpled to the ground, and Jason pocketed his gun again and jumped the turnstile to follow the others.

  He approached the bottom of the steps cautiously. Ahead of him, on the northbound platform, Carson Gattor checked the station clocks as he waited for the number 1 train. The tiled walkway w
as brightly lit, but the tracks between the platforms were dark, divided by rows of green steel I-beams. Jason saw four black-clad aggressors converging on Gattor. The lawyer was preoccupied and didn’t even notice them until they were practically in his face. Then, when he spotted the bandanas and masks, his expression twisted with confusion and fear, and he backed away down the platform. But there was nowhere for him to go.

  “Look what we have here!” the Asian man shouted from behind his mask. “A piece-of-shit white nationalist who thinks he can hide behind his nice suit. Hey, Nazi, you want us to show you what we do to fascist pigs?”

  Gattor’s eyes widened. He looked over his shoulder at the tracks, but there was no train coming to give him an escape. “What are you talking about? You’re wrong! Jesus, you’re wrong!”

  “You think you get a free pass because you’re a lawyer? You defend fascists. You defend Nazis. That makes you one of them.”

  “I don’t! I’m not!”

  But the Asian thug’s arm shot out, whipping a two-foot length of chain through the air. Gattor didn’t have time to duck. The chain hit him across the side of the head, opening up a huge cut that sprayed blood onto the platform floor. The second of the four thugs moved in immediately, punching the lawyer in the mouth with a fist hardened by a ring of brass knuckles. Gattor screamed, coughing out blood and teeth.

  Bourne leaped for the nearest of the four assailants. It was one of the two heavy-set women, and he threw her head against a steel I-beam, where she groaned and collapsed, unconscious. The attackers spotted the new threat behind them, and two of them shifted their focus from Gattor to Bourne. One was the other woman; the other was the man with green streaks like lightning bolts through his messy hair. With a knife outstretched, the skinny man jabbed at Jason, who dodged the assault and used the heel of his fist to rap the man’s head sideways. Dizzied, the man stumbled, and Jason lashed out with his boot to kick the man off the platform onto the train tracks.

  With Jason’s back turned, the woman with the Guy Fawkes mask unleashed a rebel scream and leaped at him with a lead pipe held high over her head. Jason twisted as she swung it down, but the blow landed hard on his shoulder, freezing it and shocking his brain with pain. The woman aimed for his head, but he grabbed her and wrestled her to the ground. He slammed her head against the platform floor, but she shook off the impact and fought back with insane passion, using her fingernails like blades on his back. Her head rose off the ground, and he had to rear back as she chomped her teeth and tried to bite his face. He drove his knee into her stomach, making her gasp, and then he punched her head down again, once, twice, three times. Finally, her eyes rolled back, and she lost consciousness.

  Jason shoved himself off the woman and stood up, trying to keep his balance. He shook life back into his left arm. Twenty feet away, the Asian man stood over Gattor, who lay motionless on the ground. With the chain in his hand, the assailant lashed the lawyer repeatedly around the head, and there was so much blood now that Gattor’s face was unrecognizable.

  “Stop!” Bourne shouted.

  The Asian man saw Jason coming toward him. His eyes gleamed with something like amusement. Above his chin beard, his mouth broke into a coffee-brown grin. The chain dropped from his fingers and rattled to the platform floor. In one swift motion, the man dug a pistol out of a holster at his back and pointed the gun at Carson Gattor. His finger jerked, and a bullet burned into the lawyer’s throat.

  Medusa!

  Bourne already had his own gun back in his hand, and as the Asian swung the pistol around, Jason squatted and squeezed off a single shot that caught the Asian man between the eyes. The man’s body dropped on top of the dead lawyer.

  Behind him, Jason heard running footsteps. He turned and saw the thug with the green-streaked hair climbing out of the well of the train tracks and staggering in a zigzag fashion for the platform stairs. Bourne charged after him. Just as the man got to the steps, Jason took him down hard against the concrete. Ignoring the pain in his own shoulder, he grabbed the man and wrenched him onto his back and shoved the barrel of his gun into the man’s forehead.

  “Who sent you?”

  The man spoke between bloody lips. “Nobody sent me.”

  “You’re lying. You’re Medusa.”

  “What the hell’s that? I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “The Asian. The one with the gun. Who was he? What was his name?”

  “His profile said his name was Cho. I never met him before!”

  “Profile? What profile?”

  “His Prescix profile. We got the alert that some white-power lawyer was in the neighborhood and a few of us got together to rough him up. There weren’t supposed to be guns. We weren’t going to kill him, just beat the shit out of him!”

  Jason heard police sirens getting closer outside the station. He didn’t have much time. He dug in the man’s pocket until he found his phone. “Show me.”

  The man tapped on the phone with one finger to unlock it, and he selected an app that opened with a black screen and a close-up photograph of a human eye. Inside the iris, a single gold word appeared letter by letter.

  PRESCIX

  When the intro screen dissolved, Jason saw a local map and a list of users scrolling down the right side of the phone. In the news timeline was a photograph of Carson Gattor, with a flashing message in red below the picture.

  Action Alert! Fascist Lawyer in the Village!

  “You attacked a stranger because an app told you to?”

  “Hey, you bring that white-power shit around here, you pay the price,” the man said.

  “Did you know any of the others who were with you?” Jason asked.

  “Nah. Just their profiles.”

  Bourne shook his head. He still had nothing.

  He heard screaming behind him as a train unloaded at the station and the arriving passengers spotted the bodies on the platform. It was time to go. With a quick snap of his gun, he knocked out the man on the steps, and then he climbed over him and took the stairs back to the station, which was a frenzy of panic. He calmly pulled his Islanders jersey over his head and stuffed it into a trash can.

  Then he left the station into the rain just as he saw the first of the police cars arriving.

  NINETEEN

  JASON slid into a seat across from Abbey at the all-night bistro near Gramercy Park. She had a plate of eggs in front of her, but she’d left it untouched. Her face bloomed with relief when she saw him.

  “Oh, my God! I was so worried!” She looked around the mostly empty restaurant and lowered her voice. “I heard people talking about a shooting at the subway in the Village. Was that you?”

  “Let’s not talk about it here.”

  He twisted his head to check the street, and a shiver of pain shot up his neck. Abbey noticed the grimace on his face.

  “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine, but we need to get out of sight. There’s a safe house a block away we can use. It’s run by the British. Nova knew about it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Put your hoodie up when we go. I don’t want your face on any street cameras.”

  She nodded quietly. Before pulling up the hood, she combed her fingers through her hair in a gesture that was unconsciously sensual. The look she achieved was messy and perfect. Her black bangs dipped over her forehead, and he could see hints of red among the black. Her mouth was serious now, just her lips pressed softly together. Her wide dark eyes stared across the table at him, and he found it hard to look away from her face.

  Then she brought the hood gently over her head. “That okay?”

  “Yes. Fine.”

  The two of them left the restaurant and walked down Twentieth Street in the rain. Neither one of them said a word, but he could feel something strange happening between them. The narrow street was dark, but lights g
lowed in the apartments overhead. A car passed, kicking up spray without slowing down. When they reached the park, he steered her next to the wrought-iron fence. Trees covered them and held back some of the downpour. Parked cars filled every spot, and he watched for any sign that someone was watching the area. He didn’t think that anyone at Treadstone knew about this safe house, but he couldn’t be sure.

  The twenty-story building was at the end of the block.

  “Keep your head down when we go inside,” Bourne told her. “Don’t look at the man at the desk.”

  He buzzed for entry. When the guard came on the intercom to query him, he used a name that was supposed to give him access to the building, any day, any time. After a tense moment of waiting, the door opened. Jason slipped inside, keeping Abbey behind him, and went over to the man at the desk. He repeated the name and laid out three thousand dollars in cash, which he hoped would buy them anonymity.

  “No records,” Jason told him. “We’re not here. Okay?”

  The man said nothing, but he took the money and handed over a key. Jason pocketed it and guided Abbey to the elevator. No one else was in the lobby. When the elevator doors opened, he went first, conscious of the camera looking down at them. He kept his head down and turned around, only to see Abbey raising her hands toward her hoodie to slip it down. Immediately, he moved toward her and took hold of both of her hands to stop her. He meant nothing personal by touching her. This was about keeping them safe, nothing else.

  But that was a lie.

  He bent down close to her. She tilted her chin, meeting his eyes. The message passing between them was unmistakable. Her lips moved and parted, inviting him, and he put his mouth on hers. The kiss started soft and slow, then grew intense. Their fingers were still laced together, and she pressed forward with her body against his. As she did, the hoodie slipped down, but he didn’t notice. They stayed that way, their lips exploring each other, until the elevator doors opened on the fourteenth floor.