The Bourne Evolution

by Brian Freeman

  “Yes indeed. I’m getting married in a couple of days. Stick around for the celebration, if you’d like.”

  “Married?” Priest grunted. “You?”

  “That’s right. My fiancée works for the equity group that is partnering with me to take Prescix private. She leads their security services. We met shortly after I started negotiations with the group a few months ago.”

  “Who is she?” Nelly asked.

  Gabriel threw another cricket in the air and caught it in his mouth. “Her background is rather mysterious, but that simply adds to her charm. She’s Czech. What is it about Czech women that they all screw like porn stars? Not to be crude, but she’s the most voracious sexual partner I’ve ever experienced, and that’s saying a lot.”

  “What’s her name?” Priest asked him.

  “Oh, her last name is unpronounceable,” Gabriel told them. “So I just call her Miss Shirley.”

  * * *

  —

  YOU’RE certain about the location?” Miss Shirley asked, perching on a twelve-inch ledge atop a Gramercy Park apartment building, nineteen stories above the street. Her gaze focused on the tower of the safe house rising over the trees on the other side of the park.

  “It’s the fourteenth floor,” Peter Restak replied, his voice cracking with a nervous flutter as he watched her on the narrow strip of concrete. “Southeast corner. We confirmed it with our sources in the UK . . . Miss Shirley.”

  “Excellent.”

  The gales through the New York canyons swirled unpredictably, but Miss Shirley remained in perfect balance on the ledge. She bent one knee and pointed her other leg, then spread her arms flat as she knelt into a Warrior II yoga pose on the rooftop. She held that pose for nearly a minute. When she was done, she stood up straight and extended her arms over her head with her palms flat together.

  “I sent you the video we hacked from the safe house feed,” Restak added. “Just so you know, we believe Treadstone has it as well . . . Miss Shirley.”

  “If we had faith in Treadstone taking action, then I wouldn’t be here,” she replied.

  Miss Shirley brought her arms down in front of her breasts and then slowly lifted her left foot and braced it against the inside of her right thigh. She stood one-legged in the Tree Pose, her tall, lean swimmer’s frame swaying gently like a gyroscope. On the surface of the roof below her, she heard a gasp of discomfort from Peter Restak.

  “Does this bother you?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t look very safe . . . Miss Shirley.”

  “There’s no such thing as safe or unsafe. There’s only experienced and inexperienced, ability and inability. Come up here. Join me.”

  “I’d rather not . . . Miss Shirley.”

  Her dark eyebrows slanted at a fierce downward angle, and her blue eyes zeroed in on him like a predator. “Did that sound like a request, Restak?”

  “No . . . Miss Shirley.”

  She saw the hacker wiping sweat from his hands. Almost hyperventilating with fear, Restak put both hands on the ledge and pulled himself up, his entirely body trembling. He squatted on the edge of the roof, shivering in the fierce wind. By instinct, he kept looking down. The wind made the entire building seem to move back and forth around them.

  “Stand up.”

  “I don’t think I can . . . Miss Shirley.”

  “Stand up. I won’t let you fall, Restak.”

  She watched him unbend his knees, which were tense and locked. His fingers turned white as they pressed against the ledge. She could smell his fear, sense his mind spinning. He rose only a few inches before he screamed and pitched forward, but Miss Shirley locked a hand around his forearm and held him in place. He dangled, half on the roof, half off, moaning. Slowly, she dragged him onto the ledge and lifted him until he was vertical, standing beside her on wobbling knees. Tears of terror streamed down his face. His eyes were closed.

  “Well done, Restak,” she told him. “Now open your eyes.”

  “I can’t . . . Miss Shirley.”

  “Open your eyes!”

  Restak’s eyes shot open, staring straight ahead.

  “Good. You may get down now.”

  She held his wrist and guided him off the ledge. When he got back to the roof, he collapsed and threw up. Miss Shirley did a final pirouette and then gracefully jumped down. She put the toe of her shoe on his forehead as Restak lay on the ground.

  “We must have absolute trust in one another.”

  “Yes . . . Miss Shirley.”

  “You did excellent work in eliminating Gattor. The Prescix incident worked precisely as I wished.”

  “Thank you . . . Miss Shirley.”

  “But your work in New York is over. Cain is aware of your identity. You need to return to headquarters to be reassigned.”

  Restak wiped his mouth and looked up at her with another wave of fear. Miss Shirley gave him a smile of reassurance.

  “If your usefulness to me was at an end, you’d be on the street right now, Restak. Consider this a promotion. Now let’s go back inside, shall we?”

  She held the man up, because he wasn’t able to walk, and they crossed the rooftop patio to the door that led into the building’s penthouse suite. They took glass stairs down one level to the apartment’s lavish living area overlooking the park. The sixty-two-year-old apartment owner lay where she’d fallen on the carpet, her throat cut. Miss Shirley knelt and recovered the knife from beside the body, then wiped it on the woman’s blouse and secured it in her pocket again. She took the elongated case for her sniper’s rifle from the floor and put it on top of the walnut dining room table. Unlocking the lid, she opened it and caressed the full length of the slim, hard barrel with her fingertips.

  Her head turned, gazing through the apartment windows at the tower beyond the park. She calculated the location of the corner room on the fourteenth floor, which was in clear sight. In the background, hundreds of high-rises dotted the skyline.

  “I love New York,” she said.

  Restak said nothing. A foul odor emanated from his clothes.

  “Go take a shower and clean yourself up, Restak. Then we’ll have sex, and you can take care of your apartment.”

  “All right . . . Miss Shirley.”

  “Sex is what you want, isn’t it?”

  “Yes . . . Miss Shirley.”

  “Take a pill from my purse. I suspect you’ll need it.”

  Restak slunk away from her. She watched him dig inside her purse and swallow one of the tablets from an unlabeled plastic bottle, and then he shrugged off his soiled clothes and disappeared into the apartment’s palatial bathroom, with its walk-in shower and marble bench. She heard the noise of the water, and she felt a tingling anticipation of all the things that lay ahead. The vigorous sex. The gun, long and sleek in her hands. The shooting and the eruption of blood.

  It had been that way with Sofia Ortiz, too.

  She took her phone from her pocket and played the video that Restak had sent her. She saw the two people in the elevator inside the UK safe house. They kissed, slowly and then quite passionately, like two people who were very attracted to each other. She found it surprising for a man like Cain to be entranced by someone whose beauty was so ordinary.

  At the end of the video, the woman backed away, the hood slipping down. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement, her eyes wide with desire. Miss Shirley froze the playback of the video and studied the woman’s face.

  “Abbey Laurent,” she snarled. “Well, well, aren’t you the little slut.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  ABBEY recognized Holly d’Angelo from the photo that the Carillon tech had loaded on her phone. Peter Restak’s girlfriend looked like an Italian firecracker, tiny and explosive. Her feet pounded on the gym treadmill as if she were running a hundred-yard dash, small legs pumping, sweat glowing on her face and
dripping from her hooked nose. Her eyebrows were thick and black, and her long dark hair bounced in a ponytail behind her. She wore a red tank top and formfitting shorts.

  The room was loud with the metal clang of exercise equipment, but Holly seemed too deep in concentration to notice anything outside her workout. When Abbey mounted the treadmill next to her, the other woman didn’t turn her head. Abbey switched on the machine and ran beside her at a much more relaxed pace. Every couple of minutes, she glanced over with a smile, but Holly paid no attention.

  Half an hour later, Holly still showed no signs of slowing her relentless run. Abbey dialed down the speed on her own machine to a walk, and after another ten minutes, she noticed Holly finally doing the same thing. Abbey climbed off the treadmill and did a series of stretching exercises as she waited for the other woman to finish. When Holly turned off the machine, her entire outfit was soaking wet, and her face was beet red. She did cooldown exercises of her own, and when she was in the midst of pelvic squats with her hands on her hips, Abbey decided to make her move.

  “Excuse me.”

  Holly looked up at Abbey. When she spoke, her voice had a nasal Jersey accent. “What do you want?”

  “I apologize for bothering you, but you look so familiar. I knew it as soon as I saw you on the treadmill. I’m sure we’ve met somewhere.”

  “We haven’t met,” Holly replied. “And if this is a pickup line, it needs work.”

  Abbey laughed. “No, no, seriously, I know you. It’s Holly, isn’t it?”

  The woman’s face showed surprise. “That’s right. Who are you?”

  “Britney Jenks,” Abbey lied.

  “I don’t remember you,” Holly said.

  “Oh, I don’t suppose you would. It was at some party last year. Tribeca, maybe. All those lofts look alike. I remember you were there, because you were with your boyfriend, and I knew him from one of my social groups on Prescix. Pete Restak.”

  “You have an account on Prescix?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?” Abbey said.

  “And you remember Peter?”

  “Sure. Tech guy, really smart, one of those hacker wizards, right? Dirty-blond hair, man bun.”

  “That’s him,” Holly replied.

  “Are you two still seeing each other?”

  “Why do you want to know? Do you want to ask him out?”

  “Me? Oh, no, I’ve got a boyfriend. I just noticed that Pete had dropped out of my Prescix feed. He was always good about helping me when I had computer questions. I’m pretty hopeless about that stuff. I was actually thinking about reconnecting with him, but I realized I had no way to get in touch.”

  Holly took a long time to reply. She wrapped a towel around the back of her neck and held on to the ends with her hands. “Well, Peter and I broke up months ago. I dumped his ass.”

  “I’m sorry. That’s too bad. This is probably a little awkward, but you wouldn’t still have contact info for him, would you? My laptop seems to have bad juju right now, and I don’t have a few hundred bucks to replace it. I thought maybe Pete could perform an exorcism or something.”

  Abbey smiled. Holly didn’t. Her flushed face never moved. “Yeah, I probably have his number. My phone’s in my locker. Come on back, and I’ll get it for you.”

  “Thanks, that’s great. I appreciate it.”

  Holly led the way. The woman walked quickly, the same way she ran on the treadmill, and Abbey hurried to keep up with her. They pushed through doors on the other side of the studio into the changing room, where stainless steel lockers gleamed on the nearest wall. Two or three other women were inside. Abbey followed Holly along a row of wooden benches to the far end, where Holly opened the combination lock on one of the lockers. Her street clothes were inside, along with a gym bag and purse.

  “My phone’s in here,” Holly said.

  She dug in her purse, but then with the speed of a cobra, she twisted around and grabbed Abbey by the shoulders and threw her against the lockers. Abbey’s head banged against the steel. Holly pressed her forearm hard into Abbey’s throat, and with her other hand, she brought the tip of a miniature Swiss Army knife up to within an inch of Abbey’s eye. Holly’s face contorted with anger, and her breath was warm and sour.

  “Okay, who the hell are you?”

  Abbey choked as she tried to get out the words. “I already told you.”

  “What you told me was a lie. Anybody who knows Peter Restak knows he doesn’t go by Pete. He’s never Pete. And Peter never had a Prescix account under his own name. No way. He told me if I wanted to stay safe, I should keep my life offline, the way he did. He said Prescix messes with your head.”

  “I—I must have made a mistake.”

  “A mistake? I don’t think so. Who are you, and what do you want? And how the hell did you get my name?”

  “I told you . . . a party.”

  Holly shook her head. “Me and Peter? A loft party? We’d never be caught dead in that scene.”

  One of the other women in the locker room shouted from the showers. “Hey, Holl, you okay? You want me to call 911?”

  Holly pushed even harder with her forearm against Abbey’s throat. The blade of the tiny knife loomed huge in front of Abbey’s pupil. “What do you think? Should I have her call 911? Because I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be very happy explaining yourself to the cops. You’ve got five seconds to decide. Start talking, or we get the NYPD over here and you can talk to them.”

  Abbey tried to nod. “Okay. Okay. I’ll tell you the truth.”

  Holly glanced over her shoulder and called to the other woman. “It’s all right, Steph. I’ve got it under control.”

  She let Abbey go, then took her by the wrist and shoved her down roughly on the bench. Abbey rubbed her throat and inhaled loudly. Holly folded up the knife and stuffed it back in her purse, and then she sat down next to her. The dank smell of her sweat was in Abbey’s nose.

  “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” Holly asked.

  “Who?”

  “Peter’s group. The ones he wouldn’t talk about.”

  “You mean Medusa?”

  “Is that what they’re called? Peter never gave me a name. He never told me anything. But whoever they are, they’re into some serious shit.”

  “I’m not part of them,” Abbey told her. “I swear.”

  “Then who are you?”

  Abbey sighed. Jason made covers and disguises look so easy, but it was different when you were face-to-face with a stranger. “My name’s Abbey Laurent. I’m a reporter. The fact is, I’m trying to expose that group. Right now, Peter Restak is the only contact I have that I know is Medusa. I need to find him.”

  “Peter won’t tell you anything. He’s a true believer.”

  “Do you know anything about what he’s doing?”

  Holly shrugged. “You said it yourself. Peter’s a hacker. Sometimes he’d be up half the night on his computer, and it always seemed like something bad would go down the next day. He’d have the news on, watching some protest turn violent, and it was like he knew what was going to happen. I’d ask him about it, and he’d just say that the system was rotten and the only way to cleanse it was to get rid of the dead flesh. Pretty creepy stuff.”

  “Is that why you broke up with him?”

  “That, and he was cheating on me with some bitch from the group.”

  “Do you know who she was? Did you get a name? Or did you see them together?”

  “No, I only know that she was a serious whack job. He had bite marks and bruises all over his body after she screwed him. He tried to give me some lame-ass excuse to cover for it like I was an idiot. I told him if that was what he wanted in bed, he wasn’t going to get it from me. So I kicked him to the curb.”

  “When did you last see him?” Abbey asked.

  “Six months ago. We brok
e up, but that wasn’t the end of it. About a week later, I got the crazy feeling that I was being followed. I was pretty sure somebody had been inside my apartment, too. Honestly, if you put me in a chair and made me swear, I think they still have cameras in my place. Sometimes I just get this weird feeling that I’m being watched. So when you showed up and started asking about Peter, I freaked.”

  “I understand.”

  “If you’re trying to expose this group, you better be careful.”

  “Yeah. Believe me, I know, but I really do need to find him. Do you have any idea where he’s living?”

  “He moves around a lot,” Holly told her. “He never leaves forwarding addresses. That should have been a red flag, right? After I dumped him, he moved a couple of weeks later, like he didn’t want me to be able to find him. But I didn’t like the idea of not knowing where he was. Somehow I always figured a day like this might come, when somebody would be looking to track him down. So I hung out in a park where I knew he liked to do his coding, and I spotted him. I followed him when he left. He was in a new place, an apartment on Tenth in Alphabet City. I don’t know whether he’s still there, though.”

  “Thank you, Holly.”

  “I have to shower and catch my train. I’ll get you the address.”

  Holly scrolled through a few screens on her phone to find the exact address for Peter Restak’s apartment. As Abbey keyed the address into her own phone, Holly kicked off her sneakers, then peeled the damp red tank top off her torso and rolled off her shorts and underwear. Abbey’s eyes flicked casually across the woman’s naked body, and she couldn’t help but stop and stare when she spotted a tight round scar in the fleshy part of Holly’s shoulder above her left breast.

  “I’m sorry,” Abbey said. “I don’t mean to pry, but is that a bullet wound?”

  Holly looked down at her chest. “Oh, yeah. I got shot. Let me tell you, when boys compare their scars at the bar, I always win. They hate that.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “I was in the wrong place at the really, really wrong time. Peter’s a car buff, and he wanted to go to this antique car show. It was in a big empty lot across from the Lucky Nickel hotel in Las Vegas. November 3, 2018. That ring any bells?”