The Bourne Evolution

by Brian Freeman

  Abbey felt a wave of nausea and had to sit down on the bench. “You were there when Charles Hackman killed all those people.”

  Holly rubbed the scar like it was some kind of charm. “Yeah. I was there. Believe me, I try to forget, but it’s tattooed on my brain. If that bullet had gone in another three inches lower, Hackman would have killed me, too.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  HACKMAN?” Bourne asked Abbey when they met up at an outdoor table across from the Flatiron Building. “Holly d’Angelo was one of the people who got shot by Charles Hackman in Las Vegas?”

  “Yes. And here’s the thing. Peter Restak was in the crowd, too. Holly said it was his idea to go to the car show.”

  Jason closed his eyes. He was back there again, lost in the chaos, hearing the cracks of the rifle and seeing people fall. “Restak knew the shooting was about to go down. All this time, I’ve thought Nova was killed by my agency, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe Medusa killed Nova. But why? And damn it, I saw one of my own people carrying away her body!”

  “Jason, I know you said it wasn’t safe to tell me the name of your agency, but I want to know anyway. Please.”

  Bourne stared at the young woman in front of him. A woman he liked. A woman he was attracted to. He thought about the women he’d loved in his past lives. Marie. Nova. They’d died because of him. It was an inevitable cycle, repeated over and over. He got close to a woman, he pulled her into his world, and she paid the price. They were the sacrifices for his sins. He didn’t want that fate for Abbey Laurent.

  “It’s my choice, Jason,” she went on, as if she could feel his reluctance. “I know the risks.”

  He felt as if he were signing her death warrant by saying the word. “Treadstone.”

  “You worked for them?”

  “They trained me. They made me who I am. They made all of us that way, custom-designed to be killers. For a long time, I believed in them, even when everyone in Washington was trying to shut them down. I believed in what I was doing. And then they murdered Nova. Or at least, that’s what I thought happened. Now I’m not sure. I need to get to Peter Restak and find out what he knows. If he was in Las Vegas during the shooting, he has the answers.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Abbey said.

  “That’s not a good idea. I should go alone.”

  “Jason, I told you, I’m in.”

  He wanted to argue with her. He wanted to tell her that it wasn’t safe. He also knew that if he found Restak, he would have to break the man to get him to talk. Torture worked faster on some people than others, but with a Medusa operative, Bourne was certain he’d have to inflict excruciating pain before the man cracked.

  He didn’t want Abbey to see that. He didn’t want her to see that he was capable of those things, but she already knew who he was.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go find him.”

  They crossed the sidewalk park to Fifth Avenue and hailed a cab, and Abbey gave the driver the address in Alphabet City for Peter Restak. The early evening traffic crawled as they headed east across town. Horns blared around them as backed-up vehicles stalled at the lights, and pedestrians streamed around the cars across the intersections. When they reached Second Avenue, they made faster progress until they got to the East Village. There, only a few blocks from Restak’s apartment, traffic ground to a standstill. The taxi driver threw up his arms in disgust.

  Not far away, Jason heard sirens, and he made a snap decision.

  “We’re getting out here,” he told the driver suddenly, pushing cash through the slot. He took Abbey’s arm and dragged her onto the sidewalk. They were near the playgrounds and basketball courts of Tompkins Square Park.

  “What’s going on?” Abbey asked. “Why get out here?”

  “Don’t you smell it?”

  Abbey turned her face up, inhaling the air. Her mouth bent into a frown. “Smoke.”

  “There’s a fire close by,” he said.

  “That could be a coincidence.”

  Bourne shook his head. “It’s not.”

  He took Abbey’s hand as they hurried down the next long block, past a lineup of cars and frustrated drivers. A few winter trees on the sidewalks interrupted the concrete. As they got closer to the address where Restak lived, the smell of smoke intensified, and they could see a crowd of gawkers gathered at the intersection. Three fire trucks blocked the traffic, and torrents of water streamed from fire hoses. Over the heads of the people on the street, Jason could see black smoke billowing from a top-floor window in a redbrick building on the corner.

  He checked the street number on the nearest doorway. “The fire is in Restak’s building. I’m willing to bet it’s his apartment. They’re erasing the evidence.”

  “With him in it?” Abbey asked.

  “Good question.”

  They pushed through the crowd. When they got to the front, they could see that the firefighters hadn’t been able to get the blaze under control. Flames shot through a broken window on the other wall of the building. Anything that Peter Restak had left behind was already incinerated.

  Medusa was still one step ahead of them.

  Abbey shook her head in frustration. “Are we done? Do we leave?”

  “Not yet.” Jason’s stare went from face to face, studying the people watching the fire on the three corners surrounding the building. “Sometimes an arsonist likes to stay behind to make sure everything goes as planned.”

  He saw no one suspicious in the crowd. Even so, his senses told him to linger.

  Always trust what your instincts tell you. Your brain sees clues that you don’t.

  Treadstone.

  He led Abbey across the street behind the fire trucks. They could feel the heat of the fire blowing on their skin. More sirens whined in the distance, and overlapping emergency radios squawked around them. Police officers kept the crowd squeezed behind a makeshift barrier. Jason’s eyes tried to penetrate the sea of people, all of them moving, talking, blocking each other, making it nearly impossible to spot one single individual among all the others.

  He saw something. But what?

  There!

  Halfway down the block, a cloud of vapor puffed from the recessed frame of a garage entrance, indicating that someone was hiding there, observing the fire. As Jason watched, the man stepped out far enough to offer a fleeting glimpse of his profile.

  A long nose. A blond beard spreading over his neck and cheek like a weed.

  “Restak,” Jason said. Then, as he observed the doorway, the Medusa operative stepped out of the recess, and Jason could see his head swinging their way. “Turn around,” he hissed to Abbey. “Fast!”

  The two of them spun, letting the rubberneckers in the crowd fill in around them. If Restak looked, all he would see were their backs among dozens of other people on the sidewalk. Jason counted slowly in his head, giving the man time to assess his surroundings and make sure he was safe. One, two, three . . .

  When Jason got to twenty, he twisted around and glanced down the street. Restak was walking east on Tenth, heading toward the river. He wore baggy black jeans and a blue-striped Baja poncho with the hood pulled up. Another vapor cloud trailed behind him.

  “Wait here,” Jason told Abbey.

  He took off after Restak. When he was past the fire, he crossed to the opposite side to make his pursuit less noticeable. Restak walked casually, seemingly unconcerned that he was being followed. The man reached Avenue D, where he was stopped by a red light. A group of kids played basketball in a fenced court near the corner, their voices loud. Bourne stopped, too, feeling exposed on a stretch of naked wall that offered no hiding place. Restak didn’t look back. He had his vape pen in his hand and looked pleased with himself.

  The fire had done its work. He was free.

  Then one of the kids on the court missed the basketball as it was passed to him, a
nd the ball slammed into the fence with a loud clang. Startled, Restak dropped his vape pen on the sidewalk. He bent down to retrieve it, and as he picked it up, his gaze swept across the street and settled on Bourne.

  Restak’s eyes widened in shock. Instantly, the Medusa hacker shot across Avenue D just as the light changed. Bourne took off, too, but he lost time dodging three cars that bolted through the red light. When he finally made it across the street, Restak already had a head start. The man raced east on Tenth past a series of drab brown apartment towers.

  Jason ran, too. Restak looked back, spotting him, his eyes wild with fear. They ran in tandem for one more block, and Jason slowly closed the gap. Restak was about thirty feet away when the street dead-ended at the FDR, but the man didn’t even break stride as he leaped over the concrete barrier into the middle of the parkway. Horns wailed, and brakes squealed. Restak rolled over the hood of one car, and an SUV in the next lane swerved to avoid him, crashing at high speed into a truck in the left lane. The accident triggered a chain reaction as vehicles banged into each other with screeches of metal, and one car flew onto its side as the driver overcorrected.

  Bourne stopped short at the parkway, unable to cross. The lanes in front of him were littered with crashes. Ahead of him, Restak jumped the barrier into the northbound lanes and then did a running leap to a wrought-iron fence and threw his body into the East River Park. Not slowing down, he took off toward the water.

  Jason ran up a ramp to the pedestrian overpass. When he made it to the park, he didn’t see Restak. He cursed and took off toward the river, but he made it all the way to the wide jogging path by the water and didn’t see the Medusa operative anywhere. He stopped to catch his breath and slapped the railing over the East River in frustration.

  Runners came and went in both directions in the waning light of dusk. Not far away, the Williamsburg Bridge arched across the water. He walked another hundred yards north, looking for someone hiding in the trees, but the Medusa operative had vanished.

  Peter Restak was gone.

  * * *

  —

  IT was dark by the time Jason and Abbey made it back to the safe house. They stopped at a diner for dinner, but neither one of them said anything to the other. They rode the elevator in silence, too. It was only when they got to the apartment door that Abbey said what was on both of their minds.

  “What now? What do we do?”

  Jason shrugged. “I’m not sure. I don’t have a plan yet.”

  “Can you talk to your friend Scott again?”

  “No, he made it clear that his help was a one-time thing. I’m on my own.”

  “You mean we.”

  “No. I don’t. You need to go back to Canada. I have no more leads, and the only thing you’re going to do by staying with me is put yourself at greater risk. You helped me, Abbey. You helped me a lot. But there’s nothing more for you to do now.”

  She brushed her bangs from her eyes. “Is that what you really want? For me to go?”

  He said the one thing he shouldn’t say. The one thing that made no sense. “It’s not what I want. No. But it’s the way it has to be.”

  Abbey shook her head. “I don’t care. I’m staying.”

  Jason used the key to open the apartment door. He left the lights off. The curtains at the window looking out over Gramercy Park were open, letting in the glow of the city. He realized he was tired. Bone-tired. Days of pain had caught up to him. His body was a mess of bruises. He could feel a throbbing where he’d been shot, and his headache was back. His shoulder felt numb where the woman in the Guy Fawkes mask had struck him with the lead pipe. He wanted to sleep for days, but he knew he couldn’t.

  In another hour, they’d leave the city. They’d drive all night.

  To go where? He didn’t know.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” Jason said, hearing the weariness in his own voice. “Keep the lights off. We need to go soon.”

  He went to the bedroom and pushed the door partly closed and stripped off his clothes. In the shower, he scraped off the dirt and then stood under the rainfall showerhead with his eyes closed. The hot water revived him, and some of his muscles relaxed. He felt better when he returned to the bedroom and dressed in fresh clothes. Through the crack of the door, he saw only darkness in the other room.

  “You can shower, too, if you want,” Jason called to Abbey.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Abbey?”

  He still heard only silence from the living room.

  Jason went to the bed and took his gun in his hand. He pointed it straight ahead as he crept to the door. He listened carefully and heard a low disturbance on the other side. Someone crying softly. Breath coming in ragged bursts.

  “Abbey?” he called one more time. “I’m coming out.”

  Bourne slowly opened the door into the semidarkness of the living room, leading with the gun.

  “Jason!” Abbey said, her voice choked with tears.

  He could see her near the front door, bathed in the bright city glow through the window. Her eyes pleaded with him. She was on her knees, her hands laced together on top of her black hair.

  A Treadstone agent stood behind her.

  He held two guns, both with suppressors. One was aimed across the apartment at Bourne. The other was jammed into the back of Abbey’s head.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  BENOIT,” Jason said. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Hello, Bourne.”

  “The woman’s not part of this. It’s me you want. Let her walk away, and as soon as she’s free, I’ll lower my weapon. You can take me out. Quick. Clean. I’m a man of my word, you know that.”

  “Jason, no!” Abbey shouted from the floor.

  Benoit’s arms were rock-solid. No flutter or hesitation. His dark eyes were unblinking. “Unfortunately, my orders are for both of you.”

  “So lie to Nash. Tell him Abbey wasn’t here.”

  “I wish that was possible, but I’m a man of my word, too.”

  Bourne nodded. “That’s true.”

  Jason knew this man well. They’d been in the field together many times. They’d saved each other’s lives more than once. He’d met Benoit when the man was still a French agent, and the two of them had gathered intelligence on a terror cell from a stone farmhouse in the rural countryside outside Lyon. The stakeout had been blown by the barking of a stray dog, and Bourne had found himself in the midst of a midnight firefight while Benoit was half a mile away conducting night-vision surveillance. Rushing back in the middle of the assault, Benoit could have chosen to stay out of it, rather than intervene to rescue an operative from a different country. Instead, Benoit saved Bourne and took gunshots in the arm, hip, and leg that nearly killed him.

  That was the first time they’d been together.

  The last time he’d seen Benoit was under very different circumstances.

  Benoit was the agent who’d carried away the body of Nova from the killing ground in Las Vegas. The sixty-seventh victim, never acknowledged.

  Shoot him!

  A lust for revenge screamed in Bourne’s head. All he could see was Nova draped over Benoit’s shoulder, her eyes closed, blood on her face, her long hair swinging as this man took her away. Ever since that moment, he’d wanted the opportunity to come face-to-face with Benoit again, and now here he was.

  If Bourne pulled the trigger, all three of them would die in an eruption of gunfire. Jason wouldn’t miss; neither would Benoit. But Bourne knew that he and Abbey were going to die anyway.

  Another woman in his life had been sentenced to death.

  “Kill me if you want,” Benoit said, reading the look on Jason’s face. “That won’t change anything.”

  “I should kill you. You deserve to die.”

  “We’re all going to hell for the lives we’ve led, Bourne.”
/>
  “Maybe so, but not Nova. She was out. She wasn’t a threat to anyone. But Nash and the director couldn’t let her go. So you murdered her.”

  “I didn’t shoot Nova. Charles Hackman did that.”

  “Does it matter? Hackman was Treadstone, wasn’t he? Isn’t that why the word came down to whitewash his past? You couldn’t let the public find out that the worst mass shooter in history was actually one of our own intelligence assets.”

  “Hackman was never Treadstone,” Benoit snapped. “He was Medusa. Like you, Cain! All those people died because you put your lover in the firing line. Nash thinks you ordered the hit yourself. Is that true? Did you want her dead? Were you afraid she suspected who you really were?”

  “You’re a liar! What’s going on, Benoit? Are you taping this? Does Director Shaw want a recording he can play to the congressional oversight committee? You were there. You were in Las Vegas. Am I supposed to believe that’s a coincidence? You just happened to be in the crowd when Nova was shot? Nash just happened to be waiting outside the hotel where the shooter was holed up?”

  Benoit shook his head. “I admire the act, but you’re smarter than that, Bourne. You know exactly why Nash and I were in Las Vegas.”

  “Really? Tell me.”

  “We were watching you.”

  Bourne felt the words like a blow to his chest. “What?”

  “That’s right. Look, we all knew Treadstone was dying. The director was tucked away in some basement office, and our budgets were bleeding away. That meant we had a lot of agents out there who were prime targets for recruitment by Medusa. We didn’t know who to trust and who was a traitor. We still don’t. But let’s just say your psychological history made Nash doubt you. I didn’t want to believe it, and neither did Nova. But Nash didn’t think we could take any chances. That’s why I was there, to watch you, to observe you, to follow you, to see if you’d been turned.”