The Bourne Evolution

by Brian Freeman

  Jason choked out her name again. “Nova!”

  The man carrying her turned around. Their eyes met. Jason’s grief erupted into fury, and his heartbeat took off like a rocket. He knew that man. He knew that face; he’d spent days, weeks with him around the world. An agent like him. A killer.

  Benoit.

  Treadstone was here.

  Treadstone was taking away the woman he loved. She was dead, and they were stealing her body. More than that, he knew—he knew beyond any doubt in his mind—that the agency had killed her.

  They’d done this. Whoever was in the sniper’s lair was Treadstone.

  Bourne took off after Benoit, but two other men collided with him. They all fell to the ground, crushed as people stampeded over them to escape. His head struck the concrete hard. His teeth clamped shut. He fought his way back to his feet, but by the time he did, Benoit was gone. Nova was gone.

  He headed for the street. A car would be there, ready to whisk the body from the scene. He ran, shoving his way through the crowd, pushing toward the fence bordering the lot. At the open gates, he saw people flooding out of the festival grounds, escaping in every direction. But he saw a car, too, emerging from the underground parking lot of the Lucky Nickel.

  There was Benoit. And Nova.

  The rear door of the sedan flew open. Benoit shoved the lifeless body inside and followed. Jason ran along the fence, trying to keep the car in sight as it inched through a stream of people escaping from the festival. It couldn’t go fast; it couldn’t go far. He made it to the gate, where he wasn’t even fifty yards away. He closed on the car, shouting Nova’s name, but then a gap opened up in the crowd, and the sedan accelerated. Bourne thrust out a hand for the door, but the car shot forward, disappearing toward the freeway. All he could do was stand there and watch his life taken away from him.

  Bourne stared up at the Lucky Nickel. The shooting was over. A man with a rifle was dead on the floor. The broken hotel window was quiet. He knew the cover-up would happen next. The evidence would be erased. He needed to get inside, needed to see the man who had done this.

  Would he recognize him?

  Would he know the assassin?

  Jason ran for the Lucky Nickel. He jumped the closest fence and dashed across railroad tracks toward the rear of the hotel. Police cars already had the building sealed, the front and back blocked off by dozens of emergency vehicles. There was nowhere to go. He could see frightened guests huddled in the parking lot; he could see people flooding from the hotel doors. His eyes went from face to face, watching them, memorizing them.

  An instinct. A reflex.

  Then he saw a man he knew. A window in a sedan in the hotel parking lot went down, and Bourne saw who was behind the wheel. Nash Rollins.

  Treadstone.

  Nash saw him, too. The man’s face was hard, devoid of any emotion as he looked back at Bourne.

  Then the window shut, and the car sped away.

  * * *

  —

  JASON stood in the vacant lot with Abbey. They were the only ones here. The scene of the massacre had been their first stop as they drove into the city. It was a shrine now, where strangers stopped and left flowers. From where they were, he could see the fifteenth-floor suite in the Lucky Nickel where Charles Hackman had built his sniper’s lair. Memories of that day jolted through him like bolts of lightning. He could still close his eyes and see every face. The living and the dead.

  Abbey followed the path of his eyes. “Sixty-six people. It’s unimaginable.”

  Jason shook his head. “Sixty-seven. They never counted Nova. She was never on the lists of the dead.”

  “Do you believe Benoit?” she asked. “Do you think Nova was working undercover to infiltrate Medusa?”

  “I do.”

  “Is that why she was killed?”

  Bourne nodded. “It has to be. She got inside the organization, but somehow they figured out she was a spy. So they executed her. Now we just have to hope she left some clues behind. Something to point us in the right direction.”

  “Wouldn’t Treadstone already have searched her place?” Abbey asked.

  “I’m sure they did.”

  “So what do you hope to find?”

  “Something they missed,” Jason replied. He turned away from the Lucky Nickel and stared south, toward the Stratosphere and the gleaming hotels of the Strip. “We’re closer to the heart of the conspiracy than we’ve ever been before. Medusa is here in Las Vegas. We need to find them.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THEY located Nova’s house on a dusty open lot south of the McCarran airport. It was a stucco rambler with a red clay roof. Some of the other nearby tracts had been snapped up and converted into luxury estates, but this house dated to the old days in Las Vegas. The windows had been boarded up and painted with No Trespassing signs. Garbage filled the yard, which was nothing but a square patch of flat, rocky dirt with a scattering of mesquite bushes and drooping palm trees. A mesh fence surrounded the entire lot.

  Jason drove two blocks past the house and parked the Land Rover where it wouldn’t be seen, and then they walked back along the deserted street. He checked the area for surveillance and didn’t see any, but he also spotted tire tracks in the dirt. They weren’t the first to investigate here.

  “You think this was where Nova was based?” Abbey asked.

  Bourne pushed aside a section of the fence so they could squeeze inside. “Benoit said she bought a place near the airport. This house was purchased four months before Nova was killed, and the property tax records show the owner as Felicity Brand. That’s an alias she used on one of the missions we did together.”

  “But you didn’t know about the house?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  Jason led them to the front door, which hung ajar on one of its hinges. A lizard ran across his dirty boot. The air inside was hot and stale, and the boarded-over windows left the interior dark. The furniture had all been removed, either taken by Treadstone or hauled away by thieves. Nothing was left to remind him of Nova. What was still here—some old blankets, a shopping cart, empty food bags—had obviously been left by squatters looking for a place to spend the night.

  He turned on a flashlight, which caused another scattering of lizards. A few wasps clung to the bare walls. He did an up-and-down survey of the hardwood floor with his light. Many of the beams had splintered in the heat.

  “What are you looking for?” Abbey asked.

  “Hiding places.”

  Jason paced slowly, tapping floor panels with his boot, looking for the hollow reverberation of a storage area. He found nothing. When he was done in the living room, he repeated the process in the dining room and then in each of the house’s bedrooms. In the kitchen, he pushed aside the abandoned refrigerator, disturbing a scorpion. He checked the toilet tanks in the bathrooms and found only dank brown water. There were no secret areas.

  And yet he knew Nova. She would have kept a place to hide the information she was gathering.

  “Let’s check the garage,” he said.

  They took a narrow hallway to the musty single-stall garage. Wooden shelves had been assembled on one wall, but they’d collapsed, spilling a few paint cans. When he turned his flashlight to the floor, he saw interlocking rigid tiles, an unusual upgrade in what was otherwise a downscale house. A dusting of plaster had gathered on the tiles. He saw overlapping footprints.

  Jason got on his hands and knees and began pushing the tiles with his fingers. Abbey saw what he was doing and got on the floor next to him and did the same thing. Together, they checked every tile. When they reached the center of the garage, where a vehicle would normally be parked, Abbey murmured, “Jason, look at this.”

  He shined the flashlight where she was pointing and saw that two tiles were loose, as if they’d been removed and replaced many times. He hand
ed the flashlight to Abbey and then pried back the tiles, revealing the concrete floor underneath. The light showed a square metal panel that had been installed in the concrete, along with hinges on one side and a circular ring on the other that could be used to lift the panel from the floor.

  Abbey kept the light aimed at the floor as he squeezed his finger into the ring and pulled back the metal cover.

  As he did, Abbey said, “That’s strange.”

  “What?”

  “A red light just went on down there.” An instant later, she continued: “Jason, that’s a camera!”

  Jason dropped the metal cover. He got to his feet and pulled Abbey with him. “We need to get out of here. They’re coming.”

  He avoided the front door and instead led Abbey out the back. The two of them hurried across the rocky yard, which was littered with burnt wooden posts, old tools, dried palm fronds, and one rusted hubcap. When they reached the fence at the back of the lot, he separated the mesh and pushed Abbey through ahead of him. There was a low stone wall marking the neighboring property, and he helped Abbey over the top and then climbed after her. On the other side, they waited.

  “Who’s coming?” she whispered.

  “Either Treadstone or Medusa. That was a motion-sensitive camera. Somebody just got an alert that there was movement in the house.”

  “So they know we’re in Las Vegas?” Abbey asked.

  “Hopefully the flashlight beam blocked our faces.”

  Not far away, they heard the rumble of a car moving fast. Whoever was watching the house had wasted no time. Bourne peered over the edge of the stone wall and saw a brown SUV screech to a stop on the empty street a hundred yards away. Two men got out, one tall, one short, both dressed in the yellow reflective uniforms of utility workers. A ruse. He was sure they were both armed. The men squeezed through the fence and tramped across the yard, where the structure of the house hid them.

  “Treadstone?” Abbey murmured.

  Jason shook his head. “No. These guys are hired muscle, not pros. That probably means Medusa. If we were still inside, we’d either be dead, or they’d be taking us out to be tortured and questioned in the desert. And then killed.”

  He waited. A few minutes later, both men returned outside. They toured the perimeter of the house, and Jason ducked below the wall as the two men hiked to the rear of the yard, not more than ten feet away. He heard them near the fence, and the one man talked on the phone in an irritated voice.

  “Nah, nobody’s in the house. They split. I’m telling you, we were here in like ninety seconds. If they spotted the camera, they booked it out of here. We can hang around if you want, but they ain’t coming back.”

  There was a long stretch of silence, and then Jason heard: “All right, I’ll send someone to watch the house overnight. If they show up again, we’ll get them.”

  Bourne heard the crunch of footsteps as the two men headed back to the SUV. He checked over the top of the wall and saw the truck driving away. He waited another ten minutes to make sure the men weren’t planning to return, and then he took Abbey’s hand and led them back over the wall and out of hiding.

  “So Medusa cleaned out the house and set a trap,” Abbey said.

  Jason nodded, but he didn’t say anything. He stared at the debris littering the backyard.

  “What now?” she went on. “Even if Nova left something, Medusa already found it.”

  He still didn’t answer.

  “Jason?”

  He walked to the mesh fence and pushed inside the yard again. Abbey followed him. He made his way to the old hubcap that was pressed into the dusty soil like a sundial. The monsoons and blistering summer sun had chewed away at the metal and left it brittle and rusted, but he could still make out the bow-tie Chevrolet logo.

  “What is it?” Abbey asked.

  “That’s a Nova hubcap,” Jason said.

  “Do you think that’s a coincidence?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He looked around the yard and saw a hand trowel. He didn’t think it had been left there by accident. He grabbed the trowel and dug it into the earth to pry away the hubcap, and then he stabbed at the rocky soil with the pointed edge of the spade. He didn’t have to go far. An inch down, the trowel scratched against something hard, and when he cleared more dirt, he saw the molded shell of a fireproof box with a combination lock. Digging his fingers down into the earth on both sides, he worked the box out of the ground.

  “I’ll be damned,” Abbey said.

  “Come on, let’s get back to the car. I don’t want us staying in the open.”

  Jason carried the safe under his arm, and they returned to the street. He kept an eye on the intersections to make sure that no one had been sent to watch the house. They walked two blocks back to the car, and he turned on the engine and opened the windows. It would have been safer to go elsewhere, but he didn’t want to wait to see what was inside the box.

  “Do you know the combination?” Abbey asked.

  “I hope it’s something she’d expect me to know. If she really trusted me.” He keyed in several different combinations, and on the fourth try, he heard the lock unlatch.

  “Your birthday?” Abbey said with a smile.

  “She knows that wouldn’t mean anything to me. She used the date we met. In reverse order, just to be difficult.”

  He put both hands on the lid of the security box.

  “It wouldn’t be booby-trapped, would it?” Abbey asked. He could tell that she was only half joking.

  “If it is, we’ll never know.”

  “Optimist,” she said.

  He opened the safe. Seeing the meager contents, he was disappointed. He wasn’t sure what he expected, but he was hoping that something inside would remind him of Nova. She could have left behind hidden fragments of who she was. Passports. Driver’s licenses. Anything to let him see her again. But there was nothing like that. In fact, there was no useful material inside for an intelligence agent at all, no identifications, no cash, no gun. The only thing in the box was a thick manila folder.

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I was expecting a getaway box. You keep things in it you’d need if you have to run.”

  “Do you have something like that?” Abbey asked.

  “Ten of them,” Bourne said. “They’re in different cities, different countries. You never know when you’ll need them. But this is something else.”

  “What’s in the folder?”

  He removed the folder from the box and opened it so they could both study the contents. The first thing he saw was a surveillance photo of a man getting into a beat-up Cutlass. He didn’t recognize the location, but it was in the desert, somewhere remote, with craggy hills in the background. The man himself was tall and slightly stooped, in his fifties, with an unruly mop of gray hair. He wore loose jeans and a shirt and string tie.

  “That’s Charles Hackman,” Abbey said.

  Jason dug further into the folder. Everything he found was related to Hackman. Phone records, credit card statements, printouts from his social media pages. Nova had compiled a complete dossier on the Lucky Nickel shooter.

  “This makes no sense,” Abbey said. “Are you sure it was Nova who left this? Could it have been someone else?”

  He shook his head. “This is her work.”

  “But she died in the shooting,” Abbey pointed out. “How could she have gathered information about Hackman? Until November 3, he was a complete nobody. He came out of nowhere and didn’t leave any clues behind.”

  Jason pointed at the computer date on the bottom of the printouts. October 28.

  “Nova was doing research on Hackman before the massacre,” Bourne said. “Somehow, she already knew who this guy was before anyone else did. She knew he was being groomed for something.”
>
  TWENTY-NINE

  ABBEY knocked on the door of Sylvia Hackman’s apartment in the seamy heart of North Las Vegas. There were bars on her windows, and the neighborhood around her was ground zero for gang activity in the valley. This wasn’t a place anyone chose to live unless they couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. When Abbey had first met Charles Hackman’s wife, the woman had owned an upscale house in Summerlin, but money had obviously grown tight after her husband became a notorious killer.

  The woman answered the door from behind a chain. Her eyes were suspicious. “What do you want?”

  “Mrs. Hackman, my name is Abbey Laurent. I visited you once before when I was working on an article last year.”

  “I remember. I told you back then that I don’t talk to reporters.”

  “Yes, I understand that, but I have some new information to share with you. Maybe if we put our heads together, we can get some answers.”

  “I don’t care about answers,” Sylvia snapped.

  “Don’t you want to know what really happened to your husband?”

  “I already know. I was married to a monster. He killed all those people. He ruined my life. End of story.”

  Sylvia began to close the door.

  “I can pay,” Abbey went on quickly. “Five hundred dollars. Just to talk. It looks to me like you could use the money.”

  The woman hesitated. “Off the record? You leave me out of it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Let me see the cash.”

  Abbey dug in her pocket for a wad of folded bills and pushed it through the crack in the door. Sylvia Hackman took it, undid the chain, and opened the door. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes.”

  The woman led Abbey into the small apartment, which was neat as a pin but sparsely furnished. The television was on, and she switched it off using a remote. She took a seat on a worn sofa near the barred windows, next to a fat orange cat that was sound asleep. Abbey pulled a wooden chair from the kitchenette and sat near her. She glanced around the apartment and saw nothing personal here. No family photographs. Nothing from the woman’s past.