Robert Ludlum's™ The Bourne Evolution (Jason Bourne Book 12)

by Brian Freeman

  “Instead, Charles Hackman got to her first,” Jason said.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. Nova told Nash that she’d heard some big operation was planned. She heard a reference to the Lucky Nickel. That’s why he was in town. To prevent whatever was going to happen. But we were all too late.”

  Bourne said nothing more. Abbey put her warm hands on his face. “Jason? Are you okay?”

  “The last eighteen months have been a lie,” he said, trying to process the deception, as well as his own mistakes. “Nothing I believed was true. I blamed Treadstone for killing Nova. I was chasing the wrong enemy.”

  “That’s not true,” she reminded him. “You’ve been after Medusa all along. So was Nova. And now you know where to go to get them.”

  “Las Vegas,” Jason said.

  “We should get out of here,” Benoit interjected. “If we know about this place, it’s likely that Medusa does, too. I’d rather not stay here any longer than we need to.”

  “Agreed.”

  Jason crossed the room to retrieve his gun. Benoit headed for the apartment door from the opposite direction. In a wild accident of timing, they both passed across the line of sight of the window at the exact same moment.

  The glass shattered.

  The nighttime air roared in, along with a cloud of razor-sharp fragments.

  The sniper’s bullet meant for Bourne went into the base of Benoit’s skull, which exploded with blood. As Jason threw himself down and Abbey screamed, Benoit collapsed. He was dead before his body hit the floor.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THE head of Medusa pulled his black roller bag into the men’s room on Concourse C at Dulles International Airport. He was alone inside. Near the entrance, tape had been strung to close off the restroom, and a man in a dark suit with an earpiece watched to make sure no one entered behind him.

  This was Washington, D.C. No one questioned things like that.

  He stood in front of the urinal with his hands on his hips, and as he did, his phone rang in his pocket. He knew who was calling; very few people had this number. He tapped the earbud in his left ear to take the call.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m afraid it’s bad news.”

  “That’s not the report I expect to get from you, Shirl.”

  He was the only man on the planet who called her anything but Miss Shirley without fear of punishment.

  “Yes, sir. I apologize.”

  “Why did you fail?”

  “Treadstone interfered. One of their agents was in the room to confront Bourne. I hoped he would do the work for us and kill them both, but he didn’t. Instead, he crossed my line of fire as I took the shot on Bourne, and I hit him. There was no chance for a follow-up shot. I’m afraid Bourne and the woman are both gone. They’re on the run.”

  “That’s extremely unfortunate.”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll be looking for tech signatures to see where they go next. However, I don’t believe they have any information that would threaten us.”

  “This is Bourne. Don’t be so sure.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve made certain that the evidence in the shooting points to him. Treadstone will still believe he’s working for us.”

  “Anything else, Shirl?”

  “I’ve pulled Peter Restak out of New York, per your request.”

  He could hear in her voice that there was more to the story. “But?”

  “Well, it was a close call. Restak torched his apartment, so there was no evidence left behind, but Bourne was there and nearly captured him. Fortunately, Restak was able to get away. He’s safely on the way to Las Vegas now.”

  “Maybe I was wrong,” the head of Medusa mused. “Maybe I should have had you eliminate Restak, rather than evacuate him.”

  “His skills are valuable in our operations,” Miss Shirley reminded him. “Once we have complete access to the Prescix code, I expect Restak to lead our team in correlating it with the data from the hack. We need him.”

  “That being the case, the risk of his capture was unacceptable. You didn’t move fast enough, Shirl.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Is this going to be a habit with you?”

  “No, sir. I kept Restak in town to help me set up the shoot. That was a mistake. I should have sent him away immediately.”

  “Don’t be coy with me. You kept him in town to have sex with him. Correct?”

  Miss Shirley hesitated on the phone. “Yes, sir.”

  “I indulge your appetites, Shirl, but if this is going to interfere with your work, then we have a problem.”

  “It won’t be a problem.”

  “Are you sure? Are you letting Bourne go free because you want to keep him for yourself? Is that why you missed?”

  “No, sir. That had nothing to do with it. Although I confess I wouldn’t mind getting rid of that little bitch he’s running with.”

  The head of Medusa shook his head. “Stay focused, Shirl. We’re at a critical juncture, the culmination of years of planning. Prescix is nearly ours. That means we’re ready to take the next step against the tech cabal. You need to lead the operation. That’s our priority.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t disappoint me again.”

  “No, sir.”

  He ended the call.

  When he glanced to his right, he saw that another man had taken up a position at the urinal next to him, as planned. The man was in his sixties, tall and morbidly obese, with a crown of white hair, a large bulbous nose, and several chins. He wore a brown suit that hung loosely on him despite his size. When he spoke, his accented voice sounded like he had a mouthful of oatmeal.

  “Miss Shirley?” the man asked.

  “Yes.”

  The man guffawed. “What an interesting woman! I don’t mind telling you, I’d love to see what that one is like in bed.”

  “She’d kill you, Fyodor.”

  “Ah, but what a way to go. Besides, I have more stamina than you think.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  Fyodor shook his hips and unleashed a stream of urine that roared like Niagara Falls. Russian men were oddly proud of their ability to piss. Fyodor Mikhailov was the number two man in the Russian embassy, and as such, he had the diplomatic clearance to travel all over the world. However, his real role was as the head of Russian interference operations mounted against the United States and Europe.

  He was also a disgusting human being, crude and cruel, and the head of Medusa detested him. But for now, Fyodor and the Russians were a means to an end.

  “So what is the update, my friend?” Fyodor asked. “Are we finally going to see a return on our sizable investment in your operations?”

  “Everything is proceeding according to schedule. Prescix will be ours very soon. The government is doing their part, too. The proposed regulatory framework laid out in the Ortiz legislation plays right into our hands.”

  “And the tech cabal?”

  “We expect to move on them in days. At that point, we’ll have everything we want. Psycho-profiling, manufactured news, deepfake videos, online bots customized to an individual’s background. Hackman showed us the extent of what was possible. Soon we’ll be able to manipulate and radicalize people en masse. Social debates. Legislation. Elections. Violence.”

  Fyodor finished his work at the urinal and zipped himself up. “They’ll be so busy hating each other they won’t even notice as we begin reclaiming our lost territories.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Chaos is only the beginning, my friend. It’s not enough to wound the beast. That can make him more dangerous when he recovers. No, we must split him apart, tear him down, and then start rebuilding from the ashes. Civil war. Never forget our goal, my friend. All this violence must lead to civil war. That’s the whole point of the conspiracy.”

  “We’re well on our way.”

  A broad grin broke across Fyodor’s face. “You do good work. I knew it as soon as we met all those years ago. I will share my positive r
eport in Moscow.”

  “Thank you, Fyodor. I’m honored.”

  I can’t wait to let Miss Shirley kill you, you old fool, the head of Medusa thought. The only thing that will rise from the ashes is a new world led by us. No countries. No governments. Just technology. The future is not Russia, Fyodor. The future is Medusa.

  The two men turned around and went to the row of sinks. Fyodor stood in amusement as the head of Medusa carefully used soap and water on his hands. After he was done, the Russian casually stuck out his own unwashed hand to be shaken. It was a reminder of who was still the boss.

  “What about Jason Bourne?” Fyodor asked as they shook hands. “I understand you’ve failed to remove him despite several attempts. Is that a concern?”

  “Don’t worry about Bourne,” the head of Medusa replied. “It’s just a matter of time before we take him down. He’s not a threat to our plans.”

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-SIX

  AFTER driving straight through out of New York for twenty-four hours, Jason and Abbey finally took a break at a motel off I-20 near Amarillo, Texas. They’d stopped only for gas and to visit a safe-deposit box at a bank in D.C., where Jason retrieved cash, a driver’s license and passport under a different name, and another gun. By midnight, they were still twelve hours from Las Vegas, and they needed sleep.

  He got them a room with two beds, close enough to the stairs that he could hear anyone coming their way. He left the window open, letting in warm, sticky air and the buzz of mosquitoes. Neither of them bothered to undress. They simply stretched out on top of the blankets and tried to clear their minds. But an hour later, in the deep darkness, Jason was still awake, and he could tell from the sound of Abbey’s breathing in the other bed that she was awake, too.

  They’d said little on the road. After Benoit’s death, Abbey had stared at the blood and brains on the apartment floor with a kind of numb shock, but after he dragged her away, she’d insisted on staying with him as the hunt for Medusa led to Nevada. For an entire day since then, they’d traded off driving, but they hadn’t really talked, even though there were definitely things to talk about.

  They both felt something happening between them.

  They were both pretending it wasn’t real.

  “I know you’re questioning everything you knew about Nova,” Abbey murmured in the darkness, just loud enough for him to hear.

  He didn’t answer, and she waited a long time before saying anything more.

  “What Benoit told you doesn’t change anything, does it? She still loved you. You loved her.”

  “I did love her,” Jason replied finally. “I suppose on some level, I still do. Beyond that, I’m not sure what’s true anymore. Nova was a good operative. She was more than capable of fooling me into thinking her feelings were real. Even if she did love me on some level, she didn’t trust me. As Benoit said, Treadstone thought I’d turned.”

  “He also said Nova didn’t believe that.”

  “Maybe, but if she was sure I wasn’t part of Medusa, she would have told me what she was doing. I could have helped her. I could have watched her back. Instead, she walked into a trap, and there was nothing I could do to protect her.”

  “It sounds like she was protecting you,” Abbey said.

  “No, she was keeping secrets from me.”

  He listened to her breathing. Abbey was invisible just a few feet away.

  “Jason, what happened to your memory?” she went on carefully, as if tiptoeing into a minefield. “You talk about having no past. You say you don’t remember who you are. What does that mean?”

  He tried to decide what to say to her. He’d known that she would go back to the subject of his past sooner or later. She was a reporter; she asked questions for a living. She needed to know the truth about the people she was with, in order to profile them and study them, like insects in an experiment. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe not every human motive hid something dark.

  He wanted to tell her the truth. He hadn’t felt that desire with anyone in a long time.

  “I was shot in the head during a mission,” he explained. “The injury caused amnesia. I lost everything. I had no identity, no way to explain who I was, the skills I had.”

  “Did your memory come back?” she asked.

  “Only bits and pieces of it. Disconnected images. Eventually, I found out who I was, and people told me the details of my past, but that’s not the same as remembering it. I know about my past the way you know about reading something in a history book. You can memorize the facts. You can look at the pictures. But it may as well have happened to someone else. The man in those photos is a stranger. I spent a long time trying to force myself to remember, but it doesn’t work that way. And what’s the point? The person I was no longer exists. I’m Jason Bourne. I’m the man that Treadstone created. That’s who I am. That other identity, the one I started my life with, isn’t real to me anymore.”

  Abbey was silent.

  He heard the rustle of blankets on the other bed. The floor in the old motel creaked as she stood up, but she was as dark as a ghost. Telltale sounds gave her away. The noise of clothes being removed, the rattle of a zipper. The springs of the bed he was in squealed as she joined him there. She molded herself against him, and by instinct, he put his arm around her. Her face was on his shoulder, her breath on his neck. He moved his hand down her body and felt nothing but bare skin. She was naked.

  “You also said you don’t really know who I am,” Abbey whispered.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Was that true, or was that a lie? Because I know you’re like Nova. You’re more than capable of fooling me into thinking that your feelings are real.”

  “It’s true,” Jason told her. “I want to know who you are.”

  Abbey took a slow, deep breath.

  “Well. Let’s see. You said I seem to be estranged from my father. You’re right. I love him, but I don’t respect him. I don’t even particularly like him. Before my mother got sick, he was cheating on her. She knew about it. I know that him betraying her didn’t give her cancer, but on some level, I can’t help but think it took the fight out of her. He was supposed to be the love of her life, and his love turned out to be hollow. I can’t forgive him for that.”

  “What about Michel?” Jason asked. “Why did it not work out with him? Did he remind you of your father too much?”

  She gave a quiet laugh. “You’re good. Yes, that was probably part of it. Life with Michel looked an awful lot like the life my parents had, and look how that turned out. That’s probably unfair, but it’s how I felt. Besides, I wanted something else out of life.”

  “What?”

  “If I figure it out, I’ll let you know,” Abbey replied.

  “You obviously don’t care about getting a big job,” Jason went on. “You had a shot at top magazines, and you turned them down. And yet you don’t strike me as someone who’s afraid of risks.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You won’t quit your job, but you hate standing still. You stay in Quebec, but you don’t do anything at home except sleep.”

  “Maybe I like being an enigma.”

  “Or maybe you’re like a skydiver,” Jason said.

  “How so?”

  “You love the idea of jumping. You can’t wait to feel that freedom as you fall. You’re excited by the thrill of cheating death. You can’t believe there’s anything more boring than a life spent on the ground, and you’re sure that once you take that first step, it’s going to be the most incredible experience ever.”

  “But?” she asked.

  “But that first step is scary.”

  Abbey turned his head toward her and found his mouth in the darkness. As they kissed, her hands worked on his clothes, undressing him quickly and urgently. He helped her, shrugging off his shirt, kicking off his pants. She found the skin of his chest, and her fingertips traced over old wounds and scars like an explorer. Her lips were on his face, his shoulders,
his neck. When he was naked, like her, she took his hand and pulled him on top of her, and her body rose up to meet him and guide him inside her.

  “First steps are always scary,” she whispered.

  *

  NASH Rollins pulled open the rear door of the stretch limousine parked in front of the New York apartment building where they’d found Benoit’s body. He looked both ways up and down the street, then climbed into the back and shut the door behind him. He shifted painfully in the seat and folded up his walking cane. Through the smoked windows, he saw the flashing lights of a dozen police cars.

  “Good evening, Nash,” Miles Priest said.

  “Hello, Miles.”

  The CEO’s hangdog face looked longer and sadder than usual. “You have my sympathy about Benoit. He was a good man.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “Bourne shot him. I should have seen it coming. He knew we’d see the video feed from the safe house, knew we’d send someone after him. He staked out an apartment across the street and waited for Benoit. He took him out through the window. This is war. Bourne’s declared war against us. Which means Medusa has, too.”

  Rollins heard himself spitting out the words. He’d actually questioned his judgment about Bourne’s innocence, but Cain had now erased those doubts for good. Rollins’s anger was like a fire, but he had to purge his emotions. He wanted nothing in his brain now but cold calculations.

  “Just to be clear, are we quite sure it was Bourne?” Priest asked.

  “He left a fingerprint on the sniper rifle.”

  “That seems rather careless of him.”

  “It wasn’t careless,” Rollins snapped. “It was deliberate. He was sending me and Shaw a message. He wants us to know that he was the one who killed Benoit. Just like he did with Congresswoman Ortiz.”

  “He fooled all of us, Nash. Scott convinced me that Bourne was the right man for the job. We made a mistake.”