The Bourne Evolution

by Brian Freeman

  “They know you’re the face of Big Tech,” Scott replied. “They need to take you down.”

  “Sir.”

  The voice of the helicopter pilot crackled over both of their headsets, interrupting them.

  “What is it, Tom?” Priest asked impatiently. “Why aren’t we heading for the helipad?”

  “There’s a problem on the island.”

  “What problem?”

  They felt the helicopter slow sharply, and the pilot increased altitude, climbing vertically so that the island pier and beach came into view below them. At first, Priest didn’t understand what he was seeing, but as the picture became clear, he sucked in his breath with a distraught hiss. “Jesus. Are those bodies?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Go lower! Let me see!”

  “Negative, sir. We can’t take the risk.”

  Scott found a pair of binoculars in one of the compartments of the helicopter. He used them to peer out the window. “Holy shit. There’s blood everywhere, Miles. I count six of the cabal, and they appear to be dead. That includes Tyler Wall.”

  “Medusa! It’s a massacre!”

  “If we hadn’t been late, we’d be dead, too,” Scott murmured.

  “Tom, get us out of here!” Priest roared.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Before the helicopter could move, Priest stared down at the appalling carnage on the beach again. He barked into the microphone. “Wait a minute, wait, hold your position. What’s that?”

  Immediately below the helicopter, Priest saw a man dressed in black break from the cover of the trees. The man ran across the sand toward the nearest body, and then his face tilted skyward to stare at them as they hovered over the island. From their altitude, he was little more than a stick figure on the beach.

  “Who is that?” Priest asked.

  Scott focused the binoculars again. When he spoke, his voice had a dark cast. “It’s Bourne, Miles. It’s Jason Bourne.”

  FORTY

  BOURNE expected gunfire from the silver helicopter. Instead, seconds later, he watched it veer away from the island and head back across the ocean.

  When it was gone, he kept his gun trained on the yacht, anticipating a new assault. But the boat looked dark and quiet against the huge expanse of water. He made his way through the murder scene on the beach and found no survivors. The bodies of the CEOs lay sprawled near the trees, where they’d been cut down as they tried to run. Shadows lengthened over the corpses like funeral shrouds.

  The assassins had already moved inland. He saw tire tracks in the sand, leading to a winding road that headed up the slope of the island. He sprinted in pursuit around a series of tight curves, his arms and legs pumping furiously. Half a mile later, he stopped as he spotted two Jeeps parked at an angle, blocking the road ahead of him. He waited, observing the scene, then silently moved closer.

  Behind the Jeeps, Miles Priest’s lavish estate rose above the Caribbean jungle. It was five stories high, painted in sea foam green, with airy balconies on every level to take advantage of the ocean breezes. The estate was surrounded by a high-tech security wall constructed of nine-foot steel pillars built side by side to let the light in but keep intruders out. Cameras topped the spiked pillars at regular intervals, providing a complete surveillance picture inside and out. A high two-paneled gate stretched across the entrance road. Bourne wasn’t sure how Medusa planned to invade the estate or how they expected to remain unseen.

  He moved off the road into the trees and picked his way toward the gate. When he was close, he focused binoculars on the interior grounds. The entire estate had been possessed by an eerie quiet, as complete as a ghost town. Nothing moved. The walking trails and swimming pools were empty. But as he examined the upper balconies, he saw a red pinpoint light come and go. The guards were armed and waiting, with telescopic sights surveying the area inside the wall.

  The tech cabal wouldn’t go down without a fight, but they were training their guns on the main gate, and Medusa wasn’t there. Miss Shirley and her team had vanished.

  Where were they?

  Bourne followed the estate wall. He navigated the dense jungle, picking apart the branches. Every few steps, he stopped to listen for the noise of the assassins ahead of him, but he didn’t hear a thing. The wall continued without interruption for at least two hundred yards, until he finally reached a corner that marked the edge of the estate grounds. He still saw no way to breach the wall and no sign that Medusa had done so.

  Then he realized he had company.

  He smelled the man before he saw him or heard him. The breeze across the hilltop brought the musk of body odor. Bourne froze. He sank low to the ground, hidden inside the web of leaves. On his belly, he crept forward an inch at a time, peering upward until he spotted a man in camouflage six feet away, a rifle cradled in his arms. He wasn’t an island guard. He was Medusa. The man was muscular and tall and wore a headset connected to a radio unit on his shoulder. With a word or a scream, he could give Bourne away, and anonymity was Bourne’s only asset right now.

  Bourne silently drew a hunting knife from a scabbard on his calf. He moved another inch. Then another. If the man looked closely into the jungle at his feet, he would see him. Bourne brought one knee up, poised to spring off the ground. He waited until the man’s head swiveled, and then he uncoiled his body and struck like a snake. His left hand closed over the guard’s microphone as he locked his forearm around the man’s throat, and his right hand simultaneously plunged the blade into the side of the man’s neck and severed the carotid artery with a quick, backward slice. A fountain of blood sprayed Bourne’s face, and the only sound was a grotesque gurgling. He held on tightly as the man twitched as blood poured out, before the body slumped into deadweight and he lowered him to the ground.

  He grabbed the headset and radio and took the man’s rifle. He made a quick circle with the gun, anticipating an assault from a different direction, but the man had been left behind while the others went forward.

  A sentry.

  Guarding what?

  He was in the middle of dense jungle on the wrong side of the estate wall. And yet there was no sign of the other Medusa assassins.

  Bourne heard a voice through the headset and recognized the icy woman’s voice. Miss Shirley.

  “We’re in.”

  They were already inside the estate. How? Then the next communication used a word that explained everything.

  “Jersey, all clear at the tunnel?”

  A tunnel.

  Somewhere close by was a tunnel leading under the wall and into the heart of the estate. He realized there had to be a way to get people out without relying on the main gate, but a tunnel leading out could also be used as a way in if someone knew where it was and how to get it open.

  Which told him something else.

  Medusa had a mole inside the estate.

  Bourne heard Miss Shirley’s impatient voice through the headset again. “Jersey? Report!”

  The Medusa leader expected a reply from the dead man at his feet.

  “Clear,” he told her in a muffled voice.

  “Prepare for detonation.”

  Bourne didn’t have time to prepare for anything. Almost immediately, an earthquake rumbled under his feet, nearly throwing him over. The boom of an explosion rippled across the island. Not even five seconds later, a twin explosion from the same direction rocked the island again, near the gates of the estate. A burnt smell filled the air, and black smoke rose above the crowns of the trees.

  He knew what it was. The Jeeps.

  They’d wired and blown up the Jeeps. It was a diversion. Focus the guards on the gate, and while they steeled themselves for a frontal assault that was never going to come, Miss Shirley had already led her assassins inside the heart of the estate.

  The tunnel!

  He had to find
the tunnel.

  Bourne surveyed the thick jungle, knowing that he could be practically standing at the tunnel entrance without seeing it. And yet the guard should have been waiting right at the portal. He pawed through the bushes that grew together in a tight net and found nothing. Overhead, the parrots laughed at him. Somewhere beyond the wall, he heard a rattle of gunfire and knew he was running out of time. The firefight inside the estate had already begun.

  There!

  At his feet, he spotted a concrete bunker, carefully disguised so that it blended into the forest floor. The only reason he spotted it was because the bunker’s armored door, secured with an electronic lock, was open.

  Medusa definitely had a spy clearing the way for their assault.

  Below the open door, a stairwell led ten feet down to a tunnel that headed in the direction of the estate. When he climbed down, he saw lights near the ceiling, but the lights were off. There was no power, not even from a backup generator. He assumed that meant the internal and external surveillance cameras were down, too.

  The men defending the estate were blind.

  Bourne switched on his flashlight and ran through the tunnel. At the far end, he found another fire door, which led him to a utility room underneath the estate, surrounded by steel machinery. The underground room, like everything else, was unlit. He used his flashlight to find a stairwell, and he took it upstairs and carefully emerged into a shadowy hallway on the ground floor of the estate. The hallway led to a catering kitchen, where he found half a dozen bodies on the floor.

  Chefs. Servers. All dead. All shot. Broken glass sprinkled the ceramic tile like popcorn. In the doorway that led out of the kitchen, he found two guards, dead on the floor, their weapons taken.

  He heard Miss Shirley’s voice in the headset again.

  “Philly, New York, Chicago, clear the downstairs, make sure no one comes up behind us. Kill anyone you find. We’re heading to the next level.”

  Bourne exited the kitchen into a huge interior courtyard that was open to the evening air beneath a retractable roof five stories above him. Stone railings on the upper floors of the estate rose over the atrium. The square courtyard space had been set up for a nighttime cocktail party, but it was empty, just palm trees, black-draped tables, and Caribbean sculptures in wild colors. White columns bordered the space, leading to hallways on all sides.

  He ventured into the courtyard. Gunfire immediately erupted from his right, chasing him across the pavers. He dived for cover behind a stone urn, and when he stole a look over the rim, he saw one of the estate’s security guards firing from behind a column on the east wall. To the guards, Bourne was a threat. He had no way to let them know he was on their side.

  Then the guard made the mistake of breaking cover. He crossed from one column to the next, but a gunshot cracked across the courtyard from an entirely new direction, and the guard dropped with a bullet in his head.

  Bourne heard a voice, not on his headset, but ten feet away from inside the courtyard. Someone was there, invisible on the other side of the stone urn.

  “Jersey? That you? Why’d you leave the tunnel?”

  If the Medusa man got any closer, he’d see that Bourne was an outsider, not one of his own. Bourne steadied the rifle in his hands. He expected the man to be wearing body armor, so there was no point in going for anything but a head shot. He whirled to his feet with the rifle balanced against his shoulder and fired. Two shots, one that missed over the man’s shoulder, one that landed square in the middle of the assassin’s forehead. The man died with a surprised expression on his face.

  Bourne grabbed a second rifle from the assassin and slung it around his neck. He ran to the far side of the courtyard and found a hallway built with salmon-colored stone tiles. The pastel yellow wall was interrupted by a series of double doors all made of intricate stained glass. He opened the first door and found a small leather-furnished den that was empty. He continued to the next room and found a patio with an interior swimming pool and a series of floor-to-ceiling windows that led outside to the grounds of the estate. When he listened, he heard a low whimper of scared, labored breathing. He spotted a wet bar near the patio doors and found a young woman in a flowered cocktail dress hiding behind the bar. When she saw him, saw the blood on his face and the rifle in his arms, she began to scream, and he quickly clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle it. He whispered into her ear.

  “I’m here to help. Don’t be afraid. Stay right here, and you’ll be fine.”

  He peeled away his hand, and she nodded silently at him.

  “Where would the execs be?” he asked her. “Where are they hiding?”

  She pointed a finger upward. “Top floor.”

  “Don’t move. It’ll be over soon.”

  Bourne got up from the bar. As he did, he spotted two Medusa operatives on the other side of the patio doors, patrolling the estate grounds. The men spotted him, too, and fired, shattering the glass, scoring the room with a rapid, deadly stream of fire. At his feet, the young woman screamed, and Bourne hit the floor and rolled away, drawing the bullets from her. He rolled until he found cover behind one of the wide legs of a cherrywood pool table, but a hail of bullets ricocheted around him, and he felt a searing pain in his calf. He spun away again, his shoes slipping on the floor, then fired back with one arm, sending bullets wild but driving the men to the ground.

  He shot again and hit one of the men, but the other operative unleashed a new battery of fire. Bourne threw himself down and scrambled away, the bullets pinging after him across the floor and getting closer. He stood no chance, until he heard the assassin’s rifle jam, and the rain of bullets suddenly stopped. As the man tried to clear his gun, Bourne sat up and calmly took aim. Seeing the threat, the man broke into a run, but Bourne led him with the barrel shot by shot and took him down with a bullet in the neck.

  That was four.

  By his count, Medusa still had five other men inside the building. Plus Miss Shirley and Gabriel Fox. All of them were heading upstairs to kill the members of the tech cabal hidden on the top floor.

  Bourne hurried back to the hallway. When he looked at the pink tile at his feet, he saw drops of deeper red, and he realized he was trailing blood. He’d been shot in the leg. Running made his heart beat faster and made him lose more blood, but he couldn’t stop. He half ran, half limped as he hunted for the stairs, passing more bodies as he did. Staff. Guards. Maids. When he found a marble staircase near the house’s palatial entrance, he recognized a man dead on the steps, the Indian CEO of an online retail giant who’d been mowed down before he could escape to the upper floors.

  He climbed higher. Everyone on the second and third floors was dead, too. There was nothing but silence and blood around him. As he neared the fourth floor, he heard an explosion of gunfire over his head, muffled by the walls of the mansion. He’d caught up to the Medusa team. Bourne followed the sound of the shooting back to the atrium that rose over the interior courtyard. Slipping to his knees, he slithered across the tiled hallway to the stone railing and assessed the action on the far side of the open space. At least three or four estate security guards had barricaded themselves in the opposite corner, and the Medusa team had split in two and was closing on them from both sides. The columns built along the hallways gave them cover. The gunfire in both directions was intense.

  He counted four Medusa operatives, two in each hallway. He didn’t see Gabriel Fox. He didn’t see Miss Shirley.

  Bourne felt his head spinning as pain came in waves from his leg. He tried to focus. He jutted the barrel of a rifle through a gap in the stone railing and saw the head of a Medusa assassin appear in the crosshairs of his scope across the atrium. The man in his sights was focused on the guards. He didn’t know Bourne was there.

  Breathe in.

  Slowly breathe out.

  Ease back on the trigger.

  The man’s head explo
ded.

  The new burst of fire should have alerted the others, but they were too caught up in the adrenaline of the fight to realize that the game had changed. Bourne refocused, re-aimed, sighting down the barrel at the next of the Medusa operatives taking cover along the same atrium corridor.

  Another shot. Another kill.

  But now they’d spotted the new threat.

  One of the two remaining Medusa assassins trained fire across the atrium, and the corridor around Bourne exploded with bullets, rock, and tile. He felt a fragment slice across the back of his hand and leave a gash of blood. He rolled away, his world turning upside down, but he had nowhere to go. With his body mostly exposed, he aimed through the stone railing again and fired back. A hail of bullets burned the air. He never should have survived the exchange, but he got lucky. One of his bullets nicked a column, flaking off a jagged arrowhead of stone that ricocheted into the assassin’s eye. The man wailed and staggered back, and the estate guards in the far corner immediately shot him down with a deafening burst of fire.

  Bourne had to run. He had to get to the stairs and then to the next floor. That was where Miss Shirley was. He crawled, stumbled, then found his feet and limped to the next corner and into the middle of the hallway.

  But the last Medusa assassin was waiting for him.

  The man pulled the trigger. Gunfire erupted around him. Bourne waited to die. This was the end.

  Then, in the same instant, shot after shot lit up the atrium like fireworks. The tech cabal guards burst from their barricade in the corner, and Bourne saw the Medusa assassin fall, riddled with bullets. The firefight was done. He tried to get up, tried to keep going, tried to run, but as he pushed himself to his feet, his legs buckled under him.

  His head hit the hard floor.

  Everything went black.

  * * *

  —

  ONE floor up, Miss Shirley spat out a single curse. “Fuck!”