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

by Brian Freeman

  “Give me your phone, too. Any more tricks like that, and I’ll shoot you both.”

  The young woman, unlike her companion, remained cool and calm. She took out a phone from her tight jeans and handed it to Bourne. He shoved both phones in his pocket, then collapsed backward against the seat. The woman turned around to stare at him. She looked him up and down, more curious than afraid.

  “You’re bleeding,” she said.

  The businessman, whose thick fingers were clenched around the wheel again, shot her an angry look. “Don’t talk to him! Are you crazy?”

  “Shut up, Wallace,” the girl snapped. Then she said to Bourne: “You should have somebody look at that. I can help you if you want.”

  “Are you a nurse?”

  “Close. My dad’s a vet.”

  Bourne laughed. “That’s what you call close?”

  “I’ve helped him in surgery since I was twelve. If I can deal with an angry Siamese, I think I can deal with you.”

  “Why would you want to help me?” Jason asked.

  She shrugged. “Hopefully, you’re less likely to kill me that way.”

  Bourne studied the girl’s face. She couldn’t be more than twenty-two or twenty-three. Her blond hair was long and straight, and she wore a scoop T-shirt that emphasized her skinny neck and bony shoulders. Her face was pimpled. She had sleepy brown eyes, but she had a street-smart look that told him she already knew a lot about men.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Amie.”

  “And who’s Wallace here?”

  “My boss,” she said. She added with a smirk, “Among other things.”

  “Amie, stop talking to him!” the man behind the wheel demanded again. “He’s a psychopath!”

  “You’re being boring, Wallace,” the young woman replied with a lazy glance. She nodded her head toward the car window as she continued the conversation with Bourne. “We’re in Montmagny. There’s a pharmacy a few blocks away from here. I can get the things to fix you up.”

  “Are you saying I should let you go inside by yourself?” Bourne asked.

  “Well, you could, but I’ll be honest. If you do that, I won’t come back.”

  “That is honest. Except if I come inside with you, then I have to worry about Wallace driving off and calling the police.”

  She smirked again. “You don’t need to worry about him. Wallace will be a good boy.”

  “Because he wants to keep you alive?”

  “Oh, no, he’d run out on me in a heartbeat to save his own neck. But you have his phone, and he likes to take pictures of me while I’m sucking his dick. I imagine his wife would find those pretty interesting.”

  Wallace swore at her over and over in a loud voice.

  Bourne smiled. “Have you ever done stitches?”

  “Lots of times.”

  He nodded. “Okay. Wallace, pull into the pharmacy lot when you see it. Don’t even think about trying to flag down a cop.”

  “Wallace, give the man your wallet, too,” Amie added.

  “What the hell for?” the businessman bellowed.

  “That’s our deal, baby. You always pay.”

  They reached the parking lot of the pharmacy, where the signs were in French. Bourne directed the businessman to park near the door so that he could watch the car through the windows. It was early evening, and the store was crowded when they went inside, but the number of people helped him keep a low profile. No one gave them a second glance. He took Amie by the hand in a tight grip, and she played her part, leaning her head against his shoulder as if they were lovers. He noticed an ATM near the wall and remembered he was low on cash.

  “Do you know his bank code?” Bourne asked her.

  “Sure.”

  “Take out five hundred dollars.”

  Amie shrugged. “Make it a thousand. He can afford it.”

  “You’re something else,” Jason told her.

  He avoided the bank camera as the girl made the transaction. When she handed him the cash, he gave two hundred dollars back to her. She smiled and stuffed the wad of bills in her pocket.

  “So what’s the deal with you two?” Jason asked her. “You can do a lot better than him.”

  “I know, but I have champagne tastes. Wallace helps with that. What about you? You want to tell me who you are and what you’re running from?”

  “It’s better that you not know,” Jason replied.

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  They didn’t take long to buy the supplies they needed. When they were back in the Audi, Bourne directed Wallace to the highway, and they headed west out of town. Not long after, the houses thinned, and they found themselves in a densely wooded area. When they reached a cross street that led deeper into the forest, he directed the businessman to turn away from the coastal road. They drove for several miles, until they were on a deserted stretch hugged by trees on both sides. Wallace parked the sedan on the shoulder, and Bourne could feel the man’s panic rise.

  “Let me take a look at your shoulder,” Amie said.

  She got out of the passenger seat, came around to the rear of the car, and straddled Bourne’s lap in the back seat. She undid the buttons of his shirt and pushed it off his shoulder, where the bullet wound was bleeding. Using the gauze and antiseptic from the pharmacy, she cleaned the wound, removed the torn stitches, then dipped a needle in rubbing alcohol and poured some over the bullet hole, making him wince with pain. She set about closing him up again, and he was impressed. Her stitches were neater and tighter than the doctor had given him the previous night.

  “You’re good at that,” he said.

  “I know.” She winked at him.

  Then she was done, and it was time to go. She got out of the car, and Bourne pointed the gun at Wallace’s head in the front seat. “Get out. Leave the keys.”

  “Jesus, you’re going to shoot me! Shit! Shit!”

  “I’m not going to shoot you, but I’m taking your car. You can walk back to town and report it missing. By then, I won’t need it. And remember, I still have your phone. Be nice to Amie, or I start texting your wife.”

  “Shit!” Wallace said again, backing up toward the trees and yanking the belt of his pants over his stomach. Tears rolled down his round face.

  Bourne climbed out of the rear seat. He opened the driver’s door and gestured at the young blonde. “You don’t need him. If you want to come with me, I can drop you anywhere you want.”

  “Nah. If I don’t stay with him, he’ll probably get eaten by a bear.”

  “Well, thanks for your help,” Jason told her.

  Amie patted the bulge in her front pocket, where she had the cash from the ATM. “Thank you.”

  Bourne got behind the wheel, then rolled down the window. “Why were you so sure I wouldn’t kill you, Amie?”

  The girl shrugged. “Dad treats lots of cats.”

  “Cats?” he said. “So what?”

  “Sometimes you look in a cat’s eyes and know you better not turn your back on them. But with some cats, you realize that no matter how much they growl and hiss at you, that’s not who they really are. I decided you weren’t a mean cat.”

  SEVEN

  BOURNE left the Audi in an empty parking lot behind the Musée Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Quebec City. He was confident the car wouldn’t be found for a day or more, but he had no intention of going back to it. When the time came, he’d find another way out of town. He left behind all of the phones, too, including his own. He’d used it to call Miles Priest and Scott DeRay, and that meant it could be tracked to him as soon as he powered it on. He’d find a new burner phone along the way.

  It was nearly eight o’clock at night. He hiked in the darkness through the old growth trees and shallow hills of the battlefield park known as the Plains of Abraham on his way into the heart of the city. When he reached the downtown streets, the first thing he did was find a cheap hostel near Rue Dauphine, mostly populated by students. He paid cash for a tiny room
with not much more than a bed and a shared bathroom down the hall.

  As he headed outside, he passed a young couple coming in who smelled of Turkish coffee and marijuana. He told them his phone had died and asked if they’d mind running a quick Google search for him. Ninety seconds and ten dollars later, he had the local address for the online magazine called The Fort.

  Editor and publisher, Jacques Varille.

  Senior writer, Abbey Laurent.

  The magazine office was only a few blocks away, in a gray stone building across from Esplanade Park. The cobblestoned Rue d’Auteuil was deserted, but Jason avoided the street and approached the building via the park, where the trees hid him. He watched the neighborhood, alert for signs of a trap. The windows of the building were all dark, including the top-floor offices where The Fort was housed. The cross streets looked empty, but Jason let the time tick by before he moved. Patience was how he stayed alive. When he was certain that no one was keeping the building under surveillance, he darted across the intersection.

  There were windows in the middle of the twin entry doors. Using the butt of his pistol, he broke the glass, reached around the jagged shards, and let himself inside the building. With his gun in his hand, he took the staircase to the top floor, where he found another door labeled with a sign for The Fort. The interior door yielded with a single kick of his boot.

  He had a mini penlight in his pocket that cast a weak beam, and he aimed it at the floor, making sure the light didn’t pass close to the windows. The magazine office was small, just a single room with half a dozen desks, a supply closet, a mini kitchen, and a laser printer. Cheap tourist posters of Canadian landscapes adorned the walls. The room smelled of pizza, thanks to a delivery box squeezed into one of the wastebaskets. Bourne went from desk to desk, looking for the one that belonged to Abbey Laurent. He found it at the back, and he knew it because of the photographs she kept. He recognized the attractive woman with mahogany-colored hair. The woman he’d saved from a killer in New York. The woman he’d seen through the lenses of his binoculars in the rain at Dufferin Terrace.

  The woman who’d led him into an ambush.

  Did she know what was going to happen? Was she part of Medusa? Or was she another one of their innocent pawns?

  He picked up another of the framed photographs on her desk, which showed Abbey standing next to a tall, lean man in a gray suit, obviously a few years older than she was. The man had one arm around her waist in a possessive grip, and he carried a leather briefcase in his other hand. He wore a lanyard around his neck that identified him as part of a United Nations conference. Bourne recognized the background of the photo as inside Grand Central Station. On the photograph itself, someone had written a caption in neat penmanship: Abbey et Michel, New York. It was dated the previous year.

  Jason had a hard time imagining these two in a relationship. The man in the photograph had the cautious, humorless smile of a diplomat. By contrast, Abbey stared at the camera with the grin of someone who rode life like a roller coaster with her arms in the air. She wore a little black dress with a plunging neckline and flouncy lace sleeves that said, Look at me. Even though the two women didn’t resemble each other at all, there was something in Abbey’s attitude and eyes that reminded him of Nova.

  Bourne examined Abbey’s desk, which was messy, with hardly a square inch of open space. She had notepads filled with writing, scribbled out of the lines with arrows and bubbles as she thought of new ideas. The borders of her computer monitor were covered over with yellow sticky notes. It all reflected a quick, chaotic mind.

  He opened the top drawer of her desk. Inside, he found a dozen matching Uni-Ball pens, two tins of breath mints, and coupons for just about every fast-food restaurant in the city. There was also a digital voice recorder.

  Jason took out the recorder and pressed the button for playback.

  The voice on the machine sounded loud in the dark, empty space. He quickly switched it to a whisper and held the device to his ear.

  “Congresswoman, some people say that in the age of social media, privacy is an archaic notion. I take it you disagree.”

  He had never heard Abbey Laurent’s voice before, but he was sure it was her. The fast, almost breathless way she had of talking matched her face. She sounded as if her mouth were always trying to catch up with her brain. Bourne kept listening, and the next voice on the recording was one he recognized from television.

  Congresswoman Sofia Ortiz.

  Her Hispanic-accented voice was slow and measured, like a politician considering her words.

  “Yes, I do disagree. Most strenuously. Is there convenience that comes with living our lives online? Have these apps made our lives better? Absolutely. But the question is, who is really in control of all that information? If we are talking about an individual’s personal data, then the individual should own it. Period. And I’m afraid that Big Tech has forgotten that simple lesson. These companies are the latest in a long history of monopolistic industries with too much money, too much power, too much influence, too much potential for abuse. They need to be reined in.”

  “Speaking of abuse,” Abbey went on, “one of my sources tells me that you believe Big Tech has been covering up some kind of large-scale data hack. A theft that affects practically every online user. What can you tell me about that?”

  “I’m not commenting on that,” the congresswoman replied. When she continued, Jason could hear the smile in her voice. “At least not on the record.”

  “And off the record?”

  “Off the record, people will be shocked to the core by the volume of data that was stolen.”

  “Do you know who is behind it?”

  “No. How can you investigate the perpetrator of something that Big Tech claims never happened? There are obviously foreign actors who would be likely suspects. Russia. China. Iran.”

  “What are the risks of this data being in the wrong hands?”

  “The risks? Incalculable. Online advertisers already synthesize data in order to influence your buying behavior. Imagine if nearly all of your personal data was available to a rogue actor, someone who wanted to influence you for other reasons. To shape what you think, what you believe, how you act, how you vote. That’s the situation we face.”

  “There’s already a new social media software that claims to know what you want to do before you do it,” Abbey said. “Prescix boasts that it can predict your behavior. If you don’t know what you want for dinner, the app will tell you. I’ve used it. It’s creepy how accurate it is.”

  “Prescix,” Congresswoman Ortiz replied thoughtfully. “Yes, I know the software, but the goal of this technology is not to predict what you do. It’s not so benign as they would claim. The goal is to tell you what to do. To manipulate you and make you do whatever they want.”

  Jason switched off the recorder.

  The interview confirmed what Miles Priest and Scott DeRay had expected, that Abbey had a source who knew about the data hack. The question was who and whether that person could help him infiltrate Medusa.

  He needed a name.

  Bourne dug deeper, sifting through folders and notepads on Abbey’s desk. She was prolific and had multiple projects under way, but he didn’t find any research notes that were connected to her profile of Sofia Ortiz. There was nothing to tell him who her source might be. If she had other materials about Ortiz and Big Tech, then she hadn’t left them in the office. He’d have to find her and talk to her himself.

  Jason checked his watch. He’d been inside the offices of The Fort for ten minutes, and he couldn’t stay much longer. But he wanted to see if he could access Abbey’s computer. He found the CPU tower on the floor and switched it on, and the monitor on her desk bloomed to life. The login asked for a password, and he didn’t have time to crack it. However, he was intrigued by the wallpaper photograph she’d chosen for her screen.

  It showed the hills of Red Rock Canyon outside Las Vegas.

  The picture sent a chill up hi
s spine. Las Vegas.

  Bourne knew it might be a coincidence. Millions of people went to Las Vegas as tourists, and Abbey Laurent going there might not mean anything at all. But this was also the city in which Nova had been murdered.

  He logged into the computer as a guest. He couldn’t access Abbey’s files, but he could load a search engine and search the web. He typed in: Abbey Laurent Las Vegas. What came up first in the results took Jason’s breath away.

  THE MURDERER NEXT DOOR:

  Inside the Bland Life of America’s Worst Mass Shooter

  Abbey had done a profile of Charles Hackman.

  She’d done a profile of the man who had killed Nova, along with sixty-six other men, women, and children.

  Bourne felt his breathing accelerate. Another flashback paralyzed him. In his head, he heard the bullets, the screams; he saw the panic as people ran. But they had nowhere to go. They were easy targets for a man in a hotel window.

  And he saw Nova, dead in the middle of the chaos, her body being carried away by a man he knew.

  A Treadstone agent.

  Jason didn’t have time to read further. He glanced at the monitor on the desk in front of him and saw a web camera clipped to the frame. The green light on the webcam glowed. It was active.

  Someone was watching him.

  He grabbed the camera and yanked it out of the computer port and then kicked the power plug from the wall. He didn’t have much time. Seconds. He ran for the office door of The Fort and took the stairs to the first floor two at a time. Rather than use the front door again, he followed a dusty corridor to the rear of the building and found another exit that led out to a side street. He cracked the door and looked out. The neighborhood was empty. He ran across the street, where an iron fence built atop a stone wall led into the rear yard of an upscale residential house. He leaped for the fence, propped his foot on one of the crossbars, and threw himself to the other side. Then he flattened himself against the wet green lawn and waited.