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

by Brian Freeman

  “I didn’t shoot Sofia Ortiz,” Jason said.

  Scott hesitated. “If you say so, I believe you.”

  “But?”

  “But I’m sorry, Jason. No one else will believe it. There’s too much evidence. The FBI has video of you in the hotel, fingerprints in the room and on the gun. And as for your background—well, we both know you fit the profile.”

  “Medusa framed me. They set me up.”

  Scott waited to answer. He drank another shot of Gatorade, and his face glowed with sweat. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have gotten you into this. But my hands are tied. Right now, it doesn’t matter to the cabal whether Medusa framed you or recruited you. The effect is the same. They want nothing to do with you. A member of Congress was assassinated. I’m heading to Washington this morning to reassure a bunch of furious politicians that Big Tech had nothing to do with it. If any actual evidence comes out that you were working for us, it will be devastating.”

  “I get that,” Jason replied. “I’m an outcast. Me being dead would be better for everyone. Treadstone is trying to kill me, did you know that? Nash Rollins is hunting me. Is that Miles Priest’s handiwork?”

  Scott frowned. “Yes. Miles talked to the director, and Shaw sent Nash after you. He knows the two of you have history.”

  “Well, can you call off the dogs? Give me some breathing room?”

  His friend stood up from the bench. Dawn lightened the sky, creating reflections on the boat pond. “Do you remember all the times we came here as kids? Sorry, what am I saying, of course you don’t remember. But we did. It seems like a long time ago.”

  “For me, it was a different lifetime.”

  “I know. The point is, you were my best friend, Jason.”

  “Is that your way of softening the blow that you can’t help me?”

  Scott looked down at him. “I wish I could. I wish I could set you up with a new identity somewhere, but I can’t. What’s going on is bigger than both of us. If any of this is traced back to me, I’m finished. I’m afraid you’re on your own.”

  “I don’t want to escape,” Jason replied. “I’m not running.”

  His friend’s face showed surprise. “Then why are you here?”

  “I’m still chasing Medusa.”

  “Alone? That’s crazy.”

  “Well, everyone thinks I am crazy, don’t they? Psychologically damaged. A prime candidate for terrorist recruitment.”

  “Look—Jason—”

  “Medusa is on the move, Scott. Ortiz was step one. I was step one. But whatever’s coming next is much bigger.”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “No, but I suspect the Prescix software is involved. Someone at Medusa manipulated the Prescix software last night to arrange the death of Abbey Laurent’s source. They knew I was coming after him. Oh, and I heard about the murder of the Prescix executive, too. You and Miles better be careful.”

  “We are.” Scott glanced at the boat pond and saw other early-morning runners heading in their direction. “I need to go. We can’t be seen together. What do you want, Jason? You obviously want something if you took the risk of coming here.”

  “I need to identify someone. I think he’s Medusa. I have a photograph but nothing else. I was hoping someone at Carillon could access the facial recognition systems across the cabal and get me a name and background.”

  “And if you find him, what will you do?”

  “Follow him up the chain. See where it leads me.”

  Jason could see his friend weighing the pros and cons. Everything had a cost and benefit in Scott’s world.

  “There’s a coffee shop across from the Carillon lobby,” Scott said finally. “Be there in three hours. One of my techs will find you.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “No names. I’m not putting my people at risk. You meet this man, and he’ll get you the information you need.”

  “Will the FBI be meeting me, too, Scott?”

  “Don’t worry, you’re safe. I won’t turn you in, for the simple reason that nobody wants you in custody.”

  “Just dead,” Jason said.

  Scott shook out his legs, getting ready to start running again. “I trust your skills, so I’m sure you’ll monitor the area before you move in.”

  “I appreciate the help.”

  “This is a one-time offer,” Scott replied. “For old times, Jason. After that, we’re done. But be forewarned. Once this query launches, you’ll be leaving footprints online. Nothing is private anymore. Whatever or whoever you’re searching for, Medusa will find out about it. Quickly.”

  TWENTY

  THE new Carillon Technology building rose twelve hundred feet in the air over midtown, its sharp silver angles making it look as if it had been carved out of quartz. The company had teased half the cities in the country with the prospect of landing its second headquarters, but ultimately, they’d followed the money to Manhattan. Now the company’s twin towers in California and New York stood like ultra-modern palaces on either coast, with Miles Priest presiding over one and Scott DeRay ruling the other.

  Jason watched the mass of pedestrians on Forty-Second Street. He was alert for the possibility of a trap. The location made him nervous, because the easiest kill of all was an innocent collision at a crowded intersection. Gun. Knife. Poison. No one saw a thing, and the ensuing panic covered the assassin’s escape.

  Crowds favor the hunter. You’re never safe in a crowd.

  Treadstone.

  “Do you see any threats?” Abbey asked.

  “Not right now.”

  “Do you trust Scott?”

  “I don’t trust anyone,” Bourne replied.

  The light changed. They crossed the street to the sprawling coffee shop on the opposite corner from the Carillon tower. Jason surveyed the tables through the glass windows before he took Abbey by the elbow and led her inside. They waited to purchase drinks and then found an empty table where he could watch the entrance. Abbey drank her latte, but he didn’t touch his own drink. He could tell that she’d picked up on his anxiety, because she didn’t speak to him or interrupt his concentration.

  Twenty minutes later, Jason spotted a man entering the shop with an open laptop in his hands. He wore a lime-green dress shirt buttoned to the neck and black jeans. His glasses matched his shirt, and they kept sliding down his long nose. He was short and skinny and had a mop of curly brown hair. He typed one-handed as he waited in line.

  “That’s him,” Jason said softly.

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw him at a meeting with Scott once. He’s a tech savant. Be nice to him. If you tailgate him on the freeway, he can slice your credit rating in half before you get to the next exit.”

  “I’m not sure you can cut a negative number in half,” Abbey commented with a smirk.

  The young man from Carillon spent a ridiculous amount of time at the counter specifying how the barista should prepare his drink, eliciting eye rolls from the people in line behind him. When he finally got his soy mocha, he went straight to Jason’s table without looking at anyone else in the shop. He’d obviously been prepped for the man he was supposed to meet.

  “Scott sent me,” he said as he sat down. He checked out Abbey from behind his green glasses. “Who’s the girl? Scott didn’t say there would be anybody else.”

  “She’s with me,” Jason replied.

  “We’re inseparable,” Abbey added, smiling.

  The tech studied both of them with condescending eyes. His lone typing hand made a frenzied attack on the keyboard, and he was quiet for almost a minute. Then he sat back in the chair. “Abbey Laurent. Canadian journalist for The Fort. Birthday, October 2. Studio apartment in Quebec City, behind on last month’s rent, credit card debt exceeding eight thousand dollars. Savings account balance one thousand two hundred and forty-two dollars, checking account balance eighty-nine dollars. Most common online password is ImAbs1002. Had an unusual result on her Pap smear three yea
rs ago, but further testing showed no issues. On the pill. Three full-frontal nude photos sent to a college boyfriend twelve years ago. Very nice.”

  The smile disappeared from Abbey’s face. “You piece of shit.”

  Jason put a hand on her arm and murmured, “Easy.”

  “You both need to understand that I’m not to be messed with,” the young tech snapped. “Got it? As far as your lives go, I am God.”

  “We just want to identify someone,” Jason said, “and we can pay for the privilege.”

  “Carillon pays me four hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, plus options. Keep your money, Mr. Bourne. Yes, I know who you are. I’m here to do a favor for Scott, and that’s all. Now show me the man you want to hack.”

  Her face dark with anger, Abbey took out her phone and scrolled to the picture of the Medusa operative in the coffee shop. “This is him. I can text you the picture.”

  The tech shook his head. “I already have it. I transferred everything from your phone while I was waiting in line.”

  “You little—” Abbey began, then stopped without saying anything more and clamped her lips together.

  “Don’t worry, we needed to dump the phone anyway,” Jason said. “We’ll get new burners this afternoon.”

  The tech ignored their conversation. “Did Scott explain the timeline? If anyone is monitoring this person’s online records, they’ll know you’ve located him. You won’t have much time to get to him before his identity is erased and rewritten. I’m masking our geographic signature here, but it will also take them about ninety seconds to override that and figure out where you are.”

  “Then we better move fast,” Jason said.

  The tech used his index finger to push his green glasses up his nose. He typed one-handed again, still drinking his latte and only occasionally looking at the screen. He said nothing as he worked. Almost five minutes passed, which was longer than Jason expected, and he saw a small crinkle of surprise on the tech’s face. Obviously, Medusa kept their records more secure than the Canadian health service did.

  Meanwhile, Jason kept an eye on Forty-Second Street through the coffee shop windows. He knew they didn’t have much time before someone crashed the party.

  “Interesting,” the tech said finally.

  “Did you find him?” Jason asked.

  “Yes, but I had to break into archives to recover his deleted records. He went to a lot of trouble to remove himself from the grid.”

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Peter Restak. That’s an alias. Fingerprints don’t match anyone else on file, so his previous identity is unknown.”

  Like me, Bourne thought.

  “Restak is a hacker,” the tech went on. “And an impressive one, I have to say. He didn’t leave many breadcrumbs behind. He’s used multiple online personas on different social media platforms, but he rarely uses any of them more than once. He’s a chameleon online, sometimes young, sometimes old, man, woman, trans, whatever. Once he’s inside a fake persona, he establishes relationships with similarly situated real people. He feeds them posts that reinforce their biases, and he recruits them for extremist activities. He was heavily involved in the Ortiz riot. The people he’s interacted with now have multiple arrest records. A couple of them have been killed. It’s like group behavioral modification. Very cool stuff.”

  “Does that include the murder of a lawyer in the Village last night?” Jason asked.

  “Carson Gattor. Yes, Restak orchestrated that.”

  “Did he use Prescix to do that?” Abbey asked.

  “He did, but that’s only one of his tools. You have a Prescix account, too, I see. Nine months ago, you bought a very expensive bottle of French perfume, which you couldn’t afford. You probably don’t even know why you bought it. In fact, you were part of a paid Prescix sponsorship that inserted that particular French perfume into your life at multiple touchpoints. It took twenty-three touchpoints and four days before you purchased the bottle. Don’t worry, most of the other buyers cracked more quickly than you did. The company sold seventeen thousand units that week, which is nine times their typical average U.S. weekly sales.”

  Abbey stared at him, and her face flushed deep red.

  “Let’s get back to the reason we’re here,” Jason interrupted. “Restak. What else did you find about him?”

  “I told you, very little. Even where he leaves footprints, the identity leads to a dead end. Last night he was an anarchist sympathizer with the handle KillAllNazis. That profile is now inactive. I’m sure he won’t go back to it.”

  “We need to locate him,” Jason said.

  “That won’t be easy. As far as the world is concerned, Peter Restak has no real life. No credit cards, no bank records, no permanent address, not even a past address. He knows how hackers like me identify people, because he’s exactly like me. I doubt he stays in any one place for a long period of time.”

  “There must be something,” Abbey interjected. “What about friends? Or a girlfriend? You people can’t spend every night playing Call of Duty and searching for mommy videos on Pornhub.”

  The tech’s fish eyes drilled into her again. “Do you really want to antagonize me, Abbey Laurent? Does that seem like a good idea?”

  “I want you to stop showing off and tell us what you found. Because we all know you found something. There’s no way you’re going to sit here and tell us that this Restak is a smarter hacker than you. You’ve got too much ego for that. So how do we find him?”

  The tech’s nostrils flared with annoyance. “I don’t like her, Bourne.”

  “That’s too bad, because I’m liking her more and more,” Jason replied. “Now answer her question. How do we find Restak?”

  The young man sighed. “You won’t find him directly, like I told you. But he did make a mistake. It was a girlfriend. I found a few matching photos of him with a woman named Holly d’Angelo. He scrubbed their relationship online, so there’s nothing on social media, but he must have forgotten to check photo processing services. They showed up together in the background of several photos taken by other people that were uploaded to a photo-printing database for a national drugstore. I got them with facial recognition.”

  Abbey shook her head. “Unbelievable.”

  “Where do we find Holly d’Angelo?” Jason asked.

  “She has a one-bedroom apartment in Flatbush, and she works at a medical clinic in the city. After her job most days, she works out at a women-only fitness studio on Twenty-Third. Then she takes the train home.”

  “You have her picture?” Abbey asked.

  The tech nodded. “I already sent it to your phone. I sent you the photos of Restak, too. Are we done?”

  “We’re done,” Jason replied. “Thanks for the help.”

  “Thank Scott, not me.” He slapped his laptop shut and gave Abbey another disgruntled stare from his cold eyes as he stood up. Abbey stuck out her tongue at him, which triggered an angry hiss from the tech.

  As the man turned away, Jason grabbed his wrist in an iron grip.

  “By the way,” Bourne said, “your name is Aaron Haberman. You have a condo on Thirty-Third Street in Kips Bay, and you have a cabin in the Finger Lakes that you like to visit on weekends. See, I make it a point of knowing about the people in Scott’s circle, Aaron. So if you have any ideas about messing with Abbey’s online life, then be aware that I will insert myself into your real life. And believe me when I tell you that is something you do not want.”

  *

  NASH Rollins stood on the Battery Park walkway and watched boats navigate the wavy waters of the Hudson River. It was a cool, breezy afternoon, with clouds moving fast overhead. On the far side of the channel, the Statue of Liberty lifted her torch like a salute. Rollins leaned on his cane, as stiff and unmoving as a statue himself.

  A man came up next to him at the railing. He was wiry and medium height, with choppy black hair, a prominent nose, and thick dark eyebrows. His skin was the color of olive oil
. He wore black corduroys, a black T-shirt, and a loose-fitting untucked checked shirt with the cuffs rolled back. The shirt, Rollins knew, made it impossible to see that the man had a holster and weapon in the small of his back. He also had two knives, one in his pocket, one at his ankle. He had a holster on his other ankle for a smaller backup pistol.

  Standard equipment for Treadstone.

  “Benoit,” Rollins murmured, staring at the New York view and not at the man next to him.

  “Boss.”

  The two of them had worked together for more than a decade. Rollins had recruited him from the French intelligence service at the suggestion of Cain. Whatever else was true of Cain, the man knew how to assess the value of people. Even inside Treadstone, Rollins had to be careful about the agents he trusted, and Benoit was one of the few whose reliability was beyond question.

  In the old days, Rollins had trusted Cain, too.

  “What’s going on?” Benoit asked. “I had to break off an assignment in New Orleans to get back here. I don’t recall your ever sending the jet for me before.”

  Rollins squinted into the sunlight. “I texted you a photograph.”

  Casually, Benoit removed his phone from his pocket and checked it as he pretended to take a picture of Lady Liberty. The picture that Rollins had sent was taken from a camera feed in an elevator. The man in the picture had his back to the camera, but the woman was clearly visible, a hoodie slipping down to reveal her face.

  “That was captured on an internet-enabled video feed overnight,” Rollins murmured. “The computers flagged it for manual review, which we did this morning. The woman is Abbey Laurent. The man with her is Bourne.”

  “Okay.”

  “The video came from a UK safe house near Gramercy Park. You need to be ready if they go back there.”

  “What are my orders?”

  “Termination.”

  “Just Cain or the girl, too?”

  Rollins had learned long ago to shove his conscience down into a place where it didn’t gnaw at his soul. “Take them both. We can’t afford loose ends. Shaw thinks there’s too much risk of this getting out and destroying Treadstone. We’ve only recently gone back in business, and there are a lot of people in Washington who wish we’d been shut down altogether.”