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 t
o 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.
Sylvia was tall and slim. She had short gray hair and wore glasses, and her makeup and nails were carefully done, even though she didn’t look as if she went out much. Her orange blouse and beige pants were old but clean and wrinkle-free. Abbey got the impression that Sylvia was a woman clinging to the tiniest bits of who she’d once been.
“I’m sure the last eighteen months have been very difficult,” Abbey said.
Sylvia frowned and stroked the cat’s fur. “You have no idea. I was fired from my job. I had to sell my house. It was partly for the money, but also because people kept breaking the windows and painting obscenities on the garage. My neighbors didn’t want me around anymore. My children haven’t spoken to me in a year.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No one can seem to believe that I didn’t have the faintest idea what Charles was planning. I’m as disgusted and horrified as anyone. Everyone tells me, ‘You must have known! You must be guilty, too!’ Well, I didn’t know. I didn’t have a clue. Whatever broke inside his head, it came out of nowhere. I’ll tell you what I told the FBI, Ms. Laurent. I wish I could help you, but I can’t. I have no idea why Charles did what he did. If the government couldn’t figure it out, I really don’t see how you think you can.”
Abbey looked around the apartment and wondered if it was bugged. By Treadstone. By Medusa. By the FBI. “I think the government knows more about your husband’s motive than they’re saying,” she told Sylvia.
“Are you one of those conspiracy nuts?” the woman asked. “Because if that’s all this is, you can leave now.”
“No, there’s more. I know that an intelligence agent was investigating your husband before he killed all those people.”
Sylvia stared at her. “That’s impossible. You’re mistaken.”
“I saw the information this agent gathered. She was looking into his whole life. The material was dated several days before the massacre.”
“Charles didn’t have so much as a parking ticket before the shooting. How could anyone have known what he was planning?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Abbey said.
“Who was this agent? Who did she work for?”
“I can’t say. But I do have some questions for you. I think you can help me.”
Sylvia looked shaken. “Yes, all right. I still can’t believe this is true. If someone in the government knew about Charles, why didn’t they stop him? Why didn’t they do something?”
“I’m not sure if she knew what he was going to do. She simply knew he was involved in something.”
Sylvia shook her head. “What can I tell you? What information do you want?”
“Did Charles ever mention an organization called Medusa?” Abbey asked.
“No.”
“The name never came up? You never saw it in any papers he had?”
“No, I’ve never heard of it before. What is Medusa?”
“I think they may have been involved in recruiting or manipulating your husband to do what he did.”
“Recruiting him how?”
“It may have started online. That seems to be their specialty. Are you familiar with a social media software called Prescix?”
A shadow crossed Sylvia’s face, and her lips tightened with disgust. “Oh, yes.”
“Do you know if Charles used it?”
“All the time. He signed up almost as soon as it came out. He thought it was a joke, this idea that software could predict what you were going to do next. But he couldn’t believe how accurate it was. Charles was an actuary, so he was impressed at the statistical modeling that was built into the code. He said it was like Prescix knew him better than he knew himself. What started out as a hobby became kind of an obsession for him. At first, I thought it was just a professional thing, trying to reverse engineer how they did it. But it became personal, too. He used Prescix all the time. He’d spend hours going through the feed, seeing what others were saying, going into chat rooms. I told all this to the FBI, you know. I told him this was where Charles’s problems started.”
“What do you mean?” Abbey asked.
“He became a different person because of Prescix. He was addicted to the software and obsessed with trying to understanding its algorithms. He started pulling away from me. His entire world went online. But I never thought he was at risk for anything like what he did. I still can’t imagine why he killed those people.”
“Did you know he’d purchased guns? That he was training with rifles at gun ranges?”
“I had no idea.”
“The FBI said he wasn’t particularly religious and didn’t seem to have any strong political beliefs.”
Sylvia nodded. “Yes. Charles didn’t care about those things. He was a scientist.”
“Were there any groups of people he didn’t like? Or that he spoke out against?”
“No, nothing like that,” she said. “Actually, he was frustrated by the divide in the country. He used to say that the left and the right were so far apart that maybe it would be better if we all just divorced before we wound up in another civil war.”
Abbey took her phone out of her pocket and found a photo that Jason had texted to her. It was a picture of Nova. There was something about the woman’s fiery, confident face that made her a little jealous. She realized that she felt that way whenever Jason talked about her. She could see the emotion in his face when he did, and most of the time Jason seemed disconnected from any emotions at all.
She showed the picture to Sylvia Hackman. “Do you ever remember seeing your husband with this woman? Or do you remember seeing her anywhere else?”
Sylvia studied the photograph. “I don’t think so. She has a distinctive face. I think I’d remember.”
“What about this man?” Abbey asked, pulling up a picture of Peter Restak.
“No.”
Abbey sat back in the chair and frowned. She knew more about Charles Hackman than she ever had before, even when she was researching him for The Fort, but she still felt as if she knew nothing at all. Somehow Medusa had recruited him out of millions of other prospects because of his psychological profile. What had Hackman said to his wife? Prescix knew him better than he knew himself. Somehow, thanks to Prescix, Medusa had found him and brainwashed him. Radicalized him. Set him up in a hotel with a rifle.
That wasn’t just a software operation. It was more complicated than that. It may have begun online, but there had to have been a direct contact somewhere, too.
“Did you ever see your husband’s Prescix account?” Abbey asked.
“He wouldn’t let me see it. Typically, he and I used the same password on all of our online accounts, but he used a different one for Prescix. I tried to log in, which was how I foun
d out he’d changed it. I asked him why, and he got upset. He said he deserved privacy and that I shouldn’t be checking up on him. I figured he must be having an affair with someone he’d met out there. But I never saw his account in order to know who it was. And of course, he deleted the account before the shooting. Or somebody deleted it.”
“Somebody?” Abbey asked. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, it was all very strange. The FBI asked if I was sure about Charles using the Prescix software, because they hadn’t been able to locate his account. They couldn’t even find archives of it anywhere. It’s like it never existed. I swore to them I wasn’t wrong. Charles used Prescix every day. If they couldn’t find the account, then somebody removed it. For all I know, it was the company itself. I’m sure they were worried about all the lawsuits if it came out that Charles was influenced by things he did online.”
Abbey shook her head. The social media trail had been wiped out of existence. Leave no clues. Even so, someone must have reached out to Hackman in real life. They had to have spent hours together, and that was harder to conceal. There had to be evidence. Witnesses. A location where they met.
“Was Charles away from home a lot during those last few months?” Abbey asked.
Sylvia nodded. “Yes, he’d be gone for long stretches of time. Often overnight.”
“Did you ask him where he went?”
“He said it was client work.”
“Did you look at his credit card statements?”
“I did, but wherever he went, he must have paid cash. There was nothing out there. I looked, Ms. Laurent. So did the FBI.”
“I understand, but the thing is, I’m convinced your husband didn’t do this alone. I think he had help. I need to know who helped him and where they met. Because this organization called Medusa is not done. The massacre wasn’t an isolated event. Whatever they do next is likely to be even worse.”
“I wish I could help you,” Sylvia replied. “But Charles took his secrets to his grave.”
“Did you ever follow him?” Abbey asked.
Robert Ludlum's™ The Bourne Evolution (Jason Bourne Book 12) Page 22