“I told him the same thing.”
“I’m glad we’re on the same page,” Priest replied. “Bourne is a distraction we don’t need. The sooner he’s out of the way, the better. The bigger issue is that we only have two days until the cabal meets on the island. We need a strategy to keep Gabriel Fox from giving up Prescix to Medusa.”
“Actually, I’ve been thinking about that, Miles. I have an idea.”
“What is it?”
“I think we should invite Gabriel to join us on the island,” Scott said. “Let him meet with the cabal face-to-face. Perhaps as a group, we can finally persuade him that he’s better off with us, not against us.”
Miles sipped his whisky as he reflected on this idea. “Interesting plan. And what if he still says no?”
Scott shrugged. “Then we have no choice. We kill him.”
THIRTY-THREE
JASON winced as Abbey wrapped an elastic bandage around his ankle, which he’d twisted in his jump from the hotel window. When she was done, he got to his feet, limping through the brush. They were back in the red hills, looking down from the heights of the mesa at the Three Mountains casino. The Land Rover was parked on an unpaved trail behind them. They were invisible in the darkness.
He focused the binoculars on the private casino and saw what he expected to see. Panic. Guards roamed the parking lot, shining lights into cars. High rollers were being escorted out the door and whisked away. He wondered what excuse they were using to hide what had really happened. Gas leak. Bomb threat. Computer failure. Even so, someone must have heard the gunshots in the tower; rumors had to be flying.
General Kahnke, whose hotel suite Bourne had crashed, left almost immediately, his face hidden by sunglasses and a hoodie. The general climbed into the back seat of a town car, accompanied by a redheaded mistress who’d probably been with him in the bedroom. Jason didn’t think the general was likely to survive the night. In the morning, he’d be found dead in a respectable Strip hotel. Heart attack probably. The general had seen too much.
He’d seen Bourne.
“You’re waiting for something to happen,” Abbey murmured as he continued the surveillance. “What?”
“This was an assault on one of the Medusa nerve centers. They’re going to have to assess the damage up close.”
“Meaning?”
“They’ll send someone.”
Another hour passed as he surveilled the property. It was the middle of the night. Finally, Jason spotted headlights approaching, and he knew this wasn’t one of the limos that had been coming and going since he escaped. When he focused on the vehicle through his binoculars, he saw a black SUV with smoked windows, and he recognized the profile of a Volvo XC90. He suspected it was the heavy, armored version, nearly ten thousand pounds in weight, built to withstand bullets and explosives.
Medusa had arrived.
“Now it gets interesting,” Bourne said.
The SUV pulled to a stop outside the casino doors like an ominous black spider. To Jason’s surprise, no one got out, and the engine didn’t shut down. Instead, two people emerged from inside the casino and headed toward the vehicle. The first was Peter Restak, the color drained from his face, his wounded shoulder bandaged and in a sling. The second was Andrew Yee, still in his royal-blue suit, his expression fearful. As Bourne watched, the rear door of the SUV swung open. The two men got inside, and the Volvo pulled away. The entire process took less than thirty seconds.
“Come on,” Jason said, pushing himself to his feet. He stumbled on his bad ankle, and Abbey held him up.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“The question is, where are they going? You’ll need to drive this time. Keep the lights off for now.”
He tossed her the keys, and Abbey got behind the wheel of the Land Rover. She drove down the dusty road, the truck bouncing on barren terrain. The land sloped sharply through scattered cacti and mesquite, and she squinted to avoid driving them off a cliff’s edge. When they reached the flatland, they were nowhere near the gate they’d used originally, and the paved road was on the other side of an aluminum fence.
“Drive over it,” Jason told her.
Abbey gave him one sideways look of concern, then gunned the engine. The Land Rover jolted over the uneven ground with a burst of acceleration, took down the fence as it plowed forward, and dragged it behind them before finally breaking free. They were on a divided road not far from the casino entrance road, which was hidden behind the mesa. There was no other traffic.
“Pull onto the median and wait. Keep the lights off.”
Abbey followed his instructions. Not long after, Bourne saw the armored SUV pass through the stoplight ahead of them, leaving the casino and heading west.
“Give them plenty of space, but you can use your headlights now.”
She switched on her lights and bumped off the median onto the road. At the stoplight, she turned right, and Jason could see the taillights of the SUV half a mile away, bending around a curve past housing developments that butted up to the hills. Abbey stayed behind the truck for another mile, and there were still only the two vehicles on the road. He knew that made their pursuit obvious.
“The driver will be a pro,” Jason said. “Odds are, he’s already spotted you back here. He knows you picked them up right outside the casino, and that’s going to raise a red flag.”
“Does he suspect we’re following them?”
“He will if we stay on the same course much longer. We’re far enough away that he can’t see what we’re driving, and that’s a plus. But in another minute or so, he’ll start slowing down to draw you closer so he can ID the vehicle.”
“And then what?”
“Then he’ll see if we stay behind him. If we do, either he’ll ambush us himself, or he’ll call ahead and have someone waiting to take us down in the desert.”
“So what do we do?”
“Hang on.” Bourne took out his phone and began checking maps of the area.
“Jason, he’s slowing. Should I slow down, too?”
“No. Then he’ll know it’s a tail.” He glanced up and spotted the SUV a couple of hundred yards ahead of them, and the gap between the two vehicles was closing fast. “There’s a cross street ahead. Start signaling right, and then you can slow down.”
Abbey used her turn signal and tapped the brakes.
“Turn here,” Jason told her.
She swung into the turn lane and turned right. Ahead of them, the taillights of the Volvo got smaller as the SUV accelerated again.
“Now what?”
“There’s a sharp left ahead. Take it, and keep driving as fast as you can.”
Abbey accelerated, and the Land Rover fishtailed as she turned the wheel hard at the next left. She followed the road through an empty shopping complex. As they approached another intersection at high speed, Jason told her, “Go right and then take your next left and turn off your lights again as you do.”
She followed his instructions, and a few seconds later, she braked to a stop at a major intersection.
“Go across the street, and make an immediate U. Then put your lights back on and turn right. If he sees you behind him at all, it should look like you’re coming from a completely different direction.”
“You think he turned, too?” Abbey asked, eyeing the lonely road as she crossed the intersection in the darkness.
“I think he’s heading for the freeway.”
Soon Abbey was back on the road with her lights on. Jason used the binoculars to identify the taillights of the Volvo, which was now almost a mile ahead of them. As he expected, the SUV made a right turn to merge onto I-15, heading west through the mountains toward Las Vegas. Abbey accelerated to narrow the gap. Even in the middle of the night, there were other cars on the freeway, giving them cover. The developed land ended quickly, and they found themselves in the middle of rocky desert, pitch-black except for the lights of the vehicles around them.
“We’ll be out here
for a while,” Jason said.
And they were. They passed a couple of other small towns on their route, but the towns came and went quickly and left them back in the dark hills. The driver of the SUV gave no indication that he was aware that he was being followed; he kept the vehicle at a constant speed through the empty land. More than an hour went by before they saw the sky brightening as they neared the fiery glow of the Las Vegas valley.
“You’ll need to get closer,” he told Abbey. “It will be easy to lose them in traffic as we hit the city.”
She gradually pulled within a few car lengths of the SUV, but she kept at least two other vehicles between them. Jason smiled; she had the raw instincts of a spy. He kept a close eye on the Volvo, wondering if it would exit the freeway soon, but the SUV stayed on I-15 past Nellis Air Force Base and the northern suburbs, continuing into the heart of Las Vegas. They passed the towers of the Strip hotels from north to south, and finally he saw the SUV take the sweeping exit that led them onto the eastbound section of I-215. They were heading to the city of Henderson.
The Volvo left the freeway in the Green Valley area, in a densely commercial section of town. Jason and Abbey kept it in sight through a series of stoplights, but then the SUV turned toward the MacDonald hills, climbing sharply into an area of million-dollar estates carved out of the mountains on terraced stretches of land. He could see the lights of the properties above them, widely spread across vast lots.
“Guard gate,” Abbey said, slowing the Land Rover.
Two blocks ahead of them, Jason saw the SUV pull to a stop at a gated access to an exclusive neighborhood called Sensara, monitored by guards who looked like ex-military. That was as far as they could follow. They watched the gates swing wide to allow the SUV to climb higher into the hills, and then the gates closed again, cutting them off. Jason motioned Abbey to turn the Land Rover around and head back down the hill, and once they were out of sight of the gates, they pulled to the curb on the steep access road. She turned off the engine.
“Medusa’s up there?” she asked.
He nodded. “Either that, or someone high up in the organization lives there.”
“But we don’t know where if we can’t follow them.”
“We’ll research the area tomorrow and see what we can find out.”
“What do we do now?” Abbey asked. “Do we leave?”
“No, we wait, just in case the Volvo comes back. Why don’t you try to sleep, and I’ll keep an eye on the road.”
“Why don’t you sleep? Looks like you could use it.”
Jason smiled. “Yeah. Okay.”
She was right. He was exhausted. He reclined the seat in the Land Rover and closed his eyes. Over the years, he’d mastered the art of sleeping in almost any condition, and he was out in seconds. He dreamed the way he always did, in photographs, the same way he remembered his life. Images passed through his head, of Nova, of Benoit, of Scott, of people from the past who he had known at some point and long since forgotten. He dreamed of Abbey, too, her deep red hair, her eyes wide as she stared at him, her face so close to his that he could see every lovely imperfection.
He started awake.
“Jason,” Abbey said. Her hand was on his shoulder. “The Volvo just passed us.”
He shook away his dreams and noticed the clock. Not even an hour had passed. They were still more than an hour from dawn.
“Did they see you?”
“I don’t think so. I ducked down when I saw headlights. Do you think they’re heading back to Mesquite?”
“Go after them, and we’ll see. If that’s where they head, we’ll let them go. We don’t need to go all the way back there.”
But when they caught up with the Volvo, the vehicle headed in a different direction into the hills that led toward Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam. Traffic was light on this stretch of two-lane road, and without Jason telling her what to do, Abbey held back, keeping distance between the two cars. Rocky hills loomed like silhouettes in the darkness on both sides. Jason kept an eye on the SUV’s taillights ahead of them, but then the lights abruptly disappeared. He saw no evidence of where the armored vehicle had turned.
Abbey saw it, too. “Where did they go?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Do I keep going?”
“Yes, keep the same pace.”
She drove for another mile, but the SUV had vanished from the road. Somehow they’d passed it. Jason told Abbey to pull to the dusty shoulder, and he got out of the Land Rover and studied the land behind them. On the slope of one of the dark hills, he spotted the pinpoint glow of a flashlight moving up and down. Not long after, headlights bloomed to life, and he saw the Volvo inching back down a steep slope toward the road. When it got to the highway, it turned toward Las Vegas.
Jason got back in the Land Rover. “Turn around, go slowly.”
Abbey retraced their route for almost half a mile, and then Bourne said, “Stop.”
The two of them got out of the vehicle. Jason spotted a rough track up the hillside that the SUV had followed. He began to climb, and Abbey climbed with him. The night was warm and silent except for their footsteps. He swung his flashlight back and forth across the desert land, seeing nothing but the scrub brush. Then, almost a hundred yards from the road, a reflection glinted back at him when he shined his light behind the rocks.
Jason hiked off the trail. He didn’t have to go far. The reflection came from a pair of glasses on a man’s face.
“Oh, shit,” Abbey said when she saw the body in the beam of his flashlight.
The manager of the Three Mountains casino, Andrew Yee, lay in the desert, his body stripped naked. He’d been shot in the throat.
THIRTY-FOUR
“WHAT did you say you do, Mr. Briggs?” the Henderson realtor asked Jason the following morning.
Bourne whipped off his sunglasses and gave her a grin. He dropped a little Texas twang into his voice. “Construction engineering, darling. Mostly in Dubai and Qatar. They love their big glass buildings over there.”
The Indian realtor, whose name was Iniya, smiled back with extremely white teeth. She was well into her forties but wealthy enough to look thirty. She had shoulder-length jet-black hair, overly red lips set against honey-colored skin, and smoldering green eyes. She wore a formfitting emerald designer dress, probably imported from Milan, and her breasts had been surgically enhanced to the size of small watermelons.
“And this would be … Mrs. Briggs?” Iniya asked, nodding at Abbey with pointed curiosity.
Abbey’s expression was severe. She had her hair tied tightly behind her head, and she wore an expensive two-piece navy suit they’d purchased in the Green Valley shops an hour earlier. “I’m Mr. Briggs’s attorney.”
“Oh, I see. Yes, of course.”
“Abigail here is a Harvard Law grad,” Jason went on. “I can’t say as I’m much of a fan of Hahvud types generally, but this gal is as smart as they come. My deal in Doha last fall? She out-negotiated some construction law hotshots from London twice her age on the procurement contracts and cut my sub costs by a third. The fact that she’s also mighty pretty to look at is just a bonus.”
“And you’re interested in building a house in the Sensara neighborhood?” Iniya asked.
“I am. Looks like my kind of homes up there. I like to have elbow room.”
“I understand, and you obviously have good taste, Mr. Briggs.”
“Charlie. Call me Charlie, Iniya. If we’re working together, we should be on a first-name basis.”
The realtor touched Jason’s shoulder with her long fingernails. “Okay. Charlie. Now, I do need to mention that the Sensara neighborhood is the most exclusive community in the Las Vegas valley. Privacy and security are both at a premium. You can expect to spend a minimum of seven to ten million dollars on a property there, and some of the homes have cost much more. Upwards of twenty million or even higher. Is that a price range with which you’re comfortable?”
Jason nodded toward
Abbey. “Am I comfortable with that, Abigail?”
“It’s fine.”
“Abigail says it’s fine,” Jason told the realtor. “I leave the dollars and cents to her.”
“There’s also a background check before a prospective buyer can move forward. A rather extensive one.”
“Good to know. Every club has its membership rules, right? But of course, I have nothing to hide.”
“I’m sure,” Iniya said.
“How about we go take a look-see at the home sites? I assume the powers that be wouldn’t object to that?”
“Of course, that’s fine. You’ll need to leave your IDs at the guard gate. And I assume you’re not armed? Guests can’t bring weapons into Sensara.”
Jason smiled. “You’re talking to a man from Texas, darling. We’re always armed. But I left my guns at the hotel suite. Figured they might make my future neighbors nervous.”
“Then let’s go.”
The three of them used Iniya’s red Mercedes sedan to drive into the upper reaches of the Henderson hills, where the Volvo had gone the previous night. At the guard gate, Bourne supplied a driver’s license for himself and a passport for Abbey, and he hoped that her name didn’t trigger any red flags on a watch list. The guards took a close look at their faces but didn’t otherwise react. When they’d passed inspection, Iniya drove them through the gates, and they found themselves in a world of custom multimillion-dollar homes set amid the rocky peaks. Many of the homes were finished; others were in the process of being built.
“There are still a number of homesites left throughout the hills,” Iniya told them. “Most feature unobstructed views of the Strip.”
“I can see that,” Jason said.
“Did you choose the Las Vegas area for a particular reason?” she asked.
“Oh, I like it hot. Usually, I’m in Dallas or the Middle East. I’m a bit of a gambling man, so I like having a place to stay that I can call my own when I come to town.”
Robert Ludlum's™ The Bourne Evolution (Jason Bourne Book 12) Page 25