Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Evolution - Brian Freeman Page 0,5
air. A few people left; a few others pushed their way inside. She examined the faces of the new arrivals. As comfortable as she always felt here, tonight she had an odd sense of unease. It was the same sensation she’d had on the boardwalk, that multiple sets of eyes were watching her. This was more than the usual attention she got from guys looking for a hookup. No one in the bar looked suspicious, but the feeling didn’t go away, and her lips pushed into a frown.
She felt paranoid. Just like the mystery man.
Where are you?
Even the mellow jazz music didn’t calm her nerves. The bassist was a slinky Spanish woman named Emilia who had magic fingers. On most nights, Abbey loved listening to her play. The trouble was, when she saw her face now, it wasn’t Emilia she saw. It was Sofia Ortiz in Washington Square Park. Her memory replayed that awful moment over and over, when the woman’s neck exploded in a shower of blood, when she pitched backward to the stage, when the screaming began, when the crowd surged out of control. An assassin had murdered a congresswoman right in front of her.
Her source said the killer was a former U.S. intelligence agent code-named Cain.
Who was Cain?
She hadn’t told Jacques the truth about how bad the night had been. There was blood on her shirt after it happened; that was how close she’d been to Ortiz. Then, in the riot that followed, she’d nearly been killed herself. There was gunfire everywhere, craziness, madness! She’d seen one of the anarchists aiming a pistol at her, and she’d only survived because someone in the crowd had run into her at that exact moment and they’d both tumbled to the ground. By the time she got up, the shooter had disappeared, but she could still remember his black hood and the gun pointed at her head.
With her hand trembling slightly, Abbey finished her beer. She got up from the bar, but at that moment, over the noise of the band and the crowd, she picked out two words from someone’s conversation.
“Château Frontenac.”
And then two other words. “Dead. Shot.”
Abbey tried to isolate the conversation. Who was it? She grabbed her laptop and shoved it in her bag. As she waded into the crowd, her ears pricked up to eavesdrop on what everyone was saying. She picked up snippets of talk about sports and drugs and drinks and sex, but nothing about the hotel castle on the cliff. Nothing about murder. And yet she knew, she knew, that something had happened.
And she knew that in some way it was connected to her.
“Police everywhere.”
There! Two burly young men, one black, one white, both in Nordiques jerseys, were squeezed into a corner booth behind the band. Their voices carried over the crowd. She shoved her way through the bar and bent over their table. A dim sconce light cast shadows on their faces.
“Excuse me.”
The two men stopped their conversation and sized her up from behind their beers. They liked what they saw. “What’s up, baby doll?” one of them said.
“Did I hear you say that something happened at Château Frontenac?”
“Oh, yeah,” the white Nordiques fan replied. “I was just up there. Whole area’s shut down.”
“What’s going on?”
“Dunno. I heard people saying there were bodies in the street. Some kind of shooting. Hey, why don’t you sit down, and we can—”
But Abbey was already gone.
She threaded through the mass of people toward the bar door. She needed to get back to Château Frontenac right now and find out what had happened.
When she got outside, the chill hit her wet clothes, and she shivered again. The rain had stopped, but the pavement was still damp. Rue Sainte-Angèle climbed sharply in the darkness, and she began to head up the street. As she did, a man crossed the road to intercept her. He’d obviously been waiting for her.
“Mademoiselle Laurent?”
She glanced nervously both ways. She was conscious of the fact that the two of them were alone on the empty street. Her hand covered the latch on her bag, in case she needed to reach for the Taser she kept inside. Her reporting often took her to uncomfortable places, and she’d learned to be prepared for anything.
The man gave her a bland smile and repeated his question. “You are Abbey Laurent, aren’t you? The reporter?”
“What’s this about? Who are you?”
“We had a meeting. I apologize for being late.”
“You?” She reacted with surprise. “You’re the mystery man?”