Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Evolution - Brian Freeman Page 0,75
on to her tightly, enjoying her warmth. She kissed his cheek and then kissed his lips. On the opposite side of the room, a grin creased Benoit’s face.
“Jesus Christ, Bourne, I really thought you were going to make me kill you.”
“I’m damn glad you didn’t, but what are you going to tell Nash?”
Benoit shrugged. “I’ll tell him he’s a stubborn ass, and he nearly lost one of his best agents. Two, actually, since I didn’t figure I’d get out of here alive. We can talk to him together if you’re willing. I can set up a meeting. But it has to be off the grid. I wasn’t lying. Nash literally doesn’t know who to trust, even inside Treadstone.”
“There’s something I need to know first,” Bourne said.
The other agent frowned. “Nova?”
“Yes. You said you didn’t want to believe I’d turned, and neither did Nova. What the hell does that mean? Nova was already out of Treadstone. She was forced out after the operation in London went bad. Why would she still have been in touch with anyone inside the agency?”
Benoit hesitated. “This should come from Nash, not me.”
“I need to know the truth, old friend.”
Benoit ran his hands through his choppy black hair. “All right. You’re right, you do deserve to know the truth. I told Nash that. The fact is, Medusa has been running rings around all of the intelligence agencies. We haven’t been able to get close to them. So Nash decided to run a sting. Off the books, unauthorized. Nova was the sting.”
Bourne shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Nash didn’t trust many people, but he trusted Nova. And me. For what it’s worth, we both said he should bring you in, too, but he was concerned about the damage from your memory loss. He thought it made you vulnerable. So he kept you out of the loop. The operation involved the three of us, that’s all. Nova, Nash, me. Nash didn’t even tell Director Shaw about it. There was no assignment in London that went bad. That was a ruse. We piggybacked on top of an industrial accident and put out the word in the intelligence community that it was a big Treadstone failure. We put the blame squarely on Nova. Not long after that, we pushed her out in a very public way. We wanted everyone to know she was damaged goods. Untouchable.”
“For God’s sake, why?” Bourne asked.
“Because we needed to give her a convincing cover story. We wanted to put an enormously talented agent on the street, bitter and unemployable. Don’t you see? The whole idea was to get Medusa to reach out to her. To recruit her. We’d finally have one of our own people inside their network. That was how Nash planned to destroy them.”
Jason shook his head in disbelief.
Suddenly, he had no idea whether anything Nova had told him was true. She’d lied. She’d concealed her real mission. She’d left him in the dark.
She’d told him she was in love with him.
Was that a lie, too?
“Did Medusa take the bait?” he asked.
“They did. That’s why Nova was in Las Vegas. That’s where they brought her for recruitment. She bought a house near the airport to run the operation undercover, and she thought she was in. She thought they trusted her. But then something changed. She began to get nervous; she began to worry that her cover was blown. That somehow they’d figured out she was a mole. We didn’t know how it happened, or who could have exposed her, but Nash thought you were the prime suspect. You and Nova were involved. Who knew what information you’d been able to glean about the operation without her knowing it? So I was in town to check you out. For what it’s worth, Nova never wavered. She never had any doubts about you. She was afraid that you were the one who was in danger.”
“Instead, Charles Hackman got to her first,” Jason said.
“Yes. I’m sorry. Nova told Nash that she’d heard some big operation was planned. She heard a reference to the Lucky Nickel. That’s why he was in town. To prevent whatever was going to happen. But we were all too late.”
Bourne said nothing more. Abbey put her warm hands on his face. “Jason? Are you okay?”
“The last eighteen months have been a lie,” he said, trying to process the deception, as well as his own mistakes. “Nothing I believed was true. I blamed Treadstone for killing Nova. I was chasing the wrong enemy.”