Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Evolution - Brian Freeman Page 0,82

blood. Her lifeless arms hung down. Her sunglasses had fallen off; her eyes were closed.

Jason choked out her name again. “Nova!”

The man carrying her turned around. Their eyes met. Jason’s grief erupted into fury, and his heartbeat took off like a rocket. He knew that man. He knew that face; he’d spent days, weeks with him around the world. An agent like him. A killer.

Benoit.

Treadstone was here.

Treadstone was taking away the woman he loved. She was dead, and they were stealing her body. More than that, he knew—he knew beyond any doubt in his mind—that the agency had killed her.

They’d done this. Whoever was in the sniper’s lair was Treadstone.

Bourne took off after Benoit, but two other men collided with him. They all fell to the ground, crushed as people stampeded over them to escape. His head struck the concrete hard. His teeth clamped shut. He fought his way back to his feet, but by the time he did, Benoit was gone. Nova was gone.

He headed for the street. A car would be there, ready to whisk the body from the scene. He ran, shoving his way through the crowd, pushing toward the fence bordering the lot. At the open gates, he saw people flooding out of the festival grounds, escaping in every direction. But he saw a car, too, emerging from the underground parking lot of the Lucky Nickel.

There was Benoit. And Nova.

The rear door of the sedan flew open. Benoit shoved the lifeless body inside and followed. Jason ran along the fence, trying to keep the car in sight as it inched through a stream of people escaping from the festival. It couldn’t go fast; it couldn’t go far. He made it to the gate, where he wasn’t even fifty yards away. He closed on the car, shouting Nova’s name, but then a gap opened up in the crowd, and the sedan accelerated. Bourne thrust out a hand for the door, but the car shot forward, disappearing toward the freeway. All he could do was stand there and watch his life taken away from him.

Bourne stared up at the Lucky Nickel. The shooting was over. A man with a rifle was dead on the floor. The broken hotel window was quiet. He knew the cover-up would happen next. The evidence would be erased. He needed to get inside, needed to see the man who had done this.

Would he recognize him?

Would he know the assassin?

Jason ran for the Lucky Nickel. He jumped the closest fence and dashed across railroad tracks toward the rear of the hotel. Police cars already had the building sealed, the front and back blocked off by dozens of emergency vehicles. There was nowhere to go. He could see frightened guests huddled in the parking lot; he could see people flooding from the hotel doors. His eyes went from face to face, watching them, memorizing them.

An instinct. A reflex.

Then he saw a man he knew. A window in a sedan in the hotel parking lot went down, and Bourne saw who was behind the wheel. Nash Rollins.

Treadstone.

Nash saw him, too. The man’s face was hard, devoid of any emotion as he looked back at Bourne.

Then the window shut, and the car sped away.

*

JASON stood in the vacant lot with Abbey. They were the only ones here. The scene of the massacre had been their first stop as they drove into the city. It was a shrine now, where strangers stopped and left flowers. From where they were, he could see the fifteenth-floor suite in the Lucky Nickel where Charles Hackman had built his sniper’s lair. Memories of that day jolted through him like bolts of lightning. He could still close his eyes and see every face. The living and the dead.

Abbey followed the path of his eyes. “Sixty-six people. It’s unimaginable.”

Jason shook his head. “Sixty-seven. They never counted Nova. She was never on the lists of the dead.”

“Do you believe Benoit?” she asked. “Do you think Nova was working undercover to infiltrate Medusa?”

“I do.”

“Is that why she was killed?”

Bourne nodded. “It has to be. She got inside the organization, but somehow they figured out she was a spy. So they executed her. Now we just have to hope she left some clues behind. Something to point us in the right direction.”

“Wouldn’t Treadstone already have searched her place?” Abbey asked.

“I’m sure they did.”

“So what do you hope to find?”

“Something they missed,” Jason replied. He turned away from the Lucky Nickel and stared south, toward the Stratosphere and