The young cop looked pained. He glanced both ways to make sure no one else was around. “They haven’t told us anything. They’re keeping it very quiet.”
“Sure, I understand. You’re cute, by the way. Maybe we could have that drink anyway. Hey, do you know who’s in charge around here? That guy with the limp over there, do you know who he is?”
“Somebody called him Rollins. That’s all I know.”
“Rollins. He’s American, right?”
“They all are.”
Abbey leaned close enough that she knew the cop could inhale her perfume. “Did anybody say anything about New York? I heard there might be a connection to that congresswoman getting killed in the park.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“What about the name Cain? You hear anyone mention that today?”
The cop looked uncomfortable, as if he’d made a big mistake saying anything at all. “I’m sorry, miss, you better go. If people see us talking, I could get into trouble. We’re not supposed to talk to reporters.”
“Sure. I get it. Hey, thanks for the help.”
Abbey headed away from the boardwalk. Before she’d gone too far into the plaza, she took one last look over her shoulder, and when she did, she froze in place.
The American agent named Rollins was leaning on his cane and staring directly at her.
Like he knew exactly who she was.
SIX
“WE have a situation in New York,” Miles Priest told Bourne. “We need you to go there immediately. This may be our first opportunity to infiltrate Medusa.”
Jason sat at a table in a windowless modular room with Priest and Scott DeRay. The room was a SCIF—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility—adjacent to Priest’s top-floor office in the West Coast headquarters of Carillon Technology. They could talk freely there without fear of electronic surveillance.
“What’s the situation?” Bourne asked.
His friend Scott pushed a folder across the table. “I assume you’re familiar with Sofia Ortiz.”
“The freshman congresswoman out of New York? Sure. She’s made quite a name for herself on social media.”
“Yes, she has,” Scott went on. “Mostly at our expense. She’s been crusading against the data practices at Carillon and other tech companies since she got into office. If she has her way, the feds will turn Big Tech into nothing more than utilities operating at the whims of Congress.”
“Well, you have what every politician dreams about,” Bourne pointed out. “Personal information on nearly every voter.”
“Exactly!” Miles Priest snorted. The Carillon CEO got up from his chair and paced between the walls of the SCIF. “This crusade of hers isn’t about privacy or consumer protection. It’s about power, pure and simple. Believe me, the last people you want anywhere near our data are members of Congress.”
Bourne knew that Priest was intimately familiar with the government world. He was a former director of the FBI who’d retired after thirty years inside the Beltway and switched from the public sector to the private sector. He’d taken the reins at Carillon Technology when social media companies were first beginning to flex their muscles. In the fifteen years since then, he’d built Carillon into the backbone of Silicon Valley, providing database infrastructure for nearly all of the social media giants.
Priest himself had become the personification of the money and influence of Big Tech. He was an immediately recognizable figure wherever he went, six foot six, with neatly coiffed gray hair and a long, hangdog face. His tenure at Carillon had also made him a billionaire with homes all over the world, from an estate on his own Caribbean island to a remote castle in the Highlands of Scotland.
“Ortiz has made a lot of noise,” Bourne agreed, “but she’s still just a freshman. How much influence does she really have?”
“It’s not a question of influence,” Scott said.
“Oh?”
“Yes, we have reason to believe that Ortiz is working with Medusa. Or Medusa has penetrated her office and is feeding her information. That’s why we want you to go to New York. To follow the trail.”
“A sitting congresswoman? What makes you think that?”
“Recently, there was a profile of Ortiz in an online magazine called The Fort by a Canadian journalist named Abbey Laurent. Laurent quotes a source inside Ortiz’s circle who says that the congresswoman is ready to expose the worst scandal in the history of Big Tech. Ortiz herself wouldn’t comment, but now she’s scheduled a huge rally in Washington Square Park next week. We think she’s planning to expose the data hack.”
“She’ll use that as the launching pad for legislation against us,” Priest interjected. “This will be like the Patriot Act after 9/11. When people find out that the entire tech cabal was victimized—that an encyclopedia of data on nearly every American was stolen—they’re going to demand action. It will give Congress the cover they need to put us under their thumb.”
“We know Medusa was behind the hack,” Scott went on. “We’ve been able to keep it under wraps for almost a year while we tried to figure out what they were planning to do with the data they stole. But since then, nothing. Silence. As far as we can tell, they haven’t tried to use it, haven’t tried to sell it. So we still don’t know their ultimate plan. But now it appears that Sofia Ortiz is planning to make news of the hack public. This is clearly the first shot in the war.”
Priest sat down again and put both of his long arms on the table, with his hands curled into fists. “The leak about the hack didn’t come from any of us. If Ortiz knows about it, it’s because Medusa gave her the information. They want it out there. Somewhere in Sofia Ortiz’s operation is a trail that leads back to them. That’s why we need you. That’s why we need a spy.”
“There are a lot of spies out there,” Bourne replied. “Why me?”
“Bringing you in was my idea,” Scott explained. “Miles convinced the other CEOs that we needed to hire our own operative to take on Medusa. The feds have had no luck getting inside the organization or learning anything about it. So it’s up to us now. We want someone who reports directly to us, with no conflicted loyalties. I said I had the perfect man.”
Bourne stared at Scott DeRay with a question. “Do they know about … ?”
“Treadstone?” Scott replied. “Yes, they know all about Treadstone.”
“Don’t look so surprised, Bourne!” Priest interjected with a chuckle. “I was the head of the FBI. You think the CIA can take a piss without me knowing about it? I’ve been in the loop on Treadstone since their first black ops mission.”
“And yes, I told them why you left,” Scott went on, with a meaningful glance that Bourne didn’t miss. “They know about Nova and what Treadstone did to her. No one blames you for walking away. In fact, as I told Miles, you leaving Treadstone was a gift to us. One of the best intelligence agents in the world was suddenly a man without portfolio. How could we turn that down?”
Jason heard the unspoken message. Scott knew all about the memory loss that had nearly destroyed Jason a few years earlier, but he’d kept the truth about Bourne’s amnesia from Miles Priest. Scott was protecting him.