Like Priest, Scott DeRay was former FBI. He’d been on the fast track, buzzed about as a future director and eventual attorney general. But he’d surprised his superiors a few years earlier by quitting the bureau and joining Carillon Technology as their number two executive. Scott was now the protégé and eventual successor to Miles Priest. His FBI colleagues had assumed it was about money, but Bourne knew that Scott’s decision wasn’t financial. He already came from a billionaire family; he’d gone to exclusive private schools and colleges in Europe. No, Scott had decided in his early thirties that the real future of the world was in technology, not government. So he’d moved on.
They were old friends. Bourne had known Scott throughout his Treadstone days, but their relationship went much further back. They’d spent summers together as teenagers. Scott had showed him pictures from back then, two boys hanging out week after week at the beach, laughing together, arms around each other’s shoulders. Bourne remembered none of it. To him, those events may as well have happened to someone else. He had no recollection of his childhood, but he still had Scott in his life as a reminder.
Scott was smooth and handsome. Wavy dark hair. A permanent suntan. He wasn’t particularly tall, but he had a politician’s charisma. Everyone who met him remembered him. He had limitless energy, fueled by a metabolism that barely needed more than four hours of sleep on any night. Every day, he’d run in Central Park at five in the morning, pumping through an intense workout. Then, if he wasn’t at his Manhattan desk doing venture capital deals for Carillon, he’d be on a plane or helicopter, hopscotching from Washington to Scotland to Nassau to San Francisco with Miles Priest.
His friend was going to rule the world someday. Or maybe he already did.
“What do you say, Bourne?” Priest asked impatiently. “The clock is ticking. We need someone who can find the connection between Sofia Ortiz and Medusa. We need to know what they’re planning. Will you help us?”
Jason noticed a little smirk on Scott’s face, because his friend knew there was no way he was going to say no. Sometimes Jason thought that Scott knew him better than he knew himself.
“I’m in,” Bourne replied.
*
THAT was two weeks ago.
Now Sofia Ortiz was dead, and Jason was on the run.
He sat in the back seat of an Audi sedan driven south along the Canadian coast by a fat businessman and his twenty-something mistress. Bourne knew where he needed to go. Despite the ambush the previous night, he had to go back to Quebec City. If Medusa had framed him for the murder of Sofia Ortiz, then the only thing he could do was to take the fight to Medusa, and that meant infiltrating their operation. There was one person left who could help him do that.
Abbey Laurent.
She had a source who’d told her about the data hack. She had a source who’d told her about Cain. Bourne needed to find out who was passing secrets to her and trace her source back to Medusa.
“Where are we going?” the businessman in the front seat whined, his voice oozing fear. He had sweat glistening on his head, which was mostly bald except for a thin crown of brown hair. “You haven’t told us anything!”
“Just keep driving.”
“How do we know you won’t kill us?”
“You don’t,” Jason said.
Bourne eased far back into the seat, where his face was partly hidden through the rear window. He watched small towns passing as they headed south, and he eyed the highway ahead for roadblocks and police. They were still more than an hour outside the urban core of Quebec City. His shoulder burned as if a spike had been driven through it, and his head throbbed. He tried to concentrate; he needed a plan. But as he sat in the rear of the Audi, he found himself tormented by flashbacks. His face twitched. In moments of stress, his brain fired a storm of memories at him, one after another. He saw the faces of people from his lost past, people he should have known but who were strangers to him.
And other faces.
People he’d killed.
Jason tried to shut it all out. He had to focus. Stop it!
He realized he’d become distracted. When he glanced at the front seat, he saw that the fat businessman’s right hand had drifted away from the steering wheel.
“What are you doing?” Jason hissed.
He lurched forward, shoving the gun into the man’s neck. The man had slipped a cell phone out of his pocket and was trying to dial an emergency number. Jason twisted the man’s wrist sharply, forcing him to drop the phone. The car swerved as the man screamed in pain, and a car in the opposite lane blared its horn. Jason grabbed the phone, then put the barrel of the gun against the head of the blond in the passenger seat.
“Give me your phone, too. Any more tricks like that, and I’ll shoot you both.”
The young woman, unlike her companion, remained cool and calm. She took out a phone from her tight jeans and handed it to Bourne. He shoved both phones in his pocket, then collapsed backward against the seat. The woman turned around to stare at him. She looked him up and down, more curious than afraid.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
The businessman, whose thick fingers were clenched around the wheel again, shot her an angry look. “Don’t talk to him! Are you crazy?”
“Shut up, Wallace,” the girl snapped. Then she said to Bourne: “You should have somebody look at that. I can help you if you want.”
“Are you a nurse?”
“Close. My dad’s a vet.”
Bourne laughed. “That’s what you call close?”
“I’ve helped him in surgery since I was twelve. If I can deal with an angry Siamese, I think I can deal with you.”
“Why would you want to help me?” Jason asked.
She shrugged. “Hopefully, you’re less likely to kill me that way.”
Bourne studied the girl’s face. She couldn’t be more than twenty-two or twenty-three. Her blond hair was long and straight, and she wore a scoop T-shirt that emphasized her skinny neck and bony shoulders. Her face was pimpled. She had sleepy brown eyes, but she had a street-smart look that told him she already knew a lot about men.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Amie.”
“And who’s Wallace here?”
“My boss,” she said. She added with a smirk, “Among other things.”
“Amie, stop talking to him!” the man behind the wheel demanded again. “He’s a psychopath!”
“You’re being boring, Wallace,” the young woman replied with a lazy glance. She nodded her head toward the car window as she continued the conversation with Bourne. “We’re in Montmagny. There’s a pharmacy a few blocks away from here. I can get the things to fix you up.”
“Are you saying I should let you go inside by yourself?” Bourne asked.
“Well, you could, but I’ll be honest. If you do that, I won’t come back.”
“That is honest. Except if I come inside with you, then I have to worry about Wallace driving off and calling the police.”
She smirked again. “You don’t need to worry about him. Wallace will be a good boy.”
“Because he wants to keep you alive?”
“Oh, no, he’d run out on me in a heartbeat to save his own neck. But you have his phone, and he likes to take pictures of me while I’m sucking his dick. I imagine his wife would find those pretty interesting.”