A SCORCHING November sun beat down on Las Vegas, as if summer had never left. Jason walked hand in hand with Nova through the thousands of people crowded around the Phaetons, Bel Airs, Hornets, and Thunderbolts at the antique car show. What was normally a vacant lot steps away from the I-515 was a boisterous festival that day. The air was sweet with the smell of cotton candy. Twangy country music played from the stage, and the partiers drank yard-long margaritas. Nova wore a red bikini top and black short shorts, exposing most of her deep brown skin and taut physique. Her lush black hair hung loose around her shoulders, and she hid her dark eyes behind oversized sunglasses. She walked in high heels, but he was still a foot taller than she was. Her mouth broke into a big smile as she watched children running around them.
“I think I want kids,” she said.
Jason was surprised. She’d never expressed an interest in children before, but Nova was a woman of many dimensions. A ruthless killer, a voracious lover, but also a woman who could cry at a Schumann concerto and play chess with old men in the park. One of the things he loved about her was that she was impossible to predict.
“Someday,” she added, reading the look on his face. “Not today, Jason.”
“That’s a relief,” he said, grinning.
“I’m serious, though. Think about it.”
“I will.”
She dragged him toward a gleaming 1931 Cadillac roadster and posed for a picture beside the car’s owner. Her body was voluptuous, attracting stares from the men nearby. The sixty-something car owner in a plaid cap let his hand wander while Jason took the picture, and Nova just laughed. She looked happy. No worries, no fears. Jason felt happy, too, but happiness also dulled his reactions. Happiness meant letting his guard down. That was how he made mistakes.
As he took Nova’s picture in front of the Cadillac, everything changed, and he missed it entirely. He didn’t even notice what had happened until he looked at the photograph later that night. One instant, she was smiling at him. The next instant, as he snapped the photo, her smile had vanished. She was staring at something over his shoulder, her lips in a frown. Her whole body was tense.
By the time he put away his phone, she’d pasted a smile back on her face.
“Those margaritas look amazing,” Nova said, which was unusual, because she rarely drank. “Would you be a love and get me one?”
“Come with me.”
“Oh, you know I can’t wait in lines. I get impatient and say nasty things about people. Make it a tall one, and float some Patrón on top.”
“Okay.”
As he turned away, Nova grabbed his wrist and pulled him back. Her arms snaked around his waist. Her skin glowed from the heat. “I love you, Jason Bourne,” she whispered.
Those were the last words he heard her say.
He threaded his way to the tent on the far side of the festival where they sold margaritas frozen and on the rocks. Most of the people in line were loud and not on their first drink. When he looked back over the crowd, he couldn’t see Nova near the Cadillac anymore. She’d disappeared, lost among thousands of others.
He should have been worried, but he wasn’t. He was happy.
The band onstage played a cover of a Brad Paisley song. A skinny twenty-something black man in a cowboy hat talked with a wizened old man in overalls about his 1950 Studebaker Land Cruiser. Three kids no more than ten dodged the people in line as they squealed and played tag. Two teenage girls danced to the music. He smelled smoke; someone was sneaking a cigarette. Across the street, sunlight glimmered on the windows in the tower of the Lucky Nickel hotel.
Bourne heard the first shot as soon as it happened. Nobody else did.
The report of the rifle wasn’t even as loud as a firecracker, easy to miss, but he knew what it was. His head snapped around as he tried to pinpoint the source of the gunfire. The echoes played with the sound, as if it were coming from everywhere. Definitely a long gun. Definitely high up.
It had to be the hotel. He surveyed the windows, looking for the weapon.
A few seconds later, the shooter fired again.
The black man in the cowboy hat collapsed. It happened too fast for anyone to realize he’d been shot in the head. He simply fell where he stood, his hat covering his face. Another muffled pop rolled over the festival, barely loud enough to hear.
“Gun!” Bourne shouted. “Shooter! Take cover!”
Hesitation gripped the people around him. Not fear, just a frozen moment of uncertainty. No one understood what was happening; no one believed it was real. Then a woman grabbed her chest, and when everyone saw the spray of blood, the screaming began. Parents grabbed children. People ran, and shoved, and fell, trampled in a stampede. The fence around the lot penned them in, and there was nowhere to hide. More bullets rained down, faster now, one after another, randomly spraying the crowd, cutting down human beings like paper targets in an arcade. Metal pinged as rounds thudded into Fords and LaSalles.
Bourne had only one thought.
Nova.
He raced through a scene of wild panic. Bullets missed him by inches, and more bodies fell. He searched the faces, trying to find her. Look for the calm one; she wouldn’t run. She’d be helping others, dragging children behind cars, ripping off shirts to tend to the wounded.
Where was she?
Already, sirens wailed on the streets as police scrambled for the scene. Only a couple of minutes had passed since the carnage began, but every few seconds brought more death, more blood. He stopped and stared at the Lucky Nickel tower. He could see where the shooter was now, could see the reflection near the top floor and the fire of the barrel. He waved his arms, trying to draw the attention of whoever was behind the riflescope. Shoot at me, take me, leave the others.
Leave Nova.
But the gunfire went elsewhere. He shouted Nova’s name, barely audible above the tumult of voices. He found the Cadillac roadster where she’d been standing minutes earlier, but she was gone. Dozens of people lay flat on the hot pavement behind the car, covering their heads, covering their children, hiding from the assault.
The car owner in the plaid cap lay beside his prize car. He was dead, a bullet in his throat.
“Nova!” Jason screamed, turning in every direction.
Then, with the crowd parting like a curtain, he saw her. His world turned black. Someone carried her, her body slung over a man’s shoulder, her hair swishing back and forth as he took her away. He could only see half her face, but what he saw was streaked in 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 the gleaming hotels of the Strip. “We’re closer to the heart of the conspiracy than we’ve ever been before. Medusa is here in Las Vegas. We need to find them.”