Once a month, Abbey Laurent drove from her studio apartment in the wooded neighborhood of Mount Pleasant in Washington, DC, to the small town of Hyattsville, Maryland. The point-to-point driving distance was only half an hour, but Abbey took a different route each time, randomly making multiple turns that seemed to annoy the voice on her phone’s GPS system. In the end, the trip usually took her more than an hour.
When she got to Hyattsville, she always parked in a different part of town. Today she used the empty lot of a construction supply business that was closed on Saturday. She picked her way across railroad tracks and emerged onto a sidewalk near the County Service Building. When the traffic thinned, she hurried across the street and cut through a small park. Then she followed an alley to the next street, passing an artisanal coffee shop, where she ducked inside and bought a latte to go.
As Abbey came out sipping her coffee, her gaze landed on a woman sitting at one of the outside benches. She was pretty sure the woman hadn’t been there when she went inside. The woman took a longer-than-normal look at Abbey, then went back to her coffee and picked up a paperback book. It was actually the book, more than the woman, that drew Abbey’s attention. She recognized the cover and title: Serpent!
Abbey had read the book. In fact, she was in the book. Or at least, there was a character named Phoebe Duchamp, a Montreal-based journalist, who bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Abbey Laurent. Serpent! was a novel, but the plot was closely based on the hunt for a technology group called Medusa in which Abbey had been involved two years earlier. Fiction or not, some of the details hit awfully close to home, including Phoebe’s relationship with an American intelligence agent who’d been framed by Medusa. It made her wonder about the author’s sources.
The book had been a bestseller, so it wasn’t unusual to come upon someone reading it. And yet it made Abbey nervous to see anyone with that particular book when she was on her monthly mission to Hyattsville. Because Hyattsville was where she made contact with Jason Bourne.
The woman with the paperback didn’t look up again. Abbey continued past the coffee shop to the corner of the street, and then glanced back. The woman hadn’t moved; she was still at the bench, her nose buried in the book. Abbey watched her for a few moments, then decided she was letting her paranoia get out of control. She crossed the street and went into the Hyattsville Post Office.
It was quiet inside, as it usually was. Her breath quickened. She felt a combination of fear and excitement, as she always did.
Would there be a message from Jason?
She found the post office box and used her key to open it, but when she looked inside, she slammed the metal door shut again in disappointment. The box was empty. It had been empty for every one of her last six visits. She knew the message he was sending her. She could hear his cool, hard voice in her head, explaining all the reasons they couldn’t be together.
It’s not safe.
When you’re with me, you’re in danger.
The people who come after me will come after you.
I’m a killer.
But Abbey didn’t care. All she felt was anger that he was letting her twist in the wind, not telling her where he was or what he was doing. She’d sent him letters for two years—even sent him little maple candies from her hometown of Quebec City, because it was an inside joke between them—and for a while, he’d replied. But as time wore on, his notes had grown more infrequent and more distant as he pushed her away. Until, ten months ago, they’d stopped altogether. His silence was more eloquent than anything he could have said.
Stay away from me.
He wasn’t dead. She was sure of that. She’d finally extracted a promise from him that if he got killed, someone would get in touch with her. If she could trust anything about Jason, he kept his promises. One day, some man she didn’t know would come up to her and tell her that Cain was dead and then walk away without answering any of her questions. That was how it would go. But at least she’d know. Until that happened, he was still alive. He was just ghosting her.
Bastard!
Abbey went into the main part of the post office and bought a greeting card with no message inside. Before she had time to think better of it, she wrote a note on the card, scrawled Jason’s mail drop address in Paris on the outside, and slipped it into the outgoing mail slot. As soon as she did, as soon as she thought of Jason reading what she’d written, she regretted it. But it was done. At least he’d know how she felt.
She left the post office into the warm morning air. A cloud of depression went with her despite the blue skies overhead. She retraced her steps into the alley, then sat down at one of the benches outside the coffee shop. The woman was still reading her book and didn’t look up. Abbey drank more of her latte and gripped the cup so tightly that it began to crush in her fist. She was pissed at herself and pissed at Jason Bourne.
Two years. She hadn’t seen him in two years, but she couldn’t let go of him.
Abbey brushed away the deep red bangs from her forehead. Her shoulder-length hair was always choppy and messy. Her lipstick was a slightly paler shade of red, but she didn’t wear much makeup beyond that. She was who she was, and people could take it or leave it. She didn’t think of herself as pretty, but Jason had told her that she was incredibly wrong about that. Her eyes were dark and smart, her mouth expressive and full. She stood just over five foot seven, a little taller in her suede boots. An unbuttoned, untucked purple blouse covered her white spaghetti-strap top.
She checked her phone. No messages.
She knew she should work. She had stories to write. Tom Blomberg at the Washington Sentinel had not so gently pointed out that she was late with her profile on the new DC mayor, which was mainly because the mayor kept ducking Abbey’s calls. She owed Vanity Fair an article on the latest TikTok dance craze. The Verge wanted her to do an essay on the Prescix social media software that was rising from the ashes.
That was her life now. Two years ago, she’d walked away from her stable job at an online Canadian magazine called The Fort and signed on to do freelance work for less money and no benefits. She’d given up her studio apartment in Quebec City for an even smaller studio apartment in DC for twice the rent. She had what she wanted from her career. She was in the middle of everything going on in the world. But she still couldn’t forget the sheer adrenaline she’d felt when she was with Jason. She missed it.
She missed him.
“Are you Abbey Laurent?”
Abbey looked up and tensed with surprise as the woman who’d been reading Serpent! slid onto the other side of the picnic table across from her. In her head, she heard the echo of Jason’s warning. The people who come after me will come after you.
“Who are you?” Abbey demanded.
The girl held up both hands, palms outward, as if to prove she wasn’t a threat. She had a different cheap ring on every finger. She couldn’t be older than twenty, and she was stick-thin, with a buzz cut of black hair and nerdy round glasses that made her blue eyes look oddly large.
“I need to talk to you, Abbey.”
“I said, who the fuck are you, and how do you know who I am, and how the hell did you find me?”
“My name’s Iris,” the girl said. “And we all know who you are. You’re one of the few people who calls out the bullshit on both sides.”
“Who’s we?”
“An online group. Young people all over the country. We don’t believe the lies we’re being told.”
“You’re conspiracy nuts,” Abbey concluded with a sigh.
“You of all people should know we’re not nuts.” Iris held up the paperback novel. “This is you, isn’t it? The character in the book—it’s based on you? You broke the story about Medusa and the tech cabal. That was no conspiracy, was it?”
Abbey glanced around the alley. She was unnerved by the girl’s fanatical intensity, and she wondered if Iris was alone, or whether there were others from her group nearby. “How did you find me? No one knows I’m here.”
“I told you, we know who you are. One of our people, Jerry, works at the post office. He’s seen you in there several times. So we know you come here regularly. I’ve been here for days, waiting for you to show up.”
Abbey studied Iris over the top of her coffee cup. “Sure, nothing creepy about that.”
“I’m sorry, but I needed to talk to you. I don’t know why you come here, and I don’t want to know, but you seem to be taking steps to keep it a secret. So this seemed like the safest place to meet, where no one would be watching us.”
“And what exactly do you want from me?”
“I have a story for you.”
Abbey rolled her eyes. “Yeah, everybody’s got a story. QAnon. Pizzagate. Russiagate. Every online rumor will find somebody who believes it. But ninety-nine percent of them are complete bullshit.”
“This is about a murder.”
Abbey frowned. That wasn’t what she’d expected. “Whose murder?”
“A tourist was killed in DC two weeks ago.”
“Are you talking about the woman in West Potomac Park?”
“Yes.”
“As I recall, that case sounded pretty straightforward. She was mugged and stabbed by a homeless man who was high on heroin.”
“That’s just the lie we’ve all been told. I know the truth.”
“Yeah? So what’s being covered up?”
Iris shook her head. “Not here. Too many people could be watching.”
Abbey listened to her journalist’s instincts about sources. Usually, it was easy to make a call: serious or not serious. But with Iris, she wasn’t sure. At first, she’d consigned the girl to the fanatical fringes, but something about her earnest intelligence made Abbey reassess her opinion. Most conspiracists saw big plots. Fake moon landings. Stolen elections. They didn’t waste their time on little things. Like murder.
“Okay, let’s take a walk,” Abbey said. “I’ll give you ten minutes.”
The two of them stopped next to the wall of a concrete overpass near the railroad tracks. At Iris’s request, Abbey turned off her phone.
“They can track phones,” the girl said.
When Abbey had done so, Iris took out a joint and lit it, and after smoking for a couple of minutes, she looked more relaxed. She offered it to Abbey, who shook her head.
“Deborah Mueller,” Abbey said, wanting to get back to the story. “That was the woman’s name, right?”
Iris nodded. “Yes.”
“German tourist flies in for a vacation, and two hours later, she’s dead. Murdered across the water from the Washington Monument.”
The girl slid a phone from the back pocket of her jeans. “Have you seen this video? Actually, I know you haven’t. Almost no one has.”
“What is it?”
“An interview with a homeless woman who was in the park that night. She saw the murder.”
Abbey’s brow creased with surprise. “I don’t recall there being any witnesses.”
“I know. That’s what the police said. That’s what the media said. But this video is out there. One of our group filmed it a couple days after the murder. Except it’s being censored. You can’t find it online. Search for it on Google or YouTube, and it doesn’t exist. And whatever you can’t find online may as well not be real.”
She held up the phone and played the video. The quality was bad, just an interview done with a phone. The sky looked gray, and Abbey could see the Jefferson Memorial in the background, as well as police tape surrounding the area where the body had been found. There were still a couple of cops on the scene, looking bored as they kept gawkers away. The woman in the video had gray hair and was in her fifties. She wore mismatched clothes and had a small terrier in her arms. Her voice was shrill, and she gestured over her shoulder at the police as she talked.
“I saw it!” she exclaimed. “I saw the whole thing, but they won’t listen to me! I was hiding in the grass, didn’t dare show my face, you know? They would have killed me, too. There were three men. Three! Two of them wore creepy masks, and the third, he just took a knife and killed her! Stabbed her right there where I could see it! They killed Leon, too! They must have shot him up with H, you know? I saw him go down. He had nothing to do with that woman, nothing at all.”
Iris clicked off the video. “See?”
“I see a woman who probably has mental and substance abuse issues trying to get attention for herself.”
“So she’s got problems. That doesn’t mean she’s lying. Don’t you think people have a right to judge for themselves? We can’t post the video anywhere. Google and Facebook flagged it as misinformation.”
“Well, it probably is. I mean, I don’t agree with them yanking the video. But I don’t see any big conspiracy here, Iris.”
“There’s more.”
Iris tapped her phone and showed Abbey a photograph. “This is a picture that went viral. It supposedly leaked, and nobody knows where it came from. Deborah Mueller’s body. You can see her face. Next to her is a roller bag she brought with her on the plane, okay? According to the police, they found clothes, printouts about DC tourist locations, postcards she bought at the airport, personal stuff. All the shit an ordinary German tourist would have, right?”
“So what?”
The girl played another video. “One of our people works at the airport. He was able to grab a video of the taxi line that night before the police confiscated it. See? There’s Deborah Mueller getting to the front of the line. She heads to the third cab, not the first, which pisses people off. Do you recognize the face? It’s the same woman.”
“Okay. That’s her. What’s the significance?”
Iris played the video again. “Where’s her bag?”
“What?”
“Deborah Mueller doesn’t have a roller bag with her.”
Abbey took the phone from Iris and played the video again. And then a fourth time. She tried to think of an explanation that made sense, but Iris was right. The woman whose body had been found next to a travel bag in the park came out of the airport from an international flight and got into a taxi with no luggage.
“All right,” Abbey acknowledged. “That’s pretty weird, but there are probably half a dozen different explanations for it.”
“Maybe, but don’t you think it’s worth looking into?” the girl asked.
Abbey hesitated. She played the video one more time, and then she studied the photograph of the dead woman in the park, comparing the faces. They were definitely the same. And she played the video of the homeless woman again, talking about three men converging on Deborah Mueller and killing both her and the man named Leon who got the blame for her death.
“Why do you need me?” Abbey asked. “Sounds like you’ve got a lot of sources in this group of yours.”
“We have people but no platform, no way to get the word out. You do.”
Abbey stared at the foliage around the railroad tracks and shivered, feeling an odd sensation of being watched. “Can you send me all of this?”
Iris gave her a tiny smile. “Yes.”
“I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Thank you.”
“Tell me something,” Abbey said. “How did you find out about any of this? What made you think there was something weird about this woman’s death?”
Iris opened up the pictures on her phone again. She showed Abbey another photo of Deborah Mueller lying dead in the park. Then she swiped to the next picture, which seemed to be identical to the first one. “The first picture was the one that leaked. The second one went viral, and the first disappeared. You can’t find it anywhere online anymore.”
“They’re the same,” Abbey said.
Iris shook her head. “No, they’re not. Look closely. Look at the woman’s arm.”
Abbey did. When she studied the first picture again, she now spotted a small tattoo on the woman’s wrist. It was the Eye of Providence—an eye within a triangle that appeared at the top of the pyramid on the backside of the U.S. dollar bill. And yet in the woman’s tattoo, the triangle was upside down.
Then she swiped to the second photograph, the one that had gone viral. In that picture, the woman’s arm had no tattoo.
“Okay, well, maybe the first is the fake,” Abbey pointed out. “Maybe someone added the tattoo as some kind of weird joke.”
“Either way, we’ve seen that tattoo before,” Iris said. “We think it’s the symbol of an organization that has been spreading lies online. Manipulating the truth. Making sure people believe only what they want them to believe. If this woman was part of them, then that’s the reason why she was killed.”
Abbey frowned. “What is this organization?”
“We don’t know much about them,” Iris replied. “Just their name. They call themselves the Pyramid.”