Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(33)

He frowned. “Isn’t that what NSA itself does?”

She smiled, took a sip of her beer. “What we do is a bit more specialized.”

“Well, that tells me a whole bunch of nothing.”

“Uh huh.” She set her mug down carefully. “And you never answered my question.”

“I can’t talk about Dreadnaught.” He appeared concerned. “You understand. You can’t talk about yours, either.”

“No.” She waved her hand. “Of course. You’re a good soldier, Lieutenant Goode.”

“Frankie.”

She cocked her head, gave him a quizzical look. “That was a joke.”

“Huh? Oh…oh, yeah. Sorry.”

“Never apologize, soldier.”

He gave her a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

She dropped her eyes to the menu but didn’t read it. She was thinking that she had already caused him to drop enough clues as to how he liked his women. “What’s good here?”

“The New York strip.”

“I’m partial to the tomahawk rib eye.” She lifted her eyes to him. “Ever had that?”

“Uh uh. I always order the same thing.”

Sure, you do. “How about we share the rib eye? It’s big enough for two.”

“Sure.” He grinned. “Why not?”

It was crystal clear he liked the idea of sharing his meat with her. She laughed silently at the double entendre.

She slapped the menu. “It’s settled then. You choose the fixings.” She was betting with herself that they would be potato skins, loaded, and creamed spinach. The waitress drifted by, he ordered, and she won a million dollars.

“Well, one thing’s for sure,” she said, when they were alone. “We’re in the same business.”

“What business is that?”

“Secrets.”

He nodded. “I hear you.” Tilting his head back, he drained his mug, licked his lips as he looked at her. “So I know you’ll get it.” He sighed, rubbed a hand across his face. “It’s so hard, you know. Keeping the secrets.”

“The secrets set you apart. Who can you get close to, right? You can’t even hold a decent conversation with most people.”

He let go a deeper sigh, relaxing all the more. “You got that right.”

“Unless it’s with an insider. Someone who keeps as many secrets as you do. Maybe more.”

“And even then.”

Their steak arrived, along with the potato skins, loaded with butter, sour cream, bacon bits, chives, and creamed spinach, which she despised. They spent the next forty minutes sharing the tomahawk, which was surprisingly good. Frankie thought it had too much flavor, which made her mouth twitch in a sardonic smile. What a plain vanilla guy he was. While they ate, they spoke of things of no consequence to her: where he was raised, went to school, how he became interested in intelligence work while he was in the army. He had two brothers and a sister. He told her where they were and what they were doing, but that information went in one ear and out the other. She reciprocated with her own background. She drew enormous enjoyment from fabricating it on the spot: small family, home schooling, an abusive father—that was a must with this guy; men like Frankie were dying to fix females with broken wings.

“I see you’re not plying me with liquor,” she said, lifting one eyebrow, “like most men.”

“I’m not like most men.”

Oh, yes you are.

She laughed softly, throatily. His sincerity was almost heartbreaking. “I’m beginning to get that impression.”

—



Afterward, in the parking lot, with chorus lines of traffic snaking by, he told her he wanted to see her home, as if they were sixteen-year-olds. That was a no-go. She didn’t want him to see how far away from here she lived, she didn’t want to raise any red flags about why she was at his shooting range.

“My place is being repainted; it stinks to high heaven.” She gave him a judicious look. “But, you know, Frankie, I’d like to see where you live.”

“Really?”

They were striped in shifting vehicle headlights. A semi’s air horn trumpeted a mournful sound, dopplering away.

She nodded. “Really.” Just a bit shy now. “Unless you don’t want me to.”

Of course he wanted her to; his eyes were glazed with the thought of her.

His home was in a concrete block building, low-rise, painted a pastel blue, one of many on a street lined with dusty chestnut trees. To her it looked like limbo, lost in the mists between urban and suburban. As they got out of their cars, a teenage kid in a high school varsity jacket bicycled past. He raised a hand to Frankie, who called, “Hey!” after him. Somewhere a dog barked, mournful as the semi’s air horn.

“Well, this is it,” Frankie said, opening the door to his second-floor apartment.

A bachelor pad, for certain. The living room was dominated by an enormous flat-panel TV. A sofa and easy chair were plunked in front of it with no thought to placement. Opened bags of potato chips and Cheetos shared a low table, cheap and scratched, with an oil-stained pizza box, one forlorn slice, cheese congealed like icing, lying within. No rugs. No pictures or photos on the walls, only posters for Metal Gear Solid V and Call of Duty: Black Ops. Military video games.