Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(62)
As he felt her breasts and the heat between her thighs press against him, something was unlocked inside him, some bestial thing that had long been lurking, pacing back and forth in the deepest shadows of his soul, waiting for its chance to be turned loose.
Now was its time, and it reveled in it.
—
Gwyneth’s office might have looked like a salon to Fulmer, but in fact it was kitted out with enough bleeding-edge eavesdropping gear, all cleverly hidden from view, to make it the envy of even TMZ.
And so while Fulmer’s interview with Gwyneth morphed from friendly banter to a bit of business, to bantering flirtation, to full-on sex of a massive hard-core variety heretofore hidden deeply inside Fulmer’s firmly buttoned-down psyche, all of it, from his foul-mouthed imprecations to his all-too-willing submission to the mistress side of his hostess, was duly recorded in high-fidelity and in living color, as was said by both Gwyneth and Harry Hornden.
Later, Harry would deem it “a sight to behold,” and toast Gwyneth for peeling away the layers of tough skin that shielded Fulmer from his inner demon, which now belonged, lock, stock, and barrel, to them. At the time, however, Gwyneth was far too busy goading the Fulmerial demon into more and more outré forms of behavior that were nothing she hadn’t experienced before, but would be “Holy shit!” unacceptable to the general public.
—
Within eighteen hours Bourne was airborne, in the belly of one of Keyre’s transports. He studied the surprisingly deep dossier on General Arthur MacQuerrie the Somalian’s network had assembled. When he had committed it to memory, he set it aside, put his head back, and fell into a deep and restorative slumber in which he dreamed of Sara. They were running along the sand on Beit Yannai Beach, and the sun was in their eyes. Sara took an abrupt right turn, crashing into the Mediterranean surf. He was right on her tail.
Diving through a wave, he found her on the other side and kissed her with a fierceness that drove itself all the way through his bones.
—
The Angelmaker was similarly in the air, heading for the same destination. As she stared out the Perspex window, she reviewed the final conversation she had had with Keyre before heading to his airfield.
“There’s good reason why he likes to work alone,” she had told Keyre.
His eyes narrowed, and he gave her the look she knew so well, the one that passed through skin and flesh and bone to lodge in her brain. “I’m not going to have a problem with you, am I?”
“What kind of a problem?”
“A Bourne problem.” Keyre scrutinized every facet of her face with the exquisite attention of a jeweler about to cut a precious stone. “It has not escaped my notice that you have formed an unhealthy attachment to him.”
“You know where my loyalty lies.”
“Yes, Angelmaker,” he said, putting heavy emphasis on each word. “I do.” He had rubbed his hands together. “So. To the matter of Bourne’s preference to work alone.”
“I will shadow him,” she responded firmly. Then her face clouded over. “Even into the NSA dark site?”
Keyre smirked. “What d’you think?”
The Angelmaker—or was it Mala?—did not sleep a wink on the flights’ long legs to America. Instead, she watched the visions unspool behind her eyes. She saw herself as she might have been had her father not sold her and her sister into slavery. As she might have been had she not been taken into custody by Keyre, and he not initiated her into the exquisite horrors of Yibir, had he not incised his magic formulae upon her back, had he not bled her day after day, working on her to morph the pain he inflicted into a pleasure that ensnared her in its insidious web. Always pulled in two directions, she was on the verge of losing her self in the cauldron of Yibir when Bourne had arrived to extricate both her and Liis. What would she have become? A prima ballerina like Liis? She didn’t think so. But something. Something other than what she was now: a puppet of man and magic. She no longer knew what was real, what was Yibir magic, and what was her own fantasy.
23
Crowcroft, twenty-one acres lying ninety-five miles southeast of the Leesburg Pike, had a long and storied history stretching back hundreds of years. Originally bought by an English shipping magnate to house his son, who had impregnated a woman far below his station, it was turned into a tobacco farm by the wayward son, who, as it turned out, had a better head for business than he did for women. Or for politics, for that matter. Having sided with the South in the Civil War and having agreed to house Johnny Reb during those bloody years, he was, in his elder years, thrown out on his wide bottom. For some years afterward, Crowcroft was kept afloat by remnants of the son’s ragtag progeny, but time after time it went bankrupt, preyed upon by northern carpetbaggers out to line their pockets as quickly and as unscrupulously as possible. Near the end of the twentieth century it went into foreclosure for the last time. For some years after that, it sat fallow and forlorn on the books of the local bank that had lent money to the unfortunate owners, who, as it happened, were thrown in prison for drug trafficking. The same isolated location, which was perfect for illegal activities at Crowcroft, served as a detriment to selling it to legitimate businesses. Until the U.S. government came along and took it off the bank’s hands for ten cents on the dollar.