Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(84)

All at once in this shabby hotel room on the edge of everything, he felt his isolation, something he had lived with and grown used to, as keenly as a knife blade to his throat. He missed Sara more than he had missed anyone for a very long time. Once again, he wondered where she was, hated that he was unable to contact her while she was on assignment for Mossad. He understood as no one else the need for absolute security in the field, but that didn’t—couldn’t—stop his desire to be with her, to feel her body warm against his.

The phone ringing broke the train wreck of his thoughts, and he snatched the receiver off the console. It was the front desk.

“Yes.”

“This is Carolyn, Mr. Winstead. A messenger is here from Tiffany’s, sir. He insists on delivering his package to you in person.”

“Send him up, Carolyn.” A messenger from Tiffany’s was the code phrase he and Deron had decided on. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure, sir.”

He woke Mala, the Angelmaker. It was time to go.

—



“We’ve found a passenger manifest listing,” Ellison said into his mobile. “It’s one of the names Bourne’s been using since his Treadstone days. Paid cash, as expected.” He grunted. “The twist is this time it’s a mister and missus.”

“You’re all in place?” Marshall Fulmer said.

“At Dulles International, yes, sir,” Ellison replied. “The team is deployed.”

“Excellent,” Fulmer said. “I’m on my way.”

Dirk Ellison put away his mobile, signaled to his team to take their places. He glanced at his watch: 9:45. The international flight that Bourne and his female companion were booked on was scheduled to depart at 10:45; it would begin boarding in fifteen. There was no way Bourne and the woman were getting on that plane. Personally, he thought the woman might very well be that Mossad agent Bourne had been seen with, but, really, it didn’t matter to him. Fulmer had been quite explicit: Bourne was the target; nothing else mattered.

Ellison watched the passengers at the gate in the departures lounge with his trained eagle eye—two young people of indeterminate gender sharing everything, a Coke, a burger, and whatever racket that passed for music those people listened to; an elderly threesome of yakking women, gray hair aflutter, hyped up for their first trip abroad; a couple with their three kids, reminding Ellison of the vast hole where his personal life began and ended.

But, hey, he was CIA through and through; second generation, in fact. His father was twice decorated in one of those so very desired secret ceremonies inside HQ that Ellison himself had yet to be invited to. But once he captured Jason Bourne, that would change in a heartbeat. He’d make his father proud of him. As a dedicated CIA agent, he hated taking orders from anyone other than his boss, or his boss, but times were changing, cross-agency missions, though despised by all the various mandarins, were now becoming more numerous. He didn’t like it, but having made his case to his superior, he knew unequivocally that he had no say in the matter.

However, he had plenty of say in this matter right here, right now, and he was bound and determined to make the most of it. That’s why, when he spied the couple coming down from the first class lounge, heading toward the gate as the door opened and the flight was called, he and his team closed in on them from all sides, trapping them in a move from which there was no escape.





32



Much to his chagrin, Fulmer was obliged to take Harry Hornden, the freelance journo he had climbed into bed with, on his trip to the airport. Like it or not, Hornden was now a de facto part of Fulmer’s entourage, sitting in the place of honor, beside Fulmer. Fulmer’s nostrils flared. Was it his imagination or was there a whiff of sulfur coming off the web scribe

Fulmer sighed, working his butt into the backseat of his custom Cadillac Escalade in a fruitless attempt to make himself more comfortable. Time was when journalism was a profession to be proud of. He recalled the era when the CBS News of Douglas Edwards and Walter Cronkite was the crown jewel of Bill Paley’s so-called Tiffany Network. The news division was an advertising loss leader, but so widely respected and prize-winning it was worth it. No more. In this day and age, networks could no longer afford loss leaders. Plus, the advent of Rupert Murdoch’s brand of shock-value news upended that American applecart forever.

Now, Fulmer thought sourly, the so-called news was a joke, made up of people like Harry Hornden, who had opinions in the place of a journalistic background. And he wasn’t even among the worst of them. But they all inhabited their own ring of hell, pulling breaking stories out of their butt holes.

“Marsh,” Hornden said now.

Fulmer hated when anyone called him “Marsh,” let alone this shmuck, so he grunted by way of reply. Anyway, his mind was elsewhere, already at Dulles, seeing Bourne in a small, windowless room with cuffs on his wrists and ankles. What a story that would be, and, like it or not, Hornden was the perfect journo to break it.

“So there are two men walking down the street,” Hornden continued with a certain gleam in his eye. “It’s the week before Christmas, bells are ringing, carols coming from outdoor speakers, the scent of free-cut pine trees in the air. One man says to the other, ‘I sure don’t like this talk of racism all of a sudden.’ ‘Me, neither,’ says the second guy. ‘You’re not a racist, are you?’ the first guy asks. ‘Hell, no,’ second one says. ‘You?’ ‘Not a bit of it.’ “Good,’ the second guy says, ‘Let’s go get drunk.’ ‘Capital idea,’ the first one says, ‘and we can catch us a faggot and roast his chestnuts over an open fire!’”