Free The Bourne Sanction by Robert Ludlum, Eric Van Lustbader Page A

didn’t love. Now it was she who took his hand, leading him to her bed, where they fell upon each other like half-starved animals.
    Bourne dreamed he was standing at the window of Moira’s bedroom, peering through the wooden blinds. The streetlight fell across the sidewalk and street, casting long, oblique shadows. As he watched, one of the shadows rose up from the cobbles, walked directly toward him as if it were alive and could somehow see him through the wide wooden slats.
    Bourne opened his eyes, the demarcation between sleep and consciousness instantaneous and complete. His mind was filled with the dream; he could feel his heart working in his chest harder than it should have been at this moment. Moira’s arm was draped over his hip. He moved it to her side, rolled silently out of bed. Naked, he padded into the living room. Ashes lay in a cold, gray heap in the hearth. The ship’s clock ticked toward the fourth hour of the night. He went straight toward the bars of streetlight, peered out just as he had in his dream. As in his dream the light cast oblique shadows across the sidewalk and street. No traffic passed. All was quiet and still. It took a minute or two, but he found the movement, minute, fleeting, as if someone standing had begun to shift from one foot to the other, then changed his mind. He waited to see if the movement would continue. Instead a small puff of exhaled breath flared into the light, then almost immediately vanished.
    He dressed quickly. Bypassing both the front and rear doors, he slipped out of the house via a side window. It was very cold. He held his breath so it wouldn’t steam up and betray his presence, as it had the watcher.
    He stopped just before he reached the corner of the building, peered cautiously around the brick wall. He could see the curve of a shoulder, but it was at the wrong height, so low Bourne might have taken the watcher for a child. In any event, he hadn’t moved. Melting back into the shadows, he went down 30th Street, NW, turned left onto Dent Place, which paralleled Cambridge Place. When he reached the end of the block, he turned left onto Cambridge, on Moira’s block. Now he could see just where the watcher was situated, crouched between two parked cars almost directly across the street from Moira’s house.
    A gust of humid wind caused the watcher to huddle down, sink his head between his shoulders, like a turtle. Bourne seized the moment to cross the street to the watcher’s side. Without pausing, he advanced down the block swiftly and silently. The watcher became aware of him far too late. He was still turning his head when Bourne grabbed him by the back of his jacket, slammed him back across the hood of the parked car. This threw him into the light. Bourne saw his black face, recognized the features all in a split second. At once he hauled the young man up, hustled him back into the shadows, where he was certain they wouldn’t be seen by other prying eyes.
    “Jesus Christ, Tyrone,” he said, “what the hell are you doing here?”
    “Can’t say.” Tyrone was sullen, possibly from having been discovered.
    “What d’you mean, you can’t say?”
    “I signed a confidentiality agreement is why.”
    Bourne frowned. “Deron wouldn’t make you sign something like that.” Deron was the art forger Bourne used for all his documents and, sometimes, unique new technologies or weapons Deron was experimenting with.
    “Doan work fo Deron no more.”
    “Who made you sign the agreement, Tyrone?” Bourne grabbed him by his jacket front.
    “Who are you working for? I don’t have time to play games with you. Answer me!”
    “Can’t.” Tyrone could be damn stubborn when he wanted to be, a by-product of growing up on the streets of the northeast Washington slums. “But, okay, I guess I can take yo where yo can see fo yoself.”
    He led Bourne around to the unnamed alley behind Moira’s house, stopped at an anonymous-looking black Chevy. Leaving Bourne, he