Free The Bourne Objective by Robert Ludlum, Eric Van Lustbader Page B

to him, that she had walked beside him, possibly laughing as she had with Noah Perlis, but he would never know. His only memory was of her falling down the temple steps, falling, falling… And now he was alone again, because he didn’t want Moira to suffer the fate of all the others who had tried to get close to him. Alone, always and forever…
    Tracy had shivered against him, as if she had been exhaling for the last time.
“Jason, I don’t want to be alone.”
    “You’re not alone, Tracy.”
He remembered his lips pressing against her forehead.
“I’m here with you.”
    “Yes, I know, it’s good, I feel you around me.”
Just before she died she had given a sigh, akin to a cat’s purr of contentment.
    The curtains in Noah Perlis’s flat twitched and shivered as if alive, and a harsh, flat laugh escaped his pulled-back lips. Had Holly whispered to him as Tracy had:
“It’s in our darkest hour that our secrets eat us alive.”
Little did Tracy know that every hour of his amnesiac life was his darkest hour, that the secrets eating him alive were secrets even from him. He missed Tracy, missed her with the sharpness of a stiletto slipped between his ribs so that he gasped out loud. The curtains shivered in the wind through the sash and it was as if Tracy were here with him again, looking at him with her huge blue eyes, her wide megawatt smile so like Suparwita’s. In the wind he heard her laugh, felt the back of her hand brush against his cheek, cooling his flesh.
    He had only known her a very short time, but those days had consisted of the compressed time in battle, when staying alive became the be-all and end-all of existence, when every moment contained the taint of death, when company mates become lifelong friends.
    Tracy had touched him in a place both heavily defended and starkly tender. She had wormed her way inside him and now remained there, coiled and breathing, even after death.
    And then, so close to her, hearing her voice in his mind, he remembered something she had said the night before she’d been killed:
“I live in London, Belgravia. If you saw my flat—it’s a tiny thing, but it’s mine and I love it. There’s a mews out back with a flowering pear tree that a pair of house martins nest in come spring. And a nightjar serenades me most evenings.”
    He caught his breath. Was it really a coincidence that both Tracy and Perlis lived in Belgravia? Bourne didn’t believe in coincidences, especially not with this group of people: Tracy, Holly, Perlis, the Hererras, Nikolai Yevsen, Leonid Arkadin. Perlis and Yevsen were dead, as were Tracy and Holly, and Arkadin was God only knew where. That left the Hererras as the living tendons that held this constellation together.
    Only the photo of the handsome young man with the mocking half smile was left unexplored. Where had he seen that face before? It was maddeningly familiar and yet subtly changed, as if he’d seen the man when he was younger…
or older!
In a sudden frenzy he slid out the cardboard backing and discovered a small key taped to the back of the photo. He peeled it off. The size indicated that it was from either a public locker at one of the airports or the train station or… There was a paper tag attached by a small piece of thin wire that had a series of numbers handwritten on it in ink. Safe-deposit box. He turned the key over. Imprinted on its obverse was a logo consisting of two tiny interlinked letters: AB.
    Everything clicked into place. This man was Diego Hererra, son and heir of Don Fernando Hererra, who had dealt in illicit gun trafficking with the late great Nikolai Yevsen, the legendary arms dealer whom Bourne had killed last month. Don Hererra’s legitimate business was the Aguardiente Bancorp: AB. He had given Diego the job of running Aguardiente’s London office.
    Noah Perlis was friends with Diego Hererra, and they both knew Holly. Picking up the photo of the three of them at Holly’s birthday, he looked from one face