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

apart, turned its components into smoking shrapnel, shrieked behind them. Bourne, with the motorcycle at full speed, felt Soraya’s arms wrap around his ribs. He bent low over the handlebars, feeling her breasts pressing softly against his back as she molded herself to him. The howling air was blast-furnace hot; the sky, bright orange, then clogged with oily black smoke. A hail of ruptured metal whirred and whizzed all around them, plowed into the ground, struck the roadway, fizzed into the river, shriveling.
    Jason Bourne, with Soraya Moore clinging tightly to him, accelerated into the light-glare of monument-laden D.C.

Four
    JAKOB SILVER and his brother appeared from out of the dinnertime night, when even cities such as Washington appear deserted or, at least, lonely, a certain indigo melancholy robbing the streets of life. When the two men entered the hushed luxury of the Hotel Constitution on the northeast corner of 20th and F Streets, Thomas, the desk clerk on duty, hurried past the fluted marble columns and across the expanse of luxurious carpeting to meet them.
    He had good reason to scurry. He, as well as the other desk clerks, had been given a crisp new hundred-dollar bill by Lev Silver, Jakob Silver’s brother, when he had checked in. These Jewish diamond merchants from Amsterdam were wealthy men, this much the desk clerk had surmised. The Silvers were to be treated with the utmost respect and care, befitting their exalted status.
    Thomas, a small, mousy, damp-handed man, could see that Jakob Silver’s face was flushed as if in victory. It was Thomas’s job to anticipate his VIP clients’ needs.
    “Mr. Silver, my name is Thomas. It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir,” he said. “Is there anything I might get for you?”
    “That you may, Thomas,” Jakob Silver replied. “A bottle of your best champagne.”
    “And have the Pakistani,” Lev Silver added, “what’s his name-?”
    “Omar, Mr. Silver.”
    “Ah, yes, Omar. I like him. Have him bring up the champagne.”
    “Very good.” Thomas all but bowed from the waist. “Right away, Mr. Silver.”
    He hurried away as the Silver brothers entered the elevator, a plush cubicle that silently whisked them up to the executive-level fifth floor.
    “How did it go?” Lev Silver said.
    And Jakob Silver answered, “It worked to perfection.”
    Inside their suite, he shrugged off his coat and jacket, went directly into the bathroom, and turned on all the lights. Behind him, in the sitting room, he heard the TV start up. He stripped off his sweat-stained shirt.
    In the pink-marble bathroom, everything was prepared.
    Jakob Silver, naked to the waist, bent over the marble sink and took out his gold eyes. Tall, with the build of a former rugby player, he was as fit as an Olympian: washboard abdomen, muscular shoulders, powerful limbs. Snapping closed the plastic case in which he had carefully placed the gold contact lenses, he looked into the bathroom mirror. Beyond his reflection, he could see a good chunk of the cream-and-silver suite. He heard the low drone of CNN . Then the channel was switched to Fox News, then MSNBC .
    “Nothing.” Muta ibn Aziz’s vibrant tenor voice emerged from the other room. Muta ibn Aziz had picked his cover name-Lev-himself. “On any of the all-news stations.”
    “And there won’t be,” Jakob Silver said. “CI is extremely efficient in manipulating the media.”
    Now Muta ibn Aziz appeared in the mirror, one hand gripping the door frame to the bathroom, the other out of sight behind him. Dark hair and eyes, a classic Semitic face, a zealous and inextinguishable resolve, he was Abbud ibn Aziz’s younger brother.
    Muta dragged a chair behind him, which he set down opposite the toilet. After glancing at himself in the mirror, he said: “We look naked without our beards.”
    “This is America.” He gestured curtly with his head. “Go back inside.”
    Alone again, Jakob Silver allowed himself to think like Fadi. He had