Free The Bourne Dominion by Robert & Lustbader Ludlum Page B

from his house. A black Lincoln Town Car had pulled up and the driver got out, opened the door for the secretary, who climbed in. One of the security detail followed. Two others got into their nondescript Ford, and the two cars pulled out in unison. Peter, avoiding the gaze of the fourth man left behind, began the tail, his memories trailing behind.
    In high school and college, he had experimented with like-minded boys his age, always being careful because that was his nature. But then he’d become interested in the clandestine services and begun to take the appropriate courses. When he did so, his college adviser changed. He had never seen or heard of him before. In fact, he couldn’t find him on the college’s admin list. One day, the adviser called him in for a talk, the gist of which was that if Peter truly desired a career in the clandestine services he’d have to “button it up,” as the adviser put it.
    The subject was never raised again, but Peter, having been given a word to the wise, did, in fact, button it up, reading as he did about case after case where spies or men in sensitive positions were compromised because of their sexual proclivities. He fervently did not want to become one of those disgraced people. And he vividly recalled what had happened to Father Benedict. So he became a better celibate than Benedict had ever been.
    He loved Soraya like the sister he never had, but he certainly was never in love with her. He wondered that he’d once been jealous of her affection for Bourne. He scoffed at that now. How could he have ever been jealous of Jason Bourne? He couldn’t bear to have that man’s shadowy life.
    The cars rolled out of the tree-lined streets of Georgetown, heading due east toward the heart of Washington. Dusk was forming, filled with haze and uncertainty. He checked his car’s clock. Any moment now, Soraya would be in the air, on her way across the Atlantic to Paris and her rendezvous with Amun Chalthoum. He’d called his friend Jacques Robbinet to give him the particulars of her visit. Robbinet, whom he’d metthrough Jason Bourne, was the French minister of culture. Robbinet was also one of the new leading lights of the Quai d’Orsay, the French equivalent of Central Intelligence, and so wielded enormous power both inside and outside France. Robbinet had assured Peter that he’d extend Soraya every courtesy in cutting through the Gordian knot of French red tape.
    The two cars were slowing as they approached East Capitol Street. They passed 2nd Street, SE, and stopped in front of the Folger Shakespeare Library, one of the capital’s more remarkable institutions. Henry Clay Folger had been chairman of Standard Oil, now ExxonMobil. He was cut from the same cloth as the great industrialist/robber barons John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and Henry E. Huntington. However, Folger spent much of his later years amassing a staggering collection of First Folios of Shakespeare’s plays. In addition, the library housed, in the original edition or facsimile, every important volume on Shakespeare from the invention of the printing press to the end of the seventeenth century, including a copy of every book on history, mythology, and travel that had been available to the playwright. In fact, the library possessed 55 percent of all known books printed in the English language before 1640. But the crown jewels of the collection were the First Folios, the sole textual source of over half of Shakespeare’s plays.
    As Peter watched Hendricks emerge from his bulletproof car, he wondered what the secretary was doing at the Folger. It wasn’t as if he’d come to write a dissertation on Shakespeare or the England of the Tudors and the Stuarts.
    Even more intriguing, none of his bodyguards accompanied Hendricks up the steps and into the building. Checking his watch, Peter saw that it was after four, which meant that the building was closed to the public for the day.
    Peter was familiar with the