Free Bourne 4 - The Bourne Legacy by Robert Ludlum, Eric Van Lustbader

must be making herself a cup of hot chocolate, her traditional sleep aid. He heard the neighbor's corgi bark, and for some reason he could not fathom, it seemed a mournful sound, full of sorrow and failed hope. At length, he reached into the bin, picked out a torso in Civil War gray, a new tin soldier to create.

CHAPTER FOUR

    "Must've been some accident, by the look of you," Jack Kerry said.
    "Not really, just a flat," Bourne replied easily. "But I didn't have a spare, and then I tripped on something—a tree root, I think. I took quite a tumble into the stream." He made a deprecating gesture. "I'm not exactly well coordinated."
    "Join the crew," Kerry said. He was a large, rawboned man with a double chin and too much fat around his middle. He had picked Bourne up a mile back. "One time my wife asked me to run the dishwasher, I filled it up with Tide. Jesus, you should've seen the mess!" He laughed good-naturedly.
    The night was pitch-dark, no moon or stars. A soft drizzle had begun and Kerry put on the windshield wipers. Bourne shivered a little in his damp clothes. He knew he had to focus, but every time he closed his eyes he saw images of Alex and Mo; he saw blood seeping, bits of skull and brain. His fingers curled, hands tightening into fists.
    "So what is it you do, Mr. Little?"
    Bourne had given his name as Dan Little when Kerry introduced himself. Kerry, it appeared, was an old-style gentleman who put great store in the niceties of convention.
    "I'm an accountant."
    "I design nuclear waste facilities, myself. Travel far and wide, yessir." Kerry gave him a sideways glance, light spinning off his glasses. "Hell, you don't look like an accountant, you don't mind me saying."
    Bourne forced himself to laugh. "Everyone says that. I played football in college."
    "Haven't let yourself go to seed like many ex-athletes," Kerry observed. He patted his rotund abdomen. "Not like me. Except I never was an athlete. I tried once. Never knew which way to run. Got screamed at by the coach. And then I got tackled good." He shook his head. "That was enough for me. I'm a lover, not a fighter." He glanced at Bourne again. "You got a family, Mr. Little?"
    Bourne hesitated a moment. "A wife and two children."
    "Happy, are ya?"
    A wedge of black trees hurried by, a telephone pole leaning into the wind, a shack abandoned, draped with thorny creeper, returned to the wild. Bourne closed his eyes.
    "Very happy."
    Kerry manhandled the car around a sweeping curve. One thing you could say about him—he was an excellent driver. "Me, I'm divorced. That was a bad one. My wife left me with my three-year-old in tow. That was ten years ago." He frowned. "Or is it eleven?
    Anyway, I haven't seen or heard from either her or the boy since." Bourne's eyes snapped open. "You haven't been in touch with your son?"
    "It's not that I haven't tried." There was a querulous note to Kerry's voice as he turned defensive. "For a while, I called every week, sent him letters, money, you know, for things he might like, a bike and such. Never heard a word back."
    "Why didn't you go to see him?"
    Kerry shrugged. "I finally got the message—he didn't want to see me."
    "That was your wife's message," Bourne said. "Your son's only a child. He doesn't know what he wants. How can he? He hardly knows you."
    Kerry grunted. "Easy for you to say, Mr. Little. You've got a warm hearth, a happy family to go home to every night."
    "It's precisely because I have children that I know how precious they are," Bourne said.
    "If it was my son, I'd fight tooth and nail to know him and to get him back into my life." They were coming to a more populated area now, and Bourne saw a motel, a strip of closed stores. In the distance, he could see a red flash, then another. There was a roadblock up ahead and, by the look of it, a major one. He counted eight cars in all, in two ranks of four each, turned at forty-five degrees to the highway in order to afford their occupants the greatest protection