The Bourne Deception

by Robert Ludlum

  Making up his mind at last, he went past the gravestone, picking his way through the trees, following the direction of the girl-shadow he’d seen, or thought he’d seen. The land rose quickly to a ridge, more heavily forested than that of the sema. He paused at the crest for a moment, unsure which way to go because his view was obstructed by trees stretching away in every direction. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw another flicker of movement, and he turned his head like a dog on point. Only a bird, perhaps? But cocking an ear, he heard no birdsong, no rustle of leaves in the underbrush.

  He pushed on, following the flicker, walking sure-footedly down into a steep-sided ravine filled with even thicker stands of trees.

  Then, up ahead, he saw her hair flying, and he called her name, though it was foolish and completely unlike him.

  “Holly!”

  Holly was dead, of course. He knew that better than anyone else alive, but this was Bali and anything was possible. He began to run after her, his legs and heart pumping. He ran between two trees and then something slammed the back of his head. He pitched forward into blackness.

  Who knew her better,” said a voice in his head, “you or me?”

  Perlis opened his eyes and, through the pain dizzying him, saw Jason Bourne.

  “You! How did you know I’d be here?”

  Bourne smiled. “This is your last stop, Noah. The end of the line.”

  Perlis glanced around. “That girl—I saw a girl.”

  “Holly Marie Moreau.”

  Perlis saw his gun lying on the ground and lunged for it.

  Bourne kicked him so hard, the crack of two ribs echoed off the tree branches. Perlis groaned.

  “Tell me about Holly.”

  Perlis stared up at Bourne. He could not keep the grimace of pain off his face, but at least he didn’t cry out. Then a thought occurred to him.

  “You don’t remember her, do you?” Perlis tried to laugh. “Oh, this is too good!”

  Bourne knelt down beside him. “Whatever I can’t remember you’re going to tell me.”

  “Fuck you!”

  Now Perlis did cry out as Bourne’s thumbs pressed hard into his eyeballs.

  “Now look!” he commanded.

  Perlis blinked through eyes streaming with tears and saw the girl-shadow climbing down from one of the trees.

  “Look at her!” Bourne said. “Look what you’ve made of her.”

  “¿Holly?” Perlis couldn’t believe it. Through watering eyes he saw a lithe shape, Holly’s shape. “That isn’t Holly.” But who else could it be? His heart hammered in his chest.

  “What happened?” Bourne said. “Tell me about you and Holly.”

  “I found her wandering around Venice. She was lost, but not in the geographic sense.” Perlis heard his own voice thin and attenuated, as if it were being transmitted through a poor cell connection. What was he doing? That switch had been thrown, the energy flowing out of him, just like these words he’d kept inside himself for years. “I asked her if she wanted to make some quick money and she said, Why not? She had no idea what she was getting into, but she didn’t seem to care. She was bored, she needed something new, something different. She wanted her blood to flow again.”

  “So you’re saying all you did was give her what she wanted.”

  “That’s right!” Perlis said. “That’s all I ever gave anybody.”

  “You gave Veronica Hart what she wanted?”

  “She was a Black River operative, she belonged to me.”

  “Like a head of cattle.”

  Perlis turned his head away. He was staring at the girl-shadow, who stood watching him, as if in judgment of his life. Why should he care? he wondered. He had nothing to be ashamed of. And yet he couldn’t look away, he couldn’t rid himself of the notion that the girl-shadow was Holly Marie Moreau, that she knew every secret he had chained in the prison of his heart.

  “Like Holly.”

  “What?”

  “Did Holly belong to you, too?”

  “She took my money, didn’t she?”

  “What did you pay her to do?”

  “I needed to get close to someone, and I knew I couldn’t do it myself.”

  “A man,” Bourne said. “A young man.”

  Perlis nodded. Now that he’d embarked on this path he seemed to need to keep going. “Jaime Hererra.”

  “Wait a minute. Don Fernando Hererra’s son?”

  “I sent her to London. In those days, he wasn’t yet working in his father’s firm. He frequented a club—gambling was a weakness he couldn’t yet fight. Even though he was underage, he didn’t look it, and no one challenged his fake ID.” Perlis paused for a moment, struggling to breathe. His left arm, underneath his body, moved slightly as he tried to ease his suffering. “Funny thing, Holly looked so innocent, but she was damn good at what I’d sent her to do. Within a week she and Jaime were lovers, ten days after that she moved into his flat.”

  “And then?”

  Perlis appeared to be having an increasingly difficult time catching his breath. He continued to stare, not at Bourne, but at the girl-shadow, which seemed to him all that was left of the world.

  “Is she real?”

  “It depends what you mean by real,” Bourne said. “Go on, what did Jaime Hererra have that you wanted Holly to steal?”

  Perlis said nothing, but Bourne saw him curl the fingers of his right hand, pushing them into the leafy forest floor.

  “What are you trying to hide, Noah?”

  Perlis’s left hand, which had been lying under him, swung out, a switchblade biting through Bourne’s clothes into the flesh of his side. Perlis began to twist the knife, trying to find a way through muscle, sinew, and bone to one of Bourne’s vital organs. Bourne struck him a horrific blow to the head, but Perlis, with a burst of superhuman strength, only plunged the knife in deeper.

  Bourne took Perlis’s head between his hands and, with a powerful twist, snapped his neck. At once, the life force ebbed and Perlis’s eyes grew dim and all-seeing. There was a bit of foam at the corner of his mouth, either from his excessive effort or from the madness that had begun to infect him at the end of his days.

  Gasping, Bourne let his head go and drew out the blade from his side. He started to bleed, but not badly. He grabbed Perlis’s right hand and dug the fist out of the dirt. One by one, he opened the fingers. He’d expected there to be something held against the palm—whatever it was that Perlis had taken back from Holly—but there was nothing. Circling his index finger, the one he’d been so anxious to hide, was a ring. It was impossible to slip off, so Bourne used the switchblade to cut off the finger. What he held up into the emerald and sapphire light was a plain gold band, not unlike ten million wedding rings all around the planet. Could this be the reason Perlis had killed Holly? Why? What might have made it worth a young woman’s life?

  He turned it over and over, tumbling it between his fingers. And then he saw the writing on the inside. It went all the way around the circumference. At first he thought it was Cyrillic, then possibly an ancient Sumerian language, long-dead and forgotten except by the most esoteric specialists, but in the end the characters were unfathomable. A code, then, surely.

  As Bourne continued to hold the ring aloft, he became aware of the girl-shadow approaching. She stopped a number of paces away, and because he could see the fear on her face, he rose with a grunt of pain and walked over to her.

  “You’ve been very brave, Kasih,” he told the Balinese girl who had led him to the bullet casing in the village of Tenganan, where he’d been shot.

  “You’re bleeding.” She pressed a handful of aromatic leaves she had gathered to his side.

  He took her hand and together they began their trek back to her family compound at the top of the terraced rice paddy not far from Tenganan. His free hand pressed the poultice of herbs to his fresh wound, and he could feel the blood coagulating, the pain receding. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said.

  �
�Not when you’re here.” Kasih threw one last glance over her shoulder. “Is the demon dead?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Bourne said, “the demon is dead.”

  “And he won’t come back?”

  “No, Kasih, he won’t come back.”

  She smiled, content. But even as he said it, he knew it for a lie.

  Enjoy a sneak peek at Jason Bourne’s new thrilling adventure!

  Please turn this page for a preview of

  ROBERT LUDLUM’S™

  THE BOURNE DOMINION

  Available in hardcover

  Prologue

  Phuket, Thailand

  JASON BOURNE EELED his way through the mob. He was assaulted by the bone-juddering, heart-attack-inducing, soul-shattering blast of music coming from ten-foot-tall speakers set on either end of the enormous dance floor. Above the dancers’ bobbing heads an aurora borealis of lights splintered, coalesced, and then shattered against the domed ceiling like an armada of comets and shooting stars.

  Ahead of him, across the restless sea of bodies, the woman with the thick mane of blond hair made her way around gyrating couples of all possible combinations. Bourne pressed after her; it was like trying to push his way through a soft mattress. The heat was palpable. Already the snow on the fur collar of his thick coat had melted away. His hair was slick with it. The woman darted in and out of the light, like a minnow under the sun-beaten skin of a lake. She seemed to move in a shuddering jerk-step, visible first here, then there. Bourne pushed after her, overamplified bass and drums having highjacked the feel of his own pulse.

  At length, he confirmed that she was making for the ladies’ room, and, having already plotted out a shortcut, he broke off his direct pursuit and plowed the new route through the melee. He arrived at the door just as she disappeared inside. Through the briefly open door the smells of weed, sex, and sweat emerged to swirl around him.

  He waited for a pair of young women to stumble out in a cloud of perfume and giggles, then he slid inside. Three women with long, tangled hair and chunky, jangling jewelry huddled at the line of sinks, so engrossed in snorting coke they didn’t see him. Crouching down to peer under the doors, he went quickly past the line of stalls. Only one was occupied. Drawing his Glock, he screwed the noise suppressor onto the end of the barrel. He kicked open the door and, as it slammed back against the partition, the woman with ice-blue eyes and a mane of blond hair aimed a small silver-plated .22 Beretta at him. He put a bullet through her heart, a second in her right eye.

  He was smoke by the time her forehead hit the tiles…

  Bourne opened his eyes to the diamond glare of tropical sunshine. He looked out onto the deep azure of the Andaman Sea, at the sail- and motorboats bobbing at anchor just offshore. He shivered, as if he were still in his memory shard instead of on Patong Beach in Phuket. Where was that disco? Norway? Sweden? When had he killed that woman? And who was she? A target assigned to him by Alex Conklin before the trauma that had cast him into the Mediterranean with a severe concussion. That was all he could be certain of. Why had Treadstone targeted her? He racked his brain, trying to gather all the details of his dream, but like smoke they drifted through his fingers. He remembered the fur collar of his coat, his hair, wet with snow. But what else? The woman’s face? That appeared and reappeared with the echo of the flickering star-bursts of light. For a moment the music throbbed through him, then it winked out like the last rays of the sun.

  What had triggered the memory shard?

  He rose from the blanket. Turning, he saw Moira and Berengária Moreno Skydel silhouetted against the burning blue sky, the blindingly white clouds, the vertical finger hills, umber and green. Moira had invited him down to Berengária’s estancia in Sonora, but he had wanted to get farther away from civilization, so they had met up at this resort on the west coast of Thailand, and here they had spent the last three days and nights. During that time, Moira had explained what she was doing in Sonora with the sister of the late drug czar Gustavo Moreno, the two women had asked for his help, and he had agreed. Moira said time was of the essence and, after hearing the details, he had agreed to leave for Colombia tomorrow.

  Turning back, he saw a woman in a tiny orange bikini high-stepping like a cantering horse through the surf. Her thick mane of hair shone pale blond in the sunlight. Bourne followed her, drawn by the echo of his memory shard. He stared at her brown back, where the muscles worked between her shoulder blades. She turned slightly, then, and he saw her pull smoke into her lungs from a hand-rolled joint. For a moment, the tang of the sea breeze was sweetened by the drug. Then he saw her flinch and drop the joint into the surf, and his eyes followed hers.

  Three police were coming down the beach. They wore suits, but there was no doubt as to their identity. She moved, thinking they were coming for her, but she was wrong. They were coming for Bourne.

  Without hesitation, he waded into the surf. He needed to get them away from Moira and Berengária because Moira would surely try to help him and he didn’t want her involved. Just before he dived into an on-coming wave, he saw one of the detectives raise his hand, as if in a salute. When he emerged onto the surface, far beyond the surf line, he saw that it had been a signal. A pair of WaveRunner FZRs were converging on him from either side. There were two men on each, the driver and the man behind him clad in scuba. These people were covering all avenues of escape.

  As he made for the Parole, a small sailboat close to him, his mind was working overtime. From the coordination and meticulous manner in which the approach had been made, he knew that the orders had not emanated from the Thai police, who were not known for either. Someone else was manipulating them, and he suspected he knew who. There had always been the chance that Severus Domna would seek retribution for what he had done to the secret organization. But further speculation would have to come afterward; first he had to get out of this trap and away to keep his promise to Moira to ensure Berengária’s safety.

  Within a dozen powerful strokes he’d come to the Parole. Hoisting himself over the side, he was about to stand up when a fusillade of bullets caused the boat to rock back and forth. He began to crawl toward the middle of the boat, grabbing a coil of nylon rope. His hands gripped either gunwale. The WaveRunners were closer when the second fusillade came, their violent wakes causing the boat to dance and shudder so violently, it was easy for him to capsize it. He dived backward over the side, arms pinwheeling, as if he’d been shot.

  The pair of WaveRunners crisscrossed the area around the overturned boat, their occupants looking for the bobbing of a head. When none appeared, the two scuba divers drew down their masks and, as the drivers slowed their vehicles, tumbled over the side, one hand keeping their masks in place.

  Completely invisible to them, Bourne was treading water under the overturned boat, the trapped air sustaining him. But that respite was short-lived. He saw the columns of bubbles through the transparent water as the divers plunged in on either side of the boat.

  Quickly he tied off one end of the nylon rope to the starboard cleat. When the first of the divers came at him from below, he ducked down, wrapped the cord around the diver’s neck, and pulled it tight. The diver let go of his speargun to counter Bourne’s attack and Bourne ripped off his mask, effectively blinding him. Then he grabbed the speargun as it floated free, turned, and shot the oncoming second diver through the chest.

  Blood ballooned out in a thick cloud, dispersed by the current rising from the deep. Bourne knew it wasn’t wise to stay in these waters when blood was spilled. Lungs burning, he rose, breaking the surface under the overturned boat. But almost immediately he dived back down to find the first diver. The water was dark, hazy with the gout of blood. The dead diver hung in the mist, arms out to the sides, fins pointing straight down into darkness. Bourne was in the midst of turning when the nylon rope looped around his neck and was pulled tight. The first diver drove his knees into the small of Bourne’s back while he hauled on the rope from both sides. Bourne tried grabbing at the d
iver, but he swam backward out of the way. Though it was clamped shut, a thin line of bubbles trailed from the corner of Bourne’s mouth. The rope was cutting hard into his windpipe, holding him below the surface.

  He fought the urge to struggle, knowing that this would both pull the rope tighter and exhaust him. Instead he hung motionless for a moment like the diver not three feet away, twisting in the current, playing dead. The diver pulled him close as he drew his knife to deliver the coup de grâce across Bourne’s neck.

  Bourne reached back and pressed the PURGE button on the regulator. Air shot out with such force it caused the diver to loosen his mouth, and, with a thick plume of bubbles, Bourne tore the regulator free. The cord loosened around his neck. Taking advantage of the diver’s surprise, Bourne freed himself. Turning, he tried to pinion the diver’s arms, but his adversary drove the knife toward his chest. Bourne knocked it away, but as he did so the diver wrapped his arms around Bourne’s body so he couldn’t surface to get air.

  Bourne pressed the diver’s octopus—the secondary regulator—into his mouth and sucked air into his fiery lungs. The diver scrabbled for his regulator, but Bourne fought him off. The man’s face was white and pinched. He tried again and again to position the knife so that it would cut Bourne or the octopus, to no avail. He blinked heavily several times and his eyes began to turn up as all the life drained out of him. Bourne lunged for the knife, but the diver let it go. It spiraled down into the deep.

  Though Bourne was now breathing normally through the octopus, he knew that following a purge there would be very little air left in the tanks. The diver’s legs were locked around him, ankles crossed. In addition, the nylon cord had become entangled with both of them, building a kind of cocoon. He was working on freeing himself when he felt the powerful ripple. A chill rolled through him, rising from the depths. A shark came into view. It was perhaps twelve feet long, silvery black, slanting unerringly upward toward Bourne and the two dead divers. It had smelled the blood, sensed the thrashing bodies in the water transmitting the telltale vibrations that told it there was a dying fish, possibly more than one, for it to feast on.