THE BOURNE IMPERATIVE
ERIC VAN LUSTBADER
Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Book 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Book 2
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Book 3
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
About the Authors
Other Works
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Myn Pyn, LLC
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lustbader, Eric.
Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne imperative / Eric Van Lustbader. — 1st ed. p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-446-56447-2 (regular edition) — ISBN 978-1-4555-1350-5 (large print edition)
1. Bourne, Jason (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Ludlum, Robert, 1927–2011. II. Title. III. Title: Bourne imperative.
PS3562.U752B66 2012
813'.54—dc23
2012001145
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to my cousin, David Schiffer, for keeping me up to date on the latest methods of finding terrorists, international arms dealers, and drug dealers; to my friend, Ken Dorph, for his unique perspective on the Middle East and for his insightful stories of foreign lands; and to my wife, Victoria, for her editorial suggestions and proofing skills.
Special mention must be made of Carlos Fuentes. His marvelous novel, Destiny and Desire, served as a major inspiration for Bourne’s trip to Mexico City, meshing with and enlarging upon my own personal experiences, along with other firsthand sources.
Prologue
Sadelöga, Sweden
SHE CAME OUT of the mist, and he was running, just as he had been for hours, days.
It felt like he had been alone for weeks, his heart continually thundering inside his chest, his mind befogged with bitter betrayal. Sleep was unthinkable, rest a thing of the past.
Nothing was clear now except that she had come out of the mist after he had been certain—for the thirteenth, or was it the fifteenth, time? — that he had eluded her. But here she was, coming for him like a mythical exterminating angel, indestructible and implacable.
His life had been reduced to the two of them. Nothing else existed outside the wall of white—snow and ice and the wispy brushstrokes of fishing cottages, deep red with white trim, small, compact, containing only what was necessary. He admired such judiciousness.
The mist burned like fire—a cold fire that ran up his spine and gripped the back of his neck, just as she had gripped the back of his neck—when? Days? A week ago? When they had been in bed together, when she had been another person, his lover, a woman who quickly discovered how to make him shiver and melt with pleasure.
Half-skating across a large frozen lake, he slipped, lost his gun, which went skittering over the ice. He was about to make a lunge for it when he heard the snap of a twig, as clear and sharp as a knife thrust.
Instead, he continued on, made for a stand of shivering pines. Powdery snow sprayed his face, coating his eyebrows and the stubble of a long flight across continents. He did not dare waste another moment looking back over his shoulder to check the progress of his pursuer.
She had dogged his tracks all the way from Lebanon. He had met her in a packed, smoke-blurred bar in Dahr El Ahmar — or maybe now he would admit to himself that she had met him, that every gesture, every word out of her mouth, had been by design. Events seemed so clear now that he was on the precipice of either escape or death. She had played him instead of the other way around—he, the consummate professional. How had she so easily slipped inside his defenses? But he knew, he knew: the exterminating angel was irresistible.
Inside the pines he paused, his breath clouding the air in front of his face. It was bitterly cold, but inside his winter camo coat, he felt as if he were burning alive. Clinging to one of a maze of black tree trunks, his mind returned to the hotel room, stinking of bodies and sex, recalling the moment when she had bitten his lip, her teeth clamped down on his flesh while she somehow said, “I know. I know what you are.”
Not who, but what.
She knew. He looked around now at the city of interlocking branches, at the labyrinth of needles in which he hid. It was impossible. How couldshe know? And yet...
Hearing again the snap of a twig, he started, turned slowly in a circle, all his senses questing toward the direction of the sound. Where was she? Death could come at any minute, but he knew it wouldn’t be quick. There were too many secrets she needed to know, otherwise she would have killed him during one of their animalistic trysts. Nights that still gave him shivers of arousal, even though he now knew how close he had been to death. She had been playing with him—perhaps because she came to enjoy their lovemaking as much as he did. He gave a silent laugh, his lips pulled back from his teeth, more a snarl than a smile. What a fool! He kept deluding himself that there had been something between them, even in the face of the most explicit evidence to the contrary. What a spell she had woven over him! He shuddered, crouching down, contracting into himself as he pressed his spine against the rough pine bark.