The Bourne Deception - By Robert Ludlum & Eric van Lustbader Page 0,30

Soraya said.

“We’re just beginning the prelim stages.” Delia’s pale eyes flicked toward the Egyptian and back to her friend.

“It’s all right,” Soraya assured her. “If you have anything, even if it’s speculation, I need to know.”

“Okay.” Delia’s mother was an aristocratic Colombian from Bogotá, and the daughter carried much of her maternal ancestors’ fiery blood. Her skin was as deep-toned as Soraya’s, but there the similarity ended. She had a plain face and a boyish figure, with blunt-cut hair, strong hands, and a no-nonsense manner that was often interpreted as rudeness. Soraya thought it refreshing; Delia was someone with whom she could let her hair down. “My sense is that it wasn’t a bomb. The explosion very clearly didn’t emanate from the luggage bay.”

“So, what, a mechanical failure?”

“Kylie says no,” Delia said. She meant the dog.

There was that hesitation again, and it made Soraya uneasy. She considered pressing her friend, but then thought better of it. She’d have to find a way to talk to her without Amun hanging on their every word. She nodded, and Delia went back to her work.

“She knows more than she’s telling,” Chalthoum said. “I want to know what’s going on.” When Soraya said nothing, he continued. “Go talk to her. Alone.”

Soraya turned to him. “And then?”

He shrugged. “Report back to me, what else?”

It was very late by the time Moira was ready to leave the office. With a weary hand she switched off CNN, which she’d had on with the volume muted ever since the news of the airliner incident in Egypt broke. The incident unnerved her, as it had many people in the security field. No word on what had really happened—not even from her back-channel, not-for-attribution sources, whose terse responses were so brittle they set her teeth on edge. Meanwhile the press was having a typically monstrous field day—talking heads on TV speculating terrorist attack scenarios. And that didn’t even count the more out-and-out fabrications posing as “the truth they don’t want you to know” on thousands of Internet sites, including the toxic chestnut trotted out since 9/11 that the American government was behind the incident in order to advance its own casus belli, its case for war.

As she took the elevator down to the underground garage, Moira’s mind was in two places at once: here with the new organization she was building and in Bali with Bourne. His grave wounds had made it more difficult to separate herself from him. What had seemed so simple when they’d discussed her future in the pool at the resort now seemed nebulous and vaguely anxiety producing. It wasn’t that she felt the need to take care of him—God knows she would not have made a decent nurse—but that within the eternity when his life had hung in the balance, she’d been forced to reassess her feelings for him. The possibility that he would be snatched from her filled her with dread. At least, she assumed it was dread, since she’d never before felt anything like it: a suffocating blackness that blotted out the sun at noon, the stars at midnight.

Was this love? she wondered. Could love produce this madness that transcended time and space, that caused her heart to expand beyond its known limits, that turned her bones to jelly? How many times during the night had she been roused out of a shallow and restless sleep, compelled to pad into the bathroom to stare at the reflection in the mirror she did not recognize. It was as if she had been unceremoniously thrust into someone else’s life, a life she neither wanted nor understood.

“Who are you?” she said over and over to that strange reflection. “How did you get here? What is it you want?”

Neither she nor her reflection had answers. In the stillness of the night she wept for the loss of who she had been, in despair of the new and incomprehensible future that had invaded her body like a transfusion.

But in the morning she was herself again: pragmatic, focused, ruthless both in her recruiting and in the stringent rules she set out for her operatives. She made each one swear allegiance to Heartland as if it were a sovereign nation—which in many respects Black River, her main rival, already was.

And yet, the moment the sun fell from the sky, twilight and uncertainty crept through her, and her thoughts returned to Bourne with whom she’d had no contact since she had left Bali three months ago with the body of a