Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Evolution - Brian Freeman Page 0,121

wild but driving the men to the ground.

He shot again and hit one of the men, but the other operative unleashed a new battery of fire. Bourne threw himself down and scrambled away, the bullets pinging after him across the floor and getting closer. He stood no chance, until he heard the assassin’s rifle jam, and the rain of bullets suddenly stopped. As the man tried to clear his gun, Bourne sat up and calmly took aim. Seeing the threat, the man broke into a run, but Bourne led him with the barrel shot by shot and took him down with a bullet in the neck.

That was four.

By his count, Medusa still had five other men inside the building. Plus Miss Shirley and Gabriel Fox. All of them were heading upstairs to kill the members of the tech cabal hidden on the top floor.

Bourne hurried back to the hallway. When he looked at the pink tile at his feet, he saw drops of deeper red, and he realized he was trailing blood. He’d been shot in the leg. Running made his heart beat faster and made him lose more blood, but he couldn’t stop. He half ran, half limped as he hunted for the stairs, passing more bodies as he did. Staff. Guards. Maids. When he found a marble staircase near the house’s palatial entrance, he recognized a man dead on the steps, the Indian CEO of an online retail giant who’d been mowed down before he could escape to the upper floors.

He climbed higher. Everyone on the second and third floors was dead, too. There was nothing but silence and blood around him. As he neared the fourth floor, he heard an explosion of gunfire over his head, muffled by the walls of the mansion. He’d caught up to the Medusa team. Bourne followed the sound of the shooting back to the atrium that rose over the interior courtyard. Slipping to his knees, he slithered across the tiled hallway to the stone railing and assessed the action on the far side of the open space. At least three or four estate security guards had barricaded themselves in the opposite corner, and the Medusa team had split in two and was closing on them from both sides. The columns built along the hallways gave them cover. The gunfire in both directions was intense.

He counted four Medusa operatives, two in each hallway. He didn’t see Gabriel Fox. He didn’t see Miss Shirley.

Bourne felt his head spinning as pain came in waves from his leg. He tried to focus. He jutted the barrel of a rifle through a gap in the stone railing and saw the head of a Medusa assassin appear in the crosshairs of his scope across the atrium. The man in his sights was focused on the guards. He didn’t know Bourne was there.

Breathe in.

Slowly breathe out.

Ease back on the trigger.

The man’s head exploded.

The new burst of fire should have alerted the others, but they were too caught up in the adrenaline of the fight to realize that the game had changed. Bourne refocused, re-aimed, sighting down the barrel at the next of the Medusa operatives taking cover along the same atrium corridor.

Another shot. Another kill.

But now they’d spotted the new threat.

One of the two remaining Medusa assassins trained fire across the atrium, and the corridor around Bourne exploded with bullets, rock, and tile. He felt a fragment slice across the back of his hand and leave a gash of blood. He rolled away, his world turning upside down, but he had nowhere to go. With his body mostly exposed, he aimed through the stone railing again and fired back. A hail of bullets burned the air. He never should have survived the exchange, but he got lucky. One of his bullets nicked a column, flaking off a jagged arrowhead of stone that ricocheted into the assassin’s eye. The man wailed and staggered back, and the estate guards in the far corner immediately shot him down with a deafening burst of fire.

Bourne had to run. He had to get to the stairs and then to the next floor. That was where Miss Shirley was. He crawled, stumbled, then found his feet and limped to the next corner and into the middle of the hallway.

But the last Medusa assassin was waiting for him.

The man pulled the trigger. Gunfire erupted around him. Bourne waited to die. This was the end.

Then, in the same instant, shot after shot lit up the atrium