Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Evolution - Brian Freeman Page 0,122
like fireworks. The tech cabal guards burst from their barricade in the corner, and Bourne saw the Medusa assassin fall, riddled with bullets. The firefight was done. He tried to get up, tried to keep going, tried to run, but as he pushed himself to his feet, his legs buckled under him.
His head hit the hard floor.
Everything went black.
*
ONE floor up, Miss Shirley spat out a single curse. “Fuck!”
She ripped the headset from her head, threw it to the floor, and kicked it away. She felt an urge to pull the trigger on her rifle, just to shoot up the walls in fury, but she held her fire. At that moment, eight expert assassins should have been converging from the lower floors for their final assault on the tech cabal. They should have been about to embark on a last orgy of killing, a frenzy she would feel like electricity between her legs.
Instead, the three of them were alone. Miss Shirley, one last Medusa agent, code-named Dallas, and the utterly worthless Gabriel Fox.
Fox stared at her, his face suddenly filled with fear. “What the hell’s going on?”
“They’re off the air,” she said. “All of them. Jersey, Philly, Chicago, New York, Memphis, the whole fucking lot of them, they’re all gone. Nobody’s coming to regroup with us. There’s no backup. It’s just us.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying they’re dead. This is a catastrophe. A disaster.”
She stared down the open-air hallway on the estate’s top floor. At the far end was a locked door, and on the other side, she knew, was the entire tech cabal. These were the people she’d come here to kill, and she’d failed.
The head of Medusa, the man who’d been her lover for almost twenty years, would never forgive her.
“We need to go,” she concluded.
“Are you out of your mind?” Gabriel demanded. “What about our plan? What about you and me taking over the cabal?”
“Oh, Gabriel, shut your lunatic mouth for once in your life. Don’t you get it? We need to get to one of the helicopters and get the hell off this island. If we don’t, we’ll be dead, too. We’ve lost.”
Gabriel shook his head, his face screwed up with rage. “You underestimated them!”
Miss Shirley signaled Dallas to lead the way toward the stairs. She grabbed Gabriel’s arm and dragged him with her. “I underestimated nothing. We knew exactly what we were walking into. Don’t you get it? This isn’t the tech cabal, you fucking fool. They’re not the ones who did this.”
Gabriel tried to keep up with her, but he stumbled over his own feet. “Then who did?”
Miss Shirley didn’t answer, but she knew exactly who’d destroyed her plan. She could picture the man’s face in her head, expressionless, infuriating. He was the man she was going to kill slowly, taking him apart limb by limb.
“Bourne.”
FORTY-ONE
THE barrels of half a dozen rifles surrounded Bourne.
He regained consciousness in an open-air terrace that looked out across the darkness of the island. The only light around him came from a dozen flickering candles, which cast strange, giant shadows. The dark crowns of jungle trees waved on the other side of the railings. A warm breeze blew across his bare skin; he wore only shorts. When he went to get up, he discovered that his wrists and ankles were tightly bound to a wrought-iron chaise where his body had been carried. He stared into the dirty, bloody faces of the estate security guards who’d survived the Medusa assault. They kept their guns focused on him. Meanwhile, an attractive doctor tended to his wounds. She’d already removed the bullet from his leg and bandaged the other gashes on his body.
When the doctor was done, two of the guards moved aside, and Nelly Lessard approached him, her face pale and tired. He’d met her during his meetings with Scott and Miles. Another guard brought her a chair, and she sat down next to Bourne with her short, birdlike legs squeezed together. She wore an elegant dark suit that was torn in several places, and her coiffed gray hair was in disarray. Nonetheless, she projected an aura of calm authority as she waved a hand at the security team.
“I appreciate the abundance of caution, gentlemen, but I think we can dispense with the guns. Also, please untie Mr. Bourne’s hands and legs.”
The guards freed Bourne, and he sat up slowly, fighting off another wave of dizziness and nausea. The doctor had anesthetized his wounds, but the pain wouldn’t stay away for