Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Evolution - Brian Freeman Page 0,125
not free. He needs to get me out of this mess, pull strings, whatever the hell he does. Plus, I want a seat at the table. Influence. That’s my price.”
“I already informed him of our situation,” Miss Shirley replied. “I told him what happened on the island. He anticipated your demands.”
“Smart man. What did he say?”
“He said to assure you that Medusa has a place for you.”
Gabriel sagged against the seat and let out a whistle of relief. “Hot damn. That’s good news. You know what this means, don’t you? Our plan is still good. We get me inside Medusa, and when the time is right, you and me push out the big man, and we take over instead. Then we can focus on the tech cabal again. The new legislation is moving forward in Congress. They’ll be weak, distracted. We’ll pick them off one by one.”
“Yes, we will.”
Gabriel let his hands roam over her body, his arousal returning. “This calls for a celebration.”
“You’re right, it does.”
She stood up inside the helicopter, swaying with its side-to-side motion. She tugged on the strings of her bikini top to free her breasts and then did the same with the bikini bottoms and stood naked in front of Gabriel. With a seductive smirk, she flicked the bikini out the open door of the helicopter, where the wind whipped it away.
Miss Shirley sank to her knees in front of him. She pushed Gabriel’s legs apart and clicked open the straps of the seat belt on his chest. With her fingernails scraping along his skin, she shoved the silk robe back off his shoulders and stripped it from his body until he, like her, was naked inside the helicopter. She leaned over and grabbed him by the waist, and then she bit his earlobe hard enough to draw blood. As he cringed with pain and pleasure, she whispered to him.
“Medusa has a very special place for you, Gabriel.”
“Oh, yeah? Where’s that?”
“The bottom of the sea.”
He only had an instant for his eyes to widen in fear. In one smooth motion, Miss Shirley hoisted Gabriel’s body into the air and launched him through the helicopter’s open door. The tumult of the wind drowned out his scream, and with a flash of white skin, he vanished, falling to the empty ocean below them.
Miss Shirley blew a kiss to the air and waved after him with the tips of her fingers. She slipped Gabriel’s Chinese robe around her body and tied it, and then she slid the door shut. Humming softly to herself, she did a little dance in the bouncing cabin as the helicopter flew on through the night.
FORTY-TWO
THE stars spread across the Caribbean night sky, crystal clear over the dark ocean. Bourne lay on his back on the deck of the catamaran with his hands behind his head. Inside, at the boat’s bridge, Teeling steered them north toward the Bahamian town of Freeport. From there, Bourne could charter a plane back to the U.S. and make arrangements to cross the Atlantic on his way to find Miles Priest.
His mind swirled with details. Maps. Money. Equipment. Transport. Scott had taught him long ago to break down a plan into a thousand steps, like a flowchart, with moves and countermoves that depended on how each component of the plan played out in real life.
A strategy is only as good as the steps you take to execute it.
Scott DeRay.
Bourne hadn’t told Nelly what he was planning to do, but it didn’t matter. He was sure that Scott knew he was coming. Scott would have put himself inside the heads of the Medusa leadership and come to the same conclusion that Bourne did. The next attack would happen in Scotland. They would strike at Miles Priest directly. And if that was where Medusa was headed, then Bourne would be there, too.
The exhaustion of the day made him want to sleep, but he couldn’t do that yet. He stared at the stars and felt the wind racing across his body and listened to the low throb of the motor. Normally, that was the perfect environment in which to separate himself from everything else and focus exclusively on the mission in front of him.
But he couldn’t.
He kept finding his mind distracted. The more he thought about what he had to do, the more he found his thoughts interrupted by something else.
Someone else.
Abbey Laurent.
He’d left her behind, but he hadn’t really left her behind at all. She was still with him. When he