Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Evolution - Brian Freeman Page 0,3
trees climbing toward him from the old town. He closed his eyes, feeling faint, knowing he was losing blood quickly.
“Jason Bourne.”
The words hissed at him from a few feet away.
And then another word. “Traitor.”
His eyes shot open. He lifted his gun with a jolt of pain. He wasn’t alone; he’d missed someone hiding in the shadows. A man in a gray trench coat and fedora stood near the gazebo, and he had a gun, too, pointed at him through the downpour. The other man was older by fifteen years, shorter than Bourne but as tough and weathered as a husk dried in the sun. He knew Nash Rollins well. In another life, he would have called him a friend, but not anymore.
Not since Las Vegas.
And now this man was here to kill him. Or be killed. Those were the only two options.
Bourne had kept count. There was one cartridge left in the magazine of his gun, but one was all he needed to kill an old friend. Pull the trigger. Watch him die. His brain weighed his options and assessed his strategy. His heart debated whether he could really kill the man in front of him.
Rollins had obviously wanted to be here personally for the takedown. That was a mistake. He hadn’t been in the field in years. Showdowns were about concentration, about not being distracted, and that was hard to do when your skills were rusty. As the staredown continued between them, Bourne waited for the older man to give him an opening, because he knew it would come. A surge of wind whipped into the man’s body and made him flinch. The lapse in his attention lasted barely longer than a blink, but that was enough.
Bourne fired. He shot into the flesh of Rollins’s thigh, causing the man’s leg to collapse under him. His friend toppled, unleashing a bitter wail of pain, but in another second, the old man would realize he was still alive, and he wouldn’t bother to wonder why he’d been spared. He would simply raise his own gun and fire back.
With nowhere to run, Bourne dropped his empty gun, took hold of the boardwalk railing with both hands, and threw himself over the cliff’s edge. The agony of his chest coursed through his body. Gravity grabbed hold of him, but he hovered in the air for a microsecond like a skeet target. His old friend, writhing on the ground, found enough strength to bring up his gun and fire. One shot.
One shot that grazed a burning, bloody path across his skull.
Jason Bourne fell into darkness. He was a meteor streaking through a cold universe, a tiny fragment lost in empty space. The ground far below him was like an alien planet, new and unexplored, roaring toward him at what felt like light speed. At the moment of impact, everything went black.
*
THE Canadian ambulance crew wanted to take Nash Rollins to the hospital, but he refused to leave the boardwalk. He wasn’t going anywhere until they’d found the man on the cliff. He leaned on a cane that one of the paramedics had given him and bit his tongue to try to take his mind off the pain that pulsed through his leg.
Below him, the lights of searchers bobbed in the cobblestoned streets of the Basse-Ville, hunting for the wounded American killer. Rollins knew he’d hit him as he fell. He’d seen the red cloud spray from his head. It seemed impossible to think the man had survived the gunshot and the fall, but so far they’d found no body, only a blood trail that came to a sudden stop on the Rue du Petit-Champlain. The man had simply disappeared.
Bourne was a ghost. Impossible to kill.
But then, that was what they’d trained him to be.
Rollins felt no guilt about what he’d done. He’d brought his team to do a job, and the job wasn’t finished. His prior relationship with the man didn’t matter at all. The fact that the man had spared his life by shooting him in the leg, not the head or the chest, also didn’t matter. The only thing that was important was to stop him!
He took his phone out of his pocket. When he dialed, a woman answered on the other end with a single word.
“Treadstone.”
“Go secure,” Rollins requested.
“You’re secure,” she replied after a moment of dead air on the line. “What’s the situation in Quebec? Were you correct? Is it Cain?”