Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Evolution - Brian Freeman Page 0,78
stared at the blood and brains on the apartment floor with a kind of numb shock, but after he dragged her away, she’d insisted on staying with him as the hunt for Medusa led to Nevada. For an entire day since then, they’d traded off driving, but they hadn’t really talked, even though there were definitely things to talk about.
They both felt something happening between them.
They were both pretending it wasn’t real.
“I know you’re questioning everything you knew about Nova,” Abbey murmured in the darkness, just loud enough for him to hear.
He didn’t answer, and she waited a long time before saying anything more.
“What Benoit told you doesn’t change anything, does it? She still loved you. You loved her.”
“I did love her,” Jason replied finally. “I suppose on some level, I still do. Beyond that, I’m not sure what’s true anymore. Nova was a good operative. She was more than capable of fooling me into thinking her feelings were real. Even if she did love me on some level, she didn’t trust me. As Benoit said, Treadstone thought I’d turned.”
“He also said Nova didn’t believe that.”
“Maybe, but if she was sure I wasn’t part of Medusa, she would have told me what she was doing. I could have helped her. I could have watched her back. Instead, she walked into a trap, and there was nothing I could do to protect her.”
“It sounds like she was protecting you,” Abbey said.
“No, she was keeping secrets from me.”
He listened to her breathing. Abbey was invisible just a few feet away.
“Jason, what happened to your memory?” she went on carefully, as if tiptoeing into a minefield. “You talk about having no past. You say you don’t remember who you are. What does that mean?”
He tried to decide what to say to her. He’d known that she would go back to the subject of his past sooner or later. She was a reporter; she asked questions for a living. She needed to know the truth about the people she was with, in order to profile them and study them, like insects in an experiment. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe not every human motive hid something dark.
He wanted to tell her the truth. He hadn’t felt that desire with anyone in a long time.
“I was shot in the head during a mission,” he explained. “The injury caused amnesia. I lost everything. I had no identity, no way to explain who I was, the skills I had.”
“Did your memory come back?” she asked.
“Only bits and pieces of it. Disconnected images. Eventually, I found out who I was, and people told me the details of my past, but that’s not the same as remembering it. I know about my past the way you know about reading something in a history book. You can memorize the facts. You can look at the pictures. But it may as well have happened to someone else. The man in those photos is a stranger. I spent a long time trying to force myself to remember, but it doesn’t work that way. And what’s the point? The person I was no longer exists. I’m Jason Bourne. I’m the man that Treadstone created. That’s who I am. That other identity, the one I started my life with, isn’t real to me anymore.”
Abbey was silent.
He heard the rustle of blankets on the other bed. The floor in the old motel creaked as she stood up, but she was as dark as a ghost. Telltale sounds gave her away. The noise of clothes being removed, the rattle of a zipper. The springs of the bed he was in squealed as she joined him there. She molded herself against him, and by instinct, he put his arm around her. Her face was on his shoulder, her breath on his neck. He moved his hand down her body and felt nothing but bare skin. She was naked.
“You also said you don’t really know who I am,” Abbey whispered.
“Yes, I did.”
“Was that true, or was that a lie? Because I know you’re like Nova. You’re more than capable of fooling me into thinking that your feelings are real.”
“It’s true,” Jason told her. “I want to know who you are.”
Abbey took a slow, deep breath.
“Well. Let’s see. You said I seem to be estranged from my father. You’re right. I love him, but I don’t respect him. I don’t even particularly like him. Before my mother got sick, he was cheating on her. She knew about it.