Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Evolution - Brian Freeman Page 0,8

he saw a bright white bandage below his left shoulder, with a large circle of red where blood had seeped through the gauze.

He needed to think, to remember. He pushed his fists against his head, ignoring the pain. His breath thundered in his chest, and a whole new sheen of sweat formed on his skin.

The sweat of panic.

The sweat of fear.

Jason tried to get up again, gritting his teeth against the agony in his muscles. When he swung his legs off the bed, he managed to push himself to a sitting position, with his feet on the hardwood floor. He waited until the next wave of vertigo passed. The pain he felt wasn’t just in his chest. It was in his head, too. He put his hand to the base of his skull, and the barest touch felt like a lightning bolt. He felt a gauze bandage there.

His senses fed him information that his brain tried to process. Outside, he heard the trill of songbirds, along with a whistle of air squeezing through the door frame. It made the room cold. He smelled the dankness of his own body, but he also smelled brine, as if from the sea. He stood up, propping a hand against the wall near the bed to keep himself from falling. He went to the window and separated the aluminum blinds. He was in a vacation cottage, looking out on a wooden porch. The pale blue water of a small bay lapped against a rocky beach only steps from where he was. Evergreens dotted the green grass near him, and he could see a heavily wooded promontory on the far shore of the inlet. The tide was out, leaving much of the basin exposed, with seagulls picking at the mud. The bay opened into a much larger body of water, where no land was visible.

He knew this place. The St. Lawrence estuary.

He remembered now. He was at a beachside inn in Saint-Jean-sur-Mer, two hours northeast of Quebec City. Les chalets sur la rivière. A hideaway with access to marine traffic in the Seaway, where he’d slipped aboard ships to break apart smuggling rings. Contraband. Drugs. Human trafficking. But there was more to remember in this room, so much more. He’d been here with Nova. They’d made love in that twin bed, her voracious appetite leaving him sated and exhausted.

Yes, he knew where he was.

The events of the recent past crept back slowly, sluggishly, like escaping from quicksand. The violence in Quebec City. The confrontation with Nash Rollins.

And prior to that, New York. The assassination. The riot.

It happened that way to Bourne sometimes, those paralyzing moments of forgetting. He’d learned to live with it. He was a man with a fractured history, a man without identity. Only a few years earlier, he’d lost his memory to a bullet in his head, which left him with no past, just fragments of who he once was and another name from another life that meant nothing to him. That life belonged to a stranger. He’d had to start over in his early thirties. Make new memories. And to this day, he still occasionally woke up in a fog, with no idea where he was, terrified that he’d lost everything again.

Barely able to walk upright, Jason staggered to the bathroom. He yanked on the string that turned on the bulb overhead. Under the dim yellow light, he propped himself with both hands on the porcelain sink and stared at the face in the mirror.

It was a square, handsome face, but pale and drawn now, lacking color. His hair was dark, so deep brown as to be almost black, and it was cut short and swept back on a high forehead. He had intense blue-gray eyes, and the bags under his eyes reflected a chronic lack of sleep. He hadn’t shaved in days; his stubble was forming a beard. He was more than six feet tall and athletically built, but he saw a web of fresh cuts and multicolored bruises all over his skin, the product of his fall from the boardwalk. This wasn’t the first time. His body was riddled with the scars of previous injuries, including one over his right eye and another below his ear.

When he peeled back the bandage on his chest, he saw fresh stitches closing up the small, tight hole of a bullet wound. Stitches. A doctor. He remembered that part, too. He’d staggered from the cliff in the old town and nearly bled to