Read Online The Bourne Betrayal by Robert Ludlum, Eric Van Lustbader - Free Book Online

asked.
    “I’ve already told this one behind us. I don’t know. It was just a voice on the telephone.”
    Bourne was skeptical. “Do you normally sell TSGs over the phone?”
    “For five mil, I do.”
    Believable, but was it the truth?
    “Man or woman?” Bourne said.
    “Man.”
    “Accent?”
    “British, like I told them.”
    “Do better.”
    “What, you don’t believe me?”
    “I’m asking you to think again, I’m asking you to think harder. Take a moment, then tell me what you remember.”
    “Nothing, I . . .” Cevik paused in the crisscross shadows of an Adams flowering crab apple. “Hang on. Maybe, just maybe, there was a hint of something else, something more exotic, maybe Eastern European.”
    “You lived for a number of years in Ukraine, didn’t you?”
    “You have me.” Cevik screwed up his face. “I want to say possibly he was Slavic. There was a touch . . . maybe southern Ukraine. In Odessa, on the northern Black Sea coast, where I’ve spent time, the dialect is somewhat different, you know.”
    Bourne, of course, did know, but he said nothing. In his mind, he was on a countdown to the moment when Tim Hytner would arrive with the “decoded” cipher.
    “You’re still lying to me,” Bourne said. “You must’ve seen your buyer when he picked up the TSGs.”
    “And yet I didn’t. The deal was done through a dead drop.”
    “From a voice on the phone? Come on, Cevik.”
    “It’s the truth. He gave me a specific time and a specific place. I left half the shipment and I returned an hour later for half the five mil. The next day, we completed the deal. I saw no one, and believe me when I tell you I didn’t want to.”
    Again, plausible-and a clever arrangement, Bourne thought. If it was true.
    “Human beings are born curious.”
    “That may be so,” Cevik said with a nod. “But I have no desire to die. This man . . . his people were watching the dead drop. They would have shot me on sight. You know that, Bourne. This situation is familiar to you.”
    Cevik shook out a cigarette, offered Bourne one, then took one himself. He lit it with a book of matches that was almost empty. Seeing the direction of Bourne’s gaze, he said, “Nothing to burn in the hole so they let me keep it.”
    Bourne heard an echo in his mind, as if a voice were speaking to him from a great distance. “That was then, this is now,” he said, taking the matchbook from Cevik.
    Cevik, having made no move to resist, pulled the smoke into his lungs, let it out with a soft hiss, the sound of the cars rolling by beyond the moat of grass.
    Nothing to burn in the hole. The words bounced around in Bourne’s head as if his brain were a pinball machine.
    “Tell me, Mr. Bourne, have you ever been incarcerated?”
    Nothing to burn in the hole. The sentence, once evoked, kept repeating, blocking out thought and reason.
    With a grunt almost of pain, Bourne pushed Cevik on and they resumed walking; Bourne wanted him in the light. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tim Hytner hurrying their way.
    “Do you know what it means to have your freedom taken from you?” Cevik flicked a bit of tobacco off his underlip. “All your life to live in poverty. Being poor is like watching pornography: Once you start, there’s no way out. It’s addictive, d’you see, this life without hope. Don’t you agree?”
    Bourne’s head was hurting now, each repetition of each word falling like a hammer blow on the inside of his skull. It was with extreme difficulty that he realized Cevik was merely trying to regain a measure of control. It was a basic rule of the interrogator never to answer a question. Once he did, he lost his absolute power.
    Bourne frowned. He wanted to say something; what was it? “Make no mistake. We have you where we want you.”
    “I?” Cevik’s eyebrows lifted. “I’m nothing, a conduit, that’s all. It’s my buyer you need to find. What do you want with me?”
    “We know you can lead us to the