Robert Ludlum's the Bourne Imperative Read Free Page B

on?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”
    She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t know. Ever since I got out of the hospital I’ve been getting these dizzy spells.”
    “Have you seen a doctor?”
    “There was no need. They were getting less and less frequent. I haven’t had one for over two weeks.”
    “And now this.” He moved his hand in a circular motion on her back in an attempt to soothe her. “I want you to make an appointment—”
    “Stop treating me like a child.”
    “Then stop acting like one.” His voice softened. “I’m concerned about you and I wonder why you aren’t.”
    “All right,” she said. “All right.”
    “Now you can’t go,” he said, only half in jest. “Not until—”
    She laughed, and at last her head lifted. Tears glimmered in the corners of her eyes. “That’s my dilemma precisely.” Then she shook her head. “I’ll never find peace, Peter.”
    “What you mean is you don’t deserve to find peace.”
    She looked at him and he shrugged, a wan smile on his face. “Maybe what we need to concentrate on is explaining to each other why we both deserve a bit of happiness.”
    She rose, shaking off his help, and they turned back. The homeless man had finished the breakfast Soraya had provided and was curled on his side on a bench beneath sheets of The Washington Post .
    As they passed him they could hear him snoring deeply, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. And maybe, she thought, he didn’t.
    She shot Peter a sideways glance. “What would I do without you?”
    His smile cleared, widening as he walked beside her. “You know, I ask myself that all the time.”

    "Gone?” the Director said. “In what way gone?”
    Above his head was engraved the current Mossad motto, excerpted from Proverbs 11:14: Where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety .
    “She’s vanished off the grid,” Dani Amit, head of Collections, said. “Despite our most diligent efforts, we cannot locate her.”
    “But we must locate her.” The Director shook his shaggy head, his livery lips pursed, a clear sign of his agitation. “Rebeka is the key to the mission. Without her, we’re dead in the water.”
    “I understand that, sir. We all do.”
    “Then—”
    Dani Amit’s pale blue eyes seemed infinitely sad. “We are simply at a loss.”
    “How can that be? She is one of us.”
    “That is precisely the problem. We have trained her too well.” 
    “If that were the case, our people, trained as she was trained, could find her. The fact that up till now they haven’t would argue for the fact that she is something more, something better than they are.” The rebuke was as clear as it was sharp.
    “I’m afraid—”
    “I cannot abide that phrase,” the Director said shortly. “Her job at the airline?”
    “Dead end. Her supervisor has had no contact with her since the incident in Damascus six weeks ago. I am convinced he does not know where she is.”
    “What about her phone?”
    “She’s either thrown it away or disabled its GPS.”
    “Friends, relatives.”
    “Have been interviewed. One thing I know for certain is that Rebeka told no one about us.”
    “To break protocol like this—”
    There was no need to finish that sentence. Mossad rules were strictly enforced. Rebeka had violated the prime rule.
    The Director turned, stared broodingly out the window of his satellite office on the top floor of a curving glass-faced structure in Herzliya. On the other side of the city were the Mossad training center and the summer residence of the prime minister. The Director often came here when he grew melancholy and found the Mossad’s ant-colony central HQ in downtown Tel Aviv oppressive and enervating. Here, there was a fountain in the middle of the circular driveway and fragrant flower beds all year round, not to mention the nearby harbor with its fleet of sailboats rocking gently in their slips.