Bourne 4 - The Bourne Legacy Read Online Free PDF Page A

his intended target. He paused in front of the sixth door, heard a professor's voice from inside. The talk about ethics brought an ironic smile to his face. In his experience—and it was great and varied—ethics was as dead and useless as Latin. He went on to the next classroom, which he had already determined was empty, and went in.
    Quickly now, he shut and locked the door behind him, crossed to the line of windows overlooking the quad, opened one and got to work. From his backpack, he removed a 7.62-mm SVD Dragunov sniper rifle with a collapsible stock. He fitted the optical sight onto it, leaned it on the sill. Peering through the sight, he found David Webb, by this time standing alone across the quad in front of Healy Hall. There were trees just to his left. Every once in a while, a passing student would obscure him. Khan took a deep breath, let it out slowly. He sighted on Webb's head.

    Webb shook his head, shaking off the effect his memories of the past had on him, and refocusing on his immediate surroundings. The leaves rustled in a gathering breeze, their tips gilded with sunlight. Close by, a girl, her books clutched to her chest, laughed at the punchline of a joke. A waft of pop music came from an open window somewhere. Webb, still thinking of all the things he wanted to say to Rongsey, was about to turn up the front steps of Healy Hall when a soft phutt! sounded in his ear. Reacting instinctively, he stepped into the dappled shadows beneath the trees.
    You're under attack! shouted Bourne's all-too-familiar voice, reemerging in his mind. Move now! And Webb's body reacted, scrambling as another bullet, its initial percussion muffled by a silencer, splintered the tree bark beside his cheek. A crack marksman. Bourne's thoughts began to flood through Webb's brain in response to the organism finding itself under attack.
    The ordinary world was in Webb's eyes, but the extraordinary world that ran parallel to it, Jason Bourne's world—secret, rarefied, privileged, deadly—flared like napalm in his mind. In the space of a heartbeat, he had been torn from David Webb's everyday life, set apart from everyone and everything Webb held dear. Even the chance meeting with Rongsey seemed now to belong to another lifetime. From behind, out of the sniper's sight, he gripped the tree, the pad of his forefinger feeling for the mark the bullet had made. He looked up. It was Jason Bourne who traced the trajectory of the bullet back to a thirdfloor window in a building diagonally across the quad. All around him, Georgetown students walked, strolled, talked, argued and debated. They had seen nothing, of course, and if by chance they had heard anything at all, the sounds meant nothing to them and were quickly forgotten. Webb left his protection behind the tree, moving quickly into a knot of students. He mingled with them, hurrying, but as much as possible keeping to their pace. They were his best protection now, blocking Webb from the sniper's line of sight.
    It seemed as if he was only semiconscious, a sleepwalker who nevertheless saw and sensed everything with a heightened awareness. A component of this awareness was a contempt for those civilians who inhabited the ordinary world, David Webb included.

    After the second shot, Khan had drawn back, confused. This was not a state he knew well. His mind raced, assessing what had just happened. Instead of panicking, running like a frightened sheep back into Healy Hall as Khan had anticipated, Webb had calmly moved into the cover of the trees, impeding Khan's view. That had been improbable enough—and totally out of character for the man briefly described in Spalko's dossier—
    but then Webb had used the gash the second bullet had made in the tree to gauge its trajectory. Now, using the students as cover, he was heading toward this very building. Improbably, he was attacking instead of fleeing.
    Slightly unnerved by this unexpected turn of events, Khan hurriedly broke down the rifle,