“Yeah,” one of Rivera’s men agreed. “But people are afraid of him and don’t want to piss him off. They think he’s magic.”
“So what are you saying?” Rivera said.
“If we let her go, how do we know she won’t talk? Hell, we can’t even tell her not to.”
He was right. What was it their contact had said? That Bahame could see through people’s eyes? Legends had roots in reality. Maybe people were so terrified of the man that even the ones who hated him told him everything they knew in hopes of working their way into his good graces.
“We could tie her to the tree and gag her,” another of Rivera’s men said.
This was stupid. They were exposed and wasting time.
“Boss?”
“We can’t tie her to a tree. She’d die of thirst or an animal would get her.”
The man standing behind her silently unsheathed his knife. “She’s not going to last out here on her own anyway. We’d be doing her a favor.”
Rivera stood frozen for what he knew must have seemed like far too long to his men. Indecisiveness was not a particularly attractive quality in his profession.
The knee-jerk reaction was always to fall back on his training, but this kind of a situation had never been dealt with in a way that meant anything when you were actually faced with contemplating ending the life of an innocent woman.
“We’re moving out,” he said, turning and starting in a direction that skirted the burned-out village. There would already be a lot of explaining to do in the unlikely event he ever laid eyes on the Pearly Gates. Murdering helpless women wasn’t something he wanted to add to his list.
By Robert Ludlum
The Scarlatti Inheritance
The Osterman Weekend
The Matlock Paper
Trevayne
The Cry of the Halidon
The Rhinemann Exchange
The Road to Gandolfo
The Gemini Contenders
The Chancellor Manuscript
The Holcroft Covenant
The Matarese Circle
The Parsifal Mosaic
The Aquitaine Progression
The Icarus Agenda
The Road to Omaha
The Scorpio Illusion
The Apocalypse Watch
The Matarese Countdown
The Prometheus Deception
The Sigma Protocol
The Janson Directive
The Tristan Betrayal
The Ambler Warning
The Bancroft Strategy
The Jason Bourne Novels
The Bourne Identity
The Bourne Supremacy
The Bourne Ultimatum
The Bourne Legacy*
The Bourne Betrayal*
The Bourne Sanction*
The Bourne Deception*
The Bourne Objective*
The Bourne Dominion*
*written by Eric Van Lustbader
The Covert-One Series
The Hades Factor (with Gayle Lynds)
The Cassandra Compact (with Philip Shelby)
The Paris Option (with Gayle Lynds)
The Altman Code (with Gayle Lynds)
The Lazarus Vendetta (with Patrick Larkin)
The Moscow Vector (with Patrick Larkin)
The Arctic Event (with James Cobb)
The Ares Decision (with Kyle Mills)
Paul Garrison Novels
Fire and Ice
Red Sky at Morning
Buried At Sea
Sea Hunter
The Ripple Effect
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Part One: The Mother of All Reserves
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Part Two: Right from Wrong
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Part Three: Blind Side
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Part Four: Ambush
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Acknowledgments
Afterword
About the Authors
A Preview of The Ares Decision
By Robert Ludlum
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Myn Pyn, LLC
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First e-book edition: February 2012
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ISBN 978-0-446-57675-8