‘What the hell are you doing here?!’

‘I could ask the same thing to you.’

Bourne remained silent.  Growling under his breath, it took all of Bond’s self-control to not throttle the man who stood in front of him.

The game suddenly shifted slightly.  Suddenly it wasn’t about insults, wasn’t about out-witting the other.  It was about staying alive.

Bond shifted his weight and began to walk about the room.  He moved slowly, as if Bourne was a wild animal, and sudden movements would set him off, but never breaking eye contact.  The man’s dark eyes had nothing in them, as if he no longer cared about anything; as if he no longer cared about himself, and that he would feel nothing – nothing – if he killed the other man in the room with only his hands.  Choosing his words carefully, Bond spoke again.  ‘You’re the one, aren’t you.  You’re the man who should have died off the coast of France all those months ago.  You’re the man the CIA’s going ballistic over…’

Bourne flinched.  A few seconds ago he was ready to kill the man standing in front of him.  But now, now that he’d said those words…  Now he wasn’t so sure.  The other man’s glittering blue irises that gave little away of the fierce, calculating intellect that lay behind them – the intellect that was slowly beginning to understand him, to read him.  The violent spark in the man’s eyes set Bourne on edge.  From the nothing that he felt only moments ago came only the numbing confusion and unsettling fear that he hadn’t felt since he had first set foot in the Swiss bank.  

Bourne took a step back – a defensive mechanism his body had been using long, long before he had ever become Jason Bourne – and blinked.  Then he realised his mistake.  The other man was dangling him; waiting for him to make the first mistake.  And he’d done it.  Bourne gasped as an un-silenced pistol was pressed against his throat.  Then the killer in him took over.  As he threw a vicious punch at the other man’s jaw, he used his other hand to grab the wrist that held the gun.  Twisting it nearly the whole way round, the other man yelped as he dropped the gun and was hit squarely on the jaw.  

Falling backwards, Bond crashed against the table behind him.  His eyes burned furiously.  He no longer wanted to play.  He wanted to kill this man.  The CIA’s wanted posters could go to hell.

Bourne’s eyes had lost all their colour.  Somewhere inside he wanted answers from this man.  But right now all he wanted was to resist everything this man was going to throw at him.

None of it would end well.