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This was a professional hit, not an intruder break-in. Bourne's eye caught the glint of the cell phone gripped in Alex's hand. It appeared as if he had been speaking to someone when he was shot. Had it been when Bourne was trying to get through to him earlier? Quite possibly. By the look of the blood, the lividity of the bodies, the lack of rigor mortis in the fingers, it was clear the murders had happened within the hour.
    A faint sound in the distance began to intrude on his thoughts. Sirens! Bourne left the study and raced to the front-facing window. A fleet of Virginia State Police cruisers was careening down the driveway, lights flashing. Bourne was caught in a house with the bodies of two murdered men, and no plausible alibi. He had been set up. All at once, he felt the prongs of a clever trap closing around him.

CHAPTER TWO

    The pieces came together in his mind. The expert shots fired at him on campus had not been meant to kill him but to herd him, to force him to come to Conklin. But Conklin and Mo had already been killed. Someone was still here, watching and waiting to call the police as soon as Bourne had shown up. The man who'd shot at him on campus?
    Without a second thought, Bourne grabbed Alex's cell phone, ran into the kitchen, opened a narrow door onto a steep flight of stairs down into the basement and peered down into pitch blackness. He could hear the crackling of the police radios, the crunch of gravel, the pounding on the front door. Querulous voices raised. Bourne went to the kitchen drawers, scrabbled around until he found Conklin's flashlight, then went through the basement door; for a moment he was in utter darkness. The concentrated beam of light illuminated the steps as he descended quickly, silently. He could smell the scents of concrete, old wood, lacquer and oil from the furnace. He found the hatch underneath the stairs, pulled it out. Once, on a cold and snowy winter's afternoon, Conklin had shown him the underground entrance the general had used to get to the private heliport near the stables. Bourne could hear the boards creaking above his head. The cops were inside the house. Possibly they had already found the bodies. Three cars, two dead men. It would not be long before they traced the license tags to his car. Ducking down, he entered the low passageway, fitted the hatch back into place. Too late he thought of the old-fashioned glass he had picked up. When the forensics people dust, they'll find my prints. Those, along with my car parked in the driveway... No good thinking about that now, he had to move! Bent over, he made his way along the cramped passageway. Within ten feet it opened up so that he was able to walk normally. There was a new dampness in the air; from somewhere close at hand he could hear the slow drip of water seeping. He determined that he had gone beyond the foundation of the house. Bourne quickened his pace and, not three minutes later, came upon another set of stairs. These were of metal, military in nature. He mounted them and, at the top, pushed up with his shoulder. Another hatch opened. Fresh air, the hushed and tranquil light at the end of the day, the droning of insects washed over him. He was at the edge of the general's heliport.
    The tarmac was littered with twigs and bits of dead branches. At some point, a family of raccoons had made their way into the small ramshackle shingle-roofed shed at the edge of the tarmac. The place bore the unmistakable air of abandonment. The heliport was not, however, his objective. He turned his back on it and plunged into the thick pine forest. His goal was to make a long sweeping curve away from the house, the entire estate, eventually ending up on the highway far enough away from any cordon the police threw around the estate. However, his immediate objective was the stream that ran more or less diagonally through the property. It would not be long, he knew, before the police brought in dogs. He could do very little about