face Rongsey Siv.
"Professor Webb!" Rongsey tried to clear his throat. "I don't know—" He seemed abruptly overcome.
His large black eyes were wide behind the lenses of his glasses. His expression was, as usual, impassive,
but in those eyes Webb could see all the fear in the world.
"It's okay now." Webb put his arm across Rongsey's shoulders. As always, his fondness for the
Cambodian refugee was showing through his professorial reserve. He couldn't help it. Rongsey had
overcome great adversity— losing almost all his family in the war. Rongsey and Webb had been in the
same Southeast Asian jungles, and try as he might, Webb could not fully remove himself from the tangle
of that hot, humid world. Like a recurring fever, it never really left you. He felt a shiver of recognition, like
a dream one has while awake.
" Loak soksapbaee chea tay?"How are you? he asked in Khmer.
"I'm fine, Professor," Rongsey replied in the same language. "But I don't... I mean, how did you ... ?"
"Why don't we go outside?" Webb suggested. He was now quite late for Barton's meeting, but he
couldn't care less. He picked up the switchblade and the gun. As he checked the gun's mechanism, the
firing pin broke. He threw the useless gun in a trash bin but pocketed the switchblade.
Around the corner, Rongsey helped him with the spill of term papers. They then walked in silence
through the corridors, which became increasingly crowded as they neared the front of the building. Webb
recognized the special nature of this silence, the dense weight of time returning to normal after an incident
of shared violence. It was a wartime thing, a consequence of the jungle; odd and unsettling that it should
happen on this teeming metropolitan campus.
Emerging from the corridor, they joined the swarm of students crowding through the front doors to
Healy Hall. Just inside, in the center of the floor, gleamed the hallowed Georgetown University seal. A
great majority of the students were walking around it because a school legend held that if you walked on
the seal you'd never graduate. Rongsey was one of those who gave the seal a wide berth, but Webb
strode right across it with no qualms whatsoever.
Outside, they stood in the buttery spring sunlight, facing the trees and the Old Quadrangle, breathing the
air with its hint of budding flowers. At their backs rose the looming presence of Healy Hall with its
imposing Georgian red-brick facade, nineteenth-century dormer windows, slate roof and central
two-hundred-foot clock spire.
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Page 15
The Cambodian turned to Webb. "Professor, thank you. If you hadn't come..."
"Rongsey," Webb said gently, "do you want to talk about it?"
The student's eyes were dark, unreadable. "What's there to say?"
"I suppose that would depend on you."
Rongsey shrugged. "I'll be fine, Professor Webb. Really. This isn't the first time I've been called names."
Webb stood looking at Rongsey for a moment, and he was swept by sudden emotion that caused his
eyes to sting. He wanted to take the boy in his arms, hold him close, promise him that nothing else bad
would ever happen to him. But he knew that Rongsey's Buddhist training would not allow him to accept
the gesture. Who could say what was going on beneath that fortresslike exterior. Webb had seen many
others like Rongsey, forced by the exigencies of war and cultural hatred to bear witness to death, the
collapse of a civilization, the kinds of tragedies most Americans could not understand. He felt a powerful
kinship with Rongsey, an emotional bond that was tinged with a terrible sadness, recognition of the
wound inside him that could never truly be healed.
All this emotion stood between them, silently acknowledged perhaps but never articulated. With a small,
almost sad smile, Rongsey formally thanked Webb again and they said their good-byes.
Webb stood alone amid the students and faculty hurrying by, and yet he knew that he wasn't truly alone.
Despite his best efforts, the aggressive personality of Jason Bourne had once again asserted itself. He
breathed slowly and deeply, concentrating hard, using the mental techniques his psychiatrist friend, Mo
Panov, had taught him for pushing the Bourne identity down. He concentrated first on his surrounding, on
the blue and gold colors of the spring afternoon, on the gray stone and red brick of the buildings around
the quad, of the movement of the students, the smiling faces of the girls, the laughter of the boys, the
earnest talk of the professors. He absorbed each element in its entirety, grounding himself in time and
place. Then, and only then, did he turn his thoughts inward.
Years ago he had been working for the foreign service in Phnom Penh. He'd been married then, not to
Marie, his current wife, but to a Thai woman named Dao. They had two children, Joshua and Alyssa,
and lived in a house on the bank
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