The Bourne Initiative

  Abruptly, he held up one fist, and the vessel came to a halt. Then he lifted a forefinger, circling it. The boat’s engines engaged with a deeper sound, and with a roar, the boat made a neat one-eighty, its wake bright in the moonlight.

  “Okay,” Bourne said. Mala shipped the oars while he moved to the helm, fired up the engine, which would not be heard over the larger vessel’s roar. They took off after the hit team, all running lights extinguished, the glow from the instrument panel masked by a towel.

  Luck was with them: the lowering moon had been occluded by a bank of thickening clouds within which, every so often, flashes, like jagged shards of glass, winked on and off, semaphoring an oncoming storm.

  The wind had picked up; it was against their faces. The chop increased. In their wake, the smoke had vanished. The night was clear, the last of the Nym gone to its watery grave. Somewhere back there, dorsal fins would be cleaving the wave-tops. Sharks would be circling.

  Bourne’s face was grim as he followed the hit team’s vessel as it made a wide, sweeping curve to port in what he now believed would be a semicircle heading back to Skyros.

  The Americans’ pursuit reminded him that the purge of Boris’s friends, colleagues, and family was still under way, both in Russia and the U.S. It wouldn’t be complete until all signs of him and his affairs had been eradicated, his past achievements credited to others in typical Russian revisionism fashion. In Bourne’s heart only would the real Boris Illyich Karpov remain alive.

  A change in pitch on the boat they were following knifed through his sorrow. Immediately, he cut the engine on the runabout, listened to the sea and the night. The rising wind was now at their backs; the runabout wallowed in the deepening troughs. Behind them, the first throaty rolls of thunder could be heard. The night was now very dark as storm clouds continued to overrun the starlight.

  Bourne could make out the looming cliffs of Skyros, blacker than black, sensed their solidity as the wind struck them and lifted off them. Now he had no doubt that the hit team was headed to the island, rather than to a ship lying to. Anyway, the team had had no time to mobilize a ship, as it had no idea where the Nym was headed; even the captain hadn’t known until almost the last moment.

  Their runabout, having a smaller engine, couldn’t hope to keep pace with the hit team’s vessel, but that wasn’t Bourne’s objective. All he needed was to ascertain where the boat was headed. Whether he got them there before or after the team debarked was immaterial.

  And, indeed, by the time he guided the bucking runabout into shore, the vessel was deserted, lying to at anchor. The team was on dry land. A sudden gust of wind turned the runabout broadside, nearly shoving it against the sharp-toothed rocks, outliers of the cliff wall. Bourne restarted the engine, confident that it would not be heard over the wailing of the wind and the crashing of the waves. Surely, the larger vessel would bear the brunt of the storm and be smashed to pieces on the jagged teeth. Possibly that’s precisely what the team wanted. If so, they had another means of egress off Skyros.

  Bourne guided the runabout around the narrow headland, which would act as a natural barrier to the storm. The water was now shallow enough for Bourne to jump out, bring the runabout in via the nylon bow line. Water, pushed by the approaching storm, rushed up his thighs, over his waist, before momentarily being sucked away again. He made the line fast around a rock, hoped that thus protected leeward the runabout would survive.

  Back in the runabout, he checked through all the cleverly concealed cabinets under the seat cushions, found fishing rods and rolls of lines, hooks, a scaling knife, which he jammed into his waistband. He stuffed all the rest of these, except the rods, into a well-used waterproof canvas bag, zipped it up. Then he went down on one knee, fiddling with a black box that depended from the bottom of the instrument panel.

  “What are you doing?” Mala asked, but he made no reply.

  Now both of them were in the churning surf, then onto the slippery rocks, picking their way to what passed for dry land in this inhospitable area of the island; there wasn’t even a thin line of shingle to distinguish sea from land.

  They ascended the cliff, finding hand- and footholds where they could. They rose into the wind, which, in no time at all, would seek to tear them off the rocks. The rain hadn’t yet hit, but, like the pounding hooves of a charging cavalry, it was coming. Bourne knew they had to reach the cliff’s summit and find shelter behind its peaks before that happened.

  Mala was lighter than he was, which made her faster, but also more prone to being dislodged by the storm. Bourne struggled to keep up with her, prepared to catch her if she slipped or fell. They were nearing the top when the first raindrops, fat and far between, struck his back. The rock face, already slippery, would soon enough become impassable.

  Sure enough, in the next instant Mala’s anchor foot slipped as her other leg lifted upward for new purchase. Reaching out, Bourne grabbed her ankle, held her foot steady as she found a handhold above.

  The raindrops became smaller, more numerous, until they were like needles trying to penetrate the climbers’ sopping clothes. Bourne and Mala continued their assault on the cliff unabated; to slow or falter now would be fatal.

  With her left hand, Mala grasped a vertical finger that jutted out from the body of the cliff. Using it as a fulcrum, she swung her body to the right, drawing her knees up to her chest just enough to miss crashing into a trio of rocks. Bourne followed her, grasping the rock finger higher up to accommodate his taller body, then swung himself as hard as she had.

  He found himself in a small, triangular crevasse, a fault line near the apex of the cliff, pressed tightly up against her. If he reached up, extending his arm to its limit, his fingertips could just about grasp the cliff top. A violent gust of wind threatened to blow him sideways, the way it had the runabout, and a machine-gun burst of rain peppered his face and chest, for a moment blurring his vision. They had to risk moving to a safer spot. The weather was bad enough now, but the storm had not yet reached its full fury. As it did so, it would become more unpredictable.

  He turned to see Mala watching him. By the expression on her face he knew she was thinking of another time, another place, another storm as violent as this one. Its ferocity was one of the things that allowed Bourne to rescue her out of the sacred place where Keyre “initiated” his girls, as he termed it. Bourne had been commissioned to fetch her, to bring her back from the “pits of hell,” as her father termed it. He had told him that she and her younger sister, Liis, had been abducted by Somali pirates. During the aftermath, in talking to Liis while Mala was still feverish and in and out of consciousness, Bourne had discovered the father’s treachery. His business in tatters, his debts run wild, he had sold his daughters into slavery. Delving deeper, information had come to him that their father had done all this in order to abscond with the money, leaving his old business partner and his irate debtors in Estonia behind, to forge a new life for himself.

  After Mala was safe, after Bourne had seen to her many wounds, after he had secured for her and Liis a place to stay where they would be fed and protected and loved, he had, without telling them, dealt with their father. Had he really wanted his daughters to join him? Bourne hadn’t given him the chance to lie again. Now it seemed as if storms had followed him halfway across the world, like the shrieking of the damned.

  A burst of rain slammed them back against the walls of the crevasse, and Bourne knew it was now or never. Nodding to Mala, he waited for a brief lull in the wind-driven rain, rose on tiptoe, reached up as far as he could and grabbed at the highest part of the rock face. His fingers slipped as he tried to put his weight onto his right arm. He spun, feet off the ground like a hanged man, before Mala grabbed him around the waist, steadied him. He drove himself farther, got a firmer grip on the rock, hoisted himself up.

  A vicious gust of wind caught him as he was about to roll over the top of the cliff. For perilous seconds he rocked back and forth, scrabbling for purchase as the wind tried
its best to suck him out into the black void. His heart beat fast in his chest as he drove all extraneous thought out of his mind, narrowing his focus. Nothing existed save for the ridge of rock on which he vibrated and shuddered like a tree limb. Then, with a superhuman effort, he hurled himself over the ridge, down to a surface of rock rubble. Now the peak served as a kind of parapet, rising over his head, protecting him from the brunt of the storm.

  But there was Mala to consider. Rising up over the parapet, slicing rain against his cheeks and in his eyes, he reached over and down. He called to Mala, but the howling of the storm tore his voice from his lungs, flung it far away. Still, she had had her hand up, waiting for him, and now she took him in a Roman grip—fingers grasped around wrist, and inch by agonizing inch, he lifted her out of the crevasse. In the last moments, one of her feet found solid rock, and with his help, she vaulted the rest of the way, landed, crouching beside him on the other side of the parapet.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, over the wind.

  She nodded. “You remember, right? When you took me and Liis.” She could see in his eyes that he did. Her mouth moved, but for a moment nothing came out. “I didn’t want to go. I wanted you to take Liis and leave me. With him.”

  “You fought me.”

  “Even bleeding all over, I fought you.” She swiped the rain from her forehead but it was a losing battle. “But I didn’t hurt you.” She smiled, touched his cheeks with her fingertips so lightly it took him a moment to realize that she was mapping the configuration of his bones. “You can’t imagine what happened.”

  “There will come a reckoning. One night when the moon is down.”

  “But not tonight.” She blinked rain out of her eyes. “Tonight we have the American kill team to deal with.”

  “But not in the way you think,” Bourne said, and seeing her brows knit together, he laughed softly. “I have a better idea.”

  7

  Meme LLC’s staff did not like to see their boss angry, but this evening Morgana Roy was good and pissed. Her personnel in the field had relayed intel concerning the botched mission to terminate Jason Bourne with extreme prejudice. They could not identify the team, but Morgana had a gut feeling it was part of Dreadnaught Section, what her guys blackly referred to as SAMS—a special action murder squad, which is what the Nazi SS called their kill teams. Her people were an irreverent lot, which was just the way she liked it.

  Although Meme LLC was an off-site, way off-the-books organization that was in no way connected to the U.S. government, it was still nominally a division of Dreadnaught, what she privately called “Arthur’s Acres”—the untouchable domain he had carved out for himself within the clandestine services. Which was why Dreadnaught was allowed to have a black ops SAMS team.

  After trying and failing twice to reach Mac on his encrypted mobile, she muttered, “Fuck it,” and raced out of the office. The heated, muggy air drained all promise from spring. Belatedly, she realized that she was in too much of a hurry to return to where she’d parked her car. Back inside the office, she had Rose hand her the keys to one of the company cars. Moments later, she slipped behind the wheel of a Ford sedan parked on the street. She fired the ignition, cursed as a blast of hot air exited the vents.

  Morgana liked MacQuerrie as a boss—he pretty much left her to do her own thing in the manner she felt best. That was a major perk of being off-site and so deeply blacked out from the rest of the government’s acronymic agencies, who spent much of their time butting heads and snooping into each other’s territory to make sure they weren’t getting scooped. What a briar patch.

  At that moment, she received a three-word text. She bit her lower lip, nodded to herself. She pulled out and raced down the street, heedless of what amber lights might come.

  And then there were days like today when she felt run over, betrayed, marginalized, and totally out of the loop. After informing her of the über-secretive Karpov cyber initiative, after putting her in charge of stopping it, after informing her that Jason Bourne had taken it over from his old pal, MacQuerrie had gone out and ordered Bourne terminated.

  Bourne’s death is the last thing I want, she thought. The very last thing this shitstorm calls for.

  She shook her head as she overtook a truck, accelerated into the left-hand lane. She had a heavy foot. In the long hours since Mac had given her her new brief, she and her team had parsed the vertical code he had sent her without even an iota of success. All they could tell her—and this she confirmed herself—was that the code delivered to them was a piece of the whole; a very small piece, indeed. Not nearly big enough to be the Rosetta stone to unlocking the full computer code.

  As a consequence, she’d had a couple of her team members scour the web, monitoring chatter from the Russian Federation and their known affiliates, hackers lurking in their dark web dens, known purveyors of cyber weapons. They had turned up zero. She was beginning to consider the possibility that they would fail in their mission. That they wouldn’t be able to decipher the code at all, and therefore wouldn’t be able to stop it before it was deployed.

  Two possibilities has occurred to her. One, the code was not yet complete. Two, it was complete but was being held in abeyance for some unknown reason. Bourne, had he been brought in alive, would have provided the answer to that vital question as well as the key to shutting this unthinkable weapon down for good.

  Sure, Mac had told her that he was initiating new protocols to keep the nuclear codes safer than they already were. But who was to say those new protocols would be enough to stave off Karpov’s cyber weapon? None of them could take that chance, least of all Mac. She had tried to make that crystal clear to him, but for some reason she had failed—or, more likely, he had failed to take her arguments seriously enough. People like Mac, career officers in the intelligence community, had blinders. They heard what they wanted to hear, they acted as they wanted to act, sure in the conviction that they knew best. This was particularly true when it came to ignoring intel on the ground that didn’t fit their perception of the situation. She’d seen it happen again and again, aghast that no one learned from past mistakes. The old boys’ club rules were rigidly—even obsessively—enforced to ensure hegemony, even when they ran counter to the rapidly changing situation in the field. They had invested themselves in a quasi-religious belief in the rightness of their iron-bound laws.

  “Call Mac,” she said to her Bluetooth-connected mobile. But, as before, the call went straight to voice mail. This time she didn’t bother leaving a message. What was the point?

  She raced along Route 175, headed toward NSA headquarters. She swerved around the vehicles in front of her, not caring how far over the speed limit she was pushing the car.

  She knew she was spoiling for a fight. Part of her understood why Mac hadn’t read her in to what he was doing: Mac was just doing his thing the way he always did his thing. But the fact was, the moment he had revealed that Bourne had taken up Karpov’s mantle, he had involved her.

  The bulk of the vast NSA complex loomed up before her, forcing her to finally slow down. But instead of heading to the perimeter, she veered off to the left, heading down narrower streets.

  OTTO’S FINE EUROPEAN TAILORING, the stenciled lettering on the front window proclaimed. The building had once been painted white, but the pockmarked stucco façade was in dire need of multiple repairs. At cursory glance it looked abandoned, which was more or less the point.

  Pushing through the front door, she passed into the tailor shop, where Otto, a balding man in his sixties, sat behind a waist-high counter, chalking up a suit jacket on a dummy. His own suit jacket was on a hanger hooked over the top of a full-length mirror. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbow, revealing powerful forearms. His vest held his tie close to his chest. The air smelled of cloth sizing and sour pickles. A half-eaten pastrami on rye lay on its waxed paper at his right elbow. No one else was in the shop.

  Otto glanced at her through dust-speckled glasses and nodded as she
went through the swinging door in the counter and down a narrow, ill-lighted hallway, through to a room at the rear of the building.

  A figure sat in a chair behind a desk equipped with a laptop and several other pieces of equipment. A wide pool of light from the desk lamp fell across the face and hands of the shadowy figure.

  “Hello, Morgana.” A well-modulated female voice with perhaps just a touch of an indeterminate foreign accent. “Thank you for coming.”

  “I did debate with myself, Soraya.”

  “Understandable. You live a remarkably ordered life.” Her beautiful profile was typical of Egyptian women but at the same time utterly unique.

  There was no place for Morgana to sit, so she remained standing.

  “And yet you’re here.”

  “It seems my desk is not as comfortable as it used to be,” Morgana said.

  “Well said. Feel like stretching our wings a bit, do we?”

  “An offer like yours…” Her voice faded out. Their eyes locked; there seemed no reason to finish the sentence verbally.

  There was a photo of a beautiful girl, age six, Morgana knew, on the desk. It was turned so that she could see it, deliberately, she supposed.

  “How is Sonya?” she asked.

  “Adjusting to life in America.” There was a slight pause. “She doesn’t remember her father. I am obliged to show her photos of him, but I’m not sure it does any good.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you. She would have loved him as surely as I did.” Then, more brightly: “She misses you.”

  “We’ll have to remedy that.” Morgana cleared her throat. “Afterward.”

  “You have a concern?”

  “Not exactly, but I’m so new at this.”

  “One of the things that makes you perfect for this particular brief.” She used the British word for assignment.

  “All right, then.” Morgana nodded. “What would you have me do?”