The Bourne Initiative

  Outside, the good Lieutenant Goode was waiting to escort her to the elevator.

  “How was your meeting, Morgana?” he asked genially.

  “Ducky,” she said with a wooden smile. “Just ducky.”

  At least I didn’t get shirty with him, she thought grimly.

  8

  Lightning illuminated her face, bone-white and dark-eyed. Her clothes clung to the shape of her body, revealing as much as they hid. The rain continued to pelt down. The air seemed subtropical, and the sky was low and virulent. Wind whistled over the rock face, the fluting now and again sounding like voices in a hellish chorus.

  Bourne wanted to move inland, but in the blinding rain and pitch darkness it was far too risky. He had a flashlight he’d taken from the runabout, but using it would only alert the kill team of an unknown presence they would be obliged to investigate. The remaining members had a personal grudge against him now; he’d killed one of their own. That was an offense they would neither forgive nor forget.

  The only saving grace of the storm’s ferocity was the fact that the team couldn’t move, either. How far ahead they might be was impossible to guess, but Bourne figured they had no more than a ten-minute head start. That could not put them too far ahead. They would have had to seek immediate shelter. He didn’t know if coming to Skyros had been their original plan or a spur-of-the-moment decision once the Nym had anchored there, but for sure, they had to stay there now to find Stone’s killer, which they undoubtedly suspected was Bourne.

  “What are you thinking?” Mala asked over the incessant noise of the storm.

  “Turn around,” Bourne said.

  “What?”

  Hand on her shoulders, he turned her. The movement was gentle; she did not resist. When she was sitting with her back to him, he pulled off her outer garment. The rain turned the bathing suit black, like a partial suit of armor. Her back was exposed to him. Bourne placed his fingertips at base of her neck, the apex of the complex patterns of scars Keyre had inflicted on her over nine months, the period of time dictated by the Yibir laws of sorcery to complete the patterns.

  Multiple flashes of lightning all at once threw the scars into livid relief—dark, ropy runes on an alabaster field. A chiaroscuro of agony.

  These weren’t just scars; they were written incantations. Spells woven into the fabric of Mala’s body to bind her soul to Keyre. After reuniting with her on Cyprus last year toward the end of his previous mission, Bourne had spent hours every day and night learning as much as he could about Yibir sorcery, an almost impossible task, even for him. The problem was that there was an immense amount of disbelief in sorcery in the modern world, and in Yibir sorcery most of all. So little was known about it, and what few practitioners had come to light were, at heart, terrorists, pirates, reavers, and ravagers of those who did not view the world as they did. Keyre was one such terrorist—the worst of the lot—the smartest and the cleverest, who commanded absolute obedience from his followers and absolute loyalty from his clients to whom he sold prepackaged coups, complete with the latest weapons and the best trained soldiers. The caveat, which he never mentioned beforehand, was that these well-trained soldiers were absolutely loyal to him and no one else. Any form of skimming, withholding, or reneging on a deal ended one way and one way only: the client never saw another sunrise. So fearsome was Keyre’s reputation that such betrayals happened less and less often, until now they were virtually unheard of.

  These thoughts passed quickly across the scrim of Bourne’s mind as he traced the runes, one by one, and in the proper order—that is to say, the order in which they were inflicted upon Mala’s flesh. Rather than horizontally, they were read vertically, like original Chinese or Japanese. But these runes looked nothing like Asian ideographs—or like any other language, for that matter. They possessed their own inscrutable meaning, their own grammar and syntax, their own logic, if one might call sorcery in any way logical.

  Mala turned her head, so that in the next lightning flash he saw her in profile. “What are you doing?”

  His fingertips continued to move down her back, his hands parting momentarily to trace the runes on either shoulder blade.

  She flinched. “Please don’t. I hate those things. I hate that they’re a part of me.” She had drawn her knees up to her chest. Now she laid her forehead on her forearms. Her back arched like a bow. “You can’t do anything, Jason.”

  He was finished now, the so-called incantations memorized via his fingertips. He wanted to know them because they were lies. But her belief in what Keyre had done to her was what kept her bound to him. He had seen her at her lowest ebb, when she had come so close to death he could feel its chill breath on the back of his neck. He had brought her back from that brink; all the while she had spoken to him as she spoke to herself. He knew she hated Keyre, but at the same time the dreaded Stockholm syndrome had insinuated itself into her mind with each runic cut of his knife. He had led her to a place where hate and love existed side by side, like the most intimate of lovers; in this sinister manner he had made her his creature. Bourne knew that if he was to save her he would have to break the spell she was convinced she was under. If he couldn’t, he harbored no doubt whatsoever that one day she would turn on him and, under Keyre’s explicit orders, kill him when he least expected it. For these reasons he had determined to keep her close, to follow wherever she led. He would never be truly safe otherwise.

  “Thank God you saved Liis before he could start on her.”

  “Your sister is safe,” Bourne said. “I’ve made sure of that.”

  “But is she happy?”

  “I’ve set up a trust in her name. She has her career, about which she is passionate. But beyond that, is anyone happy?”

  She turned then, to place her mouth on his. Her lips were slightly parted, the tip of her tongue entered his mouth. She sighed against him, her hard athlete’s body melting. He felt himself respond, even knowing she was at her most dangerous when she appeared most vulnerable. Unlike her younger sister, untouched by Keyre, Mala was incapable of vulnerability. If she had ever had it, it was clear to him that Keyre had excised it with the point of his sacred knife.

  “Don’t talk that way,” she whispered into his mouth. Rain struck them out of the turbulent night. “If I thought you’d ever become like me I’d die.”

  Alarm bells went off in Bourne’s head. Mala was not prone to overstatement, to embellishing a moment, wearing a ruffled blouse when she could don a T-shirt. If she said this terrible thing, she meant it. The thought rocked him; he’d been unprepared for such a raw and naked statement.

  “Such morbidity. It doesn’t suit you.”

  She shook her head, her solemn expression holding something deeper, darker. “You took me away from him,” she said. “But you didn’t save me from him.”

  “You mean the incantation—”

  “This has nothing to do with that,” she said sharply.

  “What has it to do with?”

  “When you took me away from Keyre,” she said into the drumming night, “I left a part of me with him.”

  Bourne’s throat had gone dry. This can’t be happening, he thought. But it was.

  “I had a child with him,” she went on, each word seeming to be squeezed out of her guts. “A daughter. Giza.”

  She turned to him, and he saw the tears rolling from her eyes, down her cheeks.

  “Her name is Giza, Jason. He keeps her locked away.”

  He recalled her fighting him, his strong sense that she didn’t want to leave. She had begged him to find her sister, Liis, but never mentioned Giza.

  “And please don’t ask why I didn’t tell you at the time,” she continued, as if reading his mind. “I didn’t know where he kept her then, and I don’t know now. After you took Liis and me away…after that night…I’ve never seen her.” Her shoulders began to tremble. “He holds that possibility out like a carrot, if I do what he commands.”

  Like a plague, the sins of the Soma
li continued to multiply exponentially: human trafficker, illicit arms dealer, broker between tin-pot despots and fanatic jihadists, brutalizer of girls, torturer. Extorter of the worst deeds from the tenderest and most intimate of emotions. These were the thoughts that swirled around Bourne’s mind as he held Mala’s shivering frame, wrapping his arms tightly around her. The worst thing in the world had happened to Mala. Her scars were as nothing compared to separating her from her daughter.

  “He’ll never let you see her,” he whispered when she had quietened. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “I have to believe…” She passed a hand across her eyes. The blue light from a lightning flash struck her, passing like a theatrical scrim across her face. “My mind says one thing, but my heart says the opposite.”

  He understood her a bit more, but, frankly, it didn’t help much. She was someone he’d saved, brought out of the fire of Keyre’s encampment. In the aftermath, he had helped to nurse her back to health. And how had she repaid him? He was grateful that she had told him what she surely had never told another soul, but for him the cost was too high. He had been obliged to remove her and Liis from an intolerable situation. Now, in divulging her secret to him, she had obliged him to return to Somalia, find her daughter, and rescue her. She knew this; it was the reason she had engineered this meeting. Her secret was not Giza; it was with velvet gloves coercing him into killing Keyre—something she herself could not, or would not, do. Because, so far as he could see, the only way to pry Giza out of Keyre’s clutches was through his cold, dead fingers.

  He let go of her before it was too late, before she insinuated herself into him, made him forget completely that she was the Angelmaker, that death was always clinging to her shoulder, that unless he could save her from herself she already had one foot in the grave. He saw now that merely going after Keyre and killing him wouldn’t make much of a difference, if at all. The Yibir would have control of her even from beyond the grave. Bourne suspected that the pain and suffering Keyre had inflicted on her had remade her, reconnecting axons, rewiring her brain to his demonic wavelength. For, make no mistake, Keyre was a demon made manifest in the body of a human being. Bourne had been to his camp; he’d seen with his own eyes the depravity he visited on human souls.

  The storm had finally exhausted itself, the rain reduced to a drizzle that, without wind, fell vertically. After the last hours of the attack it felt almost pleasurable.

  “We should be heading inland,” he said, rising. He wanted to be done with this place, with its secrets, its sinister shadows. “The faster we discover where the kill team has bivouacked the more secure I’ll feel.”

  “We should attack them while it’s still dark,” Mala said, shrugging on her wrap. Her skin was goose-fleshed, but she gave no sign that she was chilled. That was not her way. “But you said you wanted to hold off.”

  “I said I had a better idea.”

  Her eyes glittered. “What could be better than slitting their throats?”

  And there it was, the extreme peril that lurked behind her beautiful facade. The Angelmaker killed for money. Worse, she lived for death, craved it as others craved food and water. Was there, then, no hope for her?

  Pushing this question aside, Bourne moved them out, down the high ridge that had been their shelter. The last of the clouds, racing inland, shredded, revealing a star-strewn sky glittering with newfound luminescence. With the starlight leading the way, they soon enough came across a narrow path, the glistening rocks still shedding water. The passing of the storm had brought a lowering of the humidity and, with it, cooler temperatures that rapidly dried their clothes.

  Almost immediately the path turned steep, passing between two massive boulders. Pines sprang on their side, gnarled and twisted by the wind, adding to the sense of claustrophobia. At one point, he had to stop them. They were faced with a treacherous rock fall, impossible to navigate. Anything could set it off again.

  He moved them off to their right, finding another way down, always cognizant of the unstable rock fall to their left. As they descended, he kept a lookout for a break, to give them a broader view of their locale and, possibly, pick up the glint of movement presaging the appearance of the kill team.

  “You said you have a better idea than taking them out,” Mala whispered in his ear, mindful that their voices would carry over the rocky terrain. “What could possibly be better?” she asked again.

  Bourne halted them. He pointed off to the right, where a break in the pines offered them a view inland down the slope. “There,” he said. “There they are.”

  A fire had been lit, three tents surrounding it. Now and again they could discern in the glimmering starlight the movement of a human being, a quick, dull wink of an AR-15 assault rifle as light from the fire slithered down its barrel.

  Bourne signaled silently to her, and they crept forward along the path, breaking off it when they were just above the bivouac. They were close enough to hear voices but were completely hidden from view behind a dense copse of pines.

  “Have you made contact with MacQuerrie?” one said.

  “Not yet.”

  “Fuck, you’d better.”

  There was a pause. “Frankly, I don’t want to be the one to tell him.”

  “About Stone or Bourne?”

  “Bourne. He won’t give a shit about Stone.”

  “You’re right. He’s a fucker. Well, you’ll have to do it, and the sooner the better. There’s nothing to be done for the poor devil but to bring him back home. Bourne, on the other hand, we can do something about. He’s got to be somewhere nearby. The storm must have pinned him down just the way it did us.”

  The first one made a call, reluctantly enough, on a military-grade sat phone. When he was finished, he wiped sweat off his brow.

  “That bad?” the second one asked.

  The first one shook off his question. “Break out the night-vision glasses. He won’t be able to see us, but we sure as hell will be able to see him.”

  They heard the rustling as the kill team strapped on their night-vision goggles. The agent was right: the goggles would pick up their heat signatures. There would be nowhere to hide.

  “Jason…”

  Mala’s soft voice pulled him out of his silent session with himself. His short-term tactics were settled; it was the mid-term strategy that still had to be worked out.

  The American kill team was coming, heading up the slope because they must figure Bourne had made landfall somewhere close by. This part of the coast was forbidding, and there were only a few places to come ashore safely.

  Bourne moved them back to a more strategic position. Rocks and water were their only friends now, the only natural configurations that would block their heat signals. The soft pines, no matter how closely clustered, could not be counted upon to keep them hidden for long. Even the slightest move or alteration in their position would leak a signature and give them away. They’d be effectively pinned down.

  “Come on,” he whispered. “There’s a lot of work to do and little time to do it in.”

  9

  Jason Bourne. Where the hell is he?”

  Faced with his boss’s towering wrath, Igor Malachev trembled. “We don’t know, sir.”

  Timur Savasin, First Minister of the Russian Federation, turned a withering look on him. “What do I have you for, Igor Ivanovich, except to keep an ear and eye out on spetsnaz?”

  Malachev stiffened. “I do the best I can, sir. But Special Forces is a paranoid group.”

  “Everyone in Russia is paranoid, Igor Ivanovich. It goes with the territory.” He raised a hand, fluttered it. “Find out where Bourne is, and don’t return until you have the answer.” Malachev was almost to the first minister’s office door when Savasin said, “And, Igor Ivanovich, while you’re at it, fetch Alecks Petrovich for me.”

  Alecks Volodarsky. Savasin could have, of course, picked up the internal phone and summoned the new head of spetsnaz, the FSB Special Forces, himself, but his ire
was such that he had decided to turn his second-in-command into a lowly gofer. He resisted an urge to order him to bark.

  Alone in his vast office inside Moscow Center, Savasin stuffed his hands into his trouser pockets, fuming so hard it was a wonder smoke didn’t puff out of his ears. That boat, Boris Illyich’s fucking boat, he thought. The fucker might have been a traitor six ways from Sunday, but he had goddamn good taste. He stalked back and forth across the gray tweed carpet like a caged tiger. I wanted that boat. It was mine. The Sovereign said I could have it. And now we’ve blown it to kingdom come. I didn’t order the boat blown up. Who the fuck did? He went and stared out the window at Lubyanka Square. Directly across was the forbidding façade of Detsky Mir, Children’s World department store, which reminded Savasin that one of his grandchildren was having his seventh birthday next week. He resolved, as further punishment, to send Malachev over there on his lunch hour to buy a suitable present.

  “Come,” he muttered in response to a crisp knock on the door. And then louder, a second time, “Come!”

  Malachev or Volodarsky? He watched an old man on the square, lost in a greatcoat that might have been manufactured during World War II, struggle with a recalcitrant dog. The dog was almost as big as the old man. Savasin felt a quick stab of compassion for the dog’s master. The visitor behind him cleared his throat. Savasin didn’t turn around.

  “Igor Ivanovich said you wanted to see me, sir.”

  For a moment Savasin said nothing. He was tempted to send one of his men outside to help the old man with his willful animal, but then reflected that would only shame the old man, who might very well be a war veteran, and that would never do.

  “Tell me, Alecks Petrovich, have you found Jason Bourne?”

  “Uh, not yet, sir.”

  “But you’re close.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Savasin finally turned around to face the man he had appointed as head of spetsnaz. “Volodarsky, if you lie to me a second time, I will personally frog-march you downstairs to the cellars.” The cellars were where all the myriad terrors of the infamous Lubyanka prison resided. People who were brought down there were never seen alive again. “Is that clear?”