The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne 14)

“Including Konstantin.”

“Yes.”

“Which suited you perfectly.”

“It did.”

“So you sent the Angelmaker to bring me to you.”

“Well. Yes. But first through neutral intermediaries I had your whereabouts transmitted to the Russians and Americans.”

“We could have been killed,” Bourne pointed out.

“No, no, Bourne. I had too much faith in you. And in the Angelmaker. I knew she’d bring you to me.”

“So no auction.”

“A ruse. I kept it going for cover.”

Bourne frowned. “Cover for what?” He checked his watch. “The zero-day trigger will activate in twenty-three minutes.”

“Ah, well, that. I’m sure you’ve heard the news stories about the Russians massing along the borders of the Baltic States. Well, instead of shutting down the banks, as Karpov planned, the Initiative will freeze NATO’s communications and defense infrastructure. Once that happens, the Russians will cross the borders into Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania. Then it will be Sweden and Finland’s turn. By the time NATO figures out a way around the Initiative, the Russian putsch will be a fait accompli.”

“Keyre, you can’t do this. Even for you—”

“But my dear Bourne. It’s already done. At least it will be in, what, nineteen minutes.”

And, as it turned out, Bourne was right in having the glimmer stuck in his consciousness like a splinter, because at that moment twin explosions rocked the camp as the generators blew, plunging the citadel into an electrical and electronic abyss.

—

Center. Breathe. “Timing is everything,” her father, the angel on her shoulder, said in her ear. Aim. Squeeze the trigger. Ka-boom!

Chaos.

But before that…Morgana had staked out Keyre’s citadel for some hours, familiarized herself with the daytime and nighttime peregrinations of the guards, as well as their shift changes. She lay on her belly, peering through the powerful eyepieces of the military-grade field glasses she’d found on the plane and stuffed into a backpack, along with everything else she thought she’d need, and finally she saw the Angelmaker exit a jeep. In this one instant, remembering Mac’s recitation of her kills in just the past five years, ending with “She’s a menace,” her decision was made for her.

She watched as the Angelmaker entered Keyre’s building with Jason Bourne. Her blood was running hot, and she had wanted to fire then and there, but the timing was off. With no way to ensure that all the guards would be pulled off of their posts, she needed to wait until they were in the right positions. She had already calculated how long it would take her to reach the area of cyclone fence she had targeted, and she factored this in.

When the time was right, Ka-boom!

And amid the chaos she scooped up her backpack and ran. She was through the fence, the wire-cutters left behind, and inside Keyre’s citadel without attracting any attention. The twin explosions had caused more chaos than she had anticipated.

She ran toward her target.

Last lap, she thought. Do or die.

She was on her way.

45

What did you do?” Keyre growled.

Bourne spread his hands.

“He didn’t do anything,” the Angelmaker said. “I was with him the whole time.”

“Maybe you were, maybe you weren’t.” Keyre glared at her. “Maybe the two of you cooked this up together.

“I’m not blind.” In a blur, he reached out, grabbed the Angelmaker’s upper arm, brought her to him. “I see the way you look at him. I know how you feel about him.”

Bourne, who knew how dangerous she could be, was appalled at the slackness in her the moment Keyre touched her. Her eyes grew soft and dreamy, her head tilted back slightly, exposing the pale flesh of her throat, as if to a lover. She bent backward, as if about to swoon. Bourne had never seen her like this, and it frightened him. It looked to him as if in Keyre’s grip she had lost all control.

He lunged at her, trying to wrest her from the Somali, but she wouldn’t help him work her loose.

Keyre bared his teeth, the lips drawing back, exposing black gums, in an atavistic expression, revealing all the history and power of the Yibir. “Don’t you get it yet, Bourne? Look, look. She doesn’t want to come.”

He was right, but that didn’t stop Bourne from chopping down on Keyre’s wrist. As his hand dropped away, Bourne wrapped an arm around the Angelmaker’s waist and dragged her away. She fought him.

“I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” she cried, in eerie echo of the first time he had come to save her. It was as if they had all stepped back in time, as if the present was replaying the past in perfect synchronicity: Keyre laughing, Mala squirming and shouting, and him doing his best to contain the anger and panic of her younger self. In this unstable state, he half expected her to call out for him to find Liis and save her.

Perhaps to forestall her, he whispered into her ear: “You told me you had a daughter, that Keyre was holding her hostage. What else have you lied to me about?”

“That’s what I do. I lie,” she said, pointedly not answering him. “I warned you about my scorpion nature.”

He had no answer for her. With a sickening lurch, he saw no path through the thorny forest of her inscrutable nature. She was drawn to Keyre like a flame, she always would be. He kept trying to save her, but only she could save herself from the Yibir mesmerism, and he honestly didn’t know whether she possessed the inner strength.

Time seemed to slip away from him. He saw Keyre coming toward him, he felt Mala’s breath against his cheek, the heaving of her body, the flailing of her limbs, as if she had lost her coordination. He saw Keyre’s fist coming toward him, he saw the gleaming Damascus blade held in it, but they seemed to have no meaning for him. Not until the razor-sharp edge sliced into the meat of the arm he held around Mala.

With a shock, fire rode up his arm. His shoulder felt like it had been dislocated. As if from a great distance, he saw it drop away from Mala, he felt the blood as if it were someone else’s blood. He became aware of Mala yanking the gun from him, saw her take a staggering step back, her arms held out straight in front of her, both hands wrapped around the weapon’s grips. Strangely, Keyre didn’t continue his attack, but stood his ground three paces from Bourne, as if rooted to the spot. Blood dripped from the tip of the knife, which was now pointed at the floor. Dimly, Bourne wondered whether the blade was coated with a drug that was now in his system.

“You see how it is now, Bourne,” the Yibir magus said. “It won’t be me who doles out justice, it will be the Angelmaker.”

“Mala,” Bourne heard himself say. “Her name is Mala.”

“I’m afraid not, Bourne,” Keyre said, a note of genuine pity in his voice that pierced Bourne more deeply than if Keyre’s knife had found his heart. “Mala died a long time ago.” He pointed toward his laboratory. “She died, upon the same table that sits now in the middle of that room. All my paraphernalia is the same, in fact, it’s in the exact same spot the old tent occupied. Just the surroundings have changed.”

His expression was enigmatic; it was as if he had sunk inside himself, as if that essential part was hidden from Bourne, maybe from Mala as well.

“Mala is dead, Bourne. You’ve never accepted that fact. Mala died and in her place I created the creature you see before you: the Angelmaker.” He inclined his head toward her. “It will be the Angelmaker who will dispense justice to you.”

Mala had swung the gun in his direction. Her expression was as unreadable as was Keyre’s. Her eyes seemed to be looking inward, or perhaps through him. What was she, in fact, seeing? What Keyre wanted her to see? If so, Bourne knew he was finished. One thing Konstantin had been right about. He’d read Bourne’s Treadstone file, and he had gleaned the essential information. Bourne could not kill Mala, perhaps not even at the point of death. Part of him loved the part of her he still believed to be alive, despite Keyre??

?s contention otherwise.

“Kill him,” Keyre said. “Kill him now.”

And then from out of the depths of Bourne’s unconscious came the one last try to save them both. “Anjelica,” he said to Mala. “Your mother called you Anjelica. I’m calling you Anjelica, because that’s who you are. Anjelica didn’t die here years ago. She’s here now. She is you.”

Mala blinked.

“Anjelica.”

A small smile, perhaps of recognition, lit her face. Her lips parted as if to reply to him, and then she pitched forward onto her face, felled by a gunshot that had come from directly behind her. Locked as they were in their own world of fatal consequences, neither Bourne nor Keyre had heard Morgana’s stealthy entrance into the building. And until the gunshot, Mala had blocked Keyre’s view of her.

Both he and Bourne shouted at the same time, in shock and grief, perhaps, but the sounds, like those of an animal, were indecipherable. As they went at each other, Bourne felt a rage, pure and powerful, rise up within him. Now she was gone. Bourne knew she was gone without having to kneel beside her, check her pulse, or listen for her breath. She lay as she had fallen, deathly still, nothing more than a husk now, and perhaps, at last, at peace.

Bourne soon found that there was no good way to fight Keyre. He was as slippery as an eel, seemingly as immune to the blows Bourne rained on him as if he were made of stone. As for Morgana, she was trying her best to get a clear shot at Keyre, without success. Meanwhile, Keyre’s returned blows were taking their toll on Bourne. In his weakened state, he knew he couldn’t hold out for very long. He needed to end the struggle quickly or face defeat and death.

With lightning speed he went through his options, none of which seemed to him to give him much of a chance. But there was one, though the riskiest of the bunch, which might see him through. With the next strike from Keyre, he doubled over, moaning in pain. Taking the bait, Keyre doubled down on his attack, which built to such a frenzy that he completely disregarded his defense.

That was where Bourne got him. From his knees, Bourne drove a fist upward and, with the Somali bent over him, his knuckle struck Keyre squarely in the sternum, shattering it. In shock, Keyre seemed to freeze for a moment. And in the moment, Bourne acted. Rising from his penitent’s position, he buried his fist in Keyre’s side. Ribs went, at least two, possibly three, stove in by the power of the blow. The third strike caught Keyre’s left kidney. The fourth and fifth, as well.

Bourne grabbed a handful of the Somali’s hair, dripping sweat, and, using the massed tips of his fingers, drove the shards of Keyre’s sternum inward, into his organs. Blood poured out of Keyre’s mouth, his eyes turned upward, as if beseeching his unknown Yibir gods for a surcease that did not come. Bourne was in no mood for mercy. Taking Keyre’s head in his hands, he slammed his face into his raised knee.

Keyre dropped like a stone and lay in a widening pool of his own blood.

At the sound of pounding boot soles, Bourne turned to see a pair of guards run into the room. Morgana shot them both before they could fire. Bourne and Morgana’s eyes locked again, and a strange mixed message passed between them. She had killed Anjelica, but then the Angelmaker had been about to kill him. It was her nature, as she had told him. The nature of the scorpion. He nodded to her, and she nodded back.

He looked down at Mala’s body, the surprised expression on her face. Her eyes were as blank as those of the Sphinx. What had she thought at the end? he wondered. He thought of her tortured life, both when she was with Keyre and after. He had never left her; he’d been a poison in her blood that no amount of figurative transfusions could defeat.

In the end, despite all of his help, Keyre had owned her, body and soul.

“Bourne!” Morgana cried.

The sharpness of her voice broke the spell, and he told her how Keyre had altered the Initiative to shut down NATO to accommodate the Russian Sovereign.

“That’s it then,” she said in despair. “Even if we were to somehow get through to someone high up in NATO, even if the person would believe us, it would be too late.”

“But there must be a way,” Bourne said. “Boris wouldn’t have had the Initiative constructed without a fail-safe. A key. A way to shut down the zero-day trigger in case of emergency.”

She looked up, a gleam of hope in her eyes. “If he left it with anyone, he left it with you. He must have. You two were thick as thieves; you were the only one he trusted. You must have it.”

“Everyone seems to think I do,” Bourne said. “But I don’t.”

“All right then. But to have even the remotest chance I have to get a look at the completed code.”

He nodded. “This way.”

Bourne led her to the only metal door in the room. Fireproof. “I’ll bet anything what we need is behind here.”

It occurred to her then that the complete code had been her holy grail from the moment she had been given her slightly hysterical orders from Mac. She had hit a wall and had decided to take a different route altogether; the route her father would have had her take. But all the while, like an itch she couldn’t scratch, her failure at piecing together the Initiative never left her mind. It had increased in stature, like a myth, like fabled El Dorado. Now she fairly shook at the thought of actually seeing the finished code.

“We have less than ten minutes to find the Initiative and to somehow defeat the zero-day trigger, and, look, there’s no lock.” She could not keep the despair out of her voice. “There’s not even a handle.” She pointed. “Just this rectangle affixed to the surface.”

“It must be the locking mechanism.”

“But there’s no keypad. How—?”

Bourne touched the plate. His fingertip made an impression, just as it would on a haptic mobile phone or laptop screen.

“Good God,” Morgana said. “How can we possibly know what to input? There are no numbers, no letters, nothing but a blank screen.”

“Quiet,” Bourne said. “I’m thinking,”

“Well, think quickly,” she said. “We’re at seven minutes and counting.”

The trick was to put himself in Keyre’s mind. A horrible thing to have to attempt, but it had to be done. He turned back to look at his corpse. What would the Yibir have used to gain entrance, something no one else could possibly know? How could he know? How could anyone know? His gaze drifted inevitably to Mala. So many names, so many identities.

Without warning, he was thrown back to their night on Skyros, the blackness, the turbulence of the storm, how he had traced the runes on her back, committing them to memory, even as she turned away, as if she were ashamed of them. He froze.

The runes.

Tentatively, he touched the screen again, and then ever more authoritatively began to trace out the shape of the scars on Mala’s back.

“What the hell are you doing?” Morgana said, but it was clear that she was fascinated.

“Keyre was a Yibir magus.” Bourne was halfway through now. “He scarred Mala—the Angelmaker—with these runes.” He was done. He held his breath.

The door clicked open, and they rushed through. They found themselves in a dimly lit room, windowless and claustrophobic. Apparently it had its own generator, because all the electronics were working. On a semicircular table was a powerful desktop surrounded by two laptops. Four screens showed different areas of the citadel and the port. It was clear from them that the explosions had morphed into fires that had spread to the neighboring buildings. As they watched, transfixed, a warehouse of war matériel went up in a ball of fire and black smoke. Keyre’s men were swarming all over that section of the compound in a frantic effort to keep the rest of the stored weapons and ammo from going up and destroying the entire village.

The laptops were open but their screens were dark. Perhaps they were waiting patiently for the auction that would now never come. The desktop screen was on and active.

“It’s the Initiative!” Morgana cried. “I recognize the bits of it I’ve tried and faile

d to decipher.”

“But you discovered the zero-day trigger,” Bourne said.

Setting her backpack down, she perched on the mesh task chair. “Yes. That much I was able to decode.” She turned to him. “D’you really think there is a fail-safe?”

“Knowing Boris, I do. He was meticulous about such things. He made sure he accounted for every contingency.” He stared at the screen, his mind racing. “It would be logical if the fail-safe was in the same bit as the zero-day trigger, wouldn’t it?”

Morgana’s fingers were racing across the keyboard. “It would. But then why didn’t I see it before this?”

Bourne glanced at his watch. “Three minutes left.”

Morgana, half bent over the keyboard, her fingers a blur, kept combing through the code of the cyber weapon. “Honestly, I’d need hours, if not days to find it. Unless, of course, someone knew the key code.”

“I’ve told everyone under the sun I don’t have it. Boris didn’t leave me anything.”

“Nothing?” Morgana lifted her fingers from the keyboard, rocked back and forth in despair. “Ninety seconds. I’ll never be able to stop it.”

“Well, his yacht, but that’s at the bottom of the Mediterranean now. You can be sure that I searched it thoroughly before it was sunk.”

She picked her head up. “What was the name of the boat?”

“What? Why?”

“You said he left you the boat.” She turned to him. “What if the boat is the key?”

Bourne’s heart started to race. “Nym,” he said. “Boris’s boat was named Nym.”

As she turned back to the keyboard, he spelled it out for her.

“N-Y-M,” she repeated back as if to herself. “Fifty-three seconds. Here goes.”

She typed in the letters. Nothing happened.

“Shit,” she said.

“What is it?”

“I must have entered the key in the wrong place.” Her fingers frantically worked the keyboard, and then—

Everything stopped.

“There,” Morgana said.

The screen went dark.