The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne 14)

“Got you, you sonuvabitch.”

—

For Morgana that was the end of her second successful brief for Soraya Moore. But for Bourne, there was one more thing left to do. Much as he wanted to, he couldn’t carry Mala’s body out of the citadel, even amid such chaos, so he did the next best thing.

In Keyre’s laboratory, he stared at the table with its old bloodstains, now almost black as pitch. How much pain and suffering had this table seen—not only Mala’s, but all the young girls who had come before her.

Searching through the magus’s supplies he came upon a can of flammable liquid. What he had done with it, how he had applied it judiciously to his “girls” Bourne could not—and would not—imagine.

Standing in the doorway, even with her phone against her cheek, briefing Soraya, bringing her up to date in hushed tones, assuring her she had made a copy of the code and then destroyed the fail-safe-locked original, Morgana sensed his great sorrow. She did not pretend to understand his relationship with the Angelmaker, nor why he could feel anything for her at all. But it wasn’t her place to understand, and she did not judge him.

She watched silently as he doused the table with the liquid, then ran a thin line of it across the lab’s floor to where the Angelmaker’s body lay. There were a number of devices that created a flame in the lab, but Bourne deliberately chose the most primitive of them—long wooden matches.

Scraping the head of one along the side of the box, he watched the flame flare up. He wished he were the kind of person who believed in God; he wished he knew a prayer.

He composed his own. “Good-bye, Anjelica,” he whispered. “You will be remembered.”

Then he threw the match onto the center of the glistening table.