Page 2 of The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne 14)

  “Of course, but what do you think it is?”

  The general seemed to age a decade before her eyes. He ran a hand across his face, and to her horror, she noticed a slight tremor in the fingers.

  “My best guess: a cyber weapon, something so sophisticated that it’s far beyond anything we’ve seen—or even dreamt of—before. For some time, this thing, this weapon, was a rumor, nothing more. But because some of the stories attributed fantastic powers to it, I kept my ear to the ground, collated even the most outlandish of the rumors.

  “And, then, out of the blue, an hour ago, this shard appeared in the wild. My people found it quite by accident while trolling the dark web for intel on a certain arms dealer we’ve been after for years, but have yet to pin a single misstep on, let alone a crime. When leads do surface, the people behind them vanish as if into thin air. We never even find a body.”

  “What’s this arms dealer’s name?”

  “Keyre. He’s a Somali pirate—or was, anyway, until we took Viktor Bout into custody.” She knew Bout was the most notorious illegal arms dealer of the last decade. “That left a giant hole in the illegal arms trade, and Keyre was first into Bout’s territory, killing off whoever was left from the Russian’s own network, replacing them with his own people.

  “Keyre has proven himself to be smarter, better connected, and far more slippery than Bout ever was. The story goes that his network is larger, more far-flung, and, most crucially, contains contacts inside governments worldwide. Bout had customs and immigration people in a dozen countries in his pocket. By contrast, Keyre’s network makes Bout’s look like a kindergarten class.

  “Whether that’s the emmis, I don’t yet know, but it’s this cyber weapon that’s giving me a migraine for the ages. You need to make sense of the fragment and you have to find the rest of the code.”

  Morgana sat back, absorbing the information Mac was throwing her way. Something was nagging at her, and she voiced it: “Mac, have you thought about why this fragment suddenly showed up on the dark web?”

  “What d’you mean? There are any number of ways—”

  “No, there aren’t. Not something of this level of sophistication. No, Mac, my guess is that it was released on the dark web deliberately.”

  “But what for?”

  “I think it’s a strong possibility that whoever took possession of the cyber initiative following Karpov’s murder is putting it up for auction.”

  “Auction?”

  “What better way to whet potential buyers’ appetites, and drive up the bids, than to let them take a peek behind the curtain, so to speak.”

  “Christ, I hadn’t thought of that.” MacQuerrie was sweating now, droplets forming at his hairline, rolling down the sides of his cheek.

  “Could this Keyre be running the auction?”

  “Possible. Even likely. Somalia is just the place for such things.” The general frowned. “But I’m thinking he’s only the conduit. Someone else is the mastermind. And knowing Karpov as I did, it would have to be someone he trusted implicitly as well as explicitly.”

  “That rules out just about everyone in the Russian government, doesn’t it?”

  MacQuerrie nodded. “Yes, it does.”

  “Someone from within the initiative itself, then.”

  “Again, knowing Karpov, he wouldn’t trust anyone like that with the big picture. His operations were meticulously compartmentalized. That was his first rule of keeping his work absolutely secure. No one could betray him if they didn’t know what was really going on.”

  “In that case, I’m willing to bet several people wrote this code, each one unaware of what the others were doing. Could Karpov himself have stitched all the pieces of code together?”

  “The general was a man of many talents,” MacQuerrie said. “It’s possible, I suppose, but, frankly, not very likely.”

  “Well, no programmer could direct Karpov’s initiative as a whole. The best ones are like idiot savants: they know their stuff backward and forward, but that’s all they’re good for. They couldn’t direct themselves out of a paper bag.” She pursed her lips. “So again, I have to ask, who is running the operation now?”

  MacQuerrie did not answer right away. It seemed to Morgana that now they had come to the nub of the matter, his face had gone even grayer. Perhaps it was the lighting in his office, but she doubted that. His right eyebrow twitched, which meant he was under extreme stress. What could cause such a thing? she asked herself.

  “One thing before we go any further, Morgana.”

  She said nothing. Even for her, who was more or less inured to such things, waiting for the second shoe to drop was a mighty unpleasant experience. This was General Arthur MacQuerrie, not some fatuous NSA type who didn’t know his ass from his elbow.

  “I have no doubt that Karpov’s operation is aimed squarely at the United States.” He paused to wipe at a growing film of sweat on his upper lip. “It could be the national electrical grid or even, God forbid, the president’s bank of nuclear missile codes.”

  “What? But that’s impossible. The code data is buried so deeply behind a phalanx of firewalls…and then the codes are changed hourly.”

  “All true. But Karpov’s operational language is so obscure, so utterly unknown, I and my people believe the nuclear codes are its target.”

  “If the Russians access our nuclear codes…”

  “You see the nature of the extreme danger we’re in.”

  Morgana stared at the lines of code, cascading down her screen. Good God, she thought. What we have here is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

  Black Star. No wonder.

  “This is a superworm,” she said. “A form of malware no one’s ever encountered before.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know. This is catastrophic. You had better come up with the answer, stat.”

  Morgana didn’t like the tone that had set into his voice. This had happened more than once before, when Mac started treating her like a low-level gopher, his voice hard and threatening. She bit her lip, but bile built up in her stomach, churning, as if a whirlpool had opened up inside her.

  “Horrifyingly, there’s more,” Mac was saying.

  She tensed even more as the code vanished, to be replaced by a grainy black-and-white photo, obviously taken with a telephoto lens. A surveillance shot, then. Men in tuxedos, women in fancy floor-length gowns, jewels and beading glittering. Over their heads an ornate crystal chandelier, spilling light down on them.

  “Moscow.” MacQuerrie gave her a date from last year. “On the occasion of Boris Karpov’s wedding.”

  “I see Karpov,” Morgana said. “In the center.”

  “D’you recognize anyone else? He has his arm across the shoulders of the man to his immediate right.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you recognize that man?”

  She leaned closer, zoomed in a bit, but not too much; the images would become too vague to accurately glean features and expressions. “I’m afraid I don’t, Mac.”

  The general sighed. “Well, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  She felt the whirlpool congeal into an icy ball. She wanted to vomit it up and throw it at Mac. Instead, fighting to keep her cool, she said: “Karpov looks genuinely pleased to be with him. But, as you’ve told me, he didn’t have any close friends in the Russian hierarchy.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Now she was sure that MacQuerrie was in serious distress; his eyebrows were knit together in a dreadful expression of anxiety.

  “That man isn’t a Russian, Morgana. He’s one of ours—or at least he was. You’re looking at Boris Karpov’s best friend, the only one he would trust to continue his operation in the event of his demise.

  “The man Karpov is embracing is Jason Bourne.”

  2

  The Aegean Sea was a pure cobalt blue in the late afternoon sunlight. The boat plowed through the waves, on its way west. Nym, Boris Karpov’s hundred-foot motorboat,

whose captain and crew were Greeks and Cypriots, was the only asset of the late FSB general that hadn’t been confiscated by the Russian government following his murder and the death of his new bride. The only reason it hadn’t been confiscated was that Boris had wisely kept the boat in international waters, out of reach of even the Sovereign’s avaricious clutches.

  These thoughts were uppermost in Jason Bourne’s mind as he stood amidships, leaning on the polished port railing, staring at the smudge on the horizon that even at this distance he recognized as the island of Skyros. To the northeast and days behind them was the Sea of Marmara and, beyond, Istanbul, where they had briefly anchored to take on supplies, fuel, fresh food, and water. Istanbul was no longer a safe haven for Westerners. And yet he knew so many people in and around the city that he, rather than the captain, did all the bartering.

  From Skyros, he had no idea where he would go. At the moment, he was content to be at sea, to feel the salt wind in his hair, to have it cleanse him of Boris’s horrific murder and its exhausting and perilous aftermath. Boris had been involved in a myriad of strategies, initiatives of which neither the Sovereign nor his comrades in the FSB were aware. Perhaps they would all unravel now, or even had already died along with the spymaster who had conceived them. It was a relief not to have to think of tomorrow, of ticking clocks, of countdowns toward one catastrophe or another, of outrunning life or deadly deadlines.

  His best friend was gone, had left him the boat as a remembrance. In truth, he had no use for this huge boat. Nevertheless, here he was. It was a matter of honoring both his friendship and Boris’s memory to accept the gift, to use it as he saw fit. Boris trusted him to do that; he had every intention of respecting that trust.

  Behind him, too, was the Russian Federation. Last year, he had fallen so deeply into a nest of vipers he’d be quite happy never to set foot in Russia again. All this brooding about the past—the part of it he could remember—was making him melancholy. But what else should he feel? Every time he thought he’d had enough, that he should return to the professorial life of David Webb, the person he had been before the Bourne identity had been imprinted on him by the people running Treadstone, he knew it was useless. He’d tried that—twice, in fact—only to become bored within weeks. He was who he was now. He couldn’t outrun it; senseless to try.

  The Nym slowed to quarter speed. Captain Stavros appeared out of the wheelhouse, descended an outside ladder, and approached Bourne. He carried a bottle of chilled vodka, two glasses, and a pepper shaker.

  “Berth or anchorage?” he asked in his typical shorthand.

  In the days since Bourne had come aboard Nym, the two men had come to know each other, as much as two strangers in close quarters can know each other. They ate their meals together, drank together, afterward exchanged stories about the boat’s former master, for whom Stavros had a deep and abiding affection. Despite his formidable personality, his studied cruelty, Boris had often been astonishingly genial. Despite his dark and brooding Russian soul—or perhaps because of it—he had loved good food, fine drink, and laughter. Lots of laughter, the perfect anodyne for the bleak profession he had carved out for himself.

  Boris had felt things deeply, made friends for life, would do anything for those friends. These qualities, mirrored in Bourne, had formed the basis of their abiding friendship. Even though they often found themselves on opposite sides, many were the times they helped each other out, finding common enemies to defeat. Bourne would miss their camaraderie, but he missed the heightened experience of shared danger most of all.

  “Anchorage.” Bourne gave him coordinates, and Stavros nodded. He was used to being told the minimum about where his master was headed and why.

  Handing Bourne one of the glasses, he gave them both generous pours of the vodka—a very fine Russian brand, Bourne noted. Before they drank, Stavros dotted the surface of the liquor in each glass with pepper. He grinned at Bourne, who returned the expression. This was a silent tribute to Boris, an old-school Russian, if ever there was one. Back in the day you always used pepper before you drank your vodka. Often, the liquor would contain fusel oil, a product of poor distillation; the pepper would bind with the oil, sink it to the bottom of the glass. The word fusel, Bourne knew, was German for “bad liquor.”

  “To our great general!” Stavros cried, holding his glass high. His voice was a deep basso, clotted by years of too much drink and cigarette tar.

  “To Boris Illyich.” Long may his memory live on, Bourne thought.

  “We will never forget him!”

  They clinked glasses, downed the vodka in one.

  Above them, the sky was an inverted porcelain bowl, light-blue and white, the colors of the boat’s master stateroom. Gulls wheeled and called plaintively, having flown out from the island’s rocky cliffs on the eastern shore to beg for food.

  “Will we be staying in Skyros long?”

  “Several days,” Bourne said evasively, and the captain nodded, understanding: it was none of his business.

  He refilled Bourne’s glass, then took his leave, heading back up into the wheelhouse to guide Nym the last half mile to the anchorage two hundred yards offshore. The water was quite deep on this side of the island.

  Bourne moved toward the bow, the better to watch the craggy cliffs and the curved shingle coming into focus. Details, he thought. Everything was in the details. So many of his foes had forgotten to take care of the details; so many had lost their lives because of that lapse.

  Bourne called for the speedy runabout with its overclocked dual diesels. As he descended the accommodation ladder, he saw the captain staring down at him.

  “Sure you don’t want one of the crew with you, sir?”

  “Positive.”

  Stavros held up a Steyr M automatic pistol in a sign of query.

  “Thanks, but there’s no need.”

  “You never know.” Stavros grinned. “The general used to say that.”

  True enough. Bourne raised a hand, caught the Steyr, then made his way down to the waiting runabout. The captain had dropped anchor at the precise coordinates Bourne had given him. Bourne had been to Skyros only once, and that under extreme conditions. But in light of what was about to take place he supposed his return could be considered a homecoming of sorts.

  The crewman who had been preparing the runabout for him leapt up onto the accommodation ladder and cast off. Bourne fired up the outboard engine and headed to a spot just left of the headland that jutted out into the Aegean like a questing nose. Gulls peeled away from the boat, circled him for a while, then wheeled away, calling their disappointment.

  When he was close enough for the runabout to enter the shadow of the looming promontory, he steered it farther left. By this point, the headland was between him and the Nym. No one on board could see what he was doing or who was waiting for him.

  She was sitting on a rise on the shingle, smoking a cigarette, watching him beneath half-lowered lids as he cut the engines, dropped anchor, and leapt into the shallows.

  She made no move to help him, stayed where she was, giving him that peculiar sideways glance of hers as he picked his way up the shingle to her. She wore a revealing swimsuit of a metallic plum-colored fabric. She was turned so that he could see the ugly scar that ran along the outside of her right calf all the way up to her hipbone. It was clear the wound had been inflicted in many stages, a form of torture. He knew what had been carved into her beautiful back.

  Her magnificent legs were very long, her waist thin. A scattering of freckles dusted the bridge of her nose. Her eyes changed color with the light—either midnight-blue or black. In all, she was staggeringly beautiful.

  “Do you think what I’m wearing is appropriate?”

  “For the beach, you mean.”

  She smiled a thousand-watt smile. They were more or less repeating their lines from last year, when they had met in Nicosia. Before that, Bourne hadn’t seen her since he had spirited her away from Keyre’s camp in Somalia. She had bee

n younger then, no more than a girl, but Keyre had spent months torturing her, indoctrinating her as dictated by his Yibir traditions. What he had meant to do with her, Bourne had no idea, and if she knew she had never told him.

  Her name was Mala Ilves, an Estonian by birth. No one but Bourne called her Mala now; few even knew the name. These days she was known only as the Angelmaker.

  “For what we are here to do,” she said.

  “How can I answer? I don’t know why you asked me to come here, to such an out-of-the-way place.”

  She turned her face up to the lowering sun. “It’s peaceful here, isn’t it?” That sideways glance again. “But it’s also bloody.”

  “That was a long time ago, Mala.”

  “Not for me, it isn’t.” She ran her fingertips down the length of the scar. “It’s only yesterday.”

  Bourne came and sat down beside her. “I don’t believe that.” She smelled of licorice and the sea and clean sweat. A far cry from the stench of blood and rotting flesh that rose off her when he had brought her here from Somalia.

  She ran her hands through her thick hair. “I’ve never lied to you, Jason.”

  “How many times have you wanted to?”

  She wet her lips with the tip of a pink tongue and laughed softly. “I cannot count the times.”

  He waited a moment before he spoke again. Sunlight glanced off the waves, spreading the last of its warmth toward them. A cormorant vanished from sight, returned to the surface a good three yards away with a silvery fish in its beak. Lifting its head to the sun, as Mala had, it swallowed the fish whole.

  “So tell me, why have you brought me here?”

  “Are you in such a rush? Do you have somewhere to go? Or someone to see.”

  The last was not a question, and a tiny curl of warning reared its head in the pit of his stomach. How much did she know about his recent life? Perhaps everything. He knew he would have to begin with that assumption and work his way back to the truth. One thing he would never do is underestimate her; everyone who had made that mistake was dead.