The Bourne Initiative Read online

  What MacQuerrie wanted to do with it was not quite clear—sell it, use it as ransom to scramble to the top of the federal heap, what? One thing Fulmer did know was that Meme LLC was Morgana Roy. It was her mind that ran the cadre; without her, Meme LLC was useless. In fact, as of last night, Meme LLC was finished. Its members had been let go, but not before signing a second document of nondisclosure on pain of being charged with treason and, without access to counsel, tried and incarcerated for the rest of their lives. They were little people; they didn’t matter. Only Morgana Roy with her brilliant mind and knack for parsing the most mind-bending algorithms mattered. And now she was where she needed to be, with Françoise. Françoise had her orders. She’d soon put Morgana to work.

  In the meantime, it behooved Fulmer to bask in the glow of his newfound notoriety. He had attained hero status. In the best vampiric Beltway tradition everyone wanted to include themselves in the halo effect. But he had been around politics too long to believe it would last. As Napoleon famously wrote, “Fame is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.” Soon enough, another hero would come to the fore and be anointed by the press, and he would be forgotten, put on the shelf along with all the other sclerotic pols. Not so when he became president. Every day would be like this one, filled with spotlights and sound bites. He’d make damn sure of it.

  One of Fulmer’s beautifully self-serving traits was his ability to change course as the situation before him demanded. Difficult enough to do in the slippery business world, almost impossible in the sclerotic political arena, where you were eternally enmeshed in a web of backroom deals, bill riders placating insistent interest groups in your states, flexing moral muscles in the service of amassing a nest egg of favors from your enemies across the Congressional aisle. At this point in time, Fulmer had a larger nest egg than even Lyndon Johnson had had in his heyday.

  As a result of this ecstatic flurry of activity, Fulmer found himself at the end of each long day both exhausted and exhilarated. And it was at this time, doubtless because of their ability, akin to the Nazi Gestapo’s, to strike their target at the precise moment of maximum vulnerability, that the lampreys swam closest to him, looking to attach their suckers to his flesh without being immediately brushed aside.

  Such a person was Harry Hornden, a freelance journo of no small note. He was peculiar inasmuch as he had no trouble straddling both the old and the new worlds of journalism. He wrote award-winning think pieces for prestigious monthlies, while also maintaining a snarky and, in Fulmer’s opinion, somewhat subversive blog, read by more than a hundred thousand people, which meant, of course, an alarming number of crazies, idiots, cranks, and professional Internet trolls. That the blog appealed to both far-left anarchists and far-right white supremacists was, Fulmer supposed, some sort of victory, though over what he wasn’t at all sure, and possibly didn’t want to know. Except that Fulmer wanted in on everything, because if you weren’t constantly vigilant, you never knew what might pop up and bite you on the ass.

  And so it was that on the fifth day after the MacQuerrie shitstorm clogged cyberspace and even, for a time, overloaded the current LeakAGE site, which, for security’s sake, changed ISP daily, Fulmer accepted the invitation to have dinner with Harry Hornden. Hornden himself called Fulmer instead of having one of his flunkies do it, which, to Fulmer’s way of thinking, showed at least a working knowledge of political protocol.

  And yet he wasn’t above tweaking the journo’s nose when he arrived at the corner table Hornden had booked at The Riggsby, a newish restaurant that had the feel of old Hollywood.

  “Harry, how many times did you get called whore’s son in college?” he said, sliding into his chair opposite the journo.

  If Hornden was offended, he gave so sign of it. “That started in high school, actually.” He grinned as the drinks arrived. “I took the liberty of ordering us a brace of Sazeracs. Good for you?”

  “Always,” Fulmer said, clinking the rim of his glass with Hornden’s. He was intrigued; the journo hadn’t picked one of the top ten power restaurants in D.C., so he must have something unusual on his mind; he didn’t seem to care whether he was seen with the new hero or not.

  Hornden was a largish, square-shaped individual, long hair still sandy, eyes still bright blue, but turned down at the outer corners, as if he were eternally mournful. He looked like a college athlete gone slightly to seed. He was on the wrong side of forty and as yet unmarried, Fulmer knew, having leafed through the jacket on Hornden his staff had assembled. There wasn’t much to it, really, beyond schools attended. The text would have you believe that he was a genuine boy scout. No arrests, no girlfriends, or boyfriends, though he networked like a fiend. But his contacts were just that: contacts and nothing more. In fact, when you came right down to it, there was startlingly little background on him. This, also, Fulmer found intriguing.

  “What shall I call you?” the journo said, ignoring the menus the waiter had left on the table.

  “Just think of me as the pope,” Fulmer replied.

  “I hope you’re not expecting me to kiss your ring.”

  “I’ll let that pass.” Fulmer held up both hands, free of rings of any sort. “Divorced. Twice.”

  “Condolences.”

  “My exes would lap that sentiment up with a spoon. As for me…” He shrugged.

  The prelims over, they took up their menus as if in response to a call to arms. “I eat here all the time,” Hornden said. “Michael Schlow’s my favorite chef.”

  They ordered Caesar salads and the côte de boeuf for two, along with a fine bottle of Faust cabernet, an ironic choice if ever there was one, Fulmer thought with a wry smile. Small talk followed, continuing through the meal. Not one word of business, not a single probing question from Hornden. The conversation most closely followed the lines of two old colleagues at a reunion meal.

  “I’d prefer to leave the desserts to the pigs and the kids,” Hornden said when the main course plates and platters were cleared. “But I’m not averse to an espresso and an after-dinner drink. Averna, perhaps?”

  The usual wolf pack of reporters was milling around the restaurant’s exterior. A minor frenzy ensued as the two men exited, but Fulmer’s driver, with his lineman’s body and sharp senses, was expert at keeping the flies away from the meat. Not a word was uttered by either of the principals as they climbed into Fulmer’s black SUV, which drove off down New Hampshire Ave, NW, as soon as Max swung into the front passenger seat.

  “So,” Fulmer said, shooting his cuffs, “what’s on your little mind?”

  The journo indicated with his chin. “What about the driver and the bodyguard?”

  Fulmer pressed a button and sheet of bulletproof glass rose up to seal them off.

  “Happy now?”

  “Hardly.” Hornden seemed to have grown a haunted look. “But then was I ever?”

  Fulmer shot him a sideways glance, then looked away out the window. The last thing he was interested in debating was the existence of happiness—a state of mind so ephemeral it did not exist in the physical world. In his opinion, it was something concocted by the wolves of Madison Avenue in order to sell great quantities of useless and expensive crap to people who thought they needed it. Fulmer fervently wished he had come up with that scam. Well, there were always others; that particular magician’s hat was bottomless.

  “I want in,” Hornden said without even a pretense of a preamble. It was go time.

  Fulmer was still staring out the window, looking at nothing. His inner gaze was concentrated fully on what was happening as each moment ticked by. “In on what?”

  “Whatever it is you have up your sleeve.”

  Fulmer evinced zero interest. “This is why you asked me to dinner?”

  It wasn’t a question; no reply was forthcoming.

  “I’ll say one thing, Hornden. The dinner was excellent. Thank you for that.” He waited a beat. “Otherwise, you’ve wasted my time.”

  “If you let me in,” Hornden said slowly and
distinctly, “you get everything.”

  “I already have everything I want or need.”

  The journo’s tone changed abruptly. “Listen, Mr. Fulmer, I know your fingerprints are all over that last LeakAGE release.”

  Fulmer grunted. “I don’t even know Farreng. Never had any communication with him whatsoever.”

  “So you used a cutout. Come on, I know you’re the origin of the leak that buried MacQuerrie and his team.”

  Despite his innate caution, Fulmer’s head swung around. He tried to stare Hornden down, but the man wasn’t giving an inch. “How could you possibly know such a thing?”

  “The only way for you to find out is to let me in.” Hornden’s eyes glinted in the semi-darkness. “Then you get access to every one of my contacts—including the one who knows what you did last week.”

  The journo’s trap had been laid out, baited, and sprung. Oh, what a lovely night this turned out to be, Fulmer thought. He took his time running through possible courses of action in his mind. First off, was Hornden bluffing? Had he triggered a lucky shot in the dark? What if it wasn’t luck at all? What if he really did have an informant who knew that he was responsible for the leak? Fulmer had been dead careful, which is why he had set up the meet with Françoise in that little city in Sweden he’d already forgotten the name of. But he also knew that no matter how careful you were in this cyber day and electronic age, there was no such thing as airtight security.

  He could dismiss Hornden’s claims, kick him to the curb, go on about his business, and forget this meeting ever took place. It was certainly a tempting choice. But if Hornden’s contact was real, if he, in fact, knew what was transferred at Fulmer’s meeting with Françoise, then there was danger lurking in the long grass Fulmer could not afford to ignore. His new status and what it meant for him going forward would be put in jeopardy. The theft of government files was an act of treason, even if it uncovered wrongdoing. And then there was the NSA—those people would crucify him. He closed his eyes, counted to a hundred while watching the pulse of his heart on the inside of his eyelids.

  When he opened his eyes, he had made up his mind. All possible decisions had fallen into line, leaving one at the head.

  “I want the name of that one contact.”

  The journo had the grace not to smirk. “Naturally.”

  “Immediately.”

  “Just say the word, Mr. Fulmer, and I’ll do better than that. I myself will take you to the source.”

  “Deal,” he said, as much to himself as to Harry Hornden.

  —

  Flames leapt like a living thing from the cheap carpet, up Keyre’s arm, turning his clothes to smoke and ash. He appeared oblivious. In fury, he hurled Mala to the floor, stamped hard on her forearm. Bourne heard the crack of a bone and saw the girl’s face distort in pain.

  Keyre or Mala: the choice was not a difficult one. Reaching down, he grabbed Mala off the burning carpet, slapping out the flames snapping at her bare flesh. His momentary focus on the girl gave Keyre all the opening he needed. Leaping at Bourne, he slammed his whitened knuckles into Bourne’s right cheek, over and over. Something gave way an instant before the flames reached Keyre’s face, climbing his left cheek. He gave them no mind until their tips cindered his eyelashes. Then he withdrew behind what was now a wall of flames.

  Bourne, his face a bloody mess, dragged Mala to her feet. Whirling her around, he picked up the other lantern, threw it at where Keyre had been standing. Then he shoved her out into the night, where her sister was waiting, quaking in terror. The chaos gripping the camp was if anything more intense. The rain still pelted down, thunder rumbling down from the hills that had served as his observation garret. Gathering up both girls, he hurtled through the silvery downpour toward the south end of the camp, back the way he had come.

  With a scream, Mala tried to break away, to turn around, return to her tormentor. She was so violent that Bourne was obliged to lift her off her feet, carry her beneath one arm like a sack of squirming snakes while he held Liis with his other hand. Blood sluiced off Bourne’s cheek. Beneath the ripped skin, the bone was fractured. As for Mala, she was bleeding in too many places to count. She was holding her broken forearm in her cupped palm.

  “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” she chanted over and over again, her eyes rolling wildly.

  17

  Keyre did not want to look at Bourne; it was the Angelmaker who looked in on him to make certain the doctor was performing his duties to the utmost of his abilities. Not that he had a choice; not that he would jeopardize his life by missing a trick in bringing Bourne back from the dead—or as near to it as you could get without passing over to the other side. The Angelmaker supposed that was why the doctor, whose name was Mure, hyperventilated every time he came near his patient. If she were of another nature, she would have murmured a word or two to calm the physician down. But she would no more think of doing that than she would inhale water in an attempt to breathe.

  Keyre was not, however, above asking her, “How is the patient?” every time she emerged from the camp’s surgery, no matter how many times a day that happened.

  “The same,” was her standard reply.

  “Still unconscious?”

  She nodded. He seemed anxious, and with good reason. He had tasked her with bringing Bourne to him, only not half dead.

  “It’s been five days.” He roamed the sparsely furnished room like a caged tiger. He was naked to the waist; something he only was when they were alone. The same whorls and glyphs that he had incised into her back were weals, raised and hardened, on his own. He had filled out since his first encounter with Bourne. He had the shoulders and upper arms of an American linebacker. His left arm and the side of his face bore the terrible scars, white-blue, twisted like serpents as if with the imprint of each flame separately, of the kerosene fire. His eyelids had no lashes—once burned off, they had never grown back—and the lower lid of one was permanently withered, making that red eye water constantly. The fire, or perhaps the inhalation of smoke, had altered his voice. It was deeper in tone, darker, but at the same time paper thin, like the eerie, wavering notes of a bassoon.

  “There should have been some improvement by now.”

  “There is,” she pointed out. “He’s no longer at the point of death.”

  Keyre spun on his heel; the six-sided scar on his chest, the glyph of a Yibir master, seemed to stare at her. “What use if I can’t talk to him, tell him…” He broke off, wiped a dark hand across his forehead, his eyes, his mouth. The gestures were ritualistic, a Yibir prayer, or invocation, possibly even a spell, the Angelmaker wasn’t sure.

  “Time is running out,” he said, and for the first time she understood fully how isolated he was, how utterly alone, even among his own cadre, even at the heart of this village of gold and diamonds and international legal tender he had built fostering a larger and larger percentage of the illegal arms and human trafficking trade.

  He has no one, she thought now. He’s never had anyone. For the longest time, she had assumed that was what he wanted, what he needed. But she had mistaken him, just as everyone who came in contact with him had mistaken him. And now, for the first time, with the advent of his extreme anxiety, she glimpsed the reason for the violations he perpetrated on the girls, including her. They were the same violations that had been performed on him as a child. He was searching for someone to douse his loneliness, his apartness. Someone like him.

  To date, she was the only one who had ever fit the bill, even if it was imperfectly. This was the reason she was so precious to him, why he had fought tooth and nail to bring her back to him, why he always would. Before her he had always put himself first. With her, that had changed.

  And yet, what was he to her? Warden, torturer, artist, collaborator in Yibir with her skin and the flesh just below. A totem, in other words. Something of this world and yet not of it. Something Other, for which she had no words, which, apart from the Yibir, did not exist in any vocab
ulary.

  She took a step toward him, felt the heat from his glyphs, as if they were living things. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want him awake.”

  “Then use your magic.” There was a mocking tone to her voice she knew was dangerous, and yet she would not shy away from it. It hit her, all of a moment, that being near Jason emboldened her, just as it had when he’d first invaded the camp.

  “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” Her own words reverberated in her mind. But what had she really meant?

  “He responds to you.” Keyre seemed to have ignored her comment. “You’re the one to push the process.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. You were the one who got him here; no one else could.”

  He stared her down, and like always, she acquiesced. “As you wish.”

  “As we wish,”—his eyes grew dark—“isn’t it?”

  She laughed, because she had to laugh—it was the only way forward now. She had taken only one step on Jason’s path, and Keyre’s uncanny Yibir antennae were already vibrating. She couldn’t afford to make that same mistake again.

  “Go,” he commanded. “Do what has to be done.”

  “Whatever it takes?”

  “Whatever it takes out of you, Angelmaker.”

  —

  What do you do when you’ve a brother both older and smarter than you? More clever, too. A chess master who delights in outmaneuvering you?

  These were the questions that had plagued Timur Ludmirovich Savasin virtually all his adolescent and adult days. How simple life had been, how happy, before Konstantin revealed his true nature. Like a strange vampire, drunk on fucked-up nourishment, Savasin thought, Konstantin has drained all the enjoyment out of my life.

  From the backseat of his armor-plated Zil, Savasin stared morosely out the tinted window at the garbage-strewn streets, at the pedestrians, backs hunched against the cutting spring wind, shoulders up around their ears, hands jammed deep in the pockets of their flannel overcoats. Except the kids. They smoked, stood splayed on building stoops, hair stiff and glossy, arms tattooed like the evil-looking drawings in Japanese manga, and stared sloe-eyed at Savasin’s long, sleek Zil, as if assessing its worth on the black market. Were they armed? Savasin wondered. Did the future belong to them? Not if the Sovereign had anything to say about it. In this, above all, there was no difference between the White Russian czars, the Red Russian Communists, and now the current regime. All used what was to hand, the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD, the MGB, the KGB, the FSB. Only the names changed; the orders from the state ministers remained the same.