Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)
Eric van Lustbader
For Victoria, my one and only,
my everything.
Prologue
Somalia Coast—Horn of Africa
There is something about a man on his knees, Keyre thought, that stirs my very heart. Keyre, the Somali magus, a Yibir whose lineage stretched back through time to the days of the Ajuran Empire, predating all the subsequent failed sultanates, stood on the hard shingle twelve feet from the soft rumble of the Indian Ocean. He breathed in the salt air, the familiar scents of the sere desert behind him, the sunbaked brick of houses destroyed by bazooka blasts and rocket fire. But all these clean scents were at the moment overwhelmed by the stink of human sweat, excrement, and terror.
Ah, but terror is what Keyre fed upon, lapped up like mother’s milk since he was a child of eight, in the aftermath of his first kill. The first taste of blood was always the sharpest, but, for him, the blood didn’t matter as much as it did to his compatriots. But then they weren’t Yibir, weren’t steeped in the Stygian darkness of his family’s ancient sorcery. Their nostrils dilated as the fresh blood flowed from the newly dead. But for Keyre, the blood was an adjunct, as necessary as shooting dead the man who, on his knees, waves the white flag.
It’s the white flag, you see, he told himself. The white flag stinks of fear. I want to inhale its scent, savor its taste before I put a match to it and set it afire. Where he stood now, on the shore of Somalia, between the desert of destruction and the Indian Ocean on which he often enough plied his particular brand of terror, he was immersed in the stench of death.
Before him thirteen men knelt, backs bowed, heads bowed further. Some stared in stony silence at the shingle on which they knelt, its shifting layers slicing like razor blades into their knees. Others wailed their fear in pitiful ululations. One or two had tear streaks along their dust-caked cheeks. None of them murmured a prayer—further confirmation, if any was needed, of what Keyre already knew.
He was a tall man, cadaverously thin, all muscle and bone, with a long, triangular face and a saturnine countenance. He was both as athletic as a swimmer and as graceful as a dancer—not only strikingly handsome but possessed of a charisma gifted to very few. He had dedicated himself to many things, not the least of which was creating a dazzling smile that fooled everyone.
Thirteen men, on their knees, bowed down, wrists tied behind their backs. In Keyre’s left hand a large German Mauser restored to all its World War II glory. Who was its original owner? A member of the Gestapo, or the Abwehr, maybe, their mortal enemy. What did it matter anyway? Keyre asked himself; it was his now, unlocked and loaded.
Stepping up, he placed the muzzle of the Mauser against the back of the first prisoner’s head and pulled the trigger. The sound of the hammer falling was as loud as a thunderclap. As one, the line of men flinched. But there was no detonation, no bullet. Stepping to his right, Keyre placed the muzzle against the back of the second man’s head. When he pulled the trigger, the man’s head exploded, and what was left of him pitched forward, sprawled awkwardly onto the shingle.
Blood, the stench of it rising up to mingle with a terror that, to Keyre’s heightened senses, was palpable. Above, black birds wheeled, calling to each other, dinner bells announcing another feast. High above them, the vast sky rippled with clouds, like a weight lifter flexing his muscles.
Another step to the right brought him to a spot directly behind the third man in line. Keyre shot him, with more or less the identical result. In all, there were twelve corpses lying facedown on the bloody shingle when he reached the end of the line. That left the first man. Keyre had reloaded two-thirds of the way down the line; his Mauser was still itching to inflict more death. He could feel the sensation run up the nerves of his left arm, like the output of a live wire. His hand twitched briefly in just the way a female lion’s paw twitched when she was dreaming of running down an okapi or a gazelle. Jaws at the throat, clamping down, blood and viscera overrunning her teeth as the males loped up to feed.
Keyre took his time returning to the one remaining kneeling man. He stood in front of him, staring down.
“Look at me,” he said. He could see the man shaking. “Look at me!” he said more sharply.
The man’s head came up. Keyre locked his eyes onto the prisoner’s. “I know who you are,” he said, his tone conversational now. “I know what you and your kind have been up to. Their death sentence has been carried out, as you can see.” He crouched down so suddenly the prisoner flinched. He was a thin man, short in stature, but with plenty of upper body strength. He was dark of skin, his nose long and sharp. His brown eyes were set close together. His lips were chapped, the skin flaking off as if he’d been out in the sun too long.
He’s been here with me too long, Keyre thought. That’s for certain.
He stared hard into the other’s face as he said, “Here, your death sentence will be carried out in the blink of an eye.” There were smears of dried blood on the prisoner’s cheek; he stank of sweat and terror, and there was about him a certain fecal stench. “But for you, my friend, that death sentence can be commuted. Your life can continue.” Keyre left it there; it was time to keep silent.
The prisoner’s jaw muscles worked spasmodically. His tongue, gray as ash, appeared, then slipped back between his teeth. “H…how?” he asked in a thin, reedy voice, and Keyre knew the man would tell him what he wanted to know.