Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(11)

The diver was done. Bourne turned him, grabbed him around the neck, dragging him back toward where Mala was standing watch on the runabout. He surfaced farther away than he had calculated, then saw that Mala had wisely backed the runabout into the debris field to keep herself hidden. A few more powerful strokes brought him to the side of the runabout. He spat out the mouthpiece, drew in the rich night air.

Mala ran to the nearside gunwale. Setting the Steyr down, she knelt to help keep the diver against the runabout while Bourne unhooked the diver’s oxygen tanks and other scuba gear, which he hoisted into the runabout.

Mala heaved the diver aboard, and Bourne followed, launching himself out of the water and over the gunwale. She saw his chest wound first, but he waved her away toward their prisoner.

“Just a scratch.” He put one hand over the diver’s mouth, then wrenched the gaff out of his arm. The man’s shout was muffled to a deep grunt.

Meanwhile, Mala was examining his wet suit and equipment. “American government issue,” she said. “Part of a CIA hit team, I would imagine.”

“Not necessarily.” Bourne pulled off the diver’s neoprene cap, stared down at his unfamiliar face. The man seemed to be going in and out of consciousness. Bourne slapped him hard across the face, then again when the diver gave no sign of coming around.

His eyes opened; he stared up at Bourne, and said, “Where the hell did you come from?” In the same instant, he drew a thin-bladed knife from inside the cuff of his neoprene sleeve and jabbed it upward toward Bourne’s throat.

There was no time to pull away, but Mala interjected her forearm, her scars so hard and tough the knife point, driven fast but, owing to the diver’s position, without much energy behind it, glanced off them. Bourne drove his fist into the diver’s face, fracturing his nose. Blood fountained. Bourne snatched the knife away, threw it across the width of the runabout.

He glanced up for a moment, caught Mala looking at him. He took her arm, checked. Not even a scratch to her scars. He nodded and she smiled. Then she jammed the same forearm against the diver’s throat. He looked up at her and laughed, spitting out blood pouring from his ruined nose.

Mala didn’t like that. Scrambling over the deck, she retrieved his knife, brought it back to where he lay, Bourne pinning him in place.

“Time you told us who you work for,” Bourne said.

“Some nerve.” The diver’s voice was thick and half-strangled by blood. He had a Tennessee mountain accent.

“Reconsider.”

“Fuck you and the bitch you rode in on.”

Mala liked that even less. With one swift, practiced motion, she slit the diver’s neoprene suit lengthwise. Reaching down, she plucked at delicate things like a fisherman about to gut her catch.

The diver’s eyes flickered. His face had gone unnaturally pale in the smoke-hazed moonlight. “What’s happening?”

“You killed my captain,” Bourne said. “You killed my crew.”

The diver spat pink. “It should have been you.”

“But it wasn’t.” Bourne leaned closer. “I’m still here, and you…well, you know where you are.” Closer still. “But not what’s going to happen to you.”

“What is—?”

His voice was cut off by a scream. Mala had made an economical but very deep horizontal cut. She held her prize up for the diver to see. “I don’t like being called a bitch,” she said with remarkably little malice in her voice. “This is how much I don’t like it.” She threw the bloody sac overboard.

The diver shuddered and shook. Soon enough, Bourne knew, he would go into shock, and then he’d lose the opportunity that had been afforded him. Mala should never have cut off his balls. He suspected that making a preliminary incision would have been enough. But this was the Angelmaker, not Mala. He had to keep that firmly in mind going forward. Whatever she had been, the person he had saved, tended to, had been warped beyond all recognition by Keyre and his Yibir rituals.

The diver was starting to convulse. Bourne had only a matter of minutes before he passed into unconsciousness and, unless they could stop the bleeding in his nose, arm, and between his legs, which he thought unlikely, he’d bleed out in a matter of fifteen or twenty minutes at the most.

Pressing down hard on the diver’s shoulders, he said, “You know my name. What’s yours?”

“Smith…” He tried to laugh, blew blood bubbles. “Or Wesson.”

Using his name would help focus him, keep him in the here and now. Who knew, maybe delirious as he was becoming he’d think he was among compatriots.

“Who do you work for?”

His eyes, red-rimmed and dull with pain, peered up at Bourne, as if through a hailstorm; it was impossible to tell who or what he was seeing. “Go fuck yourself.” His voice was a reedy whisper.

“Who sent you after me? Who gave the termination order?”

The diver arched up. His eyes were going in and out of focus. He produced a macabre grin; his gums were bloody.

“Tell me. Who’s your boss?”

“Right, yeah.” Smith’s eyelids began to flicker. His eyeballs were rolling up.

“Smith. Smith!” Bourne slapped him hard across the cheek. “Stay with me.”

“Right.”

“Can’t do that until you give me the name of your—”