Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(120)

“Good God,” Morgana said. “How can we possibly know what to input? There are no numbers, no letters, nothing but a blank screen.”

“Quiet,” Bourne said. “I’m thinking,”

“Well, think quickly,” she said. “We’re at seven minutes and counting.”

The trick was to put himself in Keyre’s mind. A horrible thing to have to attempt, but it had to be done. He turned back to look at his corpse. What would the Yibir have used to gain entrance, something no one else could possibly know? How could he know? How could anyone know? His gaze drifted inevitably to Mala. So many names, so many identities.

Without warning, he was thrown back to their night on Skyros, the blackness, the turbulence of the storm, how he had traced the runes on her back, committing them to memory, even as she turned away, as if she were ashamed of them. He froze.

The runes.

Tentatively, he touched the screen again, and then ever more authoritatively began to trace out the shape of the scars on Mala’s back.

“What the hell are you doing?” Morgana said, but it was clear that she was fascinated.

“Keyre was a Yibir magus.” Bourne was halfway through now. “He scarred Mala—the Angelmaker—with these runes.” He was done. He held his breath.

The door clicked open, and they rushed through. They found themselves in a dimly lit room, windowless and claustrophobic. Apparently it had its own generator, because all the electronics were working. On a semicircular table was a powerful desktop surrounded by two laptops. Four screens showed different areas of the citadel and the port. It was clear from them that the explosions had morphed into fires that had spread to the neighboring buildings. As they watched, transfixed, a warehouse of war matériel went up in a ball of fire and black smoke. Keyre’s men were swarming all over that section of the compound in a frantic effort to keep the rest of the stored weapons and ammo from going up and destroying the entire village.

The laptops were open but their screens were dark. Perhaps they were waiting patiently for the auction that would now never come. The desktop screen was on and active.

“It’s the Initiative!” Morgana cried. “I recognize the bits of it I’ve tried and failed to decipher.”

“But you discovered the zero-day trigger,” Bourne said.

Setting her backpack down, she perched on the mesh task chair. “Yes. That much I was able to decode.” She turned to him. “D’you really think there is a fail-safe?”

“Knowing Boris, I do. He was meticulous about such things. He made sure he accounted for every contingency.” He stared at the screen, his mind racing. “It would be logical if the fail-safe was in the same bit as the zero-day trigger, wouldn’t it?”

Morgana’s fingers were racing across the keyboard. “It would. But then why didn’t I see it before this?”

Bourne glanced at his watch. “Three minutes left.”

Morgana, half bent over the keyboard, her fingers a blur, kept combing through the code of the cyber weapon. “Honestly, I’d need hours, if not days to find it. Unless, of course, someone knew the key code.”

“I’ve told everyone under the sun I don’t have it. Boris didn’t leave me anything.”

“Nothing?” Morgana lifted her fingers from the keyboard, rocked back and forth in despair. “Ninety seconds. I’ll never be able to stop it.”

“Well, his yacht, but that’s at the bottom of the Mediterranean now. You can be sure that I searched it thoroughly before it was sunk.”

She picked her head up. “What was the name of the boat?”

“What? Why?”

“You said he left you the boat.” She turned to him. “What if the boat is the key?”

Bourne’s heart started to race. “Nym,” he said. “Boris’s boat was named Nym.”

As she turned back to the keyboard, he spelled it out for her.

“N-Y-M,” she repeated back as if to herself. “Fifty-three seconds. Here goes.”

She typed in the letters. Nothing happened.

“Shit,” she said.

“What is it?”

“I must have entered the key in the wrong place.” Her fingers frantically worked the keyboard, and then—

Everything stopped.

“There,” Morgana said.

The screen went dark.

“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.