Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(18)
He found himself in a small, triangular crevasse, a fault line near the apex of the cliff, pressed tightly up against her. If he reached up, extending his arm to its limit, his fingertips could just about grasp the cliff top. A violent gust of wind threatened to blow him sideways, the way it had the runabout, and a machine-gun burst of rain peppered his face and chest, for a moment blurring his vision. They had to risk moving to a safer spot. The weather was bad enough now, but the storm had not yet reached its full fury. As it did so, it would become more unpredictable.
He turned to see Mala watching him. By the expression on her face he knew she was thinking of another time, another place, another storm as violent as this one. Its ferocity was one of the things that allowed Bourne to rescue her out of the sacred place where Keyre “initiated” his girls, as he termed it. Bourne had been commissioned to fetch her, to bring her back from the “pits of hell,” as her father termed it. He had told him that she and her younger sister, Liis, had been abducted by Somali pirates. During the aftermath, in talking to Liis while Mala was still feverish and in and out of consciousness, Bourne had discovered the father’s treachery. His business in tatters, his debts run wild, he had sold his daughters into slavery. Delving deeper, information had come to him that their father had done all this in order to abscond with the money, leaving his old business partner and his irate debtors in Estonia behind, to forge a new life for himself.
After Mala was safe, after Bourne had seen to her many wounds, after he had secured for her and Liis a place to stay where they would be fed and protected and loved, he had, without telling them, dealt with their father. Had he really wanted his daughters to join him? Bourne hadn’t given him the chance to lie again. Now it seemed as if storms had followed him halfway across the world, like the shrieking of the damned.
A burst of rain slammed them back against the walls of the crevasse, and Bourne knew it was now or never. Nodding to Mala, he waited for a brief lull in the wind-driven rain, rose on tiptoe, reached up as far as he could and grabbed at the highest part of the rock face. His fingers slipped as he tried to put his weight onto his right arm. He spun, feet off the ground like a hanged man, before Mala grabbed him around the waist, steadied him. He drove himself farther, got a firmer grip on the rock, hoisted himself up.
A vicious gust of wind caught him as he was about to roll over the top of the cliff. For perilous seconds he rocked back and forth, scrabbling for purchase as the wind tried its best to suck him out into the black void. His heart beat fast in his chest as he drove all extraneous thought out of his mind, narrowing his focus. Nothing existed save for the ridge of rock on which he vibrated and shuddered like a tree limb. Then, with a superhuman effort, he hurled himself over the ridge, down to a surface of rock rubble. Now the peak served as a kind of parapet, rising over his head, protecting him from the brunt of the storm.
But there was Mala to consider. Rising up over the parapet, slicing rain against his cheeks and in his eyes, he reached over and down. He called to Mala, but the howling of the storm tore his voice from his lungs, flung it far away. Still, she had had her hand up, waiting for him, and now she took him in a Roman grip—fingers grasped around wrist, and inch by agonizing inch, he lifted her out of the crevasse. In the last moments, one of her feet found solid rock, and with his help, she vaulted the rest of the way, landed, crouching beside him on the other side of the parapet.
“Are you all right?” he asked, over the wind.
She nodded. “You remember, right? When you took me and Liis.” She could see in his eyes that he did. Her mouth moved, but for a moment nothing came out. “I didn’t want to go. I wanted you to take Liis and leave me. With him.”
“You fought me.”
“Even bleeding all over, I fought you.” She swiped the rain from her forehead but it was a losing battle. “But I didn’t hurt you.” She smiled, touched his cheeks with her fingertips so lightly it took him a moment to realize that she was mapping the configuration of his bones. “You can’t imagine what happened.”
“There will come a reckoning. One night when the moon is down.”
“But not tonight.” She blinked rain out of her eyes. “Tonight we have the American kill team to deal with.”
“But not in the way you think,” Bourne said, and seeing her brows knit together, he laughed softly. “I have a better idea.”
7
Meme LLC’s staff did not like to see their boss angry, but this evening Morgana Roy was good and pissed. Her personnel in the field had relayed intel concerning the botched mission to terminate Jason Bourne with extreme prejudice. They could not identify the team, but Morgana had a gut feeling it was part of Dreadnaught Section, what her guys blackly referred to as SAMS—a special action murder squad, which is what the Nazi SS called their kill teams. Her people were an irreverent lot, which was just the way she liked it.
Although Meme LLC was an off-site, way off-the-books organization that was in no way connected to the U.S. government, it was still nominally a division of Dreadnaught, what she privately called “Arthur’s Acres”—the untouchable domain he had carved out for himself within the clandestine services. Which was why Dreadnaught was allowed to have a black ops SAMS team.
After trying and failing twice to reach Mac on his encrypted mobile, she muttered, “Fuck it,” and raced out of the office. The heated, muggy air drained all promise from spring. Belatedly, she realized that she was in too much of a hurry to return to where she’d parked her car. Back inside the office, she had Rose hand her the keys to one of the company cars. Moments later, she slipped behind the wheel of a Ford sedan parked on the street. She fired the ignition, cursed as a blast of hot air exited the vents.