Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(24)

“What are you thinking?” Mala asked over the incessant noise of the storm.

“Turn around,” Bourne said.

“What?”

Hand on her shoulders, he turned her. The movement was gentle; she did not resist. When she was sitting with her back to him, he pulled off her outer garment. The rain turned the bathing suit black, like a partial suit of armor. Her back was exposed to him. Bourne placed his fingertips at base of her neck, the apex of the complex patterns of scars Keyre had inflicted on her over nine months, the period of time dictated by the Yibir laws of sorcery to complete the patterns.

Multiple flashes of lightning all at once threw the scars into livid relief—dark, ropy runes on an alabaster field. A chiaroscuro of agony.

These weren’t just scars; they were written incantations. Spells woven into the fabric of Mala’s body to bind her soul to Keyre. After reuniting with her on Cyprus last year toward the end of his previous mission, Bourne had spent hours every day and night learning as much as he could about Yibir sorcery, an almost impossible task, even for him. The problem was that there was an immense amount of disbelief in sorcery in the modern world, and in Yibir sorcery most of all. So little was known about it, and what few practitioners had come to light were, at heart, terrorists, pirates, reavers, and ravagers of those who did not view the world as they did. Keyre was one such terrorist—the worst of the lot—the smartest and the cleverest, who commanded absolute obedience from his followers and absolute loyalty from his clients to whom he sold prepackaged coups, complete with the latest weapons and the best trained soldiers. The caveat, which he never mentioned beforehand, was that these well-trained soldiers were absolutely loyal to him and no one else. Any form of skimming, withholding, or reneging on a deal ended one way and one way only: the client never saw another sunrise. So fearsome was Keyre’s reputation that such betrayals happened less and less often, until now they were virtually unheard of.

These thoughts passed quickly across the scrim of Bourne’s mind as he traced the runes, one by one, and in the proper order—that is to say, the order in which they were inflicted upon Mala’s flesh. Rather than horizontally, they were read vertically, like original Chinese or Japanese. But these runes looked nothing like Asian ideographs—or like any other language, for that matter. They possessed their own inscrutable meaning, their own grammar and syntax, their own logic, if one might call sorcery in any way logical.

Mala turned her head, so that in the next lightning flash he saw her in profile. “What are you doing?”

His fingertips continued to move down her back, his hands parting momentarily to trace the runes on either shoulder blade.

She flinched. “Please don’t. I hate those things. I hate that they’re a part of me.” She had drawn her knees up to her chest. Now she laid her forehead on her forearms. Her back arched like a bow. “You can’t do anything, Jason.”

He was finished now, the so-called incantations memorized via his fingertips. He wanted to know them because they were lies. But her belief in what Keyre had done to her was what kept her bound to him. He had seen her at her lowest ebb, when she had come so close to death he could feel its chill breath on the back of his neck. He had brought her back from that brink; all the while she had spoken to him as she spoke to herself. He knew she hated Keyre, but at the same time the dreaded Stockholm syndrome had insinuated itself into her mind with each runic cut of his knife. He had led her to a place where hate and love existed side by side, like the most intimate of lovers; in this sinister manner he had made her his creature. Bourne knew that if he was to save her he would have to break the spell she was convinced she was under. If he couldn’t, he harbored no doubt whatsoever that one day she would turn on him and, under Keyre’s explicit orders, kill him when he least expected it. For these reasons he had determined to keep her close, to follow wherever she led. He would never be truly safe otherwise.

“Thank God you saved Liis before he could start on her.”

“Your sister is safe,” Bourne said. “I’ve made sure of that.”

“But is she happy?”

“I’ve set up a trust in her name. She has her career, about which she is passionate. But beyond that, is anyone happy?”

She turned then, to place her mouth on his. Her lips were slightly parted, the tip of her tongue entered his mouth. She sighed against him, her hard athlete’s body melting. He felt himself respond, even knowing she was at her most dangerous when she appeared most vulnerable. Unlike her younger sister, untouched by Keyre, Mala was incapable of vulnerability. If she had ever had it, it was clear to him that Keyre had excised it with the point of his sacred knife.

“Don’t talk that way,” she whispered into his mouth. Rain struck them out of the turbulent night. “If I thought you’d ever become like me I’d die.”

Alarm bells went off in Bourne’s head. Mala was not prone to overstatement, to embellishing a moment, wearing a ruffled blouse when she could don a T-shirt. If she said this terrible thing, she meant it. The thought rocked him; he’d been unprepared for such a raw and naked statement.

“Such morbidity. It doesn’t suit you.”

She shook her head, her solemn expression holding something deeper, darker. “You took me away from him,” she said. “But you didn’t save me from him.”

“You mean the incantation—”