Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(25)
“This has nothing to do with that,” she said sharply.
“What has it to do with?”
“When you took me away from Keyre,” she said into the drumming night, “I left a part of me with him.”
Bourne’s throat had gone dry. This can’t be happening, he thought. But it was.
“I had a child with him,” she went on, each word seeming to be squeezed out of her guts. “A daughter. Giza.”
She turned to him, and he saw the tears rolling from her eyes, down her cheeks.
“Her name is Giza, Jason. He keeps her locked away.”
He recalled her fighting him, his strong sense that she didn’t want to leave. She had begged him to find her sister, Liis, but never mentioned Giza.
“And please don’t ask why I didn’t tell you at the time,” she continued, as if reading his mind. “I didn’t know where he kept her then, and I don’t know now. After you took Liis and me away…after that night…I’ve never seen her.” Her shoulders began to tremble. “He holds that possibility out like a carrot, if I do what he commands.”
Like a plague, the sins of the Somali continued to multiply exponentially: human trafficker, illicit arms dealer, broker between tin-pot despots and fanatic jihadists, brutalizer of girls, torturer. Extorter of the worst deeds from the tenderest and most intimate of emotions. These were the thoughts that swirled around Bourne’s mind as he held Mala’s shivering frame, wrapping his arms tightly around her. The worst thing in the world had happened to Mala. Her scars were as nothing compared to separating her from her daughter.
“He’ll never let you see her,” he whispered when she had quietened. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I have to believe…” She passed a hand across her eyes. The blue light from a lightning flash struck her, passing like a theatrical scrim across her face. “My mind says one thing, but my heart says the opposite.”
He understood her a bit more, but, frankly, it didn’t help much. She was someone he’d saved, brought out of the fire of Keyre’s encampment. In the aftermath, he had helped to nurse her back to health. And how had she repaid him? He was grateful that she had told him what she surely had never told another soul, but for him the cost was too high. He had been obliged to remove her and Liis from an intolerable situation. Now, in divulging her secret to him, she had obliged him to return to Somalia, find her daughter, and rescue her. She knew this; it was the reason she had engineered this meeting. Her secret was not Giza; it was with velvet gloves coercing him into killing Keyre—something she herself could not, or would not, do. Because, so far as he could see, the only way to pry Giza out of Keyre’s clutches was through his cold, dead fingers.
He let go of her before it was too late, before she insinuated herself into him, made him forget completely that she was the Angelmaker, that death was always clinging to her shoulder, that unless he could save her from herself she already had one foot in the grave. He saw now that merely going after Keyre and killing him wouldn’t make much of a difference, if at all. The Yibir would have control of her even from beyond the grave. Bourne suspected that the pain and suffering Keyre had inflicted on her had remade her, reconnecting axons, rewiring her brain to his demonic wavelength. For, make no mistake, Keyre was a demon made manifest in the body of a human being. Bourne had been to his camp; he’d seen with his own eyes the depravity he visited on human souls.
The storm had finally exhausted itself, the rain reduced to a drizzle that, without wind, fell vertically. After the last hours of the attack it felt almost pleasurable.
“We should be heading inland,” he said, rising. He wanted to be done with this place, with its secrets, its sinister shadows. “The faster we discover where the kill team has bivouacked the more secure I’ll feel.”
“We should attack them while it’s still dark,” Mala said, shrugging on her wrap. Her skin was goose-fleshed, but she gave no sign that she was chilled. That was not her way. “But you said you wanted to hold off.”
“I said I had a better idea.”
Her eyes glittered. “What could be better than slitting their throats?”
And there it was, the extreme peril that lurked behind her beautiful facade. The Angelmaker killed for money. Worse, she lived for death, craved it as others craved food and water. Was there, then, no hope for her?
Pushing this question aside, Bourne moved them out, down the high ridge that had been their shelter. The last of the clouds, racing inland, shredded, revealing a star-strewn sky glittering with newfound luminescence. With the starlight leading the way, they soon enough came across a narrow path, the glistening rocks still shedding water. The passing of the storm had brought a lowering of the humidity and, with it, cooler temperatures that rapidly dried their clothes.
Almost immediately the path turned steep, passing between two massive boulders. Pines sprang on their side, gnarled and twisted by the wind, adding to the sense of claustrophobia. At one point, he had to stop them. They were faced with a treacherous rock fall, impossible to navigate. Anything could set it off again.
He moved them off to their right, finding another way down, always cognizant of the unstable rock fall to their left. As they descended, he kept a lookout for a break, to give them a broader view of their locale and, possibly, pick up the glint of movement presaging the appearance of the kill team.