Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(30)

After setting the last of the traps, using the fishing lines and hooks, they reached a declivity in a massive rock formation, in the lee of the wind coming in off the sea. They were approximately halfway up the cliff wall on the other side of which was the Aegean and the boats, theirs and the kill team’s.

She let out a small puff of air. “I particularly don’t like this sitting here, waiting for the Americans to catch up with us.”

“This crew isn’t CIA.”

“No? Who, then?”

“They mentioned MacQuerrie.”

“Yes, I heard.”

“General MacQuerrie is in charge of his own piece of turf within the American clandestine services. His group is known as Dreadnaught. His people do a lot of very dirty wet work.”

“Isn’t all wet work, by definition, dirty?”

“Maybe. But Dreadnaught’s is pitch-black filthy.”

“All the more reason why you should want to get up close and personal. Tooth and claw.” She gave him a particularly piercing look. “Don’t you have a personal stake in killing them?”

“Do you?” he said.

“Yeah, they blew up your friend’s boat thinking you were on it. Instead, they killed the captain and crew. Now they’re hunting both of us.”

“They don’t know you exist.”

She grunted. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You’re testing me. See if I’ll abandon you to your fate?” She shook her head. “Our fates became entwined the moment you entered Keyre’s camp. The moment—”

“Don’t say it, Mala. I’m warning you.”

“Someone should have warned your friend.”

The most terrible thing about being with her was that it was like looking into a mirror—somewhat distorted, but nevertheless the fact remained that they were both killers. Her unbridled bloodlust, the fierce joy in killing she had learned at Keyre’s knee conjured up the spirits of all the people he had killed, no matter the reason. Each life you took diminished you, of this he was certain. Would there, then, come a time when there would be nothing left of him to keep alive? She also engendered in him this nihilism, these black questions that ate at him, not at the edge of darkness, but during the interstices of life in the shadows, the moments of idleness, few though they might be.

“Jason, I need you to know that things are different now with Keyre. These days, he runs a business, everything online: expenditures, profits, transfers to and from accounts held by a mare’s nest of shell companies in Switzerland, Gibraltar, Caymans, Bermuda, Iceland, Lichtenstein, who knows where else? Domiciles don’t matter, except on paper—and even paper doesn’t exist anymore. It’s all in cyberspace, all in ironclad clouds.” She took a breath. “You wouldn’t recognize the place.”

“No pools of blood? No heads on spikes, shriveling in the sun? No incantations over guts pulled from the living?”

She said nothing.

“I’ll recognize Keyre. There’s a face I’ll never forget.”

She looked away for a moment, her hair streaming out behind her until she lassoed it with her fingers. She seemed to be listening to a sound only she could hear. It was very far away, coming off the sands of Somalia like a mirage.

When she turned back to him, her eyes seemed enlarged, as if she had ingested a drug. Maybe she had, Bourne thought. Maybe that drug was Keyre himself.

“You know,” she said in an altogether different tone of voice, “there was a time when I loved you. A time when you were my entire universe.”

“You were very ill,” he said, not wanting her words to sink in, knowing that she might very well be laying a trap, that he absolutely could not trust her, no matter how much he might want to. She was still very much Keyre’s creature, despite all his efforts. It saddened and angered him in equal measure that he had freed her body, but not her mind. He wished to convey none of this to her. “I nursed you back to life. It’s only natural. Transference.”

“That’s one word for it.”

“What word would you substitute?”

She eyed him, searching for any flicker of emotion. She was as expert at pulling emotions from people as a fisherman drawing his catch out of the water. She shook her head. “But, you see, Jason, what I learned is that love is beyond your ken. When love knocks on your door you remain deaf, dumb, and blind.”

She was talking about herself, of course, but what she said made him think of Sara, of all the time they spent together, how well they knew each other—and yet, Mala was right, he always kept a part of himself hidden, locked away, set apart from even the few people he was closest to: Sara, Boris, Soraya Moore. He loved all three of them in his way. But that was the problem: in his way. What was that, exactly? Was he really and truly incapable of loving someone, of giving all of himself? Had living in the shadows, inhabiting all the most perilous fringes of the world damaged him beyond repair? Had all the betrayals, the paranoia of future betrayals made him more weapon than human? No answer presented itself, only a blank wall even he was incapable of scaling.

Mala’s voice was like a scarf of purest silk winding around him, impossibly soft, impossibly strong. “I held you and Keyre, one in each hand”—she lifted both hands, cupping them—“balancing the two of you like the scales of justice.”