Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(36)
The point struck the ridge bone just below the Russian’s left eye. Because of the upward angle, it slipped off the bone, tore through skin and flesh, burying itself in his eye. He gave out with a bellow, jerking back, giving Bourne full control of the knife, which he pushed in deeper, past the eye, into the Russian’s brain.
—
Fran?oise awoke, as she always did, in a strange kind of purgatory, neither here nor there, but elsewhere. Possibly she hadn’t slept at all, although there were intimations of the Swedish dawn sidling through the drapes. In the bathroom, she knelt as if to pray, and vomited up the memory of her abominable meeting with her half brother, Gora.
Fran?oise, with her face drowned beneath the cold water flow from the sink, heard the opening bars of “Bad Habits” by the Last Shadow Puppets from her mobile’s speaker. It was a special ringtone she had edited and installed for only one person, and she lifted her head, crossed the hotel room without toweling off, snatched up her phone from the bedside table. Because of her insistence on dinner at Aifur Song, on squeezing out whatever amount of experience she could from this excuse of a city, she had had her guts mangled. Oh, well, she thought. It’s part of the price of doing business.
“Auntie,” Morgana said into her ear, by which code word she knew Morgana was in trouble.
She sat on the edge of the bed, back as ramrod straight as a sentry’s, and said slowly and precisely, “What flavor of trouble are you in?”
“Licorice.” The worst.
They both hated licorice.
“Where are you?” Knowing the severity of the trouble, there was no point in asking Morgana details.
“NSA HQ. Under armed guard. They allowed me one call, and I—”
“Stop.” Fran?oise knew she needed to get off the line before NSA had a chance to realize they couldn’t trace the call and started in on Morgana. That wouldn’t do at all.
“I’ll take care of it,” she said, and broke the connection. Immediately, she opened her mobile, removed the SIM card, crushed it with the high, sharp heel of a shoe. Just in case. After inserting a brand new SIM card, she pressed a speed dial key.
There was hollowness on the line, along with a number of clicks like insects or electronics communicating with one another.
“Yes,” the male voice said.
“It’s happened,” Fran?oise said. “It worked. Just as I predicted.”
“That is gratifying news,” Marshall Fulmer, the national security advisor, said, as if he had just heard the local weather report. “Where are they holding her?”
Fran?oise told him.
“I’m more than halfway back to D.C.,” he said. “I’ll make a call freezing everything in place.”
“She’s my friend. I don’t want her harmed in any way.”
“I promised you that she wouldn’t be. Just keep her out of my hair, okay?”
“No problem there.”
“You still sound nervous. Have faith, my dear.”
“In an American national security advisor?”
He laughed at that. “I like you. I really do. You have what we call true grit back in the old country.” He chuckled again. “Sit tight. She’ll be with you shortly.”
Fran?oise tossed the phone onto the bed, crawled between the sheets, and slept like a baby until Justin Farreng knocked on her door with the breakfast he had had delivered to his room two floors above.
She opened the door nude.
“Good morning.” He looked her up and down appreciatively. “What would’ve happened if I’d been housekeeping or the night manager?”
“They would’ve had a helluva story to tell.” She let him into the room, closed the door behind him.
He set the tray down on a table.
“Coffee first,” she said. “Black.” As he filled cups from the silver carafe she regarded him from beneath hooded eyes. He was not a bad-looking fellow, smart, funny at times, slightly crazy, like all the best people. And his lovemaking was more than adequate. It was a minor wonder to her that she felt nothing at all for him. He might just as well have been a slab of raw meat hanging in a butcher’s locker.
He smiled at her when he handed her the coffee, and she smiled back, even while her mind was elsewhere—with Morgana. Had Fulmer arrived in D.C. yet? Had he freed her, set her on a plane to Stockholm? Was she on her way here? Now that she was awake, the caffeine kicking in, she felt on edge, in an entirely different way than last night, waiting for Morgana’s call, which, she had had to admit to herself, might not come.
“Toast?” Farreng asked, holding up a freshly buttered triangle of whole grain.
“Revelations?” Fran?oise replied, holding out the thumb drive Fulmer had given her.
“So soon?” Farreng’s eyebrows lifted as they made the exchange. “How good?”
“It will give even you pause,” she said, dunking her toast into the coffee, then ripping off a bite between her even, white teeth. She had inserted the drive into her laptop’s USB port, using the security code Fulmer had made her memorize, the moment she had returned to her room and before she dressed for dinner. The files therein were real eye-openers, especially the ones pertaining to General MacQuerrie. Good Lord, what these people get up to, she had thought while showering off the day’s sweat and sticky particulates. Everything online, buried in servers protected by layers of firewalls and malware busters, and yet vulnerable to attacks so sophisticated the cyber weapons morphed exponentially every week, if not daily. Nothing’s safe anymore, she thought, unless it’s a hard copy locked away in a vault buried in the concrete foundation of a massive office building. And even then… Back to the future, right?