Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(37)

“Is that so?” He grinned, tumbling the drive between his fingers like a prestidigitator. “I’ll be eager to see what your sources have unearthed this time.”

“Make sure you’re sitting down when you do.”

His eyebrows rose again. Don’t do that, she thought. It makes you look like a clown.

“It’s not like you to oversell your product, Fran?oise.”

“That’s right.” She bent, taking another slice of toast. “And this time alert me before it goes live. I want a front row seat at the freaking firestorm.”

—



Mala hauled the Russian off Bourne, unwrapped Bourne’s fingers from the knife. “Shit,” she said, staring at his bloodred palm, “I can see clear to the bone.” She looked at him. “Does it hurt?”

“Don’t feel a thing,” Bourne said. “Same for my shoulder.” But his eyes were going in and out of focus.

Using the knife to make strips out of the Russian’s trousers, she fashioned compression bandages by wrapping the strips around his palm and over his shoulder under his armpit. “Not the most antiseptic, but what the hell.”

Waving off Mala’s help, he got to his feet.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “Right now.”

Bourne nodded. “We’ll take the powerboat.”

The climb up to the crest taxed neither of them, but the way down to the shingle and the curling combers was dauntingly steep for Bourne in his condition. Nevertheless, they began their descent without hesitation.

Despite the difficulties, their progress was easier than the night before in darkness and the beginnings of the storm. The wind had lapsed to the lightest of breezes, the air was still night-cooled, and the way was sunlit.

Bourne did not give the slightest indication of the level of pain he was in, now that his body’s trauma defenses were wearing off. There was no option other than to keep moving.

Nevertheless, two-thirds down, he was obliged to pause. Despite the still, cool air, sweat ran down his face, trickled along his spine and from under his arms. The throbbing in his shoulder and hand was a palpable thing, spiking his heart rate. Black spots danced before his eyes. He realized his breathing was coming in shallow gasps; he slowed it down, taking deep, even breaths, reoxygenating his lungs.

Mala, realizing something was wrong, paused below him, turning an inquiring gaze back at him.

He made a shoveling motion with his good hand, indicating she should continue on. This she did without another word, and, relying on his second wind, he followed close behind.

An eternity of pain accompanied him, during which nothing existed beyond the next hand-and foothold, the search for the best path, bypassing deadfalls, perilous crevasses or cracks, and loose rocks. Following Mala made all this easier and more difficult at the same time. She was lighter than he was by a good margin; sections that held her might not hold him, which made him doubly cautious. On the other hand, this intense concentration kept his attention from the pain, which was so excruciating he was only partially successful in compartmentalizing it.

But, at last, even eternity must end. He slid the last three feet to the shingle, keeping his knees bent as if he were a parachutist landing, in order to cushion the shock to his feet and legs. They were several hundred yards to the east of where the boats had been left. They seemed to have weathered the storm better than he expected.

He and Mala set off at once, with him taking the lead. Mala did not protest. In fact, she had said nothing at all since their brief conversation while she was jerry-rigging his bandages and binding his wounds, both of which were deep, bloody, and angry. He’d need expert medical attention, the sooner the better, in order to stave off infections that would put him in the hospital, weak and vulnerable.

They were a dozen feet from the powerboat when he collapsed. Mala ran, knelt beside him, and gasped. The wound in his shoulder had bled right through the thick cloth, soaking it. His entire right side was dark and sticky with blood. The wound must have punctured the brachial artery.

She lifted the lid of one of his eyes, said, “Shit,” wasted no time in a vain attempt to revive him; it would take too long, and time was now in short supply. She understood the extreme peril Bourne was in. Reaching under his armpits, she dragged him directly into the water, kept him afloat as she swam to the port side of the powerboat. Grabbing on to his bloody shirt with one clawed hand, she levered herself over the gunwale, then, feet firmly planted on the deck, hauled Bourne up and over, onto the deck.

For a moment, she stared at his face, pale and bloodless. Despite her efforts at field dressing, he was still bleeding. In fact, now that she had a chance to study him closely, it was clear to her that he was dying.





PART TWO





Keyre





13



As Jason Bourne lay slowly bleeding out on the deck of a water-swilled powerboat, purchased by a cutout offshore middleman for Dreadnaught, a veritable shitstorm was exploding in the face of General Arthur MacQuerrie, head of that most secret of government entities, in the form of the latest LeakAGE bombshell, a hacked trove of eyes-only documents from the NSA’s very bowels. They revealed that, in the first place, NSA, that most august, feared, and reviled surveillance division of the American clandestine services, which prided itself on its SIGINT, electronic and satellite spying, and turned its nose up at the CIA and its outmoded HUMINT, boots-on-the-ground form of intelligence gathering, had on its blackest of books its own HUMINT division code-named Dreadnaught. In the second place, that Dreadnaught was heavily and, needless to say, illegally, funded from various named sources, none of which, apparently, existed. In the third place, that said Dreadnaught was in the business of targeting enemies of the American homeland—controversial, gray-area entities, to a person—and terminating them with extreme prejudice, without the knowledge, never mind the consent, of Congress. In the fourth place, that these bloodletting assignments were decided upon and meted out solely by one General Arthur MacQuerrie without any kind of oversight whatsoever.