Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(43)
Bourne had been moving, ostensibly to gain a better look at the extent of the damage Keyre had inflicted on Mala. He stared into her eyes, which looked like depthless pools, dead at their bottoms, and he thought, She’s already lost. But then the punishment he had witnessed, meted out at twilight to the little girl, returned to him with all the force of a hammer blow. An innocent caught up, like so many innocents, in the tribal warfare between fanatic religious factions. These days, jihadists came in every color of the rainbow, shedding blood and brothers over territory more than two thousand years old.
“Those are your terms,” Bourne said, still evincing the businessman’s attitude.
“They are.”
“Let’s see if we can—”
“Final terms,” Keyre said flatly, and the instrument returned to the soft flesh beneath Mala’s right breast. “Rejoice that I have given you any terms at all.”
“Oh, I am,” Bourne said. “Rejoicing, that is.” And with that, he kicked over the lantern closest to him, which was why he had moved in the first place.
Kerosene spilled out of the uncapped reservoir and with a great whoosh of heat and light caught fire. The fibers of the rug were dry, perfect fuel for such a conflagration. Bourne pushed Liis backward through the rent with one hand, then, in almost the same motion, stepped through the flames, emerging on the other side like some avenging deity, a god of death.
16
The new, improved, and far more powerful national security advisor Marshall Fulmer bestrode the D.C. Beltway like a colossus. As the person who had uncovered MacQuerrie’s illegal incarceration of Morgana Roy and, by extension, the existence of Meme LLC, a black off-site cyber operation seemingly devoted exclusively to furthering the general’s astonishingly far-flung interests, which might or might not sync up with Russian Federation business interests—even before LeakAGE released the slurry of MacQuerrie files—Fulmer received an unprecedented quantity of air time, photo ops, and interviews with the most prestigious of TV’s talking heads. He was invited to the White House to meet with the president and his security staff, who solicited his opinion on how to ensure they would not miss even one of MacQuerrie’s well-hidden tentacular organizations.
Since MacQuerrie had shut up like a giant clam, they also wanted to know just what the hell the general was up to. Was it simply greed? Or was there a more sinister purpose at work here?
At no time during these intense sessions did Fulmer mention the Bourne Initiative. Further, he felt confident that MacQuerrie would never, ever divulge the initiative’s existence, let alone his almost obsessive interest in it. For Fulmer, since the time when he’d conceived of his plot to overthrow the general, was convinced that MacQuerrie had engaged Meme LLC to uncover where in the cyber-world General Boris Illyich Karpov had stashed the code to build the ultimate cyber weapon, one capable of punching through any firewall in its path and penetrating to the heart of America’s final defense: the nuclear launch codes.
What MacQuerrie wanted to do with it was not quite clear—sell it, use it as ransom to scramble to the top of the federal heap, what? One thing Fulmer did know was that Meme LLC was Morgana Roy. It was her mind that ran the cadre; without her, Meme LLC was useless. In fact, as of last night, Meme LLC was finished. Its members had been let go, but not before signing a second document of nondisclosure on pain of being charged with treason and, without access to counsel, tried and incarcerated for the rest of their lives. They were little people; they didn’t matter. Only Morgana Roy with her brilliant mind and knack for parsing the most mind-bending algorithms mattered. And now she was where she needed to be, with Fran?oise. Fran?oise had her orders. She’d soon put Morgana to work.
In the meantime, it behooved Fulmer to bask in the glow of his newfound notoriety. He had attained hero status. In the best vampiric Beltway tradition everyone wanted to include themselves in the halo effect. But he had been around politics too long to believe it would last. As Napoleon famously wrote, “Fame is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.” Soon enough, another hero would come to the fore and be anointed by the press, and he would be forgotten, put on the shelf along with all the other sclerotic pols. Not so when he became president. Every day would be like this one, filled with spotlights and sound bites. He’d make damn sure of it.
One of Fulmer’s beautifully self-serving traits was his ability to change course as the situation before him demanded. Difficult enough to do in the slippery business world, almost impossible in the sclerotic political arena, where you were eternally enmeshed in a web of backroom deals, bill riders placating insistent interest groups in your states, flexing moral muscles in the service of amassing a nest egg of favors from your enemies across the Congressional aisle. At this point in time, Fulmer had a larger nest egg than even Lyndon Johnson had had in his heyday.
As a result of this ecstatic flurry of activity, Fulmer found himself at the end of each long day both exhausted and exhilarated. And it was at this time, doubtless because of their ability, akin to the Nazi Gestapo’s, to strike their target at the precise moment of maximum vulnerability, that the lampreys swam closest to him, looking to attach their suckers to his flesh without being immediately brushed aside.
Such a person was Harry Hornden, a freelance journo of no small note. He was peculiar inasmuch as he had no trouble straddling both the old and the new worlds of journalism. He wrote award-winning think pieces for prestigious monthlies, while also maintaining a snarky and, in Fulmer’s opinion, somewhat subversive blog, read by more than a hundred thousand people, which meant, of course, an alarming number of crazies, idiots, cranks, and professional Internet trolls. That the blog appealed to both far-left anarchists and far-right white supremacists was, Fulmer supposed, some sort of victory, though over what he wasn’t at all sure, and possibly didn’t want to know. Except that Fulmer wanted in on everything, because if you weren’t constantly vigilant, you never knew what might pop up and bite you on the ass.