Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(46)
“There should have been some improvement by now.”
“There is,” she pointed out. “He’s no longer at the point of death.”
Keyre spun on his heel; the six-sided scar on his chest, the glyph of a Yibir master, seemed to stare at her. “What use if I can’t talk to him, tell him…” He broke off, wiped a dark hand across his forehead, his eyes, his mouth. The gestures were ritualistic, a Yibir prayer, or invocation, possibly even a spell, the Angelmaker wasn’t sure.
“Time is running out,” he said, and for the first time she understood fully how isolated he was, how utterly alone, even among his own cadre, even at the heart of this village of gold and diamonds and international legal tender he had built fostering a larger and larger percentage of the illegal arms and human trafficking trade.
He has no one, she thought now. He’s never had anyone. For the longest time, she had assumed that was what he wanted, what he needed. But she had mistaken him, just as everyone who came in contact with him had mistaken him. And now, for the first time, with the advent of his extreme anxiety, she glimpsed the reason for the violations he perpetrated on the girls, including her. They were the same violations that had been performed on him as a child. He was searching for someone to douse his loneliness, his apartness. Someone like him.
To date, she was the only one who had ever fit the bill, even if it was imperfectly. This was the reason she was so precious to him, why he had fought tooth and nail to bring her back to him, why he always would. Before her he had always put himself first. With her, that had changed.
And yet, what was he to her? Warden, torturer, artist, collaborator in Yibir with her skin and the flesh just below. A totem, in other words. Something of this world and yet not of it. Something Other, for which she had no words, which, apart from the Yibir, did not exist in any vocabulary.
She took a step toward him, felt the heat from his glyphs, as if they were living things. “What do you want me to do?”
“I want him awake.”
“Then use your magic.” There was a mocking tone to her voice she knew was dangerous, and yet she would not shy away from it. It hit her, all of a moment, that being near Jason emboldened her, just as it had when he’d first invaded the camp.
“I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” Her own words reverberated in her mind. But what had she really meant?
“He responds to you.” Keyre seemed to have ignored her comment. “You’re the one to push the process.”
“But—”
“No buts. You were the one who got him here; no one else could.”
He stared her down, and like always, she acquiesced. “As you wish.”
“As we wish,”—his eyes grew dark—“isn’t it?”
She laughed, because she had to laugh—it was the only way forward now. She had taken only one step on Jason’s path, and Keyre’s uncanny Yibir antennae were already vibrating. She couldn’t afford to make that same mistake again.
“Go,” he commanded. “Do what has to be done.”
“Whatever it takes?”
“Whatever it takes out of you, Angelmaker.”
—
What do you do when you’ve a brother both older and smarter than you? More clever, too. A chess master who delights in outmaneuvering you?
These were the questions that had plagued Timur Ludmirovich Savasin virtually all his adolescent and adult days. How simple life had been, how happy, before Konstantin revealed his true nature. Like a strange vampire, drunk on fucked-up nourishment, Savasin thought, Konstantin has drained all the enjoyment out of my life.
From the backseat of his armor-plated Zil, Savasin stared morosely out the tinted window at the garbage-strewn streets, at the pedestrians, backs hunched against the cutting spring wind, shoulders up around their ears, hands jammed deep in the pockets of their flannel overcoats. Except the kids. They smoked, stood splayed on building stoops, hair stiff and glossy, arms tattooed like the evil-looking drawings in Japanese manga, and stared sloe-eyed at Savasin’s long, sleek Zil, as if assessing its worth on the black market. Were they armed? Savasin wondered. Did the future belong to them? Not if the Sovereign had anything to say about it. In this, above all, there was no difference between the White Russian czars, the Red Russian Communists, and now the current regime. All used what was to hand, the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD, the MGB, the KGB, the FSB. Only the names changed; the orders from the state ministers remained the same.
Savasin, Moscow a blur outside his bulletproof windows, felt a welling up of disgust, not only for his own weakness in failing to find a way to deal with his brother, but for the city, the Federation itself, which was rotting beneath the soles of their expensive foreign-made shoes. The Sovereign would not countenance the truth, and everyone around him—Savasin included—was too terrified of him to clue him in. He still dreamt his dreams of a reconstituted Soviet Union without any thought of how his regime could govern such a far-flung empire when previous regimes hadn’t been able to manage it before. Moscow couldn’t even manage the Chechens, not to mention the other Muslim minorities, gorging themselves at the table of the worldwide jihad.
The chattering of his mobile fax startled him out of his increasingly gloomy thoughts. Tearing off the single sheet, he read through the text his office had sent. He was ten minutes away. What was this that couldn’t wait until he arrived? Then he read it again. What was the Bourne Initiative?