Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Initiative (Jason Bourne series)(66)

24



There came a time in everyone’s life when the innocence of childhood was punctured and the adult world, with all its hatred, betrayal, and sewage, was revealed. The break was often abrupt, shocking; it was always irrevocable. Such a moment came to Morgana Roy on a mid-morning like any other she had experienced since landing in Kalmar. She had awoken early in her hotel room, a floor below Fran?oise. It was barely light out. She performed her forty-five minutes of aikido exercises, ordered breakfast, showered, and was dressed in time to usher in the room service girl with her rolling cart.

She ate in silence while she watched the news on TV: one story after another about the increasingly warlike stance of the Russian Federation, its growing belligerence toward the United States. The president had called Russia a “regional power,” enraging both the Sovereign and the Kremlin as a whole. The stories frightened and sickened her in equal measure. Her fried eggs and pickled herring lay in her stomach like lead shot. Switching off the TV, she pushed the cart away. The taste of fish in her mouth nauseated her further. She took a swig of coffee, washing her mouth out with it, spitting it onto her plate before taking another gulp, swallowing it this time.

As she had the day before and the days before that, she met Larry London in the lobby. Together they made the short walk to the building where Larry had his temporary office, riding up to the fifth floor. She wasn’t comfortable there. If she were to be honest with herself, the entire fifth floor gave her the creeps. It was deserted when they arrived in the morning, was similarly devoid of life when they exited late in the afternoon or early evening.

The office itself was nothing to look at: bare walls painted battleship gray, wood floors, a minimum of Swedish Modern furniture—desks, a sofa, a pair of chairs, a low table, and two floor lamps, that was it. The space was as anonymous as a doctor’s waiting room. In fact, with its spray of magazines on the table, that’s precisely what it reminded her of.

Three hours of work trying to decipher the latest bit of code she had found led to nothing at all. After so many days both in D.C. and here of slogging through incomprehensible code, a suspicion had begun to grow that she was trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with the wrong pieces: nothing fit together, no matter which way she tried to integrate the various bits. If there was a unifying algorithm, she had yet to discover it, which was a first for her. She was hitting her head against a wall so often it had begun to hurt.

Abruptly, she pushed her chair away from the laptop, stalked over to the window, stared down at the anonymous passersby on the anonymous street, while she put her fists just above her buttocks and arched her back, stretching hugely.

London, sensing her distress, said. “Time for a lunch break.”

“It’s your turn to go get it.”

“So it is.” He nodded. “What d’you want?”

“Anything so long as it isn’t fish.”

He laughed easily. “Tall order, but I’m sure I’m up to it.” He grabbed his coat. “Back soon.”

She didn’t bother to answer him. She was in a dark mood. The shock of her sudden incarceration had worn off, leaving behind a dull ache, like a bruise on her psyche. Lately, though, she had realized that she was homesick. She missed D.C., missed her apartment, missed the people she had worked with at Meme LLC. Often now, she found herself wondering what had happened to them. With Mac taken into custody, surely Meme LLC had been disbanded. Where had her team gone? Scattered to the four winds, she supposed, which was a pity; it had been a long and painstaking process finding them, meshing them into a well-oiled machine.

With a spasm of disgust at her self-pity, she turned from the window, went back to her laptop. She sat down and began to work again, but her heart wasn’t in it, so she left it behind, went out into the street, walking purposefully until she found a shop selling running clothes. She bought a pair of sneakers, set out on a ten-mile run, five miles out, five back. That was her lunch hour, and reconnecting with her body settled her, damped down her anxiety, made her feel more herself again.

Back in the office, she returned to work, feeling refreshed and optimistic. Surprisingly, Larry hadn’t yet returned with lunch. Who knew what he was up to? For all she knew, he was having a matinee somewhere discreet. He seemed just the type.

She frowned, picking up where she’d left off on the latest packet of code. For the next ten or so minutes, she was immersed in trying once again to parse the code, and when, as usual, that didn’t work, she tried to fit it into the mosaic of the previous bits she had stored on her laptop. The screen flickered; she paid it no mind—the electricity in foreign countries always seemed dodgy to her. Then it happened again, and it was like a mote in God’s eye, a speck that had attached itself to her eyeball and was now making her eye water.

She turned her attention to the flicker, but it was gone. She waited, but it didn’t return. But then something odd happened. She had gone looking on the dark web for more bits of the weaponized code, had widened her search, expanding into bands of the dark web she had heretofore not explored. A flicker like the shortest bolt of lightning ran down the edge of her screen. Was that the flicker she had seen just before? Her fingers flew over the keys. This time, inside the dark web, the flicker had left a trace of itself. She followed it back, further and further, deeper and deeper, drawing closer and closer to its origin. Which was how, when it appeared again, she was able to catch it—like trapping lightning in the bottle of her laptop.