The Bourne Initiative

by Robert Ludlum

  The sky above where the boat had been was a livid bruise. They could smell the aftermath of the explosions. The stink of marine fuel was in their nostrils. The moon and the stars had vanished into the spreading cloud of smoke and debris blown apart into what amounted to nothing more than grains of sand.

  “Jason, what are you doing?” Mala asked as soon as she realized Bourne was heading directly toward the area of the disaster. “You can’t believe anyone could have survived those explosions.”

  “No,” he said grimly. “No one’s survived.”

  “Then why are you—?”

  “Quiet.” His gaze was fixed on the way ahead. “Just be quiet.”

  She stared at him for a moment, shook her head, then, with a shrug, directed her attention to the debris field. She tried to see what he was seeing, without success. This journey was a mystery to her, and this made her uncomfortable.

  They came up on the landward perimeter of the debris field quickly. Bourne still had the outboard at full throttle. Their eyes began to burn from the residue in the air. There was still a good deal of heat; at one spot the water appeared to be boiling, but the smoke made it difficult to see anything clearly. It was like entering a low-lying fog bank.

  Mala could see debris bobbing all around them, most of it unrecognizable, until they passed a human arm, twisted and blackened, all the hair burned off. And then a foot, bones poking through. The stench was momentarily sickening.

  Bourne plowed through all this at high speed. The instant they breached the far side of the debris field, they saw the patrol boat, lying to, motionless several thousand yards from them.

  “Why are they still here?” Mala asked no one in particular. “What are they waiting for?”

  “The last diver,” Bourne said, cutting the engines.

  Guiding her behind the wheel, he handed her the Steyr. Stepping to the gunwale, he removed his shoes, jacket, and trousers. Pulling up one of the cushions, he opened and felt around in the storage cabinet and removed a flying gaff, used to bring large fish up onto the boat. Pulling the hooked head off, he filled his lungs, then dove into the water.

  Beyond the debris field, the smoke had risen, then dissipated in the freshening wind driving westward. Shimmering silver light from the full moon slanted down through the water. Almost immediately, he saw the piercing light emanating from the forehead of the diver as he headed away, toward the boat rocking gently on the surface. Bourne had rightly figured that divers had attached explosives to the hull of the Nym under the waterline. It was the most logical route to destruction; it was the one he himself would have used. Plus, no one had come onto the boat when they had briefly docked to resupply in Istanbul; he’d taken care of that himself. The process of elimination had been short and to the point.

  Powerful swimmer though he was, the diver was too far away for him to make it without fins. He was about to kick up to catch some air rather than catch the diver, when a dark shadow appeared below him. It was as if the sea floor were rising toward him. A ripple of great wings told him all he needed to know. He waited as the creature rose, then he reached down and grabbed onto the upper part of the reef manta ray’s mouth. The manta jetted forward with such speed that Bourne’s arm was almost pulled out of its socket. Like its close cousin, the shark, the creature was all muscle. He could feel the power of the ray rippling the currents around it, sending patterns outward like a rock thrown into a lake.

  Bourne’s lungs ached, but he had been repeatedly waterboarded as part of his Treadstone training; his lungs held air as well or better than most free divers.

  As if sensing its passenger’s mission, the manta put on even more speed. The diver’s silhouette bloomed in front of him. He was very close when the diver, feeling the pressure of the manta’s approach, turned toward the disturbance. He saw the manta first and jerked in shock. That was when Bourne let go of his perch, pushed himself upward, and slammed into the diver.

  The diver already had his knife out, and he slashed at Bourne wildly, disconcerted by both the ray and Bourne’s sudden appearance. With a froth of bubbles, Bourne swept the diver’s mouthpiece off, jammed it into his own mouth. He felt the serrated blade slide down his chest, opening a wound from which blood drifted. He grabbed the underside of the diver’s mask, ripped it off. The diver flailed at it, and Bourne drove the hooked end of the gaff into the meat of his right arm. He let go of the knife in an automatic gesture to cover the wound with his hand.

  The diver was done. Bourne turned him, grabbed him around the neck, dragging him back toward where Mala was standing watch on the runabout. He surfaced farther away than he had calculated, then saw that Mala had wisely backed the runabout into the debris field to keep herself hidden. A few more powerful strokes brought him to the side of the runabout. He spat out the mouthpiece, drew in the rich night air.

  Mala ran to the nearside gunwale. Setting the Steyr down, she knelt to help keep the diver against the runabout while Bourne unhooked the diver’s oxygen tanks and other scuba gear, which he hoisted into the runabout.

  Mala heaved the diver aboard, and Bourne followed, launching himself out of the water and over the gunwale. She saw his chest wound first, but he waved her away toward their prisoner.

  “Just a scratch.” He put one hand over the diver’s mouth, then wrenched the gaff out of his arm. The man’s shout was muffled to a deep grunt.

  Meanwhile, Mala was examining his wet suit and equipment. “American government issue,” she said. “Part of a CIA hit team, I would imagine.”

  “Not necessarily.” Bourne pulled off the diver’s neoprene cap, stared down at his unfamiliar face. The man seemed to be going in and out of consciousness. Bourne slapped him hard across the face, then again when the diver gave no sign of coming around.

  His eyes opened; he stared up at Bourne, and said, “Where the hell did you come from?” In the same instant, he drew a thin-bladed knife from inside the cuff of his neoprene sleeve and jabbed it upward toward Bourne’s throat.

  There was no time to pull away, but Mala interjected her forearm, her scars so hard and tough the knife point, driven fast but, owing to the diver’s position, without much energy behind it, glanced off them. Bourne drove his fist into the diver’s face, fracturing his nose. Blood fountained. Bourne snatched the knife away, threw it across the width of the runabout.

  He glanced up for a moment, caught Mala looking at him. He took her arm, checked. Not even a scratch to her scars. He nodded and she smiled. Then she jammed the same forearm against the diver’s throat. He looked up at her and laughed, spitting out blood pouring from his ruined nose.

  Mala didn’t like that. Scrambling over the deck, she retrieved his knife, brought it back to where he lay, Bourne pinning him in place.

  “Time you told us who you work for,” Bourne said.

  “Some nerve.” The diver’s voice was thick and half-strangled by blood. He had a Tennessee mountain accent.

  “Reconsider.”

  “Fuck you and the bitch you rode in on.”

  Mala liked that even less. With one swift, practiced motion, she slit the diver’s neoprene suit lengthwise. Reaching down, she plucked at delicate things like a fisherman about to gut her catch.

  The diver’s eyes flickered. His face had gone unnaturally pale in the smoke-hazed moonlight. “What’s happening?”

  “You killed my captain,” Bourne said. “You killed my crew.”

  The diver spat pink. “It should have been you.”

  “But it wasn’t.” Bourne leaned closer. “I’m still here, and you…well, you know where you are.” Closer still. “But not what’s going to happen to you.”

  “What is—?”

  His voice was cut off by a scream. Mala had made an economical but very deep horizontal cut. She held her prize up for the diver to see. “I don’t like being called a bitch,” she said with remarkably little malice in her voice. “This is how much I don’t like it.” She threw the bloody sac overboard.

  The
diver shuddered and shook. Soon enough, Bourne knew, he would go into shock, and then he’d lose the opportunity that had been afforded him. Mala should never have cut off his balls. He suspected that making a preliminary incision would have been enough. But this was the Angelmaker, not Mala. He had to keep that firmly in mind going forward. Whatever she had been, the person he had saved, tended to, had been warped beyond all recognition by Keyre and his Yibir rituals.

  The diver was starting to convulse. Bourne had only a matter of minutes before he passed into unconsciousness and, unless they could stop the bleeding in his nose, arm, and between his legs, which he thought unlikely, he’d bleed out in a matter of fifteen or twenty minutes at the most.

  Pressing down hard on the diver’s shoulders, he said, “You know my name. What’s yours?”

  “Smith…” He tried to laugh, blew blood bubbles. “Or Wesson.”

  Using his name would help focus him, keep him in the here and now. Who knew, maybe delirious as he was becoming he’d think he was among compatriots.

  “Who do you work for?”

  His eyes, red-rimmed and dull with pain, peered up at Bourne, as if through a hailstorm; it was impossible to tell who or what he was seeing. “Go fuck yourself.” His voice was a reedy whisper.

  “Who sent you after me? Who gave the termination order?”

  The diver arched up. His eyes were going in and out of focus. He produced a macabre grin; his gums were bloody.

  “Tell me. Who’s your boss?”

  “Right, yeah.” Smith’s eyelids began to flicker. His eyeballs were rolling up.

  “Smith. Smith!” Bourne slapped him hard across the cheek. “Stay with me.”

  “Right.”

  “Can’t do that until you give me the name of your—”

  A froth of blood bubbled from between Smith’s lips. “You’ll never…” One shuddering breath. More blood. Then everything stopped, most significantly Smith’s heart.

  5

  Marshall Fulmer did not like Sweden—too namby-pamby for him. The Swedes had no backbone, in his not-so-humble opinion. Cowards, all of them. And he liked Kalmar even less than Stockholm, where he could never get his bearings. It wasn’t like a real city, let alone the capital of a country, but perhaps, he reflected during a lull in the meeting, it was just what the Swedes deserved.

  Kalmar was nearest the Baltic States, nearest the western tip of the Russian Federation, which, Fulmer supposed, was why it had been chosen by NATO to hold the Baltic Alliances Conference. As national security advisor, it was incumbent on him to monitor this high-level conference hastily assembled to form a strong and united response to Russia’s increasing bellicosity toward the Baltic States, and to offer support as part of the American contingent that included a four-star general from the Pentagon and a mandarin from the DoD, amusingly masquerading as a military attaché about seven levels below his actual pay grade. Well, that was the way the DoD worked, manifesting mysteries and obfuscations all over the ranch.

  Fulmer, seated between the Pentagon general and the DoD mandarin, kept his own council. He was from Western rancher stock—Montana, to be exact. He continued to maintain his family ranch outside Bozeman, and over summer recess spent his time out there riding, herding cattle, hunting, fly-fishing the stream that ran through the north side of the property, and genuinely unwinding.

  With his leathery skin and wind-crevassed face, Fulmer looked the part. Mounted on a horse, he could have passed for any number of renowned cowboys out of history. And he had built a reputation inside the Beltway of being a bit of a cowboy. Which meant he shot off his mouth almost as often as he shot his collection of sidearms at his gun club range. Out on the Bozeman ranch he was a crack shot with a scoped rifle.

  His colleagues put up with his shenanigans, his media-hogging sound bites primarily, because of the power he had accrued throughout the right corridors in Washington. He was friends with all the right people, all the movers and shakers, left wing as well as right wing. He, better than anyone else, had honed the spectacularly difficult art of walking the political tightrope between parties. He certainly knew how to twist arms when he had to, but he could also charm the pants off just about anyone whose vote he needed.

  Now, as the joint session was about to resume, his mobile buzzed. Not his official office mobile—the other one he switched out twice a month. Removing it from his pocket, he looked down at the screen as he held the phone below the table.

  A time and a local address. He glanced at his watch. The time was twenty minutes from now. He gathered the papers laid out before him, which he’d barely glanced at, and stuffed them into his slim calfskin briefcase, pushed his chair back, and asked the men on either side of him to carry on while he attended to business back in D.C. They nodded their understanding. Both of them had business back in D.C. from time to time. It was business as usual.

  Max, his bodyguard, was at his station just outside the door to the conference room. Naturally enough, he started to dog Fulmer’s tail as Fulmer headed for the private elevator that whisked attendees directly to the floor the conference had taken over.

  “Stay,” Fulmer said, as he punched the down button.

  “But, sir—”

  “This is Sweden, not Syria.”

  The elevator doors slid open, and Fulmer stepped in.

  “Make yourself useful,” he said, dismissing Max. “Go check to see that the Russians haven’t tossed my room or something.”

  Outside the post-modern, anonymous building at which the meeting was being held, he paused to take several deep breaths. The security was duck-ass tight; not a creature was stirring that wasn’t connected via wireless earwig to central station trucks just past the human perimeter. Fulmer ignored them all—they had become such a part of his life he scarcely noticed them.

  By far the worst part of his job was the endless meetings he was obliged to attend, not to mention chair. Meetings were a waste of time, period. They were the sinecure of the indecisive and the weak-minded. And yet, he was more than willing to put up with the constant irritation in order to reap the myriad benefits of his powerful position.

  What would his simple rancher father make of the place his son had carved out for himself in the world’s most potent seat of power? Probably wouldn’t have believed his son until Marshall toured him around his domain. Sadly, that was impossible; Marshall’s parents had died in a barn fire twenty years ago. They’d both rushed into the barn to save their prized horses; neither horses nor his parents had made it out alive. Were their deaths a testament to the high esteem in which they held their horses or to their foolishness? Marshall had never been able to figure that out.

  He waved off his car, set off to the west at a brisk pace. Using the GPS on his burner mobile he made his way to the Baronen Köpcenter, a vast mall near the water. Inside, he checked the directory for Stars and Bars, a sports café on the second floor. He took the escalator up. He saw the open entrance to Stars and Bars right away, but he turned on his heel, heading in the opposite direction. For the next seven or eight minutes, he wandered in and out of shops and storefronts. Inside each, he checked every person who entered after him, looking for individuals who repeated. He saw none.

  Certain that he hadn’t been followed, he retraced his steps, entering the café within thirty seconds of the time sent to him. He prided himself on being a man of promptness—something else his father wouldn’t have recognized in his adult son. On the ranch, chores got done, but no one looked at their watches.

  The young woman sat with a straight back and a certain sense of herself that Fulmer found extremely attractive. She was sitting at a table by herself, sipping at a cup of coffee into which she periodically poured what appeared to be a clear liquid—possibly vodka—from an old-fashioned glass. For long moments, he stood, transfixed, regarding her with curious concentration. Then, as if making up his mind about something, he strode through the crowded café, sat down in the molded plastic chair opposite her.

 
His face creased in a smile. “Bonjour, Françoise.”

  She wrinkled her nose, set her cup down with no little energy. “How many times have I asked you not to mangle my native language,” Françoise Sevigne said.

  “Vous ne voulez pas la façon dont je parle français? Comment provincial!”

  “You’re laughing at me in terrible French!”

  “What of it?” His smile broadened. “Are you so thin-skinned?”

  “You know that I’m not.”

  He nodded. “Indeed, I do.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  He grinned. “Try as I might, I cannot help myself.” He spread his hands. “You French. I can’t help thinking of the Maginot Line: what you considered impregnable the Germans turned to paper.”

  Her expression hardened. “You think this is amusing?”

  “Mademoiselle, that is history. On a more personal front, what we have here is so far from amusing I find I must joke about it in order to keep my mind on an even keel.”

  This response seemed to mollify her—even give her food for thought. Pouring the rest of the liquor into her coffee, she stirred it with a spoon, then pushed the cup across the table to a spot between his two hands. Before she could withdraw, he traced a tiny circle on her forefinger with the tip of his.

  “I think it best our relationship remain professional, Mr. Fulmer.”

  Fulmer’s expression remained placid. “As you wish, Françoise. But I thought the French…” He shrugged. “Never mind.” He raised the cup to his lips and drank it down in one.

  He cleared his throat. “So,” he said in his best congressional hearing voice. “How is your friend?”

  “That one is no one’s friend,” Françoise said shortly. “Especially mine.”

  “Yes, yes. I know all about what he does to little girls.”

  “I don’t think you know the half of it,” she said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be doing business with him.”