The Bourne Initiative

by Robert Ludlum

  This is what had happened to the Angelmaker. Whether her adolescent torture at the hands of Keyre made her more susceptible to sensory deprivation or it was due to a quirk in her personality was at the moment irrelevant: she had succumbed; her mind had detached itself from her body.

  “Your clothes,” he said with some urgency. “Mala, where are your clothes?”

  He took hold of her jaw, pulled her head so that she was looking directly at him. Her eyes looked like those of a junkie—the pupils pinpoints, despite the bright light. They wandered over his face as if tracing a route on a map. But she didn’t answer.

  “Mala. Mala.” He leaned in, pressed his lips to hers. They were cold, trembling slightly, as if being affected by electric currents under her skin.

  Jason.

  He felt her “speak” his name through vibrations transferred from her mouth to his, and took his lips away from hers. Her eyes focused on him.

  “In the locker, there,” she whispered hoarsely.

  She pointed, and Bourne left her momentarily, though her torso was still rocking a little, as if she were someone who had been at sea a very long time.

  He returned with her clothes, helped her into them. Then he toweled off and climbed into his.

  “Can you stand?” He had helped her into her trousers while she was sitting down. He extended a hand, but she shoved him away.

  “Cut it out.”

  He stood back, checking the door he had come through every few seconds, while she struggled to stand. He could see that her knees were rubbery, but she was as strong of will as she was of body, and soon enough she was up, stalking back and forth beside the tank, her strength flooding back with each stride.

  “Ready?” he said, and when she nodded, he led her to the door that gave out onto the short corridor to The Drowning Pool.

  This third room was smaller than the others. On one side, an array of standing heat lamps were lined up like birds with bulbous beaks, all directed at one spot. Filling a sweat- and bloodstained wooden butcher’s table directly below them were a series of clamps, graduated from small to large, lines of files, scalpels, and a grouping of what appeared to be dental instruments, gleaming in the light from the ceiling overheads. On the other side, an industrial-size stainless-steel sink stuck out from the wall like the snout of an enormous hog. Beside it, a hose that could be attached to the sink’s spigot, a galvanized metal trough, a number of cotton cloths through which the water was poured onto the client’s face, and a table on which the client—in this case General MacQuerrie—was strapped.

  “He’s been the gamut,” the Angelmaker said. Her voice was steadier now, sounding more like herself.

  “The Whole Nine Yards.”

  “What?”

  “That’s how it’s known here,” Bourne told her. “The Whole Nine Yards.”

  “Lovely.” She frowned. “What state is he in?”

  Having stepped beside the table, he bent over it slightly so he could look directly into MacQuerrie’s eyes. They were open wide, terror having taken up residence behind them. He was strapped down as if he were a mental patient prone to violent outbursts. Glancing up, Bourne signaled to the Angelmaker to keep guard on the door they had slipped through.

  “General?” Bourne raised his voice slightly. “General! Can you hear me?”

  MacQuerrie’s eyes focused on Bourne, but his lips did not move. They were bluish as if he was chilled to the bone. He was wearing a sweat-stained undershirt and trousers. His hands and feet were bare, blue-white, utterly still.

  “General, I’m not part of the NSA group. I’m not here to hurt you. Do you understand me?”

  No response.

  Bourne unstrapped him. “Do you understand me, General?”

  After a long moment, MacQuerrie’s lips moved. “Who?” It was thin, barely a whisper.

  “Who am I?”

  The general blinked. “Yes.”

  “Let me put it this way,” Bourne said, slowly and carefully. “I’m intimately connected to what you call the Bourne Initiative, though, oddly, I don’t know why or how.”

  The general licked his lips. “They tried to break me.”

  “What did they want from you?”

  “I don’t think they know. It’s possible they didn’t even care.” He took a breath, blew it out his nostrils. “I’m a traitor.”

  “In their eyes.”

  “In here, that’s all that matters.” He grimaced as a deep shiver went through him. He coughed deep in his chest. “I would be grateful now to sit up.”

  Grasping him by one hand, placing his other behind his back, Bourne levered him into a sitting position.

  “What’s that smell? Never mind, it’s me.”

  “We have very little time,” Bourne said. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”

  “Not even easily said,” the general said. He squinted, seeming in no hurry to go anywhere. “You’re not Bourne, are you?”

  “I told you as much as I can,” Bourne countered. “I need you to tell me what the Bourne Initiative is, really.”

  MacQuerrie was still squinting at Bourne. His cough rattled his chest; he turned his head, spat blood onto the floor. “I’ve been under duress for…I’ve lost all track of time. How do I know this isn’t all a part of the…that I’m not still under duress?”

  Bourne stripped off his shirt, showing the general his wounds; the bruises he’d gotten during his fight with Boxer were just blossoming. “I’ve expended a lot of time and effort—not to mention pain—to get to you, General.”

  MacQuerrie grunted, nodded. “Point taken.” He flicked his hand out, stared at the fingers trembling in midair, closed his eyes for a moment. “The Bourne Initiative is a weaponized cyber program started by Bourne’s—or should I say your—good friend, the late General Boris Karpov, of the Russian FSB, to penetrate our defenses and winkle out the president’s nuclear codes. Are you seriously telling me you don’t know anything about that?”

  “More than that, I can tell you categorically that Boris would never be party to such a program.”

  MacQuerrie lifted one eyebrow. “Really?”

  “So either that’s not the true nature of the Initiative, or you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I always know what I’m talking about.” He grunted again, but this time he expelled a gout of blood. “Ugh, what the hell?”

  Bourne laid the general back down, palpated the areas over his vital organs. MacQuerrie screamed.

  “What is it?” the Angelmaker asked. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “What isn’t?” Bourne looked down at MacQuerrie. “No point in sugar-coating it, General. Liver, kidneys. As a result there’s massive internal bleeding.” He bent lower. “Tell me what you know.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You always know what you’re talking about, General. You’re not a liar, are you?”

  “Jason, I hear footsteps,” the Angelmaker said from her position by the door.

  “Turn on the heat lamps,” Bourne ordered.

  “What?”

  “Just do it, Mala. And take your SIM card out of your mobile.”

  She switched the heat lamps on, and immediately the temperature in the room increased.

  “These things could roast the skin right off you,” the Angelmaker said, palming her SIM card.

  “What they’re there for,” the general said with an infinite weariness. He’d taken the Whole Nine Yards and was about to pay the ultimate price.

  Bourne’s eyes locked with MacQuerrie’s. “Spill it. Now.”

  “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. The Initiative is indeed a cyber program—a DDOS malware.”

  “Okay. We’ve already experienced a handful of distributed denial-of-service attacks. They’ve brought the Internet to its knees, like a power grid outage. Malware infects and then directs a huge number of DVRs, security cameras, Internet-connected cars and cameras—anything and everything that is an Internet-of-everyt
hing device—to create a worldwide botnet, a cyber-creature with one mind, which sends massive amounts of queries to any number of websites, crashing them.”

  “Right. But this one is as different from the botnets we’ve seen as VR is from the old Asteroids video game. It will slice right through the correctives like a knife through warm butter.”

  “What’s the target?”

  “You know your old friend, Bourne. He wasn’t a political animal, not at all. In fact, he hated the Sovereign and all he stood for. No, this malware is meant to crash the sites of the world’s biggest banks.”

  “Money,” Bourne breathed.

  “Yes, money. Of course money. Transferred out while the sites are frozen through a program piggybacked onto the malware.”

  It sounded right. Just like Boris. And yet, he had the sense there was something MacQuerrie wasn’t telling him, or, more likely, didn’t know. That also would be like Boris. “And you know this how?”

  MacQuerrie tried to laugh, but another gout of blood was all he could bring up. Through lips stained red, he said, “Your pal Boris and I were partners.”

  With a deep-felt groan, he turned on his side. His face was deathly pale. His extremities seemed already devoid of blood. “Beautiful plan, Bourne, magnificent.” He hawked up more blood, and something else that was black and viscid. “Problem is…someone hijacked the program, shortly after Boris was killed.”

  “Who?”

  MacQuerrie shook his head once, then grew very still.

  “General, who hijacked the malware program?”

  “There’s a third partner, a friend of Boris’s.” He gasped. “I never met him.”

  “Who?” Bourne leaned closer. “Who is he?”

  “I went on Boris’s word.”

  “General…”

  MacQuerrie’s eyes seemed to be dissolving in water; they had lost almost all the luster of the living. “His name is Dima.” He gasped again, and fingers of one hand curled, as if grasping for something unseen. “Dima Vladimirovich Orlov.”

  Bourne glanced briefly at Mala. “I don’t know of him. Do you?”

  After a moment, she nodded, her face pale and waxen.

  “Problem is…” MacQuerrie gave an animal grunt that brought Bourne’s attention back to him. “The trouble is that Dima Orlov is free to use the program to attack anything he wants. Get me, Bourne? Any fucking thing. And there’s something else…”

  “General…”

  But MacQuerrie was done, and, in any event, the Angelmaker said, “Here they come.” She shot Bourne a glance. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but we’re never making it out of here.”

  28

  I’m not hungry,” Morgana said when she met Françoise for dinner. “This evening I’d rather walk.”

  The storm that had gripped Kalmar earlier had spent itself inland, leaving the sky clear and the air cool and refreshed. It was, in fact, the perfect evening for a long walk. Also, a long talk, which was Morgana’s purpose in skipping dinner. She was far too nervous to sit still, let alone to eat a meal. There was a lump in her throat no amount of self-calming could clear. Her biggest worry was how her friend would take the news that she had been taken in, as Morgana herself had been, by the falsely named Larry London. She knew Françoise well enough to understand that she prided herself in her friends—they were, to a person, immaculately curated, trusted, and prized.

  For a time, they strolled along the waterfront, until Morgana’s nose was so filled with the stench of fish she felt her gorge rising. Everyone she passed looked strange, slightly off-kilter, vaguely sinister, even the two boys who snickered, seemed to eye her with evil intent as they kicked a soccer ball around. Shadows appeared to leap out at her from the narrow spaces between buildings. Doorways looked smashed down, windows crooked. The noises of the city, usually soft and gentle compared to D.C. or New York, threatened to overwhelm her.

  As she turned them inland, Françoise broke the silence between them. “You look troubled. Is anything the matter? Is it the usual? Are you missing home again?”

  “No, it’s not the usual, though I am missing home, more than ever.” Morgana replied so slowly it seemed every word was being pulled out of her.

  Françoise took her hand. “Then what is it?” She halted them, so they could face each other. “Come on, you know you can tell me anything, right?”

  “Right,” Morgana said, though without much conviction.

  Françoise smiled. “So come on, then. Let’s hear it. I mean, how bad can it be?”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t ask that,” Morgana said with a brittle laugh that ended abruptly. She stared into her friend’s eyes. “I’ve found out something about Larry.”

  “What? He’s fucking around, yes? While he should be working. It’s okay, Larry’s kind of ADHD, he’s on and off everything all the time. It doesn’t mean—”

  “Stop,” Morgana said, jerking her hand away. “Just stop, okay?”

  Françoise nodded, frowning deeply. “Okay. What then? I’m listening.”

  “Françoise, Larry London isn’t Larry London.”

  A look of disbelief crossed Françoise’s face. She laughed and shook her head. “What? I’m not following.”

  “Larry London isn’t his real name.”

  Françoise’s eyebrows rose. “No? What is it, then?”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know.”

  “Then how—?”

  “He’s a Russian spy.”

  Françoise’s laughter rang out. “Oh, come on! That’s ridiculous. Our Larry?”

  “He isn’t our anything, Françoise. He’s not at all what he makes himself out to be.”

  “Really?” Françoise’s tone turned skeptical. “Okay, then, show me the proof.”

  Now it all spilled out: the Internet flash-carrier band that had delivered a four-packet message to Larry—“or whoever the hell his real name is”—the fourth packet Morgana had managed to translate. She took a sheet of paper from her handbag, unfolded it carefully, handed it to her friend. Françoise scanned a hard copy of the message, reading it over and over. Then Morgana pointed to the line in the top in very small print that showed the message came from Unit 309 of spetsnaz.

  “I don’t know about you,” Morgana concluded, “but I had to look up that word: spetsnaz. It’s the ‘special action’ division of the Russian state police.” She shuddered. “I’ve been marked, Françoise—as have you, I surmise.”

  Françoise found a stoop and sat down heavily, her eyes glued to the message fragment. “Calm down,” she said, as if by rote.

  “Calm down?” Morgana’s hands flailed the air. “Françoise, this whole thing…I mean, my God, I’m working for the fucking Russians.”

  “Wow, I…” Françoise ran a hand through her hair. “Okay, well, let’s think this through.”

  Morgana bent over her. “Hey, there’s nothing to think through. I’m already guilty of treason. I want out, Françoise. Now. Tonight. Get me the fuck out of Dodge.”

  “And leave me here to deal with this clusterfuck myself?” Françoise looked up. “Thank you very much.”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “Well, that’s what I meant when I said let’s think this through. Give me that much credit at least. I mean, I’m as shocked as you are. More, really. I’ve known Larry a long time. Christ, what a nightmare. What was he hoping to get from me?”

  “Besides me, you mean?”

  “We met years ago. He couldn’t have known—”

  “What? We were already friends,” Morgana said. “D’you honestly think your meeting was accidental? D’you really think you weren’t vetted in every detail of your life—including your friends, associates and clients—before he made contact?”

  “Oh, my God.” Françoise put a hand over her mouth.

  “I know, right?”

  “How could I have been so blind?” Françoise crumpled the sheet of paper in her fist. “I should’ve seen…”

  “How
could you?” Morgana sat down beside her friend, enfolded her hand, and Françoise began to cry. “No one could have seen it. It was just a fluke—a lucky break—that I stumbled on that fragment.”

  “Morgana, what would I have done without you?” She wiped her eyes. “We’ve got to sort this out.”

  “What? No. This guy’s a professional spy. Françoise, he’s been ordered to kill me.”

  “Not until you’re done decoding the cyber weapon.”

  Morgana reared back. “What the hell are you saying?”

  Françoise looked down.

  “What is it?”

  Heaving a sigh, Françoise’s eyes met hers. “I can’t just cut and run. Larry knows too much about me. I have to figure out a way to—”

  Morgana’s eyes opened wide. “A way to what?”

  Françoise shuddered. “You know.”

  Morgana uttered an incredulous bark. “Are you for real?”

  Françoise’s eyes were imploring. “Morgana, I can’t do it on my own.”

  “You must be out of your mind.”

  “I wish I were, I really do.” She squeezed Morgana’s hand tight. “But I’m not.” Her expression was intense. “Please, Morgana. Help me. Please, please, please.”

  “Jesus God.”

  Morgana weighed her intense desire to get as far away from Larry London as she could, as quickly as she could, against her obligation to her friend. It was Françoise who got her out of the NSA’s clutches; without her, she would still be in a locked room somewhere in D.C. Françoise had saved her life. She owed her friend big time for that.

  “All right,” she said at length. She had committed herself, though not without a deep sense of misgiving. “Let’s see what we can come up with.”

  29

  Quickly, now!” Bourne gestured. “Your mobile. Drop it under the heat lamps.”

  A smile of understanding lit up her face. She dug the phone out, set it down in the center of the circles of heat, drawing her hand back quickly.

  “I never liked that phone much, anyway,” she said as she followed Bourne out of The Drowning Pool, through the door opposite the one through which they had entered.