“My goodness,” she said, turning slowly in a circle, “this could use a woman’s touch.”
Frankie flushed. “Sorry. But, well, my job gives me no spare time.”
“Except for the shooting range.”
“Huh. That’s part of my job.” He stepped toward her. “Here, let me take your coat.”
It was the first time she felt his hands on her. They trembled just a bit right before she let her coat fall into his waiting arms.
“And what about weekends?”
He shrugged. “Weekends I treat myself to a big Waffle House breakfast after I hit the shooting range.”
Waffle House, she thought pityingly. That’s his big treat.
He watched, mouth half open, while she unzipped her dress. It slid down and pooled around her ankles. Very carefully, she stepped out of it; she did not take her high heels off. Men liked their women in high heels, especially with nothing else on.
He seemed to have stopped breathing. Then, as she walked him backward into the bedroom, his breath started to come in little wheezes, like he had asthma. When the backs of his knees pressed against the bed, she shoved him down, climbed on top of him.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” he said thickly.
“Shut up.” She put her lips over his, her breasts pressed against his fluttering chest.
She undid his belt and trousers because his hands were trembling too badly, but when they touched her bare flesh they were terribly gentle, terribly romantic, if hands could be said to move in a romantic fashion, so that she felt some inner cog slip in the machinery of her plan, just for a moment, she felt the dissonance, the potential for change, and then it was back in place and everything was as it had been.
The act was purely physical for her, but not for him. And like the best escort she made it real for him, made him believe what he wanted to believe, helping him wish it into existence. There was an eruption of violent motion, of sweat and intimate moisture, and then it was over. It ended abruptly, and more than a little sadly. But then these things always did, she had found.
She had once seen a film of a cheetah running down a baby Thomson’s gazelle while its mother hightailed it. The cheetah had used every last ounce of energy to reach the small gazelle, grab it by the throat, and kill it. For a long time, it crouched above its fallen prey, watching for larger predators, chest heaving mightily until it slowly brought its breath back into itself.
This is how Frankie seemed to her now, his chest rising and falling just as if he had run a great distance. She was still on top of him, thighs spread, hands gripping his shoulders.
“My God, that was good.” She looked him right in the eye when she said this, which was the only way to lie successfully. She had learned that particular lesson a long time ago.
“Wow,” he replied. “Just wow.”
She laughed her soft, silken laugh, and, putting her lips against his ear, she told him how she had felt when he did that to her, and that, and that. She felt him stir beneath her.
“Frankie,” she said.
He stroked the base of her spine. “Mmm?”
“I want to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
“I want to tell you what I do.”
“But I thought we—”
She pressed a finger against his lips. “I’m trusting you, yeah? I need to. I’ve got no one else.”
He stared up at her, as mesmerized as he had been at dinner, but for a different reason. Then again, maybe not.
So she told him about Meme LLC, about what they did there, and, saving it for last, about Mac giving her the impossible task of deciphering and intercepting what had come to be called the Bourne Initiative.
“I never heard of the Bourne Initiative,” he said. “You sure that’s what it’s called?”
“Of course I’m sure, and here’s why: Mac claimed he didn’t send a Dreadnaught field unit to terminate Bourne.”
“Well, I know the Russians have a kill team in place.”
“That’s what Mac said.”
“Right.”
“I don’t believe it. I need Bourne. I want you to help me find him.”
“Wow.” He lifted her up, moved her aside, rolled to the edge of the bed. He stood up, looked back at her. “As usual, the general was right.”
“What?” She experienced the sudden onset of free fall. “What did you say?”
His demeanor had altered radically. The dazzling marquee lights had shut down; the carnival of pink flesh and innocence had left town. His smile was a little sad, but mostly pitying. And that pity—now it was he who was pitying her—was in the instant possibly the hardest outcome of this failure for her to endure.
“You know what a honey trap is, I take it?”
His eyes were alight with a dark and sinister energy. But at the moment she was too shocked to feel fear.
Jesus Christ, she thought.
She wanted to say something, anything, but her tongue seemed glued to the roof of her mouth. She could not move or breathe. An unbearable weight pressed down on her, forcing the air out of her lungs.
What the fuck is happening? She knew; of course she knew. But her brain refused to process the information.
Her consciousness, lifting out of her body, flew far away. Once, when she was a teenager, her father had taken her hunting up in the Yukon. They had gone hunting for what? Deer, elk? She couldn’t for the life of her remember now. It was snowing when they’d come upon the wolf. Its left forepaw was stuck in one of those awful steel traps. It turned, looked at them with eyes that she could swear spoke to her. Then it put its head down and started to gnaw at the trapped leg just above the steel jaws. “Oh, hell,” her father had muttered just before he shot the wolf dead.
Lieutenant Goode opened the shallow drawer on his bedside table, took out a pair of real handcuffs. There was a pistol in there, too—a 9mm Glock—which he expertly slid out of its stiff leather holster. Both gestures carried grave portent.
“You’re a bad girl, Morgana. Very bad.” He pointed the Glock vaguely in her direction. “So this is where you find yourself. I’m the honey, this here’s the trap, and there’s no fucking way you’re getting out of it.”
12
It was men, not machine-gun fire that came down out of the dawn. The helo disgorged four men, jumping out of the open bay as the helo hovered over the rocky slope. To a man, they tumbled, unable to hold their initial balance, but soon enough they were up and bounding like mountain goats across the rocks, heading straight for Bourne and Mala.
“At last,” he said. “Spetsnaz has arrived.”
But that wasn’t all. Three figures emerged from out of the dust of the rockslide as it began to settle. The Dreadnaughts weren’t buried; they were very much alive, and like a nest of wasps that had been swatted they were mad as hell.
“We have no choice now,” Mala said. “We have to fight them.” She looked from one group to the other. “But we’re just where we shouldn’t be, caught between them.”
Bourne squeezed off one shot at the spetsnaz unit.
“That was a lousy shot,” Mala muttered.
Turning, Bourne squeezed off a shot at the advancing Dreadnaughts.
“Missed again,” Mala grumbled. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
Grabbing her, Bourne crab-walked, picking his way through the spaces between the rocks, moving as quickly as he could out of the line of fire that had just started up between both sides.
And then Mala shut up, because she understood at last what he had meant to do all along. Following his lead, she slid on her backside, careful not to dislodge any loose rocks, making her way by staying completely in his shadow as he advanced along the cliff. The newly risen sun, tearing open a fiery rent in the pinkish dawn sky, was directly ahead of them. Behind them the two warring groups increased their combative fire.
Far enough away from the fray, Bourne slowed them, then halted altogether. They remained flat on their backs,
staring up at wisps of cloud reflecting on their undersides the tender colors of the new day, while fusillades of submachine gun fire ripped apart the tortured soughing of the wind.
They lay in a little hollow, completely blind to the action, using their ears in a vain attempt to follow the battle. Beside him, Bourne felt Mala’s muscles twitching spasmodically and knew she was itching to bang some heads together—American or Russian, it made no difference to her. Her nostrils flared to the scent of fresh blood. Hearing the moans of the dying, Bourne sensed it was all she could do not to leap up and join the killing.
She started when his fingers wrapped around her wrist, and she turned her head. A sorority of disparate emotions darkened her eyes to midnight-blue. Rage, frustration, and, yes, love swirled in those eyes. Her lips were half open, as if she were about to reveal something terribly intimate, but if so, it never emerged.
Silence. The sea wind regained sovereignty. The gunfire had ceased as abruptly as it had begun; the calling of the gulls resumed, tentatively at first, then, as a sense of normalcy returned, the morning righting itself, the cries became more plaintive as the gulls appeared over the crown of the rock face.
Just above where they lay, the crest of the cliff began a downward sweep, leading to the lowest ridge to the east. Bourne felt the waves of restlessness in Mala and, turning to her, mouthed, Wait.
Why?
Listen. Just listen.
Both were stilled, then, as if they were among the corpses littering the rocks to the west. Their eyes were turned in that direction, as well, which is why they didn’t see the lone survivor of the crossfire, a spetsnaz assassin, who had circled around to come at them from the east. He held a knife in one hand, his other weapons having emptied themselves during the withering firefight. He was big, muscular, bald of pate, animalistic of eye.
Baring his teeth, he leapt onto Bourne, drove the knife toward him. He meant to rip open his neck, but at the last instant Bourne twisted enough to change the strike point to his shoulder. Mala whipped up and around, one arm swinging wide to catch the Russian on the chin. This was a Special Forces member, hard-trained, wet-trained, with neither conscience nor room for remorse. He withdrew the knife blade, slashed it across Mala’s chest, biting through the scarred skin, into the flat muscles between the hollow of her neck and the sharp rise of her breasts.
In the first few seconds, that seemed to be a mistake. The attack allowed Bourne the time to slam the edge of his hand into the side of the Russian’s neck. The strike should have temporarily paralyzed him, but he only grinned—more a grimace, a hard surface, revealing nothing, reflecting everything.
As swiftly as the rock-fall avalanche, he crashed against Bourne, driving him backward. Sharp rocks bit into Bourne’s back. Using the point of his knife, the Russian opened the shoulder wound he had inflicted, twisting the blade, until Bourne, lips drawn back in a silent snarl of pain, wrapped his hand around it, the edge scoring a line of blood in his palm as he wrenched the blade out of the muscles of his shoulder.
The Russian jammed the heel of his hand against Bourne’s chin, pushing his head back until Bourne was effectively blind to what he was doing. Twisting Bourne’s hand back on itself he created a fulcrum of pain in Bourne’s wrist so acute that Bourne should have been forced to let go of the blade. Instead, Bourne used his free hand to pinch the Russian’s carotid artery, temporarily cutting off blood flow to his brain. The Russian grunted and, in that instant, Bourne took charge of the knife blade, pushed the point into the Russian’s face.
The point struck the ridge bone just below the Russian’s left eye. Because of the upward angle, it slipped off the bone, tore through skin and flesh, burying itself in his eye. He gave out with a bellow, jerking back, giving Bourne full control of the knife, which he pushed in deeper, past the eye, into the Russian’s brain.
—
Françoise awoke, as she always did, in a strange kind of purgatory, neither here nor there, but elsewhere. Possibly she hadn’t slept at all, although there were intimations of the Swedish dawn sidling through the drapes. In the bathroom, she knelt as if to pray, and vomited up the memory of her abominable meeting with her half brother, Gora.
Françoise, with her face drowned beneath the cold water flow from the sink, heard the opening bars of “Bad Habits” by the Last Shadow Puppets from her mobile’s speaker. It was a special ringtone she had edited and installed for only one person, and she lifted her head, crossed the hotel room without toweling off, snatched up her phone from the bedside table. Because of her insistence on dinner at Aifur Song, on squeezing out whatever amount of experience she could from this excuse of a city, she had had her guts mangled. Oh, well, she thought. It’s part of the price of doing business.
“Auntie,” Morgana said into her ear, by which code word she knew Morgana was in trouble.
She sat on the edge of the bed, back as ramrod straight as a sentry’s, and said slowly and precisely, “What flavor of trouble are you in?”
“Licorice.” The worst.
They both hated licorice.
“Where are you?” Knowing the severity of the trouble, there was no point in asking Morgana details.
“NSA HQ. Under armed guard. They allowed me one call, and I—”
“Stop.” Françoise knew she needed to get off the line before NSA had a chance to realize they couldn’t trace the call and started in on Morgana. That wouldn’t do at all.
“I’ll take care of it,” she said, and broke the connection. Immediately, she opened her mobile, removed the SIM card, crushed it with the high, sharp heel of a shoe. Just in case. After inserting a brand new SIM card, she pressed a speed dial key.
There was hollowness on the line, along with a number of clicks like insects or electronics communicating with one another.
“Yes,” the male voice said.
“It’s happened,” Françoise said. “It worked. Just as I predicted.”
“That is gratifying news,” Marshall Fulmer, the national security advisor, said, as if he had just heard the local weather report. “Where are they holding her?”
Françoise told him.
“I’m more than halfway back to D.C.,” he said. “I’ll make a call freezing everything in place.”
“She’s my friend. I don’t want her harmed in any way.”
“I promised you that she wouldn’t be. Just keep her out of my hair, okay?”
“No problem there.”
“You still sound nervous. Have faith, my dear.”
“In an American national security advisor?”
He laughed at that. “I like you. I really do. You have what we call true grit back in the old country.” He chuckled again. “Sit tight. She’ll be with you shortly.”
Françoise tossed the phone onto the bed, crawled between the sheets, and slept like a baby until Justin Farreng knocked on her door with the breakfast he had had delivered to his room two floors above.
She opened the door nude.
“Good morning.” He looked her up and down appreciatively. “What would’ve happened if I’d been housekeeping or the night manager?”
“They would’ve had a helluva story to tell.” She let him into the room, closed the door behind him.
He set the tray down on a table.
“Coffee first,” she said. “Black.” As he filled cups from the silver carafe she regarded him from beneath hooded eyes. He was not a bad-looking fellow, smart, funny at times, slightly crazy, like all the best people. And his lovemaking was more than adequate. It was a minor wonder to her that she felt nothing at all for him. He might just as well have been a slab of raw meat hanging in a butcher’s locker.
He smiled at her when he handed her the coffee, and she smiled back, even while her mind was elsewhere—with Morgana. Had Fulmer arrived in D.C. yet? Had he freed her, set her on a plane to Stockholm? Was she on her way here? Now that she was awake, the caffeine kicking in, she felt on edge, in an entirely different way than last night, waiting for Mo
rgana’s call, which, she had had to admit to herself, might not come.
“Toast?” Farreng asked, holding up a freshly buttered triangle of whole grain.
“Revelations?” Françoise replied, holding out the thumb drive Fulmer had given her.
“So soon?” Farreng’s eyebrows lifted as they made the exchange. “How good?”
“It will give even you pause,” she said, dunking her toast into the coffee, then ripping off a bite between her even, white teeth. She had inserted the drive into her laptop’s USB port, using the security code Fulmer had made her memorize, the moment she had returned to her room and before she dressed for dinner. The files therein were real eye-openers, especially the ones pertaining to General MacQuerrie. Good Lord, what these people get up to, she had thought while showering off the day’s sweat and sticky particulates. Everything online, buried in servers protected by layers of firewalls and malware busters, and yet vulnerable to attacks so sophisticated the cyber weapons morphed exponentially every week, if not daily. Nothing’s safe anymore, she thought, unless it’s a hard copy locked away in a vault buried in the concrete foundation of a massive office building. And even then… Back to the future, right?
“Is that so?” He grinned, tumbling the drive between his fingers like a prestidigitator. “I’ll be eager to see what your sources have unearthed this time.”
“Make sure you’re sitting down when you do.”
His eyebrows rose again. Don’t do that, she thought. It makes you look like a clown.
“It’s not like you to oversell your product, Françoise.”
“That’s right.” She bent, taking another slice of toast. “And this time alert me before it goes live. I want a front row seat at the freaking firestorm.”
—
Mala hauled the Russian off Bourne, unwrapped Bourne’s fingers from the knife. “Shit,” she said, staring at his bloodred palm, “I can see clear to the bone.” She looked at him. “Does it hurt?”