The Bourne Initiative By Eric Van Lustbader

The Bourne Initiative By Eric Van Lustbader

Prologue: There is something about a man on his knees, Keyre thought, that stirs my very heart. Keyre, the Somali magus, a Yibir whose lineage stretched back through time to the days of the Ajuran Empire, predating all the subsequent failed sultanates, stood on the hard shingle twelve feet from the soft rumble of the Indian Ocean. He breathed in the salt air, the familiar scents of the sere desert behind him, the sunbaked brick of houses destroyed by bazooka blasts and rocket fire. But all these clean scents were at the moment overwhelmed by the stink of human sweat, excrement, and terror. Ah, but terror is what Keyre fed upon, lapped up like mother’s milk since he was a child of eight, in the aftermath of his first kill. The first taste of blood was always the sharpest, but, for him, the blood didn’t matter as much as it did to his compatriots. But then they weren’t Yibir, weren’t steeped in the Stygian darkness of his family’s ancient sorcery. Their nostrils dilated as the fresh blood flowed from the newly dead. But for Keyre, the blood was an adjunct, as necessary as shooting dead the man who, on his knees, waves the white flag. It’s the white flag, you see, he told himself. The white flag stinks of fear. I want to inhale its scent, savor its taste before I put a match to it and set it afire. Where he stood now, on the shore of Somalia, between the desert of destruction and the Indian Ocean on which he often enough plied his particular brand of terror, he was immersed in the stench of death. Before him thirteen men knelt, backs bowed, heads bowed further. Some stared in stony silence at the shingle on which they knelt, its shifting layers slicing like razor blades into their knees. Others wailed their fear in pitiful ululations. One or two had tear streaks along their dust-caked cheeks. None of them murmured a prayer—further confirmation, if any was needed, of what Keyre already knew.

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