The Bourne Ascendancy

by Robert Ludlum

  “To answer your question,” Aashir said as Bourne drifted back to where he stood, “I’m fine.”

  Bourne eyed him critically. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Listen to me, Yusuf, I don’t want to be left behind.”

  Bourne heard the desperation in his voice, turned to him. “Not likely, considering who your father is.”

  He seemed guarded now, like an animal that’s caught the scent of a predator. “You’re not going to contact my father, tell him where I am.”

  “Why would I do that?” Bourne said softly.

  Aashir’s eyes were very wide, reminding Bourne of some corpses he’d seen, death coming as an astonishment to them.

  “My father has been desperately trying to find me since the day I left. As you may imagine, it hasn’t been easy keeping myself hidden from him and his people.”

  “You did the smart thing,” Bourne said. “You decided to hide in plain sight. He would never think to look for you in Ivan Borz’s cadre.”

  Aashir, seeming not to register the compliment, eyed Bourne critically. “He would pay you a fortune if you gave me up.”

  “I don’t need a fortune,” Bourne said. “Anyway, some things aren’t for sale.”

  Aashir leaned toward him as if the two of them were magnetized. “Truly?”

  Bourne nodded. “Truly, Aashir. Too many people have misused you already.”

  Aashir opened his mouth to say something, but turned away before he could utter a sound, but not before it was clear to Bourne that he had been released from a powerful tension.

  The night was very still. The wind seemed to have nowhere pressing to go. It hung thick and hot like a blanket smothering the city. There was no respite from it.

  “Tell me about him,” Bourne said.

  “My father?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hate the name he’s taken: Mohamed Sefavid.” A tiny smile informed Aashir’s lips. “Mohamed is a name he took as a young man. The name his parents gave him is Sameer, but he despised it.” He exhaled, relaxing a little as he leaned against the warehouse wall. “My memories of him are partial—or, more accurately, he was home only sporadically. When he was home, he was frighteningly strict. I suppose he might have felt guilty about being away so much.”

  “What was he doing when he was away from the family?”

  “What do you think? Being indoctrinated into jihadism, then weapons and explosives training. He claimed he learned from Al Murad”—Aashir shrugged—“but who really knows? My father seems allergic to the truth. Like Al Murad, he cloaks himself in ever thicker layers of myth and legend, which still inspires awe from my people. ‘From awe comes obedience,’ my father used to tell me, so often it made me sick to my stomach.”

  “That’s what he tried on you.”

  Aashir nodded. “When I was very little, he was still around. He told me stories, claimed he was a djinn, that he could spread his arms and fly across the desert wastes. Of course, I begged him to take me with him, what child wouldn’t? ‘You need to grow up a little,’ he told me, and the next morning he was gone.

  “When I was older, of course, I learned the truth. Djinns don’t kill people, but that’s what my father was training to do, honing his skills along with his hate. And death became him. He flourished under its banner. I saw it myself.

  “Many times I followed him, instead of attending classes at my school. I watched him change before my eyes. I listened to the indoctrination, the incessant spewing of hate and prejudice: the Jewish demon, fed, clothed, and armed by the American devil. But beneath all the rhetoric and religious rationale, I sensed the fear. Fear for Islam, fear not of the Israelis or the Americans, but of time. Islam has difficulty adjusting to the modern way of life. Everywhere people like my father look the old ways are being supplanted by the new, each of them a knife in Islam’s belly. This cannot be tolerated, and for these people, the only answer is death to the infidel. But time cannot be killed. It continues to roll inexorably on.”

  Aashir shook his head, as if to rid himself of the past. “Anyway, the more people my father killed the greater his reputation became. And then the moment arrived when he killed those standing in his way.

  “Then he became El Ghadan.”

  51

  They’re still alive,” El Ghadan said. “You didn’t kill them.”

  “I’m not an assassin,” Sara said. “I am not a jihadist. Killing people is not my field of expertise. You have soldiers like Islam for that.”

  El Ghadan’s SUV moved like a shark along Doha’s Corniche. The scimitar of land lay in dark contrast to the glimmering water. It seemed interesting to her that a desert dweller would prefer to be close to the sea.

  El Ghadan plucked his mobile off the seat beside him. “Then I shall call him.”

  Sara knew everything depended on her staying calm and keeping to her plan. “You sent me in as your emissary, to make a determination.”

  “A decision,” he corrected her sternly.

  “A decision is based on absolutes,” she said.

  He held out his hand, thumb up. “Life.” Then flipped it over like a Roman caesar delivering the fate of a gladiator. “Or death.”

  “In this instance there are no absolutes.”

  His lips pursed. “Explain, please.”

  “Soraya Moore is an old confidante of Jason Bourne’s. She has stories to tell, secrets to impart.”

  He grunted. “Bourne’s people—the very few that exist—are utterly loyal. They would never betray him.”

  Sara had been expecting this argument. “You are forgetting Soraya’s daughter. She would do anything to save Sonya’s life.”

  El Ghadan’s face darkened. “Is that what you promised her?”

  “I didn’t promise her anything,” Sara said. “I merely pointed out a possible exchange.”

  “You should not have done that, Ellie.”

  She leaned forward, said to the driver, “Stop the car.”

  El Ghadan waved away her words. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Getting out. I understand now that you and I can never see eye to eye.”

  Even though the vehicle was still rolling, she opened the door. Leaning across her, he slammed it shut.

  She shook her head. “You don’t get it, do you? It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at me.”

  “So it’s not a matter of money.” He shrugged. “What is it, then? A difference in, what? Philosophy?”

  “You devalue life, El Ghadan. Killing someone means nothing to you. And a two-year-old child—it’s unconscionable!”

  “I’ve seen too many children shot, beaten, charred in drone strikes. In Syria, they are shooting pregnant women in the belly.”

  “And you will follow their lead; you’re part of those atrocities.”

  “There are many people who—”

  “I don’t care about the many people, El Ghadan. I care about the woman and child you hold captive.”

  “They have outlived their usefulness. I told you.”

  “And I’m telling you they haven’t. I don’t care about what Bourne has done or what he hasn’t. This is about what this woman can do to save her child.”

  El Ghadan stared straight ahead. “You are trying to distract me.”

  Sara knew she had to pitch her voice just right, to remain neutral, leach all emotion from it, evince the dry dispassion of a bureaucrat. “You deal in information as well as in arms, isn’t that right?”

  “It is.” He said it grudgingly, clearly not liking where this conversation was headed.

  “Then what could be more useful to you than information about the world’s most mysterious human being?”

  She waited several beats, not wanting to oversell her thesis. “Consider, almost nothing is known about Jason Bourne. Now you have a direct conduit and the means to coerce her into divulging everything intimate she knows about Bourne.” Again she paused, longer this time, to allow him to get used to the idea.
“Isn’t that worth a stay of execution for them both?”

  * * *

  Bourne heard the tiny catch in Aashir’s voice. “But your father is not the nub of it, is he?”

  “Well, yes and no.”

  Bourne waited, patient as the desert.

  There was a breeze now. It had sprung up from the east, bringing with it a myriad of scents, most from modern-day Singapore, but a few from the town it had been when Sir Stamford Raffles planted the British flag in 1819 and declared it a perfect gateway port between the East and the West. There was still something of Raffles’s Singapore if you looked hard enough in the right nooks and crannies, but it was fast disappearing under the steel and glass of office towers and glamorous resorts.

  “I had a brother.” When he resumed, Aashir’s voice was barely above a whisper. “He was born to one of my father’s mistresses. He had many, believe me. He needed them, I think—all of them. He doesn’t know how to love.”

  “And your mother?”

  “He had to marry someone, didn’t he?”

  There were a number of threads in Aashir’s voice—bitterness, anger, guilt, as well as a longing to be the recipient of his father’s pride. Bourne was aware of all these, knew he was successfully leading Aashir toward the heart of the complicated knot at his core.

  “I hated her for putting up with it,” the young man continued. “She was weak, which I suppose is why he chose her to marry. He knew she wouldn’t put up a fight. She was wholly traditional. She didn’t have one foot in the modern world like a growing number of Iranian women.”

  “And this child—your half brother.”

  “Him.” Aashir’s voice turned dark. He might have been referring to the devil. “My father loved him from the moment he was born. He lavished all his attention…” He broke off, turned away again, and now a tear appeared at the apex of his cheek. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “Is he still alive?” Bourne said, knowing that Aashir needed to talk about his brother.

  “He was killed when he was eight.” Aashir wiped his cheeks dry as if angry at what he believed was his own weakness. “An American air strike. It killed my brother and his mother, her entire family. My father was devastated. For weeks, he locked himself in his study and would not come out even to eat. My mother was reduced to leaving a tray of food in front of the door three times a day. Sometimes it disappeared, but most often it just lay there until, in a flood of tears, she took it away. I wound up eating most of it so it wouldn’t go to waste.”

  Aashir was breathing hard, as if he had just finished a sprint. Bourne could see he was spent. He put his arm around the young man, turned him, guiding him back into the dimness of the warehouse.

  “It’s past time for both of us to get some rest,” Bourne said.

  * * *

  Sara, waiting for El Ghadan to make his decision, stared out the smoked windows of his SUV, thinking of Soraya and Sonya.

  When she had entered the locked room she had heard Soraya telling her daughter a story about Dinazade, had waited to say something until the story was over. Luckily, Soraya still had the discipline not to look or sound surprised at Sara appearing like one of the mythical creatures in her Persian stories.

  Sara spoke fluent Farsi, as well as Arabic, French, and Hebrew, among three or four others. Soraya greeted her in French. It was clear from her lead that neither Islam nor any of the other jihadist jailors spoke the language.

  “L’histoire de Dinazade m’a tout de suite inspiré.” The story of Dinazade immediately inspired me, she had said to Soraya. Her mind suddenly on fire, she spun out her own plan—desperate, far from a sure thing, but so far as she could determine the only chance her friend and her friend’s daughter had.

  As Soraya was Dinazade, Sara would become her sister, a modern-day Scheherazade; she would spin out tales of Jason that Soraya had supposedly told her. Each day she would bring another mythic bit of information back to El Ghadan. In this way, she hoped to keep Soraya and Sonya alive, giving Jason the time he needed to complete his own plan. Not knowing what it could be was nerve-racking in the extreme, and if she hadn’t been an expert in compartmentalizing, she doubted she would be able to keep her fear at a manageable level. But in spinning King Shahryar ever more fantastical tales Scheherazade forestalled her own death until, after a thousand and one nights and a thousand stories, the king fell in love with her, commuting her sentence.

  Now it was Sara’s turn to spin a yarn for El Ghadan that he would find compelling enough to agree to keep Soraya and her daughter alive. Scheherazade was doubly canny; she made sure she came to a crucial point in her story just as dawn broke, compelling Shahryar to wait for another night to hear the resolution.

  It would be up to her to make El Ghadan agree to such a scheme. She had to try to feed him bits of intelligence about Jason that would interest and intrigue him enough to consent to her arrangement. But even if that happened, she had no idea how long she could keep up the stories. She prayed for a quick and dramatic resolution to Jason’s current predicament. He was the only one who could save them.

  * * *

  “All right,” El Ghadan said, half turned toward her on the SUV’s backseat, “begin, and then I will decide.”

  “No.” Sara knew she had to remain firm with him. If he sensed any weakness at all he would put an immediate end to the conversation. “I need assurance from you that if you are satisfied Soraya and Sonya will live.”

  “For another twenty-four hours.” El Ghadan nodded. “Proceed.”

  “First of all, Jason Bourne isn’t his real name.”

  This news seemed to hit El Ghadan hard. “What is it?”

  “Soraya doesn’t know. I doubt if anyone does.”

  “Someone must.”

  “Possibly, but she hasn’t come across them.” She regarded him. “Shall I go on?”

  He waved a hand at her.

  “Jason Bourne was the name of someone in American military intelligence—a traitor who was shot dead for his crime. When the present Bourne was recruited into Treadstone he was given the name of the dead man.”

  “Why?”

  “You remember Carlos?”

  “The famed terrorist?” El Ghadan grunted. “Who doesn’t?”

  “Bourne’s first mission was to draw Carlos out of hiding and kill him.”

  “And did he? I never could quite make out how Carlos died.”

  “Bourne completed his brief. He was the only one who could have succeeded.”

  El Ghadan’s eyes went out of focus for a moment before his gaze snapped back to her. “I have heard some dreadful things about Treadstone’s indoctrination program. Tell me about that.”

  “It was so far off the books it was illegal. It was shut down.”

  “I require details, Ellie. I need to know what Bourne is capable of.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  For a moment, El Ghadan glowered at her. Then his face broke out into a huge grin. “So this is how it’s going to be.” He waggled a finger at her. “I know what you’re doing. I’m willing to play along, but only so far.” His face darkened. “Am I clear?”

  “Perfectly.”

  The SUV stopped. Without another word, she opened the door and stepped out into the Doha night.

  * * *

  After dropping Camilla off at his safe house, Ohrent went straight to the Kampong Glam district, at the outskirts of which was a small, unprepossessing mosque, among the oldest in Singapore. Its front doors were barred. Undeterred, Ohrent went to a small door near the rear of the left side, unnoticed by most. It was as heavily incised as the wall itself.

  He knocked four times, waited, then knocked twice. At once the door swung open, and he was admitted by a figure, robed and hooded, hidden also by the lack of clear light. Not that the deep gloom was any deterrent to Ohrent; he knew the way with his eyes closed.

  Removing his shoes, he dipped his hands in the earthenware bowl set into a niche. The hooded figure handed him a
thin towel with which to dry his hands, then the figure vanished.

  Ohrent proceeded down a short hallway that ran along the left side of the central chamber itself. Glancing in, he could make out perhaps a half dozen worshippers, foreheads pressed to their prayer rugs.

  Shortly thereafter, he turned right. He was now behind the central chamber. The air was filled with murmured prayers. He entered the second chamber on his left. Two lamps on either side of a narrow bed were blazing. A man on a stool sat at a narrow wooden table. A portable jeweler’s lamp, complete with magnifier, lit up a small rectangle within which the man’s expert hands were working. He was slim and tall, his shoulders stooped.

  At Ohrent’s entrance, he turned around.

  “Hello, Kettle,” Ohrent said. “Settling in well?”

  52

  If there was one thing Camilla had learned since agreeing to take on the Black Queen brief it was not to trust anyone. She hadn’t needed Hunter to tell her that—especially Hunter, for whom her feelings were multiple and confused. And even though she liked Ohrent, recent experience had forced her to question whether she could trust him.

  Immediately after he left her, she took out her mobile, sent an email with the two attachments to the phone she had bought earlier in the day, then forwarded the email from the new mobile to POTUS’s private mobile number.

  A moment later, she slipped out of the safe house, following Ohrent back into the byways of Singapore, shadowing him like a remora sticks to a shark. Along the way, she dropped the new mobile into a trash bin. She had no idea where she was going, or why—she only knew that for her own peace of mind she had to find out whether or not he was telling her the truth.