The Bourne Ascendancy

by Robert Ludlum

  “Don’t editorialize.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The question is whether you’re simply lazy or whether you’re nuts.”

  “I might be both, Director,” Blum said with no little sheepishness. “But I also put my life on the line redoubling on Khalifa. He was one tricky bastard.”

  “Even so,” Yadin said, “the jury’s still out on you, Blum. Just do as I tell you. I informed Rebeka that I was going to extract her, but that was just to scare the pants off her.”

  “If that’s even possible,” Blum said, glancing her way.

  “Well, you’re right there. She’s fearless. But that’s sometimes to her detriment, which is why I’m assigning you to protect her.”

  “What?”

  “You looked out for yourself pretty well in a difficult situation, Blum. You’re to help her any way you can. You’re to guard her with your life. If she dies on your watch, Blum, no matter the circumstances, I will stake you out in the desert, no joke. Are we clear?”

  “I understand, Director.”

  “I hope to God you do. Now, put her back on the line.”

  The moment Blum handed her the mobile, she said, “I believe the recent events have given us an extraordinary opportunity here in Doha.”

  “How d’you mean?” Yadin said tersely.

  Then she told him, step by step, detail by detail, with the particular brilliance no other field agent could hope to duplicate.

  Five hours later, the doctor’s printer chattered to life again.

  * * *

  Lifting off, the C-17 swung over the city in a northeasterly direction. Bourne, peering out the Perspex window, watched the long lines of people, carts, and rattletrap vehicles heading out of Damascus, out of Syria, out of the war, for refugee camps in other countries, including, ironically enough, Iraq. He heard Faraj give the pilot a sharp order, and the plane banked slowly, for the moment heading due east.

  Then Faraj clambered out of his seat, crouched beside Bourne. “Listen, Yusuf, my friend, I just got word of something and I want you to see it. I want you to see what is really happening in your poor country.”

  On Faraj’s orders, the pilot took the C-17 lower still, until houses rose up before them. People looked like no more than ants scurrying over the ground, away from a fierce rocket barrage. Oddly, the impacts sounded soft, almost muffled. What kind of ordnance, Bourne wondered, was in the payloads?

  It wasn’t long before he got his answer. Swirling clouds of dust arose from the strikes, rolling along the streets and byways of the suburb of Ghouta, where men, women, and children ran screaming, stumbled and fell, clawing at their faces, gasping for breath, convulsing as the dust clouds converged, swirled over them, undulating like some many-headed serpent.

  The serpent devoured the men, the women running with their arms thrown around the narrow, bony shoulders of their sons and daughters. A pregnant woman fell behind, then fell permanently, crying out, clutching her belly. People stumbled over her, in their desperation to escape trampling those who had already succumbed. But there was no escape; the invisible serpent, borne by the winds, traveled faster than they could.

  As the plane swung around to the north again, away from the horrific effects of the barrage, Faraj said, “This is your army at work, Yusuf, the so-called defenders of Syria. Not content with bombing their populace, they are employing sarin gas, a weapon of mass destruction.”

  Bourne checked himself from grabbing a parachute and jumping out of the C-17, but what could he do against the army’s attack? So he sat and watched, helpless and in turmoil, as the plane banked away, leaving the grim massacre behind.

  “This is what we have to deal with, Yusuf,” Faraj said. “Every day another atrocity. And not just here—Yemen, Iraq, Iran, the list goes on and on.” His hand gripped Bourne’s shoulder. “Which is why we will do what we can, in every way we can, to bring Allah’s will to Muslims everywhere.”

  “You said we were headed home,” Bourne said.

  “Home. My friend, people like us, we have no home. We are ejected from one place to another. We are pariahs, forced out of the places of our birth, always on the run, squeezed into the margins of society.”

  “But you have a plan.”

  A dark glint came to Faraj’s eyes. “A plan, yes. Years in the making, now about to come to fruition. I won’t lie to you, Yusuf, it is a daring plan, a plan only people kicked to the curb, people with nothing to lose, could imagine, let alone execute.

  “But we have, my friend, and we will. We will execute this plan. Our time has arrived. The Great Satan has sung his siren song.”

  * * *

  It was almost two thousand miles due east from Damascus to Waziristan. The C-17, not the fastest plane, rumbled along through a cloud-filled sky. Bourne was still brooding over what he had been witness to. He had seen many atrocities in his time—and no doubt more that he could not remember—but this one stood out as the most heinous. Chemical warfare had been internationally outlawed for a long time. Like poisoning wells, it was an offense that could not be excused, an offense that demanded the most severe punishment. His utter helplessness ate at him. He was a man who, having lost his own self in the fog of a forgotten past, saved himself by saving others. There was nothing he could do, and yet he was moved to do something. He looked over at Faraj and thought that there must be a way to find a chink in El Ghadan’s armor through him.

  He rose, crossed to where Faraj sat, crouched beside him as, before, Faraj had hunkered down beside him, providing commentary to the sarin gas attack. “Matters are not as simple as they used to be,” he said over the roar and jangling vibration of the engines.

  “I disagree,” Faraj stated flatly. “There is us and there is the Great Satan.”

  Bourne countered. “All this hatred of the Great Satan disguises the complexity of the problem.”

  Faraj turned to him, his thick eyebrows raised. “Which is?”

  “Islam itself,” Bourne said. “We are like a soldier, fractured in a battle eons ago, whose parts are now warring with one another. Sunni against Shia, Alawi against Sunni. And then there are the Saudi, their sticky fingers in everyone’s pies, whom we all hate and fear. The Iranians, Afghans, the Pashtun warlords of western Pakistan, hounded into the mountains, the Punjabis, who bow to no one. The list goes on and on. The bloodshed isn’t simply the Great Satan’s doing, Faraj. We also have to take responsibility.”

  Faraj grunted. “You are a man with strange ideas, Yusuf.”

  “Strange ideas are what’s needed now. I have not come to this conclusion lightly or over a short period of time.”

  “You talk like a leader, not a loner, a sniper.”

  “I suppose you could say that being alone is what has given me the time to formulate my strange ideas.”

  “And do you seek to impose these ideas on others?”

  “How would I do that, Faraj? I have no power over others, nor do I seek it.”

  “Then how do you propose to implement your ideas?”

  Bourne smiled. “By exposing them to those in power. People who do hold sway over others. People like you, Faraj.” He almost added, “El Ghadan,” but it was too soon for that. The last thing he needed was for this necessarily paranoid man to become suspicious.

  “What exactly are you getting at?” Faraj said now.

  “Let me go at this from a different direction,” Bourne said, after some time, though in truth he had already thought this idea through. “Why are you hiding out in Waziristan?”

  “You know why. To keep the Great Satan’s eyes off us while we are in the final stage of our plan.”

  “With half a dozen American drones per day raining missiles down on the area?” Bourne shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  Faraj’s eyes blazed in fury, and Bourne knew he was playing this game very close to the edge. Unfortunately, it was the only play he had.

  “Tell me then,” Faraj said, “if you’re so smart.”

 
“You are besieged on all sides by the other powerful jihadist cadres—ISIS, as you yourself told me. Al-Qaeda, the al-Nusra Front, the Muslim Brotherhood, KOMPAK, Ansar al-Sharia, the Islamic Front in Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, shall I go on? No, I thought not. This is the problem you must face, Faraj. All these other cadres say they want the same thing as you do, but do they? They won’t use your methods or your rhetoric, and they surely don’t want you to gain in power and influence.”

  Faraj nodded sagely. “All this is true, Yusuf.”

  “Do you like hiding out in Waziristan?”

  “Have you been to Waziristan?”

  Bourne grinned. “That’s what I thought. I have ideas.”

  “I’ll bet you do.” Faraj scratched fiercely at his beard. “But I’m not the one to talk with.”

  “No? But you are the leader.”

  “Of what you have seen, of what you will see when we land,” Faraj said. “El Ghadan is the supreme leader of the Tomorrow Brigade.”

  “Will he be in Waziristan?”

  Faraj continued to gaze at Bourne. Then he turned away.

  * * *

  “Are you certain?” Howard Anselm said.

  “Here is the raw product,” Marty Finnerman said, “straight from DOD’s listening posts in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.”

  And there it was, Anselm thought, staring down at the intel in stark black and white.

  “The Israeli Knesset has agreed to continue the settlement building in occupied territories. And the number of Hamas-related bombings in Tel Aviv has escalated to an unconscionable level. Fifty-five killed so far in just the past week.”

  Finnerman and Anselm were in one of the SITCOM rooms in the Pentagon. The lights were low. All the eight screens ranged around them were active, showing lists of personnel, troop movements, animated maps of Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Syria, along with surveillance tape—via both drones and CCTV on the ground—as well as dizzying raw footage from mobile phones at the front lines in these countries.

  Finnerman stood, bent over Anselm. “Events are coming about as our Gravenhurst colleagues predicted,” he said. “We don’t want peace. Gravenhurst’s members and alumni, of which we are a part, are the political-industrial axis that makes this country run. Frankly, the concept of compromise isn’t in our lexicon. Despite POTUS having come this far with the peace talks, they are going to end in failure.”

  “Which is why we came up with the contingency plan that depends on the summit’s failure.”

  Finnerman nodded. “Look, we both know the Gravenhurst threat assessment is correct: Syria is the doorway to Iran, and whether we like it or not, Iran is the next stage in the war on terror. We neutralize Syria, we deprive Iran of one of its prime client nations in the spread of jihadism. We are taking this drastic step to ensure the security of the world—the security of our own country, which, according to Gravenhurst, has never been at higher risk, not even just before 9/11.”

  Extreme distaste had transformed Finnerman’s face. “We’re all but out of Iraq and we’ll soon be leaving Afghanistan. We have six hundred and fifty billion dollars’ worth of high-tech weaponry at our disposal. It’s high time we used it against a target that truly must be crushed.”

  Anselm shook his head. “You know what POTUS is going to say. The people have had their fill of war. More than.”

  “Then it’s the administration’s job to tell them how wrong they are, how their livelihoods, the very lives of their children and grandchildren depend on our intervention in Syria.”

  “The Russians have made it a very tough sell.”

  “We expose the Russian president for the opportunist he is. How difficult will that be? Nobody likes the fucker anyway. We’ll have the help of both CNN and Fox, not to mention the Washington Post, as well as the outsized number of conservative and religious bloggers I have in my pocket. That doesn’t even begin to include the senators and congressmen invested in our military complex.” Finnerman grinned. “You’re in your element, Howard. Rectitude, sir! Rectitude is the order of the day.”

  “Perhaps, but there’s still POTUS to convince,” Anselm said. “We knew that from day one.”

  Finnerman smiled his foxy smile. “On that front, fate has stepped in to help us. Look here.” He directed Anselm’s attention to the center screen, where a frozen frame of a surveillance tape had been put up.

  “This just came through, transferred from one of our forward-position video monitoring posts in the Middle East.”

  Both men stared at the frame, which held the images of two men.

  “The picture is so damn grainy,” Anselm said. “Who the hell is it?”

  Finnerman used the remote he was holding as a pointer. “The one on the left is Abu Faraj Khalid, Syrian cadre commander of the Tomorrow Brigade.”

  “El Ghadan’s people.”

  “Right.” Finnerman nodded. Ever since the tape had come in he had been working himself up into a righteous rage. “And the man next to him—”

  “Looks like a fellow Syrian,” Anselm said.

  “Indeed.” Finnerman fiddled with the remote, and the frame slid over so that the right half of the screen showed a close-up of Faraj’s companion. “Then we ran our facial recognition software on him.” He pressed another button on the remote and a dozen white triangles covered key portions of the face. They began to flicker so quickly the human eye picked up only a blur.

  “Stop it, Marty. I’m getting a headache.”

  “Patience.” The triangles came out of the blur and froze. “Ah, there we are.” The photo of the two men disappeared, the face of the man in question slid to the left, and up came a photo of Jason Bourne, side by side with the blowup. The same dozen white triangles appeared on Bourne’s face and began to pulse on and off in time to the ones on the so-called Syrian’s face. “It’s Bourne, sir. He’s in disguise—a very good one. But the FR program sees through disguises to the real contours of the face.”

  “Bourne.” Anselm seemed mesmerized.

  “In the company of one of the most notorious terrorist leaders.”

  A slow smile spread across Anselm’s face. “It’s all true, then.”

  “Indeed,” Finnerman said. “We now have the irrefutable proof to bring POTUS on board: Bourne is working with El Ghadan.”

  25

  Sara dried her hair with a bathtowel.

  “I like your hair dead black,” Blum said. “It suits you.”

  Sara’s eyes flashed. “Don’t get any ideas.”

  “Not to worry.” He laughed. “I don’t go for girls with short hair.”

  Sara snorted as she turned to contemplate her reflection in the mirror. The doctor’s wife had expertly cut off her hair while Blum raided the local pharmacy for hair dye and makeup, using the list she had given him.

  Sara did look different, it was true. Though not as completely transformed as Jason could look, she knew she would pass for Qatari as soon as she donned the traditional clothes. The headscarf would help as well. She had also shortened her gait; pace of walking was something that could give even the best-disguised field agent away. The doctor’s wife proved the most help, perfecting her makeup, fixing the robes and headscarf she had bought for Sara just so.

  At last Sara and Blum were ready to venture outside.

  It seemed like an age since she had felt fresh air on her face. The moon was out, shimmering along the sweeping curve of the Corniche. They strolled for a bit, as if they were lovers enjoying the sight of the high-rises lighting up the spangled night. A speedboat passed them on their right, leaving a phosphorescent wake, and Sara shivered as the memory of her mortal struggle aboard Hassim’s craft pierced her to the marrow.

  Nite Jewel was the kind of place that sent a limo for its regulars. Blum called, and after a half hour more of walking had brought them near to the time he had set for the meet with Lieutenant Tamer, the car pulled up beside them.

  Nite Jewel was a stone’s throw from the Corniche. Down a side street fille
d with darkened boutiques, its façade glowed and glimmered, a testament to its name. Depending from the canopy protecting the doorway was a grid of LED cylinders that bled one color to the other in an endless rainbow, bathing the patrons entering in a red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, purple glow.

  The limo slid to a stop at the curb and Blum emerged first, followed by Sara in her traditional Qatari outfit. The doorman, recognizing Blum immediately, nodded deferentially and held open the heavy door coated with silver leaf.

  Inside, it was darker than the city night outside. Gradually, as her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, Sara realized they were walking down a passageway lit only by tiny, starlike LED bulbs randomly set into the black-painted ceiling. The walls, she saw as they neared the end of the passageway, were a patterned midnight-blue wallpaper.

  Then they emerged into the club itself, and she blinked in disbelief. Whoever had designed Nite Jewel had fallen in love with certain Hollywood films of the thirties. The sumptuous room was composed of a three-tiered horseshoe of tables. At the open end of the horseshoe was a stage occupied now by a jazz quintet.

  Each table was intimately set with a fringed lamp that shed pink light and an old-fashioned telephone with which patrons, should they desire it, might call people at other tables. As they were shown to their table, Sara could see that though there was a sprinkling of twos and threes at the tables, the vast majority were occupied by individuals, more women than men, so far as she could see.

  Blum had booked a table in the center, on the third and highest tier. Mahmoud Tamer was already in residence, nursing a glass of what looked to be club soda with ice. He was a glowering, intense-looking individual with pocked cheeks and the sloped shoulders of a tree dweller. He didn’t look stupid, though, and in any event, Sara was too well trained to underestimate anyone from a first impression.

  Tamer rose when Blum, still ahead of her, approached the table. He was in uniform, and a uniform could give even the ugliest man stature and gravitas. Just ask Mussolini.

  Tamer slowly looked Blum over from head to toe, as if taking inventory prior to a cattle auction.