The Bourne Ascendancy

by Robert Ludlum

El Ghadan, head turned away from her, stared out the window. “You don’t seem to exist, Ellie.” His head swung around, his eyes fully on her. “Can you explain this?”

  “I don’t think I have to,” Sara said.

  “I don’t like dealing with people whose identities are unknown to me.”

  “I don’t like dealing with jihadists,” Sara said evenly, “and yet here we are. Strange bedfellows.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “What is your real name?”

  “I imagine El Ghadan is not the name you were born with.”

  “You must tell me.”

  “My anonymity guarantees my effectiveness.”

  She sat very still. He seemed to be weighing her words carefully.

  “I have product for you, El Ghadan. Either we do business or we don’t.” She shrugged. “You’re the one who needs an eye on the Israelis.”

  “I had one,” El Ghadan said. “Or rather, Khalifa did. He was running the man who brought you to Nite Jewel.”

  “Blum.” She nodded. “He wanted me to vet Khalifa’s lieutenant.”

  El Ghadan grunted. “It seemed to me he also wanted you there for protection.”

  Sara allowed the ghost of a smile to cross her lips. “Perhaps that as well.”

  “That does not speak well of him, as either a Semite or a man.”

  Sara chose not to respond.

  El Ghadan sighed. “I may as well tell you that my current thinking is to take you in and sweat you.”

  “Sure,” she said. “What do you need me for? Did you clean house here? Yes? No? Go back to using Blum. Khalifa did that and where is he now?”

  El Ghadan’s eyes narrowed. “Are you saying Blum set up Khalifa’s death?”

  “I’m saying you’ll never know. Does that make continuing with Blum a decent bet?”

  “As it happens, Khalifa’s house was rotten to the core.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He shook his head. “You’re too smart to be a woman.”

  With no little effort, Sara kept her ghost of a smile, but her expression seemed frozen in place, as if she had looked upon Medusa. “For all the women of the world I take offense.”

  “You cannot fathom how offensive it is to have you in my vehicle.” El Ghadan showed her his teeth. “Now I will see the product you have for me.”

  “I suppose it’s offensive as well for you to have a woman as your eyes.”

  He looked away, staring out at the city through the smoked glass window. “You have a price, I imagine.”

  Sara named it, knowing it was very high. But then cheap product was of interest to no one.

  El Ghadan snapped his fingers, and the man riding shotgun up front handed over an ostrich-leather case. Rolling the lock tumblers beneath his finger, El Ghadan opened the case, counted out the money, put it on the seat between them. Then he looked expectantly at Sara.

  She handed over the part of the product her father had sent—an ultra-secret file the Scrivener Directorate at Mossad had cooked up. El Ghadan read it through twice before folding the sheet and putting it away. She waited for a comment. Outside, the Corniche flickered past, neon lights skimming the waves like flying fish. She longed to be out in the sea-soaked air, away from this monstrous creature who frightened her more than she cared to admit.

  He gave her a portion of the bills on the car seat, put the rest back in the case. “The other half after your product is checked for accuracy.”

  “It’s good as gold.”

  He appeared unmoved. “This is what we shall do. My choice is Blum or you, is that right?”

  “Frankly,” she said crisply, boldly, “I don’t see that you have a choice at all.” She was all in now, every chip she had on the table, riding on this one hand, winner take all.

  “You see, if your product is good, then I believe you,” El Ghadan said. “In that event, I must think the worst of Blum, and he will be shot dead, just like Khalifa’s lieutenants.”

  * * *

  Bourne was given a new robe, which more or less fit him. He declined a new pair of trousers, not wanting to transfer what he had in his pockets. In the meantime, Ivan Borz spoke to the wounded Faraj, left him in charge of the devastated field. He directed Bourne to a jeep undamaged in the twin blasts. Aashir, the group leader who had spoken to Bourne directly after the drone attack, was already behind the wheel. With Bourne and Borz in the back, Aashir drove them west for just over an hour. He drove with seriousness and complete command; it was clear he knew their destination and how to get there. Very possibly, Bourne thought, he had been there before with Borz.

  The mountains, blue and purple, bearded crests barely visible behind clouds, reared up in front of them like wild horses. The air was as sharp as a knife edge.

  “We are in Mahsud territory,” Borz said. “All the tribes hate one another. No one can move freely in Waziristan without a chief malik’s assurance of safe passage.” He spat over the side. “It’s like living in fucking Nazi Germany.” Turning to Bourne, he said, “D’you know much about the tribes hereabouts, Yusuf? Speaking the lingo, you must.”

  “The Waziri fear dishonor over death,” Bourne said. “They’ll lie, cheat, steal, and flee in order not to be bested by any enemy. The most common mistake outsiders make about them is that they’re cowards, when the opposite is true.”

  “So how would you handle them?”

  “If you don’t become one of them,” Bourne said, “you have no standing with them.”

  Borz shot him a quick look. “How the fuck do you do that?”

  * * *

  “Good Lord,” POTUS exclaimed. “This has disaster written all over it!”

  His hand trembled as he read the SITREP Marty Finnerman had brought over from the Pentagon, along with Vincent Terrier, the fieldman whose network had tracked Faraj’s C-17 to the remote valley of the Mahsud in Waziristan.

  Morning light slanted in through the Oval Office windows. The reinforced concrete antiterrorist blocks, still in shadow, loomed larger than ever, marking the perimeter of the public sector of which the White House was the center.

  “A hundred casualties—all of them young American boys.” POTUS looked up at Anselm, Finnerman, and Terrier as if they were a trio of giant owls that had roosted on the corners of his desk. “How the fuck can this be justified, Marty? For the love of God, my drone program has just blown up in my face.”

  “Not so,” Anselm said, knowing that the faster they fed POTUS their spin the quicker they could deflect him from his path to PR ruin. “First, we remind the public of the full list of terrorist leaders the drones have dispatched. We emphasize how much more secure the United States is now that these extremists are dead.”

  Finnerman took up the baton. “Next, we point out as simply and clearly as possible that these Americans were not only defectors, they were traitors to their country.”

  “We play up the fact that they were recruited here at home,” Anselm went on. “We parade the recruiter, fill the press with photos of him, background on how insidious his network was until we rolled it up.”

  “Is this true?” POTUS looked from Finnerman to Anselm. “Do we have him? Have we rolled up his network?”

  “We will have done,” Finnerman said in the tone, both authoritative and soothing, POTUS responded to best, “when we go public with the story. Terrier here will make sure of that, won’t you, Vinnie.”

  Terrier nodded. “You can count on it, sir.”

  Anselm gestured. “There, you see? The point is to get out in front of this, turn a potentially damaging story into one that underscores your administration’s continuing dedication to national security.”

  POTUS wiped sweat from his upper lip. “But these young men—”

  “Are traitors,” Finnerman said. “And in times of war traitors are summarily executed.”

  “The point we’ll make,” Anselm said, leaning forward to better bring their plan home to POTUS, “is that these A
mericans were recruited at home, voluntarily and illegally, I might add, and traveled to Syria to be trained by Abu Faraj Khalid, one of the most notorious terrorist leaders.”

  “Who Terrier’s network assiduously tracked from Damascus to Waziristan,” Finnerman continued, “where we unleashed two drones to destroy him and interdict his plan to return these brainwashed American men as parts of local terrorist cells.”

  “By the time our media blitz is over,” Anselm said, “you’ll be hailed by conservatives and liberals alike as a hero. I’ll wager even the Tea Party will be pleased.”

  * * *

  “And then,” Finnerman said when they were alone in the privacy of Anselm’s office, “we can get on with our real business.”

  Anselm nodded. “Making POTUS look good when the peace summit falls apart next week.”

  “When Jason Bourne is shot dead in Singapore during his attempt to assassinate POTUS, we will release the photo of him with Faraj. That’s all we’ll need to convince POTUS and Congress that we need to go to war in order to protect him, the United States, and the free world.”

  30

  Khan Abdali was a cadaver of a man—tall and impossibly thin, with bony shoulders and long, ropy arms. His skin was as dark as stained teak, thick-looking, grained and lined as leather. It was impossible to tell his age; he could have been anywhere from fifty to seventy. He was dressed in white robes and loose trousers over which he wore a blue vest embroidered with tribal emblems. His gold-colored turban was as large as his head. But it was his eyes, dark, deeply inset in his face, hard as marbles, that caused him to fill up any room he entered or occupied.

  The chief malik met them at the outskirts of the village. He was flanked by six of his heavily armed men, bearded, turbaned, all with black vests over white robes, all with assault rifles The village behind them was nothing more than a loosely grouped selection of concrete boxes, some whitewashed, some not, surrounded by pockmarked concrete walls. There were lines of dust-caked trucks, looking the worse for wear, having been driven hundreds of miles over the rocky terrain. Children climbed in the backs of the trucks, and above them, on a dusty promontory, two solitary sentinels, AR-15s at the ready, peered mistrustfully down from behind semicircular stone emplacements.

  Bourne spoke the traditional greeting, right hand over his heart. Khan Abdali, clearly surprised, came forward and returned the greeting.

  “You know our land?” he said.

  “I spent three years here,” Bourne said.

  “And why did you leave?”

  “Over a woman.”

  “Oho!” Khan Abdali threw his head back and laughed. “And did you take her?”

  “From a malik of the Tori Khels.”

  “Bah! I spit on all Tori Khels!” And Khan Abdali did just that, hawking and spitting a huge glob onto the earth to one side. “And did this accursed malik come after you?”

  “I let him,” Bourne said.

  Khan Abdali’s shaggy eyebrows raised. “Did you now?”

  “Yes. I confronted him. I told him I was a djinn. I told him I had put a spell on his woman and that if he did not leave us both alone I would put a spell on him and he would die a long, slow, agonizing death.”

  Now Khan Abdali was fairly shaking with laughter. Indeed, tears were streaming from his eyes and he could scarcely catch his breath. Gasping, he was finally able to say, “My dear Yusuf, you are a man of rare courage and imagination. I am grateful to welcome you into our village, despite the fact you are in the company of this impossibly rude Chechen.”

  Tea, preserved olives, and a sweetish flatbread were served in Khan Abdali’s own house, the living quarters strewn with afghan rugs and Turkish brass oil lamps, any one of which could have held Bourne’s fictional djinn. The walls were covered with black-and-white blowups of what appeared to be the chief malik’s men and children. There were no photos of the village’s women, which came as no surprise to Bourne, whose knowledge of the Waziri was such that he knew they valued their women above their religion. These people were not fanatics; they therefore did not understand the fanatics who had infested their mountains and valleys and did not much like them. It was only because the tribes were too busy with their internecine warfare that they did not unite to drive the fanatics out. Besides, Waziristan was vastly underpopulated. A couple of hundred fanatics made little difference to them, unless they became a nuisance. Or asked for favors.

  “Your children are magnificent, Khan Abdali,” Bourne said, being deliberately overeffusive. “My hearty congratulations.”

  The chief malik smiled, showing two gold teeth and more than one space between them. “Children and grandchildren, Yusuf, my brother.”

  “Truly Allah has blessed you.”

  “May his beneficent light be ever upon us.”

  The three men sat on one of the rugs, cross-legged, eating and drinking. Aashir lounged against one wall, burning eyes taking everything in, no matter how minuscule, while Bourne continued to chat with the chief malik, gaining information about the current state of tribal warfare in this part of Waziristan. He could tell that Borz was growing impatient, especially because he could not understand the conversation. When Borz began to fidget, Bourne felt compelled to admonish him to remain calm.

  “Your friend has a harsh face,” Khan Abdali said. “It complements his impatient manner.”

  “These Chechen,” Bourne said. “Impatience is in their blood.”

  Khan Abdali, refilling Bourne’s cup from a copper kettle, nodded sagely. “Such is the tragedy of men, always rushing headlong to their doom.” He tipped his head discreetly. “And the young Arab?”

  “His name is Aashir Al Kindi, and he has been kind to me,” Bourne said. “That is all I know about him.”

  “I have seen him here before. He has better manners than the Chechen.”

  “I have no doubt,” Bourne said.

  “Perhaps you will teach him to speak our language.”

  “If we both find the time, I certainly will.”

  The chief malik nodded, apparently satisfied. “What is it the Chechen wants from me, Yusuf, my brother?”

  “He requires safe passage for himself and his men.”

  “Direction?”

  “Due west, into Afghanistan.”

  Khan Abdali heaved a great sigh. “I have no love for the Afghans, especially the Taliban who, due to the meddling of the Americans, have tightened their stranglehold on the country. I cannot abide their abhorrent views. They have warped religion into a cudgel with which to beat senseless those around them.”

  “My friend considers the Taliban his enemy,” Bourne said, “of that I can assure you.”

  Khan Abdali cocked his head as he gazed at Borz. “Will he kill Taliban when he reaches Afghanistan with our help?”

  Bourne turned to Borz. “It seems he wants you to go to war with the Taliban.”

  “What?”

  “That’s his price for safe passage into Afghanistan. He wants Taliban heads.”

  Borz snorted.

  “Watch yourself,” Bourne cautioned.

  “I am on a deadline. I cannot spare the time, Yusuf.”

  “I urge you to make the time, Borz. He won’t budge, otherwise.”

  Borz considered a moment. “Tell him okay.”

  Bourne eyed him. “I won’t do that if you’re ordering me to lie to him.”

  “How the fuck is he going to know what we do once we’re out of his accursed country?”

  “Waziristan has sheltered you, kept you safe, even tolerated you bringing the American drones in. You will give your word and we will take Taliban heads.”

  Borz gave Bourne a murderous glare. “You said these people lie. So what is the problem?”

  Bourne wanted to slam his hand into Borz’s face. He set that impulse aside for another day. “I said they might lie in order not to be bested. These are honorable people, Borz. They’re not extremists. They have tolerated you, but that could change at any moment. Frankly, Kh
an Abdali doesn’t much care for you. If not for me you would have been sent packing.”

  Expelling a long held breath, Borz nodded. “All right, and damn him to the lowest level of hell.”

  Bourne turned back to the chief malik. “Khan Abdali, my brother, my friend is in many ways uncivilized. Nevertheless, he means well and is honorable. He gives you his word that after crossing over into Afghanistan, he will take many Taliban heads.”

  The chief malik stroked his beard thoughtfully. “I agree, Yusuf, my brother, the Chechen is uncivilized. On the other hand, he has you as a friend. I will agree to the safe passage, but I will have two of my best hunting maliks guide you. They will make the crossing with you. They will help you take Taliban heads.”

  And make sure Borz keeps to his word, Bourne thought, with a smile and the requisite effusive show of thanks to Khan Abdali.

  Before departing, Khan Abdali took Bourne aside. “Yusuf, my brother,” he said softly but intensely, “I fear treachery on every side of you.” His breath was redolent of dates and preserved olives. “I wish you a long life.” He took hold of Bourne’s right hand, turned it palm upward. “To that end, I give you this.” He placed something small but heavy in Bourne’s palm, closed Bourne’s fingers around it in order to hide it. “It is a chīlai—a bracelet. It is both a talisman and a weapon. Inside is a mangèr.”

  “A serpent?”

  Khan Abdali smiled a curious smile. “This snake is only as long as your fingernail. But, Yusuf, my brother, it is coated with a fast-acting poison. The mangèr will keep you safe in times of extreme darkness, yes?”

  “Thank you, Khan Abdali.” Bourne slipped the bracelet over his left wrist. “You are most generous—and most wise.”

  The chief malik nodded. “Safe travels, my brother.”

  The dust cloud the jeep threw up upon its rattling departure soon obscured the village and all its inhabitants.

  * * *

  Vincent Terrier sat in a windowside booth in Jake’s World, a chromium-clad diner in rural Virginia with fifties-era aqua trim and picture windows overlooking the ashy parking lot and the interstate. From the parking lot, it looked like a vintage jukebox lying on its side. The outdoor lights were on as twilight was shouldered aside by the coming night.