Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Ascendancy (26 page)

S
onya was playing
with the toys Islam had brought her gradually over the days: a rubber Arabian horse, a simple jigsaw puzzle in the shape of a dog, and a computer tablet on which she could learn prayer words from the Dua Surah Quran when either he or Soraya sounded them out for her.

Perhaps surprisingly, her favorite was the tablet, for then she could engage with Islam, whom she had come to like enormously. The feeling appeared mutual. When he brought their meals, he never failed to play with her, laugh with her, pray with her. Soraya would have liked to say that she hated this interaction, that she felt it a violation. After all, Islam could have been the one who had murdered her husband. That time was still jumbled in her mind, the terror, shock, and anguish obscuring all detail no matter how hard she tried to recreate the event. Of course, part of her did not want to envision it again; anyone in his right mind would understand. And yet, as a trained agent, she was bound and determined to remember it all—every last horrific second.

But on the other hand, Sonya was bringing him closer to them. The repeated evocation of positive emotion was her greatest ally. It ate away at the chains of domination and subjugation that had bound her from the moment she and her family had been abducted. Just as important, it kept Sonya active, engaged, and happy. The child was far too young to dwell on the implications of their continuing incarceration.

Soraya heard Islam’s voice intoning the prayer word Sonya had selected on the tablet. She heard her daughter’s high-pitched voice repeating the word perfectly. And now that she thought about it, there was never a time when Islam had to repeat the word or correct her. That was how Sonya’s mind worked. She had inherited all the best traits of her mother and her father. What frightened Soraya was that when she had grown up she would not remember Aaron, would not recall how gentle and wise he was, how much he loved her. Soraya knew that it was up to her to provide the memories—her and Aaron’s many friends in Paris.

If they ever got back to Paris. But of course they would. Each hour of every day Islam’s compassion for her and love for Sonya strengthened. Soraya knew that the time was drawing near when she could count on him as an ally in her plan to escape.

“You’re all packed, Mr. President. Your bags are aboard Air Force One.”

POTUS, seated at his desk in the Oval Office, lifted his head from his one hundredth or so reading of his itinerary in Singapore, both before the summit and during it. Who knew there was so much to see in the tiny city-state?

“Howard,” he said, seeing his chief of staff standing in the doorway, “why so formal?”

“I have a surprise for you, Mr. President.”

Anselm stood aside and William Magnus’s two children entered the room. Teddy, his eight-year-old son, in his exuberance, actually burst in, running across the presidential seal on the carpet to throw himself into his father’s arms. Charlie, his sixteen-year-old daughter, was more sedate in her entry, stepping carefully, as if the soles of her chunky shoes would mar the carpet.

“
Hul
lo, Dad,” Charlie muttered. She wore leather pants and a cropped sweater that clung to her no longer childish curves and left bare an inch of flesh at her waist.

“Well,” said a beaming POTUS, in his most presidential tone, “what brings you two rascals to your father’s inner sanctum?”

“
God
, Dad.” Charlie fairly shuddered.

“I brought them, Bill.”

And in walked Maggie, his wife of twenty-odd years—he could never remember the exact number. She was impeccably dressed, as always, today in a gray Chanel suit and shiny black Louboutin pumps. Her hair was as cropped as Charlie’s sweater.

She strode across the room as if she owned the West Wing, bent from the waist, and pecked him respectfully on the cheek. “They’re always badgering me to see you at work.”

“
I’ve
never badgered you,” Charlie said in her supercilious way.

Maggie raised one eyebrow. “About anything?”

“About coming
here
, anyway.” Charlie had the mannerism, annoying to the rest of the family, of emphasizing at least one word in each sentence she uttered, as if she were a character in a comic book.

“Unfortunately,” Anselm interceded, “the president has a full schedule today.”

“When
doesn’t
he?” Charlie muttered to no one in particular.

“Come on, crew.” Maggie spread her arms. “Onward.”

“You promised us sundaes,” Teddy protested as he slid off his father’s lap and went to the protective wing of his mother.

“And so you shall have,” Maggie said, kissing him on the top of his head. “Come along, Charlene.” She was already moving toward the door.

“In a
minute
, Mother.” Charlie had come around her father’s desk to stare out the window behind him. “What is it you
see
out there?”

The president swiveled around in his chair. “Are you asking me or telling me?”

Charlie turned to him. Her smile was as artificial as coffee creamer. “Who can see
in
?”

“What? No one.” Magnus shifted uneasily in his chair. When had she become a woman? he asked himself. When had she put her precious childhood behind her? “What are you looking at?”

“I’m
wondering
if your
pants
are stained.”

POTUS blinked. “I beg your pardon?” Could he have heard his daughter right? What on earth could she mean?

“I’ll make this
simpler
for you, Dad.” She leaned forward from the waist as his wife had done, but it wasn’t to kiss him respectfully on the cheek. “Are. Your.
Pants
. Stained.”

Magnus blinked. “Why should they be stained, Charlie?”

“A
human
stain, Dad.”

The degree of contempt in her voice confused and astonished him. He stared up at her, still not quite getting it. His brain was slowed by shock, as if it were encased in a block of ice.

“But of
course
—” She threw Anselm such a poisonous look that he immediately scuttled out into the hallway. She turned back to Magnus. “Of course, you have
people
to take
care
of that for you.”

Now Magnus was alarmed, but he still didn’t know why. “Dammit, Charlie, start making sense.”

Drawing closer, she whispered in his ear, “I
know
, Dad.”

Magnus blinked. “Know what?”

“Your affair. And now I wonder if you ever
fucked
Camilla in
here
, where you
work
at making the world a
better
place.” Seeing his stricken expression, she laughed softly, unpleasantly. “Don’t worry. Even
Mom
doesn’t know, though who’s to say whether she
suspects
?”

And then she was gone, skipped out before Howard could intervene, or Magnus himself, reeling as much from her coarseness as from her accusation, could fabricate a chastising denial.

Instead of taking Aashir’s hand and descending, Bourne went up into the sunlight, disappearing from sight. Shaking his head, Aashir slung his rifle over his shoulder and clambered up after him. There he found Bourne crouched over the second Taliban.

“He’s dead,” Bourne said.

“I made sure of that.” The pride in Aashir’s voice was evident.

“That was a mistake.” Bourne looked up at him. “You should have wounded him. Now we’ll never know whether he contacted a larger group, or whether we already dealt with them. He had important information to give us.”

“I didn’t think…” Aashir hung his head. “I was trying to make up for missing him the first time.”

“This is a lesson you can only learn in the field,” Bourne said. “Remember I told you that?”

Aashir nodded. Then he saw Bourne go completely still. “What is it?” he whispered.

“Third man,” Bourne said. “At your ten o’clock.”

“He’s been lying low.”

“Yes.”

“That’s the way of these people.” Aashir slowly unslung the AWM. “Let me make up for—”

Bourne’s hand clamped to his arm stopped him.

“Wait,” Bourne said. “Wait.”

Before Aashir could say a word, Bourne was off, scuttling to their right, over the rocks, moving in a deliberately noisy fashion. He was making himself a target, Aashir realized. Grasping the AWM, he slithered down, working his way slowly to the left in order to come around behind the third Taliban, whose focus must now be wholly on Bourne.

A shot rang out, and with it, movement up ahead and to Aashir’s right. He saw the enemy then: a flash of black beard and gray turban. He fought down his instinct to shoot to kill, and, observing Bourne’s warning, waited, patient as a spider. Waited until the Taliban showed enough of himself. Then he aimed the AWM, squeezed off a shot that caught the soldier in his right shoulder. The Taliban went down, tried to re-aim his rifle at the figure racing toward him. Aashir shot him in nearly the same spot. He went down and stayed down.

Aashir and Bourne reached the fallen Taliban at virtually the same time. The soldier was bleeding profusely. Bourne kicked away his weapon, went quickly and efficiently through his robes, relieving him of a handgun and a knife.

“Now,” Bourne said, squatting beside him, “we talk.”

The Taliban turned his head away, which brought Aashir into his line of vision.

“Where is your cadre?” Bourne said. “How many men?” He jammed the butt of the AWM into the wounded shoulder. The Taliban’s teeth ground together, but he said nothing.

Bourne stood up, signed to Aashir, and went out of the Taliban’s hearing. “We don’t have time for a prolonged interrogation. I want you to turn away.”

Aashir glanced over his shoulder at the wounded soldier. “I want to watch.”

“Believe me, you don’t.”

Bourne returned to where the Taliban lay. The soldier looked up at him with bloodshot eyes, no expression on his face. Then Bourne bent down and, after a minute or so, Aashir did look away. Was it the wind making his eyes tear? When he wiped them clear and turned back, the Taliban was talking.

“My cadre went into the cave.” The soldier licked his lips. “We’re an advance scouting party. That’s all there is.”

Curious now, Aashir came and crouched beside the Taliban.

Bourne ignored Aashir. “Within how many miles?” he said.

“Fifty,” the Taliban said. “Seventy. It’s impossible to say.” Even as he spoke, he took up a rock and, with a cry, drove it into the side of Aashir’s head.

Aashir fell back, bleeding. Stepping over him, Bourne slammed the heel of his boot into the Taliban’s throat, crushing it. The soldier gasped, gagging for air. Then his eyes lost their focus and his chest gave one last heave, then was still.

Aashir’s eyelids were fluttering as he moved in and out of consciousness. Stooping, Bourne gathered him, slung him over his shoulder, and began the process of descending the fissure into the cave, returning to what was left of Borz’s Chechen cadre.

W
hy would you send me
as your emissary?” Sara said. “Do you trust me that much?”

“My dear Ellie,” El Ghadan said, “I don’t trust you at all.”

They were seated in a golden restaurant—walls, floor, and ceiling, all gold, all glittering as the early afternoon sunlight turned the floor molten, reflected upward, setting fire to the entire room. Apart from Sara, El Ghadan, and three of his men, no other patrons were in the restaurant, though it was the luncheon hour. Platoons of waiters with nothing else to do served them the food El Ghadan had ordered. Menus had not been provided.

“Not at this point in time, anyway.” El Ghadan stirred honey into his tea. “I have devised a test for you, Ellie. This test can be given nowhere else but on Street Fifty-Two.” He took up his cup and, with a peculiarly delicate gesture, sipped his tea. “Tell me, have you been to the Industrial Area?”

“I have.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I was asked to find out if Arabian Switchgears was being used by al-Qaeda to transship weapons into Somalia.”

He watched her as the food came, a kingly array of dishes set before them. He said nothing until the wait staff had retreated to their station at the rear of the restaurant. Outside, the sun had turned the water to thousands of tiny prisms.

“Eat, eat,” he said, ladling mounds of food onto her plate like a mother who had taken a starving child in off the street. “This is the best food in Qatar.”

“Better than what your followers get, holed up in the mountains.”

“And what did you find at Arabian Switchgears?”

She met his steady gaze with her own. “You know what I found.”

“That was a Mossad-engineered incursion.”

“Allegedly,” she said.

His lips curled in a dark smile. “So you work for Mossad.”

Watch it, girl, she told herself. You’re sailing too close to the wind. Now make this work. “I know people in the FSB, Al-Mukhabarat al-Ammah, CIB, MI6, BAIS, the Chinese Ministry of State Security, Mossad. Shall I go on?” She relaxed her face, laughing softly. “How do you suppose I obtained the product you wanted?”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Still more to you than meets the eye, Ellie.”

She needed to change both the topic and the atmosphere. Her gesture took in the entire table. “Such luxury for a man who purports to hate Doha and its decadent Western ways.”

El Ghadan put down his fork and sat back. “I keep wondering why you continue to goad me.”

“Let’s be honest, you and I hate each other—and yet we’re mysteriously drawn to each other.”

“I don’t hate you,” El Ghadan said.

“I’m being honest, why can’t you?”

He took up his fork and began to eat.

“Yes, I see,” Sara said. “It’s impossible for you to be honest.”

For a moment, his gaze turned toward the golden heavens. “Honesty. Let me see, you say we are drawn together. But to me the reason is not so very mysterious. We live in the margins, you and I, nevertheless we refuse to be marginalized. Systems of government, religions, ideologies rule the world, but they are all flawed. And into these flaws flows corruption, seeking to take hold. We are all human, after all; therefore, all corrupt.”

“I could not disagree more.”

“You disagree, Ellie?”

When he smiled—really smiled—as now, he became quite charming. From Sara’s point of view, frighteningly so.

He spread his hands. “But corruption is the human condition. Every student of history knows this. C’mon, Ellie, you’re digging in your heels for the wrong reason.”

“And what would that be?”

“To spite me. To oppose me. To show you can fight me.” That disarming smile again. “I already know this.”

She brought food to her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. The best food in Doha, and it tasted like ashes in her mouth. Being with him was like being too near a black hole—all your energy was focused on not getting sucked in. She felt mentally and emotionally spent. She missed Jason more than she could say, and this too frightened her.

And yet from these depths inspiration sometimes came; she found it in herself to rally. “Tell me, what do you stand for? Sooner or later, we all have to make a stand, we who live in the margins. You’re no exception.” She looked at him shrewdly, beginning to warm to her subject. “You included religions as flawed, therefore corrupt. So you’re not a fundamentalist. What then?” And then she decided to play her ace. “I’m thinking now that you’re very much like your partner, Ivan Borz.”

Outwardly, El Ghadan’s expression did not change, but Sara, trained in divining details in subjects whose demeanor ranged from recalcitrant to hostile, felt the changes beneath his skin. He grew tense, his heart rate increased as, she supposed, his blood pressure rose. Direct hit!

“Borz is a businessman, plain and simple,” she went on. “Nothing complicated about his purpose. He wants to make money; he wants power. That’s you all over, isn’t it?”

El Ghadan returned to his food, but he was attacking it now. “You have no idea what I want.”

“Are you afraid to tell me?”

Now he appeared piqued. “Listen to me, Ellie.” He leaned forward, his hands flat on the table, fingers spread. “While it’s true that you and I live in the margins, there we part company. Do you know why? Because you have everything and we have nothing. We have been thought pariahs for so long that this is precisely what we have become. So in a sense you have made us what we are.”

His eyes, always wary, always calculating, seemed to burn in his skull. Something had changed in him. Naked emotion had laid his face bare, stripped it of artifice and bombast. “We have had nothing for so long that those who have everything become the target of our hatred and our violence. The fact that you want to push your values on us only enrages us more.”

He appeared now to catch himself, to rein in his sudden outburst of anger, to retreat behind his implacable façade. “And as for me being here in Doha—I’m not here because I want to be in that SUV out there or eating this rich food. Wearing these Western clothes is a necessity, a disguise. It’s my job to be here now.”

He reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket, pulled out a slim wallet. “Look at this thing. It’s made of crocodile skin and cost five hundred dollars. Imagine! This is a coveted item in Western culture.” He shook his head. “Who can fathom such an atrocity!”

The extremity of his rage had distanced him from her, had made of him a thunderous figure, at perfect odds with his civilized clothes. He looked as if he wanted to rip them off right then and there.

Instead he said, in a low, ominous rumble, “My purpose is to destroy the people who carry their lives in this.” He shook the wallet. “Who live in expensive high-rises, wear expensive clothes, eat expensive food—the people who have everything, while the dispossessed of the world watch with sunken cheeks and hollow eyes.”

Sara’s appetite flooded back. Her heart lifted. So she had done it. She had succeeded in getting him to reveal himself, at last, when all others had failed even to get near him.

“Now you are going to give me the ‘This isn’t killing, this is war’ speech, right?”

His features darkened, like the sky anticipating a storm front. “No woman has ever talked to me the way you do.”

“You frighten everyone, El Ghadan, especially women.” She shrugged. “But then your stock-in-trade is intimidation—like Ivan Borz, like the worst criminal.”

“Still you goad me.” His eyes narrowed. “Why? What is it you really want, Ellie?”

She would not tell him that he had already given her what she wanted. “I want what all women want, El Ghadan: respect.”

He wiped his lips with a napkin, took up an olive, glistening with oil, between his fingers. He was back on secure ground, back to having information she wanted. “When you get to Street Fifty-Two and accomplish what is required of you,” he said, savoring the olive in the same way he savored his words, “you shall have it.”

“You see how it is now,” Hunter said as she wiped the sweat off the back of Camilla’s neck. They were sitting on the bed in Camilla’s room, the rumpled covers like sea foam caught in a single instant. “This is the world we’re both living in. This is reality.”

“No,” Camilla said, her voice tiny and throttled by emotion. “This is deceit. This is hypocrisy. This is betrayal at the deepest level.”

“Poor Cam.”

Hunter stroked her back, but she twisted away. “Get off me. I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

Hunter heaved a sigh Camilla thought a bit too theatrical. She rose and padded to the bedroom door. With her hand on the knob, she said, “You say that now, Cam. But, actually, I’m the only one who can save you from this shitstorm.”

She walked out, timing her exit as perfectly as a veteran actor. And what, Camilla thought now, was the world she was caught in but a stage and all the players actors? Master performers. And what was she? An emotional wreck, an expendable walk-on. In terms of war, cannon fodder.

Putting her head in her hands, she bent over and wept, not only for this current act of betrayal, but for her broken childhood, the disciplinarian mother, the philandering father, the diffident and aloof sister. The Secret Service had been a way to wall herself off from all of them, a way to take a new path, a way to make a new life for herself.

Now here she was, on the vast, lonely stage, with nothing left for her.

She rose, slogged into the bathroom, splashed cold water onto her face until she felt on the verge of drowning. And that’s when it came to her. She lifted her head, stared at herself in the mirror, and didn’t like what she saw. She didn’t like it at all.

“Fuck you,” she said. And then more forcefully, “Fuck you!”

She was addressing herself, but also all those actors around her who had purported to be her friends. Their masks were down; she heard the lines they uttered for what they were.

“Fuck you!” she shouted, then turned, walked back into her room, pulled on jeans and her favorite sweatshirt, the one with Stewie Griffin from
Family Guy
, holding a scepter, an emperor’s crown on his head, above which was emblazoned the motto “Born to Rule.” In bare feet, she went out of her room, along the hall, and down the stairs, determined that her days of self-pity were at an end.

She found Hunter in the industrial-size kitchen, a stainless steel rectangle with three refrigerators, four dishwashing machines, two sinks, walk-in pantry, and freezer. Hunter was sitting on a wooden stool at the central much-used butcher-block island. In front of her was an enormous bowl of vanilla ice cream onto which she was squeezing U-Bet from a giant brown plastic bottle.

“Whipped cream’s in the fridge on the right,” she said.

Camilla noticed not one spoon on the island, but two. Returning from the refrigerator, she set the whipped cream down and pulled up a stool next to Hunter.

“Stewie,” Hunter said. “Is that your power shirt?”

“Something like that.” Camilla wanted to smile, but didn’t. Nevertheless, the feeling of animosity that had been eating away at her insides vanished, and she felt more at ease.

When Hunter reached for the whipped cream, she stopped her.

“No more sex,” she said.

“Are you punishing me, or yourself?”

“And no more lies.”

Hunter nodded. “Okay.”

Camilla took her hand away, and Hunter laid on the whipped cream.

“I saw you with that shitbag Terrier at Jake’s World,” Camilla said.

Hunter passed the second spoon over. “Dig in.”

“That’s all you have to say? ‘Dig in’?”

Hunter took a huge mound of the sundae on her spoon and crammed it into her mouth. For a moment her eyes closed in ecstasy. Then she made a humming sound, which jolted Camilla almost off her seat. That same vocalization signaled Hunter’s orgasm, the first of a chain reaction.

Camilla’s temper was up. “Hunter, answer me!”

“What d’you want me to say, ‘Guilty as charged’?”

“That would do, yes.”

“You’re not eating the sundae,” Hunter pointed out. “Come on. Enjoy yourself.”

“I didn’t come down here to have dessert.”

“Why
did
you come down here?”

“How did you know I would?” A good interrogator answered a question with another.

“I know you.”

“I’ll admit you think you do.”

Hunter turned to her. “Okay. What am I guilty of, exactly?”

“Of lying to me, for starters.”

“Didn’t you lie to me?”

“What? When?”

“You said you’d never been with a woman before.”

Into Camilla’s mind flew Helena and the memory of their college tryst.

“Jesus, how did you—?”

“Who cares? It doesn’t matter. That’s the point, isn’t it?” Hunter picked up the second spoon, placed it in Camilla’s hand. “Now, let’s have some fun, and eat together from this enchanted bowl. Nothing better on earth than a chocolate sundae.”