Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Ascendancy (29 page)

J
immie Ohrent was a man
of means. He had no pressing need to be a horse trainer, or to have a job at all. Nevertheless, he was known as the best horse trainer in Southeast Asia. As a boy in Melbourne, he had ridden horses on his uncle Mike’s farm. Later, after spending ten hairy but exciting years in the Middle East, he had returned to Melbourne. Finding it both changed and boring, he decided to follow his uncle, crossing the Strait of Malacca to Singapore to make his fortune. Borrowing money from Uncle Mike, he bought a bit of land and started raising Thoroughbreds and Arabians, which he sold at auction. These horses won races at the Singapore Thoroughbred Club, and Ohrent’s fortune was made. He sold one Arabian, then another, to key members of the ruling family, both of which went on to win the coveted Raffles Cup. As a result, Ohrent was a frequent dinner guest at the presidential palace. He started gambling runs to Macau with the big boys, and his fortune was lost. He fell into a funk, drank self-destructively like his grandfather, and lost himself.

But he wasn’t his grandfather, and he rose from the ashes like a phoenix. In time, he made money again, but not to the same degree. He was not the same man; it didn’t matter. Ohrent being Ohrent, he had tired of the limelight. He disliked the cabal of horse owners with whom he had been obliged to mingle, and didn’t miss them. He loved horses more than people, but he’d had enough of breeding. He sold his business, because of his neglect at a reduced price. Again, it didn’t matter. He became a trainer. He looked after horses and trained jockeys, for a hundredth of what he had been earning. But it was a profession he loved, and for which he had a natural flair.

By the time Camilla arrived in Singapore, Ohrent had been working for the Americans for just over a decade, making nice money that afforded him luxuries now and then. Plus, he was reminded of his days in the Middle East, when green youth made any adventure sing like a diva. His affiliation with them was unofficial, clandestine, and sporadic, which was precisely how he and they liked it. By the time she presented herself to him at the trainers’ facilities at the Thoroughbred Club, he had already lined up a horse for her—a beautifully proportioned hot-blooded filly named Jessuetta. Jessuetta was usually jockeyed by a man named Gruen, but Ohrent didn’t much like him and had been looking around for a replacement when orders came down from his local American handler.

At first sight, Ohrent had doubts about Camilla. Though she was more or less the right size and weight to jockey, she was untried. But all concerns vanished the moment he saw her ride Jessuetta. He loved her from that moment on—not that he didn’t have things to teach her, but she had a jockey’s instincts, and she was an instant learner; not once did he have to repeat himself. Best of all, she, like him, possessed a natural rapport with the horses. Jessuetta loved her fully as much as he did. Maybe more.

“The one thing you have to watch out for is not to slap her on the flank,” he said. “She’ll kick the clacker out of whoever’s behind her.”

Camilla laughed. “I’m not about to slap Jessuetta anywhere at any time. I can tell she wouldn’t respond well to that.”

Which comment made him love Camilla all the more, so much so that privately he felt it a pity and a waste to set her up for a fall. By the way she inveigled Jessuetta to reach her full potential far better than Gruen, he was of the opinion that she could jockey Jessuetta to victory if given the chance. But she wouldn’t. That was the brief he had been given, and, being both well paid by the Americans and an upright kind of guy, he followed all briefs to the letter, even when he didn’t understand or agree with them. Ours not to reason why, and all that, he told himself stoically when he was overcome by a dark hour and the urgent need to ingest a half bottle of whiskey.

But in truth, those moments were few and far between. In the end, there were always his horses, who loved him, never failed him, and would never do anyone dirt. Sometimes Ohrent wished he had been born an animal. Life would have been so much simpler—and cleaner. No skullduggery, no backbiting, no jealousy, greed, or fear. Best of all, he would have lived his life completely ignorant of the inevitable end.

For her part, Camilla was immediately infatuated with the atmosphere of the Thoroughbred Club and Singapore in general. On her first day, as part of her orientation, after she had met and ridden Jessuetta for the first time, Ohrent took her to the National Orchid Garden, where her ecstasy over her fast furlongs-long ride around the racing oval was almost exceeded by the two hours she and her guide spent among hundreds of orchid species, each one more extraordinary than the last.

Afterward, she asked him to take her to a mobile phone store, where she bought a cheap phone with a local SIM card and a half hour of talk time and Internet access.

He took her to lunch at a second-floor restaurant in the Muslim quarter, across the street from a shop that sold alcohol-free perfumes—alcohol being forbidden to Muslims—to local clientele and curious tourists alike. Over seven dishes, each more incendiary than the next, they engaged one another in order to come to terms with their brief. They were both people who found discovering the humanity in their colleagues vital to accomplishing their work.

“You’ve no family?” she said.

“Oh, family.” He took a bite of curried chicken. “Well, it’s my experience that families are a nuisance, get me as cross as a frog in a sock, they do. Always earbashing, telling you what to do and how to do it. Now, my horses like everything I do, they like how I do them. No backtalk.”

“Still, it must get lonely,” Camilla said, thinking as much of herself as of him.

He shrugged. “It’s the life I chose.” He gave her a canny look. “But you’re still a young woman. Why would you choose to be alone?”

“Who says I am?” she said, a bit too quickly.

The well-tanned flesh at the corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled. “You have the look.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “It’s unmistakable.”

“How dispiriting.”

“Well, I’ll give you the drum. There’s no shame in it. If you want the shadows, why not?”

Why not, indeed? For so many reasons, she thought, not wanting to count the ways. She ate some food instead. Her lips were already numb, but the fire was just starting to kindle in her stomach. How fun!

“But it seems to me,” he said, “that the shadow world is not your lucky country.”

“My what?”

“Your natural habitat.”

“So what?” she said somewhat snappily. “I’ve adjusted.”

“Like to high blood pressure?”

Now it was her turn to smile. She liked this man, with his long, lean body, unbent by either age or disappointment. His informal, straightforward manner relaxed her, as did his slightly off-kilter humor.

“Well, now that
would
be bad for me.”

“So can this kind of life. And unlike with high blood pressure there’s no little pill you can take to normalize things. Here, where we are, nothing is ever normal, nor can it ever be.”

More food, more heat, building into a bonfire. “All the people I know like it.”

“Yes, but the question is whether
you
do.”

She considered this for a moment, chewing slowly. “I tell myself I do every day.”

He put down his fork. “Now that is a troubling sign.”

She sat back, all at once overcome with a terrible foreboding.

As if he could divine her thoughts, he said with some urgency, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” The last thing she wanted was her contact here in the target zone to report her as a risk.

“Hmmm.”

This sound, emanating from the back of his throat, made it clear he didn’t believe her. But neither did he press her, for which she was grateful. He glanced up as the waiter spoke to him in a language she did not understand.

“There was a time,” he said, “when I was as far from here as I was from the place where I was born. I had joined a Bedouin caravan, about to cross the Negev Desert. Three
pops!
like this—” He put a finger in his open mouth and, pursing his lips, flicked it out. “Three pops,” he repeated, “and the heads next to me exploded like dropped melons.”

He stared down at his food for a moment, but Camilla could tell that he was gazing back through time.

“One, two, three. Blood and brains all over the place—on me, the camels, everything.” He looked up at her, his expression abruptly bleak. “Palestinians: Hamas, or the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. Who knows? And anyway, it doesn’t matter. I killed one of them right away, tracked the two others down and shot them at point-blank range. What else was I to do? They were terrible shots. Aiming for me, the bleeding buggers had killed three of my hosts.” He wiped his hands, as if they were still covered in blood. “
That’s
the world we live in; the world you have talked yourself into.”

“Or others have,” she said under her breath.

“Finished?” he asked her, only half meaning the meal.

When she made no reply, he spoke softly to the waiter, who cleared the dishes away, piled one atop another, a rickety tower.

Ohrent’s gaze settled on her. “Well, now you’ve rocked up here, and here we be.”

Camilla watched him for some time. Then she took out the envelope Hunter had given her. She had not opened it or even tried to imagine what was inside. Sliding it across the table, she kept her hand on it until one of his lifted, landing at its far edge.

“Read it,” Camilla said, taking her hand away.

He regarded her with a strange calmness that seemed to reach across the space between them and settle her. She felt perfectly at ease with him opening the envelope, though she could not have said why. Frankly, she didn’t care; it felt right.

For what seemed a long time, Ohrent did nothing. Then, slowly, carefully, as if he knew that what she had given him was of great value, he turned the envelope over, slit it open, and read the off-re
servation
brief that Hunter and Terrier had devised for her.

His expression did not change, but she was aware that he had begun to read it all over again. Only when he was done did he look up.

“Really?”

“It’s real.” For a moment, she thought she had misread him, that that was not what he had meant.

He dropped the paper onto the table. “Good God, woman, what pressure you must be under!”

She stared at him, and something in her expression must have clued him in, because he said, “You haven’t read this, have you? You don’t know.”

Heart in her mouth, she took up the paper, spun it around. She had only begun to read it when she blanched, feeling as if she were in an elevator whose cable had snapped.

S
ara was ushered
into Omega + Gulf Agencies without fanfare or even a word being spoken. She watched the young man El Ghadan had called Islam out of the corner of her eye. He was slim-hipped, hollowed-chested, with the ropy arms of someone born and bred to hardship and backbreaking work. More than anything, he looked like he could use a good meal—several of them, in fact.

Sara had seen countless others like him; sad to say, she had zero sympathy for people whose credo was “I kill to know I’m alive.” Still and all, until she could get a grip on the nature of the test El Ghadan had set for her, she knew she needed to keep an open mind on everyone and everything she encountered here.

Islam showed her three large open-plan rooms where busy people were working on…what?

“Traffic scheduling, essentially,” Islam said without inflection, when she asked. “The company creates the routing and shipping calendars for any number of import-export firms all over the world. Doha is the central hub.”

“What kinds of goods?” she asked.

“All kinds,” he said, deliberately evasive.

Those three large offices, plus a cluster of smaller ones for management, seemed to make up the extent of Omega + Gulf Agencies’ quarters.

“What about the rest of the building’s space?”

“Warehousing.”

Using a magnetic key card, he led her through a door as thick as a bank vault’s. Ahead was a carpeted, well-lighted corridor hung with prints of trains, freighters, and cargo planes, worked in a rigorous engineering hand. It looked more like a hallway in an upscale hotel than an entry to a warehouse.

Partway down, Islam pushed open a right-hand door with his shoulder and they were out of the air-conditioning. The courtyard in which she now found herself was surrounded on all sides by the building’s featureless concrete walls, mostly hidden by a fierce riot of climbing bougainvillea. It was dominated by a vast fig tree in its center, gnarled as a fisherman’s fist. Beneath the tree was a rough-hewn wooden table and chairs. As they approached, Sara saw that the table was set with a tea service and a number of small hand-hewn plates piled with fresh figs, pistachios, dried dates and apricots, and delicate honey pastries. The spread was more appropriate to a doyen’s salon.

Islam ushered her to a chair. He sat at her left elbow, poured mint tea into tall, narrow glasses. The scent of fresh lemons perfumed the air. Somewhere high up in the fig tree a bird sang briefly, then fell silent.

Islam gestured. “Help yourself. Please.”

“This is very pleasant,” she said, looking around. “Do you work here every day?”

“Are you not hungry? I assure you every bit of food is the freshest possible.”

Sara drank some of the tea. Then she put down the glass and smiled at him. “Islam, what am I doing here?”

“You have a man’s directness.”

“And that’s a fault?”

He shook his head. “I merely make an observation. It’s unusual.”

“Are you uncomfortable sitting here with me?”

“Should I be?”

She watched him for a moment, silent and enigmatic.

“You are El Ghadan’s emissary,” he said at last.

“And that too is unusual.”

“Unprecedented, I would say.”

“It’s a pity I don’t know what being his emissary entails.”

“You are his strong right arm,” Islam said. “You tell me what to do and I do it.”

She stared at him for a long moment. “I feel like I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole.”

He frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

Time to change the perspective. “I see you are unarmed.”

“Here?” He spread his arms wide. “We are in the heart of a fortress.”

Now we’re getting somewhere, she thought. “I am to make a decision, then.”

He showed her his teeth. “Precisely.” He popped a date into his mouth and seemed very pleased.

“About you? Shall I interview you?”

“Oh, no.” He laughed. “However, I imagine I would find it very pleasant to be interviewed by you.”

That’s what you think, Sara thought. “If not you,” she said, “who?”

He reached for a miniature honey cake. “I don’t know whether ‘interview’ is the correct term.”

“Then what would be?”

“That depends on your opinion of our guests.”

She was a bit taken aback. “Guests? You have guests here?”

“Yes.”

“In the warehouse.”

He nodded.

“Tell me.”

He ate the sweet, licked the honey from his fingers. “Imagine for a moment that you have an enemy. An implacable enemy. Now further suppose you have a mission to carry out. This mission, like all those facing you, is of vital importance. The problem is that neither you yourself nor anyone working for you can complete this mission.”

He held a dried apricot that looked like a human ear. Biting it in half, he said, “Desperate times, would you not agree?” He did not wait for an answer. “But there is one person who can accomplish this mission for you. The only problem is he won’t ever do that. Why? Because he is that implacable enemy I mentioned. What to do?”

Islam finished off the apricot. “Then an idea springs into your head. What if you were to coerce your enemy into doing what he otherwise would never do? This person does not respond to force or interrogation. He would laugh in your face if you offered him money. But your enemy must have a weak spot, no? Every person does. So you find this weak spot and you exploit it. This forces him to comply.”

He raised a forefinger. “Or so it at first seems. The fact is, new information comes to light that your enemy has somehow tricked you. You have given him a mobile phone with a GPS transponder that cannot be disabled. This will let you know where he is at all times. After days of tracking him, your people tell you that the GPS is in fact sending dual signals. One has broken off from the other and is degrading fast, leaving you with the true signal.

“Instead of being in, let’s say, Singapore, where he should be, preparing to begin the mission, your enemy is in Afghanistan. Why? You do not know, but it cannot be good for either you or your mission. Your enemy has broken trust with you.”

As he recounted this “hypothetical” scenario, his voice increased in tension, and fury came into it, turning it dark and ominous. For her part, Sara knew precisely who he was talking about, and her concern for Bourne increased exponentially.

Careful not to reveal the slightest hint of emotion, she said, “What has all this to do with your guests?”

“They are the coercion, the people who were supposed to force your enemy to comply.”

“And who are they?”

“A woman and her two-year-old daughter.”

A scream, like an unwanted guest, rose up from Sara’s depths. She snapped it off the way a bear will bite off the head of a fish and swallow it whole.

Her voice sounded thick and ungainly as she said, “What kind of decision am I being asked to make?”

Islam lounged in his chair, another square of sticky pastry between his fingertips. “Life for them,” he said, contemplating her with a frightening intensity. “Or death.”