Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Ascendancy (8 page)

S
andcrabbing was not
a particularly glamorous undertaking. In fact, it was shunned by many field operatives, or at least shunted off onto underlings. It was also never less than difficult, depending as much on raw intuition as on grubby digging. For Sara Yadin, the difficulty was compounded by the fact that she was a female in an Arab country. Had she been in Riyadh, for instance, where women were not even allowed to drive a car, instead of in Doha, a far less restrictive city, her job would have been impossible.

But Sara was unflaggingly intrepid. Even her few detractors, who thought that too often she flew too close to the sun, grudgingly admitted to that.

Start with what you know, her training had taught her, and move on from there.

The reason her father hadn’t objected to her coming to Doha was that he knew she ran a number of reliable contacts and conduits here. The trouble was, having been recuperating in hospital for months, she hadn’t been in touch with them for a while. The first one was out of the country, the second knew nothing, and the third was in hospital and unconscious, the victim of a stroke. She moved on to a man named Hassim, who owned Vongole, an upscale restaurant on a tony strip known as La Croisette.

Hassim wasn’t at the restaurant, so she drove to his house, a walled villa of pale gold, beyond which could be seen the tops of date palms clattering in the hot wind. Through the open gate, she could see that the place was three-tiered, with flat tiled roofs and a shaded entry portico. Hassim’s silver Rolls was in the driveway. She pulled up next to it, emerged into the blistering desert heat, and in the blessed shade beneath the portico rang the bell.

Hassim himself, rather than one of his servants, answered the door.

“Were you expecting me?” Sara said, half in jest.

“It happened I saw you drive up,” he said as he ushered her inside. “It’s a pleasure to see you, Rebeka, though your presence here seems a bit insecure.”

“I know, but I don’t have time for the usual dead-drop protocol.”

He nodded. “Fair enough.”

He led her through the octagonal entryway and into a large seating area. He was a small man, neat and fastidious. He and his family had made their fortune in oil, but, sensing the decline in fossil fuels, he had felt the need to diversify away from energy. Vongole was his third restaurant in Doha, the newest and the most successful, though as far as Sara knew they were all packed nightly.

“May I offer you a drink? Some chilled fruit juice, perhaps?”

“Thanks, Hassim.” As pressed for time as she was, it would have been unforgivable to decline. “Whatever you have will be fine.”

Crossing to a sideboard, he opened a small refrigerator, poured out passionfruit juice from a frosty glass pitcher. He brought the slim glasses over and they drank silently.

“So,” Hassim said, “how can I help?”

Briefly, Sara recounted what she knew from Bourne about the massacre at the Al-Bourah Hotel, which was much more than had been reported in the local papers and TV stations.

“The inference I have made,” she concluded, “is that the raid would not have been possible without police collusion.”

“And you want a name.”

“That’s why I’ve come to you in all due haste.”

Hassim nodded, but he didn’t look confident. “That’s not an easy question to answer.”

“It’s an eminently easy question to answer.” She set down her empty glass and peered at him. “You get top police brass eating at Vongole virtually every night of the week. The emir’s people as well, if I’m not mistaken. Surely you’ve heard something that can help me.”

“I never said I didn’t.” But he had trouble meeting her eye.

“Hassim.” She took a step toward him. “What’s going on?”

“Something has changed,” he said.

“Something? What, exactly?”

“Maybe from the emir on down, I don’t know.” His eyes flicked toward her as he licked his lips. “There’s more money going to the Syrian rebels, for one thing.”

“That’s hardly news.”

“Well, but the money isn’t going to the rebels directly. It’s going to a middleman who uses it to arm the rebels—or so the emir and his people believe.”

She took a step toward him, could sense the fear coming off him like a rank perfume. “But the truth is—”

“Different,” he said. He licked his lips again. “Listen, I—”

“Is it more money you want? I’ll get it for you. A bonus.”

“Money.” He laughed nervously. “No. Not at all.”

“Then what, Hassim? What can I give you in return for your complete cooperation in the matter?”

“Assurance,” he said.

“You have it.”

“Protection.”

She nodded. “As well.” What in the world has gotten him so spooked? she wondered.

“Along with a promise to extract me at a moment’s notice.”

“Okay. I can do that.”

He nodded. “The money is going to this middleman. Tons of it.”

“So you said, Hassim. Who is this middleman? An arms dealer? If so, I’m sure I know him.”

“Oh, you know him, all right,” Hassim said. “The middleman is El Ghadan.”

Sara was rocked back on her feet. So it wasn’t just the police who were colluding with El Ghadan, it was the Qatari government itself! No wonder Hassim had extracted those promises from her.

She pulled herself together long enough to ask, “Who’s he dealing with in the police, Hassim?”

“The whole department, probably.”

“You’ve come this far,” she urged. “You might as well hit the finish line.”

“Right, sure.” Hassim looked disgusted, but whether it was due to the tale he had to tell or with himself was impossible to say. “But for this I need to make a call.” He rose. “I’ll be right back.”

Sara watched him pad out of the room. She desperately wanted to follow him, try to overhear at least his side of the phone conversation, but she didn’t dare take the chance. She was following a slender thread, and because it was the only thread she had, she was not prepared to put it in jeopardy by doing something rash.

Instead, she stood up, roamed about the room, examining a cut crystal ashtray here, a bronze statuette there. She picked up a shell, pink as the inside of an ear. To her surprise, it was made of a kind of resin. She turned it over, but there was only the mark of another seashell, tiny, stamped in gold.

She put it down as Hassim bustled back. “It wasn’t easy, but I got it.”

“Do I note a hesitation in your voice?”

Hassim cleared his throat. “I’m a restaurateur now, pure and simple. While you have been out of sight, I’ve been expanding my empire. That’s what I’m concentrating on now.”

“Are we done, then?”

He looked at her with a mixture of sadness and relief. “This is the last bit of product, Rebeka. I can’t afford to keep sticking my neck out.”

Something inside her hardened. “I understand your position, Hassim, but calling it a day isn’t so easy.”

“Nevertheless, that’s what I’m doing.” He regarded her steadily. “That’s the price of this product. I tell you, I’m out. That’s it.”

“Take it or leave it, huh?”

He licked his lips, nodded.

Sara took a deep breath, let it out very slowly and evenly. “Let’s have it, then.”

“I have your word?”

“You do.”

“His name is Khalifa Al Mohannadi,” Hassim said. “He’s a colonel in the National Tactical Command Center here in Doha.”

“NTCC,” Sara mused. “He’s antiterrorist, then. You sure about this? Your source is reliable?”

“One hundred percent.”

“A colonel in NTCC in bed with El Ghadan. That’s a joke.”

“If it is,” Hassim said, “it’s a sad one for my country.”

Sara’s look was unfocused, her mind far away, spinning like a top. “Qatar has always found a way to keep itself balanced amid constant Mideast turmoil,” she said. “I’m wondering why it feels a need to secretly align itself with the most dangerous terrorist alive.”

Z
izzy ran to Hafiz and,
keeping out of the line of fire through the shattered window, knelt down beside him.

“Is he dead?” Bourne said, staring out the window.

“Still breathing.”

“Stay with him.” Bourne sprinted to the door.

“Where are you going?” Zizzy asked, but Bourne was already gone.

One motorcycle in the line parked outside the ministry had keys in the ignition. Mounting the cycle, Bourne fired it up, racing away before any of the guards had a chance to react. Heading toward the barrier at speed, he waved at the soldiers manning it. They lifted the barrier just enough for him to duck under it as he thundered down the street, heading for the mosque from which he judged the shot had been fired.

Arriving, he slowed, circled the building several times while studying it. To use a mosque as cover for a violent act was strictly forbidden, but he knew that wouldn’t stop a rebel, for whom the exigencies of war overrode his moral code, or a jihadist, who had only death in his heart.

Similarly, he knew the sniper would not be in a hurry to leave his cover. In the first place, any haste would make him stand out among the worshippers, and might even incur their wrath. In the second place, he would doubtless be assured that no one had an inkling where the shot had come from, let alone set out to find him. It was Bourne’s good luck to be in Hafiz’s office when the minister was killed. The sniper’s line of sight was readily available to his keen and practiced eye.

The day was waning, the sun already sunk beneath the smoldering skyline. Overhead, a pair of jet fighters returning from their strafing mission twinkled like stars, high up enough to catch the sun’s last rays.

Bourne watched the first of the worshippers, prayer rugs tucked beneath their arms, slipping on their shoes as they exited the mosque. He waited, his eyes seeming to penetrate the burgeoning mass of men, searching for the one man of interest to him.

As the crowd thinned somewhat, he saw him. He was a tall man, with the build of a wrestler. His hair was dark, curled and oiled, and he buried his knuckles in his thick beard as, no doubt out of habit, he glanced around.

Bourne turned away, bent down, asked a passing boy the way to the Technical Computer Institute at Bostan Addour. The boy had no idea, but that hardly mattered. The sniper had not gotten a look at Bourne’s face as he scanned the immediate environment.

As Bourne turned back, he noted that the sniper’s prayer rug was larger than most, in order to conceal his rifle, Bourne surmised, even though he had doubtless broken it down, unscrewing the long barrel, placing it beside the stock. The man had the face of a wolf, his eyes wary, his manner calm and methodical. His skin was as rough as sandpaper, dark as stained mahogany, pocked as if from a scourge that had attacked the populace of his boyhood village.

Bourne tracked him as he ducked into a beat-up beetle-brown Skoda sedan that slid to a stop in front of the mosque. The driver was the only other person in the vehicle. Choosing a safe distance, Bourne followed the car as it slid through the evening traffic. Blue shadows lay in the street like exhausted dogs. The shelling had stopped, at least for the time being, and an eerie calm had descended over the city. To some, huddled in doorways or looking up to the sky, the quiet seemed more unsettling than the mortar bursts and the small-arms fire, and their terror made the air shimmer with bleak anticipation. At any moment, the shelling would begin again, but when? For civilians, the pause was an effective form of torture, fraying nerves to the breaking point.

The Skoda led Bourne down narrow streets lined with concrete-block houses with overhanging upper stories, their blank faces marred by spray-painted graffiti proclaiming the victories of the rebels or the self-righteousness of the jihadists. Beyond, the dusky hills were coming alive with thousands of lights, as if they were home to swarms of fireflies.

At length the Skoda turned down a darkened street, poorer than those that had come before. On the left, Bourne could see a difference in the buildings’ façades. The structures were larger and lacked windows, which led him to believe the street was lined with warehouses. At least half of them had sustained damage, a few were crumbling altogether. Many had been abandoned.

Which was the point, he saw, as the Skoda stopped in front of one such warehouse. The sniper hopped out, his prayer rug and its unholy contents left behind. The Skoda drove slowly off.

The sniper gave a series of rhythmic knocks on a worm-eaten wooden door, and it was opened immediately. He stepped inside and the door slammed shut behind him. Bourne slipped off the motorcycle, walked the hundred or so yards to the warehouse door. He repeated the rhythmic knocks. Again, the door was opened immediately. Bourne stepped inside, struck the man he saw in the side of the neck, then slammed his head against the wall.

The man collapsed. Bourne quickly went through his clothes, retrieved a dirk with a wicked-looking curved blade and an old Russian Stechkin automatic pistol. The tiny entry gave way to the vast interior, now reeking of rot and neglect and human sweat. Metal barrels lined the wall on his left, a crate or two on his right. Otherwise the warehouse was empty. The stench of vehicular exhaust came to him, not as stale as one might have expected.

Against the far wall, a steep flight of narrow wooden stairs led up to a second-floor office with a line of windows that overlooked the warehouse proper. Through one of the windows, Bourne could see the sniper. He was talking animatedly with two men, neither of whom Bourne could make out clearly.

Cleaving to the left wall, he made his way toward the office, using the stacked barrels as cover. He passed small puddles on the concrete floor, black, viscous as pitch: automotive oil. Clearly, heavy trucks of some sort were being run in and out of here on a regular basis.

Up ahead, the figures in the office were still in deep discussion. None had yet turned to look out the windows. Bourne was moving, half bent over, between the stacks of barrels, when the driver of the Skoda tried to slip a knife blade between two of his ribs. They were the correct ribs—the ones safeguarding his lungs.

At the last instant Bourne’s senses had prickled, and he was turning as the tip of the blade flashed toward him. Grabbing the extended wrist, he jerked the arm toward him, turning back away from the attack, using the driver’s own momentum to lead him around and down.

He slammed the edge of his hand into the driver’s collarbone. The driver groaned, and Bourne knocked the knife out of his fist. He was cadaverously thin, all ropy muscle, without an ounce of fat on him.

Completely ignoring the pain of Bourne’s blow, the man whipped his wrist free. Using his left shoulder, sharp as a pointed stick, as a cudgel, he jolted Bourne back into the barrels. Reaching up, he brought one of the teetering barrels down on Bourne’s neck and shoulder, driving him to his knees. Time enough for him to draw a Tokarev pistol and point it at Bourne’s forehead.

As his finger tightened on the trigger Bourne pressed the Stechkin into his abdomen at an upward angle and fired. The driver stumbled backward. He tried to re-aim his pistol but the bullet Bourne had fired point-blank had torn through his innards, lodging in his heart. His eyes rolled up as he fell backward onto the oily cement.

The noise of the shot ricocheted around the nearly bare space, catching the attention of the three men in the office. They stared out of the windows as Bourne covered the rest of the distance to the rear of the warehouse.

They were all in motion as he mounted the stairs two at a time. He couldn’t see them now, but the reverse was also true. He reached the top without incident and hauled the rickety door open.

Then the blast blew the office apart.