The Bourne Ascendancy

  Terrier dug into a slice of indifferent apple pie, sipped impoverished coffee, and thought of Nighthawks, Edward Hopper’s iconic painting of the Depression-era patrons of a New York City diner. The painting perfectly captured the existential emptiness of Terrier’s life, a life begun in the filthy tenements of Detroit, where his father had been an autoworker before being laid off, his emptied plant a symbol of Middle America’s creeping death. And what of young Terrier himself: product of a negligent public school education, a state college where he was high all the time, and then…work? Not on your life. Not a decent job to be had for a hundred miles around, though he washed dishes for a time and was a gravedigger for a cemetery sadist for barely six months. Otherwise, his needle was stuck on empty.

  With no prospects and no future, Terrier had joined the armed forces, where he served three tours of duty in the Horn of Africa, Iraq, and, latterly, Afghanistan. It was in the Afghan mountain strongholds of the enemy that he received his Saul of Tarsus moment. The people he discovered in the caves high up in the mountains were women and children, some no more than a year old, ragged and perpetually starving. Their eyes were the eyes of old men who had seen too much of a life without either prospects or future.

  As Terrier harked back to his own bankrupt beginnings, he at last understood how easy it was for the extremists to recruit these children before they even became men. The clever bastards gave the kids both prospects and a future, the only future available to them: They were fed, clothed, housed, armed, and all the while the poison of indoctrination was being pumped into them. For these kids it was a matter of survival, nothing more or less. Hate gave them a reason for being alive; the prospect of martyrdom, a promise that their deaths would be meaningful to both themselves and their families.

  Terrier returned from Afghanistan a changed man, but not in the manner of many of his fellow soldiers. He applied to the DOD, and was immediately snatched up both because of his experience and his innate intelligence. He trained for six months at the Farm, then another three months at the Dairy, before being dispatched as a fieldman, returned to the hot spots of the Middle East with which he was so familiar. He spoke the lingo, he knew the minds of the people. He was the perfect weapon.

  To the delight of his handlers and their masters, he unfailingly accomplished the objectives of his briefs. At some point, he came to the attention of Marty Finnerman, who, with his keen eye for talent, appropriated Terrier as his own dog in the hunt, running him on brief after brief, collecting invaluable product on the movements and the ever-morphing tactics of the elusive enemy.

  Which was how Terrier had come to be brought by his handler into the West Wing to brief POTUS.

  The lights in the diner shone off Terrier’s empty plate, with its last bits of lard-soaked crust. Outside, a monstrous midnight-blue ’72 Chrysler Imperial, in cherry condition, turned into the parking lot. Terrier raised a hand, called over the waitress, and ordered two coffees.

  The searchlight headlamps of the Imperial were switched off. The wide grille reflected the diner’s neon glow. He watched the figure exit the car, trot up the concrete steps, and enter the building.

  * * *

  Hunter looked around, spotted Terrier, and slid into the other side of his booth just as the coffee was brought to the table. She wore stained jeans, cowboy boots, and a denim shirt under a suede jacket, which she did not bother to take off.

  “All that’s missing is fringe on your jacket,” he said with a wry tone.

  “And fuck you too,” Hunter said with a small laugh.

  “Couldn’t you come in a less conspicuous vehicle?” he said. “Like a Honda or a Chevy, maybe?”

  Hunter sipped her coffee. “You love my Imperial.”

  And it was true, he did. It was a symbol of what America had been at its height and now was no more. It gave him a warm feeling in the pit of his stomach, a reaffirmation of the correctness of the path they had chosen.

  “How are things at the Dairy?” he said.

  “My, aren’t you coy this evening.” Hunter eyed him critically. “Your performance went down a storm. Camilla believed it completely.”

  “And have you taken advantage?”

  “What d’you think?”

  “So.” He put his hands on the table. “What is your assessment?”

  “She’s going to be fine. She has precisely the right background, as you know, since you whispered her name in Finnerman’s ear. That fucking father of hers embodies everything that’s wrong with the consumerist imperium America has become.”

  “Kudos to her for seeing the truth,” Terrier said. He drank off half his coffee, which was already cool. “Tell me she’ll be ready by the time she’s shipped off to Singapore.”

  “Stop worrying.”

  Hunter pushed her cup away; Terrier could scarcely blame her.

  “Camilla is a very accomplished young woman; her ability to learn and absorb is astonishing.”

  Now it was Terrier’s turn to eye her critically. “So that’s how it is.”

  “I’m not sleeping with her.”

  “Yet.” He gave a nonjudgmental laugh. “You still have a couple of days to rectify that.”

  Hunter grinned, then said, “What’s doing in the world beyond the Dairy?”

  He passed her a manila envelope. “For our mutual friend.”

  “Really?”

  “It will seal the deal.”

  “Beautiful.” Hunter slipped the folder onto the seat beside her. “Okay, then.”

  Terrier hunched forward. “The big boys are planning one massive spin on the drone strike debacle. Pulling out all the stops—the Americans were recruited on homeland soil, came to Syria of their own accord, indoctrinated by Faraj.”

  “In other words, traitors.”

  “Right. They posed a grave and imminent danger to America, blah, blah, blah.”

  “It might work.”

  He nodded. “Better than even chance.” He shrugged. “But then again maybe not. There’ll be plenty of outrage from overseas, not to mention the antidrone lobby.”

  “Which we encourage in every way possible.”

  Terrier leaned forward, lowered his voice. “But here’s the kicker. Finnerman wants me to roll up a local network as the extremists who did the local recruiting.”

  “That’s a joke,” Hunter said.

  Terrier nodded. “But only to us.”

  “Have you picked a likely target?”

  He smiled. “What d’you think?”

  * * *

  One of the racing bikes in the rack outside the barn went missing while Hunter was fetching her Imperial. Camilla was on a narrow pathway above the road that Hunter took to Jake’s World diner. The night was clear, and she had no difficulty in following the Imperial’s wide red trail. She knew that if Hunter was going more than five miles, she’d lose her, but intuition told her that wherever she was going was close enough to the Dairy.

  The ways in and out of the Dairy were heavily manned, of course, and there was no way Camilla could pass through without showing her credentials, which was out of the question. She was going AWOL, at least for a short time, and she knew she needed to leave no trace of her leaving or returning.

  On one of her horseback rides, she had spotted what she believed was a hole in the net that surrounded the Dairy like a castle moat. She might have thought about riding Dixon, but she had been afraid of the sound of his hooves. Plus, his absence from his stall at this time of night would inevitably be recorded. The bike was silent, as well as compact. She had made the right choice—the hole in the Dairy’s net proved impossible for a horse, even without its rider. A large buck had tried to leap over the net, but its underbelly had caught on the razor wire atop it, and it had bled to death. Its weight had brought the net down without causing a break in the electronic circuit—a definite design flaw. Camilla walked the bike over the deer’s back. Once, on the downslope, she had to reach out, grab hold of the tines of an antler to steady herself. She
felt the innate power of the animal even in death, and briefly mourned its demise, which seemed as arbitrary and unnecessary as a soldier’s on the battlefield. Still holding on, she blessed the deer for providing the bridge to her exit.

  It was inevitable that the Imperial would get ahead of her, but that too was no problem, for she saw it heading directly for the bright jukebox lights of the diner.

  Hunkered down inside her leather jacket and pedaling for all she was worth, she arrived five or six minutes after Hunter pulled up and went inside. Wheeling around to the rear, she surprised a trio of fat raccoons, who leered toothily at her from their spot beside two green Dumpsters. She shone her flashlight into their eyes, forcing them to lumber grumpily into the shadows.

  Dismounting, she leaned the bike against the rear stairs, then trotted up and through the door, striding through the kitchen as if she belonged there. The staff was too busy to notice her, and in any event, she had reached the corridor where the toilets were located before any of them had a chance to turn from their duties.

  She spotted Hunter right away, sitting on one side of the booth, talking earnestly, but she had to maneuver a bit to catch a glimpse of the person she was huddled with.

  When she did, a chill slithered down her spine, as if someone had slipped a snake inside her shirt. Hunter was in conversation with Vincent Terrier, the man she had claimed to loathe, and by the look of high animation on her face Camilla could tell that their discussion was of a highly clandestine nature.

  She took another step to the side, could lip-read some of what they were saying. Fuck me, they’re in this ideological shit together. Terrier was the beater, driving me closer to Hunter, she thought, wiping away the beads of cold sweat that had formed at her hairline.

  31

  Stars fell on the Mahsud’s valley in Waziristan in such profusion that the sky seemed white in places. Deep in a night blanketed with an eerie silence devoid of either insect buzz or bird call, Bourne stood gazing at the wreckage of the C-17. The bracing air still reeked of burned insulation, burst-apart concrete, melted plastic, and the unmistakable horrific barbecue stench of charred human flesh.

  “I can’t sleep either.”

  Bourne turned to see Aashir slouching toward him, hands in pockets, head slightly tucked into his narrow shoulders. He stared mournfully at the ruined runway. “I never expected this.”

  “What did you expect?” Bourne said.

  Aashir shrugged. “I didn’t think about it. I was too busy planning my getaway.”

  “From what?”

  Aashir didn’t immediately answer, and when he did, it was obliquely. “I had a friend. A girl. That’s not supposed to happen—or, anyway, it’s not allowed. We met anyway. We thought we were being discreet, but, you know, there are so many wagging tongues, so many eagle eyes watching out for single men and women together. Spies, you know, with nothing else to do except enforce sharia law, tell their tales, and bring the hammer of justice down.” He laughed bitterly. “Hammer of sexism is more like it.”

  Now Bourne was listening closely. This story interested him. It marked Aashir as someone other than an extremist. What he was doing embedded in Faraj’s jihadist cadre was still a mystery.

  “You won’t tell anyone I said that, Yusuf.”

  “Of course not. As I’ve pointed out to Borz, I’m a pragmatist, not a zealot.”

  “Unlike Faraj and El Ghadan, whose infatuation with fanaticism is absolute.” Aashir’s voice, following his expression, had turned mournful, like a sax playing a minor-key melody. “They will kill and, eventually, be killed for it.”

  “And what is it you want for yourself, Aashir?”

  “Freedom, I suppose.” He shrugged again. “But, really, I don’t know what that means.”

  “To be free.”

  “Yes.”

  Bourne wondered if anyone knew. Everyone was tied to their lives. Did that make them prisoners, or free men?

  They walked side by side, staring straight ahead. It was a fact of life that it was easier to talk to a stranger about personal matters than it was to someone you knew.

  “What are you doing here?” Bourne asked.

  Aashir shrugged. “Can you think of a better place to hide?”

  “You can’t hide here forever,” Bourne pointed out. “Besides, you know we’re moving out as soon as all the wounded are in stable condition.”

  “Afghanistan is as good as here, I suppose.” Aashir gestured vaguely. “Where else should I go, Yusuf? To the West? To join the people who dropped napalm, white phosphorus, bunker busters, air-to-ground missiles, and the largest array of state-of-the-art engines and vehicles of death ever assembled upon millions of innocent Vietnamese, Cambodians, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Afghans, not to mention Libyans and Yemenis?” He shook his head. “No. There is nowhere for me to go, except here with Faraj.”

  “As you yourself pointed out, Aashir, this is temporary shelter at best. Faraj and El Ghadan are bent on the destruction of not only their enemies but themselves. Where will that lead you? Injured, or dead, like those being buried out on the side of the runway? You don’t want that. Go home. Home is where you belong. You have unfinished business there.”

  Aashir shook his head as they continued to walk out toward the mountains, away from the killing field, where the stench of death was being superseded by quicklime. “You don’t understand.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  Instead, Aashir changed the subject. “I’ve heard you’re an ace marksman. Is that true?”

  “It is.”

  “Why do you do that?”

  Bourne considered a moment. “There is a certain satisfaction in mastering a skill—any skill.”

  “Would you teach me?”

  Bourne nodded. “If you wish.”

  Aashir cocked his head, regarded Bourne from the corners of his eyes. “What are you doing here, Yusuf?”

  “I’m a misfit,” Bourne said truthfully. “For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt like an outsider. I’m not like other people; I have different interests.”

  “Like staring into the war from the other end of a long gun.”

  “Yes, but that came later.”

  This was another of Bourne’s innate skills, to listen to the questions, silences, and hesitations of another person, and from them intuit their secret histories.

  Aashir, with his full attention on Bourne, said, “So tell me, what came first?”

  “A feeling of being set adrift on an endless sea.”

  “Out of sight of land—and my parents.” Aashir seemed to be musing to himself.

  “Are they so terrible?” Bourne asked.

  “My mother cried when I tried to talk to her, and my father—well, there’s no talking to my father. His disappointment in me was like a third person in the room.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  Aashir gave a sad little snicker. “My father is deaf to what he doesn’t want to hear.”

  Bourne had met too many of those kinds of men. In fact his shadow world was rife with them. “Where are you running away from?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  The conversation was drawing them inexorably closer, as often happens when strangers meet in extreme circumstances, bond, and become friends.

  “Your accent is Yemeni,” Bourne said.

  Aashir nodded. “You have a good ear, Yusuf. And you are Syrian, I hear. What part are you from?”

  Bourne sensed it was time to draw the young man even closer. “I don’t know.”

  Aashir laughed. “How could you not know?”

  “I was shot.” Bourne showed him the scar. “I fell into the water, was picked up by fishermen, who saved my life. They brought me to a doctor, who fixed my body, but my mind was another matter. I have amnesia. I can’t remember anything before the time of the shooting.”

  Aashir stared at him, making eye contact for the first time since they started their walk, since they had begun to speak of things that mat
tered to both of them. “You don’t remember your mother or father, if you had a family?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And your name?”

  “I chose it.” Bourne gestured. “I would give anything to know what you know—where you were born and raised, who your parents are, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins. A place to call home. You shouldn’t run away from all that; it’s too precious.” He stepped in closer. “But listen, you mustn’t tell anyone. I gave Faraj a fiction about my background.”

  Aashir shook his head. “There’s no need to worry. I don’t tell Faraj anything. He’s like my father. What would he understand, anyway?”

  They continued to walk; Aashir scuffed at the ground with the toe of his boot. He appeared to be about to say something, then quickly, almost furtively, changed his mind. He looked up at the star-kissed mountains and said, “So what am I doing here, Yusuf?”

  “That’s a good question, Aashir, but now that we know each other a bit it’s not so difficult to answer,” Bourne said. “You’re doing what every intelligent person your age does. You’re finding out who you really are.”

  Aashir laughed then, and it was a laugh Bourne did not understand.

  * * *

  Sara was being followed. A man in front, a pair in back. For good measure, there was also a car. The owls were to be expected, and she was therefore reassured. The number of men El Ghadan had assigned to her was also reassuring, since it provided further proof that his base was in fact in Doha, as she had suspected. That meant Soraya and Sonya were still in Doha. Somehow, this comforted her, feeling closer to them. But she was still under strict orders from Jason to keep her distance. He had something planned, she knew that much. And frustrating though it might be, she had reconciled herself to not knowing what it was. Better for her, better for everyone, especially now that she had made contact with El Ghadan. It was imperative that he have no suspicion whatsoever that she had any connection to his hostages.