The Bourne Ascendancy

  El Ghadan stepped out of the SUV even before it had fully stopped. He took the .38 out of her hand, checked the ammo to make sure she hadn’t replaced the live rounds with blanks, then gestured to his men.

  They ran down the stone steps to the jetty, used gaffs to bring Blum’s body to the surface. They hauled him up onto the jetty, while above them El Ghadan and Sara peered down.

  “So?” El Ghadan called down.

  One of his men squatted down, pressed two fingers against Blum’s carotid artery. “He’s dead,” he said, glancing up.

  “Roll him in with full pockets.”

  El Ghadan watched as his men stuffed Blum’s trousers’ pockets with rocks and bits of concrete. Then they rose and kicked him back into the water.

  He sank before Sara had time to say a prayer.

  33

  Dinazade was lost in the sea of stars,” Soraya sang to her daughter, and then abruptly stopped.

  “Islam,” she said, though her heart was thumping like mad in her chest. By now, she was used to the rhythms of her captivity; his visit was out of bounds. She pumped up her voice. “How good to see you.”

  The jihadist grabbed the back of a wooden chair, dragged it over in front of her a good six feet away, and sat down.

  “How are you feeling, Soraya?”

  “I’m fine.” She was aware that her voice was overbright, and she struggled not to bite her lip in self-recrimination.

  Islam seemed to smile. It was curious, she thought, how she could tell his expression even beneath the concealing headscarf.

  “I know you wouldn’t tell me the truth even if your life depended on it.” He looked down at his hands with their cupped fingers, then back up again at her. “If you want anything—”

  “You know what I want.”

  “Anything I am able to provide.”

  Sonya was squirming in her lap, but she remained silent, as she most often did when the two adults were speaking. Soraya knew their tones of voice disturbed her, but there was little she could do. “That’s why you came in here.”

  “Yes.”

  He stared at her intently. She could tell that his smile had dried up.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No? What do you think, then?”

  “It’s you who wants something from me, Islam. What could that be?” When he did not respond, she began a kind of singsong intoning: “‘Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having nothing in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.’”

  “I hate the sea,” Islam interrupted. “I don’t want to hear about the sea.”

  “This is a story about Ishmael, a young man close in name to you, and his captain, a man named Ahab.”

  “I said—”

  “This Captain Ahab was obsessed, like El Ghadan. Ahab’s obsession is Moby-Dick, the great white whale that took Ahab’s leg and his first ship.”

  “Not interested.”

  “But surely you’ll be interested in how it ends. Ahab finally finds his white whale—although many people, myself included, believe it’s Moby-Dick who finds Ahab, in his new ship. The whale destroys the ship, Ahab, and all who are in it—except for Ishmael. He, alone, was the sane one on a ship manned by the insane. He, alone, is left to tell the tale.”

  Islam seemed unmoved by her impromptu parable of his own situation. “This is a Western story—one that does not belong to me. I want to hear that song you were singing.”

  “Not a song,” Soraya said, “a story, a myth.”

  “What language were you singing it in?”

  “Farsi. It’s a story about Dinazade, lost among the stars.”

  So this is the reason for his unscheduled visit, Soraya mused. He heard me start to sing to Sonya. This is another step forward for us, she thought. I am drawing him closer and closer.

  “Can you sing it in Arabic? I don’t know Farsi.”

  “As you wish.” She nodded, and when she recommenced singing her voice changed, as if by magic, the subtle shadings of Arabic different from those of Farsi. She had of course taught Sonya both languages. “Dinazade was lost for a very long time, although in the sea of stars time did not exist. There was never a day or a night. The sun did not rise, nor did it set. The sun was as lost as was Dinazade, lost on another world, in another sky, far, far smaller than the one that held all these stars.

  “Dinazade’s prison was beautiful, but it was a prison for all that, a prison without either walls or bars. The sea of stars was infinite. In all her wanderings, Dinazade had never come across another soul. Her prison was inhabited by no one else.

  “Or so she thought.”

  Soraya settled Sonya more comfortably in her lap. She did not look directly at Islam, but in the corner of her eye she noted his rapt attention.

  She continued: “At some point—it was impossible to say when, since in this prison time did not exist—Dinazade became aware of a stirring beneath her. At first it was just a ripple, so faint she at first thought she had imagined it. But then a second ripple passed over her, stronger this time, like the exhalation of a djinn.

  “Gradually, she became aware of something rising up from the infinite space below her. It blotted out the stars as it rose toward her. More and more stars winked out, until she could make out something glinting like metal in the starlight from above. It was not metal. It was the scale of a fish—a fish so vast her eyes could not take in more than an infinitesimal fraction of it.

  “On it came, growing vaster until it seemed to Dinazade that the fish was larger than the infinite space through which it swam. The fish’s name was Bahamut, and he claimed that all of the world’s seven seas could fit into one of his nostrils, like a single grain of sand in the desert.

  “On Bahamut’s back was a white bull, and on this bull was a ruby mountain, and at the peak of this mountain was a seraph. Do you know what a seraph is, muffin? A seraph is an angel.”

  “I like angels, Mama.”

  Soraya smiled, making sure it encompassed Islam as well as her daughter. “We all do, darling.”

  She took a breath, let it out slowly and completely. “Dinazade spoke to the seraph, begging the seraph to free her from the prison into which she had been so wickedly cast. And do you know what the seraph said to Dinazade, muffin?”

  “What, Mama?”

  “The seraph said, ‘I see you are lost.’ The seraph hovered over Dinazade, its expression unfathomable. ‘Only you can free yourself, Dinazade.’ Then the seraph came closer, the beating of its wings like the murmur of a bee when it lands on a flower. Dinazade stared into the seraph’s eyes and saw only herself.

  “The seraph whispered in a voice that made it clear it was revealing a secret, ‘When you find yourself you will be free.’”

  * * *

  The instant Blum hit the water, after being knocked in by the force of the blank hitting him, he bit down on the tiny ruby pebble that had been embedded at the top of the tube of toothpaste Rebeka had given him in the souq. Fear was a palpable thing, a beast writhing in the pit of his stomach. He did not want to die. Of course he didn’t. It was a natural reaction.

  Intellectually, he knew that he was not going to die, but already his bodily functions were shutting down, his heart rate slowing, his blood pressure sinking. He thought of all the prep work Rebeka had done. He imagined how she must have walked down the Corniche, out of sight of the black SUV following a half mile behind, how she had extracted one bullet from the .38 El Ghadan had given her, thrown it into the restless, star-strewn sea. In its place, she had chambered a bullet from the several blanks of differing calibers she had made from the Mossad doctor’s stores. Replacing the .38 at the small of her back, she had walked on toward her terminal rendezvous with him.

  All going to waste now.

  The world closed in on him as death rose up from the black depths, enfolding him. He longed to cry out, but he would not
open his mouth for fear of drowning. He wanted to cry out: I’m lost! Please find me, someone!

  It was death that found him.

  * * *

  The Kidon divers were waiting for him. Their orders were explicit, precise, irrevocable. Everything depended on clockwork timing. When Blum hit the water for the second and final time, they kicked out with their fins, closed in on him, and, like a pair of seraphs, enfolded him in their arms, emptying his pockets of rocks and concrete chunks, swimming toward safety and, for Blum, a return to life.

  * * *

  Camilla, pitching herself off her horse at the apex of the turn, falling perfectly, her relaxed body rolling over on her right shoulder, felt no elation at her success. Becoming aware of Hunter’s applause, hearing her shouting, “Brava! Brava!” she felt no satisfaction.

  Rather, she was plunged into a sense of loss so deep it seemed to cut her like a knife. She was alone. Alone and lost in a desert populated only by mirages. People who professed to help her, to be her friends, were nothing of the sort. They were merely kings, queens, bishops, and knights on a vast and unknowable chessboard where she was the pawn being shuttled between them in order for one or another of them to gain advantage.

  For Camilla this was a familiar sensation. She and her sister had been passed back and forth between her warring parents like burning coals too hot to hold for long. She could vividly recall wandering through the many rooms of the countess’s villa, or attending dinners meticulously laid out by a platoon of servants, her teeth grinding at the phenomenal excesses of the super-rich that her father happily basked in as though bathed in Caribbean sunshine.

  As she sat with her back against an upright post on the Dairy’s racetrack, it occurred to her that she had no one to blame but herself. She had put herself into the emotional position she knew best, the one she had endured as a child. And with this knowledge came the revelation of just how utterly and irrevocably lost she was.

  Hunter dismounted, led Dixon back to where Camilla sat. Dixon lowered his head, snorted as she rubbed her palm against his velvet muzzle. She pushed herself up as he urged her on with his head.

  Hunter, all smiles, held out her hand for Camilla to shake. “That was perfect,” she said, her enthusiasm seeming genuine. “Now we can concentrate on winning.”

  Was everything Hunter had said to her a lie, even her avowal of protection? It must be, she thought. It must be. She’s just like my sister, my father. Another betrayal. POTUS, Howard Anselm, Marty Finnerman, Terrier, and Hunter. How was it, Camilla wondered, that these people could be so completely duplicitous? How had they successfully walled off parts of themselves, becoming who they were required to be as the situation dictated? In the military, and later in the Secret Service, she had trained to be a protector, not an actor, not a liar, not someone who seemed to revel in preying on people’s emotions.

  As she gripped Hunter’s forceful hand, she had a vision of herself as a tasty fish that had been thrown into a sea filled with ravenous sharks.

  34

  There were two reasons why the cadre didn’t head out of the valley in the morning. The first was that the wounded required a bit more time to recuperate. The second was that intel relayed to Borz through a method Bourne was yet to detect had put a spy drone in the vicinity, possibly sent to check on the aftermath of yesterday’s strike. In any event, Borz deemed it safer to travel by night, at least until they crossed the mountainous border into Afghanistan.

  As he had promised Bourne, Khan Abdali had sent two of his best warriors. They were impossibly lean, tall and majestic as Maasai. In addition to the requisite automatic weapons and bandoliers of ammo, they carried at their waists broad swords that looked like scimitars. Bourne knew that the various Waziri tribes often settled their disputes with these swords, as had their fathers and grandfathers before them.

  They were sun-fried and taciturn, always keeping to themselves. From time to time they drank water, but refused food; they carried their own: hard, unleavened bread, like the Jews, and chunks of cheese, white as chalk, harder than the bread. They made everyone, save Bourne, uneasy, especially Faraj, who viewed them as spies.

  “I don’t like being watched,” he said to Bourne at one point. “These people are nothing but trouble.”

  “No one likes to be cooped up inside all day,” Bourne said, “especially these boys.”

  Because of the suspected American drone and its cameras, no one was allowed outside, in order to give the impression that everyone in the camp had been killed or had fled. Even the jeeps had been pulled into sheds.

  Faraj didn’t care what the Waziri felt. “Keep a close eye on them,” he ordered as he stalked away.

  At Aashir’s insistence, Bourne spent most of the day teaching him to shoot the L115A3 AWM. They crept out into the blinding sunlight, Bourne showing him how to keep himself hidden in the valley’s sparse vegetation.

  “A sniper’s dead meat if he’s spotted,” Bourne said in a hushed tone. “You’ll be killed before you start.”

  They crouched among a cluster of boulders Bourne had selected. Bourne kept one eye on the skyline access points to the valley. He no longer needed his theatrical makeup. The sun had darkened his skin, his beard was now full. He was Yusuf Al Khatib.

  After he was certain they were in the clear, he displayed the AWM for his pupil. “Pay close attention,” he told Aashir. “You’re learning on the best weapon of its kind.”

  Bourne shot a buzzard, showing Aashir how it was done. Then he handed over the AWM. Aashir missed with his first two shots. Bourne counseled patience. Once, he took the AWM from Aashir and pushed him down among the rocks. Moments later, a shadow, as from a gigantic bird, passed over them, but there was no sound—none at all. Only a deadly silence. The shadow passed over again, more slowly this time. The utter stillness was almost unbearable.

  Bourne forced them to stay hunkered down and unmoving for a full twenty minutes after the shadow had passed for the last time. Afterward, there were no more buzzards to shoot at. Bourne picked out rocks of different sizes and set them up anywhere from five hundred to a thousand yards away for Aashir to practice on.

  Later, back inside one of the metal huts as Bourne was putting the rifle away, Faraj sauntered up to him. His left arm was tied tightly to his chest. Tiny dots of blood had seeped through the bandages.

  “You should not have gone outside,” Faraj said without preamble.

  “I took Aashir shooting.”

  “Were you going to shoot down the drone?” Faraj’s voice was withering. “You broke protocol. What if you had been seen and photographed? You would have jeopardized the entire cadre.”

  “Snipers are invisible. That’s what makes them so deadly,” Bourne said pointedly.

  Faraj ignored him. “You should not have taken him.”

  “He wanted to go.”

  Faraj stared hard at Bourne. “Believe me when I tell you, that boy doesn’t know what he wants.”

  “It was a good day for him, Faraj. Let it go.”

  Faraj’s eyes narrowed. “You seem to have much in common with him.”

  Bourne glanced at him briefly. He knew Faraj was jealous of his relationship with Borz. “I don’t know about that. He seems a bit lost. I’m teaching him to shoot, that’s all.”

  “He is lost,” Faraj observed, “but learning how to handle the long gun isn’t going to help his basic problem.”

  Bourne wiped his hands on a rag, set it aside. “What is his basic problem?”

  “I guess you’re not as close with him as I thought,” Faraj said, before walking away.

  * * *

  An electric atmosphere accompanied dinner. The knowledge that the cadre was going to move out at midnight had gripped everyone. It was a good night to begin their trek: Both moon and stars were hidden behind thick layers of clouds, dark, ominous, and heavy as metal. During dinner the wind off the mountains began to shriek like a creature in torment. Khan Abdali’s men ignored it, as did most of Borz?
??s Chechens, but Faraj and his cadre appeared ill at ease.

  Aashir slipped onto Bourne’s bench, set his metal plate down, and began to eat, as if the two had done this night after night for years.

  “How’s my skill—really?” he said.

  “Anyone can learn to shoot accurately,” Bourne said, “but it takes certain instincts to become a sniper.”

  “And I don’t have them.”

  “I didn’t say that, and I didn’t mean it. We won’t know until there are live targets to shoot at—moving targets.”

  “I shot down the buzzards.”

  “Buzzards aren’t men.” Bourne pushed aside his plate; he had no appetite anyway. “You have to learn your target, then anticipate movement—up, down, left, right, fast or slow. But without true fieldwork we’ll know nothing.”

  “Then we’re going to the right place.” Aashir’s fork clattered onto his plate. He seemed to have as little appetite for this food as Bourne.

  “Afghanistan is never the right place,” Bourne said. “It’s the wrong place for everything—except death.”

  He rose, and Aashir with him. They went outside. The wind had ceased its eerie howling, but the still air was icy, laden with moisture.

  “The rain will slow our progress,” the young man pointed out.

  “It won’t slow the Waziri,” Bourne pointed out. “We can’t let it slow us.”

  Aashir opened his mouth, then closed it again, turning away, and again Bourne had the impression he was about to say something—something extremely difficult for him to get out. Whatever it was seemed lodged in his voice box, sticking there like a needle. He would get to it, Bourne knew, in his own time, at his own pace.

  “Do you have a wife, Yusuf? Children?”

  “I have no one,” Bourne said. “I have myself.”

  They began to walk. They picked their way past the remnants of the C-17, then the mass grave of the American recruits—the cannon fodder for El Ghadan’s plan. The trembling anticipation of the pull-out was joined by the melancholy of death.