The Bourne Ascendancy

  “Everyone wants a piece of me.” Magnus scrubbed his face with his hands. “I feel like I need a sauna, a rubdown, and a shower, in that order.”

  “Unfortunately, Bill, those luxuries will have to wait until we’re on the ground. Singapore is noted for its practitioners of the healing arts.”

  “The healing arts are what I need most now.” Magnus looked up at his chief of staff. “She knows, Howard. Charlie knows.”

  “She knows what, Bill?” Anselm tried to sound calm, but his pulse was fluttering.

  “About Camilla!” POTUS scrubbed his face again, as if trying to erase the terrifying incident in the Oval Office. “Of all the people to find out! Jesus Christ, what are we going to do?”

  Anselm seated himself opposite his boss. “Calm down, Bill.”

  “Calm down? You should’ve seen the look on her face.”

  “I saw the look she gave me.”

  “And scuttled away like a rat.”

  “I wanted to give the two of you privacy.”

  “Oh, don’t give me that crap. You knew what was about to happen. You just didn’t want to be there when the bomb hit.” Unconsciously, POTUS held his hands in prayer. “Anyway, it wasn’t anything like what she threw my way.” Then he exploded. “Respect, Howard! She’s lost all respect for me! My only daughter.” His voice cracked, and he lowered it. “She’ll never forgive me, Howard. Never. My relationship with her is ruined.”

  Anselm decided this was not the time to tell his friend that his relationship with his daughter—as well as with his wife—had been ruined years ago. The human creature, he had discovered, possessed an almost unlimited capacity for denial and self-deception.

  Instead, he made soothing noises because he knew that was what POTUS needed to hear. “It’ll be all right, Bill. We’ll work it out.”

  “How? How? Just tell me that.”

  “First of all, we will give it time. We’ll let Charlie’s feathers settle. The air will clear and then we’ll go to work on her. She’ll come around, you’ll see.”

  “I could get her something,” Magnus said. “Something major that’ll make an impression. She’s been wanting a car, driving lessons. You know. What about a Fiat? They’re cute.”

  Anselm mentally rolled his eyes. “Buy American, Bill. Anyway, let the dust settle before making that decision.” Now for the hard part, he thought, taking a deep breath. “In the meantime, you need to keep the presidential mouse in the house.”

  Magnus’s face was mottled, as if he had been weeping. But of course that was impossible. Presidents didn’t weep, except at national tragedies of enormous scope. And even then…He was commander in chief of the United States Armed Forces, for Christ’s sake.

  He swung around in his chair, his back to Anselm. “But, see, the thing of it is, I miss her, Howard.”

  “Who, Bill? Who do you miss? Charlie?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” POTUS snapped. “When we get to Singapore, I have to see Camilla.”

  Anselm groaned inwardly, thinking, Is there truly no rest for the presidential mouse? “After what we just discussed—?”

  “I know what’s coming,” POTUS snapped. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Bill, you must listen to reason. She’s been given a brief.”

  “I don’t care. Dammit, I won’t be able to function at the summit. That’s the bottom line, Howard. I won’t be strong. I won’t be presidential. You don’t want that, do you?”

  Anselm wiped sweat out of his eyes. Christ, he thought, it was times like these when no amount of power was worth the angst. “No, sir,” he said dutifully, revealing none of this. “No one does.”

  “Then just do it, Howard.” POTUS held his head in his hands, as if battered by a pain beyond imagining. “Just fucking make it happen.”

  * * *

  Borz hauled back on the joystick. “What the fuck is happening back there?”

  “There’s an explosive device attached to the altimeter,” Bourne shouted back. “There was a reason the altimeter dial wasn’t working correctly. It’s been jiggered.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’m not positive, but it seems most likely that when we touch down the device will detonate.”

  For the next thirty seconds or so, Borz emitted a stream of the most obscene curses. Then he got down to business. “Can you render the device harmless?”

  “I need a needle-nosed pliers and a wire cutter,” Bourne said.

  “The engineer’s emergency toolkit is in the bulkhead just above you,” Borz called without turning around.

  Bourne twisted open the flush handle, found what he needed, then returned his attention to the explosive device.

  “What is it?” Borz asked.

  “Semtex,” Bourne answered. “Enough to blow us all to kingdom come.”

  “Christ Jesus!” Borz muttered as he pulled back on the throttle. “Don’t take too long, Yusuf,” he shouted. “We’re running out of fuel.”

  “How could we be running out of fuel? We’ve only been flying for an hour.”

  “The tank wasn’t full,” Borz said. “It didn’t need to be.”

  All those men, left dead in the Afghan caves; the cadre seriously diminished.

  Bourne went for the red wire, but at the last moment, as he settled the jaws of the wire cutter around it, he saw the trap. The bomb maker had set a double blind. Cutting this red wire would not defuse the bomb. In fact, breaking the connection would signal the bomb that it was under attack. It would explode at once.

  Carefully, Bourne backed the wire cutter away from the red wire.

  “How’re you coming? Yusuf, I’ll be forced to land in about four minutes. That’s all the time we have left.”

  44

  El Ghadan insisted on driving Sara to the Industrial Area in his huge American SUV. He activated a privacy panel that shut them off from the driver and the muscle up front.

  “With me, you won’t ever have to worry about the police.” Sara was still learning the extent of his influence throughout Qatar.

  “What is our destination?” she asked.

  “Street Fifty-Two and Al Manajer,” he replied. “Omega and Gulf Agencies.” He turned toward her on the seat. “I’m throwing you into the big pond.”

  “You really feel the need to test me? After the product I gave you? After I killed Blum for you?”

  “This is sink or swim, Ellie. No second chances.”

  The SUV swung onto the Industrial Area approach road. They were in the southwest quadrant, a section of the city no tourist knew existed, let alone ever saw. No one challenged them, no guard even looked their way. It was uncanny, and, for Sara, another sobering example of El Ghadan’s control of this region. They rolled slowly, inexorably toward the far southern edge of the Industrial Area.

  The vehicle pulled up to the curb outside a long, low, almost windowless building. Over its steel-jacketed front doors was a sign: OMEGA + GULF AGENCIES. Looking out through the heavily smoked glass windows, Sara saw no vehicles, no pedestrians—just the sunbaked road, hot enough to fry falafel.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Now we wait.”

  He sat very close to her, his presence like that of a coiled serpent.

  “Wait for what? I think I have the right to know what it is you expect of me.”

  El Ghadan was staring straight at the front doors of Omega + Gulf Agencies. “That is not for me to say.”

  Sara’s brow wrinkled. “Then how will I know—?”

  “It will be for you to make the choice, Ellie.”

  Choice? What choice? She felt a chill slither through her, even while a bead of sweat rolled down the indentation of her spine.

  She tried to take another tack. “What goes on in there? What is the agencies’ business?”

  “For the moment, you know all you need to know.”

  His voice had abruptly turned harsh and cutting, and despite her best efforts, she could not help feeling diminished by it.
br />   The doors to Omega + Gulf Agencies opened and a slim young man stepped out into the blinding sunlight. He wore jeans, an immaculate white T-shirt, and Nike sneakers. A pair of wraparound sunglasses shaded his eyes. He oriented himself to the SUV but did not make a move. His mouth was an expressionless slash.

  “Here is Islam,” El Ghadan said with what appeared to be an enigmatic smile. “Go along now. You don’t want to keep him waiting.”

  She slipped slowly, almost dazedly out of the SUV. The sunlight hit her like an anvil.

  Because she was on the edge of the unknown, because she was confronting a test the parameters of which were hidden from her, she began to wonder whether El Ghadan suspected she wasn’t who she claimed to be—a friend of the fictional diamond merchant, Martine Heur, and a freelance fieldman.

  Could he suspect her of being American, or Israeli? Even worse, did he know about her relationship with Jason? She tried to reassure herself. How could he know? But then the darkness of the unknown came rushing in. What if he did know? Then what in the world was he playing at here at the corner of Street Fifty-Two and Al Manajer?

  All at once, she began to feel the ground soften beneath her feet, until she was sinking into quicksand. Suddenly, she didn’t know where she was.

  She had lost her bearings.

  * * *

  The nest of colored wires swam before Bourne’s eyes as he remembered an early morning in Bosnia when Soraya had been caught by the tripwire that led like a spider’s silken strand to an explosive hidden just beneath the icy crust of earth. Sprawled on the snowy ground, she could not move forward or backward. The scents of pine resin and leaf mold filled his nostrils.

  “Don’t move,” he had cautioned her. “Relax. I have you.”

  Using only his fingertips, he had exposed the explosives—three packs of C4, bound together by black electrician’s tape. Unlike other bombs of that type, this one had a timer that started ticking down the moment the tripwire was activated.

  There were the four main wires—white, black, yellow, and red. Two were alive, two were dummies. The red was almost always alive, the one to go for. He opened his slender gravity knife, but as he pried apart the black and white wires to get to the red wire, he froze. Four more wires presented themselves below the top four. The digital clock was counting down. Two minutes left, a minute and a half.

  “Jason?”

  “Right here, Soraya. I almost have it.”

  But he didn’t. Eight wires and very little time to sort through them. Already down to a minute, now less. He examined the wires one by one, working out what each was attached to. But now he had less than thirty seconds until both he and Soraya were blown to smithereens.

  It was impossible. There was no way to discover which wire was the correct one to cut—the bomb maker was diabolical.

  Fifteen seconds. Ten.

  That’s when he saw it: At the ten-second mark, deep in the heart of the bomb, a hair trigger moved. He saw at once the wire it was attached to, and at the three-second mark, he cut the white wire in the lower tier.

  * * *

  “Yusuf!” Borz shouted now. “We’re running on fumes. I’ve got to take her down.”

  Aashir appeared in the doorway. “What’s happening, Yusuf?”

  “Come here,” Bourne said, by way of answer. When Aashir was kneeling beside him, he said, “Lift away those wires. Careful! Slowly!”

  And there was the lower tier of wires. Same bomb maker, only this time there was no ticking clock. Instead, the bomb was connected to the altimeter.

  “Borz, call off the altitude!” Bourne shouted.

  “Two thousand feet,” Borz replied. “Fifteen hundred.”

  Bourne searched for the telltale hair trigger, but he could find no sign of it. And yet it must be there. It was this bomb maker’s signature.

  “A thousand feet and dropping fast. Yusuf, I’m going to have to land the plane.”

  Bourne concentrated on each of the four lower wires in turn, but he could see nothing.

  “Five hundred!” Borz shouted. “Four hundred, three! Wheels are down!”

  At two hundred feet Bourne saw his mistake. The bomber had reversed himself: The upper wires were live, the lower tier dummies. His wire cutter hovered over one of the wires, then another. No hair trigger. Nothing.

  “One hundred feet! Yusuf, tell me you’ve got it!”

  He had a one-in-four chance of being right. Not good enough, not by a long shot. But to do nothing meant certain death.

  “Fifty feet! Wheels will make contact in ten, nine, eight…”

  Right before Bourne’s eyes something shifted. It was minute, but it was the same motion he had discovered in the Bosnian bomb.

  “Six, five, four…”

  He cut the black wire, and then the plane landed, bumping along the ground.

  “My God,” Borz shouted in triumph, “I’m a fucking puddle of sweat!”

  * * *

  They stood on the Afghan plain, the Antonov crouched at the end of the runway farthest from where they were grouped. A hundred yards away, the Bombardier Challenger 890 CS gleamed in the sunlight. It had been expertly painted with the colors and insignia of Balinese Air Transport, a regional freight line.

  If the waiting pilot was surprised by the diminished number of Borz’s cadre he gave no sign of it while he and Borz huddled in hurried discussion. Once inside the plane, Borz gave instructions to shave and climb into overalls with the insignia of a Singapore security firm on their chest and right sleeve. Work shoes were awaiting them as well. The men lined up for the toilet, where scissors and razor awaited them to cut and shave off their beards.

  Bourne was suitably impressed. Borz seemed to have thought of everything down to the smallest detail. He was a professional through and through.

  During his time in the toilet, staring at himself clean-shaven, Bourne took out the piece of the plan he had taken from Borz’s office after the drone attack. What he had at first thought was a sewage system was in fact a drainage network, part of what appeared to be a perfect oval. This pointed to a stadium of some kind. The new national stadium was not yet finished. Though there were over a dozen other stadiums in and around the center of Singapore, Bourne knew this one had to be one the president would visit during the week of the peace summit. Then he looked closer at a corner of the plan. There was a section of a watermark: part of a horse’s head.

  And at that moment he knew the target of Borz’s attack.

  Part Four

  45

  Jimmie 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.