Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Ascendancy (14 page)

“I would not have shepherded Eisa through the city had it been otherwise,” Bourne said.

“The lamb! Yes, the lamb!” Then Abu Faraj Khalid threw his arms wide and embraced Bourne.

“
As-salam alaykum wa rahmatu, akhoya, Allahi wa barakatuhu
,” he cried. Peace be upon you, my brother, and Allah’s mercy and blessings.

W
hen Sara woke,
she felt warmth on her face, a light, then a window onto the coming dawn bloomed in her vision.

Someone said, “Go get him. She’s awake.”

A moment later, Levi Blum’s face appeared, hovering over her.

“What…” Her mouth felt full of cotton. She tried to swab her lips with her tongue.

“Here.” Blum lifted her head so she could get a straw into her mouth.

She sucked on ice water, a little at a time. When she’d had enough, she nodded, and he took the glass away.

She tried again. “What happened? Where am I?”

“I brought you to our doctor.” The Mossad employed a permanent doctor in all their fields of operation. “You passed out right in the middle of a sentence. I had no idea what was going on so I did what I thought best. Rebeka, your side is a mess. What happened?”

She told him about the nightmare ride on Hassim’s boat, Khalifa shooting Hassim, then turning on her and what transpired after. “The shark scraped me up.”

“That’s one thing,” he said, “but the doc found a deep wound underneath, not quite fully healed.”

Sara closed her eyes. She’d been too preoccupied to realize that the shark had turned into her on the same side she had been knifed in Mexico City last year.

“There was more bleeding than I guess you realized,” Blum was saying now.

Then something occurred to her, and she struggled to sit up. “The mobile,” she said. “Where is Khalifa’s mobile?”

“Here.” Blum handed it to her, then propped her up with a number of pillows. “It was on the side table. Did you think I’d appropriate it?”

“Frankly, Levi, I did.”

He nodded. “I don’t blame you.” He sat with his hands in his lap, fingers intertwined, like a schoolboy called to accounts.

“You were working with Khalifa. He almost killed me. This is the end of your career in Mossad, Levi. Believe me when I tell you this.”

“Ah, Rebeka, I know it looks bad, but before making a judgment you’ll regret, I beg you to listen to what I have to tell you.”

“What could you possibly have to say to me that would mitigate what you’ve done?”

“Yes.” His head bobbed up and down. “In your place I’d say the same. But then, too, I might take a step back and listen.”

Sara let go a long sigh. Then she nodded. “You have three minutes.”

“But—”

“Make the most of them, Levi.”

“Right.” He swallowed. “It’s true that Colonel Khalifa came to me, but it’s also true that he’d already had me under surveillance.”

“What?”

“That’s right. I was blown the moment I landed in Doha. Don’t ask me how or who. I don’t know. But when he made his pitch I knew I only had two choices: Do as he said or abandon ship. For me, the second option was out of the question; screwing up this assignment I’d be drummed out of Mossad instantly. Anyway, I thought, if I’m to double, why not double again?”

“You mean you meant to gather product on him to deliver back to Mossad.”

“Right.”

“Yet you didn’t.”

“Rebeka, I have material, I just didn’t dare send it. He had me under the microscope from the get-go. I couldn’t chance it.”

“Then you should have pulled yourself out.”

“And miss this opportunity? Besides, he would’ve had me locked down the moment I showed my face at the airport.”

Her eyes turned steely. “How much, Levi?”

“What?” When he was startled he reminded her of a bird about to take wing.

“How much product did you give Khalifa?”

“The bare minimum to keep myself running.”

“And the quality?”

“Bits and pieces. Here and there. You know.”

“You blow any of our agents?”

“Absolutely not.” He shrugged his coat-hanger shoulders. “Anyway, he wanted something very different.”

“Like what?”

“Like details of our operations in western Pakistan.”

“Western Pak. Really?”

Blum nodded. It was getting on her nerves.

“He said nothing was going to be disturbed,” he protested. “That it was strictly a monitoring he wanted.”

“And you believed him?”

“Call Tel Aviv. See if we’re still intact.”

“I will, believe me.”

His head continued to bob up and down, like an Adam’s apple on a thirsty drunk. “Anyway, I know we are. Intact, I mean. Fully.”

“I need a list, Levi. ASAP.”

“Way ahead of you on that, Rebeka. I used the doctor’s laptop to access my encrypted files and had the relevant ones printed out for you.”

He handed her an envelope. She knew almost nothing about Mossad’s ops in western Pakistan. In any event, the contents of the envelope didn’t seem all that thick. She took a quick look, her eyes skimming the list of product Blum had passed on to Khalifa. As he said, all tracking movements, all in and around the borders of Waziristan. She shoved the sheets back.

“All right,” she said, still weighing the envelope like an assayer toting up the value of an ore find. “Let’s give it a go.”

He nodded. “Sure, I saw a chance to make some heavy money, but I also figured if I gained Khalifa’s trust I might be able to discover how he’d fingered me so quickly.”

Her stomach clenched. “Someone inside Mossad is dirty.”

“Well, that’s what I thought too. It’s the logical conclusion, right? But then something totally unexpected happened.” He glanced at his watch. “Rebeka, my three minutes are up.”

She gave him a sour smile. “Go on, Levi. Don’t be an idiot. But you damn well better have gold-nugget product for me.”

“Wait. I’ve opened up an entire vein of gold.”

“Don’t oversell, Levi. Just sell.”

He relaxed somewhat as his confidence built back up. “So here’s what happened. Khalifa had arranged a regular weekly rendezvous for us. It moved around, as good security dictates. In this case, a round robin of five restaurants, always at an hour in the middle of the afternoon when, because they were very expensive and not at malls, they were closed to the public.

“Anyway, one afternoon I arrived early—early enough to see Khalifa huddled with another man. With this man were four gorillas—not Doha police, not Qatari army, or intelligence. They weren’t connected with Qatar at all.”

“What were they?”

“Military, or rather ex-military. They’re Chechen.”

“Chechen?” Sara’s head reared back against the pillows. “Are you certain?”

“Absolutely. I took photos with my mobile.”

He brought it out, scrolled through, then handed her the phone. Sara saw Khalifa in a dimly lit space—the rendezvous restaurant—huddled over a table with a man whose profile was partly obscured by shadows. Another photo showed the other four men. Clearly they were not Arabs.

“In this light and distance how on earth did you get such good shots?”

He ventured a grin, obviously pleased with her reaction. “Camera on my mobile is fantastic. Forty-one megapixels. Aces in dim light. And all without a flash.”

Sara nodded absently. She returned to the photo of the men.They could only be bodyguards. As she scanned each face a sense of disquiet built within her, as if her momentum was propelling her along thinner and thinner ice.

“Keep going,” Blum urged, and she did. “I spent some time digging.”

Now she arrived at other photos of the same men. These were file shots, identified by Interpol, marked as extremely dangerous. The next photo in the group was a grainy close-up of the man meeting with Khalifa. The last one identified him.

“Ivan Borz,” she said in a breath.

“The one and only.”

Sara felt as if she had fallen through the ice. “My God.”

“Ivan Borz, the biggest arms dealer this side of Viktor Bout. In fact, now that Bout is behind bars, Borz is the man when it comes to global arms shipments.”

“But Borz is into much more,” Sara said.

Blum nodded. “The so-called Wolf isn’t also known as the Poppy Man for nothing. He controls the world’s illegal trade in opium and heroin.” He took his mobile back from her. “But, frankly, I don’t think it was Khalifa’s ambition to get into either of these areas. He was in bed with Borz for an entirely different reason.”

Sara stared at Blum for a moment, wondering at how easy it was to misjudge people. “Go on,” she said.

“Borz is tied very closely to El Ghadan. In fact, Borz is El Ghadan’s spymaster.”

“That’s how El Ghadan was able to gain access to the Al-Bourah Hotel here in Doha—through Khalifa.”

“Yes. And I was well on my way to monitoring Borz through Khalifa.”

“Did you find out anything?”

“Something very, very big is on the immediate horizon. That’s why Borz ordered the eyes on me. He doesn’t want intervention, doesn’t want anything disturbed. Let sleeping dogs lie, you know? He just wants to make sure we’re not on to his new op, whatever it is.” Blum did not look happy. “But now that Khalifa’s dead, how in hell will we find out what it is?”

Faraj had Bourne sit up front with him in the cab of the second truck. The vehicles pulled out into a sunrise turning the sky the color of a battlefield streaked with blood. They rumbled through the streets, passing more burned-out cars. Cyclists veered away from them, and pedestrians stopped what they were doing, averted their faces, as if the devil himself were abroad in their city.

Almost immediately, shelling began in another neighborhood, and Bourne could only imagine the assault was a diversion to keep the army occupied while Faraj and his contingent made their way to their destination.

“Without us,” Faraj said over the roar of the engine, the grinding of gears, “your country is without hope.”

Bourne, posing as a Syrian, had told the leader he had been born in Latakia, a city far to the west, on the Mediterranean coast.

“My father and brother are dead,” Bourne said. “Together. In one instant, gone. My mother never recovered. She went mad with grief.”

Faraj nodded, scrubbed at his beard. “It is a common enough tragedy, yes? And, you know, tragedies by their very definition should be anything but common.”

“Not these days,” Bourne said. “Not here.”

“Tell me about your home, tell me about Latakia.”

“It’s a port city, very busy these days.” He had chosen Latakia because much of Zizzy’s business with Hafiz had passed through that container port. “It’s also under attack from ISIS.”

Faraj gave Bourne a sideways glance. “That Iraqi al-Qaeda group is by far the most dangerous to your country, and to us as well. ISIS tried to merge with al-Nusra but we took the initiative and spiked the nascent alliance. Do you know why? Its slogan is ‘From Diyala to Beirut.’ ISIS wants to spread to the length and breadth of the Ottoman Empire, and in the process stamp out all other jihadists who are not as extreme as it is. That would include us. Al-Nusra, us, we’re all kind compared to ISIS.”

Bourne decided to make Faraj’s thesis personal. “My father and brother were killed fighting ISIS in the north. First the Turks, then the Israelis, then the Americans, and finally Iraqi fanatics. ISIS has been murdering, kidnapping, and torturing people in Raqqa and Aleppo. They needed to do something.”

“They died as martyrs. We all aspire to such deaths.” Faraj sat back, combing his beard absently as he mused. “We face a grim future, my friend. The economies of the world have left us behind, with no hope of catching up, let alone keeping pace. We are remnants, soldiers of a bygone age, fighting the good fight for Islam and Allah. We seek to turn back the world clock, but it is a proven fact in Saudi, in Tunisia, in Morocco, and especially here and in Egypt that the modern world is inimical to sharia law.”

Bourne was both startled and fascinated to find a jihadist leader who was so clear-eyed about his situation. “Then what are we to do?”

“Fight on,” Faraj said, “and just possibly we will win. It took the deaths of thirty percent of the young boys in the American South for the North to win their Civil War. Those boys had much to live for. Ours do not. Their poverty, their future is so bleak they have little or nothing to lose. Joining our cause is their way to glory.”

He turned his fierce, feral gaze on Bourne. “And we have so many, my friend, so very many, all willing to die for our cause. The Americans can never kill enough of us. This war will have a very different outcome.”

Some time ago, they had passed beyond the western boundary of the city, and now Bourne understood there was another reason for setting the recruitment in Nairabein Park. They swung off the highway, away from the seemingly endless line of rumbling trucks on their way into the city.

They headed south, then southwest, into the countryside.

“Tell me,” Faraj said, “are you prepared to leave Damascus? Are you prepared to leave your homeland?”

“In your service, Abu Faraj Khalid, of course.”

The leader nodded. “Good.”

The journey continued. Bourne took out his prepaid mobile, dialed into the Mossad server. There was a message for him. It was encrypted. He retrieved the message, then spent the next ten minutes decrypting it in his head. It was from Sara, and it contained high-level product vital to him. Deleting the message, he cleared the phone’s history, then turned it off and put it away.

He looked up to find Faraj regarding him levelly. “A love letter?”

Bourne laughed. “If I had a woman I would only cause her grief.”

Faraj nodded, as if in understanding, one warrior to another.

Five minutes later, they stopped before a gate in a high cyclone fence. More jihadists appeared, hailed by Faraj. One of them unlocked the gate and the group followed the trucks into the compound, locking the gate behind them.

They went around to their left and Bourne saw that what he had at first taken for a training facility was in fact an airfield. A Boeing C-17 military transport sat at one end of the runway, its rear door gaping open, waiting for its cargo to march on board.

The trucks pulled up behind the plane. The troops on the ground helped the recruits down, guiding them into the belly of the C-17. Faraj climbed down, Bourne following, and they stood, waiting for the transport to fill up. Faraj spent a few moments in consultation with the pilot and navigator. The early morning air force sorties were causing a last-minute change in course until they cleared Syrian airspace.