Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Ascendancy by Eric Van Lustbader Read Free Book Online

reflectively. “Eat, my friend. Eat! You cannot starve yourself! Nothing can be as bad as that.”
    Zizzy gave the aspect of a mythical creature—his goggle eyes and beaked nose dominated a sun- and wind-darkened face. He had a wide forehead, as prominent as the prow of a fast ship. When he smiled, which was often, his teeth gleamed like little cakes of sugar.
    As he watched Bourne pick at his food, he said, “I worry about you, Jason. I worry that one day I will find your perfectly preserved corpse half buried in the side of a sand dune.” He laughed. “But then I console myself with the sure and certain knowledge that you are far too tough for that to happen.” Popping an enormous date into his mouth, he sat back and said, “Now, tell me what has befallen you.”
    Bourne told him what had transpired at the hotel, both before and after the massacre. As he finished, he put a mobile on the table. “El Ghadan gave this to me. Every day at midnight he will send me a short video of Soraya and Sonya, along with the day’s newspaper.”
    “Proof of life.”
    Bourne nodded. “It also contains a GPS that cannot be turned off.”
    “So he can monitor your every move.” Zizzy shook his head. “He’s got you in an escape-proof box. This is a disaster, Jason. A complete and utter disaster.” He spread his hands, the food and drink forgotten. “How can I help, my friend?”
    “My first impulse was of course to go find them, despite El Ghadan’s explicit warning,” Bourne said. “But then I forced myself to take several steps back and look at the situation objectively.”
    “That’s good,” Zizzy said. “Because as of now you have seven days until the Singapore summit, seven days before El Ghadan goes to work on your friend and her daughter, seven days before he reshapes your world.”
    Bitterness squeezed Bourne’s heart. It was a fact, hard but true, that everyone who had ever mattered to him had been either exposed to mortal danger or killed. Pulling his mind back to the problem at hand, he said, “Zizzy, I need to know as much as I can about him.”
    “Not an easy task, my friend. El Ghadan’s past is as heavily guarded as his real identity.” Zizzy pulled at his lower lip, as he was wont to do when he had sunk deep in thought. “Well, I do think there is someone who might be able to help.” He checked his watch. “And, as luck would have it, this is just about the right time to catch him.”
    *  *  *
    “He might be Jordanian or Omani—there are people who believe that—but I’m not one of them.”
    So said the tiny man—he was barely five feet tall—with a huge head, a nose like a hawk’s beak, the ears of an Indian elephant, and a halo of white hair tangled as a thorny bush. This was Nebuchadnezzar, known as Nebby. He could have been seventy or a hundred and seventy, it was impossible to tell. His eyes were bright with a mischievous intelligence rare in men a quarter his age.
    Bourne and Abdul Aziz were sitting on a circular rug in the center of Nebby’s living room. He had a small apartment on the outskirts of the city, where, as he put it, he could study the desert. What there was to see in the expanse of sand and wind was anyone’s guess. According to Zizzy, the old man dealt in information, traded item for item. He owed Zizzy several favors, so in this case no payment from Bourne was expected.
    Tea had been served by a young woman with dark hair and a ready smile. All around them were shelves containing artifacts from Nebby’s long and varied life: shells from Zanzibar, carvings from Namibia and Ethiopia, strange voodoo-like dolls from Uganda that looked like preserved babies, Moroccan tiles and pottery. A Maasai chieftain’s polished wooden stick, strange deep-sea fish, dried and preserved. The array was dizzying, virtually endless. The air vibrated to the energies of these shards of his past.
    Nebby sipped his tea as daintily as an English nanny, set his glass down, and continued.