Free Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Ascendancy by Eric Van Lustbader Page A

she told me. ‘I want to marry him. He has promised to take me away from this godforsaken country.’ Tears leaked out of her eyes, rolled down her cheeks. ‘I want my own life. Only you can understand this. Brother, I beg you to help us. I beg you to shield me from what I know is coming.’ And what did I do? I went about my business, hid my head in the sand, telling myself that our brother could never do such a barbaric thing, that that was not the kind of family I had been born into. Then, before I knew it, it was over. She was dead and her lover was gone. ‘Now it is as if nothing happened,’ my brother said to me. ‘I have erased the shame our sister brought upon this family.’”
    Bourne asked now, “Have you been to your brother’s grave?”
    “Why would I want to do that?”
    Zizzy’s brother had died under mysterious circumstances two years after he had killed their sister. It was unclear to Bourne whether Zizzy had murdered him. He had never asked and Zizzy had certainly never volunteered the information.
    “I dug the grave myself,” Zizzy added, as if suddenly struck by the memory. “That was more than enough.”
    There was a silence between them, thickening like glue.
    “I should never have questioned you about the woman,” Zizzy said at length. It seemed clear he had realized Bourne’s motivation for bringing up his brother. “That was wrong of me.”
    “Forget it,” Bourne said.
    Zizzy stared at Bourne for a moment. “I did it,” he said so softly Bourne had to strain to hear him. “I killed him.” He looked Bourne straight in the eye. “I had to. I hadn’t protected my sister in life. I had to protect her in death.”
    “I understand, Zizzy.”
    Zizzy let out a long-held breath. It was like the scrape of the desert wind over an endless ocean of sand. “With what you did for that woman I knew you would.”
    He leaned forward, held out his hand. “Are we good?”
    Bourne took it in his. “Good as gold.”
    *  *  *
    Blum breathed a sigh of relief when he and Rebeka parted company. Something about her made him question himself, as if her presence caused him to peer into his own insidious nature. That was all nonsense, he told himself as he turned the corner and entered a crowded marketplace. His own guilt was imbuing her with supernatural powers.
    It was natural, his handler had warned him, to feel guilt, even remorse, at what he was doing. The important thing was to keep those feelings in perspective, to remember the account that had been opened for him in a venerable Gibraltar bank. Each and every month an agreed-upon amount was deposited—money that when it reached a certain level would become what he thought of as his trajectory money: the means by which he could escape the constant pressures and terrors of his current double life. His handler had generously provided the scenario: Blum basking in the sun of some tropical South Pacific island, a fat joint in one hand, a lissome young thing in the other, with nothing on the horizon but to eat, drink, swim, sleep, get high, and fuck. “All this can be yours,” his handler had said. But what had come to Blum was product useful to Mossad gleaned from his handler and, very slowly, a local network he had cobbled together, making sure of cutouts along the way so no one member knew of the other’s existence. The problem had been sending the product home. Being watched so closely he had yet to find a way to do it.
    Passing between a silk merchant and a coppersmith, he pulled out the electronic ear he had used at the diamond cutter’s. The audio data was recorded onto the phone’s 64GB micro SD card. This was the moment when his life split in two. Minor product was one thing; it kept his handler at bay. But this was major. If he failed to deliver this product he would immediately come under suspicion, but if he did send it he would be betraying the people he worked for, the country that had raised and nurtured him. Perhaps this moment