Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Bourne Ascendancy Read Free Page A

calm, all was serene. Then, as if he had been struck by a bolt of lightning, the recent past came roaring back, jolting him into complete awareness.
    His first sense was that he was bound wrists and ankles to a ladder-back wooden chair. Looking around, he found himself inside a small room with bare concrete walls, no windows, one door, locked and guarded. The sole decoration was a thick afghan carpet hanging on the wall directly in front of him.
    On his right side, El Ghadan sat in another ladder-back chair, a small octagonal table inlaid with Arabic script in mother-of-pearl between them. Bourne noted his posture: draped across the chair, one leg over the other. He might have given the full illusion of nonchalance had not his upper leg been swinging back and forth with a nervous energy. He lifted a hand and one of his men scuttled away, returning with a tray filled with two mugs of coffee, cream and sugar, and a plate of dates rolled in coconut.
    El Ghadan gestured as the tray was set down. “Please, help yourself.” He shook his head. “My apologies.” He picked up one of the mugs. “Coffee? No.” He sipped it himself. “Dates, then?” He held one out, popped it in his mouth.
    He licked stray shreds of coconut off his fingertips. “I need something done,” he said. “I need it done quickly.”
    “You have your own men, your own resources.”
    El Ghadan ignored him. “A week from now, in Singapore, your American president is set to broker an historic peace treaty between the Israelis and the Palestinians.” He leaned forward even as he lowered his voice. “The treaty is hanging by a delicate thread. Without his help, without his guidance, it will never get done. I want you to see that the president never reaches the Golden Palace Hotel in Singapore, where the signing will take place.”
    “You’re out of your mind,” Bourne said.
    “That is your response?” El Ghadan waited patiently, but when Bourne remained silent, he nodded. “So be it, then. A lesson in humility must be learned.”
    As if on cue, one of his men wheeled in a 24-volt car battery. Over his shoulder were two lengths of bare copper wire. He wore heavy-duty rubber gloves. He set the battery down beside Bourne, shrugged off the wire, and affixed one end to a battery terminal, leaving the other dangling off the corner.
    Bourne watched with the kind of stoicism bred in the Treadstone program and put to the test a number of times in the field. The man wound the copper wire several times around Bourne’s chest. When he was finished, he crouched down, nodded to his leader.
    “Here’s what’s going to happen, Bourne,” El Ghadan said. “Rashid is going to touch the unattached wire to the second terminal. When that happens twenty-four volts of electricity will run through your chest.
    “Not enough to electrocute you, of course, but then, that is not my aim. No one learns a lesson from dying. No, the twenty-four volts will make the intercostal muscles around your lungs seize up. If Rashid here isn’t careful, if the current stays on too long, you’ll asphyxiate. But that will take time, and in the meanwhile the pain will be excruciating, like being on the verge of dying.” He nodded. “Show him, Rashid.”
    El Ghadan’s man touched the wire to the second terminal. Bourne was certain he had prepared himself, but the blinding agony that lanced through him made his body jerk. A great fist clamped down on his lungs and squeezed until his eyes began to water.
    Rashid lifted the end of the wire off the terminal. Bourne’s body collapsed, sweat ran down the sides of his neck, burned his eyes, flooded his underarms and groin. He knew he had to keep his wits about him, had to maintain at least a modicum of control. Otherwise…
    Once again Rashid sent the current through Bourne. All the color leached out of the room, sounds were distorted. Bourne’s head lolled, chin on sweat-streaked chest. His mind was in chaos, his thoughts fractured. He