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

needed to remember something. What was it?
    The current surged through him a third time, and all coherent thought fled him. The giant fist bore into him as if it were about to crush his rib cage, send the scimitar-shaped bones through his heart. The room turned red, then black.
    *  *  *
    “How are we feeling?” El Ghadan’s voice floated ghostlike through the darkness. “Back among the living?”
    All the lights in the room had been extinguished. Bourne took one shuddering breath after another, felt as if a freight train had run over his chest. Coarse fingers gripped his chin. A light shone in his eyes, blinding him. Someone pulled his lids apart.
    “Pupils normal,” another voice said. “A remarkable recovery.”
    “To be expected.” This from El Ghadan. “We’re ready for act two.”
    Someone pulled aside the carpet on the wall. Light flooded the room, coming through a one-way mirror. Bourne, struggling to focus, blinked furiously to clear his vision, then wished he hadn’t bothered. He was observing the room he had seen on the tablet’s screen. There were Soraya, Sonya, and Lipkin-Renais, bound, sitting in a line facing him.
    El Ghadan was just visible, his face limned in profile on the other side of the octagonal table. “The little girl is terrified, Bourne.”
    “Sonya.” Bourne’s mouth was full of sand. His tongue felt swollen to twice its normal size. He tried to gather saliva. “Her name is Sonya.”
    El Ghadan shifted and his chair creaked. “In a moment Sonya is going to be so much more terrified.”
    Bourne jerked his head around. The terrorist’s face was alight. “Don’t do anything stupid,” Bourne said.
    “Stupidity doesn’t enter into it.” El Ghadan shrugged. “This is on your head, Bourne, not mine.”
    He made a sign. Bourne saw Lipkin-Renais’s face go pale. A gunman stepped into view. Sonya screamed, her little body shaking as if with ague. Soraya’s eyes opened wide in horror; she knew what was coming.
    On either side of the glass, Soraya and Bourne shouted, “No!”
    Sonya kept on screaming.
    Bourne’s voice was hoarse. “You don’t need to do this.”
    El Ghadan settled back, as if about to watch his favorite movie. “Watch, Bourne. Your lesson in humility continues.”
    The pistol fired. Lipkin-Renais’s blood, bone, and brains splattered over the cringing Soraya like pink hail.
    *  *  *
    El Ghadan rose, stood in front of Bourne, blocking his view, but the wails of shock, anguish, and grief remained in the room.
    “Now,” he said, “your conscience holds yet another sin.”
    He folded his hands in front of him, fingers laced, like a priest about to deliver a homily. “Here is what will happen if you do not comply. First Sonya will be shot in front of Soraya. Then Soraya will be taken to an interrogation cell where she will be systematically stripped of her will, of her personality—her very self. She will become a nonperson, nothing more than a slab of meat. Then I personally will flay the flesh from her one strip at a time, until her body is a quivering mass of bleeding sinew and fat.”
    He leaned forward, his hands still clasped, his voice low and conversational over Soraya’s wails and Sonya’s crying. “I have it on good authority that you are something of an expert in these matters, Bourne.”
    He stepped aside, once more revealing the horrific scene in the other room. Soraya was trying to take her hysterical daughter into her arms, but the restraints held her fast.
    “Please,” she shouted at the gunman. “I just want to hold Sonya.” She stared up into his implacable eyes, the only part of his face visible through the scarf wrapped around his neck and head. “Please let me hold her!”
    “Rejoice,” the gunman said. “Your two-year-old hasn’t been incinerated in a drone strike.”
    “How long do you think it will take her to die?” El Ghadan said. “Four days? A week? She looks a hardy soul, so I think longer, don’t you,