The Bourne Ascendancy by Robert Ludlum

Author:Robert Ludlum
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, United States, Spy Stories & Tales of Intrigue, Thrillers, Espionage, Literature & Fiction
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-06-10T04:00:00+00:00

30

KHAN ABDALI WAS a cadaver of a man—tall and impossibly thin, with bony shoulders and long, ropy arms. His skin was as dark as stained teak, thick-looking, grained and lined as leather. It was impossible to tell his age; he could have been anywhere from fifty to seventy. He was dressed in white robes and loose trousers over which he wore a blue vest embroidered with tribal emblems. His gold-colored turban was as large as his head. But it was his eyes, dark, deeply inset in his face, hard as marbles, that caused him to fill up any room he entered or occupied.

The chief malik met them at the outskirts of the village. He was flanked by six of his heavily armed men, bearded, turbaned, all with black vests over white robes, all with assault rifles The village behind them was nothing more than a loosely grouped selection of concrete boxes, some whitewashed, some not, surrounded by pockmarked concrete walls. There were lines of dust-caked trucks, looking the worse for wear, having been driven hundreds of miles over the rocky terrain. Children climbed in the backs of the trucks, and above them, on a dusty promontory, two solitary sentinels, AR-15s at the ready, peered mistrustfully down from behind semicircular stone emplacements.

Bourne spoke the traditional greeting, right hand over his heart. Khan Abdali, clearly surprised, came forward and returned the greeting.

“You know our land?” he said.

“I spent three years here,” Bourne said.

“And why did you leave?”

“Over a woman.”

“Oho!” Khan Abdali threw his head back and laughed. “And did you take her?”

“From a malik of the Tori Khels.”

“Bah! I spit on all Tori Khels!” And Khan Abdali did just that, hawking and spitting a huge glob onto the earth to one side. “And did this accursed malik come after you?”

“I let him,” Bourne said.

Khan Abdali’s shaggy eyebrows raised. “Did you now?”

“Yes. I confronted him. I told him I was a djinn. I told him I had put a spell on his woman and that if he did not leave us both alone I would put a spell on him and he would die a long, slow, agonizing death.”

Now Khan Abdali was fairly shaking with laughter. Indeed, tears were streaming from his eyes and he could scarcely catch his breath. Gasping, he was finally able to say, “My dear Yusuf, you are a man of rare courage and imagination. I am grateful to welcome you into our village, despite the fact you are in the company of this impossibly rude Chechen.”

Tea, preserved olives, and a sweetish flatbread were served in Khan Abdali’s own house, the living quarters strewn with afghan rugs and Turkish brass oil lamps, any one of which could have held Bourne’s fictional djinn. The walls were covered with black-and-white blowups of what appeared to be the chief malik’s men and children. There were no photos of the village’s women, which came as no surprise to Bourne, whose knowledge of the Waziri was such that he knew they valued their women above their religion.

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