The Bourne Dominion by Robert & Lustbader Ludlum Read Free Book Online Page B

and walked a bit away from the encampment. After a time, Bourne joined him.
    Essai stared off through the trees. “I have four children,” he said after a long time. “Three now, actually. My daughter is dead.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “It was years ago, like another lifetime.” Essai bit his lip, as if pondering whether or not to go on. “She was a willful girl—not, as you canimagine, the best of traits in a Muslim household. As a child I could control her, but there came a time when she rebelled. She ran away three times. The first two, I was able to bring her back—she was only fourteen. But then, four years later, she ran away with an Irani boy. Can you imagine?”
    “I imagine it could have been worse,” Bourne said.
    “No,” Essai said, “it couldn’t.” He began to peel the bark off a tree, digging into the tree’s flesh with his long, scimitar nails. “The boy was engaged to be married and, quite stupidly, he took her back to Iran with him. Don’t ask me why, because to this day I have no idea.”
    “Perhaps he truly loved her.”
    Essai shook his head. “The things humans do…”
    His voice trailed off for a moment, but his nails never stopped stripping the tree. Then he took a deep breath and when he let it out, the words came like water over-spilling a dam. “The inevitable happened, of course. My daughter was taken away from him and imprisoned. They were going to stone her to death, can you imagine! Iranis, what barbarians!”
    He meant Sunni, of course, because though Iranis weren’t Arabs like him, they were nevertheless Muslim. Sunni, rather than Shi’a, like him. The enmity that accompanied the schism between Islam’s two main sects was as poisonous as it was irreparable.
    “Fucking animals is what they are.”
    It was the first time he had used an expletive, and Bourne could see how much it took out of him, but his vehemence dictated he expel the curse from his system like an infection.
    “So I went in—myself, myself. I got her out of prison, got her out of Tehran, got her out of Iran. I was on my way back home with her, on a ship crossing the Mediterranean, when the Domna appeared.” Quite suddenly he turned his eyes on Bourne. “Six men. Six! That’s how many they determined was needed. The Domna had warned me not to go to Iran, not to interfere, that peace needed to be kept within the High Council. To do that, they said, both Shi’a and Sunni were required to respect each other’s traditions. ‘But this is my daughter,’ I said. ‘My fleshand blood.’ Otherwise, they said, a sectarian war would break out within the Domna and we would be no better than those we sought to control. I doubt they heard me, or if they did, they did not care. ‘We remind you of the dominion,’ they said. ‘Nothing is more important.’ ”
    His head swung away again. There was bark under his nails, and dirt. An ant crawled along one finger, wandering, lost.
    “That was the last I saw of her, my daughter. Nothing more was said. I did nothing because… because then I was Domna and there was nothing to be done in the face of its collective will. It’s true that I had lost a lot of blood and I was in pain.” He raised his right hand so Bourne could see the ugly white knot, the scar in the center of his palm. “I had no strength left, I told myself, I was loyal, I told myself. But when I returned home and saw the look on my wife’s face the lies I told myself evaporated like mist in sunlight.” His eyes sought Bourne’s. “Everything changed, do you understand?”
    “You crossed the Rubicon.”
    Essai let that sink in, then he nodded. “I came home a different man, a man of war, a man with a blackened heart. My colleagues—those I had considered friends—had betrayed me. They had slipped away when I wasn’t paying attention. They no longer belonged to the Domna—at least the Domna I had once admired. This was a new Domna, in thrall to the Mosque and its hideous Black