Free The Bourne Dominion by Robert & Lustbader Ludlum Page A

offormidable mountains, shaggy with dense forest. In a couple of hours that was where he’d be headed.
    “What can you tell me about this man Vegas?”
    “He’s crusty, belligerent, often intractable.”
    “Beautiful.”
    Essai ignored Bourne’s sarcasm. “But he has another side. He’s a longtime oilman. He has overseen the oil outfit out there for close to twenty years. By now, I think his veins must run with oil. In any event, he’s strictly hands-on; he believes in a hard day’s work, even at his age, which must be sixty—knowing him, possibly more. He’s hard drinking, buried two wives, lost a daughter to a Brazilian, who seduced her, then spirited her away. He’s never seen or spoken to her in thirty-odd years.”
    “Sons?”
    Essai shook his head. “He lives with a young Indian woman now, but to my knowledge she’s never been pregnant. Other than that, I don’t know anything about her.”
    “What doesn’t he like?”
    Essai shot him a look. “You mean what does he like?”
    “It’s more important to know what to avoid saying or doing,” Bourne said.
    “I understand.” Essai nodded reflectively. “He hates communists and fascists in equal measure.”
    “How about drug lords?”
    Essai glanced at him again, as if trying to figure out where this line of questioning was going. He was smart enough not to ask. “You’re on your own there.”
    Bourne thought for a moment. “What I find interesting is that he lost his child and now, when he’s in the perfect position to have more, he doesn’t.”
    Essai shrugged. “Too much heartache. I can relate to that.”
    “But would you—?”
    “My wife is too old.”
    “My point. His woman isn’t.”
    P eter Marks watched the gardener get into her SUV and drive away from Hendricks’s house. He’d observed her feeding the roses, then spraying them from a pump canister. She had worked slowly, methodically, gently, murmuring to the roses as if she were making love to them. She drove off without a glance at the security personnel.
    The four men assigned to the secretary were of great concern to him. If he was going to shadow Hendricks in an attempt to discover what he was hiding, he’d have to stay off their radar. He considered it a challenge, rather than a problem.
    Peter had always faced challenges head-on—he’d run at them with a fervor that burned brightest when he was a teenager and young adult. He hadn’t come out so much as been brought out by Father Benedict, his local parish priest. But unlike the other boys whom the father had taken behind the sacristy for holy wine and sex, Peter had told his father. He was ten when this happened, but he was a precocious boy and wanted to publicly denounce the priest the following Sunday during Mass.
    His father had forbade this. “
It will be far worse for you than for him
,” he’d told his son. “
Everyone will know and you’ll be branded for life.
” There was no mistaking the warning in his father’s voice. Peter had experienced the magnitude of his father’s anger and he wasn’t eager to trigger it again.
    That Sunday, when they went to church, another priest whom Peter had never seen before performed the Mass. He wondered where Father Benedict was. Afterward, on the church steps in the sunshine of late morning, he heard people talking. Father Benedict had been assaulted the night before on his way home from church.
Beaten to a pulp
was the phrase most used. He now lay in critical condition at Sisters of Mercy Hospital eight blocks away. Peter never went to see him, and Father Benedict never returned to his parish church, even though he was discharged from Sisters of Mercy six weeks later. In the intervening years, Peter had never spoken to his father about Benedict, though hissuspicion was that the priest had been on the receiving end of his father’s wrath. And now, of course, it was too late to ask—his father had died eleven years ago.
    Peter’s eyes cleared. Hendricks had emerged