Chris Jordan - Torn

He seems so calm, so matter of fact. Maybe he’s making it up about Jed’s evil stepmother, trying to get me on his side. This sounds horrible-it feels horrible to think it-but at the moment it doesn’t matter how Jed died, whether it was an accident or on purpose. Knowing the truth won’t bring him back. All that matters is Noah. Getting him away from these people. That’s what Jed would want. Get Noah away from people who think like this-lions killing their cubs, women who steal children because it gives them some advantage, men who arrange to kidnap mothers as if it’s some clever move in a game of chess.

My little boy has to be rescued. I’ll fight for that to my last breath. As I blot up my tears with Missy’s tissues, I’m certain of only one thing: I’ll do whatever it takes to get my child back. Including murder.

Does that make me as bad as they are?

Maybe, but I don’t care.

Evangeline in the starlight, watching her lover sleep. Although, in truth, her handsome Vash is both more and less than a lover. The sex is good-he’s as strong as a horse, dutiful in his devotion to her pleasure-but there’s no emotional connection, no mental sparks passing between them. Not like Arthur in his heyday, obsessed with getting into her mind as well as her pants. Ah, now there was a lover! She would not, in truth, consider Mr. Bagrat Kavashi an actual friend, let alone a lover. More like a companion whose interests frequently converge with her own.

A convergence, that’s what they have. A useful convergence, with benefits. Besides, she has little use for friends, in the normal sense of the word, as people you care for and who in turn care for you. Evangeline truly cares only for herself and that, she sincerely believes, is as it should be. It’s the source of her focus, her power, her strength.

She plops onto the enormous bed, making the mattress bounce. “Wakey, wakey,” she trills.

Bagrat Kavashi sits bolt upright, eyes wild. He looks, in this moment, fully capable of hot-blooded murder, which makes him all the more attractive.

“So where’s Wendy?” she asks sweetly. “He’s not at home. I checked.”

“What?” says Vash, still groggy with sleep. “What is wrong?”

“Wendall Weems. He’s up to something, darling. I can feel it in my trim little tummy. I checked the cameras. He’s not at home.”

Vash grunts, reaches for her. She backs away, smoothing the hem of her silky, thigh-high chemise.

“I want you to find him,” she says. “Where’s Wendy? That’s the game. Like Waldo.”

“Who is this Waldo?”

“Never mind. Come with me, chop-chop.”

She more or less drags him down the hall to the nearby war room. What had once been a mere office suite, now converted to a state-of-the-art intelligence-gathering hub. On its multiplicity of screens she can monitor activities in the village, on the campus, and, thanks to recent work by BK’s clever technical operatives, she can now look around inside the fully compromised residence of her rival.

“Drink this,” she says, handing Vash a cold can of Red Bull.

Muttering curses in his native language, her chief of security drains the slender can, wipes his mustache with the back of his hand, and burps loudly, aggressively.

“Feel better?” she says. “Good. Let’s get to work.”

“Work? Is time for sleep!”

“Exactly. Except Wendy isn’t sleeping, which I find suspicious. He’s a man of regular habits, always in bed no later than ten, up no later than six. Out of curiosity, I checked his bedroom, to see if he was asleep-I mean, why should he sleep if I can’t?-and he’s not there. So I checked his office. Then I checked every room in the Bunker. No Wendy.”

“You crazy woman. So what, he’s not in bed? Maybe he’s got girlfriend.”

Evangeline has a good laugh. “You’re cute when you’re cranky, you know that? Wendy with a girl? That bag of wrinkles?”

“Okay, a boy, a goat. Who cares?”

She curls up in her big chair, hugging her bare legs. “Vash? Think about it. Haley Corbin is missing, right?”

He shrugs, acknowledging the unpleasant fact. A miscalculation he hasn’t wanted to factor into the present situation. “Maybe she runs away. I tell you we find her, don’t worry. Not a problem.”

“Runs away right after she hires an FBI agent to help her find her little boy?”

“Ex-FBI,” he corrects her. “A big nobody. Once you leave FBI, you have no power, no authority. But okay, maybe she don’t run away. You think, what, Wendy steal her? Why he does this, exactly?”

“Because we were going to make her go away. It makes sense if you think about it. We have the boy in our possession, so he takes the mother, right from under our noses. A countermove.”

Vash shrugs, but he looks interested, and not just in her legs. “Is possible. I check it out, okay?”

He cinches the sash on his black silk robe-a gift from her, one of many-and sits down at the console. Using the scrambled line, he puts the word out to his night shift captain. Be on the lookout for Wendall Weems, total discretion required. And now that his mind is more or less fully functional, he decides that Eva the Diva may be onto something. The woman is crazed on several levels, but she has remarkable survival instincts. Plus she’s right about Ruler Weems being very methodical, a man of well-established habits. Given the precarious situation-an undeclared war of succession-any deviation from the norm is suspicious. There’s nothing on Weems’s schedule about a sudden trip, and in any case there’s no way he could leave the Bunker, let alone the village of Conklin, without Kavashi being informed. Weems is supposed to be under constant surveillance, and yet he’s managed to vanish from his residence without triggering alarms. Something, indeed, must be happening.

Question: if Weems or his agents spirited away Mrs. Corbin, right under the noses of the BK operatives in New York, would he be dumb enough to bring her back to Conklin? Hiding her in plain sight, as it were?

Cold hands slip around his neck, producing an involuntary shiver. “Have you found him yet, darling?”

“Not to worry Eva’s pretty little head.”

“Mmmm. Still, I do worry. Wendy is an ugly little man, but he’s very dangerous. It would be a huge mistake to underestimate him.”

“No mistake. We find him.”

Evangeline begins to nuzzle him, unaware of the faint twinge of revulsion that her touch produces. “Which brings us to the next question,” she says huskily, kissing his throat. “Once we find him, what do we do with him? How do we make Wendy and all his followers go away?”

“Whatever you like, that’s what we do.”

“Really?” she says, straddling his lap, her nimble fingers reaching for the bathrobe sash. “Let me show you what I like, you great big bad boy.”

Kavashi does his duty. Toward the end he almost begins to enjoy it.

Shane wakes up feeling strangely refreshed, and, by the time he rolls off the bed, entirely suspicious. No way he fell asleep unassisted. Not, as in this case, deeply and without dreams. And for that matter fully clothed.

He’s trying to recall exactly what he may have ingested the night before when the telephone begins to bleat.

“Yes?”

“This is your wake-up call, Mr. Gouda,” a personalized recording announces. “The Hive is now open for your breakfast needs. Follow the green line from the Hive to Profit Hall. Doors close at precisely eight, so don’t be late!”

Very cheery, in an insistent sort of way. Setting the tone: we instruct, you obey.

Shane decides that to maintain his cover he must, at the very least, be semi-obedient. Ron Gouda might stray from the line now and then-he’s a bit of a rebel, is Ronnie Boy-but there’s no point in getting himself ejected from the village before he’s had a chance to scope it out. Plus, he’s famished.