Torn (23 page)

You never know what you might see when the rest of the world is asleep.

His gut instincts tell him that Haley Corbin is being held somewhere in the vicinity. Probably not in the village itself—it’s unlikely that her captors would risk her being seen by visitors—but definitely somewhere within Ruler territory. He’s mindful that although Conklin County comprises something like two thousand square miles, most of the occupied part is right here.

She’ll be somewhere close.

Shane checks the time. Barely nine, much earlier than he thought, considering the starry depth of the night, or the general sense of slumbering quiet within the motel, or the domicile, or whatever. Maybe he doesn’t need to wait
until midnight for his walk on the wild side. Eleven will do. No problem.

Shane lies down on the narrow bed, fully dressed. His feet extend well beyond the foot of the bed, but the mattress has a pleasing firmness and the pillow is, to his surprise, pure heaven. He’s thinking the room is a bit stuffy, maybe slightly too warm—is there a thermostat? He can’t recall seeing a thermostat—and the air has a faint medicinal odor—what is that exactly, and why does it seem so familiar?

He closes his eyes.

In three deep breaths he’s sound asleep.

6. How Can You Improve On Perfection?

“We were never able to develop any proof,” Weems says. “Not actionable proof.”

The man is explaining how he knows that Jed and twenty-six other equally innocent passengers were murdered, and yet he remains utterly calm. It makes me feel like screaming, or scratching his eyes out, or both.

How can they be doing this to me? First stealing my little boy, then making me relive the horror of my husband’s death all over again? How can they be so cruel and yet remain so calm? How can they be so cruel, and yet remain so cool about it? Weems acts as if he’s delivering a lecture. Missy and her husband sitting there like toads, blinking at me, as if they’ve heard it ad nauseam. And maybe they have.

“Monsters,” I say, my throat thick. “Jed always knew what you were. That’s why he cut himself off from you horrible people.”

Weems nods sagely, as if anticipating my every response.
“Great men often have problems relating to their children. It goes all the way back to the ancient kings. In the animal world, male lions will sometimes destroy their own cubs, rather than risk competing with them when they’re fully grown. Arthur is—was—a genius, a transcendent thinker, but like all humans he’s not without faults. He drove his only child away, and that is a terrible thing, even if his intentions were otherwise. Even if he later regretted what he had done.”

“Jed never even knew his mother was dying! How could anyone do that to a boy? His own father!”

Weems sighs, shakes his head. “As I said before, I can’t believe that cruelty was Arthur’s intention. He thought he was protecting the boy.”

“By not letting him see his own mother?”

He shrugs, conceding the point. “As I said, even the great Arthur Conklin is not without fault. The point is, he changed his mind about Jedediah. After he suffered his first heart attack, when his mind was still reasonably clear, he asked me to make contact with the boy. Sorry, I continue to think of Jedediah as a boy, since that’s how I knew him. By the time his father expressed an interest in reconciliation he was, of course, a full-grown man, with a wife and child of his own—indeed with a life of his own, a man in full.”

A man in full. Not a phrase I’d ever thought about, but it described Jedediah exactly. Out of necessity, out of the emotional cruelty of his own family, he’d been forced to grow up when he was still very young. When most boys his age were still having their boxers washed and folded by their indulgent mothers, Jed was living entirely on his own, working his way through college.

My man in full.

“I did manage to contact Jedediah,” Weems says. “It was a few months before he was killed. Did he mention that to you?”

I shake my head, ashamed that Jed felt he had to keep secrets from me. Although he had alluded to something going on in the Ruler organization, and joked that if he ever disappeared it would be because of his father. The truth is, I hadn’t wanted to know. Hadn’t wanted to think about anything disrupting our life, and assumed it was just some sort of residual paranoia, understandable when dear old Dad runs a cult.

“He made it clear he had no desire to have any sort of contact, that it was too late to mend fences. I said something about how we could make things better for him, if he came back into the fold, and he said, and I’ll never forget this, ‘How can you improve on perfection?’ He was quite serious. Jedediah felt that his life was perfect exactly as it was. Those were his words. ‘I have the perfect wife, the perfect child. All my father could do is mess things up. So thanks but no thanks.’” Weems heaves a sigh of regret that sounds almost genuine. “I must confess, Mrs. Corbin. I truly did not understand what he meant until I met you and had a glimpse, however brief, of your little boy.”

By then I’m bawling so hard, so convulsively, that I barely notice Missy fussing anxiously, trying to blot my flood of tears with a wad of tissues. If Weems is troubled by my reaction, he doesn’t show it. He simply waits until the crying abates, then continues where he left off. “Whatever I believed his motivations to be, Jed made it abundantly clear that he would remain apart, no matter what pressures might be brought to bear,” he says, sounding philosophical. “I broke the news as gently as I knew how
to Arthur, who by then was beginning to fail—his mind was no longer clear—and I’m not sure he even truly comprehended the situation. But Evangeline assumes that everyone shares her lust for power and wealth. She convinced herself that Arthur was going to name Jedediah as his successor, cutting her out. So she arranged to have him killed, and to make it look like an accident. Somehow she made it happen. I’ve never been able to determine the details. Some clever, undetectable form of sabotage, no doubt.”

In the back of my mind, the image of a plane falls from the sky, tumbling like a bird with a broken wing. It’s more than I can bear. I have to force the image back into its little box or it will drive me mad.

“I’m sure it’s distressing,” Weems says, “but you need to understand what she’s capable of. At the moment she believes that controlling Arthur’s only grandchild is somehow to her benefit. The moment she no longer believes that, he’ll be a liability, and, as I say, Evangeline’s liabilities have a way of vanishing without a trace.”

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.

7. Whatever She Likes

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 dis
cretion 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.