Winter's Scars: The Forsaken (Winter's Saga 5) (43 page)

“Punishment for what?”  Rosario knew she was going off script here, allowing the assignment to ramble, but something about the kid felt very earnest. 

“For existing.  Look, Williams supplies him with
young metahumans and he uses his psychological warfare techniques to break them to the point where they have dissociative identity disorder.  He creates what he calls Monarch Slaves.  Alik and I have done a lot of research since our escape about the Monarch Programming.  Are you familiar with it?”

Rosario had been typing notes when he turned the questioning tables on
her.  Before she could respond, the door opened and in shuffled Special Agent Marcus Boyle. 

“What’d I miss?” he asked stupidly.  “Have you gotten to the part where your sister was abducted by aliens?”

Evan made a promise to himself right then. 
I will punch that smug smile off his face someday.  I swear I will.  Let’s just see if he believes I’m strong enough to beat the crap out of him after I break his nose.

“You have something you wanna say to me, smart ass?” Boyle caught the look of ice Evan flashed and was having none of it.

“Plenty of things, but you wouldn’t be able to follow any of it,” he blurted.

“What the hell did you just—”

“Okay, how about we get you something to drink, Mr. Winter.  I’ll be right back,” Rosario flipped the lid to her laptop closed and grabbed Marcus’ arm to drag him out of the room.

“What the hell did that little prick just say to me?  I could crush his skull with one fist and damn well get away with it, too.  Let’s see how smart he is after I turn him into a vegetable!”  Agent Boyle was yelling profanities loud enough for Evan to hear even after Agent Garza got him out of the room and shut the door behind her. 

Evan just smiled into his shirt.  The moment Marcus’ tirade started, Evan’s keen ears heard the scraping of chairs and shuffling of feet from behind the one-way mirror.  In his peripheral vision, he caught the vibration of a door shutting in the glass where several people had been observing the entire interrogation.  Whoever they were, they had left their post.

Evan dove across the table and flipped
open the laptop.  His fingers quickly woke the machine where it was asking for a password.

I don’t have time for this shit,
Evan thought angrily.  His skilled hands flipped the machine over.  Working with his gnawed-to-the-nub fingernails, he managed to pry the back cover of the laptop off and stared at the motherboard where all his answers could be found.  Finding exactly what he needed, he detached three wires, crossed them and reattached.  He lightly replaced the back cover and flipped the machine upright on his lap.  He pressed and held the power button and just at the right moment, pressed several strategic buttons at once.  The screen scrolled to life within three seconds. 

Evan’s ears were trained on the sounds coming from the hallway.  Apparently,
Agent Marcus was a little sensitive about his lack of intelligence because he wasn’t calming down at all.  On the contrary, the more he yelled the angrier he seemed to get. 
Surely the mark of an imbecile
, Evan thought.

His fingers never stopped moving across the keyboard.  Once he was in, which took all of seventeen seconds
, he pulled up exactly what he wanted to know. 

Five minutes later, Special Agent Rosario Garza headed back to the interrogation room, minus one Meathead Marcus who was cooling off in the gym.  She had a cold soda in her hand when she reached the code panel that opened the door.  The entire screen was lit green—a state that only happened for a second once the code was correctly entered into the panel and the door was unlocked.  With pursed lips, she tried the doorknob first.  It opened smoothly in her hand. 

The room was empty. 

It didn’t surprise her to see Evan Winter gone.  Neither did it surprise her to see her laptop sitting open and logged in. 

Left on the screen was the government’s entire top-secret dossier on one Donovan Arkdone.  What did surprise her was that he allowed the video camera to record him the entire time and left the SD card inside the camera untouched.

He also left his photograph of his brother and missing sister in the exact spot where she had left her business card.  The card was gone.

“Well, at least he took my card,” she mumbled while gathering the hacked laptop.  She slipped the video camera’s SD card into her pocket and headed back out the door, shaking her head ruefully as she headed to the elevators. 

To her ear
piece she asked, “The girl Dr. Mor, is she still in custody?” But she already knew the answer.

“She left to use the bathroom and now we can’t find her.”

“Of course, you can’t.” Agent Garza locked her jaw and shook her head. 

“I’m getting a lot of heat, Agent Garza,” a different voice came over her earpiece—it was her Director, one of the men on the other side of the one-way mirror.  “If they try to travel to the States, make sure they’re allowed entry.  I want this monkey off my back.  Am I clear, Agent?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

Garza
yanked her earpiece away from her ear one second too late as she heard the Director slam his own earpiece on a hard surface. 

The Director had made his wishes more than clear.  This was between Arkdone and the Winter family—the U
.S. government was to stay out of it.

Chapter 82 Beautifully Breakable

Meg and Sirus had made their rounds.  Arkdone flaunted his
recognizable guest to every powerful person at the benefit. 

Meg felt sick at some thoughts she heard in their heads as they leered their pasty eyes over
the delicate red, form fitting fabric of her gown.

Not everyone in the room was corrupt, but the vast majority w
ere.  The most earnest, kindhearted people were those who worked that night as drivers, servers, bartenders and busboys. 

Meg was feeling nauseous at the auras she’d touched over the past two hours.  She was fighting the overwhelming urge to take a scalding hot shower with the strongest soap she could find just to scrub herself clean of their sickly colors, pungent colognes and foul breath.

Finally, Arkdone had become too busy to continue to flaunt his prize to the room leaving Meg and Sirus to slip away. They walked slowly up the opulent stairs toward one of the two balconies that overlooked the room in all its grandeur.

“Does Gideon know what we talked about earlier?” Meg asked Sirus.

“He does now.”

“What does he think?”

“He’s too pissed off to think straight.”

For some reason, those words gave Meg hope.  She tried to hide the smile that desperately wanted to press her lips.

“Can I ask just one thing of you?”

“It depends on what that thing is,” Sirus answered realistically.

Meg nodded, understanding his parameters.  “Would you catch me if I fall?”

“Don’t you feel well?”  He reached out and held her elbow in his strong hand.

“I’m fine right now,” she smiled sadly.

“Why would you fall?”  Sirus searched her worried eyes and tried to understand.

“What time is it?”  She asked, trying to distract him. She’d been holding her gown’s hem up just a bit as she managed the red velvet stairs.  Now that they reached the topmost step, she let go of the material so it danced like red petals at her toes.  She looked at Sirus expectantly.

“It’s nearly nine.”

Meg nodded solemnly.  “Then it is time.”

She offered him one last sad smile before turning toward the balcony, but stopped to look back at the worried expression on Sirus’ face.

“I will try to be as gentle as possible, but it will come at a cost,” Meg offered him a cryptic warning. 

She turned back
, stepped confidently toward the rail, grasped the ornate wrought iron and bowed her head. 

Chapter 83 Isolated

Sloan was shaking in Cole’s arms.  They had just returned from the embassy and the family was gathered around them in the living room of their home in Cairo.

“Calm down, Sloan.  I told you I’d take care of everything, didn’t I?”

“Y-yes.” Sloan’s stammered.  Her “yes” sounded more like a “no.”

“Evan, what happened exactly?” Margo was holding Theo’s hand.  Evan couldn’t help but feel a wave of anger at his mother, knowing full well that if Danny came toddling out of his room where he was napping, she would drop everything to cater to his every need.  That knowledge tightened Evan’s heart and he had to work to relax his voice so he didn’t come across as angry when he spoke to her.

“You’ll see, Mom.  Everything is falling into place.”

“Evan!” Cole blurted, “You just escaped interrogation from the U.S. Government!  How do you think we’re ever going to get back to the States?  We just pissed-off people we were trying to turn into allies.”

“I
did
make allies today,” Evan’s honey eyes flashed angrily at Cole.

“What makes you say that, Evan?” Theo began.  He was running his fingers through his thinning hair anxiously.  “This was supposed to be a formality.  Burns said they just wanted to talk to us before they granted permission for us to return home.”  Theo’s eyes blinked daggers at Evan from across the room.

Evan stood abruptly from the sofa where he’d just relayed to the entire family what happened during his meeting.

“Why do you assume the worst of me?” he looked at the worried, angry faces across the room.  From his pocket he yanked his phone out and pressed a series of buttons.  The room watched him with distrust.

“Agent Garza,” Evan said into the phone, but glared at Margo as he spoke. 

“Yes, this is Evan Winter.”  He paused listening.

“I am aware of that.  How soon can we return to the U.S.?”

Evan paused and worked his jaw angrily.

“I will be in touch.”

He jabbed the “end call” button and shoved the phone back into his pocket, grabbed his keys off the coffee table and started to storm out of the room.

“Evan, where are you going?” Margo called after him.

“I know you don’t care where I’m going, Mom, but in answer to the question you didn’t ask: I just got definitive permission for the family to cross back into the US.  They will not detain us, or question us further.  They want to wash their hands of us,” he yanked the back door open but stopped for a moment. 

“Wanna know on whose orders?  Senator Arkdone’s.  Mull that little tidbit over for a while.  I’m out of here.” Evan slammed the door closed behind him leaving his family staring drop-jawed at the still vibrating door where a charred spot was burned into the wood in the perfect shape of Evan’s left hand.

Chapter 84 A New Generation of Metahuman

Rhett Hayes watched with a keen eye the anxious excitement pouring through the Facility.  Metahumans were called to arms.  Every
body eighteen and older, except a few key figures, was mobilized immediately and the entire campus was tense with final preparations. 

Rhett was on landscaping duty right outside the administration building
, so he had the best view of the buses as they began loading with soldier after ripped soldier.  Three buses were filled.  Two were full of soldiers, and the other was stocked with weapons.

“They say it’s war,” Nat
e Townsend whispered from two feet beside him.  His hands were skillfully pruning the hedges while Rhett worked on the plants near their base. 

“Sure looks like it,” Rhett muttered under his breath.  They weren’t supposed to be talking, but since the Director came over the intercom and ordered all squadron leaders and instructors to his administration building three hours ago, there was no one watching the younger metahumans go about their chores.

“Where do you think they’re going?” Nate asked.

“Joey from the commissary said he heard they were going to the Americas.”

“Oh, damn.  I wish I could go.”

Rhett didn’t say it, but he wished he could go
, too.  They missed the cut off by one year.

“We’re all going to meet in the pit to compare notes,” Rhett nodded once to Nate.

“Twenty minutes after they pull out?” Nate whispered. 

Rhett nodded once then motioned a subtle hand signal that meant both “watch out” and “spread the word.”

“Right,” Nate nodded curtly, having received the secret message.

Rhett moved first.  He walked s
wiftly—as if he were going exactly where he was ordered and not for a walk around the east side of the buildings to put eyes on the others of 17
th
Company and give them the order to meet.

Moments after Rhett left, Nate slipped his shears behind the bushes and began his determined walk around the west side of the campus.  Each time he came to another of his company, he discretely moved his hands indicating the message passed down by Rhett.

Most others in their group were on the east side of campus, so Rhett took the greatest risk of being found out and punished for being off task.