The Operator

“You wanted to know just as much as I did,” Michael said, picking the blood out from under his nails. “This is not my problem, it’s yours. Reed is still at large.”

“She’ll come in. She’s halfway here already.” There was blood on his ring, and Bill polished it off as he paced forward, eager for the endgame. Meeting the guard’s eyes, he gestured for him to open the door.

Shoulders hunched in anger, Michael followed him into the barren room lit by a bare bulb in a protective cage. The janitorial cart, buckets, mops, and racks of cleaning supplies and poisons had been pushed into the shadows to leave a good-size ten-by-ten space. Bill’s lip curled as he saw Jack hunched over Allen in the middle of it. The beaten and bloodied anchor was restrained in a folding chair, but both men looked as if they’d seen better days. As Michael and Bill stared at him in question, Jack slowly stood upright, his mood unclear.

The door shut behind them with a heavy click. Away from the guard’s eyes, Bill turned, shoving Michael into a rack, pinning the lanky, taller man with his anger.

“I told you to stay in that office because I knew you’d try to kill her,” Bill said, voice low and inches from his face. “Don’t think I don’t know your every thought. Leave her alone. She will slit your throat and walk away before you hit the ground if she decides you’re a danger to those she cares about.” And a little threat to the ego never hurt.

Michael’s clenched fists slowly opened as Bill gave him a disparaging up-and-down look before returning to Allen and Jack. “She’s not going to kill me,” Michael promised in a dangerously soft voice.

Not as long as I can keep you away from her, anyway. “Jack,” Bill said, his voice mockingly light. “How’s our girl?”

A flicker of fear crossed Jack’s face. “He said the dart was true. She’s on the Evocane.”

The rush of satisfaction was like white light through Bill. “Are you sure?” he said, unable to read the truth of it in Allen’s hanging head.

Jack nodded, and Bill clapped Jack companionably across the shoulder and drew him from Allen. “Then we did well,” he said. “Soon as she runs out, she’ll come back.” He looked at Michael. “And we have our final test subject,” he added, knowing the man didn’t believe it.

“She won’t,” Allen croaked, peering at them through a swollen, misshapen eye. “She won’t.” He almost breathed the words. “Denier will reverse-engineer it. She’ll be gone in less than a week, and neither of you bloodsuckers will be using her again.”

Expression ugly, Michael stepped forward, his arm raised to smack him. Tired of his ham-handed methods, Bill jerked him to an unexpected halt. Michael needed to feel in control, but with too much freedom, he’d remember he could kill Bill, too. It was a balancing act, but Bill had a net and Michael didn’t.

For a long moment they stared at each other, Michael off balance and unable to pull away until Bill shoved him stumbling back. Across the room, Jack waited, poised for anything. “Enough,” Bill said. “You are not getting accelerated until I know it works. So you’d better hope we find her.”

Anger made the scratch under Michael’s eye stand out. “You have no intention of accelerating me. Admit it.”

“I own you,” Bill said, feeling his face warm. “I found you in that putrid, stinking mental hospital. I stopped the electroshock treatments. I dried you out from the drugs. I made your priors go away. I gave you everything you wanted.”

“Except this.”

“Don’t make a mistake you won’t walk away from. You need me, Kord,” Bill intoned, pulling hard on his ugly past and hammering it against Michael’s fear of making a mistake, a mistake that others could see and judge him a fool for. The anxiety was deep and ingrained, and the best way to manipulate the unpredictable man. “Peri will come home. What happens then is still open.” He hesitated, backing off a step. “Understand?”

Michael’s eyes dropped, and again in charge, Bill forced himself to his usual calm. From the corner, Jack exhaled. It had been chancy, but the altercation had bought him a few more days for Michael to stew before reaching his breaking point.

Satisfied, Bill leaned to look Allen eye to swollen eye, and the bound man jerked when Bill brushed a sweat-clumped strand of hair away. “You said she won’t come back? Allen, we both know Denier is good, but he will need at least two years to reverse-engineer it, and that’s assuming he can find the right equipment, which he won’t. In a week, she’ll be out of Evocane,” Bill said softly. “Slavering on the floor and in the throes of withdrawal. A day later, if she doesn’t die of dehydration or stroke, she’ll begin to hallucinate. Really bad hallucinations, nothing pleasant or nice, like unicorns and rainbows. Shortly after that, you’ll have to put her in a vulnerable, medically induced coma to keep her from trying to meet her maker from the thirty-fourth floor. I think she’ll choose the alternative and come . . . see . . . me.” He hesitated. “Our Peri is stubborn, not stupid.”

Bill straightened to his full height, pleased to see Michael’s anger soften at the reminder of what waited for an accelerated drafter caught without his Evocane. With repeated exposure, the painful withdrawal symptoms would turn into a death sentence. Allen said nothing, his breathing giving away his fear.

“Good morning, Allen,” Bill said conversationally, relishing that he was taller than anyone in the room apart from Michael. “Did you really think we didn’t know who you were all those years ago?” Turning to Jack, he inclined his head in invitation. “Save me the trouble of looking at the transcripts. What else has he told you?”