Hell and Gone Read Online Free PDF Page B

The management was trained to send it up no matter what. Neither Gedney nor Doyle ever touched the stuff. Not when they met in this room, anyway. This was reserved for private discussions; the Industry had equipped this room with the latest anti-eavesdropping devices and bug detectors. It was an utter dead zone. Plus, the view was nice.
    “How’s the asset?” Doyle asked. He was wearing a suit but still had traces of grease under his fingernails.
    Gedney sat on the edge of the bed, his feet barely touching the floor. “Surgery went very well, I hear. He’s going to make it. Just like I thought he would. I told you about what happened to him in Philadelphia three years ago, right? The man is a born survivor. Maybe it’s good fortune he crossed our path.”
    “Yeah,” Doyle said. “I’ll be sure to pass that sentiment about fortune along to our friends over in Burbank. But you still think he’s right for our project?”
    “He will be in a few months. Soon as he’s healed we’ll begin training.”
    “Can he be trained? I worry about all that tech. Not that he can really do anything, but he’s kind of the proverbial bull in a china shop. I just want some assurances that he’ll behave.”
    “Anyone can be broken,” Gedney said. “And if not, we’ll flush him down the toilet. Whatever.”
    “We have any other loose ends? For instance, is anyone looking for the asset?”
    “Asset apparently has a friend in the FBI—Philadelphia field office. But that won’t be a problem. In fact, it may work to our advantage in other matters. We’re looking into it.”
    “The Hunters are still missing.”
    “They’ll be found and eliminated. They’re staying underground, which is good. Some of the teams have worked up about a half-dozen scenarios that fit the situation. Sooner or later they’ll emerge, and then…”
    He allowed the statement to hang in the air for a few moments, spreading his hands as if they were blown apart by an invisible explosion.
    “Good,” Doyle said, nodding.
    Outside, down on the square, a saxophone player started running up and down some scales, warming up. The notes bounced off the buildings.
    “Well, anything else on the agenda?” Doyle seemed eager to leave. Gedney knew he was a lawyer in name and degree only; what he really loved was screwing around with machine parts.
    “Go with God,” Gedney said. “I’ll keep you posted on the asset.”

6
     
    His brain has not only been washed, as they say…it’s been dry cleaned.
    —Khigh Dhiegh, The Manchurian Candidate
     
    WHEN HARDIE WOKE up for the third time, he was in bed, tucked in tight under warm blankets.
    Kendra always loved to tuck in the sheets and blankets at the bottom of the bed, forming a kind of pouch, which was great unless you were a adult human being the size of Hardie, which made going to bed like trying to slide a .357 Magnum into a holster meant for a .22. So Hardie would push his feet down and try to unwedge some of the sheets from between the mattress and box spring so he could actually straighten his legs while he slept. This only pissed off Kendra, because he was ruining the whole pouch effect. Every night they fought this battle, for their entire marriage, sometimes one side surrendering to the other (Hardie would spend a few weeks at a time simply curling up like a fetus; Kendra would occasionally skip the pouch thing, if it was warm enough). The happiest nights of their marriage were the months after Hardie had been shot and almost killed. For a few weeks he was in a hospital bed at the hospital; then later he was in a hospital bed in their spare bedroom. Kendra was free to slide into that pouch without fear of someone ripping it open in the middle of the night.
    Now, though, it felt like more than a pouch. He was really wedged in tight—strapped down, maybe? Hard to tell. Sometimes when you sleep, a body part will go numb; Hardie’s entire body felt numb.
    But what came back online almost instantly were