Evan shook his head slowly, “Some really sick stuff. He confessed to being partners with Williams. He gave a gruesome demonstration of the nanoweapon he had his engineers design just to use on us. Once injected, the device sought out the heart. Half were triggers, the other half explosives. They were set up in pairs.” Evan was staring down at the floor to the left of the peeling desk in front of him, his right hand thoughtfully rubbing his chest at the site where he still had a small, white scar.
“He was forcing my family apart because we didn’t know who was a deadly match with whom. We were trapped in that asylum he has in his home state. Each of us was put in a dank cell and left to watch the video ourselves, terrified out of our minds for our family members, for those we knew would come for us and wondering the whole time how much more punishment this asshole had in store for us.”
“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.