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 discretion 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.

Shane wakes up feeling strangely refreshed, and, by the time he rolls off the bed, entirely suspicious. No way he fell asleep unassisted. Not, as in this case, deeply and without dreams. And for that matter fully clothed.

He’s trying to recall exactly what he may have ingested the night before when the telephone begins to bleat.

“Yes?”

“This is your wake-up call, Mr. Gouda,” a personalized recording announces. “The Hive is now open for your breakfast needs. Follow the green line from the Hive to Profit Hall. Doors close at precisely eight, so don’t be late!”

Very cheery, in an insistent sort of way. Setting the tone: we instruct, you obey.

Shane decides that to maintain his cover he must, at the very least, be semi-obedient. Ron Gouda might stray from the line now and then-he’s a bit of a rebel, is Ronnie Boy-but there’s no point in getting himself ejected from the village before he’s had a chance to scope it out. Plus, he’s famished.

As he passes through the reception area, one of the staff members helpfully points the way to the underground passage that leads directly to the Hive.

“No need for the heavy coat, Mr. Gouda!”

His first reaction: there’s a new shift at the desk, so how do they know who he is? Then he sees them furtively consulting computer screens as guests stumble into the lobby, and Shane recalls his picture being snapped for the ID badge.

He hates that they’re so well-organized. That’s not going to make his task any easier.

“Can I leave this here?” he asks, handing over his puffy down jacket.

“Not a problem,” says a cheerful young woman with gleaming white teeth. She whips out a plastic coat hanger, deftly suspending the jacket on a partially filled clothing rack. Practiced and efficient, all part of the routine.

Probably some discreet security staffer will go through my pockets later, he thinks. Through everybody’s pockets. Which might explain why the connecting tunnel wasn’t mentioned when he arrived last night. An opportunity for security to see what telling items might be left in all that bulky clothing. Clever, and it confirms his assumption that his ‘domicile unit’ will likely be examined in his absence.

Maggie’s data file, downloaded to a flash memory stick about the size of a postage stamp, has been secured upon his person. He’s resolved that any attempt to retrieve it will result in broken limbs, and not his own.

As to the room itself, they can search it to their hearts’ content. He left not a fingerprint behind. Mr. Gouda being meticulous about hygiene, wiping the taps and so on. Not that a print would do them much good. Like all current and former agents and employees of the FBI, his fingerprints are stored in supposedly unhackable files and not available to unauthorized inquiries. His laptop, purposefully left in place for their perusal, has been scrubbed of everything but RG Paving spreadsheets and estimating software. They might, he supposes, harvest some DNA from his pillow-even a healthy scalp sheds a little dandruff-but that won’t get them anywhere because he’s made sure his DNA is not on file. Not at the FBI, not anywhere.

Professional paranoia, perhaps, but it has saved his life more than once. He has to assume that whoever abducted Haley Corbin will know she had been consulting with a former FBI agent who specializes in child recovery cases. Will they be expecting an intrusion from Randall Shane? Print and DNA data are covered, but facial recognition software would make an easy distinction between the ersatz Ron Gouda and the real one, so there’s always the possibility that he was flagged at the checkpoint and is now under surveillance.

Not that he’s seen any sign of it. So far he’s been treated like all the other ‘guests.’ That is, like cattle being gently but firmly funneled down the old chute. According to Maggie, the real genius of the Ruler organization is in knowing precisely everything about the financial status of all potential members, as well as other personal details that may prove useful for maximum extraction of cash. Five grand for a three-day seminar is just the beginning.

At that price, Ron Gouda expects a damn good breakfast, and Shane finds himself in total agreement.

The Hive is-and he hears the joke more than once-buzzing. Shane counts twenty-seven other guests filing into a spacious, glass-domed cafeteria. Sorting themselves out by choosing tables, then wandering up to the sumptuous buffet. Shane, who feels like a bear coming out of hibernation, picks up the commingled scents of bacon, eggs, pancakes, maple syrup. He loads up a plate. A big plate.

He’s here to mingle, and so homes in on an occupied table. “Hey there, mind if I join you?”

Of course they do, but the Gouda doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Shane, far from an extrovert in real life, is rather enjoying the hail-fellow-well-met persona of the man he’s impersonating. He introduces himself and shakes hands, making it impossible that his tablemates fail to respond in kind.