Read Online Agent Hill: Powerless by James Hunt - Free Book Online Page B

voice soft when he spoke. “I need to know everything about your sister. What she does in her spare time, what type of foods she likes to eat, her pet peeves, her interests, her fears, what she was like as a child—anything and everything you know about her.”
    “Why? Why are you doing this? What did Sarah do? What did we do?”
    The man smiled. “You really don’t know, do you?” Ben shook his head. The man stood up and walked around the room a bit as if he was trying to find the right words before he spoke. “Your sister doesn’t work at a packaging company, Ben. She’s a covert agent in what I’ve discovered to be the most secret intelligence agency in the world. They don’t appear to operate within the confines of any government or laws, and they basically do whatever the hell they want to do when they want to do it. I actually kind of admire them for it.”
    Ben knew he was hearing the words, but none of it seemed real. He was trapped in some nightmare, his mind and body begging him to wake up but his consciousness refusing him. “You’re lying.”
    “I know it’s a lot to take in, but think about it. Your sister probably makes up excuses for missing events, telling you something came up. She most likely always comes to your place, and you never go to hers. She has a convenient job where there’s no real office, where you would never think to go and visit her. Ben, your sister is not the person you think she is.”
    All of it was too much. Ben’s mind went back to every conversation, every dinner, every call, text, email, trying to piece together some evidence that the man was lying, but the harder he thought about it, the angrier he became. It wasn’t an anger born of not being able to assimilate the information but a rage grown from the knowledge that this man he’d never met before was right.
    “I need to find her, Ben,” the man said, crouching down in front of him. “It’s important for both me and your family that I find her.”
    “If I answer your questions, I get to see my kids?”
    The man smiled, and Ben could feel the sour wave of disgust wash over his body. Disgust that he was so easily bought, disgust that he believed what the man said about his sister, disgust from the fact that he was betraying his own blood. But in the hierarchy of his mind, Ben’s children took precedence.
    The man took a seat in front of Ben and twirled the ring around his finger. “Tell me what she was like when she was a girl.”

Chapter 6
    There wasn’t an ear in the entire room that didn’t have a phone glued to it. The chatter from the number of conversations was a constant background noise to everyone’s personal conversation, and everyone did their best to focus on their specific tasks at hand.
    Chancellor Jollenbeck stood at the head of the conference table, where a rotating coterie of advisors provided news from each of their own subordinates, channeling information up the chain of command in order for their leader to determine the next best course of action.
    “Chancellor, the riots in downtown Berlin are still going on, and the police force there is having trouble with containment.”
    “Send in the reserves from the north, and make sure they bring fresh supplies of water and food rations with them,” the chancellor answered. “God knows when they’ll get to go back to their homes.”
    “Chancellor, the utilities in the southwest still haven’t made any progress. They’re saying all the equipment needs to be replaced, from the circuit boards in the facility to the power lines that feed the rest of the area.”
    “They’re going to have to make do with what they’ve got,” the chancellor replied. “Get them in touch with the American engineers—they say that they may have a work-around.”
    It’d been like this for the past six hours. There were too many fires for her staff to put out. She was pulling resources from everywhere in the country. The sagging shoulders and tired eyes