Read Online Seen And Not Seen (The Veil Book 1) by William Bowden - Free Book Online

Alka.”
    Griffin leaves without another word. Robert tracks his exit, his gaze then swinging back to Garr.
    “Just what is it that the Director of the F.B.I. doesn’t know?”
    * * *
    Robert ponders the child through the containment chamber observation window. She is with the nurse and playing with some toys.
    The others, save for Felton, are ashen. Toor is particularly distressed and confronts Robert.
    “Is this what you go to? What you do? All this running rings around Blake—is it just a smoke screen for… for this?”
    The hand mosaic is still laid out on the chamber floor, a spot under the index finger. Robert rubs the brown spot of his own on his right hand, his face blank of all emotion.
    Toor chokes back the horror conjured up in her mind, “You have the resources. Is this what I have been signing off on?”
    Robert’s gaze into the chamber remains cold, “Does the virus work?”
    “Essentially, yes, it does,” says Felton.
    Toor cannot contain herself, slapping Robert harshly across the face, “Bastard!”
    Robert is completely taken aback, but Toor’s rage is unabated—she moves to strike again. In the blink of an eye Robert grabs both her arms, shoving her violently against a wall, his face contorted in a rage of his own.
    “It’s not me!! How could you even think it!”
    Landelle and Lucius move in to separate them. Toor struggles against Robert as he pins her to the wall.
    “Damn you to hell! It’s not me, I tell you!”
    A final shove and he pulls back, Landelle pulling a shaken Toor away. Garr confronts Robert with an unspoken question.
    “Somebody else was bound to try sooner or later,” Robert says to her.
    “Try what?” asks Felton.
    A grim-faced Garr hands Robert Apio’s drawing of the ‘Emerald City.’ He snatches it away from her with a look of shock.
    “Trinity… it’s Messiah,” she says to him.
    The suggestion horrifies Robert, “Can’t be…”
    “One of the coalition member states must have hijacked Trinity and restarted the Messiah program,” Garr says. “Bobby, they’re using children .”
    The others are puzzled as to what Justice Garr and Robert are talking about, except Felton who, for once, is unable to contain himself.
    “Trinity? Messiah?”
    But Garr and Robert ignore the others.
    “If it is Trinity then they’re using the original sequencer. That means a sample of Messiah and an antidote that they are not aware of.”
    “Will somebody explain to me what the hell they are talking about,” Felton says to the others.
    “The Veil’s intervention will have put the cat among the pigeons,” Garr says to Robert. “We need to find out what’s going on inside Trinity, quickly and quietly, and without exposing it to the world. And we need that sample and antidote.”
    “You knew this wasn’t my doing,” Robert says to Garr.
    “I know you well enough to be certain you had your own back door into Trinity, but to do that you need to be off Blake’s radar.”
    Robert ponders Apio’s drawing again, the bright sun shining over the green landscape. He raises a grave look to Garr.
    “Yes…,” she says to him. “The Thin Man.”

ROBERT
    The VTOL flies perilously close to the canyon walls. They are an hour out from the Nevada skunkworks in a Cantor Satori freight shuttle and so far Toor has been able to evade detection. In the cargo hold Landelle coldly observes a morose Robert lost in some thought.
    “Don’t go there. We need you here,” she says.
    Robert surfaces from the depths to face Landelle.
    “M.I.5 and M.I.6 both worked up psych profiles on you,” she says. “Seen them?”
    “Yep.”
    “Bet that was expensive.”
    Robert can’t help a little smile at that.
    “Were they right? About where you go to in your head?”
    * * *
    The wheat fields had always been there for him, even if he hadn’t noticed. A bright summer’s day in England, a boy and girl race through the wheat, laughing and giggling all the while. An age of innocence that seemed