Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set by Eric Van Lustbader Read Free Book Online Page A

a purely political creature, which put him at odds with Jack, and therefore dangerous. “You need to be brought up to speed as quickly as possible.”
    He offered a sheaf of papers—forensic reports, possible witness interviews, search results, photos of everything that had been vacuumed up from Alli and Emma’s room. (Jack couldn’t help thinking of it in that way.)
    Nina Miller settled herself by scooping the sides of her skirt under her thighs. Her eyes were bright, inquisitive, completely noncommittal.
    Garner said, “First thing: We’ve sent out a news brief on the reason for government agents here, as well as the whereabouts of Alli Carson.”
    Jack, preoccupied with the reports, did not immediately respond. He had stood up, moved over to the window so sunlight spilled across the pages. He kept his back to the others, shoulders slightly hunched. He tried to relax his body without much success. The letters,words, clauses, sentences on the pages swam in front of his eyes like terrified fish. They swirled like snowflakes, spiraled like water down a drain, pogoed like Mexican jumping beans.
    Jack was having trouble finding his spot. Stress always did that to him, not only made his dyslexia worse but interfered with the techniques he’d been taught to work around it. Like all dyslexics, he had a brain designed to recognize things visually, not verbally. The speed of his thought processes was somewhere between four hundred and two thousand times faster than for people whose brains were wired for word-based thought. But that became a liability around written words, since his mind buzzed like a bee trying to find its way into a blocked hive. Dyslexics learned by doing. They learned to read by literally picturing each word. But there was a host of disorienting trigger words, such as a, and, the, to, from —words crucial to decipher even the most elementary sentences—for which no pictures existed. In his lessons, Jack had been asked to make those words out of clay. In fashioning them with his hands, his brain learned them. But stress broke the intense concentration required to read, stripped him of his training, shoved him out onto a rough sea of swirls, angles, serifs, and, worst of all, punctuation, which might have been the scratching of a mouse against a wedge of hard cheese for all the sense he could make of it.
    “There’s no way of knowing, however, how long our disinformation will hold up. On the Internet, where every blogger is a reporter, there’s a limited time we can keep something like this a secret,” Garner continued.
    Jack felt the others’ eyes on him as he crossed the room. He spoke up, more to distract himself from his growing terror than from a need to engage Garner. In fact, his fervent wish was for a sinkhole to open up under Garner and Nina Miller, swallow them whole, but no luck. When he looked, both of them were still alive and well. “How long do we have?”
    “A week, possibly less.”
    Jack turned back to the gibberish that spitefully refused to resolve itself into language.
    “You aren’t finished yet?” Garner said from over Jack’s right shoulder.
    “I’m sure Mr. McClure needs a moment to orient himself to our standards of methodology,” Nina said, “which are quite different from those of the ATF.” She walked over to Jack. “Am I right, Mr. McClure?”
    Jack nodded, unable to get his vocal cords out of their own way.
    “ATF, yes, I see.” Garner’s laugh held a rancid note. “I trust our protocols aren’t too difficult for you to follow.”
    Nina pointed to paragraphs on certain pages, read them aloud, as if to speed the process of familiarization by highlighting elements the team found of particular interest. Jack, his stomach clenched painfully, felt relief, but with it came a flush of secret shame. His frustration had morphed into anger, just as it always did. Trying to control that poisonous alchemical process was the key to maneuvering through the briar patch