AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Confusion replaced his anger.
“Great to see you, Zelimir,” Thom bellowed over the whine of the helicopter’s turbine. He recognized the startled look on his security chief’s face and chuckled. “I bet he’s the last person in the world you ever expected to see with me, eh?”
Kovac found his voice without moving his eyes away from Dr. Adam Jenner. “Yes, sir.”
Severance dropped his voice an octave, making his next words a gesture of intimacy and trust. “It’s time you understand everything. Past time.”
Jenner approached and touched a gloved hand to the bandage where Kovac had pistol-whipped him back in the Rome hotel. “No hard feelings, Mr. Kovac.”
Ten minutes later, they were in the underground base’s most luxurious suite. It was here that Thom and his wife would wait out the coming chaos. In total, there were facilities here for two hundred of the top members of the Responsivist organization.
The last time Severance had been here, the four rooms had been nothing but bare concrete walls. He admired the work that had gone into the suite, and, apart from the fact the windows were actually flat-panel televisions, could find no evidence he was fifty feet belowground.
“This is almost as nice as our new house in Beverly Hills,” he remarked, brushing his fingers against a silk damask wall. “Heidi’s going to love it.”
He asked a waiting attendant, who was beaming just to be in the presence of their group’s leader, for coffee service and sat in one of the wingback chairs in his office. The flat-panel monitor behind him showed the sea crashing against a rocky coast. The live feed was from a camera mounted not too far from the base’s entrance.
Jenner lowered himself onto a plush sofa, while Kovac stood at almost rigid attention in front of Severance.
“Zelimir, sit, please.”
The Serb took a chair but in no way relaxed.
“You know the old expression ‘keep your friends close but your enemies closer’?” Severance asked once the valet had poured coffee. He didn’t wait for Kovac to answer. “Our greatest enemies aren’t only those who ridicule our beliefs without fully understanding them. They are those that once believed but have lost their faith. They do us the greatest harm because they are privy to secrets we would never share with outsiders. Lydell Cooper and I talked about this at great length.”
At the mention of the Responsivist founder, Kovac nodded and shot a glance at Jenner, as if to say Jenner didn’t deserve to be in the same room when that name was uttered. The psychiatrist looked back at him with a fond, almost paternal smile.
“We decided to create an expert on Responsivism, a man who families would turn to if they felt they had lost control of their loved ones. He could also approach those who left on their own, in order to determine their intentions. He could then report back to us so, ah, appropriate actions could be taken.”
There was a trace of respect on Kovac’s face when he looked at Dr. Jenner. “I had no idea.”
“You don’t know the best part,” Severance went on. “There was really only one person we believed could do a credible job.”
“Who?” Kovac asked.
“Why, me, my dear boy,” Jenner said. “Only, with the plastic surgery to my face, the contact lenses, and the passage of almost twenty years, you don’t recognize me.”
Kovac stared hard at Jenner, as if the intensity of his gaze could see through the disguise. “I don’t . . .” His voice trailed off.
“I am Lydell Cooper, Mr. Kovac.”
“But you’re dead,” Kovac blurted without thinking.
“Surely a man of your background knows that no one is truly dead until their body is found. I have sailed for most of my life. The storm that supposedly killed me was nothing compared to some of the weather I’ve been through.”
“I don’t understand.”
Severance spoke up, “Lydell had laid the foundation of Responsivism with his writings, giving us our basic tenets, the core of what we all believe.”
“But I am no organizer,” Cooper said. “That is where Thom and my daughter, Heidi, outshone me. I detest public speaking, holding meetings, or any of the mundane day-to-day details. So
as they grew the movement, I took on a different role, that of protector. By acting like our biggest detractor, I was able to keep watch over everyone trying to harm us.”
Kovac finally found his voice. “All those people you turned against us, you reprogrammed?”
“Would have left anyway,” Dr. Cooper replied airily. “What I did was minimize their criticism of us. They had left the fold, so to speak, but for the most part none of them revealed much about us.”
“What about what happened in Rome?”
