Free The Devil's Dream: Waking Up by David Beers

off, but either way, his eyes opened and he looked out a windshield into blackness illuminated only by the van's two headlights. He turned his head slowly, his neck muscles feeling more like rusty metal than live flesh. A large black man sat two feet from him, in the driver's seat—Henry recognized him as Arthur Morgant. Henry closed his eyes hard and held them there for a full five seconds before looking back at the man. No, not Arthur Morgant. The man driving the car was Matthew Brand. A man inside a man, that's what he was and—
    Jesus Christ, get it together.
    If his neck felt rusty, then his head felt like an engine with no oil, unable to fully understand the world around him. He was in a van, naked, with his hands taped down to the arm-rests. Taped down heavy. His feet were taped together, all the way from the toes to the top of his ankles. He couldn't move. He glanced around the van, his head moving slowly, and saw it appeared older—like something a construction crew might use. No CD player, just a radio that showed the time in bright green lights.
    Three in the morning.
    I've been taken.
    The thought revealed itself to Henry like the burning bush to Moses, illuminating everything, and at the same, made it so that he focused on nothing else. I've been taken . Kidnapped. Stolen. And he was naked, meaning…oh, Dear God, meaning the tracking devices were useless. He looked back to Brand, his brain finally grasping what was happening. He wasn't at home, wasn't even at his fake home. He was with a madman, strapped to the seat with enough tape to hold down a mule.
    He's going to come for you . That's what Art told him. Everything had been to prepare him for this moment; the entire crash course of Victor's life, the constant reminder of what was coming, all of it leading here, to this criminal in this van. Henry lowered his head, closed his eyes, and tried to gather himself, to find his center in this hazy world he had woken in.
    "Matthew?" He asked as he opened his eyes, staring out the front window.
    "Yes, that's my name," Brand answered. "And you're supposed to be Victor Trust, right?"
    Henry kept his mind on his breathing, kept the breaths coming in and out at regular, slow intervals. "Yeah, Vick. What are you going to do with me?"
    Matthew didn't take his eyes off the road. "We're going to talk. Drive and talk. I need to know if you're my son and if you are, we'll talk some more. If you're not, you'll die."
    "How are you going to know if I'm your son?"
    "I haven't quite figured that out yet, to be honest with you, Vick. Taking us both to a DNA testing clinic isn't going to work, as I don't think they're going to allow me to wait for the results without calling the authorities. I'm hoping that our discussion here can lend some credence, one way or the other."
    Henry knew everything about Victor Trust. His entire history, all of it made up, but every single detail inside his brain and things were coming to life up there now. The oil finally flowing down to the pistons; the dull slowness of his first few waking moments passing. "How am I supposed to know if I'm your son? The cops told me I was, that's it. It's not like I have any documents proving I'm your wife's kid. My parents said they adopted me, but that they never met the mother. That's all I know."
    "How long have you known you were adopted?"
    "Maybe three days," Henry answered.
    A few seconds of silence passed between them.
    "Are you frightened?"
    How should he answer that? He was a trained FBI agent, not an actor, and so breaking down and crying in a situation like this wasn't his modus operandi. He trained for this purpose, for situations in which he no longer controlled whether he lived or died. Yet he wasn't Henry, he was Vick, an eighteen-year-old kid taken from his bed and thrust into some strange van.
    He could find the answer needed, though. He could find a way to the place that this question demanded; most days, hell, nearly every single day, Henry