فصل 4

chapter 4 trouble sleeping

Hatch inspected his personal guard, then returned alone to his room to read. A half hour later his door opened and Hatch’s servant, a beautiful, long-haired Filipino woman, walked in. She left a glass of Scotch on the table, then bowed to him. “As you requested, Excellency.” “Thank you,” Hatch said.

“My pleasure, sir. May I do anything else for you?” “Go to the dispensary and get me Ambien and Seroquel.” “Ambien and Seroquel?”

“They’re sleeping pills.”

“Yes, sir. How many?”

“Just bring me the bottles.”

“Immediately, sir.”

Hatch went back to his book as his servant hurried from the room. For the last week he hadn’t been sleeping well. Most people living the horror and violence of his life wouldn’t sleep well, if they could at all—their consciences wouldn’t allow it. But Hatch wasn’t wired that way. He didn’t lose any more sleep over sending someone to the rat bowl than he would destroying a digital foe in a video game.

Hatch thought of himself as a warrior in that way, or, even more so, a general. It was logic. You couldn’t become overly sentimental over one soldier if you wanted to defeat an army. Sentimentality didn’t work in war. Hatch prided himself on being above such “small-mindedness,” as he called it. If you couldn’t sacrifice a few men for the many, you could never be trusted to lead.

What was costing him sleep was just one man. Welch. As his former top man and EGG, Welch knew things. No, Welch knew everything. He not only knew the Elgen’s plans; he knew their strategies and methods of achieving them. He knew their technology. He even knew their finances. Most of all, he knew Hatch. Welch was a threat greater than the resistance because he was the ultimate insider—a cancerous tumor inside the Elgen brain. Welch in the wrong hands, or speaking into the wrong ear, could spell disaster for the Elgen, and for Hatch personally. As long as Welch lived, Hatch’s plans were in peril. Welch needed to be exterminated no matter the cost.

Hatch regretted not just shooting Welch the night he was arrested. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. But first Welch needed to be found, and that was no simple matter. Welch had overseen nearly all of the Elgen hunts for more than a decade and was personally responsible for finding six of the Glows. He knew the Elgen search techniques better than Hatch did. Finding Welch in Taiwan would be like finding a grain of rice in a rice paddy—a grain of rice that knew you were looking for it and knew how to be invisible. No matter—he would be found. And next time Hatch wouldn’t wait for a show execution. The million-dollar reward he had offered was for a dead Welch, not a live one.