THE 13: STAND BOOK TWO Read Online Free

They hoped they could have things somewhat normal—provided there were no further aggressions from the Chinese—in the next six months. Until then, back from the brink of extinction, Ma Bell was back at the top of her class. Landlines were being reinstated and used again. Since most of the technology had consisted of large fiber-optic lines that were buried beneath ground, it had been relatively easy to get them back up and running.
Funny
, Hayes thought,
my granddad was right. There is beauty in simplicity
.
    He picked up the receiver and punched the numbers. There was some buzzing then a series of clicks—though they were working, the landlines still had some issues. Finally, he heard the ringing on the other end.
    “Yeah?”
    “Gavin, it’s me. Everything set?”
    “Yep.”
    “You want to drive?” Hayes asked. “Or do you want me to have my driver take us?”
    “No sense in bringing someone who doesn’t need to be there. I’ll drive. Where you gonna be?”
    “I’m at the courthouse now. We’re supposed to hear a couple cases today, but I doubt counsel will even show up. They haven’t all week.”
    “It ain’t gonna get any better, Milton. Not until something changes.”
    “Yeah.” Hayes sighed into the phone.
    “People are scared, man. They still don’t know if we’re coming or going. That degenerate in the White House is laying down, man! He’s nothing but a yellow-belly.”
    “Well, then, we had better be convincing, huh?”
    “Don’t you worry about me. What I’m offering is pretty convincing. You just make sure you can sell it from a legal and judicial standpoint.”
    Hayes bit the tips of his fingernails. What he and Gavin Pemberton were doing could get them killed. But he couldn’t stand by and watch his country just lie down and die. He wouldn’t. “I can sell it.”
    “Good. Then I’ll see you in an hour.”

CHAPTER 3
New Chinese Territory
    K eene was cold. Freezing, actually. He opened his eyes and took in the scene around him. Dark room. He was in a bed, and there was something sticking out of his wrist. An IV. He traced the small tube with his eyes from his arm to the drip-bag hanging on the metal frame beside the bed. He was here alone. But where was here?
    The last thing he remembered was sitting on the floor of his cell. They had finally broken him.
    After he and his team had taken out the nuclear device that was meant for Washington, he had followed General Chin to a remote farmhouse somewhere just across the Canadian border. But he had been careless. Chin got the drop on him. He had been knocked out and taken to a prison camp.
    Outside of being in a prison camp, he hadn’t known where he was. But at least he knew that he and his men had stopped the invasion. That was enough for him, then. Past that, the only thing he could remember was that they came for him. Regularly. For weeks on end. They would beat him until he was almost unconscious. Then they would send a medical staff in to tend to him, until he was well enough to be beaten again.
    He had been brought to his wits’ end—the once hard-core, black ops operative, turned CIA agent. He had been reduced to a broken shell of the man he once was. He remembered wanting to just die. And he had asked God to let him die.
    It was coming back to him now. He had been sitting on the floor, leaning against the cold steel slab that was his bed. He couldn’t take it anymore. He had been replaying all the conversations he had had with Boz and all that stuff about God that Boz had been trying to get him to listen to. At the time, he hadn’t cared. It was all just ridiculous to him. He hadn’t wanted anything to do with God.
    But something changed. Lying there in that cell, after weeks upon weeks of getting beaten, he realized how alone he was. And he realized that he had been that way long before the prison camp. Suddenly, all the things Boz had been saying started to make sense. And just when he thought he had been broken beyond