Cottonwood Read Free

you back,” said Kate.
    But they did.
     

 
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    It was amazing how many simple-minded sons of bitches there were for sale in the world. Damek van Meyer thought this quite often and the thought always made him happy in a way that nothing—not money, not works of art, not the sight of powerful men in defeat or beautiful women in naked decadence—ever could. The world was filled with ignorant and avaricious men, and if a man had the means to purchase them, that man could easily rule the world. How tragic it was that only now, in what the natives of this country liked to call ‘the golden years’ of his life did van Meyer acquire the means.
    He had spent his youth in petty pursuits, as all youth do. His were more to do with carrying guns across invisible borders and putting drugs into softened hands, but petty things were all they were. Even his ambitions were not so much higher. He had been born into slums, where his most fevered wishes had been no greater than to rule the filthy streets of his spawning. Achieving that, he wished to be warlord over his own army and end the reigns of those who kept him small now. And so it went, like ripples expanding outward in still waters, never setting his goals further than what he could already see within his reach, never imagining …but that, ha, was before the bugs.
    Look at him now. And look at them, those bleating sheep, those soft-bellied fools. Through the one-way glass of this small antechamber, van Meyer watched the auditorium of Cottonwood’s convention center fill with people. Good Americans, every one, handpicked for their lack of training, their lack of skill, lack of resources and lack of purpose. If he were not so pressed to acquire social workers, he would give them all guns.
    “Mr. van Meyer? It’s ten o’clock.”
    “ Danke , Piotr. We’ll give five minutes more, ja ? To settle. What could be more American than to be fashionably late?”
    Piotr laughed dutifully, but van Meyer knew he was being humored. That his ass, to coin the phrase, was kissed. He did not mind. To have his ass kissed by Piotr Lantz was as soothing as warm towels for the hand on a cold and rainy night. He had been a young man when he first found Piotr scavenging in the streets he had made himself master over—a hungry child, slitting throats of beggars for a handful of coins. For the cost of a hot meal and a gun, he had won the boy to his service for all these years. He was not an intelligent man, his Piotr, but a hyena upon two legs, possessed of animal cunning and cruel humor, a squat and somehow crooked sort of creature now past his prime, but still deadly. With a thousand Piotrs at his side, he would not even need the bug.
    “What do you think of them?” van Meyer asked, jutting his chin at the glass.
    Piotr came to see, his reflection ghostly in the mirror. “Soft bunch. Tofu-eaters.”
    “ Ja .”
    “And that one.” Piotr’s stubby finger smudged the glass. “Little Pollyanna in the first row. She came in singing .”
    Van Meyer laughed. Little Pollyanna, yes. He’d noticed her. Younger than most at twenty-four, but old enough that humming happy tunes in public caught stares. Pretty, if thin-faced to his eye. Fair-haired, blue-eyed. The picture of hope in its fullest flower. A cursory ISP-scan revealed no subversive websites, no internet habits at all, beyond an abandoned avatar page, a handful of foolish comics and video viewing ports, and a subscription to something called a Brookings Bugle . Her history was that of low-paying menial jobs and prolonged unemployment leading inexorably deeper into poor credit, desperate financial circumstances. Perhaps slightly above average intelligence on testing, despite mediocre performance in school and no higher learning. Clean body, clean genes. A blank slate.
    And she was singing. Van Meyer could just make out the strain of it through the glass if the other noises died just so. He could even name the