Noah doesn’t answer.
“Feel free to thank me at any time,” Cole says.
“Give me a few more days aboveground and I’ll think about it.”
“I thought you weren’t a fan of Stonecut Ridge.”
“I’m a fan of daylight.”
“You’re also a fan of breaking the rules, and we’re not going to be able to go forward without a few. Hence, your brief punishment.”
“Brief. OK. Is she all right?”
“She’s fine.”
“And that boyfriend of hers?”
“He’s recovering nicely. His injuries were minor.”
“Sounds like I broke the right rule, then.”
“Well, then, the cell was worth it. Right? I mean, it had a toilet.”
“What about the kid?”
“What kid?”
“The hacker. Luke’s brother. Did you throw him in a cell, too?”
“I made a terrible mistake with their security, and I couldn’t fix it in time. Luke’s brother responded. I can’t fault him for that.”
“I was the response, and you just faulted me for three weeks.”
“Maybe I just don’t like you, Noah.”
“It’s Dylan you don’t like. You don’t even know Noah.”
“Small blessings, then. Come now. This is a happy day. Don’t ruin the mood by reminding me you’re a sociopath.”
Cole walks up to the transport pods and knocks on the titanium outer shell of the nearest one. Then he runs one hand over the unmarked sensor in its side. Part of the top goes translucent, offering a square view of the young comatose man inside. An oxygen mask covers the lower half of his face; it hides the feeding tube that’s been forced down his throat.
Noah approaches slowly, making no effort to hide his interest in its occupant.
“This is Tommy Grover, a veteran of the United States Marine Corps who fell in with a very bad crowd after his honorable discharge. He’s believed to have been killed and swept out to sea after a car crash on PCH that also killed most of his friends. But the truth, as you can see, is very different. He’s very much alive and in one piece and here with us today. You see, the real story is that Tommy was the lookout the night his friends abducted and tortured Luke Prescott. And unfortunately, he didn’t get away in time, which means he was interrogated by Charlotte. After she’d been triggered by the drugs you gave her.”
Eyes wide, Noah looks up at Cole for confirmation this isn’t a joke. When Cole nods, he feels, for a moment, like they’re back to being partners again. In business, at least.
“So unfortunately, given what he’s seen, Tommy Grover will not be integrating back into society at any time in the foreseeable future. And given that he was rather enthusiastically participating in a plot to repeatedly bomb targets of value to various marginalized communities who had earned the ire of his very special group of fellow bigots, I don’t really think any of us will be shedding a tear for Mr. Grover anytime soon.”
Cole moves to the next transport and repeats the same ritual, revealing the partially obscured face of the man inside. This man’s older.
“And this is Richard Davies. If he has any loved ones, which I doubt he does, they recently came across the smoldering remains of his property in the mountains just south of Seattle, and given his history as a loner and generally unfriendly individual, they probably assumed he burned the place to the ground on purpose and fled into the next phase of his nomadic existence. He’s got no family that we can find, probably because what little family he had destroyed itself when he was a boy. His father lost the family farm. His mother descended into addiction and prostitution, before his father shot her right in front of him when he was a kid.
“Maybe this is what eventually triggered his career as a serial killer. I’ll leave the messy psychology of it to you. But what we do know for sure is that he murdered several women and turned their skin into personal items. Wallets, belts, that sort of thing. We hope he did it after they died, but we’re not sure. We haven’t bothered to wake him up to find out. We figured we’d leave that to you.”
“We?”
“You asked me to reactivate The Consortium, and I’m proud to say I have. And these two men are a gift from all of us. To you.”
“To me,” he says.
While Noah eyes Davies’s transport pod with something that looks like hunger, Cole wonders if the man inside will survive a long plane flight. Surely Noah has more patience and self-control than that; surely he can see the greater potential.
“Your name isn’t going to be the only thing that’s different this time, Noah.”
As if he’s been caught studying the cover of a dirty magazine by the parent holding his hand, Noah looks up.
“This time out, you’re going to follow a dual track,” Cole says. “Now, none of us want to deprive you of your great dream of turning Zypraxon into something marketable that increases competence and effectiveness in the wake of what would normally be paralyzing fear. We share in this dream, even. We do. Truly. But we don’t know how long it’s going to take you to get there. And given the strange, twisting path we took to get where we are today, I’d be the last one to give it an end date.
“So this time, you’re going to pursue another path concurrently with your chosen one. You’re going to make a study of the minds, the behavior, the brain matter, pretty much any part of them you want, of the type of men who cause the paralyzing fear Zypraxon is supposed to protect us against. You’re going to see if you can isolate the neurological, the biological, the physiological origins of what we, for the purposes of our study, are calling pure evil. And you’re going to do it without messy restrictions and the sort of scientific ethics you never really paid much attention to anyway.”
“I see,” he says quietly. “You do realize that for any study to be effective you need more than one subject. More than two, even.”
“You’ll get more. Many more, if all goes as planned.”
“I see.”
Just as Cole hoped, Noah’s so sidelined by the offering of two live subjects, he’s temporarily forgotten about paradrenaline altogether.
“Good. I’m glad you see. See this, too.”
When Cole comes within inches of Dylan, the security team seems to straighten all at once.
“There’s no recording of the phone call you had with Charley the night of Luke’s abduction. So I have no idea what other secrets you might have shared or if you took her into your confidence about anything besides your secret stash. And honestly, I don’t care. I’m not going to make her miserable over it. Not right now. Not after everything she’s been through. And you? You have way too much work to do.
“And besides, you and I now have a secret that’s far more important than anything you could have shared with her. And so, if you ever go around my back again, if you ever try to earn her confidence, try to make her into the sister in darkness and grief that you probably fantasize she is during your private moments when there’s no one around for you to crack wise with or fuck into doing your bidding, I’ll let her know. I’ll let her know that you’re hard at work on the very serial killer I let her believe she murdered by mistake. And then I’ll take him away from you, close your labs again, and destroy everything you’ve done.”
“Then you won’t have my hard work, either,” Noah says.
“I have paradrenaline and you don’t. It’s a remarkable chemical, the medical implications of which might be so vast they probably won’t all be revealed within our lifetimes. And for the time being, you’re not going anywhere near it. You can’t make it without her, and you have no access to her without me. Make no mistake, Noah Turlington. You’re my employee again. I’ve rehired you, despite everything, and that means this time, I’ve figured out the best way to be rid of you if things go off the rails again.”
“I see.” His smile seems genuine and affectionate. Maybe he just likes the attention. “How long? How long before I can study paradrenaline?”
/> “Gosh, I’m not sure,” Cole says. “You were pretty close, to be honest. Then you went behind my back, and I had to start the clock all over again. Maybe while you’re doing all this work, you can make an effort to earn my trust.”
Cole taps Richard Davies’s transport pod. To his security team, he says, “Load them in, please.”
Noah steps back as the team advances, but it looks like it’s a bit of a struggle for him, as if the presence of Richard Davies exerts a magnetic pull. He seems so thoroughly pleased with his gift, it looks like Cole’s threats and ultimatums have gone right through him. That was the plan. Part of it, anyway. To leave Noah so excited by the prospect of unfettered experiments on a subject like Richard Davies, there will be almost no chance he’ll ever break any of Cole’s rules again.
The threats were fun, though.
Either way, the rules have been established. The jet is gassed. The transport pods are being loaded into the plane, and in just another moment, Noah Turlington will follow them onboard, albeit from a different entrance. They’ve already wheeled the staircase to the forward loading door.
Noah turns his back to Cole and starts walking toward the shiny new plane, staring up at it with a look of wide-eyed wonderment.
“You’re pleased?” Cole asks.
“Very.”
“Good.”
Those security team members who aren’t helping load the transport pods are standing in a circle around the two of them now. A circle they’ve shifted and at times widened as they’ve moved closer to the plane. Cole can tell that every minute the two of them spend together, the surrounding men will spend on edge, trigger fingers at the ready. Maybe it’s because they know their history; maybe it’s the energy they give off.
He’s so distracted by these thoughts he doesn’t notice Noah’s been looking at him with a broad smile for a long moment. “You seem different,” Noah says.
“Different?”
“Yeah. The way you’re carrying yourself. I don’t know. It’s more confident.”
“Well, I haven’t changed my hair, and I haven’t been to the gym in weeks.”
“No, it’s something else. Don’t worry. It’s a good thing.”
“Oh, OK then.”
“Oh, yeah, absolutely. Murder looks good on you.”
Many impossible things have become possible in Cole’s life of late, but there simply isn’t any way for Noah to know what he did to Donald Clements. There just isn’t. He’d spent the last three weeks buried in a concrete cell under the earth with no electronic devices of any kind. The cell guards and the team that brought him here played no part in Cole’s visit to Donald Clements’s home in North Carolina.
So Cole must entertain, for a moment, at least, the possibility that Noah truly did detect evidence of this crime in Cole’s very presence. His bearing, his mood. Perhaps, given who he is and where he’s been, Noah Turlington can detect the scent of murder the way a former smoker can smell a lit cigarette from a block away.
Or he made a wild guess.
If that’s the case, the length of time it’s taken Cole to respond has let Noah know he scored a direct hit. That’s for sure. Cole’s face is hot. He forces himself to maintain eye contact until Noah’s smile becomes cartoonish.
“Have a nice flight, Noah.” He starts walking toward the awaiting SUV. “And get to work.”
He makes them drive the Suburban out of the hangar before Noah’s boarded the jet. Then, once they’re a short distance away, he makes them pull over and park. That’s where they stay until the 737 taxis into the desert night, taillights winking against the dark curtain of mountains on the horizon. They wait until the plane charges down the runway and rises into the star-filled night sky.
It’s relief he feels when the plane banks and then vanishes from view. Contradictory, ironic relief, and, if examined too closely, it will fall apart. Out of sight, out of mind is a preposterous phrase to apply to Noah Turlington. The man’s done his worst while being both. But still, Cole feels like he’s finally banishing Noah, and both versions of Dylan, to a distant island prison where his mad genius will be channeled and contained.
Maybe the relief comes from somewhere else.
From the day he took the reins of his father’s company, Cole knew he’d one day take a life. His father had been preparing him for this since he was a young boy. True, most likely he’d do it in service of some noble, world-changing endeavor, but no matter the reason, Cole never thought he’d have to pull the trigger himself. And yet, in a way, he has. Which shouldn’t surprise him, either.
Eventually he’d have to kill. He’s known this his whole life.
Maybe he’s just relieved to finally have it out of the way.
43
The last thing he can remember is the satisfying sound of his tannery blowing skyward, followed by dark shadows leaping forward out of the wood like spirits released by the explosion. But while swift, their motions were purely human as they raced toward him with firelight at their backs. And they brought darkness with them. A darkness so total it hasn’t left him, even though a cascade of physical sensations is now alerting him to the fact that he’s suddenly awake.
His throat is raw and burning. Both of his nostrils are full of something rubbery. Fiery pinpricks run down both of his exposed arms. He has no real sense of where his body ends or begins, save for those parts of it that feel like they’ve been invaded by inanimate objects.
Then, very slowly, light appears. First, a vague halo, right in front of his vision. Then the halo begins to spread, like a time lapse of ice melting from a windowpane. He’s blinking what feels like layers of sand from his eyes. But he doesn’t feel any on his cheeks. His eyes are just terribly dry; that’s when he realizes he must have been out for some time.
He’s only been on a plane a few times in his life, but he has no trouble recognizing the low thrum of jet engines beneath him. Then a face appears just on the other side of the suddenly translucent glass. A face like Superman. Impossibly handsome, studying him with cheerful curiosity. The man’s eyes meet his. The man smiles.
“You and I,” the man shouts, just loud enough to be audible, “are going to have a lot of fun together, Richard.”
The glass starts to turn opaque again. But the impossibly handsome man keeps smiling. As the window shrinks, what he glimpsed of the man beyond the window gives him a sudden sense of space and perspective that makes him realize how confined he is. He’s not floating in some dreamlike space; he’s naked and stuck full of IV lines and trapped inside some vessel he doesn’t understand. Immobilized and helpless inside something that has the shape of a coffin. And that’s when he starts to scream.
Richard Davies screams until there’s a burning sensation inside one of the IV lines feeding into his arm. A sharp, acrid smell fills the mask covering his nose and mouth. He starts to lose consciousness, knows he’s no longer making a sound, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s already screaming in his dreams.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Liz Pearsons of Thomas & Mercer and Caitlin Alexander offered this book wonderful editorial direction, making the writing of Charlotte’s second adventure a supremely gratifying endeavor. Also, big thank-yous to my agents, Lynn Nesbit at Janklow & Nesbit and Elizabeth Newman at CAA, and my attorney, Christine Cuddy.
A huge thank-you to Dennelle Catlett with Thomas & Mercer publicity and the wonderful team at Little Bird, namely Sarah Burmingham and Claire McLaughlin. Kyla Pigoni and Gabrielle Guarnero are the best marketing team ever, and they also have great taste in macaroons. And, of course, Grace Doyle, Thomas & Mercer editorial director, who’s given her full support to this series from day one. Barbara Peters at Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Bea and Leah Koch at the Ripped Bodice in Los Angeles were both very supportive of the first book in this series, and I thank them for that.
For research help, a big thank-you to Kim Ullrich for putting me in touch with her brother, Jeff, who helped me navigate some of the complex sci
ence around tunnel engineering and construction. Also thanks to engineer Cory Haeder for providing additional resources. Any embellishments or errors relating to these topics belong to me alone and not these highly skilled experts.
Whenever I finish a novel, I always feel compelled to thank my regular support system, including my best friend, the very talented writer Eric Shaw Quinn, as well as my always wonderful mother, Anne Rice; my aunt Karen O’Brien; Sandra Lassalle; my amazing webmaster Cathy Dipierro at The Unreal Agency; and her crack-shot graphic designer Christine Bocchiaro.
And now a standard disclaimer: Altamira can’t be found on any map. Neither can most of the roads and highways mentioned as passing through it. That’s a shame, because once they get some of their issues sorted out, I think it could be a pretty great place to live. We’ll see.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2016 Cathryn Farnsworth
Christopher Rice is the New York Times bestselling and Lambda Literary Award–winning author of Bone Music (the Amazon Charts bestselling first novel in the Burning Girl series), A Density of Souls, and the Bram Stoker Award finalists The Heavens Rise and The Vines. He also coauthored Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra with his mother, New York Times bestselling author Anne Rice. Christopher is currently serving as head writer and executive producer of The Vampire Chronicles, a television series based on his mother’s bestselling series of the same name. He also cohosts the YouTube channel The Dinner Party Show with his best friend, New York Times bestselling author Eric Shaw Quinn (#TDPS). Christopher lives in West Hollywood, California. Visit him online at www.christopherricebooks.com.
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