“Again, we don’t know that, Charley. He could be talking about abductions that are next week or next month or next year.”
“Then why would he be so sure we couldn’t stop them? If the others don’t start their sick shit until next week or the week after, why would he be sure we can’t stop them by then? What he’s really saying is he thinks we’re too late, and that’s got to mean it’s already in motion.”
“Charley . . .” There’s a note of fear in his voice that silences her. “We know things about each other, you and I. Personal things . . .” He pauses suddenly. Is he inviting her to disagree? Is he just nervous about what he wants to say next? She’s got no idea, so she says nothing. “I don’t invoke the memory of my father very often. I don’t know, maybe it’s because he left me with big shoes to fill and I don’t want to remind everyone how big. But I know this isn’t what you wanted to hear. So, I’m asking you to remember the story I told you six months ago. About what happened to me when I was a boy . . .”
Charlotte’s so startled by this turn, she looks to Luke to see if she’s hearing correctly. Luke shakes his head. He, too, knows the story Cole’s referring to; half of it anyway. And like her, he seems to have no idea why their boss is bringing it up now. Cole also doesn’t sound like himself. Not the version she’s used to working with, at least. The Cole speaking to her now is the same one who takes to the stage in front of the press to make a dazzling pitch for a new stomach drug that’s not much of an improvement over the old one despite its snazzy marketing campaign.
“Please, I implore you. Remember what my father did when he found out. Remember what he didn’t do. He didn’t give in to his desire for revenge. He forgave those boys, Charley. You can find forgiveness, too, I’m sure of it.”
Luke’s still holding the Thunder Derm in one hand, but he seems like he’s forgotten about it altogether. She realizes that by looking at him, she’s revealing his facial expressions to Kansas Command, so she turns abruptly to one side. He does the same.
She knows what she has to do.
There are dozens of good reasons to hesitate but only one that matters, and it’s Luke. If she proceeds along this path and she’s wrong, she could jeopardize their relationship to Graydon Pharmaceuticals forever. And Graydon has given her boyfriend more than just a sense of belonging. It’s sped him past the trauma he endured in the mountains above their town six months ago. If he loses his connection to it, will nightmares plague him and a sense of constant dread return?
And was that part of Cole’s plan all along? Tie Luke more closely to their operations so he might turn against Charlotte the moment she chose to defy Cole’s authority?
But there’s something else here. A kind of code Cole’s speaking in that’s taking its time to sink in.
You can find forgiveness, too . . .
She knows the real story of what Cole’s father did, and he didn’t find anything close to forgiveness.
Why would he tell her such a transparent lie unless he was trying to send her a message? And what’s the message? Don’t listen? Or at the very least, the people monitoring us, the people who might be solely responsible for this order, can’t be trusted?
She knows it could be wishful thinking, knows she’s looking for any excuse not to quit. She’s never met Cole’s business partners. Doesn’t even know their names, and she prefers it that way, so long as they let her hunt men like Mattingly. But right now, Cole’s frightened, too. Too frightened to speak openly with her on a line of communication his business partners are monitoring. And so, at its most basic level, his code can only mean one thing: Don’t listen to me. Something’s very wrong here.
But if she proceeds with what she’s planning, she’s got more to fear than the wrath of Cole’s partners. She and Luke will lose all contact with Cole’s immense resources. In the past, Bailey’s been able to work miracles for them when they’re in the field, but for the first time he’s laced into the center of Cole’s operations, and now he’s presumably being monitored by the same people monitoring Cole.
Typically, when you’re faced with this many fears at once, it’s hard to decide which one should guide your next steps.
This time it isn’t. There’s something she fears more than squadrons of pursuing helicopters and harsh discipline from her corporate overlords.
She’s afraid of letting someone die a horrible death at the hands of a man like Cyrus Mattingly.
Without another word or some gesture of defiance, she removes both TruGlass lenses and drops them on the floor. Then she takes out her earpiece and sets it next to them. She gently crushes millions of dollars of technology under one bare foot.
With a strength Zypraxon can never give her, she lifts her gaze to Luke.
If he’s surprised, he’s managing to hide it, but for an awful moment, he doesn’t move, and she’s afraid he’ll either refuse to join her or suggest they part ways, a delaying tactic for the former.
Then, with a small, satisfied smile that can only mean he’s impressed by her bravery, Luke removes his lenses and his earpiece and hands them to her.
“You really are something, Charley Rowe.”
16
Lebanon, Kansas
In the minute after Charlotte and Luke’s TruGlass feeds went dark, things got so quiet inside Kansas Command that Cole was sure he could hear little shifts in the walls of earth surrounding the bunker. Then came a jarring sound that reminded him of the noise Cyrus Mattingly’s wicked device made as it toppled. Only much louder and right behind him.
When Noah picks up the folding chair a second time and slams it into the wall again, Cole is stunned silent. He didn’t think the man capable of such a tantrum.
Before Cole can say a word, Scott Durham and several members of the security team are racing toward Noah like Black Friday shoppers through the just opened entrance to a Best Buy.
Noah’s expecting them, hands up, unwilling to fight. But Cole doubts his anger’s been purged entirely.
“Take him to his room and keep him there,” Cole says.
“On it,” Scott answers.
When the men seize him, Noah makes eye contact with Cole. “Coward!” he shouts as he’s led away. “Coward!”
With a dismissive wave, Cole turns his back.
He expected Noah to indict his character over this, but chair throwing—that’s new.
Noah’s loss.
Noah’s the one who just deprived himself of the opportunity to see what Cole plans to do now. Or what he doesn’t plan to do.
17
Off Highway 287
Luke’s right.
If they’re going to talk strategy, they have to leave the truck, even if it means losing sight and sound on Mattingly for a minute. They’ve got no idea how many cameras and microphones Cole’s people have planted inside of the thing, and trying to find them all, if they can even be found, would eat up precious time.
After she checks their captive’s restraints again, Charlotte follows Luke out the cargo door he left open. She tries for a ginger little jump, but she still lands with enough force to punch holes deep into the dirt with her bare feet. Luke leads her into the shadows far from the truck and a good distance from where he parked the Escalade. If Kansas Command can hear them this far from the SUV and the truck, then there’s no hope of secrecy and their only choice is to work against the clock.
“What do you think their response time is?” he asks.
“Depends on if they kept their word and didn’t have a team following us. Did you see anyone?”
“No one, but they could be good. I don’t know.”
“What’s the flight time between here and Kansas Command?” she asks.
“Maybe two hours by Black Hawk, two and a half.”
“How much time do we need?” she asks.
Luke pulls the stopwatch from inside of his shirt, shows her the screen.
Two hours, thirty-six minutes left on the clock.
“It’s not enough,” Luke
says after she’s taken the number in.
“Not enough what?”
“To get to Amarillo.”
“What’s in Amarillo?” she asks.
“It’s where Mattingly was headed, according to Bailey.”
So that explains the look he gave her when she asked him if he’d talked to anyone during his drive.
“And how does Bailey know this?” she asks.
“He was speaking in code, and it’s not like I can ask him now, no offense.”
“There was no other way.”
“Not objecting, promise. Just pointing out that if this does take us to Amarillo, we might be out of the trigger window by the time we get there, and whatever we do, we’ll have to do it without Zypraxon.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” she says, “and it might not come to that.”
“How?”
“Cole might remote dose me.”
The last time Luke just stared at her like this was when she suggested they might be able to repaint the entire living room in just an afternoon. Without Zypraxon.
“Seriously?” he finally asks.
“Well, he won’t want me to die. I’m still the only test subject he has.”
“Or he might try to intercept us, especially if he knows where the truck was going.”
“But we don’t know that. We just know Bailey knows where Mattingly was headed.”
“Maybe. Also, you’ve got trackers in your blood, remember.”
“Maybe your brother will throw them off-line again.”
“I don’t know. He and Cole are pretty tight these days. Kind of one of those if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em things.”
“Your brother’s not a joiner.”
“I’m talking about Cole,” Luke says.
“Yeah, well, maybe they’ll work together and give us some time.”
Luke says, “Babe, honestly. I’m not following. I’m pretty sure we just pissed them off. Royally. Why would they help us get to Amarillo?”
“Because Cole lied.”
“Yeah, he lies all the time.”
“No. He lied to the people who were listening in just now, not to me.”
“About what?” he asks.
“The story about his father and what happened to him as a kid. You only know the first half, but I know the whole thing.”
“OK . . .”
“Cole’s father didn’t forgive those boys. He poisoned them.”
Luke just stares at her. When it comes to mere shock value, she assumed this piece of news would have a hard time competing with the crates of snakes and rats and the madman inside the truck. But at the end of this night, hopefully, they can leave those things behind. Cole they’re stuck with for the foreseeable future, and with him, this dark secret from his past. She gives Luke the moment he needs to take that fact on board.
“Woah,” he finally says.
“Yeah.”
“So he’s telling us to keep going. That’s good.”
“Sort of. But the code thing means he’s either working against his business partners, or they’re working against him.”
Luke swallows this like an intact gumball. The only thing more fearsome than Cole Graydon are the people he does business with; men and women they’ve never met, for whom Charley is little more than a lab rat. Men and women with a vested interest in keeping their funding of this operation a secret and stopping it before it darkens their doors. Men and women to whom the potential victims of Mattingly’s so-called others might be little more than an inconvenience, easily forgotten, easily swept aside.
She has to save those women.
“Let’s get to work,” she says.
18
Cyrus Mattingly is no stranger to pain. He learned how to endure it when he was a kid, back when his father sent him to the ranch. His third day there, some dickhead counselor—Floyd Hickins, a real hayseed asshole who used to go around with a piece of straw in his damn teeth like he was on the cover of a Zane Grey novel—knocked him off his horse because Cyrus gave him lip. There’d been a dizzying moment of realizing he’d left the saddle. Then the thundering agony of his leg snapping as it broke his fall. Determined not to cry, he forced himself to squint up at the guy’s big silver belt buckle, sure he could focus the tears away just by trying to make sense of the designs stamped on it even as the bright sun overhead turned the man into an imposing backlit shadow. Cyrus was right, and it was a lesson he never forgot.
That was before Mother got to him and made the ranch a better place. But it was one of his earliest and best lessons on how you could throw your mind past pain, keeping it just so far ahead that it sometimes had trouble catching up. That’s part of what he tries to teach his seedlings. Your mind is more powerful than your nerves.
But he’ll never have that chance again, according to the evil bitch who’s turned this night into a royal clusterfuck.
Should he believe her? They all lie. Mother’s taught him this. If law enforcement gets you for any reason, don’t say a word, because everything they say back is an attempt to trick you into confirming what they already believe.
That was one of her many lessons, but most of what Mother’s given them are rules. Very strict rules. And he knows damn well he’s followed most of them down to the last detail. When it comes to their family reunions, at least. Which begs the question, how in the Sam Hill did this bitch get him?
There’ve been no emails, no phone calls. Not even burner phones. Just a single piece of paper, typed by Mother, which he shredded to bits as soon as he read it. Mother mailed it to him three months ago; a few sentences in a code only her boys could recognize. The code was just filler, a greeting of sorts. The only important detail was the date at the top. The countdown notification.
It was never a huge surprise when the letter arrived. Mother typically picked the same time of year: early fall, when the summer thunderstorms weren’t quite so frequent, before the roads iced up in winter.
She’d used the same system for years now. The next run always took place on the first weekend three months from the date at the top of the letter. Upon receipt, his first two orders of business were to clear his schedule for two weeks starting on the run date and to start looking for an affordable truck that could be disposed of when he was done. In the beginning, truck prep would take longer. But they’ve been at this for so many years now, that part’s become a cinch. And now most of the months leading up to the run he spends in delicious anticipation of what lies ahead, their annual ritual. Their family reunion.
There’d be no further communication until they were well on their way. Once they were within hours of her place with a seedling in tow, they were to call from a pay phone, if they could find one. Or any sort of landline. She liked to lecture them that only dyed-in-the-wool city folk thought pay phones a thing of the past. True, they weren’t on every corner anymore, but they could still be found throughout remote areas likes the ones they were all crossing tonight, places where cell phone coverage was spotty. In her retirement, Mother subsisted off a steady diet of true crime shows and podcasts; a master class in how to protect her boys, she called them. They’d rendered her constantly afraid of digital surveillance in this new age, so afraid that Cyrus was pretty sure if one of them ever dared to show up at her place with a cell phone anywhere on his person, she might coldcock him worse than Floyd did him all those years ago.
But nobody, nobody had seen that damn letter except for him. They would have literally had to be standing over his shoulder when he opened it.
Kind of like this bitch was when you were at those movie theaters . . .
The effort needed to banish this thought allows the pain of his broken arm to punch through his consciousness. And with it, an even worse thought.
What if they got to Mother first?
But if that’s the case, how come the bitch is so desperate to find out where he was headed? Is she just trying to get a confession out of him?
She’s got to b
e law enforcement. Maybe a fed or something more than a local cop, and that was why she felt comfortable making those crazy threats against him, going on and on about how he didn’t know what she really was. And now she’s falling back a little and talking with her partner because she knows she went too far by breaking his arm.
Who knows? Maybe that’ll get everything against him thrown out, and he’ll even come out of this a richer man after his big lawsuit against . . . against . . . the FBI?
“How’s your arm?”
She pulls the blindfold free. He blinks a few times, sees her standing at the foot of the gurney. And she doesn’t look remotely remorseful about breaking his arm.
“You’re real stupid, you know that?” he says.
“How’s that?”
“You abused me. I’m going to have your badge.”
“I have a badge?”
The question sounds rhetorical.
Then Cyrus is thrown upward. He expected his arm to cry out in pain and his limbs to spread as he fell. But he’s still strapped to the gurney, and technically that’s what was just thrown toward the ceiling, not him. When it drops, some force grabs it in what can only be a confident grip. Then he’s ascending again, with a few jerks here and there before he levels out. The word he wants to apply to what he’s feeling seems downright inappropriate, impossible even. But there’s no other way to describe it. He’s being held. Not just held, carried. Somehow that bitch threw the gurney’s plank and his entire body weight up into the air as if they both weighed nothing, and now she’s carrying him in both hands over her head.
He’s staring up at the truck’s rusted ceiling when cool night air washes his body. The cargo door’s open, and they’re getting close to it. Panic flares. She’ll have to lower him before she steps out from the back. There’s no way she can . . .
A pathetic-sounding yelp escapes him as he drops down into the night. Impossible, he thinks, fucking impossible.
She just jumped from the back of the truck while holding him and the plank high above her head like they had the combined weight of a basket of feathers. She didn’t even pause to use the drop step on the bumper, and her arms didn’t even recoil slightly from the impact with the ground.
Blood Victory: A Burning Girl Thriller (The Burning Girl) Page 15