“What others?” she asks again.

Tears have dampened the hood’s fabric, and he’s sucking rapid breaths through his grimacing mouth, but no answer comes. She’d love to snap his bones one after the other, but that’s only proved effective when the answer she’s looking for is one or two words. This answer, she’s sure, is much more complex, and she has to hear every word of it.

“Charley?” Cole says. “You want to fill me in on the plan here?”

Charlotte steps past Luke through the divider, dropping her voice as she moves toward the truck’s cargo door.

“You first,” she says. “Did you have any indication there were other trucks?”

“None, and we still don’t.”

“He just said there were others. Didn’t you hear him?”

“Yes, I heard him. And we’ve got no idea what he means.”

“I’m going to find out,” she says.

“How?” Cole asks. “Breaking his other arm?”

“I don’t have time for pain.”

“What’s time got to do with it?” he asks.

“Everything up until now has been rehearsed and practiced and coordinated. He just said I’ll never stop the others. That means he thinks it’s too late because I’m too busy here with him.”

“What are you asking for, Charley?”

“The thing that just broke him was telling him I’d followed him to all those movie theaters, watched him for nights in a row without him realizing it. That’s when he freaked out and slipped up and told us about the others. Pain’s not going to get us what we want out of this guy. Fear of what he doesn’t understand will.”

She lets this sit. When Cole doesn’t rush to ask her to elaborate, she figures he’s got some sense of where she’s headed.

Knowing her words will probably be audible to Cole’s business partners, she says, “I’m asking for permission to take his blindfold off and show him what I’m capable of.”

“I see,” Cole says after a long pause.

Maybe she’s imagining it because she’s been listening for it, but she’s pretty sure she can hear other voices, even some movement in the background when Cole speaks.

“Well,” Cole finally says, “this is a question that will require consultation on my end, apparently.”

She takes his “apparently” as a sign his business partners are listening in just as she suspected, maybe trying to get Cole’s attention even now. That might explain the scuffling sounds on his end. Are they actually present at Kansas Command?

“I see,” she says. “Well, I’ll be waiting, and so will the others.”

14

Lebanon, Kansas

Goddammit, Charley, Cole thinks, why did you have to ask? Just do it and let me clean up the mess.

But who is he to judge? He’s as sidelined by Cyrus Mattingly’s announcement as she is. Cole’s withheld plenty of truths since this operation began; concealing knowledge there might be more trucks isn’t one of them. As soon as their target snarled the word others, Cole had to grip the back of the chair nearest him to stay standing, and he didn’t come out of his daze until Scott signaled The Consortium was already calling in.

All that was before Charley made her request.

How long has Noah been right next to them, literally breathing down his neck?

“You’ll agree, of course,” he whispers.

“It’s not my decision,” Cole answers.

“What does that mean?”

“Tell you what,” Cole whispers, “this time you get to watch the call. With my permission.”

Cole studies Noah’s reaction, which tells him next to nothing about how Noah feels about this invite. He reminds himself it’s damn near impossible for Noah to have corresponded with either Stephen, Philip, or Julia during the past year. Still, Cole’s taking a risk. Inviting Noah to watch this meeting will either expose him to the bullshit The Consortium’s been subjecting Cole to for months now, or it will add another voice to the team that’s been ganging up on him.

“Do I have permission to speak?” Noah asks.

Depends on what you’ll speak out against, Cole thinks.

“Nope. Stand right where you did last time and don’t say a word.”

Cole’s more than halfway to the conference room when he looks back. Noah’s right on his heels. Once they’re inside, the not-so-good doctor makes a childish show of scooting down the wall like a Scooby-Doo character trying to escape detection by a bad guy. And, of course, he stops just short of where he stood last time. Cole gestures for him to keep moving, then feels like an idiot when he realizes they’re both being silent for no reason. He hasn’t picked up the conference call yet. Noah moves another foot or two down the wall.

“Right there,” Cole says, confident Dr. Feelbad’s finally out of camera range.

Noah looks to the screen, even though it’s dark; maybe because it’s the only way he can keep from shooting Cole the bird.

With a swipe of his touch pad, Cole picks up the call. The expressions on the faces of his business partners seem remarkably unchanged from a day ago, despite what they’ve all borne witness to since. Cole’s surprised by how much this disappoints him, wonders if he’s reading too much into it. He’d figured even cold-hearted masters of the universe like Stephen and Philip would be softened some by a firsthand view of what the victims of a beast like Cyrus Mattingly endure. Maybe he hadn’t figured this so much as hoped for it, and that’s the problem. When it comes to The Consortium, he should keep his hopes to a minimum.

“I assume everyone’s been watching the feeds,” Cole says.

All three of them nod.

“All right, well, before we address the question before us, let’s do a brief review of the facts as they—”

“With all due respect,” Stephen says, “I don’t think a review is quite necessary in this moment. Bluebird’s question is just a by-product of a larger unresolved question we’ve avoided answering for far too long now, and I feel it’s my duty to point out the time has come to have a serious, frank discussion about it. Hopefully, we can keep it divorced from the emotion that usually seems to bedevil this topic.”

It chaps Cole’s ass that Stephen insists on calling Charley by her code name no matter the circumstances. Even Philip will sometimes refer to her as Ms. Rowe when they’re discussing an issue that might have a grave impact on her life, or her sanity.

Cole’s poised to ask Stephen about this so-called larger question when the man launches into a speech that doesn’t just sound practiced; it sounds scripted.

“We must now make a decision about what it is we actually seek to accomplish with an operation like this. Are we a vigilante organization? Are we an investigative body? Do we fancy ourselves some highly secret arm of international law enforcement? Obviously, we have the power to be any of these things, but what we are capable of and what we should be doing are sharply different things. At present it seems like we’re drifting back and forth between all the various missions I just mentioned without rhyme or reason. And this drift, if you will, seems to happen entirely at the behest of our test subject’s emotional whims.”