“What’s he doing there?”
“Whatever I tell him to.”
“In Dallas,” Noah says.
“Yes.”
“And we’re in Kansas.”
“You’re really flashing that PhD, aren’t you?”
Noah’s suddenly so close to him, Cole can feel the man’s breath on his lips. A few of the techs turn, startled.
“Your evasions justify my interrogation.” It’s not a growl, but it’s close.
Cole gently raises a hand to push Noah back on his heels. “Easy, tiger. This is my show.”
And we’re not at a hotel suite at the Montage in Laguna Beach, and I haven’t had a glass of merlot.
“Didn’t you promise her you’d never include me in an op? You know, given my terrible, horrible, no good very bad betrayal which, oh, by the way, turned her into a superhero.”
“Things have changed.”
“How?”
“Let’s go upstairs, get you that shower you asked for. You smell . . . not up to your usual standards.”
Like cedar and baking bread and a hint of pine . . . and oh my God, shut up, you teenager.
With a cocky grin, Noah steps forward into the inch or two of space Cole had just created with one hand. “It’s not that bad, is it?”
“She’s getting up!” one of the techs barks.
Noah turns back to the screens. Cole brushes past him and takes up a post right behind Shannon Tran. In the past, Shannon’s job was coordinating with the extensive ground teams and microdrone surveillance crews that followed Charley during an op. But those have been taken out of the mix now, leaving Shannon focused on Charley’s every move.
The command center was quiet to begin with; now you can hear a pin drop.
“Bring up her audio,” Cole says.
The raucous sounds of a barroom scene from Sister Trip thunder through the control room. They’ve all watched most of the movie right along with Charlotte three times now, each time in a different theater located in a different part of Dallas. If memory serves, the sisters are hatching a plot to fend off the unwanted advances of a drunk cowboy. When they’re done, the entire bar will be caught up in a massive line dance that allows all three of the film’s plucky heroines to escape out the bar’s back door.
“Could you cut that out?” Charlotte says.
Her voice is loud enough to be heard over the movie. She’s standing in the aisle closest to a man in a baseball cap and a leather jacket who’s just looked up at her from his iPhone’s glowing screen. The other moviegoers looking in her direction must assume she’s staring the guy down out of anger. The truth is, she’s trying to give everyone in the control room a good long look at him.
Silently and swiftly, Shannon takes a screen cap of the guy’s face and drags it onto an adjacent screen where she’s already called up Cyrus Mattingly’s driver’s license photo. Their face ID software goes to work on the fuzzy, shadowed image from the movie theater.
“You’re bothering everyone in the movie, all right?”
The women sitting on all sides of Mattingly mutter their agreement. Two of them clap weakly.
Finally, Mattingly puts his phone to sleep and slides it into his jacket pocket. Then he puts his hands up in a gesture of surrender, all without taking his eyes off Charlotte. If Charlotte and Cole’s theory holds true, he’s actually studying every detail he can discern in the darkness of the theater; that way he’ll be able to catch up with her as soon as she leaves.
“Thank you!” Charlotte says to him with nothing that sounds like gratitude. She heads back to her seat, her TruGlass capturing glimpses of grateful-looking women who smile and silently applaud her as she goes.
“Well,” Noah finally says, “I’m honored to be part of a multistate operation devoted to improving the moviegoing experience in the Dallas metroplex. Truly.”
Ignoring him, Cole asks Shannon how much of the film they have left. “About an hour,” she says.
He jabs Noah in the side and gestures for him to follow. “Upstairs,” Cole says. “Time for that shower.”
3
Dallas, Texas
Hailey Brinkmann is from California, which is why she doesn’t have a Texas accent.
Hailey Brinkmann never attended college, and that’s good because it means Charlotte didn’t have to familiarize herself with some random campus and unfamiliar town before she turned herself into Hailey.
Hailey Brinkmann recently dyed her hair corn-silk blonde because she felt like that’s how girls in Texas wear their hair. (Charlotte’s black bob, with its single streak of platinum, was about as Texas as a surf shop for vegans, Luke told her.)
Hailey Brinkmann is assertive. She moved cross-country with no clear prospects and no friends in the Dallas area. So, it makes sense that she’s also outspoken and determined and really freakin’ hates it when people text all through the movie.
She is, in essence, exactly the type of woman who will capture the attention of a man like Cyrus Mattingly—provided he continues with the routine he’s followed for three nights now.
As Charlotte takes her seat in the fourth row of the theater, she reminds herself of how thoroughly convincing her alter ego’s fake ID is. She also reminds herself that the likelihood of her having to share the details of her cover story with anyone else just turned remote. Especially now that she’s managed to capture Mattingly’s attention.
In the three weeks she’s been pretending to move into the tiny little rental house in Richardson, she’s only had to share her story once, thanks to an accidental run-in with the next-door neighbor. The poor chain-smoking woman spends most of her time caring for her wheelchair-bound husband and their two service dogs, and as Charlotte shared Hailey’s story with her, she seemed both too exhausted and too worried about accidentally blowing smoke in Hailey’s face to absorb a single detail.
The props that come along with being Hailey Brinkmann serve one real purpose. They’re for Cyrus Mattingly to root through after he abducts her.
As for her little rental house, the name on the lease belongs to a company hiding a company hiding a company. Besides, she doubts Mattingly’s the type of guy who’d be willing or able to check.
He’s not a hacker. He’s a truck driver. And if what they’ve observed of him over the past few nights can be believed, he’s got a particular weakness for women who speak their minds.
Two nights before, at another showing of Sister Trip, this one at the Cinemark 17 in Farmers Branch, she watched Mattingly rise from his seat just a few seconds after the woman who’d earlier called him out over his texting walked past him. Instead of hopping into the little Kia Soul in which she drove to the theater, Charlotte stepped into Luke’s souped-up Cadillac Escalade, courtesy of Graydon Pharmaceuticals, and they followed Mattingly as he followed his target to a sprawling apartment complex about a fifteen-minute drive from the theater.
They watched as Mattingly’s target pulled into a subterranean parking garage, an automated gate rolling shut behind her while Mattingly watched her from behind the wheel of his Econoline van, which he’d parked at the nearest open curb. If Mattingly made a play for the woman, they’d initiate their thwart plan—Luke would find a way to intercept Mattingly before he got to the woman’s door, posing as either a concerned citizen or an affable moron who’d made a wrong turn down a dark hallway.