“I get it. I’m excited, too.”

But he sounds dazed, because that’s what he actually is.

“As soon as we have more paradrenaline, we can get back to work.”

“I understand,” he says.

“This could be huge, Cole. Huge.”

“I know.”

“But it’s—”

“Early. I know. I get it. It’s one thing to wipe it out in a lab sample, another in a live subject, let alone a human one.”

“Still . . . congratulations,” she says.

“To you, too, Doctor.”

He hangs up. For a while, he can’t move. The jet’s engines suddenly sound like they’re miles away and he’s hearing them from underwater.

It’s not too soon to say he was right about at least one thing. The potential medical implications of paradrenaline are too significant to let someone as devious and unreliable as Noah Turlington anywhere near them, no matter how brilliant he is. He’s got other plans for Noah. Plans more appropriate to his skill set and his weaknesses. And Noah can certainly work with the fruits of Kelley’s research here and there. But not for a single moment will Cole allow him unrestricted access to the dazzling hormone that produced those results.

For the project, it’s not a loss. Kelley Chen is just as brilliant as Noah. Also, she’s not a narcissistic sociopath with a history of deceit and sexual manipulation. She’s a PhD from Stanford and a former dorm mate of Cole’s who applies the same obsessive focus to her work today that she applied to her studies back when they were both undergrads. Her background check was ten times more thorough than any Cole had ordered on an employee previously; the results, divinely and delightfully boring.

And she hasn’t complained once about being sequestered to Iceland and the lab he’s built for her there, even though the place is hardly as plush as The Consortium’s island. It’s a nice facility, but certain corners had to be cut, given he was footing the bill himself.

If the band ever gets back together.

But Kelley’s right.

It’s too soon to get too excited.

Too soon to be sure if they’ve actually discovered a cure for cancer, or just the first fleeting suggestion of one.

28

Charley’s getting a crick in her neck from staring down at Luke’s laptop, but she’s too engrossed to care. Once Luke explained where the flash drive had come from, the three of them scrambled to load the thing into his computer as fast as they could. They’ve been standing over his kitchen counter staring down at it for several minutes now. “What are these?” Charley finally asks.

“Screenshots from someone else’s computer,” Luke says.

“I got that part,” she answers, “but what are all these arrows?”

“Seismic readings,” Marty says.

“What, like earthquake risk?” Charley asks.

“No, they’re measurements of the thickness of the rock in the path of the tunnel. They shot seismic waves down through the mountain, and the speed at which the waves came back gave them a sense of what’s down there, but . . .” He reaches around Luke and swipes the touch pad. “They’re different. I mean, they’re the same, but they’re different.”

“What’s that mean, Buddha?” Luke asks.

Marty points to the line across the top of each image. Both alternate between wavy and jagged in the same pattern. “That there’s the ground level, sort of. I mean, we’re dealing with a mountainous surface, so the word ground is relative, but you know what I mean. Point is, it’s the same in both. Then these clusters of arrows, those are speed indicators. They show how quickly the seismic waves moved through the rock under the surface. The denser the cluster, the slower the waves travel, the thicker the rock. I mean, this isn’t my area of expertise, but it makes sense.”

“Makes sense how?” Charley asks.

“Well, it’s the type of readings Clements would need to do before they drill. He’s got to have some sense of what’s down there. Normally you drill boreholes, but they’re going through the bottom of a mountain range, so drilling a bunch of holes straight down to try to get samples isn’t the easiest. This way he just shoots seismic waves through the rocks and interprets what comes back and then calculates what he’s going to need to drill. But one of these has to be fake.”

“How do you know?” Luke asks. “They could just be two different attempts that turned up different readings.”

“Maybe, but I doubt it. They’re too different. In the one on the left, the arrows thicken up a good ways from the bottom. I’m not a geologist, but I’ve heard talk around town from the crews. The mountains are a bunch of different rock types, and some are easier to drill than others. I’m guessing one of these maps is showing a bunch of metamorphic rock right in the path of the tunnel, but the other isn’t. And metamorphic rock, that’s tough stuff.”

“OK. So if one’s fake, is he trying to rip somebody off?” Luke asks.

Charley gets an idea. “Like maybe the tunnel’s impossible to build and he doesn’t want anyone to know. Could be an insurance thing. He stocks up on a bunch of equipment and then he can’t drill, so he’s got some kind of claim.” She feels pretty satisfied with this theory, but when she sees their blank looks, she adds, “I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud.”