Blood Victory

“OK. What’s the worst that could—”

“She’s headed into the middle of some sort of operation we don’t understand, and all she’s got with her is her boyfriend in some fancy car.”

“I told you, we can get anywhere she is in three hours, max.”

“A lot can go wrong in three hours.”

“Maybe, but in the presence of a suitable trigger event, Zypraxon has never failed us.”

Scott Durham’s standing directly under a screen transmitting an angle on everything that’s piled on the other side of the accordion panel from where Charley’s been confined.

“Thoughts, Mr. Durham?” Cole asks.

“Is he going to make deliveries?” Scott asks. “While he’s got her back there? I mean, there’s a flat screen. Bags of books. Clothes still in department store bags, it looks like.”

“None of it’s sorted or packaged,” Noah says. “The guy’s not doing business while he’s got Charley tied up in back. And why would he buy his own truck for that?”

“He makes the deliveries once he’s done with her?” Durham says, sounding suddenly less sure of himself. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s black market stuff.”

“He’s selling black market items and he hasn’t corresponded with anyone about drop-off and delivery before now?” Noah asks.

“He bought all that stuff himself, guys,” Cole says. “We have records.”

On an exterior cam angled at Mattingly’s property, Cole can see the barn doors opening, allowing the box truck’s headlights to cut twin swaths across the flat lawns leading to the nearest road. The local time in Dallas is 8:00 p.m.

“Make sure Luke’s ready to tail,” Cole says.

“Already did,” Shannon Tran responds.

“OK. Mattingly’s hit the road at exactly eight p.m. Based on that, we’re going to assume he wants most of this drive to take place while Texas sleeps. What I need is for someone to animate a map for me that basically highlights the entire ground area he could reasonably cover before sunrise. In any direction. I need it to take in time changes if he suddenly tacks east or west, and I need the highlighted area to move with him as he moves. Tell me now if I need to explain that again.”

“You don’t,” Tim Zadan says. “I’m on it.”

Cole’s pretty sure he knows exactly where they’re headed, thanks to the Amarillo postmark on Mattingly’s letter. He feels guiltier about creating the extra work for Tim than he does for keeping the letter a secret from his business partners, which says a lot about his feelings toward The Consortium at present.

Noah’s next to him so suddenly, Cole jumps, which makes Noah smile. “This is fun. You should bring me in on these things more often.”

Bullshit, Cole thinks. Don’t distract me with a smile, Mr. Turlington. It won’t work.

Noah’s still rattled by the hours Charley’s spending in confinement, for sure, and that’s good. Even though Cole’s managing several different agendas this evening, finding out if Noah has a heart is one of the more important ones.

11

Highway 287

The traffic’s thinned out, leaving Luke all by his lonesome while he follows Mattingly’s truck in the highway’s northwest-bound lanes.

With a press of a button on the center console, he transforms his view of the road ahead into something resembling a vast undersea landscape. The transition’s so jarring, an untrained driver might careen nose-first into the nearest guardrail. But after months of practice, Dark Mode, as the techs call it, has become Luke’s favorite special feature on an SUV with many.

Personally, Luke prefers to call it Cloak Mode since the process blacks out all of the Escalade’s windows with previously hidden tinting that blooms ink-blot style if you’re watching the process unfold from outside. Which you shouldn’t be. The feature’s only designed to be used at night and during a close pursuit. On the inside, the windshield and windows transform into opaque computer screens transmitting hyperbrilliant views of the surrounding landscape streamed from exterior night vision cameras lining the Escalade’s exterior. Guardrails, other vehicles, the occasional tufts of brush beside the flat prairie highway—they’re all defined by a seemingly infinite spectrum of blues and greens that give them a dazzling texture. Even lane markers, which typically require reflected light to be seen, are clearly visible.

Simultaneously, every light source inside the SUV dims to nearly imperceptible levels so as not to reflect off any of the critical displays. That means no using the GPS screen manually, which is fine because he’s only supposed to use this mode when he’s trying to follow someone closely. The system works in conjunction with the reflection-deterrent paint covering the Escalade’s exterior; paint so gritty it feels almost like shark’s skin to the touch, but that’s how it reduces the amount of light that can bounce off it.

In other words, with the press of a button, Luke can turn his SUV into something that can be hard to spot on city streets after dark and nearly impossible to make out on a vast stretch of empty highway at night. Which is exactly where he is now.

But processing all of this new visual information, not being startled by an animal’s watching eyes from the brush beside the road or a dozen other potential distractions he might never see with his naked eye, required extensive training.

In the event of distraction, electronic sensors give off soft chimes if Luke veers too close to any sort of obstruction. Learning how to drive by those took practice as well. His eyes still need time to adjust to the windshield change, and during just that brief period, he has to drive by sound, not sight. This part seemed simple enough when they first explained it; then he took a spin in the thing and realized the extent to which his reflexive reactions behind the wheel were inextricably tied to his eyes, not his ears.

Yet another potential hazard addressed in training, the Dark Mode screens are so detailed and realistic that after an extended period of time, the driver can lose touch with their immediate physical surroundings and start to feel like they’re floating through the dark untethered. Every few minutes or so, Luke’s supposed to touch his own nose, then grip the gear shift for thirty seconds to fight this sensory-deprivation effect.

When the techs first explained the whole system to him, chests bursting with pride, Luke was pretty sure he’d identified its Achilles’ heel before they finished their pitch. “What about oncoming headlights?” he’d asked. “If the thing’s that sensitive, they’ll blind me and wash everything out, right?” Apparently not. The program’s designed to recognize the fierce intensity of approaching headlights and dim them until they look like candle flames behind a pane of smudged glass. And that was when Luke had yet another moment of shaking his head and wondering just how much goddamn money these people had.

Mattingly’s truck is a bright-green rectangle speeding down the highway ahead of him, the occasional rattles of its carriage visible in the windshield’s new hyperbrilliance. Charley insisted Cole not tell her what was waiting for her inside, but Luke, they all made clear, wouldn’t have been given the info even if they had shared it with Charley. No gory details for him. Not yet. It’ll be a while before they’re confident he can handle whatever Charley endures at the hands of these monsters before she kicks the shit out of them.