“Kansas,” Noah mutters, surveying his vast, empty surroundings. “Huh. Will there be more of it when the sun rises?”

He’s right—it’s too dark to see the farmhouse on the horizon, and they haven’t planted any of the fields. But the airstrip underfoot is new, installed only months before. Surely Noah won’t be willing to believe they bought a farm in the middle of nowhere and installed an airstrip just for the purpose of flying him here and killing him.

But there’s something else going on with his most important scientist, and it takes Cole a moment to puzzle through it.

Noah actually has a life he loves now, and he doesn’t want to be pulled away from it for even a second. His residence on the island is plush, luxurious even. Of course, he lives as a prisoner, his movements constantly monitored, no contact with the outside world—other than Cole—allowed. But remarkably, after a year, he hasn’t asked for any. There’s nobody from his former life—lives plural, if you want to be technical about it—he wants to speak with. For Noah, the past year has been all work and no play, and he couldn’t be happier about it. And so the prospect of spending even a short amount of time in a temporary holding cell has him exhibiting signs of an emotion he almost never displays—fear. The charm with which Noah stepped off the plane was his cover for an emotion so out of character Cole had trouble recognizing it at first.

“Did you have a bad experience in Kansas at some point?” Cole asks.

“No,” he says, “but you, good sir, have no experience here, and that’s what concerns me.”

“How so?”

“For God’s sake, Cole, you own your own helicopter, and you’ve never stayed in a hotel room that doesn’t look like either Versailles or an Apple Store. Your idea of roughing it is a house where you can hear the laundry room. And now you’re on a farm. In Kansas! And so am I, apparently. The whole thing’s very out of the ordinary, even for extraordinary men like us.”

“Well, it’s what she wants,” Cole answers.

“Charley?”

Cole nods.

“Does she want me here, too?” Noah asks.

“No. But I do.”

“And why’s that?”

“I’ll explain once we’re inside.”

This time when Cole starts for the Suburban, he’s determined not to stop, even if the men behind him all begin shooting at each other.

Cole thought seeing the inside of the farmhouse might calm Noah down a bit. But given his ramrod-straight posture as they pass through its rooms, decorated in what can only be described as bland western chic, that’s not going to be the case. Maybe the absence of personal effects unnerves him. Aboveground, the place looks ready to list on Airbnb.

Still, does Noah really think Cole would have someone blow his head off where his brains might land on a brand-new leather sofa or a vintage hand-drawn map of the Great Plains in a thick gold frame?

The trip down the cellar steps doesn’t help, either. That’s no surprise. The year before, Cole had Noah thrown in an underground cell for several weeks as punishment for making unauthorized contact with Charlotte.

When they move through the false basement, Noah sucks in a deep breath that sounds more weary than frightened. Just then, the security team lifts a stand-alone shelving unit away from the walls, revealing the vague outline of a hidden door. The cover over the fingerprint reader is camouflaged with the surrounding stone. When the door unlocks with a hiss under Cole’s touch, they’re all suddenly bathed in a glow Cole finds comforting. Maybe Noah will, too.

As they enter the bunker, Noah’s exhalation is just barely audible.

The control room’s impressive. The soothing glow comes from the wall of LED screens, the largest of which is a detailed digital map of Dallas, with pulsing red pinpoints indicating the position of Charley, her boyfriend, Luke Prescott, and their target, a long-haul truck driver named Cyrus Mattingly. Right now, the three points are grouped together closely on the grounds of the NorthPark Center Mall, which is identified with blazing red text brighter than the rest of the map. The dimmable lighting installed along the rough-hewn ceiling and floor minimizes eye strain for the techs, but it also makes the bunker feel like a large passenger jet that’s leveled off at cruising altitude for a long nighttime flight, which Cole likes—maybe because he always flies first class.

With wide-eyed fascination, Noah takes it all in. His labs are certainly impressive, but he’s never been inside one of their command centers. And with good reason. Cole promised Charlotte he never would be.

But that was before.

A short hallway leads to several other cavern-like rooms with closed doors. One’s a break room occupied by the idling strike team. Inside, the men have cots to nap on, a drink machine that dispenses ten different forms of caffeine, and a fully stocked snack bar along with a foosball table and some arcade games and a PlayStation or a dudebox or whatever it’s called—all of it designed to fill the time until the men deploy in one of the jets that’s already gassed up inside the hangar Cole had built over the site of the old stables and barn.

In another of the far rooms sits the young man who’s arguably the most important person on site, a man Noah’s never met in person even though the two conspired on a hack the year before that almost destroyed Cole’s relationship with one of his key business partners. He’ll introduce the two of them in person when he’s ready, which won’t be anytime soon.

The third room is Cole’s private communications center; the fourth, a rest area with bunks for the surveillance techs.

Noah could not care less about the nearby hallway of closed doors. He’s too enamored by the mosaic of images on the screens above. The rightmost monitors are taken up with various biometric readings transmitted directly from Charlotte Rowe’s bloodstream and brain matter. They refresh every few seconds—everything from her blood pressure to her blood oxygen level to her white and red blood cell counts and more. Noah’s got his own version of these devices circulating through his blood. The difference is, his blood trackers are programmed to cause excruciating pain and/or kill him if necessary.

“Which one is she?” Noah asks.

“That’s her,” Cole says, pointing to a screen that’s mostly black except for a smaller screen that appears to be showing a movie. “In the theater.”

Transfixed, Noah approaches the backs of the technicians sitting at their stations, who ignore his arrival. It’s not the first time he’s seen a TruGlass feed, but it’s probably the first time he’s seen one on a large high-definition screen and not a laptop. It drives home the miracle of a set of contact lenses that can transmit a crystal-clear feed of everything their wearer sees.

Noah points to the screen below. It offers a view of a skybridge that connects the top floor of one of the parking structures with the main shopping mall at NorthPark Center, a view that shifts and bounces with the jerky motions of a restless, bored human.

“Whose eyes are those?”

“Luke’s.”

Startled, Noah turns to face Cole. “You flew me all the way here to help you spy on Charlotte and Luke’s date night?”

“Luke isn’t attending the movie, as you can see. He’s parked outside the mall.”