Cole’s face is hot, and he’s afraid his cheeks just turned a telling shade of red. It’s not the memory that’s doing it but the idea that Noah would invite him to share that secret with him, that Noah believes they’re capable of sharing secrets from which they can’t reap scientific glory or a massive financial reward.

“I know where they’re going,” Cole says. “I’ve known for months. I’ve got a secret ground team waiting for them. Nobody knows about it except for Bailey and my security director.”

“That’s good.” A new light is coming into Noah’s eyes. “This is good, Cole.”

“I’m glad you’re impressed.”

“You have an address?”

“A town, but it’s not a very big one. Amarillo, Texas. They’re headed in that direction now, so it looks like we were right.”

“How’d you get it?”

“A letter we intercepted. In a manner of speaking. Surveillance cams caught Mattingly opening it, and we were able to zoom in and screen cap it. He tore it up a few minutes later, but he wasn’t as thorough with the envelope. We pulled the pieces, and we were able to put the postmark together. We were already taking the mail out of his trash every day. This was the first thing he tried to destroy.”

Approval emanates from Noah, and even though Cole is trying with all his might to ignore it, he’s savoring it.

“And why’d you keep it a secret?” he asks.

“I think The Consortium’s conspiring against me. Maybe not Julia. I wasn’t sure about her until tonight. But I think Stephen and Philip are in cahoots, and I think tonight was about forcing Charley to defy them so they’d have pretext to confine her in a lab and end the field operations.”

“That’s why you wanted me to see the second call,” he says.

Cole nods. “Everything changed after paradron.”

“The poison?”

“I gave it to Stephen. It’s his now. Since then, I think he’s lost his taste for the rest of this.”

“You just gave it to him?”

“That’s how The Consortium works, Noah. A breakthrough becomes the property of whoever’s business relates to that specific area. Stephen’s in weapons, so he gets poisons. It’s the only way to justify all of us contributing substantially to the funding.”

“Fine, but I’m having trouble believing Stephen would suddenly need to start messing with everything just because you guys made one little poison. There’s a huge potential here for everyone if we all keep working, and if he’s trying to dial this down, there’s got to be some bigger agenda at work. And what about the killers? We don’t get any more to study if Charley stops going after them.”

“Maybe he thinks we have enough.”

“We have two. That’s not enough of a sample for anything.”

“I’m just saying, since we gave him paradron, he’s been a nightmare. Nothing’s right. Nothing’s safe enough. He wants nine planning meetings about every move, and he doesn’t spend them giving any actual ideas, just picking stuff apart. It’s like he’s done.”

“Done with what, though?” Noah asks.

“Operations like this.”

“It’s his first one.”

“I know, and I think he wants it to be the last,” Cole says.

“So, he was trying to turn Charley against you so she’d act out and become too dangerous to let run around in the world.”

“Yes, which, given our difficult history, isn’t the tallest order.”

“But what does he get out of that?”

“Well, for one, with Charley locked in a lab, we’re all spending a lot less money, and we’re not exposed to the security risks of her driving halfway across Texas on a whim while triggered. Honestly, I think he’s trying to reduce his investment in this now that he’s got paradron, and for some reason, he feels like we don’t need to make Charley happy anymore to get paradrenaline out of her blood. And that scares me.”

“Philip, though. How does he get Philip to go along with him? Philip’s private security. He’s about people power. He’s going to be invested in science that increases human capabilities. He doesn’t give a shit about poison. I certainly can’t see him joining a thwart plan over it.”

“I don’t know. Philip’s never liked me very much.”

“This isn’t that.”

“Isn’t what?”

“It’s not personality driven, Cole. There’s something else here. It’s bigger.”

Noah’s irritated, for sure, but it’s not the anger of earlier, and it doesn’t seem to be directed at Cole. He rises to his feet, crosses to the window, and stares through it, even though all he’s looking at is a lowered metal storm shudder on the other side of the glass. He’s seeing his own thoughts, and apparently, they’re as vast as the hidden view outside.

“What?” Cole finally asks.

“These men, they’re masters of the universe. If Stephen’s hoping to harvest weapons from all this, he’s got to be looking at the psychos I’ve got in my lab and thinking their brains could yield something pretty damn effective. I’ve spent the past year generating never-before-seen neural maps of the brain structures that lead to sadistic, remorseless violence. I’d like to use those to treat violent psychopaths, but a guy like Stephen, it makes sense he’d start asking how to mimic those neurological systems to create super soldiers who can kill in battle without hesitation or remorse. Instead, with weapons potential all over the place in our studies, he suddenly decides to screw with Charley’s ability to feed that pipeline.”

“It’s the security risks,” Cole says, but he’s repeating himself and believing the explanation less and less each time. “He’s just worried she’ll do something out in the world that will draw attention to his involvement.”

“I don’t believe that. There’s almost nothing you guys can’t cover up. That can’t be why. And for Philip there’s no why at all.”

“Noah, if you’ve got a theory, then share it.”

The challenge gets his attention. He turns, his expression focused.

Shit, Cole thinks, he really does have a theory.

“I think you don’t know what you gave them,” he says.

“Meaning?”

Noah turns from the window, sinks down onto the foot of the bed, studying Cole as if he’s not sure Cole will be able to handle the impact of what he’s about to say. “I think paradron is a lot more than just a poison. And when Stephen took a good look at it on his end, he realized that and for some reason decided he doesn’t need Charley at all. Or us.”

“Just Philip?”

“Maybe.”

Cole wants to protest, but it’s just defiance. There’s an elegance to Noah’s theory that’s impossible to ignore.

Memories of his own behavior are coming back to him with vicious force; he’s thinking of how heavily he sugarcoated paradron’s origin story when he related it to Noah just a few moments ago. They didn’t generate a poison; they ended up with one by mistake, and it came as a terrible defeat. They weren’t trying to turn cancer into a more effective poison; they were trying to cure it. Had their emotions blinded them? Had he and Kelley Chen been so stung by their sense of failure they’d offloaded the samples to Stephen too quickly and without enough analysis? If that was the case, then he was partly to blame.