“I need you to get inside her head,” Cole answers.

“I haven’t spoken to Charley in six months.”

“Forgive me. I need you to get me inside her head. If I can’t control her movements on the ground, I have to control her mind while she’s out there. Nobody knows her mind better than you. You deceived her for months back in Arizona. She trusted you, let her guard down.”

“Much of that assessment is correct.”

“Good,” Cole says. “Then you’re my leash. She made a bad judgment call on the last op. Your job is to tell me if you think she’s about to make one again and to tell me how to appeal to her sensitivities if I need to rein her in without the help of a ground team trailing her every move. You can read her better than anyone else can, so tonight I need you reading her constantly and closely.”

“Have you consulted your business partners on any of this?” Noah asks.

The question’s innocuous enough, but Cole knows from the tension undergirding his jaw that his anger’s evident in his expression.

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know, a lot of this feels . . .”

“Feels like what?” Cole asks.

“Like you’re bending over backwards not to hurt Charlotte’s feelings when you should be considering the larger implications here.”

“Well, the only feeling of Charlotte’s you’ve ever cared about is fear.”

“That’s a little glib, don’t you think?”

“I think you’re lecturing me on aspects of this operation that aren’t exactly your purview.”

“It wasn’t a lecture. It was a comment. You need sleep.”

“I’m sleeping just fine. What exactly do you mean by larger implications?”

Noah looks stricken, as if he’s not quite sure how he’s angered Cole, and the possible punishment for doing so has him concerned. It could be an act. He’s good at acts.

“The first time Charley took down a killer, she was alone and we were just watching. The second time, you were the only one working with her. Now, you’ve got three business partners, and they’ll want you to consult them. Not just give them orders. Like you’re giving me.”

“Apparently you have relationships with Stephen, Philip, and Julia I’m not aware of.”

“I don’t, Cole. I’m just assuming their egos are as big as yours. Don’t step on their feet and bring the house down all around us. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I will take your concern for their feet under advisement.”

The truth is, Cole’s business partners are already acting like he’s stepped on their feet when he’s done his best to tiptoe around them, and he’d like to know why. It’s why he flew Noah halfway around the world. Sure, he’ll appreciate whatever insights into Charlotte’s behavior Noah might offer. But the real reason, the one Noah’s comment just poked in the center of its gut, is much bigger and harder to wrestle with: Cole’s worried his business partners have turned against the idea of Charlotte’s field tests altogether and want to stick her in a lab for as long as her blood’s of use to them. In the event they take measures to obstruct tonight’s operation, Cole needs to know firsthand where Noah’s loyalties lie.

Noah’s raising the prospect of Cole mishandling his business partners is not a good sign his loyalties lie with Cole.

Right now, his urge is to interrogate Noah, ask him if he’s had any contact with the members of what they long ago nicknamed The Consortium. But it’s a ridiculous question. The man’s under such constant surveillance it would be impossible for him to make contact with anyone while he’s in residence at the lab. More importantly, Cole doesn’t want to shine too big a spotlight on his suspicions. Because the fact of the matter is, Charlotte’s not the only one participating in a field test tonight. So is Noah, even if he doesn’t know it. The difference is that Noah’s being tested for loyalty, not the ability to tear holes in walls with his bare hands.

“You’re not telling her I’m here, I take it,” Noah says, referring to Charley.

“No.”

“And if she finds out?”

“I’ll deal with it. Unless she finds out from you, in which case you’ll be on the first plane home.”

“That’s fair, I guess.”

“Fair?” Cole asks. “This isn’t a proposal, Noah.”

Smirking, Noah rises to his feet and begins unzipping the suitcase resting on the bed behind them. Or maybe he’s not smirking.

“Fine, then,” he says, pulling out his toiletry bag and unzipping it—probably to make sure the security team didn’t remove anything from it. “I accept.” He zips the bag and tucks it under one arm, turning to Cole with a confident grin.

There’s no point in arguing with Noah about the fact he’s accepting a set of directions as if they were an offer, so Cole ignores the bait, confident what he has to say next will get the necessary meaning across.

“You’ll come downstairs when I need you and only then. Don’t engage with any of the other personnel. Speak only when I speak to you, and speak only to me. Got it?”

“Sure,” Noah says. “On one condition.”

“There are no conditions, Noah. This isn’t a—”

“Shower with me.”

He knows what Noah’s doing; he’s trying to defuse the anger that swelled in Cole when he mentioned Cole’s business partners. Another bad sign. If they were only going to be forced together for another hour or two, Cole would ignore this request as a childish head game. But there’s no telling how long this operation is going to last. If he doesn’t put Noah in check now, who knows how many inane distractions he’ll have to put up with.

Once they’re nose to nose, Cole grabs Noah’s crotch with just enough force to make the man wince. “Careful,” he says, “it’s been a while. Tastes change. You might be the one who ends up tied to the bed this time.”

Confident there’s nothing Noah Turlington would like less than losing control, Cole turns and leaves the room.

Scott Durham’s waiting for him right outside, standing so close to the door they end up crashing into each other.

“Get me Bailey,” he says.

The rain’s let up some, but it still comes in infrequent gusts, and every few minutes there’s thunder and a flash of lightning on the horizon. Cole walks alone to the airplane hangar under the shelter of an umbrella. The path is sprinkled with the same type of foot-level landscape lighting that lines the front walk of his primary residence in California.

He passes the old windmill, its blades spinning loudly as they slice the cloud-filled sky. It’s pastoral, pretty even, but still, he can’t make sense of his affection for the thing. Scott was startled when Cole asked them to leave it up during construction, muttered some joke about The Wizard of Oz. Cole’s never seen the film, so he deflected Scott’s suspicions with a line about his gay card being revoked.

But his response was ridiculous, really.

As if Cole’s a member of any tribe—gay, straight, or otherwise. He doesn’t walk among the normal, the living. Not since his college days at Stanford, and even then, he was considered part of the intermediary elite; not a big enough deal to rub elbows with the children of royalty, but too suspiciously rich to hang with the children of doctors and lawyers. It was the science nerds who ended up taking him in. Maybe because they thought he’d give them jobs someday. Which in some cases he did. But he can’t remember the last time he watched anything on television other than cable news, and most of the pop culture references he knows come from the Instagram accounts of the gay porn stars he hires to have sex with him at his glass and steel mansion above La Jolla Bay. On some days, he’s not sure if these are the privileges of being a member of the .01% or the costs.