“Look,” she says. “Blink a few times and let your eyes adjust and you’ll see them.” He follows her instructions. “They’re tiny, so if they line up with the sun, the brightness hides them. But they follow me everywhere I go.”

If they’re drones, they’re the smallest drones Luke’s ever seen. And they’re moving together in a strange, swarmlike pattern. Almost like they’re feeding off each other. Or positioning themselves in relation to each other. They’re small enough and high enough that if he’d noticed them on his own, he would have dismissed them as specks on the surface of his eyes. Or maybe a cloud of gnats.

“Hell,” he whispers.

So the message in the sand is for them.

“Makes you wonder if all the crazy people in the world are really crazy, doesn’t it?” she asks. She lowers her arm and her eyes, squinting and blinking the glare away. “Sure you still want to help?”

She starts for the Camaro without waiting for his answer.

31

Three hundred people are waiting for Cole in the auditorium at Graydon headquarters, most of them journalists, but he’s pacing backstage, Dylan’s voice tinny through the earpiece in his ear.

“Yes,” Cole says, “I’m aware it could mean anything. That’s why I’m asking you what it means.”

“I don’t know,” Dylan answers.

“Guess.”

“Can I see it?” Dylan asks.

“It just came in, and I’m a little busy right now.”

“Where are you? It’s loud.”

“I’m running my company, thank you.”

“Right. The stomach drug no one needs.”

“You spoke with her the other day. What is she planning?”

“I told her the world was full of bad men, and she should go find some and show them what she can do.”

“And now she’s planning something and she wants us to be patient and you have no idea what that is.”

“Well, maybe if I could see the message.”

“I said I’ll send it to you. Later.”

“Or you could tap me into your feeds instead of sending me things on a delay.”

“Not a chance. Speaking of which, you’re getting a package later today. The thing that’s inside it, you’ll need to wear it at all times.”

“A tracking device seems excessive. I’m just sitting here waiting for my subject to perform. Just like you are.”

“This request didn’t come from me.”

“The Consortium. Good to know they’re back in the game.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

On the other side of the drop screen bearing a projection of Graydon’s logo, he can hear the audience growing restless. The stage manager waves at him and points to her watch. Cole holds up a finger.

“E-mail me when the package arrives.”

Before Dylan can say another word, Cole ends the call with the press of a button.

He’d thought a little clarity about Charlotte Rowe’s message in the sand might focus him before he took to the stage, but talking to Dylan has only rattled his nerves.

A minute later, when he walks out into the floodlights, greeted by robust applause, he feels his performer’s instincts kick in. Media presentations are one of those rare moments when he feels like something more than a pretender to the throne. Maybe because, unlike some other aspects of the job, he’s incredibly good at them.

But he’s halfway through his speech when he hears Dylan’s voice saying, I told her the world was full of bad men, and she should go find some and show them what she can do. His vision seems to blur. Then he sees the puzzled faces in the front row and realizes he’s fallen silent. Once he manages a deep breath and starts reading from the teleprompter again, the words he hears coming out of his mouth sound like they’re being spoken by a stranger.

32

They should have made him wait outside the trailer, Charlotte realizes now.

Then, once she and Marty took the measure of both packages and realized how completely strange the contents of the bigger one were, they could have sent Luke on his way without letting him into the next level of this.

But they didn’t, so he’s up to date on everything. And now she feels stuck with him.

He’s standing with her on Altamira’s windswept beach, the whitecaps making frenzied love to Bayard Rock just offshore. Thanks to the mountains behind them, it feels like they’re much farther away from Marty’s trailer than they actually are.

Cell phone service out here’s lousy, but apparently it’s good enough for Marty’s text message to reach Luke’s phone.

“Clear as a bell,” Luke reports.

“That’s just . . .”

“Impossible?” he asks.

She nods, but she feels like a fool for saying so. In this strange new world, how can she know what is or isn’t possible? How can she know the first thing about a pair of contact lenses capable of transmitting crystal clear images of everything she sees?

They looked innocent enough at first. But the note with them felt threatening.

WEAR THEM WHILE YOU WORK.

Also in the box, an eight-inch tablet that didn’t bear the logo of any tech company she was familiar with; when they powered it on, an entry blank appeared in the middle of a black square. The passkey came inside a felt pouch; a digital counter containing seven digits. Every thirty seconds, the last number changed; every minute, the second. The third number took a minute and a half to change, and by the time they figured that out, they were all in agreement that every number in the sequence probably changed after a specific interval of time, so if you lost the passkey, there was no accessing the website that captured the contacts’ transmission.

She has no idea how the transmission’s getting from the contacts to the website, but she doubts it’s something easily intercepted like Bluetooth or a cell connection. For all she knows, the damn things have a direct connection to a satellite. They’d been so dazzled by the tech, they’d almost forgotten about the second package, the one with the plastic bag full of Zypraxon.

“Let’s head north,” Luke suggests now.

A few minutes later they’ve climbed the perilous stone steps back to PCH and are headed up the coast in Luke’s cruiser. She’s got his cell phone in her lap so he can drive, and the texts from Marty keep coming. Little comments on everything he’s seeing through her eyes while he sits in his trailer with the tablet. At least he’s a good driver . . . You’re coming up on one of my favorite trees . . . Looked like he got pretty close to that Camry. Is he distracted? . . . Ugh. A RAV4. Hate those. They look like a toddler’s shoe with tires on it.

They’re thirty minutes up the coast now.

“Any drop?” Luke finally asks.

“Nope.”

“Damn,” Luke whispers, “so they’re definitely watching, too.”

“I think that’s the whole point.”

“I need to head back, make a pass through town before I bring you to Marty’s so Mona thinks I’m on patrol.”

There’s a question lurking in the way he said bring you back to Marty’s. Should she answer it? Is she ready to decide whether she should let him back in? Maybe there’s a better way. Make him earn it.

“So what’s your assessment?” she asks.

“Of what?”

“Of these,” she says, pointing to her eyes, and the impossible, undetectable technology they contain. “Of what they’re doing with the resort.”

Luke furrows his brow, chews his bottom lip, signs he’s considering his answer carefully because he knows this is an audition. “You said when Dylan called you the other day he didn’t seem to know what you guys did at that bar, right?”

“Correct,” she answers. “Or he didn’t mention it, at least.”

“And why wouldn’t he, if he was trying to frighten you? I mean, he had no qualms about giving you my name and telling you stuff about that field we were in.”

“So you’re saying he didn’t know about me and those two wannabe rapists.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“OK. So what do you think that means?”

“Whatever his plans for you out in the desert, he wasn’t prepared to put eyes on you right away. It took him a day to get the kind of surveillance in place that would scare the crap out of you. Scare you out of sending my brother after him anyway.”

A little dig there, she thinks, but I’ll forgive him if he keeps coming up with strong theories.

“Keep going,” she says.

“I think whoever he’s working with, he had to go to them at the last minute because his initial plan didn’t go the way he wanted it to. Or maybe he was forced to go to them sooner than he wanted to.”

“OK.”

“And that’s interesting.”

“How so?”

“Because both possibilities suggest Graydon wasn’t in on his original plan. Which might also mean they’re not all that happy about what he’s doing. Which might also mean the relationship between the two of them has . . . weaknesses.”

“All right then,” she says, trying to conceal how smart she thinks these deductions are. “Why is Graydon buying the resort?”

“They’re investing in you.”

“Or trying to show me how powerful they are.”