bought the ticket, he sees it’s a nice-enough-size crowd inside the screening room. Better yet, it’s mostly female, and not too many in groups.
It’s a stadium-style theater, with a few rows of seats at floor level and a raked seating area behind. He’s second row, close to the center. Not as close as he’d like to be, but that’s a casualty of paying cash and not being able to reserve the seat in advance with a credit card.
He tries not to eavesdrop on the chatter all around him. He doesn’t want his judgment of anything he overhears to bias his selection.
By now he’s familiar with the chain of trailers that precede the film—a superhero saves the world from blowing up, long-dead kings and queens in some foreign country have stupid fights in expensive costumes, something with aliens but he’s not really sure because it’s really just a teaser, but in that one it looks like the world actually does blow up.
So many damn people in Hollywood want to blow up the world.
Frustrated souls they are. They need a way to channel and focus all that rage so they can survive in the world without twisting it to their own ways. The world has enough dark corridors for men like him to slip into and feed their impulses before returning to daylit roadways, focused and purged. You just need someone like Mother to show you the way.
Once the lights inside the theater go completely dark and the studio’s familiar logo fills the screen, Cyrus takes out his phone, turns up the brightness all the way, and begins swiping through a random assortment of web pages on his phone. Right away he feels the ripple of tension go through the women on all sides of him, and it sets off a warm churning in his gut. They shift in their seats; a few of them mutter curses under their breath.
He’s willing to bet all of them are debating whether to say something to him about his rudeness.
And that’s good.
Because the one who does won’t have much longer to live.
2
Lebanon, Kansas
Lightning strikes so close to the end of the airstrip, Cole Graydon’s security director makes a sound like he’s been kneed in the gut.
The blinking wing lights of the Gulfstream they watched descend out of the stormy sky have vanished, Cole’s sure of it. Heart hammering, he waits for a plume of orange on the horizon, proof that he was wrong to ignore his security director’s earlier warnings.
Look, I know Noah Turlington could use several pieces of humble pie, but think twice before you send him hurtling headfirst through a tornado.
Cole had pretended to indulge Scott Durham’s concerns by leaving the decision whether to land in the hands of the Gulfstream’s pilot. But secretly he’d been savoring the image of Noah—beautiful, strong, brilliant, ice-water-in-his-veins Noah, the man who’s caused him so much grief for so many years—gripping armrests while trying not to hurl.
There’ve been several breaks in the rain since Cole and Scott stepped from the Suburban and took shelter under the overhang next to the airstrip. The wind, however, hasn’t let up once. Every now and then it drives residual droplets from the overhang’s roof into their faces with stinging force.
Cole spots the plane again, wings canted, fighting crosswinds.
It’s too close to the ground now to recover if wind shear drives it into the earth like an angry god’s fist. That’s when he realizes how right Scott is—Noah is incredibly valuable, maybe as valuable an investment as Charlotte Rowe, the test subject his more iron-hearted business partners still call Bluebird. Project Bluebird is the name for their collective effort to harness the powers Noah’s drug unleashes in Charlotte’s blood. Still, he’s worried his business partners have come to view her as more of a lab rat than a person. Noah’s drug might be Cole’s passport to changing the world, but changing the world becomes more of a challenge in those moments when it seems like he might have to tear Charlotte’s life apart to do it. Maybe it’s time he extended the same courtesy to Noah, despite their tortured history.
Cole reminds himself that all of Noah’s work at the island this past year has been logged, monitored, and backed up and backed up again. His days of conducting rogue scientific experiments on unsuspecting private citizens like Charlotte Rowe are long over. So if the plane does go down, it won’t be a total loss.