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.”
“What’s he doing there?”
“Whatever I tell him to.”
“In Dallas,” Noah says.
“Yes.”
“And we’re in Kansas.”
“You’re really flashing that PhD, aren’t you?”
Noah’s suddenly so close to him, Cole can feel the man’s breath on his lips. A few of the techs turn, startled.
“Your evasions justify my interrogation.” It’s not a growl, but it’s close.
Cole gently raises a hand to push Noah back on his heels. “Easy, tiger. This is my show.”
And we’re not at a hotel suite at the Montage in Laguna Beach, and I haven’t had a glass of merlot.
“Didn’t you promise her you’d never include me in an op? You know, given my terrible, horrible, no good very bad betrayal which, oh, by the way, turned her into a superhero.”