Blood Victory: A Burning Girl Thriller (The Burning Girl) Read online

  “Pity. I enjoyed that part.”

  “Did you, though?”

  “Absolutely. If only you could have been there.” Noah’s acidic smile suggests he knows full well Cole played some hand in his flight’s terrifying final minutes.

  “I was,” Cole answers, “in spirit.”

  “I always knew you had more than you let on.”

  “More what?”

  “Spirit.”

  “That’s very kind of you. Let’s go to the house.”

  “There’s a house?” Noah asks, looking in both directions.

  Cole smiles and starts for the car. When Scott touches his shoulder, he turns.

  Noah hasn’t moved an inch. The security team has encircled him. Another moment of this and they’ll be reaching for their weapons.

  Noah’s expression is blank now, no charming smile, no twinkle in his eye.

  “What is it, Noah?” Cole asks.

  “I’d like to know if she’s OK.”

  “Charley?”

  Noah nods.

  Cole’s startled not just by the question but by the gentle, unaffected tone with which Noah asked it. Once, Noah endangered Charlotte’s life by making her an unwitting test subject in an experiment that could have killed her. The result was quite the opposite, and now Cole’s company is working to reap the rewards. But Noah’s actions then seemed to show a callous disregard for Charley’s well-being.

  And now he’s worried about her? Maybe that makes sense. Whether they like it or not, Noah and Charley are bound by more than just the consequences of Noah’s dangerous experiment; years ago, when they were both too young to remember, their mothers were both brutalized and murdered by the same serial killers, a married couple named Daniel and Abigail Banning. So maybe his concern is natural, if it’s genuine. And Cole’s hoping it is.

  “Of course she’s OK,” Cole says. “She’s operational.”

  “And the operation’s in Kansas?”

  “Not quite, no.”

  “Then what am I doing here?”

  “I said I would explain at the—”

  “I heard you, but first, I have to be driven through the middle of nowhere while I’m hemmed in on all sides by your men with guns. The last time this happened I ended up in an underground cell for a few weeks. Perhaps just a bit more explanation before we—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, you don’t really think I flew you halfway across the world to shoot you and bury you in some mud, do you?”

  “I didn’t say that, but stranger things have happened in our line of work.”

  “And you caused most of them.”

  “And you paid for them.”

  “If I wanted you dead, I could have just crashed your plane.”

  “You almost did.”

  “Come now, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” Noah says to the security team surrounding him, all of whom turn to stone in response. “I mean, I’m not going to say I didn’t enjoy myself, but plenty of enjoyable things in the world make you feel like you’re about to die.”

  “Speak for yourself, special ops.”

  “I am, if the faces of these gentlemen are any indication.”

  “Get in the car, Dylan,” Cole says, then does everything he can to conceal his frustration at having accidentally used Noah’s old name. The name he used to call him in bed, before he knew his real one. Maybe, Cole thinks, he’ll take my use of his chosen name, the name he still wants to be called, as a sign I’m not about to have him executed.

  “Kansas,” Noah mutters, surveying his vast, empty surroundings. “Huh. Will there be more of it when the sun rises?”

  He’s right—it’s too dark to see the farmhouse on the horizon, and they haven’t planted any of the fields. But the airstrip underfoot is new, installed only months before. Surely Noah won’t be willing to believe they bought a farm in the middle of nowhere and installed an airstrip just for the purpose of flying him here and killing him.

  But there’s something else going on with his most important scientist, and it takes Cole a moment to puzzle through it.

  Noah actually has a life he loves now, and he doesn’t want to be pulled away from it for even a second. His residence on the island is plush, luxurious even. Of course, he lives as a prisoner, his movements constantly monitored, no contact with the outside world—other than Cole—allowed. But remarkably, after a year, he hasn’t asked for any. There’s nobody from his former life—lives plural, if you want to be technical about it—he wants to speak with. For Noah, the past year has been all work and no play, and he couldn’t be happier about it. And so the prospect of spending even a short amount of time in a temporary holding cell has him exhibiting signs of an emotion he almost never displays—fear. The charm with which Noah stepped off the plane was his cover for an emotion so out of character Cole had trouble recognizing it at first.

  “Did you have a bad experience in Kansas at some point?” Cole asks.

  “No,” he says, “but you, good sir, have no experience here, and that’s what concerns me.”

  “How so?”

  “For God’s sake, Cole, you own your own helicopter, and you’ve never stayed in a hotel room that doesn’t look like either Versailles or an Apple Store. Your idea of roughing it is a house where you can hear the laundry room. And now you’re on a farm. In Kansas! And so am I, apparently. The whole thing’s very out of the ordinary, even for extraordinary men like us.”

  “Well, it’s what she wants,” Cole answers.

  “Charley?”

  Cole nods.

  “Does she want me here, too?” Noah asks.

  “No. But I do.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “I’ll explain once we’re inside.”

  This time when Cole starts for the Suburban, he’s determined not to stop, even if the men behind him all begin shooting at each other.

  Cole thought seeing the inside of the farmhouse might calm Noah down a bit. But given his ramrod-straight posture as they pass through its rooms, decorated in what can only be described as bland western chic, that’s not going to be the case. Maybe the absence of personal effects unnerves him. Aboveground, the place looks ready to list on Airbnb.

  Still, does Noah really think Cole would have someone blow his head off where his brains might land on a brand-new leather sofa or a vintage hand-drawn map of the Great Plains in a thick gold frame?

  The trip down the cellar steps doesn’t help, either. That’s no surprise. The year before, Cole had Noah thrown in an underground cell for several weeks as punishment for making unauthorized contact with Charlotte.

  When they move through the false basement, Noah sucks in a deep breath that sounds more weary than frightened. Just then, the security team lifts a stand-alone shelving unit away from the walls, revealing the vague outline of a hidden door. The cover over the fingerprint reader is camouflaged with the surrounding stone. When the door unlocks with a hiss under Cole’s touch, they’re all suddenly bathed in a glow Cole finds comforting. Maybe Noah will, too.

  As 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.”

  “Things have changed.”

  “How?”

  “Let’s go upstairs, get you that shower you asked for. You smell . . . not up to your usual standards.”

  Like cedar and baking bread and a hint of pine . . . and oh my God, shut up, you teenager.

  With a cocky grin, Noah steps forward into the inch or two of space Cole had just created with one hand. “It’s not that bad, is it?”

  “She’s getting up!” one of the techs barks.

  Noah turns back to the screens. Cole brushes past him and takes up a post right behind Shannon Tran. In the past, Shannon’s job was coordinating with the extensive ground teams and microdrone surveillance crews that followed Charley during an op. But those have been taken out of the mix now, leaving Shannon focused on Charley’s every move.

  The command center was quiet to begin with; now you can hear a pin drop.

  “Bring up her audio,” Cole says.

  The raucous sounds of a barroom scene from Sister Trip thunder through the control room. They’ve all watched most of the movie right along with Charlotte three times now, each time in a different theater located in a different part of Dallas. If memory serves, the sisters are hatching a plot to fend off the unwanted advances of a drunk cowboy. When they’re done, the entire bar will be caught up in a massive line dance that allows all three of the film’s plucky heroines to escape out the bar’s back door.

  “Could you cut that out?” Charlotte says.

  Her voice is loud enough to be heard over the movie. She’s standing in the aisle closest to a man in a baseball cap and a leather jacket who’s just looked up at her from his iPhone’s glowing screen. The other moviegoers looking in her direction must assume she’s staring the guy down out of anger. The truth is, she’s trying to give everyone in the control room a good long look at him.

  Silently and swiftly, Shannon takes a screen cap of the guy’s face and drags it onto an adjacent screen where she’s already called up Cyrus Mattingly’s driver’s license photo. Their face ID software goes to work on the fuzzy, shadowed image from the movie theater.

  “You’re bothering everyone in the movie, all right?”

  The women sitting on all sides of Mattingly mutter their agreement. Two of them clap weakly.

  Finally, Mattingly puts his phone to sleep and slides it into his jacket pocket. Then he puts his hands up in a gesture of surrender, all without taking his eyes off Charlotte. If Charlotte and Cole’s theory holds true, he’s actually studying every detail he can discern in the darkness of the theater; that way he’ll be able to catch up with her as soon as she leaves.

  “Thank you!” Charlotte says to him with nothing that sounds like gratitude. She heads back to her seat, her TruGlass capturing glimpses of grateful-looking women who smile and silently applaud her as she goes.

  “Well,” Noah finally says, “I’m honored to be part of a multistate operation devoted to improving the moviegoing experience in the Dallas metroplex. Truly.”

  Ignoring him, Cole asks Shannon how much of the film they have left. “About an hour,” she says.

  He jabs Noah in the side and gestures for him to follow. “Upstairs,” Cole says. “Time for that shower.”

  3

  Dallas, Texas

  Hailey Brinkmann is from California, which is why she doesn’t have a Texas accent.

  Hailey Brinkmann never attended college, and that’s good because it means Charlotte didn’t have to familiarize herself with some random campus and unfamiliar town before she turned herself into Hailey.

  Hailey Brinkmann recently dyed her hair corn-silk blonde because she felt like that’s how girls in Texas wear their hair. (Charlotte’s black bob, with its single streak of platinum, was about as Texas as a surf shop for vegans, Luke told her.)

  Hailey Brinkmann is assertive. She moved cross-country with no clear prospects and no friends in the Dallas area. So, it makes sense that she’s also outspoken and determined and really freakin’ hates it when people text all through the movie.

  She is, in essence, exactly the type of woman who will capture the attention of a man like Cyrus Mattingly—provided he continues with the routine he’s followed for three nights now.

  As Charlotte takes her seat in the fourth row of the theater, she reminds herself of how thoroughly convincing her alter ego’s fake ID is. She also reminds herself that
the likelihood of her having to share the details of her cover story with anyone else just turned remote. Especially now that she’s managed to capture Mattingly’s attention.

  In the three weeks she’s been pretending to move into the tiny little rental house in Richardson, she’s only had to share her story once, thanks to an accidental run-in with the next-door neighbor. The poor chain-smoking woman spends most of her time caring for her wheelchair-bound husband and their two service dogs, and as Charlotte shared Hailey’s story with her, she seemed both too exhausted and too worried about accidentally blowing smoke in Hailey’s face to absorb a single detail.

  The props that come along with being Hailey Brinkmann serve one real purpose. They’re for Cyrus Mattingly to root through after he abducts her.

  As for her little rental house, the name on the lease belongs to a company hiding a company hiding a company. Besides, she doubts Mattingly’s the type of guy who’d be willing or able to check.

  He’s not a hacker. He’s a truck driver. And if what they’ve observed of him over the past few nights can be believed, he’s got a particular weakness for women who speak their minds.

  Two nights before, at another showing of Sister Trip, this one at the Cinemark 17 in Farmers Branch, she watched Mattingly rise from his seat just a few seconds after the woman who’d earlier called him out over his texting walked past him. Instead of hopping into the little Kia Soul in which she drove to the theater, Charlotte stepped into Luke’s souped-up Cadillac Escalade, courtesy of Graydon Pharmaceuticals, and they followed Mattingly as he followed his target to a sprawling apartment complex about a fifteen-minute drive from the theater.

  They watched as Mattingly’s target pulled into a subterranean parking garage, an automated gate rolling shut behind her while Mattingly watched her from behind the wheel of his Econoline van, which he’d parked at the nearest open curb. If Mattingly made a play for the woman, they’d initiate their thwart plan—Luke would find a way to intercept Mattingly before he got to the woman’s door, posing as either a concerned citizen or an affable moron who’d made a wrong turn down a dark hallway.