“You’re going to fuck with people’s heads,” Hager said, “but we won’t need to send you anywhere.”
Leaning on the balcony rail now, finishing the cigarette, Cobb thought of how the weeks after that day had played out. The early training. The understanding of what he could really do. The abilities were limited, of course—while mind reading seemed to work on everyone, the more advanced skills only worked on certain people. Then there was the technology, all of it spooky as hell. Even Hager had confided he had no idea how it worked; the company had little teams of genius engineers squirreled away in places—maybe compounds just like this one, with their own Callies and Iolas—designing the stuff. It was easy enough to see what the equipment did, though even now, more than a year into the work, the whole project was still in testing. Still in beta, as the techs said. But it was growing fast, taking on momentum, and Cobb often felt there were angles to it that he was still being kept in the dark about. Things to come.
He shivered. Just the cold air, he told himself. Nothing more to it. His nerves were fine with all this stuff. He and Hager had settled the morality angle way back when, in that first phone call.
“You want to take your time and think hard about this,” Hager had said. “Right now you’re surprised by it all, you’re rattled, and that’s only human. What I want you to do is go back upstairs and take a good look at your situation. The house. The girls. You’d have to agree we’ve been good to you. Haven’t we, Cobb?”
“Yes. Yes, sir. Everything here is amazing.” Cobb found the words coming out fast; he was tripping over them like a kid. All at once it occurred to him that he’d never thanked Hager—never thanked any of these people. Jesus, how had he overlooked that? “Sir, I just want to say how much all this means to me, and I’m sorry I haven’t—”
“Don’t worry about that, Cobb. Just listen to me. This work you’ll be doing for us, it’s going to be hard sometimes. You’re going to do things to people—bad things, that they don’t deserve. You’ll have to do it, though. It’s just going to be that way. You have to help us out, like we’ve helped you out, alright?”
“Yes, sir.”
“When it gets tough, you’re going to think about that house, and those girls, and you’re going to do whatever it takes to keep them.”
“I will, sir.”
“And you want to remember something: The bad stuff that’s coming, it’s not your fault, ’cause if you weren’t doing it, we’d just have someone else in your place. It would happen either way, so you might as well be the one to benefit. Does that make sense?”
“Perfect sense.”
“Alright, Cobb. Go on back upstairs now. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Cobb stubbed the cigarette out on the balcony rail. Down on the patio, Iola’s moans had turned into soft, ragged cries. She’d drawn her feet up out of the water, her toes gripping the pool’s edge and her knees bouncing rhythmically. She reached down and laced her fingers into Callie’s hair, then sucked in one deep breath and screamed. The sound rolled across the pool and out into the darkness over the valley. A few seconds later, her body spent like a wrung sponge, Iola sagged flat on the bricks. Callie took her hands, helped her sit up, eased her into the water, and hugged her.
Cobb dropped the cigarette at his feet. Yeah, his nerves were just fine with the work. He crossed the balcony to the steps leading down, pulling his shirt off as he went.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It was a quarter past noon when Dryden and Rachel arrived in Cold Spring, Utah. The off-ramp T-boned into the town’s main drag, a strip of chain stores and gas stations and fast-food places, all of it weathered and faded. There was high country half a mile east—a line of hills marching away south at a diagonal, their tops crowned with pine forests and scrub. Otherwise the landscape was low-rolling desert as far as Dryden could see.
He took a side street off the strip and crossed to the east edge of town and saw what he was looking for almost at once: a dirt lane running out toward the hills. Three minutes later he and Rachel were parked at an overlook halfway up the nearest incline, maybe two hundred feet above the desert floor and the town. U.S. 50 was visible for twenty miles or more, stretching away into the shimmer, back toward Nevada and California. Just as visible was the two-lane that formed Cold Spring’s central strip, leading south out of town into the wastes. Five miles off in that direction, vast and stark and nearly blinding white, lay Elias Dry Lake. Dryden squinted but couldn’t make out the tower at its center.
He leaned into the car and took a pen from the console tray.
“Give me your hand,” he said.
Rachel held it out, and Dryden wrote a phone number on the back. Above it he wrote the name Cole Harris.
“Who’s that?” Rachel asked.