Blood Echo (Burning Girl #2)(6)

It’s not the first time one of Davies’s road trips has sent them scrambling to add resources. It’s the third.

Cole’s hoping for a different outcome this time. Whether he’s sipping Balvenie in his home office or pacing the back of this chilly windowless room, he’s not interested in spending another few days watching Davies sell vegetables at the Pike Place Market while making as little conversation with his customers as possible.

But the visit to the leather store is new.

It’s the escalation they’ve been waiting for.

It’s the escalation I’ve been waiting for, anyway, Cole thinks. Ed wants to shut this whole thing down.

The surveillance center sits in the basement of one of Graydon’s never-used satellite office buildings. His father only bought it to give prying eyes the illusion that Graydon hadn’t moved all of its laboratory research offshore. Even if his dad were still around, it probably would have stayed as empty as it is now. Their neighbors are cold storage facilities and small office parks for companies that prefer the relative anonymity of Otay Mesa, an arid stretch of San Diego right next to the Mexican border.

Save for the yards of steel fencing and a guardhouse at the parking lot’s one entry point—a guardhouse that wasn’t manned up until a few months ago—the exterior of the building is nondescript. From the air, the place looks like a U made of bone. The outer walls are mostly long, uninterrupted stretches of heavily tinted windows and bands of concrete painted so white they’re blinding on a sunny day. Which in this part of the country is pretty much every day. Nothing about the exterior gives a hint of the labyrinth of never-occupied laboratory spaces and office suites constructed inside.

It’s in this hyper-air-conditioned, lightless bunker, with its thick layer of carpet underfoot and its walls reinforced to withstand both electronic surveillance and a bomb blast, that Cole feels less like a spoiled, privileged fraud and more like a daring innovator pursuing a grand vision that would have made his father proud.

He turns his attention to four of the newly installed LCD screens now showing live feeds.

The leftmost screen, which is slightly larger than the others and hung vertically, displays Richard Davies’s pickup truck as a green dot moving through a black grid of streets that represents Seattle.

To the right of it, two screens broadcast alternating aerial feeds of Davies’s truck captured by the small cloud of microdrones trailing him from an altitude of about three hundred feet. The expensive little buggers will monitor Davies’s every move, but only when there’s enough open sky for them to make quick course changes without smacking into a building and convincing the people inside that Earth’s been invaded by alien nanobots. The weather forecast must have improved; there’s no operating them in high winds or a consistent downpour.

Right now, the microdrone cloud’s offering up four different angles from around the same fixed point: the front of the truck, the back, the passenger side, and the driver’s side. They alternate with a rhythm that’s just a beat or two shy of headache inducing.

Another screen shows the feed from a shoulder-mounted cam on a conventional tail—if a guy who’s been trained to kill in a dozen different ways can be considered conventional. Because the camera’s got massive zoom capabilities, there’s no telling the actual distance between the tail’s vehicle and Davies’s truck.

Cole could ask; the tail’s in constant radio contact with one of the techs seated before the row of screens. Or he’s supposed to be.

He knows what it’s like to put one of these things together on the fly, and he’s not going through that hell again.

Cole studies what he can see of the neighborhood Davies is driving through.

“He’s scoping?” Cole asks.

“Too early. The streetwalkers don’t come out until after dark.” The tech who answered him is Asian and tomboyish, with a neat pageboy cut and a heavy sweater to protect her from the blasting AC. Her lower lip tenses. Does she regret speaking up without being called on? Cole’s grateful for it; she made it clear, without meaning to, that Ed has brought everyone in the room up to speed on their target.

Good. So Ed’s only being an obstinate jerk when I walk into the room.

“Scouting locations, then,” Cole says.

“Possibly,” Ed answers. “If the file is reliable, he’s taken girls from this area before. Not sure why he needs to get the lay of the land again.”

Ed’s use of the word file sounds acidic, probably because the file came from an intelligence source he didn’t vet and select. An intelligence source Cole hasn’t yet shared with him, or anyone.

“It’s been six months,” Cole says. “Things could change. Buildings get torn down.”

“Yeah. Real estate’s booming round these parts.”

“Newly abandoned buildings, then. Burned-out lots. They’re all good abduction sites.”

“Sure,” Ed says as if he isn’t and doesn’t care if he is or not.

“It’s another escalation, for sure.”

Nobody answers him.

Maybe if he’d phrased it as a question . . .

Ed’s desire to keep Cole inside a plastic bubble, completely removed from the workings of Project Bluebird 2.0, is possibly protective loyalty. But it’s completely unworkable in the long run, and it worsens Cole’s concern that Ed might deliberately throw the project off track while Cole’s not looking.