Motti was quieter than usual, a new pair of glasses perched on his nose and dosed up on special painkillers prescribed by Coldhardt’s private doctor. Patch too seemed very restrained; from the way his hand kept touching his stomach, she imagined the pain was reminding him of how close he’d come to dying last night. How close they all had come. On the long haul back to Geneva, Tye had thought of little else. Even when Jonah took over at the plane controls, the events of their disastrous mission kept looping through her thoughts, staving off sleep. Jonah and Con weren’t here for the debrief either, which was also weird. They were staying with Maya in a safe house in Chamonix across the French border; the girl was being kept well away from the heart of Coldhardt’s operation until her story checked out. And as for Coldhardt himself, well … That was really the strangest part of it. It had fallen to Tye to call him last night from San Angelo – ‘you’ll be able to read just how bad he’s taking it,’ the others had insisted – and so she’d given Coldhardt the bare details of their encounter with Heidel and his party posse; explained Heidel had known the Talent were coming and even known their names … And while she hadn’t mentioned how his ring had wound up on Sadie’s finger – they were still licking their wounds, which tasted bad enough already – she figured he needed to know about the manuscript ending up in the flames.
