Runner

CHAPTER ONE

Just after three in the morning, Sam Dryden surrendered the night to insomnia and went running on the boardwalk. Cool humidity clung to him and filtered the lights of El Sedero to his left, the town sliding past like a tanker in the fog. To his right was the Pacific, black and silent as the edge of the world tonight. His footfalls on the old wood came back to him from every part of the darkness.

It was just as well not to sleep. Sleep brought dreams of happier times, worse than nightmares in their own way.

Mercury lights over the boardwalk shone down into the mist. They snaked away in a chain to the south, the farthest all but lost in the gloom where the boardwalk terminated at the channel. Dryden passed the occasional campfire on the beach and caught fragments of conversations amplified in the fog. Soft voices, laughter, huddled silhouettes haloed by firelight. Shutter glimpses of what life could be. Dryden felt like an intruder, seeing them. Like a ghost passing them in the dark.

These nighttime runs were a new thing, though he’d lived in El Sedero for years. He’d started taking them a few weeks before, at all hours of the night. They came on like fits — compulsions he wasn’t sure he could fight. He hadn’t tried to, so far. He found the exertion and the cold air refreshing, if not quite enjoyable. No doubt the exercise was good for him, too, though outwardly he didn’t seem to need it. He was lean for his six-foot frame and looked at least no older than his thirty-six years. Maybe the jogs were just his mind’s attempt to kick-start him from inertia.

Inertia. That was what a friend had called it, months ago. One of the few who still came around. Five years back, right after everything had happened, there had been lots of friends. They’d been supportive when they were supposed to be, and later they’d been insistent — they’d pushed him the way people did when they cared. Pushed him to start his life again. He’d said he appreciated it, said they were right — of course you had to move on after a while. He’d agreed and nodded, and watched the way their eyes got sad when they understood he was only saying those things to make them stop talking. He hadn’t tried to explain his side of it. Hadn’t told them that missing someone could feel like a watch you’d been assigned to stand. That it could feel like duty.

He passed the last of the fires. Here the beach beneath the walk became rocky and damp, the moisture catching the glow from each lamppost. The shore lay vacant for the next several hundred yards. A minute later, in the middle of the dead stretch, Dryden came to an intersection in the boardwalk; a second branch led away inland.

He slowed and stopped. He almost always did, at this spot. He wasn’t sure what drew him to it — maybe just the emptiness of it. The junction lay in the darkness between lights, and there was never anyone around. Nights like this, with no moon and no surf, this place was the equivalent of a sensory deprivation chamber.

He leaned on the wooden rail with his elbows, facing the sea. As his breathing slowed, faint sounds finally came to him. The hiss of tires on the freeway, a mile inland beyond the dunes. Tiny animals moving in the beach grass behind the walk. Dryden had been standing there for over a minute when he heard another sound: running footsteps on the boardwalk’s planking.

For a moment he thought it was another jogger. Then he knew otherwise — the cadence was too fast. This was someone sprinting full-out. In the saturated air, the sound’s origin was hard to trace. He looked left and then right along the shoreline stretch of the walk, but against the light glow he saw nobody coming. He was just stepping back from the rail, turning to look down the inland route, when the sprinting figure crashed into him from that direction.

He heard a gasp — the voice of a young girl. Instantly she was fighting, pushing back from him in a panic, already turning to bolt away along the shoreline course.

“Hey,” Dryden said. “Are you alright?”

She stopped and faced him. Even in the faint light, Dryden could see that she was terrified of something. She regarded him with nothing but caution and kept herself balanced to sprint again, though she seemed too out of breath to go much farther. She wore jeans and a T-shirt but no shoes or socks. Her hair — dark brown, hanging below her shoulders — was clean but uncombed. The girl could not have been more than twelve. For the briefest moment her eyes intensified; Dryden could see the calculation going on behind them.

Just like that, her defensive posture changed. She remained afraid, but not of him. She turned her gaze inland instead, back the way she’d come from, and scrutinized the darkness there. Dryden looked, too, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. The inland run of the boardwalk led to the harbor road, across which lay the dune ridge, shrouded in the thick night. All appeared calm and quiet.

“You live near here?” the girl asked.

“Who’s after you?”

She turned to him again and moved closer.

“I need somewhere to hide,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything, but please get me out of here first.”

“I’ll take you to the police station, kid, but I can’t—”

“Not the police,” she said, so abruptly that Dryden felt an impulse to turn and continue his jog. Whatever the girl was in trouble for, getting caught up in it was not going to improve his night.

Seeing his change of expression, she stepped forward fast and grabbed his hand, her eyes pleading. “I’m not running from the police. It’s not like that.”

Her gaze snapped to the side again, in the same moment that Dryden sensed movement in his peripheral vision. He followed her stare, and for a moment couldn’t make sense of what he saw. Somehow he could discern the shapes of the dunes now, invisible in the gloom only moments earlier. They were rimmed with a faint, shifting light. The girl’s breathing trembled.

“Yes or no,” she said. “I can’t wait any longer.”

Dryden knew the sound of real terror in a person’s voice. This girl wasn’t afraid of getting busted for some misdemeanor; she was afraid for her life.

The light around the dunes sharpened, and Dryden suddenly understood what he was seeing: People with flashlights were about to crest the ridge from the far side. The urge to distance himself from the girl was gone, replaced by a sense that something was very wrong here, and that she wasn’t lying.

“Come on,” Dryden said.

Still holding her hand, he ran north along the boardwalk, back in the direction of his house. He had to slow his pace only slightly for her. As they ran, Dryden kept looking to the dunes. He and the girl had gone no more than fifty yards when the first sharp spike of light topped the ridge. Within seconds, three more appeared. He was surprised by how close they were; the night had been playing tricks on his sense of distance.

Directly ahead along the boardwalk, one of the overhead mercury lights was coming up fast. Dryden stopped, the girl almost pulling his arm off as she stopped with him.

“What are you doing?” she asked. She watched the pursuers as tensely as Dryden did.

He nodded to the cone of light on the boardwalk. “They’ll see us if we run through the light.”

“We can’t stay here,” the girl said.

The men with flashlights — six of them now — were descending the face of the dune ridge at sprint speed.

Dryden looked over the rail on the ocean side of the boardwalk. The beach was only a few feet below. He gestured to it, and the girl understood. She slipped under the waist-high rail, and he followed, his feet touching down on the loose stones piled beneath the walk. Beyond the stones, the beach extended a hundred feet to the waterline, rocky but still mostly sand. Dryden knelt and touched the surface; it was smooth and flat, saturated by the mist, and bore not a footprint as far as he could see in the near-dark. If he and the girl made any move on the beach, the pursuers would easily spot their prints and follow.

He turned his attention to the space beneath the walk. It wasn’t promising. The piled stones were volleyball sized; picking their way over them would be slow going, especially in the deep shadows there. Worse, support beams crisscrossed the space every few feet. They’d make little progress before the men arrived, and certainly at least one of the six would drop to the beach to put some light under the boardwalk. As a hiding place, it was a dead giveaway.

Dryden looked up over the planking and saw the men reach the base of the dune. It was all happening too quickly. In the still night he heard their running footsteps on the asphalt of the harbor road, and then on the wood of the inland boardwalk stretch. In less than thirty seconds, they would reach the rail above this very spot.

Dryden looked at the cross bracing under the walk and saw the only solution available. He guided the girl underneath. She was shaking but seemed relieved to be getting out of sight. Below the surface planks, heavy beams ran lengthwise along the walkway. These were in turn supported by far thicker beams, running sideways like the planking. Above these lower beams were gaps, not big enough for a person to fit into, but big enough for a pair of feet or hands.

“Hold on to me,” Dryden said, and pulled the girl against his chest. She complied without hesitating; the footsteps of the approaching men began to shake the boardwalk.

With the girl hugging tight against him, Dryden reached up and grabbed one of the lower beams with his fingertips — it was far too big to get his hands around — and then swung his feet up and hooked them into the gap above the next beam, five feet away. He made a hammock of himself, with the girl atop him, and pulled himself as tightly against the underside of the boardwalk as he could. It was like doing a push-up in reverse.

It was immediately clear he could not hold this position for long. Everything about it was wrong. His fingertips had no traction on the giant beam, requiring him to apply pressure to hang on. The muscles in his forearms were burning within seconds. At the same time, keeping his body straight involved contracting half of his muscles in ways they weren’t meant to be used.

The girl seemed to understand, perhaps feeling his muscle tremors. As the footsteps thundered toward them, she put her mouth to his ear and whispered, “They have guns. They’ll kill us.”

A moment later, the gaps in the boardwalk above filled with flashlight glare. The men had reached the shoreline stretch of the walk and had begun to fan out along it.

One of them spoke, his voice ringing clear and strong. It sounded like a voice accustomed to giving orders.

“Search the beach. Search beneath the causeway.”

Boots scuffed the wood, then landed hard on the rocks nearby. The glow of the flashlights filled Dryden’s peripheral vision, though for the moment the beams remained pointed toward the sea. The girl hugged him tighter; he thought he could feel her shutting her eyes as she buried her face in his shoulder. The pain in his muscles was beyond burning now, but pain wasn’t the problem. There were ways to disregard agony — Dryden had learned them long ago — but at some point his muscles would simply fail. Willpower couldn’t beat physics forever.

He managed to swivel his head a few degrees toward the beach. The flashlight beams finished sweeping the sand, and then one by one they turned to scour the space beneath the boardwalk. Dryden looked upward again, to prevent his eyes from shining. Staring at the planking above his face, he saw the diffused glow as beams passed directly beneath him. If even one of the searchers was clever or suspicious enough to raise his light by two feet, it would all be over. Dryden waited for the blinding glare that would signal that very thing.

It never came.

The vague wash of light subsided. Darkness. Dryden counted to ten and risked another glance at the beach. The searchers had moved on to the north, inspecting the boardwalk as they went. It was time to swing down and try for a quiet getaway, whatever the risk. Every moment he delayed increased the chance that he’d simply fall, which would be anything but quiet. He was starting to slide his feet out of the gap when a sound stopped him.

Footsteps. Heavy and slow, on the boardwalk above. They approached from the south, the direction the searchers had come from. Dryden remained frozen. The man on the boardwalk stopped directly above him; traces of sand fell in Dryden’s face.

“Clay,” the man called out. It was the leader. The guy with the voice. He’d remained on the boardwalk while the others searched.

One of the men on the beach, Clay apparently, turned and approached, his flashlight playing haphazardly over the ground. He stopped at the edge of the boardwalk, looking up at the leader. Had he lowered his gaze and looked straight ahead, he would have locked eyes with Dryden, no more than eighteen inches away. Dryden dared not even turn his head upward again; the slightest movement could give him up. He hoped the shuddering of his muscles didn’t show as intensely as it felt.

Of Clay’s features, Dryden could see almost nothing. The man was barely a silhouette against the black ocean and sky. Only the backscatter glow from the flashlight beam offered any detail: medium-length hair, dark clothing, a weapon hanging at his side by a shoulder strap. A submachine gun — something like an MP-5 with a heavy sound suppressor.

Above, on the boardwalk, the leader said, “This is out of hand already. Go back to the van, set up coverage of police channels in a twenty-mile radius. Call Chernin, get him working on personal cell phones of officers and whatever federal agents are based in the area. Gold-pan the audio for keywords like girl and lost. Try psych ward while you’re at it.”

“You think if she talks to anybody,” Clay said, “they’ll think she walked out of a mental hospital?”

Dryden suddenly felt his fingertips slipping from their hold on the fog-dampened wood. No amount of exertion could stop it; he was going to lose his grip in a matter of seconds.

“Solid chance of it,” the leader said.

Dryden’s fingertips held by a quarter inch. He felt that margin shrink by half in the span of a breath.

“And if we lose the trail anyway?” Clay asked.

For a second the leader didn’t answer. Then he said, “Either she gets buried in the gravel pits, or we do.”

Dryden tensed for the fall, trying to imagine any way he could get on his feet and escape with the girl.

At that instant he felt her move. Without a sound, she took her arms from around his chest, reached past his head to the beam, and clamped her hands as tightly as she could over his fingertips. The minor force she could apply was enough to make the difference; his grip held.

Above the clamor of thoughts demanding Dryden’s attention, one briefly took precedence: How the hell had she known?

A second later Clay pocketed his flashlight, climbed onto the boardwalk, and ran off in the direction the group had come from. Dryden waited for the leader to move off as well, but for a moment he only stood there, his breath audible in the darkness. Then he turned and thudded away to the north, following the searchers. When his footsteps had grown faint, Dryden at last slipped his feet from the beam and swung down. Blood surged into his muscles like ice water. The girl got her balance on the rocks and leaned past him to look up the beach. Dryden looked, too: The searchers were a hundred yards away.

The girl sniffled. Dryden realized she was crying.

“Thank you,” she whispered. Her voice cracked on the first word. “I’m sorry you had to do that for me.”

Dryden had a thousand questions. They could all wait a few minutes.

He turned and scanned inland for the best route away from here. There was a comforting span of darkness between the boardwalk and the harbor road. A block north along its length, the back streets of El Sedero branched deeper inland, into the cover of night. He and the girl could take the long way around and circle back to his house, half a mile north on the beach.

Taking a last look to make sure the searchers were still moving away, Dryden guided the girl under the boardwalk and into the long grass beyond.

CHAPTER TWO

Neither of them spoke until they were three blocks in from the sea, moving north on the dark streets of the old part of town. Even there, Dryden kept watch for Clay, on the chance he’d gone this way en route to the van — the marine fog wasn’t dense enough to provide them cover. For the moment, though, they seemed to have El Sedero to themselves.

Dryden spoke quietly. “Who are they? What is this — are you a witness to something?”

He couldn’t imagine what else it could be.

The girl shook her head. “I don’t think so. I don’t really know.”

“You don’t know if you witnessed something?”

“There’s more to it than that,” she said.

Dryden could still hear a hitch in her breathing, though she’d stopped crying a few minutes earlier.

“It’s not too late for you to keep yourself out of this,” she said. “What you’ve already done is more than—”

“I’m not leaving you out here by yourself. I’m taking you somewhere safe. We can still go to the police, even if these guys can listen in.”

The girl shook her head again, more emphatically this time. “We can’t.”

“There are police stations that have a hundred officers in them,” Dryden said, “even this time of night. You’d be protected, no matter who knows you’re there.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then explain it to me.”

The girl was quiet again for a moment. She looked down at her bare feet, padding silently on the concrete.

Dryden said, “My name’s Sam. Sam Dryden.”

The girl looked up at him. “Rachel.”

“Rachel, I’m not going to think you’re crazy. I saw them. I heard what they said. Whatever this is, you can tell me.”

She kept her eyes on him as they walked. If Dryden had ever seen a kid look more lost, he didn’t know when.

“Where would you be safe?” he asked. “You must have family. You must have someone.”

“I don’t know if I do or not,” she said. “I don’t remember.”

She seemed about to say more when an explosion of sound cut her off, ripping through the mist in front of them. Rachel jumped and grabbed Dryden’s arm, but already they could both see the source of the noise. A cat had knocked a metal trash can lid to the sidewalk, seeking some unseen quarry among the garbage inside. Rachel calmed, but kept hold of Dryden’s arm as they started forward again.

“All I can remember is the last two months,” she said. “In that time, no, I don’t have anyone.”

There was a worn-out quality to her speech that no kid’s voice should have. It would’ve fit a soldier, months or years into combat deployment. The spoken counterpart to the thousand-yard stare.

“Where did you come from tonight?” Dryden asked. “Where were they chasing you from?”

“From where they were keeping me. Where they had me the whole time I can remember. They were going to kill me tonight. I got away.”

They passed the cat in the trash can. It paused from its hunting to regard them warily, then went back to business. Dryden stepped over the lid in his path, and then a thought came to him. It skittered like fingertips down his spine. Even as the notion took shape, Rachel froze and stared at him with wide eyes, seeming to react to something in his body language.

Dryden looked at her, briefly distracted by her uncanny perception, then let it go. He turned his attention back on the fallen lid.

“We need to get off the sidewalk,” he said.

He was moving even before he finished saying it. He guided Rachel into the shadows beside the nearest house and around to the back side. Here, the adjoining rear yards of two rows of homes formed a channel that paralleled the street. Dryden picked up their pace, north through the channel, determined to get away from the trash can as quickly as possible.

“They’ll come to that sound, won’t they,” Rachel said.

“Yes.”

He’d no sooner said it than running footsteps thudded on concrete, somewhere nearby. He shoved Rachel behind a shrub and ducked in alongside her; they were sandwiched between tiny branches and the foundation wall of a house. Staring out through the gap between the shrub and the concrete, Dryden had a limited view to the south, back the way they’d come from. He saw a shape flash by, two houses away. Seconds later the searcher’s boots stopped on the sidewalk Dryden and Rachel had abandoned a moment before. Silence. Then came the beep and hiss of a communication device. In the still, dense air, the man’s voice reached Dryden with clarity.

“Three-six, north of three-four’s position. No contact.”

A voice came back over the communicator, distorted but perceptible as Clay’s. “Copy, this is three-four, on my way back from the van.”

Now a third voice came in; Dryden recognized it as that of the leader. “Three-six, continue the street search. We think the girl doubled back. Resweep of the beach picked up a lead.”

“Copy, what’d you find?” the nearby man asked.

“A man’s wallet,” the leader said. “Under the causeway, right where we lost the trail.”

Dryden shut his eyes and exhaled. He didn’t even need to check; his ass against the foundation wall told him what was missing from his back pocket. He checked anyway. His wallet was gone.

Over the communicator, the leader said, “Double set of tracks in the sand, inland from the wallet toward your position. The team’s coming to you now. Coordinate with them and sweep the neighborhood. Three-four, meet me at the van; the wallet’s owner lives just north of here.”

CHAPTER THREE

Martin Gaul stood on the private balcony outside his office. He had his phone in his hand. He was holding it tightly enough that he could hear its glass display stressing.

The balcony faced south from the top floor of the building, overlooking Los Angeles from Sunset Boulevard. Gaul stared down on the nighttime expanse of the city — a thousand square miles of lighted gridwork, crisscrossed with freeways like the fiber-optic veins of an electronic life form.

He shut his eyes and tried to steady his breathing. Tried to choke the anxiety that had arrived with a phone call three minutes earlier.

Curren’s team had lost the girl.

Gaul turned from the rail. He paced to a table near the sliding door and set the phone on it, willing the damned thing to ring again, this time with news that everything was taken care of. He stared at it a moment longer and then went back to the view.

There was a taste in his mouth — a mix of low-burning fear and tension. He had experienced it before, thirty years back, the summer between college and the army, when he lived in Boston. He’d gone to a Sox game with friends and hit a bar outside Fenway afterward, and a lot of shots later he’d come out alone, vaguely aware that his friends had already gone. There’d been a girl he thought he was doing pretty well with, but then she left without saying good-bye, which put him in a rough mood. He remembered wandering outside and walking toward what he thought was the bus stop, and much later ending up down by the river, near Harvard Bridge. He was looking for a spot to take a piss when the trouble happened.

All this time later, he couldn’t remember much of how it had started. There’d been a guy there. Maybe a homeless guy, he’d thought at the time. Maybe just another drunk coming from a bar. They had argued. Gaul might have started it — he could admit that to himself now. He’d been in that mood, after all. He’d started lots of arguments because of moods like that, and given people no choice but to argue back.

This time it had become more than an argument. There had been shoves and punches, and one of his had connected just right and dropped the guy at the edge of the river, and Gaul had gotten out of there. It’d only occurred to him later, ten minutes and ten blocks away, to wonder if the guy had landed with his head in the water. Something had splashed, but in the moment he’d ignored it. He got a bus home and lay awake for over an hour, convincing himself he’d imagined that splash — the mind could invent all kinds of things to color in its fears.

The story had led the local newscast, noon the following day. Grad student dead in the Charles, foul play suspected, police asking for tips. Gaul’s mind had filled up with what-ifs. How many outdoor security cameras had he stumbled past, going to and from the river? How many cabbies and bouncers and late-shift bus drivers had seen him out there, well enough to describe him to the police?

All summer long, that taste in his mouth, just like right now. Like your throat had some chemical it only made when you were in deep trouble — the kind of trouble that left you with nothing to do but wait.

The phone rang. He snapped it up as if it were prey.

“Tell me you got her,” he said.

“I left the bulk of the team searching,” Curren said. “They’ll report when they’ve got something. Clay and I are inside Sam Dryden’s residence now. He’s not here.”

“You haven’t made your presence there obvious, have you? If he and the girl are still en route to the place—”

“They wouldn’t see us. Drapes are closed. No lights on that weren’t already on. I don’t expect them to show, though. They should’ve been here by now if they were coming. Maybe Dryden noticed the wallet missing and got spooked.”

“If he’s helping her, where does it put us?”

“In trouble, I would say.”

Gaul felt a vein behind his ear begin to throb against the band of his glasses. “Let’s hear it,” he said.

Curren recited a summary of Dryden’s bio, no doubt reading it off a handheld unit. “Sam Dryden. Army right out of high school, Rangers, then Delta for three years. Generalized training along the way, multirole stuff: rotorcraft pilot certification, HALO jumps, like that. Then he resigns from Delta and the record goes black for the next six years.”

“There’s no such thing as black,” Gaul said.

“That’s above my pay scale. Officially, he disappears off the planet from age twenty-four to thirty. When he appears again, he’s out of the military, living here in El Sedero. Marries at thirty-one, has a kid, goes to school to get a teaching certificate. He’s a year into that when the wife and kid die in a car crash, at which point he gives up on the teaching thing. That’s five years ago now. File’s pretty thin since then. Some income from private security work, consulting for small companies. Nothing special.”

It took a moment for Gaul to reply. His free hand was gripping the balcony rail. The sodium-lit tundra of the city lay hard and clear in his vision. He hadn’t blinked in all the time Curren had been talking.

“Sir?” Curren said.

The girl was gone, probably being assisted by a man whose training surpassed even Curren’s. Gaul could make two calls and have access to the blacked-out portion of Sam Dryden’s file within half an hour — he would do that as soon as he ended this conversation — but the details hardly mattered. The fact that Dryden had done anything worth blacking out meant he had a formidable skillset, even if it was outdated by a few years.

“Turn the house inside out,” Gaul said. “Every name, every e-mail address, run everything through the system.”

“Clay’s on it now.”

“Help him,” Gaul said, and hung up.

He made the calls to get his people working on Dryden’s file, and then he made another call. The voice that answered sounded rough and cracked. Its owner had probably been awake already — it was after six in the morning in Washington, D.C. — but likely by no more than a few minutes.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Gaul said.

“What do you need?”

Gaul had long admired the man’s directness. Late-night television comics had the guy all wrong, playing him as an affable buffoon. He was off balance in front of a microphone, that was all.

Gaul spent ninety seconds filling him in, sugarcoating none of it. When he was done the line stayed silent a long time. Then something sloshed in a glass. Not water, Gaul knew — not even at this hour.

“I need satellite coverage,” Gaul said. “I need the Mirandas, the whole constellation. I need full control of them, I need Homeland and DoD locked out, and I need it to stay that way until I say otherwise.”

The man on the other end sighed. Something — maybe a couch — creaked and settled.

“I’ll have to take that up the chain,” the man said.

Gaul didn’t ask how long it would take. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of chain above the guy.

“I’ll call you back,” the man said. “Fifteen minutes.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Dryden stared out through the boughs of a cedar at the edge of a small park. He and Rachel had traveled only three blocks from the yard they’d first hidden in. They were still deep inside the residential back streets of El Sedero, with Rachel’s pursuers everywhere.

Within sixty seconds of the last radio transmission, the rest of the men had filtered into the neighborhood like shadows. When they wanted to be quiet, they were good at it. They’d also stowed their flashlights, making it much harder to pinpoint their locations. Each time Dryden had led Rachel from one piece of cover to the next, he’d studied the open ground for at least a minute first. Even at that, they’d been lucky to make it this far; these people had elite training in their backgrounds. Dryden could see it in the moves they made — and didn’t make. No wasted motion. Nothing extraneous. He’d had the same principles drilled into him years before.

He studied the park. One side butted up against a row of backyards; another lay open to the street. As he watched, a silhouette passed through the space between the jungle gym and the swing set, forty yards away.

Dryden turned his attention toward the adjacent homes. They lay east of where he and Rachel were hiding — inland, away from the sea. The plan, so far as he had one, was to move in that direction, into the broad commercial district across the interstate. If nothing else, that part of town was much larger, with storefronts and warehouses and industrial lots. Easier to hide in. Harder to seek in. The plan could evolve from there.

The man in the park slipped away to the street, crossed it, and vanished into the shadows between houses on the far side. Dryden turned the other way again, scrutinizing the open ground between the cedar shrub and the east-side row of homes. The distance he and Rachel would have to cross was seventy feet, give or take. It lay mostly in darkness, but there was no cover at all. Anyone watching might see them, once they went for it.

He gave the street and the yards beyond one last survey. No one moving. No one there at all, that he could see. He was already holding Rachel’s hand; he turned to her and nodded in the direction they would run. She nodded back, scared but ready. Dryden was tensing to move when she squeezed his hand sharply, a convulsive action that could only be a warning. He didn’t even look toward her. He didn’t move at all. He held dead still and took quiet breaths through his mouth.

Three seconds later a man passed in front of the cedar shrub, less than ten feet from where they crouched. He’d come from behind and to the side, his approach hidden by the bush itself. His footsteps were entirely silent on the damp grass. Even now, watching each step, Dryden could hear nothing. How Rachel had detected him, he couldn’t imagine. She was maybe three feet closer to where the guy had appeared from, and kids’ ears tended to be better than those of grown-ups, but for all that, her senses had to be unreal.

Dryden waited. The man moved deeper into the park. He stopped there and turned a slow circle, briefly swinging his gaze past the place where Dryden and Rachel were hiding. It occurred to Dryden that only the sheer number of such shrubs — hundreds throughout the park and the surrounding blocks — prevented the searchers from systematically checking them all. They were watching open ground for movement instead.

The guy finished his sweep and moved on, following the same path as the man before him. When he’d gone, Dryden scanned the street again. Empty — at least as empty as it had seemed before. He looked at Rachel. She nodded, ready as ever. They ran.

They didn’t stop running until nearly ten minutes later. When Rachel slowed, five minutes in, Dryden picked her up and kept going at almost full speed. He only stopped when they reached the top of an embankment high above the freeway.

He was winded and felt a vague headache at his temples: not quite pain, but a kind of chill. Whatever it was, it meant he’d slipped a bit since his prime. Back in his days in the unit, he’d routinely knocked out ten-mile runs hauling gear that weighed as much as Rachel.

He recovered enough to breathe quietly and listened to the night around them. Above the whisper of traffic, sparse at this hour, he strained for what he hoped he wouldn’t hear: a helicopter. Someone who could assemble a team of men with silenced machine guns — and was brazen enough to deploy them on civilian streets — might be able to call in other resources. A chopper with a thermal camera would spot him and the girl as easily as if they were glowing.

Dryden listened for twenty seconds longer but heard nothing. It didn’t mean they were in the clear.

He stared across the freeway toward the commercial and industrial parts of town. Chopper or no chopper, they still had to hide. He was about to start down the embankment when something stopped him — an instinctive impulse, deep in his mind, like the feel of the hair on his neck standing taut.

A response to a threat. But what threat?

He held still and listened again. There was no sound but the traffic. He scanned the darkness and saw nothing.

The fear hadn’t come from anything he’d seen or heard — it had only been a thought, just below conscious awareness. Some sense of an extra wrinkle in the danger they faced. What was it?

He waited, but the idea stayed out of reach. All that came to him was a sudden conviction: Hiding in El Sedero was the wrong move.

Rachel watched him. Her eyes were full of concern, though she said nothing.

Dryden nodded across the interstate. Beyond the trees on the far side, a quarter mile away, the lights of a twenty-four-hour superstore shone in the humidity.

“Time to go,” he said.

The computer room, one level below Gaul’s office, was lit only by the glow of its plasma monitors — nine in all. Gaul paced while his chief technical officer, Lowry, prepped them for the image streams from the Miranda satellites. There was no actual image data coming down yet, just blank screens configured and waiting. Gaul had yet to receive access to the birds, and every additional minute of delay made his pulse louder in his ears.

“Signatures locked,” Lowry said. “Ready whenever we get the streams.”

The Mirandas were the most impressive machines humans had ever put into orbit. Their thermal imaging capability was ten years ahead of what even the most optimistic science journalists supposed it was. A Miranda could distinguish a fat man from a skinny man anywhere on earth, day or night, although that wasn’t what made them special. Lots of spy birds could do that. The difference was that a Miranda could do it from an orbit fifteen times higher: 2,000 miles up instead of the standard 130 for most recon platforms. That meant each one of them had a very wide area in which to hunt.

The full constellation of Mirandas had overlapping coverage of the entire planet at all times, like the GPS network. The system could watch any spot on earth, at any moment, from at least three satellites, and often four or five. It could lock onto a moving target, whether it was a jogger or a cruise missile, and follow it with ease. There was nowhere to run from it, and sure as hell nowhere to hide.

Of course, you had to find your target before you could follow it. Gaul would only be able to spot Rachel and her new friend if they were still on foot in the countryside around El Sedero by the time he got access to the Mirandas, and every second he had to wait, that window of opportunity slipped closer to shut.

Suddenly message boxes bloomed on all nine of the monitors; Lowry snapped to attention. A second later, Gaul’s phone rang. He answered.

“They’re all yours,” the man on the line said.

Dryden and Rachel reached the edge of the superstore’s lot at a run, and stopped to survey the scattered cars parked there. Most were clustered at the front of the building, probably belonging to the store’s third-shift employees, but a handful were parked out at the periphery. Maybe they’d been left there by workers pulling a double shift, who’d arrived last evening when the lot was full.

Dryden led the way to the nearest of the outlying vehicles, a dark green Taurus. The more commonplace the model, the better; anything they took would be reported stolen within hours, and Rachel’s pursuers had access to police communications. Blending in would be critical. Dryden gave the Taurus only a passing consideration, however, because it was new enough that it almost certainly had a smart key; it couldn’t simply be hot-wired.

They moved on, skirting the rim of the lot toward the next group of vehicles, forty yards away.

Lowry muttered his thoughts aloud as he entered commands to target the satellites. “Number twelve, frame at three by three kilometers. Number fifteen, slave to twelve, index outdoor biologics, human. Number four, slave to twelve, ditto command.”

Complementing the Mirandas’ remarkable hardware was a software suite right out of a conspiracy theorist’s worst nightmare. A Miranda could be instructed to canvass an area the size of a town, and isolate all human figures who were not inside man-made structures. One satellite could count the targets in a wide frame, while another two or three could set to work zooming in on each of them for close-up shots. Throughout the process the birds could communicate with one another so as to efficiently divide up the workload. The whole operation would take less than thirty seconds.

It was already under way.

On the first monitor was the wide frame of the town, the land and ocean showing up as cool black. Sharp points of bluish white light indicated homes and other heat sources.

On the next three monitors, still frames began to pop up: the tight snapshots of human targets, coming in from the other satellites. The first image showed a group of people encircling a superbright thermal source.

“Beach campfire,” Lowry said. “Tell it to ignore?”

Gaul nodded. Lowry instructed the system to disregard that target.

Other snaps showed Curren’s team rendezvousing with him at the van. Gaul had ordered them back to it moments earlier, so they could move on Rachel and Dryden as soon as their location was available.

As more still shots came in — a woman walking a dog, a tall man taking out the trash — it became apparent that the Mirandas were choosing their targets in a progression from west to east. In this case it meant they’d started at the shore and proceeded inland. Probably a default setting of the software. Gaul stared at the monitor showing the wide image of the town. It extended about a mile and a half in from the coast to some kind of shopping center on the far right. The Mirandas had now indexed all of the outdoor targets on the left half, and would have the right side finished in another ten to fifteen seconds.

There was only one vehicle in the outer reaches of the lot worth considering; Dryden settled on it even before getting close enough to know whether it was locked. It was a Ford F-150 pickup from the early nineties, possibly the eighties; it would have nothing in the ignition but copper wires and insulation. He found the driver’s door locked — no surprise there — but, ducking to look through the cab, saw that the passenger side was not. Rachel, running ten feet behind him, understood; she diverted to the passenger side, got in, and reached across to open Dryden’s door. He slid in behind the wheel.

Two thousand thirty-one miles above the Rockies, fleeing southeast toward the Gulf of Mexico at just under four miles per second, Miranda Fifteen kept its lens platform pointed at El Sedero and snapped rapid-fire shots of the human targets on its list. Target seven, captured and sent. Target eight, captured and sent. Target nine — the onboard computer faltered. There was no target nine at the stated location. Miranda Fifteen automatically communicated this error to Miranda Twelve, the satellite running the master frame and assigning targets. Miranda Twelve replied that target nine had vanished 2.315 seconds earlier; there was no longer a signature of two human beings outdoors at that location, but instead a signature of two human beings inside a vehicle, 99.103 percent likely to be a Ford model F-150 manufactured in 1988. The last command string from the operator had specified only human targets outdoors; therefore target nine was no longer valid.

Miranda Fifteen considered this dilemma for 485 nanoseconds, the time required to run all three of its what-if algorithms, and determined that this was not a problem the human operator needed to be troubled with. It ignored target nine and moved on.

Dryden found a screwdriver in the truck’s glove box. He used it to crack open the ignition housing; it took only a few seconds more to hot-wire the vehicle.

“Not stealing,” Dryden said. “Borrowing.”

“It’s pretty old,” Rachel said. “How upset can they be?”

Dryden pulled out of the lot and turned left. Just ahead lay the southbound on-ramp to the 101. Rachel looked back at the town’s lights, diffused in the mist, and exhaled deeply.

“Let’s hear the rest of your story,” Dryden said.

Gaul stared at the completed batch of satellite snaps like a man staring at a slot machine on which he’d lost his last dollar. Fourteen human beings were outdoors in the target area. None of them were children.

She was gone.

Lowry was already retargeting a wider search frame, but Gaul had no hope for it. The first frame had covered as much area as anyone on foot could have gone in the time allowed. Their absence meant they’d found transportation.

Gaul sat in a chair and rested his forehead on his hands.

Rachel, out of his reach.

Out there in the world.

She couldn’t remember anything important, but that was only temporary. With the drug out of her system, her memory would begin stitching itself back together within a week. Soon enough after that, she’d remember everything.

The taste in his mouth thickened. For a few seconds he was back in Boston, in that shitty little flat on West Ninth Street, waiting for the day the police would knock on his door.

“Sir?” Lowry said.

“What is it?”

“One of the Hail Mary processes might give us something.”

Gaul raised his head. On the first computer, Lowry had run an option — actually, he’d simply agreed to an option the program had recommended. The software suite had drawn the same conclusion as Gaul: Failure to locate someone on foot probably meant they’d found a vehicle.

“Part of the latest software bundle,” Lowry said. “Sometimes there are heat trails on pavement if a vehicle has just left the search area. It’d be pretty faint, but the Mirandas can turn up their sensitivity and detect the heat for up to sixty seconds, depending on how fast the vehicle was going. If anyone drove out of the area recently, we might get lucky.”

The wide image of El Sedero remained motionless while the satellites carried out the new task. Suddenly the image reframed to tighten on the right side, a close-up of the shopping center. Faint, and fading even as Gaul watched, a twin set of dark blue lines snaked from the parking lot to the road, then to the freeway’s on-ramp.

“Show me that parking lot sixty seconds ago,” Gaul said.

CHAPTER FIVE

Dryden changed lanes to pass a semi, keeping the pickup just above the speed limit to avoid drawing attention. Visibility on the 101 was better than it had been in town. As the freeway followed the coast, it also climbed above the fog.

For now, his goal was simply to put distance between themselves and El Sedero. He would decide on a destination after hearing the rest of Rachel’s story. She’d been quiet for the past minute, contemplating how to tell it. Finally she turned to him.

“Before I say anything, I need to do something so you’ll believe me,” she said.

“There are men with machine guns after you. Whatever’s going on, you don’t need to convince me it’s real.”

“You might feel different after you’ve heard more of it.”

She looked down at her hands. They were drumming a pattern on her knees. Whatever she was about to do, it was making her nervous.

“This is going to weird you out,” she said. “Just so you know.”

“More than what’s already happened tonight?”

“Way more.”

She exhaled hard, and before Dryden could respond, she said, “Think of a four-digit number. A random one, not part of your phone number or anything else someone might know. Don’t say it out loud, just think of it. Clamp your lips together, too, so you don’t accidentally mouth it.”

Dryden glanced at her, wondering if it was a joke. It wasn’t. She was staring at him, anxiety running through her like an electric current.

Dryden focused on the road again and went with it. He closed his mouth. He ignored numbers that meant anything to him. He let his mind spin up one that was purely random: 6,724. The idea of it had hardly formed when Rachel spoke again.

“Six thousand seven hundred twenty-four.”

Dryden turned and stared at her. She stared back. The truck strayed onto the rumble strip, and he jerked the wheel back to the left and watched the road again. For a few seconds he couldn’t think of what to say. Never before had he encountered something unbelievable and undeniable at the same time.

He glanced at her again. She was still watching him for his reaction.

He faced forward and thought, Say antelope if you’re hearing this.

“Antelope,” Rachel said.

Curren accelerated to ninety, veering through the light traffic on the freeway.

“They’re four and a half miles ahead,” Gaul said over the cell phone. “They’re doing just about exactly the speed limit, so you’ll catch up to them in a matter of minutes. Next exit is more than twenty miles out.”

“Copy,” Curren said, though he could tell Gaul had already hung up.

Working for Gaul sometimes felt like working for God. The man’s knowledge resources seemed to border on omnipotent, while remaining almost entirely shrouded. Also, you didn’t want to piss him off. Curren wouldn’t have been surprised to learn Gaul could turn people into salt pillars.

“You can just … read me?” Dryden asked.

He felt his mind trying to get a fix on all of it, and not quite managing.

“Reading might be the wrong word,” Rachel said. “That makes it sound like I’m doing it on purpose. It’s more like hearing. It just happens. I can’t even shut it off.”

“And you hear everything. Every thought. Every idea.”

Rachel nodded. “As far as I know. Sometimes it’s confusing, if I can’t tell my own thoughts from someone else’s. If I find myself thinking, It would suck to get shot right now, it’s hard to know if that’s your thought or just mine. But most thoughts, yeah, I can tell they’re yours.” Then, softer: “I can tell you’re a nice person, and that you like me, and that being with me reminds you of someone. And that makes you happy and sad at the same time.”

Tension crept into Dryden’s mind: Would he have to censor his thoughts now? Every stupid, random thing that leapt into his head? Could he even do that?

“Don’t worry about it,” Rachel said.

It took a second for him to realize what had just happened — that she’d replied to something he hadn’t even said aloud.

“Sorry,” Rachel said. “I can wait for you to actually say things, if you like.”

For a long moment Dryden said nothing. He watched the lines on the pavement sliding past.

“How do you do it?” he asked. “How does it work?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve always been able to?”

“For the past two months, at least. How long before that, I have no idea.”

In her own way, she sounded as confused as he felt. No doubt she was.

“I know it doesn’t work over much distance,” she said. “If you ever need some privacy, a short walk would do it.”

The strange chill at Dryden’s temples was still there. It hadn’t faded at all since he’d first noticed it, near the freeway. Now that he thought about it, he wondered if it had been there even before that — back in town, back on the boardwalk even, in the first moments after he’d encountered Rachel.

“The chill comes from me,” she said. “Whatever it is my brain does, that’s what it feels like to the other person.” The way she said it — quiet and vulnerable, apologetic — Dryden could almost read her thoughts. Don’t think I’m a freak. Don’t abandon me. Please.

“I barely feel it,” Dryden said. “Don’t worry.”

She nodded, then drew her knees against her on the seat and hugged them. She seemed tiny, sitting there like that.

Four minutes until they would overtake the pickup. Curren couldn’t see its taillights yet, through the rises and turns of the coast highway, but he’d done the math in his head.

He looked over his shoulder at the van’s middle bench seat, where three of his men sat with their weapons ready.

He saw no pleasure in their expressions, and felt none himself. The job needed doing; nothing more to it than that.

“Don’t bother disabling the vehicle,” Curren said. “Start with killshots. The girl first.”

“The place they had me in was like a hospital,” Rachel said. “Except it was empty. There was just me, and the people keeping me there.”

“This was the place you were running from tonight?”

Rachel nodded.

Dryden tried to picture it. El Sedero was a pretty small town; it was hard to envision anything like an abandoned hospital there. He thought of the district Rachel’s pursuers had seemed to come from: the area just inland from the dune ridge. There was an office park over there — a hundred acres of well-kept grounds, with an array of sprawling one- and two-story buildings. The kind of structures you could drive past every day for twenty years and never so much as think about. You could work in one of them and not have a clue what went on in the place next door.

“Those were the buildings,” Rachel said. “The one they had me in was off by itself, way in back.”

Dryden waited for her to go on. She still had her arms around her legs. She was staring ahead at the night rolling toward them.

“I woke up there, two months ago,” she said. “I was strapped to a hospital bed. I didn’t know where I was, or who I was. A doctor with blond hair would show up sometimes, either to hook an IV to my arm or take one away. Other times, different men would come in, the same ones who were chasing me tonight, and they’d untie my bed straps. Then they’d come in later and strap me down again. Nobody would ever speak to me, no matter how much I asked. Nobody would tell me what was happening to me, or why.”

Dryden felt his hands tighten on the steering wheel.

“Sometime in the first few days,” Rachel said, “I noticed strange thoughts in my head. For a while I thought they were my memories coming back, but not for long — they were just too bizarre. They didn’t seem like my own thoughts at all. Like, some of them were a man’s thoughts about his wife, from his own point of view. These thoughts got a lot louder whenever the blond man or the others came into the room, and at some point I understood what I was really hearing.”

Dryden passed another semi. Ahead of it, the road lay empty and dark for a mile or more.

“Everything I know, I got from their thoughts,” Rachel said. “The people in that building. It wasn’t much; they hardly knew anything at all. They’d been assigned to keep me there, but they didn’t know where I came from. They knew I could hear thoughts — they’d been warned about that — but no one had told them how I could do it, how I got this way. So I don’t know, either.”

“They must have known other things. Who they worked for — the government, a company, something like that.”

“It was hard to get anything like that from them. Most of the time they weren’t close enough for me to hear them thinking. Even when they were, it almost never helped. You’d be surprised how scattered people’s thoughts are. You hear little chunks of an argument they had with someone, looping over and over. Probably stuff they wish they’d said. Sometimes you just hear a song in their head. You hardly ever hear important things about their lives: their name, their job, anything like that. Like, how often do you actually think of your own name?”

“I guess I can see that.”

“When people do focus their thoughts, they mostly think about what they don’t know. What they’re unsure of. So with these guys, a lot of their questions were the same ones I had. Like who I was. Where I came from. They didn’t know. I did get the name of someone they work for, someone pretty powerful, I think — a man they thought of as Gaul.”

The name struck Dryden. He’d heard it before, though he couldn’t quite place it. Someone at the top of one of the big defense contractors, he thought. Way up in the overlap between corporate America and the government. That wasn’t a world Dryden swam in himself, but he’d learned more about it than he cared to, during his active years.

“The people in that building wondered about him a lot,” Rachel said. “They were always nervous about him. Especially the blond man. He’s the one I mostly learned things from. He had a room down the hall from me — his office, I guess. He was in there a lot. Maybe he thought it was out of my range, but it wasn’t. Not quite.”

“What did you learn from him?”

Rachel shut her eyes. Dryden got the impression again that she was framing her thoughts, trying to put them in some order that would make sense.

“That they were supposed to get information from me. Things I know — things I knew, anyway, when I could remember.”

Dryden waited for her to continue.

“That’s what the IV drugs were for. To make me talk — in my sleep. Only it was more than that. The drugs were supposed to make it so I could have conversations in my sleep. Someone could ask me questions, and I’d answer. Like if I was hypnotized, I think. My memory problems come from the drugs, too. The way the blond man understood it, that was a side effect that only kicked in while I was awake. When I was asleep—talking in my sleep — I could still remember what I knew.” She breathed out softly. Dryden heard emotion in the sound of it. An edge of fear, for some reason.

“Did you find out, after a while, what they’d gotten from you?” Dryden asked. “Did you hear it in the blond guy’s thoughts?”

Rachel shook her head. “It was never them questioning me. What I heard in his thoughts was that he and the others always had to leave the building as soon as the drugs knocked me out, and that other people would be coming in to question me. Those people would always be gone before I woke up. The blond man and the others had no idea who they were — never even saw them. So I had no way of knowing what I’d said in my sleep.” She was quiet for a second. “I guess that all sounds pretty strange to you.”

Dryden watched the highway. What Rachel had said didn’t sound strange at all. Dryden could name three different narcotic agents that had the effects she’d described. He’d seen each of them used on people, time and again. All three carried the side effect Rachel now suffered: a roadblock in the memory, usually lodged right at the point when the drugs were first administered.

Rachel turned to him. He glanced at her and saw her eyebrows knit toward each other — confusion at what she’d just heard in his thoughts.

“There’s a lot about me I’ll have to explain to you sometime,” Dryden said. “If you want to know.”

She nodded and faced forward again.

“This information they were trying to get from you,” Dryden said. “It sounds like it scares you.”

Rachel nodded again, and Dryden heard the same tremor in her breath he’d heard before.

“Why are you afraid of it?” he asked.

“Because they were afraid. The blond man, and the others there, the soldiers. They didn’t know anything themselves, but they knew other people who had some of the details. Other people who worked for Gaul, higher up. And whatever the information is that’s in my head, those people are terrified of it. They’re scared the way people get when it comes to really big things. Like diseases. Like wars. It’s like there’s … something coming.”

The chill in the girl’s voice seemed to radiate into Dryden’s bones.

“That’s it,” Rachel said. “That’s all I know about it. And I’m scared.”

Before Dryden could ask anything else, a new set of headlights appeared in the mirror, far back along the freeway. The newcomer changed lanes to pass another vehicle, moving fast.

Rachel reacted — either to Dryden’s sudden alertness or to the thoughts beneath it. She turned and leaned forward and looked into the passenger side mirror.

Dryden kept his eyes on his own mirror, watching the road ahead only as much as he had to. The new arrival slipped through the headlights of the vehicle it’d passed, becoming a silhouette for a fleeting moment.

It looked like a van.

Gaul watched the F-150, its engine compartment and cab lit up in ghostly blue-white thermal, from three separate viewing angles. A fourth Miranda had a wider view, which included the van containing Curren and the team. The van was closing distance easily, and there was no sign that Sam Dryden had spotted the pursuers. The pickup maintained its speed.

Gaul’s cell phone rang; it was Hollings, the man he’d assigned to dig into the classified part of Dryden’s background. Gaul ignored the call; nothing in the world mattered right now as much as the drama about to unfold on these monitors, hopefully with brutal speed and efficiency. Dryden was a well-trained soldier, but all the training in the world couldn’t counter the odds he faced. Curren and his team were six men with state-of-the-art weapons and training, and the element of surprise.

The van closed to within five hundred yards. There was no escape.

The cell phone quit ringing.

Dryden watched the van close in. It had slowed a bit after first appearing, maybe to keep from standing out, but had still halved its distance in the past sixty seconds.

“How did they find us?” Rachel asked.

Dryden thought of the unformed suspicion he’d felt earlier, when he was listening for a helicopter. Now it took shape fully in his mind. He’d overlooked the answer initially; he hadn’t known that anyone as powerful as Gaul was involved.

“They’re using a satellite,” he said. “Maybe more than one.”

He sorted through the implications of that fact, trying to stay rational even as the van closed in. Depending on how good Gaul’s birds were, he and his techs might be able to watch the entire conflict that was about to unfold. In that case, it would be no use stopping and fleeing on foot into the hills; thermal satellite cameras would easily follow them, and Gaul could direct his men on the ground accordingly. In fact, any kind of escape would be pointless as long as the pursuers were in any shape to follow. That left a limited range of options, none of them friendly.

Dryden felt old mental tricks coming back to him. Ways of keeping his pulse down and his mind cold. The sensation was strangely pleasant, like the bass rhythm of a song not heard in years.

“I’m getting a reassuring vibe from you,” Rachel said, “but I have to wonder why you’re still going the speed limit.”

“It keeps them thinking surprise is on their side,” Dryden said. “Which means it’s really on ours.”

Ahead loomed yet another semi. There would be just enough time to pass it before the van caught up. And that was going to be critical, because Dryden suddenly understood what he had to do. The road was perfect for it: two lanes, bordered on the left by a concrete median divider, and on the right by a guardrail and then a 45-degree drop to the sea. No shoulder on either side. The freeway might as well have been the Lincoln Tunnel — exactly what he needed.

He glanced at Rachel. “You already know my plan, don’t you,” he said.

“I think so,” she said. She gripped the armrest on the passenger door, bracing for things to get rough.

Dryden risked a slight increase in speed to pass the semi, even using his turn signal when he changed lanes. Behind them, the van changed lanes, too, and began the final push to close the gap.

Gaul leaned in toward the nearest monitor. All the night’s stress and anxiety would end within the minute, right there in a pixelated blaze.

At that moment, footsteps came sprinting down the corridor outside, and a technician appeared in the doorway with a cordless phone.

“Sir,” the man said, “it’s Hollings. He says it’s critical.”

Keeping his eyes on the monitor, Gaul took the phone from the tech.

“Can it wait thirty seconds?” Gaul said into the phone.

“I’m not sure it can, sir,” Hollings said. “I tried calling your cell, but I couldn’t get through—”

“You’re wasting seconds now. Just tell me,” Gaul said.

“I have part of Sam Dryden’s restricted file. He is significantly more advanced than Delta. If Curren’s men are still pursuing him, they need to be told.”

“What did Dryden do after Delta?” Gaul asked.

“A federal program called Ferret. It might’ve been under Homeland, I’m still trying to figure that out.”

“What sort of work did he do in Ferret?”

“The only thing Ferret does at all. Extraordinary rendition.”

The two words seeped into Gaul like winter drafts.

His eyes went to the monitors again. The pickup, cruising along at the speed limit. The man at the wheel carrying six years’ experience in abducting people for the United States government. Six years honing a skill set that would include violent conflict in every possible civilian environment.

Gaul’s focus went to the van, closing fast on the truck, and he saw the absurdity that had been right in front of him for minutes: There was essentially zero chance a man like Sam Dryden would fail to spot trouble on his tail.

Gaul dropped the cordless unit and grabbed his cell phone in the same movement.

CHAPTER SIX

Curren watched the F-150 slip past the nose of the semi ahead. He could see Dryden and the girl in silhouette above the pickup’s seatback.

“When he gets back in the right lane,” Curren said, “I’ll stay in the left and come up just shy of passing. Clear to fire when I say go.”

The three shooters on the bench seat took position. A fourth prepared to slide open the door.

Curren’s cell rang — Gaul. He reached to answer it, then simply ignored it. Taking his attention off the action now would be the wrong move.

Ahead, Dryden merged back into the right lane. Curren accelerated along the length of the semi and beyond it. He would overtake the pickup in less than ten seconds. The man at the side door slid it open; wind roared into the vehicle. The shooters brought their MP-5s to the ready.

In the last moments before it would all go down, Curren found himself wondering how a man like Sam Dryden — a former Delta operator, not to mention whatever the hell he’d been for those six black years — could end up this naive.

Then Dryden did something strange.

He put the truck’s turn signal back on and merged once more to the left, though there was nothing ahead of him to pass. The pickup was directly in front of the van again.

“What the fuck is this?” Curren said.

Dryden watched the van and the semi in his rearview mirror. The timing was going to come down to tenths of a second, though there was no way to be that exact in the execution. This was going to be messy as hell.

Beside him, Rachel pulled her seat belt tight.

The van was behind the pickup, a single car length from its tailgate. The semi was another two lengths behind the van, in the next lane.

“Close enough for government work,” Dryden said, and slammed his heel on the brake.

The effect was all he could have asked for.

At freeway speed, the van’s driver had nowhere near the time or space he needed to react. There was no place for him to go but the open lane to the right, directly in front of the semi. The van swerved hard for it, missing the pickup’s back end by inches.

In the same instant, Dryden took his foot off the brake; his speed had dropped to forty. When the van passed the pickup’s back end, Dryden veered right as well, ramming the van’s nose from the side and sending it into the guardrail at an angle.

At more than seventy miles per hour.

All that was left was the physics: mass, momentum, friction, velocity, no forgiveness in any of it. The van’s front end dug into the guardrail, and its tail swung outward. It spun more than 360 degrees, and then its tires got a grip on the pavement when the vehicle was more or less sideways, pitching it into a tumble along the freeway. In the mirror, Dryden saw at least two bodies thrown from the vehicle, from what looked like an open side door.

All of this had happened within three seconds of Dryden hitting the brakes. For those same three seconds, the driver of the semi had been trying to stop — unsuccessfully. The semi plowed into the tumbling van and partially rolled up over it, finally grinding both the van and the semi to a stop in a shower of sparks. The van, which had ruptured its fuel tank at some point during its acrobatics, was ablaze by the time it slid to a halt.

Dryden stopped the pickup fifty yards beyond the wreckage. He stepped out onto the freeway and looked back. He saw the semi driver open his door, drop to the pavement, and run like hell, no doubt expecting the van to go off like a bomb. But the van’s fuel was mostly spread along the freeway, and what remained in the tank was already burning. Dryden squinted into the glare and saw the van’s occupants trapped inside, fully engulfed. The two who’d been thrown lay far from the wreck, on the asphalt. It was possible they were alive. It was not possible they would be of any use to Gaul in the near future, if ever again.

Dryden got back in the truck. He found Rachel staring at him, scared, her eyes huge.

“I’m sorry that had to happen,” Dryden said.

He considered saying more in the way of justifying it, but didn’t. She wasn’t stupid, and in any case, it was time to get going. Without a doubt, Gaul was already sending whatever else he could mobilize — probably something with wings or rotors this time. The only way to survive the next hour was to lose the satellites, though at the moment Dryden had no idea how he was going to do that. Whatever he came up with, it would take time to do it, and there was no telling how long they really had. He put the truck in gear and got moving. He pushed it up to eighty this time, the fastest he could go without risking a blown cylinder.

He glanced at Rachel. She was staring straight ahead, her eyes rimmed with tears. She wiped at them and said, “I don’t mean to make you feel bad. You protected me, and there was no other way. I understand that. What I’m crying about is weird, and … stupid. It’s just me.”

“If you want to talk about it, you can.”

For a moment she said nothing. Then: “When you hit them from the side, in that little bit of time afterward, before they hit the guardrail, they were close enough that I could read them all. And right before they hit, they all knew they were going to die. Going that fast, and suddenly out of control like that, they just knew. It was every bad feeling at the same time. All the hardness about them was gone, all the training, everything. There was nothing but fear, and knowing they were dead.”

Dryden saw her turn to him.

“I loved it,” she said. “I loved that it was that bad for them. I thought, This is what you get, I hope it hurts. I felt all that for about a second, and then it hit me — how bad it was to think something like that, and I just lost it.”

She wiped at her eyes again. She looked miserable.

“If anyone in this world has earned a little vindictiveness,” Dryden said, “it’s you.”

“It still doesn’t feel right.”

She rested her head on her knees.

“You need me to stop talking for a while,” she said. “You need time to think.”

Dryden nodded. “I need time to think.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The computer room bustled. Gaul had summoned four techs, in addition to Lowry, to pore over maps of the cities that lay ahead of Sam Dryden on the 101. Predicting his next move, or at least narrowing the possibilities, was critical. It would be stupid now to assume any amount of naiveté on Dryden’s part. Certainly he knew he was being watched by satellites, even after his disposal of Curren’s team. Obviously Dryden’s primary goal now was finding a way to throw the birds off his trail.

The one advantage Gaul could exploit was the degree to which satellites had improved in the years since Dryden had been familiar with them in Ferret. The Mirandas were orders of magnitude more powerful, and adaptable, than anything in the skies during Dryden’s service. He probably had a dodging move in mind, and it would probably be clever enough to fool any of the satellites he’d ever worked with. It would almost certainly not fool the Mirandas.

It was only necessary to keep Dryden in sight for another half hour at most, and then it would all be over. Gaul had already made the calls — he’d been on the phone before Curren’s van had even stopped tumbling — to get his second play off the ground, literally. Within minutes, an AH-6 Little Bird had lifted off from a pad in Los Alamitos. It was now speeding north across L.A. at 150 miles per hour, almost head-on toward Dryden, who was north of the city and coming south.

Gaul paced and silently berated himself for not sending the chopper earlier, when the girl had first gotten away. Had he done so, the damn thing could have been on-site above the pickup by the time things had gone bad on the freeway. But there had been no reason to think Curren could fail, once the Mirandas had located Rachel and her new friend. With all the stress over simply finding her, it hadn’t occurred to Gaul that the team might be defeated.

He sank into a chair before the bank of monitors running the Miranda feeds. One had a wide angle on the AH-6, crossing over Century City now. Three others were locked onto the speeding pickup containing Dryden and the girl. The truck was within a mile of its first chance to exit the freeway since El Sedero. Gaul’s techs looked up from their maps as the pickup closed in on it. They had compiled a list of possible places toward which Dryden might be headed, in order to ditch the satellites. The consensus was that Dryden would have to get underground somehow, into the basement of a large building, or even into a sewer tunnel. If he chose a large enough building, or a complex enough tunnel network, he would have his choice of dozens of possible exits, some of them separated by hundreds of yards. This was exactly the kind of move Gaul hoped he would make: overwhelming for a satellite from a few years ago, a cakewalk for the Mirandas.

On the monitors, the F-150 passed the exit without taking it. The techs immediately discarded two pages of material and focused on the exits farther ahead.

The software was continually updating the distance between Dryden and the AH-6, the two closing toward one another at a combined 230 miles per hour. If Dryden kept going south on the freeway, the chopper would intercept him that much sooner. Unfortunately, he’d reached a densely populated area, with half a dozen exits available in the next few miles.

Gaul stood and paced again. His own confidence unnerved him; he’d been confident that Curren would finish the job, after all, and as a result he’d been slow to make his next move. While it was close to impossible for Dryden to evade the Mirandas, prudence called for having a backup plan anyway. Gaul stepped into the corridor and called the D.C. number again. It was answered on the second ring.

“If Dryden gets free of these birds,” Gaul said, “he will vanish off the face of the earth. It won’t be worth the time to stake out the houses of old friends and relatives; he won’t make a mistake like that. He won’t make any mistake at all, and there’ll be no loose end for us to grab.”

“What’s your point?” the man asked. He sounded more awake. Limbered up by the alcohol, maybe.

“If we lose him, it’s going to take something extreme to get him back. We would have to turn the eyes of the civilized world on him. Do something guaranteed to command headlines for days.”

There was a silence on the other end. Gaul pictured the man moving away from listening ears.

“Do you have something in mind?” the man asked.

Gaul thought about it. “Roughly. Yes.”

“Tell me.”

Gaul explained it to him. He covered it in broad strokes in thirty seconds.

“If we do this and it goes badly,” the man said, “we’re in a lot of trouble.”

“We’re in more trouble if she gets away from us.”

Silence on the line. Gaul heard the man breathing.

“I’ll talk to Marsh at Homeland,” the man said. “Let me know when this goes from the back burner to the front.” He hung up before Gaul could reply.

Gaul returned to the computer room. The techs were animated, sending a flurry of command strings to the available Mirandas, all four of which were now targeted on the F-150.

“He’s off the freeway,” Lowry said. “Moving toward a cluster of five candidate locations. Highest probability is a four-story hospital, half a mile away.”

One of the Mirandas had already been tasked on the hospital; the software had pulled up the building’s schematics from a database. There were twelve exits, including one into an underground tunnel connecting to a second hospital across the street, which itself had seven exits. Between the two buildings, there were five access points into service tunnels below street level.

The other candidate buildings were almost as complex, and there would be no telling which Dryden would choose until the last moment. The very fact that he was moving toward them was a good sign, though. So far, he was doing as the techs had predicted.

“Come on, asshole,” Gaul said. “Step into the trap.”

Dryden coasted through the nearly empty streets. The sky was still ink black, the first hint of dawn probably an hour away. Ahead, the shapes of a few office midrises stood above a sprawl of low-slung buildings — shops, restaurants, warehouses.

He could feel the eyes of the satellites on him like crosshairs. Since leaving the wreck site, he’d thought of little else but the various spy platforms he’d worked with in Ferret — and the performance improvements he’d witnessed during those six years. Several more years had passed since then.

Rachel remained quiet. She sat with her hands in her lap, no doubt nervous but containing it well.

Just ahead, a green light went yellow. Dryden slowed and stopped.

“We’ll be where we’re going in less than a minute,” he said.

Rachel nodded. “I like your plan. It’s … different.”

“It has to be.”

Rachel stared forward through the windshield, looking for the destination.

“How do you know about this place?” she asked.

“My wife and I met there, when we were kids.”

“Is this going to be dangerous? I mean, for the people inside?”

Dryden shook his head. “They practice for this all the time, in case the real thing ever happens. This’ll be just another drill.”

“It’s going to make them really mad, though.”

“I’ll send them a donation when this is all over.”

“Let’s hope.”

On the monitors, the pickup got moving again, rolling through the intersection. It coasted along for another thirty seconds, then slowed and pulled to the curb. It was three blocks shy of the hospital, and no closer to any other building the techs had predicted. Instantly they started shuffling their handwritten notes while Lowry pulled up database programs, frantically trying to identify the building Dryden had stopped in front of.

The pickup’s doors opened; Dryden and the girl emerged, already running. They sprinted up the long walkway toward the building’s main entrance. Gaul stared at the monitor showing the widest image of the place. Its layout and profile suggested a single-story hotel: long hallways lined with small rooms. The satellites could roughly image the shapes of bodies inside, reading the infrared right through the roof. The clarity was starkly reduced, to something like a view through pebbled glass, but was still good enough to establish the size and outline of each figure.

All appeared to be asleep, understandably at this hour.

Gaul leaned closer to the nearest monitor. Something about the sleepers bothered him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

“Got it,” Lowry said. “It’s a boarding school.”

The techs traded looks. What the hell kind of place was that to dodge the satellites?

Gaul suddenly understood what had caught his attention about the sleepers: They were small. They were all kids.

“Oh shit,” Gaul said.

The doors would all be locked, of course. It didn’t matter. Getting in quietly was not the point, and in fact couldn’t have been further from it. Midsprint, Dryden stooped and picked up a heavy landscaping rock from beside the walkway. As he and Rachel reached the entrance, he heaved it through the glass-block window beside the left door. The suddenly empty frame was too narrow for Dryden to slip through, but Rachel made it easily. A second later she opened the door from inside.

They ran to the nearest hallway intersection, and then Dryden stopped, turning to her.

“You know what to do?” he asked.

Rachel nodded.

“Alright,” Dryden said. “When you get outside, run in the direction we were driving — that’s east. I’ll meet you five blocks from here. But even then, we’re going to keep distance between us for a while.”

“I understand,” she said.

He patted her on the shoulder. “Let’s make some noise.”

They split up down the divergent corridors. Dryden spotted a fire alarm handle twenty yards ahead, but even before he could reach it, the calm was shredded by the hundred-decibel bass drone of the alarm system. Rachel had beaten him to it.

Gaul didn’t need audio to know what was happening. Every sleeper in the building jolted awake in perfect unison. It was a surreal thing to watch from an overhead view. Within seconds they flooded into the hallways.

Just like that, the Rachel shape was lost in a sea of similar shapes. Dryden should have been easier to distinguish, being taller than the kids, but with enough people in a confined space, the hallways became solid rivers of blue-white thermal glow. Worse, the shapes of other adults — teachers or whoever the hell lived there full-time — were now converging from various wings of the school, seeking to manage the chaos. There would be no way to distinguish them from Dryden when the crowd exited the building.

Dryden moved among the flood of kids making their way to the nearest exits. As he did, he heard the message that was spreading through the crowd far faster than anyone could walk. Spreading from person to person like a blast wave from its point of origin — wherever Rachel had begun saying it: It’s not a fire. It’s a gas leak. Get as far from the building as you can.

Gaul stood back and watched it all come apart. People were leaving the school en masse and running away. Had they stopped at a distance of a block or two, the Mirandas could have probably kept track of them as a group and noted any stragglers leaving its outskirts. That would have enabled them to spot Rachel and Dryden.

The fleeing kids and teachers weren’t stopping after a block or two, though, or even five. And secondary effects were kicking in now: People in other buildings, seeing the evacuation in progress — third-shift workers, early arrivals — were joining in the flight.

The search area was simply too large, and too busy. It was information overload, for the satellites and for the techs.

“This is fucked,” Lowry said. His hands flew over the keyboard, commanding the birds to widen their frames. “Aren’t kids supposed to just line up outside when there’s a fire drill? That’s how we did it at my school.”

“Dryden thought of that,” Gaul said.

“How would he know he had to? He didn’t know what these satellites can do.”

“He didn’t know,” Gaul said. “But he knew he didn’t know. Get it?”

“No,” Lowry said. He returned his attention to the monitors. To the nearest tech he said, “Set twenty-six to two-by-two kilometers. Slave the others to it. We can get him.”

“No you can’t,” Gaul said. He took out his cell phone and left the room again.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Mojave lay in meditative calm beneath the pink sky, waiting for dawn. Dryden kept the Jeep Cherokee at a pace to match the sparse traffic around him, running north out of Palmdale into the desert.

He and Rachel had taken the Jeep from a parking lot more than a mile away from the boarding school. Ten miles farther on they’d switched its license plate with that of another vehicle. Then they’d gone east across Simi Valley and the northern part of the San Fernando, and up through the canyons to the desert. Dryden had chosen the busiest roads available, as an extra precaution against being reacquired by the satellites.

For all that, he was only just now relaxing. Having no way of knowing the satellites’ capabilities, he hadn’t assumed the boarding school trick had fooled them. He’d prepared himself for every oncoming vehicle to suddenly spin out, automatic weapons blazing. For the entire drive he’d kept his mind strictly focused on response scenarios, if/then procedures he would use if needed, based on every form of attack he could anticipate — including from above. These plans had to be revised to fit each passing street.

At last confident that trouble would have arrived by now if it were coming, he allowed the scenarios to fade.

Rachel reacted visibly to the change, as if Dryden had turned down a blaring radio.

“How do you make yourself do that?” she asked. “How do you focus that much?”

“It’s an old trick. It comes with practice.”

They rode in silence for a minute. The desert and highway were still deep in gloom, but the San Gabriel Mountains ahead and to the left had begun to catch the sunrise — a skin of light sliding down over the peaks.

“The drugs they were using on you,” Dryden said. “Did you happen to catch what they were called?”

Rachel shook her head. “The blond man never really thought about the name. Like with his own name — it was already familiar to him.”

“Was it just one certain drug?”

Rachel nodded.

“And he gave it to you in a drip bag?”

Another nod.

“What color was it? The liquid.”

Rachel thought about it. “Mostly clear, but kind of blue, I guess. You could just barely see the color.”

“When they gave it to you, it put you to sleep within two or three minutes, right?”

“Yes.”

“And just before you fell asleep, your hands would start shaking, and you’d get a taste in your mouth, like mustard, for no obvious reason.”

She stared at him. “Yes.”

Dryden nodded. “There are a handful of drugs they use for sleep interrogation. That’s the most common one.” He looked at her. “Your memories will come back, but not right away. It’ll take a week, give or take a day, maybe.”

Her reaction to the news was complex. There was relief in her eyes, but it was replaced almost immediately by something close to fear. Anxiety, at least. Dryden thought he knew why.

They stopped at a Burger King in Rosamond. There was a mess of loose change in the Jeep’s console, including a few crumpled singles. It felt strangely wrong to take it, even from a vehicle they’d already stolen, but this would be the only time it was necessary. Soon enough they’d be done borrowing or stealing anything.

They ordered burgers and fries and took them to a seating area outside. In the sun’s glare, every piece of chrome in the parking lot gleamed like a blade.

Dryden realized he was seeing Rachel in the light for the first time. Her eyes were darker than he’d first thought — deep brown, like her hair. Other details stood out, unnoticeable before now: The girl was skin and bones. Her arms were covered with bruises of varying age — the telltale markings of the things she’d told him about: restraining straps, a swollen scar where the IV connector had been.

He thought of the boardwalk — the way she’d crashed into him at the junction. If he hadn’t been there, what would’ve happened? She might’ve gone north along the walk; she’d have seen for herself that south was a dead end. Maybe she’d have dropped to the beach and run north there. Either way they’d have caught her inside of two minutes.

She looked down at her tray. The wind whipped her hair around.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

“For what?”

“This. You being caught up in all of it. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s okay.”

“How can it be okay?” she asked. “You can’t go home. Anywhere you go, they’ll—”

“Hey.” He said it as gently as he could.

She stopped talking and held his gaze.

“You can hear what I’m thinking,” he said. “If I could go back to last night and not be there, would I?”

Her forehead furrowed. She looked down into the table again and spoke in a whisper. “Thank you.”

Desert birds wheeled and turned above the restaurant. They alighted and hopped around a few yards from the table.

Rachel watched them, managing the first smile Dryden had seen from her. It lit up her eyes. She threw the birds the last few fries from her carton; she’d inhaled the rest of her meal in a couple of minutes. Greasy fast food, but no doubt the best thing she’d eaten in two months. A minute later the birds were gone, sweeping away in high arcs over the parking lot and the scrubland. Rachel watched them, her eyes taking in the wide open space all around, the flat pan of the desert reaching away to the mountains. Dryden wondered what it must look like after two months stuck in a room.

“How did you escape?” he asked.

Rachel bit her lower lip. “I did something pretty bad. I mean, it was all I could think of, and if I said I regretted it, that wouldn’t be true, but … it was bad.”

Dryden waited.

“Last night the blond man gave me the drug at seven o’clock, like every night. I woke up a little before three in the morning — also like every night. But this time, after I woke up, he came in with another drug bag. That had never happened before. And it wasn’t the usual drug. This one he was thinking about. It was something called a barbiturate. There was enough of it in the bag to stop my heart. Which was the idea, I guess.”

“Christ.”

“I told him I knew what it was. He got flustered, but he didn’t stop what he was doing. So then I told him something else. Something I’d heard in the soldiers’ thoughts when they strapped me down for the night. The fact that it was true must’ve helped me sound convincing.” She was quiet a beat. “They had orders to restrain him and put him in a van with my body, and drive us both to a gravel pit thirty miles north of El Sedero. Along the way they were going to wrap his head in cling wrap to suffocate him, and then bury him right on top of me.”

Dryden imagined it. The guy standing there, hearing that, knowing it was true. Knowing the kind of man he worked for.

“What happened then?” he asked.

“I asked if he knew how the building’s security system worked. He said he didn’t. I told him I knew as much as the soldiers knew about it — which was everything. I said I’d help him escape if he’d let me go, once we were out. He agreed. He even meant it; I guess he knew he couldn’t lie to me. So we went. We got as far as the building’s back door. I gave him the code to disarm the door alarm. I didn’t tell him there were motion detectors behind the building, and that there was no way to shut them off.”

Dryden thought he knew what was coming. If she really didn’t feel good about it, he was prepared to feel good about it on her behalf.

“I told him we had to run,” she said. “We opened the door and counted to three, and then he went. He got about twenty feet before the lights came on and everything started blaring — around the time he realized I hadn’t followed him. He turned around and saw me still standing in the doorway, and he understood. But by then there was nothing he could do about it. He had no choice but to keep running. I stepped out and hid in a shrub beside the wall, and right after that the soldiers came out and went after him. I waited until they were out of sight before I made my own run, in the other direction, and I heard the gunshots about ten seconds later. I don’t know how much of a lead I got by doing all that. A minute, maybe. I saw their flashlights behind me pretty soon after the shots.”

Her voice had dropped to nearly a breath by the time she finished.

“I know he deserved it,” she said. “I just don’t like telling myself people deserve it.”

They got back on the road. They came to Highway 58 and took it west toward the San Gabriels. Toward Bakersfield. Climbing into the foothills, Dryden glanced in the rearview mirror. The outlying sprawl of the Mojave glittered in the sun like a spill of broken glass. Like the shattered ruin of a city.

Whatever the information is that’s in my head, those people are terrified of it. They’re scared the way people get when it comes to really big things. Like diseases. Like wars. It’s like there’s … something coming.

In the passenger seat, Rachel shivered. She glanced at Dryden.

“It’s scary waiting a week to find out what I know,” she said. “Whatever it is, maybe I could warn people about it, if I could remember.”

Dryden thought of the drug they’d given her. Thought of the places he’d seen it used — little cinder-block rooms in Cairo and Tikrit, the holds of ships anchored at Diego Garcia. For a few seconds his background seemed almost to be another passenger in the Jeep, leaning forward into the space between himself and Rachel. He ignored the feeling and focused on the drug again. Focused on the specifics he knew about it.

“There might be a faster way to get to your memories,” he said.

CHAPTER NINE

Bloom where you’re planted.

The saying had become a kind of mantra for Gaul, over the years. The moral equivalent of a shoehorn, he supposed, though he preferred not to think of it that way. It was an assessment of reality, that was all. An organizing principle.

He’d gotten the phrase from a college buddy who’d gone on to be a successful defense attorney. This old buddy had once cross-examined a fifteen-year-old girl who’d been raped at a fraternity party. The girl was poor southern white trash, and the defendants were Tulane students from wealthy families — one had a federal judge for an aunt. Gaul’s buddy had explained to him over drinks, years after the fact, the mindset it took to put a teenaged girl on the stand and rip her to pieces in front of her family. There was a meticulous strategy to it. There was no question she’d end up crying in front of the jury, but that was okay, as long as you made her look like a liar before that happened. Yes, the jury was going to feel protective of her, and yes, those feelings would kick into higher gear when the tears came, but as long as you tripped her with her own story first, as long as you did it just right, then it wouldn’t look like you’d bullied the poor little thing. If you played it perfectly, put a little English on it, as they say, then the crying would actually work against her. It would lend weakness to her testimony. There was all that to consider, while in the back of your head, humming like an old fridge, was the knowledge that your clients had actually done it. Had held her down in a hallway off the frat house’s kitchen, the music so loud she could feel the bass in her shoulders and hips where they were pressed to the floor, so loud that people in the next room couldn’t hear her screaming when all three of the defendants fucked her. It wasn’t your job to wonder why they’d done it. Heat of the moment, too much alcohol, alphas being alphas and all that. Neither was it your job to find it fake as all hell when they looked contrite in your office a week later, their eyes full of nothing but fear for their own futures. No, your job was to help them salvage those futures. And if that meant shredding a little girl on the witness stand — violating her again, your conscience would say if you let it — well, what of it? You had to do your job. You had to bloom where you were planted.

Gaul had found the notion as useful as a machete in jungle foliage whenever life had put him somewhere tricky. In career terms, there were all kinds of problems you could hack your way out of — and opportunities you could hack your way toward — if you had that idea in your grip. It even helped him bury old guilts, like that ugly splash in the water under Harvard Bridge, which sometimes came to him in the darkness before sleep.

Gaul had the saying in his head now, as he stood under the palms near the overlook, three hundred feet above Topanga Beach. The Pacific Coast Highway curved past, far below. Beyond, the ocean lay soft blue in the late morning haze. Gaul watched a black SUV swing off the highway onto the canyon road. It made its way up through the switchbacks and took the turn onto Overlook Drive, and came to a stop next to Gaul’s BMW. There were no other vehicles or people around.

The SUV’s back door opened, and a man named Dennis Marsh stepped out. He was fifty, trim, his hair just going thin. The wind coming off the ocean set his tie and the legs of his dress pants flapping. Marsh crossed to where Gaul stood, put his palms to the wooden top of the railing, and stared at the sea. No handshake.

Gaul didn’t ask how his flight from D.C. had been. Marsh had gotten here in the backseat of an F-16 trainer, the needle pegged at Mach 2, in order to have this conversation in person. There were things you shouldn’t talk about even on secure phone lines.

Gaul studied the man’s face. He’d known Dennis Marsh for more than twenty years. The guy was a realist when he had to be — he wouldn’t have become the secretary of Homeland Security otherwise — but he was very far from being a subscriber to the bloom where you’re planted philosophy. A fact that made Gaul just a little nervous, given the man’s stature.

If small people created problems, they could be dealt with easily enough. Like the idiot doctor who’d been overseeing Rachel in El Sedero. The man had taken a lunch meeting with a guy from the L.A. Times a week ago. Audio recordings of the conversation had picked up nothing damning, and it had turned out the reporter was the doctor’s cousin, but all the same, Gaul had opted to play it safe. Why leave a troubling door open even a crack? But such easy solutions weren’t on the table when you were dealing with someone at Marsh’s level.

“I heard from our friend,” Marsh said. His gaze stayed fixed on the ocean. “He explained what you want me to do.”

Gaul said nothing.

“There’s not a chance I’m doing this blind,” Marsh said. “You know that. You need to tell me what I’m dealing with here. I want to know everything.”

“I can’t tell you everything. I don’t know everything myself.”

“If I do what you’re asking, I’m risking a lot more than prison,” Marsh said. “I’m risking household-name status as a bad guy. Tell me.”

Gaul wanted to tell him to relax. Wanted to remind him that there were very large political boulders rolling and grinding around over this thing, and that among the men who wanted to see it resolved was Marsh’s boss, the one with the rose garden outside his house. Wanted to tell him, in short, that his cooperation was in no sense a fucking favor he could call in later on. Instead Gaul kept his voice respectful and said, “I appreciate the position I’m putting you in, Dennis. I’ll owe you for this.”

Marsh finally turned to face him. Zero tolerance for friendly bullshit in his expression. “Tell me.”

Gaul rested his elbows on the rail and looked down at the highway. How much to really give him? Where to start?

“I know parts of it already,” Marsh said. “I know it’s not really Sam Dryden you’re after. I know there’s a girl, and I know you had her in your custody for two months, and I know this is tied to research at Fort Detrick, more than a decade ago.” Marsh’s voice went quieter, as if the specks of people on the beach below might hear him. “I came out of military intel, Martin. All kinds of interesting watercooler talk in that field. I know about the animal testing at Detrick, way back. The gibbons. I’m aware there were human trials later, trying to get the same effect, and I’ve heard from more than one good source that it worked. Have I got all of it right so far?”

Gaul nodded without looking at him. He heard a little hiss of breath from the man in response.

“Christ,” Marsh whispered. Then: “Is she one of them? Is she a mind reader?”

Gaul kept his reaction hidden. Kept his jaw set and his eyes on the sweep of the ocean.

If you think all she can do is read minds, then your sources aren’t half as good as you imagine. Hearing thoughts is the least damn thing Rachel can do, when she gets in your head.

“Yes,” Gaul said. “She can hear thoughts.”

In its own temporary way, he supposed, that was the whole truth. Until her memory came back, Rachel would be limited to mind reading. That was a passive ability, like hearing, or feeling pain. The rest of her capabilities were active, focus-intensive skills. With her memory blocked, she didn’t even know she had them.

“So lay it out for me,” Marsh said. “What exactly is happening? What are you asking me to step into?”

For a moment Gaul didn’t respond. A bright yellow open-top Humvee went by, down on the highway. As it passed below the overlook, the three girls inside screamed laughter, the sound of it immediately washed away in the same wind that blew their long hair around. Gaul watched the vehicle slip away down the coast toward Santa Monica. What would it feel like to be that carefree? To not know how much the world was about to change.

“Martin?”

Gaul blinked. He turned back to Marsh and stood up from the rail.

“I won’t go into the details of what happened at Detrick,” Gaul said. “Except to say the research there ended five years ago, and the work was taken up by private interests instead. Defense contractors.”

“Plural?”

Gaul nodded. “Two of us. My company, Belding-Milner, along with Western Dynamics.”

Something flickered through Marsh’s expression at that. He looked like a chess player assessing some new arrangement of pieces on the board. Easy enough to guess what had struck him: Belding-Milner and Western Dynamics had been rivals forever. Bitter ones. Everybody knew that. Marsh’s eyes narrowed for a tenth of a second as he filed the news away.

“You both took over the research,” he said.

“We each took it over,” Gaul said. He watched Marsh pick up the subtle point of the wording.

“Each company working independent of the other, you mean. No sharing.”

“No sharing,” Gaul said. “I’m sure the government was happy enough to run it that way. In spite of what you hear, they’re okay with a little competition now and then.”

“So who won?”

Gaul looked down. He felt his jaw tighten. Bullshit for the sake of saving face had never much appealed to him. “The other guys. In five years our research has yielded almost nothing. Western Dynamics had success right from the start.”

Marsh waited for him to go on.

“As of now, they’re beyond just doing research. They’ve got a finished product in final trials.”

“What kind of product?” Marsh asked.

“People. I don’t mean test subjects — actual operatives. Loyal personnel.”

“And these operatives are … also mind readers.”

Gaul nodded.

Mind readers, among other things.

The operatives at Western Dynamics could technically do all the same things as Rachel, though that was like comparing junior high chess club kids to Gary Kasparov. Rachel was almost a god next to them.

“So where do you come into this?” Marsh asked.

“I come into it a few months ago, with a phone call from a good friend at Detrick. Head of a small working group following up on the old research there. He had information about a test subject from back then — a girl. The events that ended the research at Detrick were … traumatic. But this girl had not only survived them, she’d escaped. She’d been free all this time since then, five years, but there was a chance to … reacquire her. My friend wondered if Belding-Milner wanted to head up that effort.”

“And gain something you could use against your competition.”

“All’s fair.”

“She’s a kid, Martin. What were your people going to do with her?”

Bloom where we were planted.

“Nothing harsher than necessary. Most of the tests we had in mind could be done with a few drops of her blood, or functional MRI scans. But our first move was to set up narcotic interrogations. Her knowledge alone had to be worth looking into.”

“And?”

Gaul sighed. “She knew something, alright.”

“What did she know?”

Gaul was quiet a long time. Far to the southeast, a big yacht slid out of Marina del Rey, turning away into the haze.

“What did the girl know?” Marsh repeated.

Gaul told him. By the time he’d finished, three minutes later, Marsh’s face had paled a shade or two. A sheen of sweat sharpened the lines on his forehead.

“This is real?” Marsh asked. “This isn’t just some tech proposal someone worked up—”

“I’m told it’s standing by to go active anytime. Do you understand, then, why the girl can’t be left alive? Under the wrong circumstances, she could interfere with it. There would be serious problems. This is bigger than a pissing match between defense contractors, Dennis. My orders to kill her came down from on high. I have to follow them.”

Marsh nodded weakly. His mouth worked, his tongue trying to wet his lips.

“Are you on board with this?” Gaul asked. “Are you going to help me?”

Another nod, just perceptible. Marsh was staring past Gaul, his gaze taking in the spread of Los Angeles. Maybe he was seeing it in the light of what was coming.

“Then we’re done here,” Gaul said. “You know what to do.”

He didn’t wait for Marsh to nod again. He turned and crossed to his BMW, got in, and started it. He backed around in a semicircle, pointing the car’s nose downhill, then craned his head to look at Marsh again. The man was still standing there at the rail, lost in what he’d just learned. For a moment Gaul felt the same tinge of nervousness he’d had when Marsh first got out of the SUV. Just how much of a realist was the guy? How willing to play along? Then Marsh turned, his expression set with acceptance, and strode back to his vehicle.

That’ll have to do, Gaul thought. He took his foot off the brake and coasted down toward the canyon road.

CHAPTER TEN

The man behind the counter in the sporting goods store was looking at a magazine with naked women in it. Rachel couldn’t actually see the magazine — the man had it down behind the countertop, out of view — but she could more or less see the pictures in his head. There were lots of tattoos in the images. There were metal rings and spikes stuck through skin. Now and again the man would turn his attention on a woman in the store. Rachel could feel his eyes tracking over the the smooth lines of girls’ legs, following them up to the hems of their shorts. Over these mental pictures came his thoughts, crude and simple. They seemed almost like animal noises. Nice nice nice, fuck yeah …

Rachel tried to keep herself out of his sight as best she could. She stuck close to Sam as he pushed the shopping cart around. The sporting goods store was in Bakersfield. It was just past ten in the morning, and through the big glass wall up front, Rachel could see the parking lot and the city beyond, everything blazing in the sunlight.

Right there, parked at the near edge of the lot, was the used car they’d bought down the street. A Toyota something, a RAV4, she thought Sam had called it. It was old, but he was satisfied with how it ran. They’d left the stolen Jeep in a long-term parking lot at the airport and walked to the dealership from there — after first hitting a Payless to get Rachel a pair of sneakers. But before they’d done any of that, before they’d even reached Bakersfield, they’d driven up a dirt road in the mountains southeast of town. At the base of a pine tree in the middle of the woods, Sam had dug up a plastic box with three things inside it. First was an envelope containing ten thousand dollars in fifties and twenties. Next was a handgun and a box of bullets. Last was a cardboard sleeve with three sets of fake identities inside it. All of these had Sam’s picture but different names.

It helps to have friends in dark places, he had said.

Rachel had asked him why he had this stuff hidden up here. He’d explained that with his old job, he’d sometimes worked against very powerful people. In a perfect world, those people would never learn his name, but in the real world, stuff happened—shit happened was how he’d phrased it in his thoughts.

What I mean is, this isn’t the first time I’ve had to think about vanishing, he’d said.

Which had made her wonder about something: Was it strange that she’d run into someone — she had literally run into him — who was this good at keeping her safe from Gaul and his people? Wasn’t that a doozy of a coincidence?

On the heels of that thought came another, this one from somewhere deep in her mind: Had it been a coincidence?

She couldn’t imagine what else it could’ve been, but the question unsettled her.

They were standing in front of a shelf full of something called freeze-dried meals: foil packets with pictures of hikers on the fronts, labeled with dish names like Lasagna with Meat Sauce and Chicken Teriyaki with Rice.

“Fair warning,” Sam said. “This stuff’s all going to taste terrible. Very light to carry, though.”

He filled half the cart with them. The other half was already full of clothing, his size and hers. Atop the clothing were two items: a propane cookstove the size of a CD spindle, and a hand-pumped water purifier. Tucked into the space beneath the cart were two backpacks, two sleeping bags, and two pair of hiking boots. Everything they would need to stay in the woods for a week or more. By the time they emerged again, she would know who she really was — if they didn’t find out sooner.

A middle-aged woman walked by. Rachel caught the fragmented spill of her thoughts: Still like the gray one, but … what’s over here? No, those are men’s.

Way in the background, like a radio turned down but endlessly droning, the man at the checkout was still staring at the dirty magazine.

Sam pushed the cart to the next aisle. Rachel followed. She’d found she didn’t like getting too far away from him. Compared to everyone else she’d been near today — even people in other cars on the highway — Sam’s thoughts were unique. No matter what he was thinking at any one moment, there was a feeling that was always there, a feeling that seemed to be pointed right at her. It made her think of the warmth near a fireplace. That was how Sam’s thoughts felt. Like protective heat. Like arms around her.

They were heading north through the city, ten minutes later, when it happened. They had two more stops to make: an electronics store here in Bakersfield, to buy an audio recorder, and a specialty shop in the city of Visalia, an hour away. What they needed in Visalia were two unusual items — Sam had spent ten minutes on a pay phone, calling places to ask about them. These items would be for emergency use only; Rachel hoped like crazy they wouldn’t need them.

Sam made a left toward a Best Buy half a mile down a cross street. The moment he’d completed the turn, Rachel felt her breath catch. It was like someone had driven an elbow hard into her chest. A choked little sound came out of her mouth.

Sam turned to her. Concern flared in his thoughts.

“What’s wrong? Rachel?”

She forced out a breath, sucked in another.

“I’m fine,” she said. She heard how she sounded, though. She didn’t sound fine. She didn’t really feel fine, either. For another second she had no idea what she did feel. Fear, it seemed like, but why? What was she afraid of?

Then her eyes locked onto it. Just north of the Best Buy, rising out of the city sprawl: a cell phone tower. There was nothing special about it. It was just standing there, its red beacon lights hardly visible in the sun. Yet she could barely make herself look at the thing. It was like staring at a close-up picture of an insect face. Everything about it made her skin prickle.

“Rachel, what is it?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

She didn’t want to tell him. He’d think she was crazy.

Sam put the Toyota’s blinker on and pulled off the road into a strip mall. He put it in park.

“Hey,” he said. His voice was soft. The fireplace feeling was stronger than ever. She looked away from the tower and let that sensation drive the fear away.

“You can tell me,” Sam said. “Whatever it is.”

Rachel nodded. She took a deep breath and explained it the best she could. She expected to hear judgment in his mind when she finished, but there was none there. All he did was stare at the tower and try to make sense of what she’d described.

“Maybe the drugs just made me paranoid,” Rachel said.

Sam was still looking ahead through the windshield.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“What else is there? Why would I be afraid of something like that?”

Now that she’d kept her eyes off of it this long, she found herself unwilling to even glance at it again.

“It sounds like a conditioned response,” Sam said.

“What’s that?”

“It means if there was something you were afraid of before you lost your memory — something you were really afraid of — you’d still be scared of it now, even if you couldn’t remember why.”

The word Pavlov flickered through his thoughts.

“But even before I lost my memory,” Rachel said, “why would I have been scared of cell phone towers?”

“Maybe we’ll know soon enough.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The last good time Owen Carter could remember having, before the Gravel Man started talking in his head, was a day last year when he took his grandfather’s pickup out into the desert and found a turtle, and drew sketches of it all afternoon while it sunned itself. There was peace in drawing. He’d known that since high school, ten years back. He liked the simplicity of the task: Make the drawing look as much like the real thing as you could. Make it feel like the real thing even, the way it felt to be looking at it in person. It was work he could escape into when other things in his life got too hard to get his head around. Which happened all the time.

He’s not stupid, he had heard his grandfather say once, years back. Owen had been coming in from the pole barn, his hands greasy from changing out the gearbox on an old Suburban, and he’d caught the end of the conversation from outside the screen door. Grandpa was talking to his friend Carl, who ran the grocery store in Cold Spring, a few miles down the road. That was where Owen always bought his sketch pads and his pencils.

He just needs things explained a certain way, Grandpa said, and nothing distracting him. He can fix anything under a hood as good as I can.

What’s gonna happen to him if you kick it tomorrow, Roger? Carl asked. I mean you’re only sixty-eight, but shit happens. Is he gonna run the shop by himself? Is he gonna handle the money, and the overhead, and upkeep on the equipment? Is he gonna handle these dumbshit rich pricks that have a breakdown on the highway and get towed in, and piss and moan about the labor costs because they’re having a bad day and they need someone to bitch at? And that’s a moot point, anyway, ’cause you need state certification to run the shop, and I don’t see how he’s going to have that. Carl’s voice got a little nicer then. I’m just saying someone’s gonna have to look after him. And it ain’t gonna be me and Tonya. We’re going down to the Gulf Coast after I retire. Look, I get that you don’t want to think about this, but you’re running blindfolded on what happens to him when you’re gone. You need to have a plan.

Owen had stood there outside the door, waiting to hear what Grandpa would say back to all that, but Grandpa hadn’t said anything. The man only let out a long breath and then Owen heard his chair creak, the way it did when he leaned it back and put his hands through his hair.

Now and again that conversation would come back to Owen, when he was having his cereal in the morning, or cleaning up the tools in the shop.

What happens to him when you’re gone?

Memories like that were just the sort of thing that made him want to draw something.

That day in the desert, with the turtle, had ended with the kind of sunset you sometimes saw in magazines. Against the red sky there had been a few high, feathery clouds, and an old jet trail flattening out and unshaping itself in the wind way up there. Owen had made a few quick sketches of that, and then gotten in the pickup to head back to the house, but before he could turn the ignition he heard a voice in his head say, I think I’ve got one.

He stopped. His hand fell away from the key. He turned in his seat and looked into the truck bed, as if the voice had come from there, though he already knew it hadn’t.

Mark it, the voice said. Off-axis three seven … two? Mod track’s pretty strong, but try to dial it in.

It was a man’s voice, coming to him as if from far away, and it was rough and broken, like the man was speaking through a mouthful of gravel.

That’s a little better, the voice said. It sounded much closer now.

Okay, good, yeah. Now just step out. Yeah, leave the room, I’ve got it.

Owen felt his heart banging against his rib cage. Was he going crazy? Was this how it started?

The voice spoke again, as loud as if the man were in the truck’s cab with him, though still garbled and pebbly.

Tell me your name.

“What?” Owen found himself saying aloud.

Tell me your name. Don’t be afraid.

Sweating now. His breathing kicked up into high gear, trying to keep pace with his heartbeat.

You’re not crazy, the gravel voice said. I promise. Please tell me your name.

In a single convulsive move, Owen grabbed the ignition key again and turned it. When the old pickup’s engine rolled over, he goosed it hard, dumped it into drive, and floored it. The truck fishtailed a little and then the tires bit into the desert two-track and Owen was racing along.

You can’t ignore me. You can’t get away from me, either.

Owen stabbed the ON button for the radio and cranked the volume high. The gospel station out of Cold Spring washed out at him. He punched one of the presets and got Ozzy Osbourne singing “Flying High Again,” and turned the volume dial as far up as it would go.

But even over the music, and the scream of the engine and the rattle of the old truck’s suspension, the voice was still there.

You don’t have to be scared of me.

There was maybe a minute or two when Owen almost believed he could make it go away. It wasn’t the music or any other noise that helped; it was the hard concentration it took to drive this fast in the desert. The quick thinking he had to do when little turns and cross-ruts would come sliding into his headlights, and he’d have only half a second to brake or veer. It was the kind of thinking that normally wore him out in no time at all. It was wearing him out right now, too, but it also seemed to push the voice away, if only a little.

Then he saw his grandfather’s house, a mile ahead. A single pool of light in the wide open desert. Owen couldn’t come racing into the dooryard at this speed, with the radio going loud. How would he explain that behavior? It’d been years since he’d really gotten in trouble for anything, but sometimes he’d do something dumb and he could tell Grandpa was disappointed in him. Even with those things, though, Grandpa always understood that he hadn’t meant to do wrong. That helped. But driving like crazy for no reason at all — no reason he could talk about, anyway — would be a different kind of deal. He wasn’t sure what Grandpa would say about that.

A quarter mile out, Owen dropped his speed to twenty and killed the radio. He’d no sooner done it than the voice came back as strong as ever.

Tell me your name and I’ll leave you alone for a while. I promise.

Owen could see Grandpa in the pole barn, the big sodium lights turned on inside. Grandpa was working on the tractor Mr. Seward had brought over last Friday.

Tell me your name. That’s all I want for now.

“Owen,” he said. It came out of him like a cry of pain.

The rest of it, too. Your whole name.

This time he didn’t even get as far as saying it. All he did was think it — his whole name like it appeared when he signed up for a fishing license — and just like that the voice repeated it back to him.

Owen Carter. Thank you, Owen Carter.

The voice stayed away all that evening, through dinner and through the TV shows Owen watched, while Grandpa read and checked the computer for e-mails from customers. Owen went to bed at eleven thirty. He turned the light off right away; he’d found himself holding tight to the idea that if he could get to sleep quickly, everything would be fine in the morning. A good sleep could make a lot of troubles go away.

He’d been lying in the dark no more than thirty seconds when that hope came to an end.

Hello, Owen.

No Ozzy Osbourne to distract him here. No wheel ruts or turns to grab his attention either.

“Stop,” Owen whispered. “Please.”

He was sure he was only talking to himself, but pleading felt like the thing to do, all the same.

This doesn’t have to be bad for you, you know. It can be good, if you don’t fight me. Here, I’ll show you.

Owen was breathing fast again. He wasn’t sure he’d ever felt fear like this. Confusion, yes. There had been lots of confusion in his life, and it was always a little scary, but this—

All at once, something happened. Some change of his mood. It came over him so quickly, he didn’t recognize what it was right away. And then he did.

“What in hell?” he whispered.

Go with it, the gravelly voice said. There’s nothing wrong with feeling good.

Owen had felt this way many times in his life, though in recent years the intensity of it had faded a bit. When was the last time it’d felt this strong? Maybe when he was twenty or so.

Beneath his underpants, he felt his erection swelling.

It’s good, right?

Owen only nodded. His mind was filling up with pictures of girls now. He’d never been with one for real, had never even seen one with her clothes off in person, but he’d seen pictures and videos. Back in high school his friend Bobby Campbell had shown him his father’s stash of magazines and DVDs. Bobby was a good guy, and had made Owen copies of three of those discs, and all these years later Owen still had them hidden behind the loose paneling board inside his closet. How long had it been since he’d watched one of those? A couple years, he thought, but the images came back to him now, and so did the feelings those movies had given him.

Go with it. Go on.

It felt real. Not like watching a movie now, but like the real thing — at least like the dreams he’d had a few times in his teens. Like there was a girl here with him. Sliding around on top of him, warm and soft and smooth. Tearing her clothes off, and — oh Lord—

He was still breathing fast, but fear no longer had any part in it. He had his shorts down and his hand around himself in one quick move, and he finished in no more than twenty seconds. He lay there panting afterward, the images in his head still there but fading, every other thought a distant wisp in the dark.

Good for you. You can have that every night if you don’t fight me.

Almost in spite of himself, Owen felt the question rise in his thoughts: What if he did fight? What then?

We’ll see about that tomorrow, the voice said.

The next day they saw about it. Grandpa went into town for groceries, and when Owen was still watching the dust from his tires settle in the yard, the voice spoke up.

Think of something your grandfather cares about. Some object of his, there in the house.

“What?”

Do it.

Owen wanted to resist, but even the suggestion was hard to ignore. The answer popped into his mind a second later. He thought of the porcelain cat statue on Grandpa’s nightstand. The one Grandpa had bought for Grandma Lilly when they were just kids themselves, way back.

That’s perfect. Go into his room.

“I never go in there,” Owen said.

Go. Trust me.

Owen felt uneasy but did as he was told. He crossed the living room to the threshold of his grandfather’s bedroom. He could see the cat statue already. A slender little thing, standing upright, the cat frozen in the middle of licking a raised paw.

Knock it over. Shatter it on the floor.

“What are you talking about? I’m not doing that.”

You are. You will.

Owen turned his back on the bedroom and went to the front door. Enough of this. Maybe he was crazy, but he wasn’t about to be a bad person because of it. If he was going to have a voice in his head the rest of his life, well, he’d get through it. He’d gotten through plenty of other things.

He shoved open the screen door and had taken three steps into the yard when the feeling hit. It came on fast again, like the good feeling the night before, but that was all the two feelings had in common.

This one seemed to grab his stomach and twist it. It wasn’t quite pain — not physical pain like from a cut. It was deeper than that. Harder to understand. Not hard to feel, though.

He saw Grandpa standing next to Grandma’s coffin at the funeral, ten years ago. Standing there wiping at his eyes while people came and went, putting a hand on his shoulder and trying to say nice things. He saw Grandpa later that same day, in his bedroom with the curtains pulled, lying there curled on his side, the sunlight filtered ugly blue through the heavy fabric. I’ll come out and fix you dinner in a bit, he had said. His voice sounded awful, like he was sick. Just give me some time, alright? Go out and take a walk or something. Lying in there trying not to full-out cry, and only partway succeeding.

It happened because of you, the gravel voice said.

“What?”

Her heart giving out like that. It was because of you. Because of how hard it was living with you.

That was bullshit.

Still the feeling inside him, deeper than pain and somehow worse, held its grip. It tightened. Twisted harder.

She died because of you. And he was crying because of you. Because how was he going to go on after that, without her and yet still having to put up with you?

“Shut up,” Owen said. “You’re lying.”

His whole life after that was going to be miserable. Nothing to look forward to anymore, and still all the work and drudgery of looking after you. And the fear, too. The fear of what would become of you when he was gone.

“It’s not true,” Owen said. He was gritting his teeth. Spitting the words. “You’re only me. You’re my own head screwing with me.”

Afraid not, the voice said, and a second later the feeling in his gut seemed to blossom and spread. Like a balloon full of poison had just burst in his blood. The images became more real, the way the naked girl on top of him had become more real. There was Grandpa at the graveside. Grandpa in his bedroom in the ugly light, making whimpering noises like a sick dog.

All because of you, Owen.

It didn’t seem to matter anymore that it was bullshit. He felt it anyway. Felt it all being his fault, all the pain Grandpa had inside him that he could never talk about. All the things that made his shoulders hunch down like he was hauling weight.

Go back in and break the statue. I promise this will all go away.

“He got it for her. He keeps it because of her.”

He can glue it back together. It’ll be fine.

“Why do you want me to break it?”

So I know you’ll do what I say.

“Give me something else to do.”

No. Go break it. You can tell him you just bumped into it.

“I never go in there. I won’t be able to explain what I was doing.”

You’ll have to make something up. That’s your business. Just go in there now and break it.

Owen made no move to do so. He stood there, his back to the screen door, the dirt yard blurring in his tears.

You want to feel this way all day? All night, too? You want to feel it so bad you don’t even get to sleep? I can make that happen. You know I can.

He knew. You didn’t have to be smart to know that much. His tears overran his eyes and spilled.

Go, Owen. The voice was soft now. Talking to him like a friend who cared. You’ll feel better as soon as you’ve done it. It’ll only take you a second.

Nodding now. Feeling his resistance let go. He wiped at his eyes, turned, and went back to the door.

In the weeks that followed, there were other tests. Most weren’t as bad as the one with the cat statue, but some were scarier, because they made one thing clear: He wasn’t going crazy. Whoever — or whatever — the Gravel Man was, Owen’s brain wasn’t making it up.

He knew it for sure two weeks after breaking the statue. It was another time when his grandfather had gone into town. The voice sent Owen into the desert on foot, with a hand shovel, to a place three hundred yards due south of the pole barn. There was a spot where three Joshua trees made a triangle, ten feet apart from each other. The voice told him to dig right in the center of the shape, and within thirty seconds he hit something hard that sounded like plastic.

It turned out to be a long rectangular case, and though he knew what it was even before he opened it, Owen took a sharp breath when he saw what was inside.

Have you ever held a gun before, Owen?

“I’m not allowed.”

You can hold this one. It’s called an MP-5. It’s already loaded and ready to shoot. The safety isn’t even on. Pick it up.

It was heavier than he’d imagined. His arms shook a little. Maybe that was just his nerves. He brought it to his shoulder the way people did on TV.

Fire it. Shoot at the dirt twenty feet away. No one will hear.

He hesitated.

You’re not going to fight me on something this easy, are you, Owen?

He took a breath and pulled the trigger. The gun kicked hard against his grip — he almost dropped it.

You have to hold it tight. That’s why we’re practicing. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you all about how to use it.

The worst test of all came four months later. This time Grandpa was up in Cedarville looking for a new chainfall. He would be gone for hours.

Get on the quad and take it across the road, the Gravel Man said. Go straight north into the desert. We’ll talk while you ride.

Owen got the four-wheeler out of the pole barn and headed north. It was state land up here, this side of the road, no houses or two-tracks, not even Jeep trails. Just empty desert with a few hills and canyons and a lot of wide open nothing. Owen rode, topping one rise after another, his grandfather’s house falling farther and farther behind.

I need to tell you about something important. A basic rule of life that you probably don’t understand yet.

“What is it?”

The way most people deal with pain. The way they pass it off onto others.

Owen had no idea what that meant.

I know you don’t. It’s okay. I’ll explain. You must have had bullies in school, right?

“Yes.”

I’ll bet most of them were getting their asses kicked at home by their fathers. That was how the pain came to them. And maybe they could’ve just taken it in, absorbed it, dealt with it somehow. But they didn’t. They went to school and passed the pain off to you. That’s what people do. Not just bullies, either. There was a girl you liked, right? The summer before ninth grade. Carrie?

Owen had long since stopped being surprised the Gravel Man knew these things. You couldn’t keep secrets from someone who could get inside your head.

“Yes,” he said.

She liked you, too, didn’t she? Isn’t that why you still remember her? Because for those two months you had fun together. She liked working on cars, the same as you, and you weren’t so nervous around her, the way you were with everyone else.

Yes, he supposed Carrie had really liked him. So what, though. What could’ve really become of it, over time? How much chance had it had?

You got back to school that fall and you hung out with her for one day, and that was all it took for her to see what everyone else thought of it. How the girls with the nice clothes laughed at her for being with you. How everyone laughed. And the next morning you went to her locker to say hi, and her friends were there with her, and she looked at you and made that deadpan face. Remember what she said back to you, instead of hi?

Yes, he remembered. He was never going to forget that.

She said yep. You said hi and she said yep, with that face that really said, What are you doing here? Why do you think you’re good enough for me? And she walked away with her friends, and that was that.

“Why are you talking about this?”

Because she passed the pain off to you, like a bully. The pain she would’ve felt if she’d stayed with you and endured all their teasing. Or the pain she’d have felt if she tried to sit you down and explain the whole thing, how shallow that would’ve made her feel. The easiest thing for her was to make that face and say yep and walk away. No pain for her then. All of it landed on you instead. That’s what people do, Owen. That’s the axis the world spins on, and you need to understand it.

“Why?”

Because you’re going to do it, too. You’re going to pass your pain off onto someone else. You’re going to learn how, today.

A mile later he topped a final rise and saw a lime green convertible out ahead on the plain. As he closed in on it, he saw a low, dark shape tucked down behind the car’s back end. All at once the shape jumped, and Owen saw that it was a man sitting there, hunched on the ground. The man’s head turned toward the sound of the quad, and then he sprang up — not entirely up, though. There was something wrong with the man. He couldn’t seem to stand up straight.

In the last fifty yards Owen saw what the problem was. The man’s wrists were tied together and bound by a chain to the car’s bumper. His ankles were bound together, too, though they were free of the car. He moved like a fish on a line, his whole body jerking around in big arcing jolts. He had his feet on the ground and he was bent over at the waist, watching as Owen stopped ten feet away and killed the four-wheeler’s engine.

“Jesus, you’re a lifesaver,” the man said. He nodded at the quad. “You got tools on that thing? Something to take this bumper off with?”

Up close, the man was barely a man at all. He looked like a college kid. He had dark hair, and he wore shorts and a tight T-shirt. There was a little barbed-wire tattoo going around his upper arm.

You don’t have to say anything to him, the Gravel Man said. You’re not going to help him.

“Did you hear me?” the kid asked.

Owen nodded. “I don’t have any tools.”

“Well, just call the cops, then.” His voice was full of fear. “The guys that did this might come back. Tell me you got a phone.”

Owen only stared. This was another moment that didn’t take a smart person to understand. He knew this much: Like the buried gun had been left just for him, this young man tied to the car had been left here. Just for him.

“Hey!” the kid said. “Are you listening?”

“What is this?” Owen whispered. He heard a shake in his own voice.

Go around the front of the car to the passenger side. On the floor in front of the seat there’s a claw hammer.

Owen understood what he was meant to do. A wave of fear ran up his back, making him flinch.

“I can’t do this,” he said.

You can start with his head. The screaming won’t last very long that way.

Owen’s knees threatened to give. The kid was screaming something at him, red-faced angry now, but the meaning of the words didn’t come through. Owen’s own pulse was thudding in his ears, and his own voice in his head was muttering No, no, no, no.

The Gravel Man’s voice was louder, though.

You’ve seen that I can make you hurt, but I can make it worse than it was before. Worse than anything you ever felt.

“I can’t do it.”

Get the hammer and beat him to death with it.

“I can’t!” Owen screamed.

The young man fell silent at that. He looked confused. That was the last thing Owen saw before the feeling dropped on him like an engine block.

He saw his grandmother’s grave again, but this time Grandpa wasn’t there. There was no one there but himself, and the ground before the headstone was torn open in a deep gouge that exposed the coffin. Down there, framed by dirt and clay, the coffin lid creaked.

Your fault, Owen. Your fault, your fault, your fault—

“I can’t do it, no matter what you make me feel.”

I can make it hurt. So much hurt you’ll have to pass it off onto him. You won’t have any choice.

“I can’t.”

You will.

Before Owen could say any more, the coffin lid swung open, and in the same awful moment he found himself pitching forward and down, off balance, into the pit. He could hear himself screaming, but the sound wasn’t enough to block out the Gravel Man’s voice.

Do you know the word putrefaction, Owen? Do you know it, dummy?

He saw her bones, dirty white in the sun, half a second before he landed on her ribs and snapped them like pretzel sticks. His hands and knees splashed down in the bottom of the coffin, two inches deep in something wet. Wet but thick like gravy.

Putrefaction is what happens after you die, even if they embalm you. Putrefaction means you turn to soup.

Screaming louder now. He reared up, and his hands came up to cover his eyes, but they were thick and dripping with—

Soup. People turn to soup. Your grandmother is soup because it killed her to have to raise you—

How he got back onto the quad, he didn’t know. He was aware of the young man screaming again and rattling the chain, no longer mad but simply terrified. Owen saw all that and then his hand was on the ignition and the four-wheeler was roaring, and a second later he was off. He saw the desert blurring past. He felt the wind searing his face. The young man and the lime green car were far behind him, and—

And what was this? The Gravel Man’s voice had lost some of its hold on him. It was only faint now, barely getting to him. Hadn’t that happened once before? That first night in the desert, driving fast in the pickup, concentrating hard on the ground rolling through his headlights. Wasn’t that all it took? He gave the quad everything. He couldn’t even see his speed through the vibration and the tears. He didn’t care. Faster. Just go faster. He felt his control of the machine slipping away. Felt it want to flip out from under him with every little jarring dip in the ground. That didn’t matter. The distraction was working, that was what mattered. The Gravel Man was speaking, but Owen couldn’t make out the words.

In the next instant he crested a rise and found himself airborne. His stomach heaved upward and his shoulders clenched. Then the wheels came down and the shocks compressed and the chassis slammed against the undercarriage, and his hands took over and killed the throttle and worked the brakes.

He was atop the next rise by the time he stopped. His breath was ragged, and the engine was growling low and guttural.

He turned and looked back the way he’d come from. Over the swells of the land he could see the convertible half a mile back. The young man had twisted around to stare at him. His face was a tiny white circle in the sun.

You can’t get away from me. It’s not even worth trying.

“Please,” Owen said.

You know what I want. You know what I’ll do to you if I don’t get it. I can still make it worse. I can keep you in the soup as long as I want to. Take a few minutes to think about it. Our friend isn’t going anywhere.

The voice went silent.

There was no sound but the low rumble of the quad’s engine and the ringing of blood in Owen’s ears.

When he breathed in, he could still taste the air inside the coffin. Like the smell when a rat died in a wall somewhere in the house, and there was no way to find it to get rid of it. He looked at his hands. They were clean and dry, but he could still feel the thick liquid coating them, dripping through the gaps between his fingers.

He slid off the quad and sank to the ground next to it. He crossed his arms and gripped his own shoulders and began rocking forward and back at the waist. He hadn’t done that since he was very young — kids at school had teased him to death for it — but here it was, back again. He didn’t fight it.

When he rolled the quad back up to the convertible and cut the engine, the kid didn’t say anything. He only stared at Owen, his eyes wary.

Owen went around to the passenger door. The claw hammer was there in front of the seat. He leaned down and got it, and when the kid saw it, a kind of nervous hope seemed to fill his face. Like Owen had found a tool to help him with after all. Then the kid met his eyes and saw what was there, and he drew away like a chained-up animal. He made sounds that weren’t quite words — or if they were words, they might have been please and no. His bound-together feet slipped out from under him and he thrashed his body around.

Owen stood above him with the hammer down at his side.

“I don’t mean it,” he said.

He rode back up to the spot two days later, when Grandpa went into town for brake pads. The convertible was gone, and where the young man had bled, there was only a scoured patch of ground. A good bit of the desert topsoil had been raked up and taken away.

Three months had passed since then. Every night at bedtime, the Gravel Man visited and made the girls in Owen’s memory come to life. It was always good — there was no denying that — but whenever the nice feelings faded and he was alone again, the same thoughts always came to him. They circled like ghosts in the dark of his bedroom.

Where was all this going?

What was it for?

To those questions, the Gravel Man never offered any answers.