Runner

CHAPTER TWELVE

It was raining when Holly Ferrel arrived at Amarillo Children’s Medical Center. The car pulled under the overhang at the entrance, and two of the three men with her — the two seated on the passenger side, front and back — got out fast. From her position in back, Holly couldn’t see their heads, but she knew they were sweeping their gazes over the geography surrounding the hospital’s entry. She could see their hands ready to go under their suit coats for the sidearms holstered there. She could see their posture, tense and wired, the embodiment of her own anxiety.

One of them gave the roof a double pat with his fingertips; only then did the driver put the car in park.

“Clear,” the driver said to her. He said it the way a ticket taker at a movie theater might say “Enjoy the show.” Every step in the process was routine — to him and to her. It’d been going on for weeks.

One of the others came around and opened the door for her. The two of them followed her as far as the entrance, then took up positions outside as she went in. She liked to tell herself the fear stayed outside with them. That it was like an overcoat she could hang up at the door and not think about again until it was time to go home. Some days it almost worked.

Sixty seconds later, and five stories up, Holly passed through another door. An engraved steel sign beside it read ONCOLOGY.

She didn’t go straight to her office. She nodded hello to the nurses on duty at the station, crossed to the north-wing hallway, and went to the third doorway on the right. The door was wide open. Even before reaching it, she saw the dim room inside strobing with familiar light. She came to it, leaned in, and knocked on the frame.

Ten feet away, Laney Miller looked up from the video game on her laptop. Her eyes brightened.

“Hi, Holly.”

Laney’s voice, soft and raspy, reminded Holly of a teenaged girl who’d just spent a week singing lead in the high school musical. For a second the awful math swam into Holly’s thoughts: the odds against Laney ever doing that. The odds against her becoming a teenager at all. Holly buried the notion before her face could register it.

She crossed to the bed, leaned down, and kissed Laney’s forehead beneath the pink knit cap that kept her scalp warm.

“How do you feel today?” Holly asked.

Laney managed half a smile. “Same.”

So many things going on in that face, in that tone. I don’t want to lie to you, but I also don’t want to make you feel bad. I know you’re doing everything you can.

Holly returned the smile. “Same is better than worse, right?”

One of her professors at NYU had told her doctors weren’t supposed to get attached. Not very attached, anyway. That was better left to nurses. Her attending physician during her residency at Anne Arundel, in Annapolis, had said something similar. In the decade since, Holly had never taken the advice.

Laney was playing the video game again. Its name slipped Holly’s mind, but she was familiar with how it worked: The player existed in a 3-D world made up of small, discrete cubes — cubes of grassy earth, exposed dirt, sand, and rock. You could dig shafts deep into the ground or into the sides of cliffs, and use the freed material — also in the form of cubes — to build things with. For three days now, Laney had been creating a replica of Egypt’s Giza Plateau in the game. The three largest pyramids and the Sphinx. It was absorbing work. Which qualified it as a godsend.

“I found a new Neil deGrasse Tyson video on YouTube,” Laney said. “He was talking about Europa — that’s one of Jupiter’s moons. He said the whole thing is covered with ice, but under the ice there’s an ocean of liquid water, and there might be life down there.”

Before her time here, Laney had been about as serious an astronomer as a sixth grader could be. She had shown Holly pictures from her blog, of herself and her little sister at the Hayden Planetarium in New York. Once Laney had even been to the Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona. What she’d liked most of all, though, was just lying on the rooftop deck of her home, in farm country north of Tulsa. It’s a long way from city lights, she had told Holly. It’s dark enough that you can see satellites going over, if you watch long enough. They don’t blink or anything. They look just like stars, except they move. They slide right across the sky in a minute or so.

Holly’s phone beeped with a text message. She took it out and looked at it.

Karen Simonyi: Lab just sent the new numbers for Laney. Not what we hoped for.

Holly kept her expression blank. From Laney’s point of view, it might’ve been a text about dinner plans. Still, when Holly met the girl’s eyes, it was possible to imagine she knew otherwise — to imagine Laney could tell what she was thinking.

Holly almost shivered at that idea.

That all too familiar idea.

Laney looked puzzled. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Sorry, just spacing out.”

The girl offered another smile, this one a little closer to full. “Doctors aren’t allowed to space out. Too many responsibilities.”

“That’s why we space out.”

Holly kissed her forehead again and left the room.

Two minutes later she was standing at her office window, looking out over the Texas flatlands in the rain. The numbers for Laney were on her computer screen. She’d looked them over twice. She leaned her head against the windowpane. Far below, one of her bodyguards walked out under the entry overhang. He turned and surveyed the road in both directions, then headed back to the door. He did this several times per hour.

Holly went to her desk chair and sank into it. She shut her eyes. In the silence were all the memories that always came to her. Like old acquaintances. These days, just about anything could trigger them. Could send her back to when everything had gone wrong — to when it could’ve gone right if she’d done things differently. If she’d been stronger.

She squeezed her eyes more tightly shut. Felt the pressure against her eyeballs. Saw little pops and flashes of light in the black. She’d found long ago that this helped her deal with the other feeling — the sense that regret could be a physical thing. That it could stand behind you with its hand on your back, and that sometimes it could reach inside you and clutch your heart in its grip.

“Rachel,” she whispered. She braced her elbows on the desk and put her face into her palms, and the name echoed in her thoughts as if she’d spoken it in a catacomb.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Evening came to the forest and brought with it a change of soundtrack, from chaotic birdsong to the sedate rhythm of a billion insects. Dryden sat on the small porch of the cabin and watched the shadows deepen among the sequoias. Through the open door he could hear Rachel breathing softly in her sleep. If she began speaking, it would take only seconds to step inside and switch on the audio recorder next to her.

The cabin, a simple one-room structure, was an old Fish and Game Department outpost Dryden had found while backpacking, years earlier. Department field workers probably stayed in it a few nights a year; the rest of the time it was left unlocked for the use of any backcountry hiker that happened by. No harm in that — there was nothing of value kept inside. Dryden sat with his back against the exterior wall, waiting for answers to emerge from Rachel’s dreams.

For the first hour that she’d slept, Dryden had sat on the floor next to her sleeping bag, though for reasons that had little to do with listening in on her. He was concerned with keeping her from hurting herself: The drug they’d used on her worked by inhibiting something called REM atonia, a kind of natural sleep paralysis — the body’s own countermeasure against sleepwalking. Under the drug, that paralysis was blocked. Subjects would act out their dreams: moving their limbs, which wasn’t helpful for interrogators, and moving their lips, which was.

Sleep interrogation wasn’t especially new. Dryden had heard firsthand accounts of the practice going back forty years or more, with older and less sophisticated narcotics. The principle had always been the same, though: Get the subject dreaming, get him talking, and then interact with him. Try to influence the dream by suggestion. Dryden had seen interrogators sit at bedsides and whisper in Farsi or Arabic, pretending to be a subject’s brother or father or son. Subtlety was everything. Dreams were fragile, evanescent things; the surest way to end one was to let the subject realize he was dreaming.

Rachel had less than the normal dose of the drug in her system right now, but there was no question she still had some of it left in her. It took forever for the kidneys to filter the stuff out of the blood. The subjects Dryden had seen during his years with Ferret had always been tied to their beds for at least one more night after their last interrogation session. In almost all cases they moved and talked that extra night, if only a little. Sometimes the interrogator would try to get a bit more out of them on those occasions; why not?

Dryden turned and looked in on Rachel. She lay on one side with the sleeping bag pulled up around her chin.

So many questions. Who was she, really? Where had she come from, before her time in that building in El Sedero? Did she have a family somewhere? Did she have anyone? Rachel herself had rattled these questions off before lying down, and then she’d surprised Dryden.

Don’t ask me any of those things in my sleep. Like you said, if this works at all, it’ll be just barely. You might only have time for a question or two. I can wait a week to find out who I am. Just ask about the other stuff.

When she’d said it, the fear beneath her expression had been palpable. Above the edge of her sleeping bag, her face was relaxed now. Soft features, untroubled. The face of a child, at last. Part of Dryden hoped she’d just sleep through the night. She sure as hell deserved to.

Less than a hundred yards from the cabin, a jay scolded and flew from a low branch. Dryden turned fast and studied the place it had flown from. He watched for movement, more out of instinct than any real fear that Gaul could have tracked them here. Dryden’s precautions had been a few degrees beyond paranoid, even under these circumstances.

For starters, there was nothing to link him to this location. His hiking trips had always been personal outings, never related to his military service — wilderness training or anything else on record. Of all the documents in Dryden’s past for Gaul to dig up, there could be nothing to indicate he’d ever been to Sequoia National Park, much less to this nameless little structure more than a mile from any marked trail. There was simply no way anyone could know he and Rachel were here.

Yet Dryden kept his eyes on the spot from which the jay had fled.

A fern swayed.

It wasn’t the wind; the weeds around it were still.

The pistol, a SIG SAUER P-226, was two feet from Dryden’s hand, on a shelf inside the door.

The fern shook harder, and then a fox kit sprang from it, tackled a second later by its sibling. They wrestled in the clear patch for a few seconds, then tumbled into brush on the far side.

Dryden let his nerves rest. It felt nice, if only for a minute, to see the forest the way he might have seen it as a kid. Or as a father. Erin would have been six years old this month, maybe a little young to come out here backpacking overnight, but not by much.

His mind sometimes made a picture of her, the way she might look now. He imagined her standing here under the sequoias, staring up with her eyes wide, feeling six inches tall.

He’d learned years before not to let those kinds of thoughts last. He’d learned how to let them fade — how to let everything fade, really. How to go through the day in logical steps: sleeping, breathing, buying groceries, taking the trash to the curb. Life as a mechanical process. As limbo. As inertia.

That it could all change — that there was anything for it to change to—had not crossed his mind in years. Not until today.

He looked into the cabin again. Rachel had eased onto her back. For a minute or two he watched her sleep. Then he faced the woods again and watched the dark come down.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Long after night had claimed the valley, after the moon had risen through low clouds, sending wraiths of pale light playing over the forest floor, Rachel began to murmur in her sleep. Dryden entered the cabin, moving carefully so as not to wake her. His adjusted eyes found the audio device, and he pressed RECORD.

For the first minute or two, her sounds were indecipherable, even from a foot away.

Then her body stiffened. Her right arm jerked. Dryden knelt beside her, ready to take hold of her if it looked like she could injure herself.

Her arm spasmed again. The other did the same. Both started to move away from her sides but stopped after traveling less than two inches, held fast as if by invisible straps. She tried to sit up, but her shoulders also met unseen resistance. With a chill, Dryden understood. After two months of sleeping in restraints, Rachel’s body had become conditioned to the limits. Dryden took a moment to reflect with satisfaction upon the revenge she’d dealt the blond man, even if she hadn’t meant it as such.

Her murmurs fell silent for thirty seconds, and then she said, “It’s so pretty from this window at night.”

Her eyes were still closed. The cabin had no windows, regardless. Rachel was describing something in her dream.

“From up here,” she whispered, “all the lights…”

She trailed off.

Dryden sat down on the plank floor beside her. He steadied himself. This would either work or it wouldn’t. All he could do was try.

Making his voice as soft as he could, he said, “Hello, Rachel.”

She didn’t quite startle. The reaction was more reserved than that. A twitch of her eyebrows in the faint light. Tension in her features that hadn’t been there a few seconds earlier.

“Hello,” she said. Her tone was devoid of emotion.

“Can I ask you some questions?”

Rachel exhaled slowly. When she spoke, she sounded like she was reading from a note card.

“Rachel Grant. Molecular Biology Working Group, Fort Detrick, Maryland, RNA-Interference Cohort, Knockout One One.”

Dryden took in the words. Took in their meaning, at least in the abstract — the rough implication of where Rachel had come from. Of what she was.

But more than the words themselves, what struck him was the way she’d said them, and the way her jaw clamped shut when she was finished. The mix of determined and scared shitless that etched itself across her face.

It was a look Dryden had seen on other faces. Many others.

As carefully as he’d first spoken, he said, “Do you recognize my voice?”

She appeared to think about it. Her eyes, already shut, tightened as if narrowing.

Then the scared resolve fell back over her like a shadow, and she replied in the same flat tone as before.

“Rachel Grant. Molecular Biology Working Group, Fort Detrick, Maryland, RNA-Interference Cohort, Knockout One One.”

An old, familiar phrase surfaced in Dryden’s mind. One that was known to soldiers the world over.

Name, rank, and serial number.

Rachel’s stock reply was the equivalent. She held it in front of herself like a shield, because in her head she was back in that little room in El Sedero. Whatever pretty dream she’d been having a minute ago, the very act of questioning her had changed it, and now her mind was stuck in the phantom restraints as surely as her arms were.

Dryden rubbed his eyes. Christ, how to explain it to her — that he wasn’t one of those people? How to explain it without telling her too much and waking her up?

Rachel’s head turned a few degrees toward him, though her eyes remained shut.

“Waking who up?” she asked.

Dryden stared at her. Because he’d been with her all day, because he’d gotten used to having her respond to things before he actually said them, he almost missed what’d just happened — that she’d heard his thoughts, even from inside the dream.

“Inside what dream?” she asked.

Shit. Shit.

Dryden felt it all getting away from him. Like a stack of dinner plates atop his hand, unbalancing, pitching outward—

He made his voice as stern and cold as he could manage, and said the words as quickly as they formed in his head: “The thing everyone’s scared of — tell us about it again. Right now. You’ve already given us that much, there’s no harm in repeating it.”

For a moment Rachel seemed to continue looking at him through her closed eyelids, as if still hung up on the question of who was dreaming. Then the strained resolve settled back into place.

“Why do you need to hear it again?” she asked. “I told you.”

“Just do it,” Dryden said. “Tell us what it is.”

“I told you where it is. Go see it for yourself if you want to know about it. You can walk right up to it. No one’s going to stop you.”

Before Dryden could respond to that, Rachel’s forehead furrowed, and she turned her head toward the cabin’s nearest wall.

“Who’s in the next room?” she asked.

Dryden ignored the question — that she was referring to someone in her dream was obvious, but to dwell on that for even a second would only further break the spell.

“Alright then,” Dryden said. “Tell us again where this thing is.”

Rachel stared at the wall a moment longer, her face still full of concern.

“Stop stalling, Rachel. Tell us.”

“Elias Dry Lake, in Utah.” She gave up on the wall and sank back onto the fabric of her sleeping bag. “It’s right there. You can’t miss it.”

“Keep talking,” Dryden said. “Tell us what’s there.”

A strange little smile turned up the corners of her mouth. If anything, it made her look more scared.

“What’s the point of threatening me now?” she whispered. “I already know what Gaul’s going to do to me. So do you guys.”

Dryden could see tremors running through her body. It was all he could do to keep from putting a hand on her shoulder.

“It must burn him up, though, right?” Rachel said. “He gets something as useful as me in his hands, and he doesn’t get to keep me? Someone else builds a new toy for themselves, and Gaul has to kill me because…” Rachel laughed; the sound of it crept under Dryden’s skin. How many times had he heard a prisoner laugh that same way, in the deep end of despair, holding on to bravado as if it were a punctured raft? “Because any time now they’re going to stop test driving that new toy and really give it the gas … and if I’m still alive when that happens … talk about a wrench in the gears—”

She cut herself off. All at once she looked confused. For a second Dryden expected her to open her eyes.

Then she said, “Who are you? Wait … Sam?”

Dryden spoke softly again. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“Who’s with you? Who’s in the next room?”

“There is no other room, Rachel.”

She started to reply, then stopped herself. She looked thoughtful. “I’m dreaming, right?”

“You’re dreaming,” Dryden said. No point trying to fool her now. “You’re dreaming there’s someone in the next room.”

Rachel shook her head. “I can hear a man thinking, but he’s not in my dream. He’s there with you. He’s right on the other side of that wall.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In the fraction of a second it took Dryden to understand, everything changed.

Outside the cabin, feet scraped the dry ground as the intruder reacted to what Rachel had said, and then footsteps sprinted hard along the exterior wall. Sprinted toward the front of the structure, and its still-wide-open door.

Dryden came up from his sitting position beside Rachel, threw his body at the shelf next to the door, and had the SIG SAUER in his hand an instant later. He braced a palm on the door frame and shoved himself backward, dropping to a shooter’s stance in the middle of the floor.

In the next second a man appeared in the doorway.

A big man, silhouetted against the moonlit forest.

Holding a shotgun.

Dryden fired.

Three shots in rapid succession, into the figure’s chest from less than ten feet away.

Rachel woke, screaming.

The intruder dropped the shotgun and staggered backward. One foot went off the edge of the porch platform, and he fell on his back in the dirt.

Rachel called out Dryden’s name, groping around in the darkness, disoriented. Keeping the SIG and most of his attention on the fallen man outside, Dryden found Rachel’s flailing hand and held it.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m right here.”

He could hear her hyperventilating, trying to get control of herself. Waking up to gunshots was a hell of an alarm clock for anyone; he couldn’t imagine how it felt to a kid.

In his peripheral vision he saw Rachel sit up and look out through the doorway. The man was just visible outside. Dryden gave her hand a squeeze and then let go. He moved toward the dying man, ready to put another few shots into him at the first sign of movement. When he reached the door and got a full view past the lip of the rough platform, the SIG immediately felt heavier in his grip.

The man on the ground was a uniformed cop.

Implications flared in Dryden’s mind like muzzle flashes. Dots and connections, stitching together in rapid fire. He heard Rachel take a sharp breath in the dark behind him, picking up on what he’d seen.

He crossed the porch, stepped to the ground, and knelt over the officer. The man was still breathing, but Dryden could tell from the sound that his lungs were shredded. They were filling with blood. The guy had a minute at most.

There was a 9 mm on the cop’s hip. Dryden popped the holster strap, pulled the gun out, and slid it far from the man’s reach. As he did, he saw the guy’s head move. Dryden met his eyes just as they opened and fixed on him.

He thought to ask the man if he was alone, then decided it was a waste of fading seconds; if there was another cop within a hundred yards, there’d be bullets coming out of the woods already.

The officer struggled to take a breath. When he let it out, his body was racked with a violent coughing fit. Blood came out of his mouth; it looked black in the moonlight.

“How did you find us?” Dryden asked.

“Hiker saw your car … trailhead. You stupid fuck.”

“How would a hiker know to look for it?”

The cop’s voice grew fainter on each word. “Whole world’s looking for it. You were on TV all day.”

Dryden sat back on his knees, as if pushed by the force of the strange information.

“On TV for what?”

“You know for what,” the cop said. Another coughing fit seized him, worse than the first. When it ended, his breathing went fast and shallow. Then it stopped. The man convulsed once and went still. Gone.

Dryden stood and turned toward the cabin. Rachel was standing in the doorway, shaking; she couldn’t take her eyes off the body.

“Rachel—”

Dryden stopped himself.

He turned and listened.

The sound was right at the edge of his hearing. Rising and falling against the night wind. Then it solidified, and there was no doubting it.

Rotors. Far away but coming in. The drumming reverberated off the mountains on both sides of the valley, masking its direction and even its distance. It didn’t matter. It was already too close. Dryden went to Rachel and turned her face away from the dead man. He spoke softly but urgently.

“They’re coming,” he said. “We need to go.”

She nodded, still looking dazed. Dryden stepped past her into the cabin, put the SIG in its holster, and clipped it around his waist. Then he picked up the duffel bag containing the two emergency items from Visalia. The last thing he took was the audio recorder; he put it in his front pocket and left the sleeping bags and other gear behind.

Rachel, already following his lead and putting on her shoes, indicated the duffel bag in his hand. “Shouldn’t we get those out now?”

“Not yet,” Dryden said. He went to the doorway and listened to the drumbeat of the incoming chopper, so much louder already. “Not just yet.”

Rachel finished tying her shoes, and they left the cabin at a run.

Gaul was ready to put a chair through a window. He went so far as to pick one up, then slammed it back down, his hands gripping the armrests hard enough to whiten his knuckles.

He was in the computer lab again. The window, spared for the moment, looked out on the same L.A. nightscape as his private balcony upstairs.

Lowry and the others were at their stations. They sat transfixed by what the Mirandas were showing from four separate angles. Dryden and the girl were sprinting through trackless backcountry in Sequoia National Park while the body of the officer cooled in the dirt far behind them.

Gaul’s people had been explicit in their instructions to local authorities, from the moment the hiker’s tip had come in: They were not to interfere. Apparently this one hadn’t been able to resist getting his name on Fox News. Well, mission accomplished.

The element of surprise was gone. Granted, it wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway; Dryden still would have heard the chopper coming. But he wouldn’t have known it was hostile and would have lost precious minutes weighing the choice of whether to run for it. In truth, though, none of that mattered. There was no possible exit for Dryden and the girl this time.

There were only seven roads within a twenty-mile radius of the cabin they’d been holed up in. All of those roads were now blocked by local and federal authorities whom Gaul had control of, in a roundabout way, but those personnel were a redundancy; Dryden had no chance of reaching even the nearest road. The helicopter, a Black Hawk, carried ten specialists who answered directly to Gaul. They were his new sword point, promoted to fill the vacuum left by Curren’s group. The Black Hawk’s pilot had been instructed not to risk getting close to Dryden; there was no telling what sort of weaponry he was packing right now, having been free and unaccounted for all day. Instead, the pilot would circle Dryden and the girl at a distance of half a mile, guided by the techs watching the Miranda feeds, and deploy the ten-man specialist team into the forest at different points along the circle. They would form a mile-wide ring around the prey. Then it was just a matter of tightening in on them.

The helicopter was close now — closer than either of the ridges from which its echoes rebounded, to the east and west. Because of that, Dryden could finally determine the chopper’s location by sound, even though its lights were predictably blacked out. The aircraft was less than a mile to the south, and in the last minute it had halted its advance to take up a stationary hover.

That, too, was predictable.

There was a big difference between this conflict and those of the previous night: Dryden had had all day to contemplate this one. From the moment he’d settled on the cabin as a destination, he’d been aware that its primary asset was also its greatest vulnerability. The secluded forest made a perfect hideout, but failing in that function, it made a terrible place from which to flee. In a game of cat-and-mouse against satellites, desolation was a fatal disadvantage.

Usually.

That had to be what Gaul was thinking now, in any case. He would also be thinking of Dryden’s background and skill set; he would’ve taken both into account in planning this assault.

It was no surprise, then, that the chopper had gone stationary at a distance, rather than coming in for a sniper kill. Gaul would have to play it safe and assume Dryden had the means to take down any chopper close enough for that; a good .50 caliber with a nightscope would have done the trick, if aimed well enough. Dryden had in fact considered getting one. He’d decided against it on practical grounds: Taking down the helicopter in this scenario would not be a winning play.

As he and Rachel ran, he heard the chopper begin to move again, having hovered in place for maybe twenty seconds. Its new course was neither toward them nor away; it seemed to orbit their position counterclockwise, maintaining its safe distance, and after traveling a few hundred yards it halted again. Obviously men were fast-roping down out of it, probably one to three of them each time it stopped to hover. It would either deposit them in a straight-line pattern, in which they would comb across the wilderness like hunters driving game, or it would off-load them in a giant, constricting circle.

Either way, the fast-roping was also something Dryden had expected. He was counting on it, in fact, though the plan would be far from risk-free. As the chopper resumed movement after its second stop, Dryden considered the fact that there were now at least two soldiers on the ground within half a mile, running straight toward them with satellite techs speaking through their headsets.

Catching his thought, Rachel said, “I think it’s time to open the duffel bag.”

“I think you’re right.”

On-screen, the third specialist was roping down into the forest. Gaul watched. It was hard to make out the details, looking at the scene from such a high angle, with a heat source as bright as a chopper right above the action—

“What the fuck?” Lowry said.

Gaul turned toward Lowry’s workstation. Lowry was tapping the monitor as if it were glitching.

“What?” Gaul asked.

“Dryden and the girl,” Lowry said. “They just disappeared right in front of me.” He keyed the handset through which he communicated with the soldiers on the ground. “Continue on vector, but be advised we’ve temporarily lost the targets.”

“Bullshit,” Gaul said. “There’s gotta be a tree in the way. They’re fucking redwoods.”

“We had four birds on them,” Lowry said. “They can’t all be blocked. Not for this long.”

On the monitor displaying the widest frame, the Black Hawk was moving again, arcing toward its fourth drop point. The three men on the ground continued their sprints inward toward an objective that appeared to have vanished. Gaul’s sense of calm had vanished with it.

The specialty shop in Visalia sold gear for firefighters, including the two remarkable items Dryden had purchased, one large and one small — the smallest in stock, anyway. They were called proximity suits, or more commonly kiln suits. Surprisingly lightweight, at least considering their capability, they were made of several insulating layers, with an outer skin of aluminized fabric to reflect radiant heat. This kind of suit was standard issue for fire crews aboard aircraft carriers or at oil refineries, people whose jobs might at times require them to actually walk into the flames. The material was that good at blocking heat.

The suits Dryden and Rachel had just donned were rated to keep out temperatures up to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. With any luck they’d keep 98.6 degrees in—at least for a while.

They were wearing the suits inside-out, for whatever good it might do. Even the hoods — made of the same fabric as the body, and sporting a flexible plastic face screen — could be reversed. Dryden supposed the suits might’ve hidden them whichever way they’d worn them, but there was a good reason to have flipped them, regardless: Full-body reflective clothing was bad camouflage on a moonlit night. Reversed, the suits were simple black fabric on the outside.

They were also damned uncomfortable to run in. The moment he and Rachel had put them on, they’d turned and sprinted into the trees on a course perpendicular to the one they’d been on. Anyone watching on satellites, no longer able to see them, might assume they were still moving forward on their original path or had doubled back. Any other direction would be a guess.

As it happened, they were running almost straight north, toward a terrain feature Dryden had chosen earlier using a detailed map. The only way out, even if it was a long shot.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Gaul sat slumped in the chair he’d nearly thrown through the window. The full team was on the ground now. They’d converged on the spot where Dryden and the girl had vanished, and where Gaul had been certain they would find a mine shaft or natural tunnel of some kind; no other explanation made sense. Yet they had turned up nothing except the same hard ground — too rocky to hold a footprint — that covered the valley for miles in all directions.

“So, okay, let’s work through it,” Lowry said. “They fool the satellites, however the hell that’s possible, and they run. They disappeared twelve minutes ago, figure ten minutes to cover a mile—”

“Figure seven,” Gaul said. “They’re motivated.”

“That puts them almost two miles from where the team is, in which direction, we don’t know. We have a round search area growing in diameter by one mile every three or four minutes—”

Gaul stood, crossed to Lowry’s workstation, grabbed the communicator, and keyed it.

“Put the chopper on the deck,” he said. “Right now. Pick up the team and get airborne. Stow the fucking thermal vision; if the satellites can’t see them, neither will you. I want every man aboard wearing a standard amplified night-vision headset — there’s plenty of moonlight for that. I want all eyes scouring the woods from five hundred feet up.”

He set the communicator down and paced away. When he turned back, he found Lowry staring at him like an idiot.

“I don’t know where the chopper should start its search, sir,” Lowry said. “Which direction to send it.”

“Figure it out!” Gaul said. “People used to do that, before they had computers.”

Lowry knew better than to reply to that. He looked at his feet until Gaul turned away, then faced his monitor and brought up the widest Miranda image of the forest. He broadened it further still, to a width of five miles, and added a topographic map overlay.

“Let’s assume a man like Sam Dryden knows the terrain,” Lowry said.

“Let’s,” Gaul said.

“He’s also going to know we have the local roads blocked. But here’s Highway 198, about thirty miles away. He could figure we’re not expecting him to get that far, so maybe we’re not blocking it. Plus it’s busy; better chance to stop a vehicle and commandeer it.”

Lowry highlighted the path of a narrow waterway on the map.

“This stream bed transits the valley right down to the highway,” he said. “Straight shot, the whole thirty miles downhill. Dryden and the girl could probably make double time if they followed that. To reach the stream, their shortest path would be straight north from where we lost them. They wouldn’t have reached it yet, and right now they’d be right about…” He did the math in his head, then tapped the screen with his finger. “Here.”

He picked up the communicator and relayed the instructions to the Black Hawk’s pilot.

“Copy that,” the pilot said. “I’m setting her down now. There’s a clearing half a klick north of the team’s position, the only one big enough to land in. All boots rendezvous there.”

Captain Walt Larsen took the Black Hawk down into the clearing carefully; descending among sequoias was a first for him. They were about three times the height of any wilderness cover he’d ever landed in.

At twenty feet from the deck he saw that the clearing floor was a mess of ferns and scrub, two or three feet deep everywhere. Probably no risk of snagging a wheel, but he’d be careful on takeoff all the same. The Black Hawk set down as firmly as she would have on a tarmac.

“If you gotta step out for a piss, you got time,” Larsen said to his copilot, Bowles. “Team’s one to two minutes out.”

He’d no sooner said it than he heard one of the soldiers clamber into the troop compartment behind them. He turned.

It wasn’t one of the soldiers.

Dryden and Rachel had been sitting concealed among the brush from the moment they’d reached the clearing, ten minutes earlier. Waiting for the chopper had been the hardest part. Though Dryden had been confident it would land here, there was always the chance things could go wrong.

Then it had thundered in above them, silhouetted like a giant insect against the near-black sky, and set down only a few yards away. Dryden had been up and running before it had even settled on its wheel shocks.

Now he vaulted into the bay, tearing off the hood of his proximity suit with one hand, leveling the SIG at the flight deck with the other. The pilot turned to him with what started as a casual expression, and then paled.

“Sidearms on the console, right now,” Dryden said. “I’d rather not kill you.”

Both pilots were now staring at him, too surprised to comply. Dryden stepped forward and smashed the barrel of the SIG against the copilot’s nose. Blood burst from it in a gush.

“I shoot on three,” Dryden said. “One, two—”

He didn’t get any further. Both pilots carefully withdrew their .45 sidearms and placed them on a flat portion of the console.

Behind Dryden, Rachel climbed into the troop bay.

“Both of you, out,” Dryden said to the pilots.

That surprised them, but they didn’t argue. They opened their doors, dropped to the undergrowth, and ran.

Dryden climbed forward into the pilot’s seat, and Rachel followed, discarding her own hood as she squeezed past him into the copilot’s chair. By habit he grabbed the pilot’s headset and put it on, even as he sat; the heavy ear protectors cut out most of the chopper’s noise. Rachel donned her own pair. Dryden reached to the comm selector switch near the headset jacks and set it to cockpit only — the chopper would no longer transmit audio from the headsets to any outside listener.

“You really would have shot them on three,” Rachel said, not asking, knowing. “That wasn’t a bluff.”

“That’s why it worked,” Dryden said.

His eyes roamed the instrument panel. He’d trained in a standard UH-60 Black Hawk; this was the MH-60K special ops variant, but the panel was nearly identical. It had a few extra bells and whistles, notably an all-purpose display that was currently showing what looked like a satellite feed of the forest — a pretty damn impressive satellite feed compared to the ones Dryden had seen in his day. In the image, the chopper was centered and two bluish white spots of light — the pilot and copilot — were visible at the edges of the clearing, where they’d retreated to. A few hundred yards to the south, the gathered team could be seen, coming north toward the Black Hawk. Fast. Without a doubt, they’d been told what was happening.

Dryden took the controls. He increased the power and felt the Black Hawk shift beneath him. Rachel grabbed the sides of her seat. The rotors reached a scream, and the forest floor dropped away. Dryden hit the master switch for the exterior lights; the encircling wall of sequoias appeared from the darkness as if he’d waved a magic wand. From the cockpit of the helicopter, the clearing suddenly looked a lot smaller than it had from outside. With the trees topping out above two hundred feet, it felt more like a deep well than a clearing. Climbing out of it was going to be the most dangerous part of the escape.

Compounding the risk was the fact that he had to do it quickly. On the satellite feed, the team on the ground had cut their distance from the clearing by half, in less than a minute. They’d be right beneath the Black Hawk in another fifty seconds or so, firing at it with everything they had.

Dryden divided his attention between the trees and the satellite image. He pushed the climb rate to the maximum that he felt comfortable with — then pushed it 10 percent higher. It was a reasonable gamble: risk crashing by going too fast, or guarantee being shot down by going too slow.

He leaned forward and tried to see the treetops. It was hard to judge, but he guessed he had seventy feet to go. On the display, the team was now perhaps fifty yards from the clearing.

Dryden noticed a data tag in the lower left corner of the satellite feed: SAT-ALPHA-MIRANDA 21.

Miranda. He’d heard whispers of a project by that name, just hitting the drawing boards around the time he’d gotten out of the business.

At that moment the satellite display went black.

“I guess we weren’t supposed to see that,” Rachel said.

“Be glad they can’t shut off the engines. That’ll be on next year’s model.”

The tops of the trees were dropping past them now. Their highest boughs fell away, and suddenly the Black Hawk was in the clear above the forest. The sequoia canopy planed away to the base of the mountains, like a rough carpet in the moonlight. Dryden pushed the stick forward and felt the bird tilt in response. That was when the first bullets hit.

It sounded like a hailstorm against the armored underside of the craft. Multiple firestreams raking the metal at once. Rachel screamed. One of the lights shattered, and something near the tail rotor gave off a shriek, but the caution advisory panel remained silent.

After what felt like ten seconds but was probably no more than two, the chopper lumbered forward in response to the tilt. In the last moment before it left the airspace above the clearing, the front-right nose window imploded, and Rachel gasped sharply — an involuntary sound that had nothing to do with fear. Dryden had heard men make that sound before.

Leaving just enough of his attention on the controls to keep the Black Hawk climbing away over the forest, he switched on the cabin lights and turned to Rachel. Her eyes were huge, and she was holding her left arm to her side with the other hand. Where the arm met her chest, there was blood everywhere.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

They were over open country now, ten minutes west of where they’d taken off. The overspeed indicator was screaming. Dryden ignored it. He ignored everything he could afford to and kept the rest of his attention on Rachel.

There was no way to assess the extent of her injury. He needed both hands — both feet, too — on the controls, and she couldn’t remove the top half of the kiln suit by herself. With the suit still on, Dryden could get only the roughest visual sense of where she’d been hit. The arm, at least; he could see the exit hole the bullet had made near her triceps. He guessed it’d entered on the inward part of the arm, lower down. Whether it’d hit anything else before that — leg, abdomen, upper torso — he couldn’t tell.

“Keep pressure on the arm,” he said. “I know it’s hard, but you have to.”

Rachel nodded, frantic and exhausted at the same time. Losing strength.

“Take another deep breath for me,” Dryden said. “Slow in, slow out.”

She complied. Over the headset, he listened to the sound as she exhaled.

No rattle. No wheeze. Good signs, so far.

“Any pressure?” he asked. “Anything feel like it’s stopping you from expanding your lungs?”

She shook her head.

Also good — but no reason to relax. Damage to the chest could be tricky, as well as deceptive. A bullet could miss the heart and lungs but still cause internal bleeding, slowly building pressure against the lungs until one or both collapsed. In shock, as Rachel certainly was, it was possible to miss the signs.

Dryden had the Black Hawk as low as he felt comfortable flying — two hundred feet off the deck. Out ahead was Fresno, maybe another ten minutes away, though outlying districts of the city were closer.

He looked at Rachel’s arm again. She had her right hand clamped around it above the exit wound — a far cry from a tourniquet, but the best option available for now. There was some blood visible around the hole in the suit, but there was no way to tell how fast she was bleeding. Anything coming out of her was running down her arm inside the sleeve.

So far, she hadn’t cried. Dryden wished he could chalk it up to heroism on her part, but life had taught him better. It was the shock — she simply hadn’t begun feeling the pain yet.

It was coming though. Coming on right now, he guessed, given her body language.

“It’s starting,” he said.

She nodded, moved her hand to reposition her grip on her arm, and winced hard.

A second airspeed alarm sounded, this one telling him he’d descended too low for this rate of speed. He climbed until it went silent again. Beside him Rachel shuddered, fighting the tears but losing.

Gaul paced, his cheeks and forehead flushed darker than any of the techs had seen them before.

The satellites kept up with the chopper easily. Three feeds were dedicated to it, at varying frame widths. A fourth frame was scaled wide enough to take in all of Fresno, along with forty miles of open country to the north and west. There was a reason for that. There were other airborne objects being monitored. Fast-moving ones.

“How’s the math stacking up?” Gaul asked.

“It’s going to be tight,” Lowry said.

Gaul said nothing more. He continued pacing.

Watching Fresno rise to meet them, Dryden scanned the outlying grid for a place that met his requirements. It had to be open enough to land the chopper in, but it also had to be crowded with people. The parking lot of a mall might do. He watched for one — then saw something better.

“You like football?” Dryden asked.

“I might,” Rachel said. “I don’t remember.”

The stadium — for a high school, by the look of it — lay a quarter mile ahead, lit up with a night game in progress. The stands looked to be a third full. Dryden pulled back on the stick, slowing the Black Hawk’s forward speed.

Fifteen seconds later they were directly above the field, hovering stationary. Every face below, in the stands and on the turf, was turned up toward the chopper. Dryden dumped it into a breakneck descent, and the players scattered like leaves in the rotor wash.

“I’m going to carry you,” Dryden said, “and it’s going to hurt like hell. But no matter what, you’re going to keep pressure on that arm.”

Forty feet above the deck now. Thirty. Twenty.

“I don’t know how much more it can hurt than this,” Rachel said.

“You will. And if you need to scream, scream.”

He gave it power at the last second to soften the touchdown, and the instant he felt the wheels hit, he was out and moving, rounding the nose to Rachel’s side, opening her door.

“Lean against me when I lift you. I’m going to carry you with one arm.”

“What are you going to do with the other one?” she said, and then she understood — not by mind reading but simply by seeing. “Oh wow.”

“Try to see the humor in it,” he said.

She tilted her body into his own, sucking in a deep breath as she did. He got his arm beneath her knees and lifted her.

She screamed.

Behind Dryden, a few dozen gawkers were running from the sidelines toward the Black Hawk. He turned to them, raised the SIG SAUER in his free hand, and opened fire into the dirt far shy of them.

Panic hit the crowd like a rogue wave, turning it, propelling it back. Even those in the stands reacted, surging for the big exit tunnels at each level. As Dryden had seen from the air, the tunnels were huge relative to the crowd that would flow through them. No risk of the kind of dangerous bottlenecks that sometimes happened with stampedes. Just a couple of hundred people hauling ass for the parking lot.

Carrying Rachel, Dryden sprinted to follow the crowd, making for the nearest field-level tunnel.

He was halfway there when the ground came to life with a bass vibration and a pair of F-18 Hornets screamed over the stadium, missing the top seating section by no more than a hundred feet. A heartbeat later the trailing sonic boom shattered the field lights, plunging everything into near-darkness.

Dryden wondered how much closer he could have cut it. He had no doubt the fighters would have turned the Black Hawk into a fireball if it had still been airborne.

He kept moving with the crowd. The darkness and confusion were to his advantage, if anything. He kept the SIG low at his side, ready to raise it and deter any potential heroes, but it turned out to be unnecessary. In the chaos of the tunnel, nobody recognized him as the shooter.

Passing a pay phone at the outer end of the tunnel, he grabbed a directory and yanked it free of its flimsy chain.

A minute later he and Rachel were in the lot, which was clearing out rapidly. He broke the window of an early-nineties model Honda, unlocked it, and set her carefully in the backseat. Her face had lost a lot of color, even since they’d left the chopper.

He got behind the wheel, smashed the ignition with the grip of the SIG, and hot-wired it. Then he handed the phone book to Rachel.

“Look for the letters MD after someone’s name,” he said.

All around them, the lot was mayhem. People were driving over the curbs just to get the hell away from the stadium. He put the Honda in gear and headed out, just another cow in the herd.

Wind scoured Gaul’s computer room, at times whistling between the shards that still clung to the huge window frame. When it gusted, papers flew, but nobody dared move from his workstation to gather them.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Dena Sobel was skimming her pool when the Hornets made their second pass over Fresno, this time a few thousand feet up, and not dragging a damn shock wave behind them. Whatever hurry they’d been in the first time, it seemed to have passed. They were heading back in the direction they’d come from earlier, probably going home to Travis Air Force Base, Dena supposed.

Across the golf course, a few of her neighbors were outside their homes, tending to lights and windows that had been damaged by the sonic boom. Dena, a surgeon aboard the USS Carl Vinson for three tours, was familiar with the effects of supersonic flybys, and the one that had shaken her house minutes earlier had been louder than any she’d ever heard. The fighters must have been traveling a lot faster than the speed of sound.

A breeze stirred the white oaks that overhung the pool, bringing with it the sound of sirens from the direction of downtown. Within half a minute there were more, mostly police but a few ambulances as well. They sounded like they were everywhere.

Dena set the skimmer in its clip on the wall and headed inside to call the ER desk. Whatever was happening in town, if there were injuries, word would have reached there by now. As she picked up the phone, headlights washed the front windows, and brakes chirped on the driveway. Not five seconds later, someone pounded on the front door.

Dryden saw a shadow approach, through the windows that framed the entry. Assuming Dr. Sobel would look out through them before opening the door, he recalled the dying police officer’s words.

Dryden stepped back out of the light and turned toward the Honda to make his features less visible. A woman’s face appeared in one of the small windows, and Dryden waved her out frantically. If there was any recognition in her eyes, it didn’t show.

“Please help me!” Dryden yelled, indicating the car. “It’s my daughter!”

His desperation, every ounce of it sincere, apparently came across. The door swung inward, and a woman in her fifties emerged.

“Are you Dena Sobel?” Dryden asked.

She nodded, eyeing the Honda. Dryden was already running to it, opening the back door.

“She’s hurt,” Dryden said.

In the backseat, Rachel sat holding her now-exposed arm. Dryden had pulled into a parking lot en route from the high school, gotten in back, and helped Rachel remove the top half of the kiln suit. He’d verified at last that the arm was her only injury, but how badly hurt it was, he still couldn’t tell. He doubted the artery had been fully severed — if it had, Rachel would be unconscious or dead by now — but there was some chance it had at least been nicked, or that some different but still significant damage had happened.

Dena was beside him at the door now. She pushed past him, leaned into the backseat, and got her first look at the injury.

“This is a gunshot wound,” she said. “Why the hell did you bring her here? She needs to go to the ER—”

She’d turned back to look at Dryden as she spoke. Now she cut herself off, seeing the SIG in his hand.

He wasn’t pointing it. He held it low at his side, aimed down, his finger outside the trigger guard.

“I need you to help her here,” Dryden said. “In the house. No hospital. No police report.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“You have to. If there’s any official report of where this girl is, she’ll be dead within the hour.”

Dena stared at him. Her eyes went to the gun once more, then returned to his face and stayed there.

“You’re the guy on TV,” she said.

“I’m the guy on TV. But whatever they’re saying is bullshit. We can tell you the truth — we can even prove it — but right now you need to take care of her. Please.”

“Why should I believe you?”

Rachel leaned toward the open door from inside the back of the car. “Think of a four-digit number,” she said.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Sources in law enforcement are confirming, just in the past few minutes, that the events in Fresno are tied to the Homeland alert we’ve been reporting on since early today.”

The CNN anchor looked appropriately grave delivering the lines. The thrum of excitement behind her practiced expression was only just discernible.

Dryden was standing in Dena’s living room, watching the coverage on the wall-mounted television. On-screen was a live aerial feed of the high school football field, the Black Hawk centered in the shot. It was sitting right where he’d landed it, angled across the 50-yard line. Flasher-equipped vehicles from what looked like half a dozen state and federal agencies were parked around it on the field.

For the first ten minutes after bringing Rachel inside — and parking the stolen car in a strip mall four blocks away — Dryden had stood in the spare bedroom where Dena was tending to Rachel. Dena had given her 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, then set to work examining the arm. The key points she’d been able to assess immediately. “The bone’s intact. No damage to the brachial artery or the deep brachial. Exit wound’s consistent with a solid bullet coming out — no fragmentation inside.” Each word had fallen over Dryden like the answer to a separate prayer.

“I can clean it up and start antibiotics now,” Dena had said. “Another thirty minutes, the meds will have the pain knocked down a bit — not a lot — and I’ll give her stitches.” She’d given Rachel a long all-over glance then. The two halves of the girl’s kiln suit lay on the carpet, and her clothing was all but pasted to her skin by half-dried blood. The heavy suit had contained nearly all of it, keeping it inside where it could saturate her shirt and pants.

“While we’re waiting on the painkillers, I’ll clean you up,” Dena said. Her tone was softer than it’d been. “My daughters kept a lot of their old outfits. I’ll find something that’ll fit you.”

Dryden had taken this as a cue to step out of the room. Now, half an hour later, he’d seen enough of CNN and Fox to understand what’d been airing all day.

It was bad.

Very bad.

The bullet points, repeated every few minutes, were straightforward enough: Based on solid but still-undisclosed evidence, Homeland Security believed there was a man inside the United States with a working radiological bomb — a dirty bomb. This man had all the knowledge and tools necessary to arm and detonate the weapon, and there was credible intelligence that he intended to do so. The money quote had come from the Homeland secretary himself: We are working in a time frame of perhaps hours. We need everyone looking for this man.

There was no official name for the suspect, but there was a picture. A digital composite, they called it — purportedly a high-tech version of a police sketch, computer generated based on surveillance images that weren’t being released to the public.

The picture was no composite, though; Dryden recognized it at once. Gaul’s people had gotten it from the hard drive of his home computer in El Sedero. It was a picture that had originally contained his wife, Trisha; the two of them had taken a trip to San Francisco, a few months before Erin was born, and had asked a passerby to snap the shot of them standing together on the Embarcadero. Someone had now erased everything in the image except Dryden’s head, reshaped his mouth to turn his smile deadpan, and filtered the whole picture to make it look less like a photo and more like something compiled by software.

For all that, it was a dead-on image of him. It was no wonder Dena had recognized him so quickly.

Others had recognized him, too, it seemed. The salesman he’d bought the used car from in Bakersfield. A clerk at the sporting goods store. The image had gone into rotation on the news probably just a couple of hours after they’d left that city. The car dealership had contacted authorities early in the afternoon, and the vehicle’s description had gone into the news mix immediately. Once the hiker had found the car at the trailhead, it would’ve been an obvious move for police to check the few human-made structures in the surrounding miles.

As Dryden watched, the dead cop’s face appeared on-screen. He’d seen it there a few times now, accompanied by the man’s name and a slug for a bio: Glen Carlton, 47 years old, 23-year veteran of Kern County Sheriff’s Department.

“Is that part true?”

Dryden turned. Dena was standing at the near end of the hallway, watching him.

Dryden nodded. “That part’s true.” He looked at the screen again. Looked at the man’s face. A guy who’d done nothing worse than risk — and lose — his life for what he’d believed was a valid reason. “In the moment I couldn’t see what he was.”

He could think of nothing else to say about it. He stared until the image had left the screen again.

“She’s resting,” Dena said, nodding back down the hall. In her hands she held a spool of surgical thread and the needle she’d used for the stitching. “I want to know everything. You, her — everything.”

She crossed to the open kitchen, set the needle and thread down, and rinsed the blood from her hands.

Earlier, after Rachel had demonstrated her ability in the driveway, they’d told Dena a few of the basics. The fact that the manhunt was really for Rachel. The memory loss.

Dena dried her hands with a towel, came around the island that divided the kitchen from the living room, and leaned back against it, facing Dryden.

“Everything,” she said.

He told her. It took twenty minutes. He finished by taking the digital recorder from his pocket and playing back the audio from the cabin.

Until arriving at Dena’s house, Dryden hadn’t spent even a minute thinking of what Rachel had said in her sleep. There hadn’t been a minute he could spare. Once Dena had begun tending to Rachel’s injury, and Dryden had gone to the living room to watch the news, he’d revisited the girl’s words. He did it again now as the recording played. He watched Dena’s reactions to the key passages.

Rachel Grant. Molecular Biology Working Group, Fort Detrick, Maryland, RNA-Interference Cohort, Knockout One One.

I told you where it is.

Elias Dry Lake, in Utah.

Any time now they’re going to stop test driving that new toy and really give it the gas … and if I’m still alive when that happens … talk about a wrench in the gears …

When it was over, neither of them spoke for thirty seconds. Dryden could see Dena taking it all in, or trying to.

Finally she said, “What the hell could it be? I don’t assume it’s really a vehicle — that sounded like a figure of speech, but … Jesus.”

“If Gaul didn’t build it,” Dryden said, “then the government or some other company did. Maybe another defense contractor. It sounds like a weapon system of some kind, doesn’t it?”

Dena nodded. “Something related to what Rachel can do.”

“And they’re afraid to crank up the juice to it while she’s alive.”

As to the reason for that, Dryden couldn’t even guess. The gaps remaining in their knowledge were maddening.

“I don’t think you’ll get another shot at questioning her,” Dena said. “She’s resting now, but I wouldn’t expect her to sleep again for some time, after what she’s been through. And if this drug you described is making its way out of her system—”

“No, the cabin was the only chance,” Dryden said. “We were lucky to get that much.”

They were quiet another long while. Then Dryden said, “Do you have a computer?”

Dena nodded. She crossed to the end table beside the couch, opened a drawer and took out a touch-screen tablet. She turned it on, brought it to the island, and set it in front of Dryden.

It occurred to him that any use of the Internet could be a serious risk. Even back when he’d been with Ferret, technology had existed that could monitor local ISPs for search-engine queries. Certain keywords typed into Google within a specified area — a city, maybe a county — would trigger flags and give up the computer’s location.

There was a lot he could learn without doing a text search, though. He opened the tablet’s default Web browser, went to Google Maps, and switched to the photographic overhead view. He dragged and zoomed the image until Utah filled the frame.

Elias Dry Lake.

If he’d ever heard of it, he couldn’t remember it now. He zoomed the map in until terrain features with labeled names were visible — small rivers, lakes, mountains — and began methodically dragging it left and right in narrow search bands, working his way down from the state’s northern edge.

He found it three minutes later. The arid lake bed lay toward the southern end of a huge desert region west of the Rockies. U.S. 50 passed by five miles to the north; a single narrow two-lane led south from the highway to the lake’s northern rim and simply ended there. Even in a wide frame of the entire lake bed — it measured maybe three miles by three — it was clear that no buildings stood anywhere near it. The whole expanse lay glaring white and vacant, empty even by the standards of a desert.

“What’s that?” Dena asked.

She pointed to a single pixel in the middle of the screen, just dark enough to stand out from the background. Whatever it was, it stood almost centered in the lake bed. Dryden had missed it at first glance.

He zoomed in until the thing took up half the screen, though he’d known what it would be even before it resolved.

It was a cell phone tower. The structure itself was nearly invisible from overhead; only its shadow on the sand gave it away.

“False alarm,” Dena said.

“I don’t think so.”

Dryden told her about Rachel’s panic attack in Bakersfield, at the sight of an ordinary cell tower there. Then for good measure he dragged the map to show the freeway again, and the small town clustered around the nearest interchange. It took less than a minute to find the cell tower that served it; it was located right at the north edge of town, near the off-ramp. Dryden scanned the freeway itself for several miles in each direction and found additional towers that served traffic along its route. All were within a few hundred yards of the road.

“The tower on the lake bed doesn’t serve U.S. 50 or the nearest town,” Dryden said, “and there’s no other town of any kind for twenty miles. There’s no reason to put a real cell tower in that spot. It would make no sense at all.”

“What do you think it is, then?”

He had no answer to that. He centered the lakebed again, stared at it for thirty seconds, and then straightened up and paced away from the island.

“Most of what Rachel said in the recording is lost on me,” Dena said. “But one word rang a bell. Knockout.”

“You know what it means?” Dryden asked.

“I know one meaning of it. I’d almost bet my life it’s the relevant one.”

Dryden waited for her to go on.

“It’s not in my field of expertise,” Dena said, “but lots of people in medicine have heard the term. Usually it refers to mice. Knockout mice. It means they’ve been genetically modified — that a specific gene has been switched off. Knocked out.”

Dryden considered what that implied. It fit well enough with the rest of what Rachel had said. Molecular biology. RNA interference. Dryden had no serious background in science, but clearly those terms came from the world of genetic research.

“Why would turning off genes give someone a new ability?” he asked.

Dena shrugged. “Because DNA is a mess. People call it a blueprint, but it’s more like a recipe — one that nature’s been tinkering with for a few billion years. That’s how a professor of mine described it: an old recipe, where outdated instructions get lined out instead of erased. When an animal evolves away from having a certain trait, like when we lost our tails or most of our fur, the genes for that trait wouldn’t have been deleted. Instead, what usually happens is that a new gene is created that blocks those genes. Those new genes are like the pen lines crossing out older parts of the recipe. So if you knock out those genes, the new ones, then the old instructions won’t be crossed out anymore. They come back into the mix. Does that all make sense?”

Dryden went back over it in his head. He nodded. “More or less.”

He paced to the sliding glass door at the back of the room. He stared over the pool and the golf course beyond.

“Mind reading,” he said.

Sprinklers were wetting down the fairway. The grass glistened in the glow of landscaping lights.

“I go to conferences a few times a year,” Dena said. “You should see some of the PowerPoint talks people give. There are animals that can naturally regrow limbs — newts can do it. Amputate a foreleg just below the shoulder, the newt grows the whole thing back. The elbow joint, the humerus, all the bones and muscles and nerves in the hand. All the skin. Everything. They’ve always been able to do it. There are researchers who think all vertebrates have it in their DNA to do that, too, including us. There are just other genes suppressing the ability. The trick would be to identify them and knock them out.”

Dryden turned from the sliding door. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would we have evolved away from being able to do something that important?”

“Best guess I’ve heard is that it’s better to just take the loss. A new limb is weak for a long time; the skin is raw, vulnerable to infection. Survival odds probably go up if you just scab over the stump and get by with three limbs instead. What’s that old line? Mother Nature’s a bitch but you gotta love her?” She shrugged. “But why evolution would ditch something like mind reading, I can’t begin to guess.”

On TV, a few emergency vehicles were still clustered around the Black Hawk. Dryden went back to the computer and stared at the image on its screen: the dry lake and the tiny speck of the tower’s shadow.

“You’re planning to go there,” Dena said. It wasn’t a question.

Dryden nodded.

“Why not just wait for her memory to come back?” Dena asked. “You can both stay here as long as you need to.”

“Can she stay here without me for the next day or two?”

“Of course. But why risk going to that place?”

Dryden’s eyes were still on the display.

“Because I don’t like flying blind. I don’t like spending the next week with these people knowing everything, and us knowing almost nothing. Rachel said herself the answers are there.”

“You’d only have to wait six or seven days—”

“And Gaul knows that. He knows that once she remembers, she’ll have a whole range of options, maybe something as simple as going public with her information — but Gaul has a full week to plan for every move Rachel can make, before she even knows what they’ll be. What he might not be prepared for is her making a move sooner than that.”

Dena indicated the tower. “Gaul knows about that place. Rachel told him. I wouldn’t think he’d expect her to show up there again, but how hard would it be for him to keep watch on it, just in case?”

Dryden thought of the satellites. “Not hard at all. But I’m going.”

“Not without me.”

Dryden and Dena both turned. Rachel stood at the mouth of the hallway. Dryden saw the bandage Dena had applied to her wound: heavy gauze pads on the front and back of her arm, wrapped together with white tape. Her new clothes, a pair of jeans and a purple T-shirt, were only a little too big on her.

Dena went to her. “Honey, you need to be lying down—”

“I’ll sit,” Rachel said. “This is important.”

Dena started to respond but held back. She could see the same thing in Rachel’s eyes that Dryden could: The girl was determined to make her point.

“I want you to take it easy,” Dena said.

Rachel nodded and followed her back to the island. Dena pulled out a chair, and the girl sat carefully in it.

“Did you hear the recording playback?” Dryden asked.

“In your thoughts, when you both listened to it.”

Dryden glanced at Dena. Despite her earlier exposure to Rachel’s ability, she still appeared shoved off balance by it.

When Dryden looked back at Rachel, he saw her eyes fixed on the computer. She put her fingertips tentatively to the screen and zoomed in until the cell tower filled it.

“You know I can’t take you there,” Dryden said. “It’s one thing to risk my own life. Yours, no way.”

“We can get within a few miles of it without any risk,” Rachel said. “If you want to look closer then, by yourself, I’ll understand, but you can’t leave me a thousand miles behind. Besides, there are good reasons to take me along. There might be things there that jump out at me that wouldn’t stick out to you at all. That place might jog a memory.”

For a long time Dryden didn’t respond. He looked at Rachel, then the computer screen, then nothing at all.

“I think there’s a lot more at stake here than us,” Rachel said softly. “Don’t you? I think we should go. Right now.”

Dryden rubbed his eyes.

“Christ,” he said.

Silence drew out. It was Dena who broke it. “You both know what I think, but I won’t try to change your minds. I’ve got a second car that my daughter uses when she’s home from school. It’s old, but it’s reliable. There’ll be roadblocks set up all around Fresno, I imagine, but … I could get you past those. You can hide in the trunk, and I’ll drive you north to Modesto and take a train home. If you’re caught, you’ll have to say you broke in and stole the car while I was gone.”

Dryden traded a glance with Rachel, then looked at Dena again.

“I don’t know how we could ever thank you,” he said.

“Don’t die,” Dena said. “That would do it.”

Dryden kept the unpleasant reply to himself: For almost any outcome he could imagine, Dena would never find out what became of him and Rachel. The girl said nothing in response to that thought, but she shivered as if a chill had crossed her skin.

CHAPTER TWENTY

They left five minutes later.

The car was a Honda Accord, ten or twelve years old. Its backseats could be folded down to open up the trunk space to the passenger compartment, but for the moment there was no reason to do that. Dryden lay curled on one side of the trunk, Rachel on the other. Three minutes and five turns after leaving the house, Dena called back to them, her voice muffled by the foam of the seatbacks. “They’re stopping drivers at the on-ramp. Stay quiet until I say it’s clear.”

The car braked thirty seconds later, then crept forward, start-and-stop. Dryden pictured a long line of clotted traffic, all of it washed in the LED flare of police lights. A moment later he heard the crackle of two-way radios. In the darkness, Rachel found his hand and held it tightly. Footsteps clicked on asphalt. Dena’s window buzzed down, and the sounds of the city came through.

A man said, “Evening.” Sharp voice, a practiced balance between hard and polite.

“Hi,” Dena said. “Is this about that thing on TV?”

“Yes, ma’am. Can you show me your ID?”

Seconds of silence. Then white light shone at the seam where the seatback met the trunk. It darted and roamed. The officer was shining a flashlight beam around the car’s interior.

“Can I ask where you’re headed tonight?” the man said.

“Just getting out of here for a couple days. If that guy’s here in town with that thing — you know — I’d rather not be here.”

It sounded like something Dena had been rehearsing in her head for the past several minutes. No doubt it was. Her delivery of the line was dramatic — too much so. Dryden tensed.

Another five seconds passed, and then the officer said, “Do me a favor and pop your trunk for me.”

Rachel’s hand convulsed around Dryden’s.

“Is that really necessary?” Dena asked.

“It won’t take long. Go ahead and open it.”

Dena said nothing.

Dryden had the SIG SAUER in his rear waistband, but he made no move to draw it. There was simply nothing he could do with it that would make any difference. There would be a dozen or more officers within twenty yards of the car, all of them prepared to encounter trouble tonight. There would be multiple choppers, local and federal, stationed above the city. There was no possibility of escape.

“Ma’am?” the officer said.

No response. In his mind, Dryden saw Dena at the wheel, her mouth working to speak, but nothing coming out. Everything falling apart right in front of her.

“Ma’am.”

“I have personal things in the trunk,” Dena said. “I’d prefer not to have someone going through it. Can I please just go?” Her voice was high and stretched. Everything about it would be a big red flag to a cop.

“Ma’am, I need you to open your trunk. Now.”

“Don’t you need a warrant for that?”

“I can have one on my phone screen in about thirty seconds. Would you like me to do so?”

“I just want to get out of Fresno,” Dena said. “I’m just scared out of my fucking mind being here, and none of this is helping me.”

“Ma’am, I’m not going to say it again—”

All at once the cop cut himself off. For an awful second Dryden imagined Dena had done something to make him do that — like reach for the gear selector to dump the car back into drive.

But there was no sudden lurch of the vehicle. No sound or movement at all. Just silence playing out. Dryden could feel Rachel shaking, the sensation traveling through her hand into his own.

The silence held. Like fingers gripping a cliff edge.

Then the officer spoke again. “Alright, it’s fine. You can go on through. Have a good night.”

For another moment Dena said nothing. Maybe she thought the guy was kidding. Then his footsteps moved off along the pavement, right past the trunk to the next car in line.

Dryden heard Dena exhale shakily, and a second later the Honda was moving, weaving through the blockade and picking up speed. It crept through one last turn and then accelerated rapidly, and even over the revving engine Dryden could hear Dena up front, breathing.

“Okay, it’s safe,” she called.

Dryden pulled the handle that released the seatback from its hold and shoved it forward and down. Air and light from the passenger compartment flooded the trunk. He saw Rachel next to him, looking pale and almost sick.

“You okay?” he asked.

She managed a nod. She was still shaking badly.

“Come on,” Dryden said. He guided her forward onto the folded-down seats. Outside, the edges of Fresno were sliding by at seventy miles an hour.

Dena looked back at the two of them. She was as badly rattled as Rachel.

“I don’t get it,” Dena said. “I don’t know why he let me go. He just … did, all of a sudden.”

Dryden’s mind went to bad explanations first — old habit. Maybe it was a trap. Maybe someone with a thermal camera had seen that there were warm bodies in the trunk. Maybe there’d been standing orders to let anyone like that go through, to be followed, and someone had given word to the cop at the last second.

“Did the officer have an earpiece in?” Dryden asked. “Did he touch his ear like someone had told him something?”

Dena shook her head. “Nothing like that. He was right in my face, I would’ve seen it.”

“What about someone giving him a hand signal? Did he look away at another cop before he let you past?”

“No. I was watching him the whole time. He was staring right at me and then … he just changed his mind. I still can’t believe it.”

Dryden couldn’t believe it, either. Didn’t believe it. Not quite, anyway. He turned and stared through the back window. He could see the glow of flashers half a mile behind, pulsing against street signs and buildings near the interchange.

Dena seemed to pick up on his tension.

“What is it?” she asked. “Is there something I should know?”

Dryden watched the road behind them a few seconds longer, then turned forward again.

“I don’t know,” he said.

They reached Modesto just after two in the morning. Dena stopped first at a Walmart on the edge of town.

“There are things you’ll need,” she said, “and you’ll want to minimize the time you spend in public places like stores.”

Dryden and Rachel stayed in the car while Dena went in. She came back out twenty minutes later with several bags full of nonperishable food, plus a flashlight, batteries, and fresh bandages and antibiotic gel for Rachel’s arm. She’d also bought a baseball cap and a pair of wrap-around Oakleys for Dryden. “Better than nothing,” she said.

They were at the train station ten minutes later. Dena parked and left the engine running, and for a moment no one spoke.

“When I wake up tomorrow morning,” Dena said, “I’m going to lie there for thirty seconds and wonder if I dreamed this.”

Rachel leaned forward between the seats and hugged her. Dena held on for a long time, her eyes closed.

“Thank you,” Dryden said. It was probably the fifth time he’d said it.

Dena opened her eyes over Rachel’s shoulder and looked at him.

“Protect her,” she said.

Dryden nodded. “With my life.”

He hoped like hell it would be enough.

A minute later he and Rachel were on the freeway, accelerating into the sparse middle-of-the-night traffic. In his mind Dryden went back over the route he’d eyeballed on Dena’s computer. For a few seconds he couldn’t recall the name of the town right at the end — the one at the U.S. 50 interchange, where the two-lane led south to Elias Dry Lake. Then he remembered: The town was called Cold Spring.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Cobb woke an hour before sunrise, took a long steam shower, and went out on the balcony off his bedroom suite to have a smoke. The bedroom overlooked the valley, its mountain walls thick with snow. Every bit of it glittered in the sharp air, and overhead the brightest stars stood out in the predawn twilight.

He heard the patio door slide open right beneath him. The twins came out and crossed the pavers to the edge of the pool. While they waited for its thermal cover to retract, they peeled each other’s clothes off, taking their time with it, kissing, whispering to each other in whatever language it was they spoke. They weren’t really twins; Cobb had simply thought of them that way since the day he’d met them. They looked like each other, that was all — same skinny little bodies, same big dark eyes and pert little tits, same pouty expressions when the whiskey or the vodka or the pot ran out, though there was always someone by to restock it inside of an hour. Cobb didn’t even know the girls’ names. In his head he called them Callie and Iola, for shits.

He watched as the steam from the uncovered pool filled the air around them — the girls insisted on keeping the damned thing at 100 degrees, and Cobb didn’t argue; he sure as hell wasn’t paying the energy bill for this place. Before the steam cloud obscured them, Callie slipped into the pool and Iola seated herself at its edge, her feet dangling in the water. Callie went under the surface and came up again right in front of Iola, her face between her thighs. The girls were only shapes in the steam now; Cobb watched as Callie’s face dipped forward and Iola leaned back on the pavers, her breathing turning into cute little moans. Cobb glanced over his shoulder at the nightstand clock in the bedroom. Thirty minutes until his shift started. Plenty of time to go down to the pool and join them.

It was the damnedest thing, the turns life could take. A year and a half earlier he’d been a logistics specialist — which was to say a warehouse worker — stocking shelves at a supply depot in Ramadi. In addition to killing camel spiders the size of his Christ-loving hands, that life had consisted of squaring away pallets of toilet paper and potato chips and coffee for the private American army in Iraq — about the same size as the real army that’d withdrawn a few years before. Cobb had woken up every morning there in his shitty little particleboard housing unit, his twenty-third birthday just behind him, his framed diploma from Ohio State six thousand miles away at his folks’ place in Rochester, and he’d thought the same thing he so often thought now: How the hell did I end up here? Hadn’t that always been the million-dollar question, though? Yes indeedy. Seth Cobb, the directionless wonder. Where will the wind take him next?

Where it had taken him about fifteen months ago was to a hiring office out at the edge of the company grounds, there in Ramadi, after someone had stuffed a bright green flyer under his door in the middle of the night. The flyer had been both vague and right to the point.

Cobb had family and loved ones, but he was more than willing to miss out on their company for five years, and he was quite sure the feeling was mutual. So just like that, he’d found himself sitting at a little desk in the run-down building the flyer had directed him to. It was a disused hangar of some kind; he could see fuel stains on the concrete floor. There was a door to a back room, and every time someone opened it Cobb got a glimpse of bulky, high-end medical equipment inside. One of the machines was an MRI, he thought.

Before he got any closer to that room, there were written tests to complete. These would turn out to be the strangest part of the whole process. None of the questions were difficult, exactly. There weren’t even right and wrong answers, only judgment calls, like Your house is on fire and your dog is trapped inside; do you risk your life to save him? Or Would you play a single round of Russian roulette to save a loved one from certain death? After two days’ worth of that stuff, the written tests had culminated in something that deeply puzzled Cobb — at the time, at least. He had been made to sit off in a corner of the big room, away from any other applicant, and a man in his thirties had sat down directly behind him, saying nothing. The man just sat there while Cobb paged through one final test packet. This last test, he saw, contained no questions. There were just instructions, like For the next five minutes, think in detail about the worst things you’ve ever done and gotten away with or Have you ever deeply hurt someone you cared about? Think about it, in specifics, for the next five minutes.

What the hell was the point of this, he wondered. He could sit here running Pink Floyd lyrics through his head and they wouldn’t know the difference. But for the hell of it, he went ahead and obeyed the instructions. He found it oddly stressful, after a while; it even seemed to give him a headache, or at least a funny chill at his temples.

That test lasted an hour, and when it was over, the man behind him stood up and left, taking out a phone as he went. Twenty minutes later Cobb had been ushered into the back room at last, and he spent the next four hours getting poked and scanned and being buzzed into the claustrophobic tunnels of diagnostic equipment. That day had ended in a little office outside the hangar, with Cobb seated across from two men he’d never seen before. Both were fortyish and hard and leathery. He never learned their names.

“If you accept this job offer, you’ll be working for a company called Western Dynamics. You know it?”

Cobb nodded. “Big defense contractor.”

“You’ll be required to take three doses of a drug, a simple pill, the first one tonight if you’re on board.”

“Is this a drug trial?”

“Not at all.”

“What does the drug do?”

“Nothing dangerous. You won’t know what it’s for until later. That’s part of the deal. And the flyer wasn’t bullshitting about losing contact with your kin. You won’t have a phone. You won’t have Internet access or mail service either.”

“What’s the generous pay?”

“Two hundred thousand a year, all of which you can bank, because room and board will be provided for you.”

Cobb whistled and sat back in his chair. He asked if he’d have a stack of nondisclosure forms to sign if he took the job. No, the men told him. When it came to that, the situation was very simple: If he ever shared the details of this job with any outsider, he would be killed, and no one would ever be prosecuted for killing him. Cobb looked into their eyes and saw that it wasn’t a joke. Which made him believe the rest of it, too.

“Let’s have the first pill,” he said.

A funny thing had happened that same night, back at his housing unit on the other side of Ramadi. A messenger came by with a thick three-ring binder, and Cobb laughed, because here was the paperwork after all. Of course. Only it wasn’t paperwork. Inside the folder were detailed profiles of over one hundred women; no names for any of them, just reference codes. All of the women were between the ages of eighteen and twenty, and every last one was a heartbreaker. The profiles included high-res face photos as well as nude shots. Tucked inside the folder’s front flap was a handwritten note: Pick any two, and submit your choices to the hiring office tomorrow at 0800.

Less than twenty-four hours later, Cobb had been in the air aboard a C-17 transport. He’d dozed en route, waking when the plane touched down here at the compound — the place he’d called home ever since. Even now he had no idea where it was located. Somewhere in northern Canada, he guessed. There were mountains, and it was cold as hell year-round, and there were no roads connecting the compound to anything else. Nothing surrounding the place but northern wilderness as far as you could see. The compound itself consisted of the airport, with its array of buildings and hangars, and then a single road looping out into the woods, skirting the rim of the valley and accessing the dozen houses that stood there overlooking the drop-off. Each house was a hundred yards from the next, every one of them screened from its neighbors by the intervening forest.

The wind shifted and partly blew the steam cloud away from the patio. Cobb took in what it revealed, then smiled around his cigarette.

Callie was still at it, her eyes closed, lost in the moment; Cobb couldn’t see her mouth, but he could tell she was smiling. All at once she opened her eyes and looked up at him. She raised one hand from Iola’s thigh and beckoned him with it. Cobb nodded and took another deep drag.

The two girls had arrived here the day after he had. By then he’d all but forgotten having picked them from among the profiles; he’d mostly figured that was just another psych test. That first day here, on his own, he’d simply marveled at the house; he had it all to himself. It was brand-new — you could still smell the carpet and the paint — and it looked like something you’d see on MTV Cribs.

No shit. There was the heated pool, with a hot tub at one end; the patio itself was heated by electrical coils under the paver bricks. There was a home theater with 7.1 surround sound. There was a sauna. There was a Sub-Zero fridge in the giant kitchen, and on the granite counter there was a tablet computer dedicated solely to a list of foods and drinks. You could scroll down that list and tap two dozen items — or just one, if you had a craving for it — and the groceries would show up at the door thirty or forty minutes later, no charge. Cobb had been soaking it all up, wondering what in the name of hell he was supposed to do here, when the doorbell rang and he met Callie and Iola for the first time.

Those first few weeks, it remained unclear what exactly the job would be. An older guy named Hager stopped by a few times, early on, to explain some of the ropes. There were two more scheduled dosages of the drug, he said, which would be brought to the house at the necessary times. It was fine if Cobb used the available alcohol and marijuana, within reason; those substances would not conflict with the drug, either now or later on when his work began.

“What sort of work?” Cobb had asked.

“That’ll come later. Another few weeks. For now, just settle in. Enjoy yourself. There are marked hiking trails that go up on some of the ridges close by. Take the girls out for a walk, if they feel like it. If you ever encounter any of your neighbors, it’s fine if you want to say hello, exchange pleasantries, but keep it to a minimum. They’ll all be doing the same work as you, but you’re not to discuss it. I’ve had this same talk with them, so it’ll be fine.” Hager had ended the conversation somewhat cryptically. “There’s a landline phone in the basement. I’m sure you saw it. It connects to my office here at the compound, and nowhere else — you just push the red button. In time there’ll be something you want to ask me about. When it happens, give me a ring.”

That was all.

In the weeks that followed — very, very nice weeks — Cobb did as Hager had said. He settled in. It was clear from the start that communication was never really going to happen between him and the girls; he didn’t know what language they spoke, but he thought it was something from Eastern Europe. Maybe they were Romanian — they reminded him of the cute little gymnasts from there that he’d always tuned in for when the Olympics were on. In any case, how much talking did you really need? You could share an emotional connection well enough without words. Some nights the three of them would get bombed out of their minds and load up a foreign film from the theater’s digital library, something in French or German so that none of them could understand it. They’d try to follow along and end up laughing so hard it actually hurt, and then the clothes would come off and for the next few hours Cobb’s whole world would just be smooth skin and moisture and heat, clenching little hands and sighs and screams, and before he finally passed out in a tangle of their limbs, he’d think, I feel sorry for every last person on earth right now, stuck living their lives and not this one.

When it finally happened — the thing that would make him pick up the phone downstairs — he didn’t immediately recognize what was going on. This was a month or so after he’d taken the last of the three pills, and in fact he hadn’t thought about those pills in days. He was high when the effect started, and his first thought on the matter was that he was hallucinating. True, pot had never made him do that before, but there had to be a first time for everything. Anyway, this wasn’t a full-on hallucination. Not a visual one, at least. Just an auditory thing — Callie’s and Iola’s voices in his head, chattering away in the same language they spoke. It was about six hours before he put it together, enough time for the high to be long gone and for his thinking to crystalize. It was early evening, and he was standing in the kitchen with Callie. By then he’d realized he was getting images in his mind alongside the girls’ voices. One of these images suddenly stood out vividly: a can of Pepsi being popped open. Not three seconds later, Callie turned and crossed to the fridge and took out a can of Pepsi. A minute after that, Cobb was in the basement pushing the red button.

Hager walked him through it as if he were talking to a man on a ledge. Yes, he said, those were the girls’ thoughts he was getting in his head. Like stray radio stations. Yes, the pills had done that to him. Yes, the condition was permanent. There was more to it, though, than hearing thoughts. The pills had given Cobb other capabilities, but these were active skills that would have to be trained up. Hager would send a man over in the morning to begin said training.

“What other capabilities?” Cobb asked.

“Think of it as sending instead of just receiving. Ship to shore, shore to ship, that sort of thing.”

“You mean putting thoughts in other people’s heads, not just hearing theirs.”

“Thoughts, but more importantly feelings, deep emotional impulses, like guilt or disgust, or even elation. Forcing people to feel those things.”

“What the hell for?” Cobb asked.

“For lots of reasons. It’s useful in all kinds of ways.”

Cobb had grasped the meaning of it then, like something sharp and jagged in his hands. A sculpture made of broken glass.

“I’m a weapon,” he said into the phone. “You’re going to send me all over the world to fuck with people’s heads.”

“You’re going to fuck with people’s heads,” Hager said, “but we won’t need to send you anywhere.”

Leaning on the balcony rail now, finishing the cigarette, Cobb thought of how the weeks after that day had played out. The early training. The understanding of what he could really do. The abilities were limited, of course — while mind reading seemed to work on everyone, the more advanced skills only worked on certain people. Then there was the technology, all of it spooky as hell. Even Hager had confided he had no idea how it worked; the company had little teams of genius engineers squirreled away in places — maybe compounds just like this one, with their own Callies and Iolas — designing the stuff. It was easy enough to see what the equipment did, though even now, more than a year into the work, the whole project was still in testing. Still in beta, as the techs said. But it was growing fast, taking on momentum, and Cobb often felt there were angles to it that he was still being kept in the dark about. Things to come.

He shivered. Just the cold air, he told himself. Nothing more to it. His nerves were fine with all this stuff. He and Hager had settled the morality angle way back when, in that first phone call.

“You want to take your time and think hard about this,” Hager had said. “Right now you’re surprised by it all, you’re rattled, and that’s only human. What I want you to do is go back upstairs and take a good look at your situation. The house. The girls. You’d have to agree we’ve been good to you. Haven’t we, Cobb?”

“Yes. Yes, sir. Everything here is amazing.” Cobb found the words coming out fast; he was tripping over them like a kid. All at once it occurred to him that he’d never thanked Hager — never thanked any of these people. Jesus, how had he overlooked that? “Sir, I just want to say how much all this means to me, and I’m sorry I haven’t—”

“Don’t worry about that, Cobb. Just listen to me. This work you’ll be doing for us, it’s going to be hard sometimes. You’re going to do things to people — bad things, that they don’t deserve. You’ll have to do it, though. It’s just going to be that way. You have to help us out, like we’ve helped you out, alright?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When it gets tough, you’re going to think about that house, and those girls, and you’re going to do whatever it takes to keep them.”

“I will, sir.”

“And you want to remember something: The bad stuff that’s coming, it’s not your fault, ’cause if you weren’t doing it, we’d just have someone else in your place. It would happen either way, so you might as well be the one to benefit. Does that make sense?”

“Perfect sense.”

“Alright, Cobb. Go on back upstairs now. Everything’s going to be fine.”

Cobb stubbed the cigarette out on the balcony rail. Down on the patio, Iola’s moans had turned into soft, ragged cries. She’d drawn her feet up out of the water, her toes gripping the pool’s edge and her knees bouncing rhythmically. She reached down and laced her fingers into Callie’s hair, then sucked in one deep breath and screamed. The sound rolled across the pool and out into the darkness over the valley. A few seconds later, her body spent like a wrung sponge, Iola sagged flat on the bricks. Callie took her hands, helped her sit up, eased her into the water, and hugged her.

Cobb dropped the cigarette at his feet. Yeah, his nerves were just fine with the work. He crossed the balcony to the steps leading down, pulling his shirt off as he went.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It was a quarter past noon when Dryden and Rachel arrived in Cold Spring, Utah. The off-ramp T-boned into the town’s main drag, a strip of chain stores and gas stations and fast-food places, all of it weathered and faded. There was high country half a mile east — a line of hills marching away south at a diagonal, their tops crowned with pine forests and scrub. Otherwise the landscape was low-rolling desert as far as Dryden could see.

He took a side street off the strip and crossed to the east edge of town and saw what he was looking for almost at once: a dirt lane running out toward the hills. Three minutes later he and Rachel were parked at an overlook halfway up the nearest incline, maybe two hundred feet above the desert floor and the town. U.S. 50 was visible for twenty miles or more, stretching away into the shimmer, back toward Nevada and California. Just as visible was the two-lane that formed Cold Spring’s central strip, leading south out of town into the wastes. Five miles off in that direction, vast and stark and nearly blinding white, lay Elias Dry Lake. Dryden squinted but couldn’t make out the tower at its center.

He leaned into the car and took a pen from the console tray.

“Give me your hand,” he said.

Rachel held it out, and Dryden wrote a phone number on the back. Above it he wrote the name Cole Harris.

“Who’s that?” Rachel asked.

“A friend of mine. One of the only people in the world I trust. I was in the army with him, and we stayed friends afterward.”

He turned and studied the hillside above the overlook. It rose another two hundred feet to the crest of the ridge, the whole climb shallow and forested. There were no roads above this point. No houses or other structures, either.

“I want you to wait here,” he said. “Go about halfway up the slope between this spot and the top. Stay in the trees, out of view and out of the sun, but keep an eye on the lake bed. After I’m there, if you see anything happening, a line of cars heading down there, a helicopter landing, then you go into town and call that number. Walk into a store and say you have to call your parents. No one will give you a problem with it.”

All the way from Modesto they’d tuned in to the news wherever they could get a signal. The manhunt was almost the only story being covered, and at no point had there been any mention of a young girl travelling with the suspect. Dryden supposed Gaul had his reasons for keeping it that way; if the plan was to kill Rachel, it wouldn’t help to have the whole country praying for her safety while the search played out.

“Cole Harris lives in San Jose, California,” Dryden said. “You call him and tell him your name, and tell him Sam Dryden wants him to come here and get you. And say this word: goldenrod. Okay? Remember it. Say goldenrod and he’ll understand.”

“What does it mean?”

“It’s called a nonduress code. We used them in the army. It means This isn’t a trick, nobody has a gun to my head. Or more generally, This isn’t BS. It’s a word he and I agreed on, and no one else knows about it. If you say it, then he knows the message is coming from me.”

Rachel was staring at the number on her hand. Dryden hoped like hell she wouldn’t need to call it.

“I think this is one of those moments when I can’t tell your thoughts from mine,” Rachel said.

Up close, it was hard to tell exactly where the desert ended and the lake bed began. Whatever shoreline there’d once been had long since been smoothed out by the wind. All that gave away the transition was that the ground suddenly got a lot flatter under the Honda’s tires, and the sage and desert grass all but vanished.

Out ahead, the cell tower was visible now, a standard steel lattice mast with guy wires stabilizing it. Hard to tell its height with no trees or buildings for reference, but it had to be two hundred feet tall at least. From this distance, still a mile or more away, nothing about the thing struck Dryden as unusual.

That perception had changed by the time he parked and got out of the car. In his years in the service, especially later on with Ferret, Dryden had encountered transmitter towers a handful of times. Once or twice he’d installed eavesdropping equipment on them, piggybacking it into cables at the base. In those cases he’d worked from instructions provided by a technician; he himself had no real expertise with industrial comm stuff like this. He had wondered, right up until getting within thirty feet of this thing, whether he would even know if something about it was strange. He wasn’t wondering anymore.

He stopped within arm’s length of the structure’s nearest corner. The steel frame of the tower itself looked like all the rest he’d ever seen: triangular cross-bracing, the welded joints infused with copper connectors to help with conductivity. And like other towers, it had a metal tube bolted to one of its legs, running up inside the corner, protecting sensitive cables from the elements and from tampering. In most cases Dryden had seen, these tubes were made of steel or even aluminum — they usually escaped notice. This one had caught his eye right away; it was made of neither of those metals. He stepped closer to it. In the desert sunlight, the tube’s surface gleamed a dull silver. The last time he’d seen this kind of material, there’d also been desert sun shining on it. A different desert, far away from here.

He rapped on the tube with his knuckles. It was like knocking on a thick slab of granite — the same way it’d felt that other time, tapping on the side of an M-1A1 Abrams where a bomb blast had stripped away the paint. The cell tower’s cables were protected by a thick sleeve of depleted uranium. Tank armor.

Dryden stepped back again, getting a better angle on the higher portions of the tower. The uranium tube climbed to about half the structure’s height and then connected to a large black cylinder; the thing had the shape of a beer keg but was maybe five times the size of one. Dryden couldn’t remember seeing anything like it on a radio tower before. Whatever it was, he could hear it humming in the still air like a transformer.

There was nothing else attached to the tower. No cellular transceiver. No microwave relays. Nothing but the heavy tube and the strange black drum. As Dryden listened, the thing’s bass hum seemed to come not only from overhead but from the tower itself, the steel lattice vibrating like a tuning fork. Even the hardpan beneath his feet seemed to throb.

Was there any reason to bring Rachel down to see this thing? What could she learn from it? He thought of her reaction to the tower in Bakersfield. If a random one could provoke that response in her, would the details of this one do more?

She would insist on coming. He could refuse — but what was the plan after that? Well, that was simple: There wasn’t one.

Dryden cursed under his breath.

He went back to the car but didn’t get in. If he was bringing Rachel here, there were safety measures to take first. These, too, were simple.

He tilted his face skyward and turned very slowly in a complete circle. He wasn’t looking for aircraft. He wasn’t looking for anything at all.

He pictured the satellite feeds he’d seen during his active years. Even that technology — outdated compared to what Gaul was using — had been able to resolve human faces in bright daylight. The resulting detail might not be wedding-picture sharp, but it would be more than enough to identify someone.

For good measure, Dryden made another slow circle, taking a minute or more to do it. If it had occurred to Gaul to keep watch on this place, then one of his computer rooms would suddenly be buzzing with activity.

Dryden opened the driver’s door of the Honda, got behind the wheel, and settled in to wait.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

An hour passed.

Nothing happened.

Dryden opened the door and stood again. He made a visor of his hand and swept his gaze over the horizon on all sides. No choppers coming in. No vehicles coming down the two-lane from Cold Spring.

There were good-sized cities, sure to have at least one police helicopter, within half an hour’s flight time of this location. Those aircraft would’ve scrambled within a few minutes, if one of Gaul’s satellites had spotted Dryden here.

Gaul couldn’t have known this was a trick — that Rachel wasn’t in the car. At night, a satellite using thermal vision could’ve seen that she wasn’t in the vehicle, but in sunlight, with the roof of the car hotter than any person who might be inside, there was no chance of that.

If Gaul had been watching this place, the response would’ve already come down. Fast and hard.

Dryden waited another minute, then got back in the car and started it.

When he pulled up to the overlook, Rachel practically sprinted out of the trees. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen relief so vivid in a pair of eyes before. She climbed into the passenger seat and took hold of his arm — it was like she needed to be sure he was real.

“Anything?” she asked.

“Nothing I could make sense of.”

She opened her mouth to respond, but he beat her to it.

“Yes, I’ll take you there. We’ll look at it for exactly one minute, and then we’re getting the hell out of here.”

For the first three or four miles of the drive, right up until the tower came into view, Rachel felt only exhilaration. She guessed part of it was excitement at maybe learning something in the next few minutes, but there was no denying what was mostly behind the feeling: She was no longer up in the woods, all by herself.

She had no intention of telling Sam how that had felt. Being scared — for him, more than for herself — had been one thing, but above all, what she’d felt was …

Cold.

That was all she could think of to describe it. Being alone felt cold, after all this time spent with him. All this time spent close to that fireplace feeling that seemed to roll off of him and encircle her. She was pretty sure she knew what that feeling was, though she didn’t plan to talk about that either. No doubt it would be awkward for both of them. No matter, though. It was enough just to feel it again.

She was thinking about that, and smiling, when her eyes picked out the faint line of the tower, way out ahead against the desert sky.

The smile went away. The same irrational fear she’d felt in Bakersfield, as if she were looking at a giant bug, stole back over her.

Sam noticed.

“We can turn back,” he said.

Rachel shook her head. She tried to push the fear out of her voice before speaking. “I’ll be okay.”

She felt the vibration in the ground as soon as she got out of the car. It hummed through the soles of her shoes, into her feet and her bones.

“Are you alright?” Sam asked.

She nodded.

Her eyes had fixed on the large black pop-can-shaped thing, a hundred feet up. The whole tower scared her, but that thing was the worst somehow. She made herself take a deep breath — her breathing seemed to go shallow if she wasn’t careful.

She let go of the car door and moved toward the base of the tower. One step after another. Easy does it. At the edge of her vision she saw Sam turning and scanning the road behind them. She kept going.

She knew what she had to do. She wasn’t sure how she knew — maybe it was another conditioned response. She also knew it was just about the last thing in the world she felt like doing, but that really wasn’t a reason to back down, was it? She was tired of looking scared. Tired of being scared. She crossed the last few feet to the tower’s base and grabbed hold of the nearest corner with both hands.

If the vibration in the ground had made her bones hum, this contact made them scream. It made the bones themselves feel hollow. Hollow and full of buzzing flies.

She heard herself making a noise. Whimpering. Crying out. Heard Sam somewhere behind her, calling her name, running toward her. She caught the intention in his thoughts: grab her by the shoulders and pull her away from the damned thing.

“No!” she said.

She heard him stop right at her back. He came around to the side, his hand closing on one of her arms.

“Rachel—”

This is how it works. I have to hold on until it happens.

The thoughts had formed on their own. She had no idea what they meant. What was supposed to happen?

“Rachel?”

Have to hold on. Any second now—

“Don’t stop me,” she said. “It’s okay.”

He said something else, but she missed it. The sunlit desert fell away, and all at once she was lost in a world of voices and mental pictures.

Pictures of everything. People, dogs, cars, but in almost all of them there was—

The town. The place they’d driven through when they got off the freeway, north of here. These were mind pictures of the town, the stores she’d seen, the gas station, the hills to the east. And the voices were thoughts. Like a thousand people’s thoughts at the same time, as if she were standing in the middle of a huge crowd, close enough to read them all.

Sam was still in the background saying her name. Asking if she was okay. She wanted to answer, but—

Something else was happening now. Beneath all the pictures and the voices, beneath her own feet even, there was—

A tunnel. Opening up like a trapdoor below her. She couldn’t see it but she could feel it. A tunnel made of wires, crackling and humming like the big black thing halfway up the tower. The tunnel led down and away — far, far away. Her mind reached down into it, screaming along its length at dizzying speed, and she felt—

Someone else. Someone at the far end.

— another mind there. A man’s mind, it seemed like. She felt his thoughts seeping into her. An image of a swimming pool with mountains behind it. Two women with dark hair, in the water, naked. Then a room full of strange machines and computers.

Mod signal on number two just got a little screwy, what’s that about — whoa, hey, HEY.

Panic soaking the man’s thoughts now.

What the fuck just happened? Get Hager, someone fucking get Hager!

Yet even these sounds and pictures were fading away from her, the crackling tunnel and all the rest of it, dimming and quieting, because suddenly she had a sense of—

What was it?

Some place inside her own mind. Like a room for storing things, only she couldn’t see into it. There was something blocking the way, like a fabric stretched across the entry. A membrane. The things inside the room were pressing at it, their shapes pushing it outward, stretching it.

My memories. These are my memories trying to get free.

It seemed to her that the tower itself was shaking them up. The vibration in her bones, in her mind, jarring everything.

She could feel Sam’s hand gripping her arm tighter now. Any moment he’d pull her away, but—

Something in the memory room was breaking through. Something important to her, its edges sharp and white hot, cutting through the membrane.

She saw a picture in her mind. A woman stooping to smile at her. She had kind brown eyes. She was beautiful.

Hello, Rachel. How are you feeling today?

What was her name? That’s what was trying to cut through the barrier. The woman’s name. She was sure of it.

Sam was talking louder now. Fear in his voice. Telling her to let go.

The membrane was stretched to the breaking point, the burning edge of the name almost through—

Holly. Her name is Holly.

Holly what?

The mental picture was still there. Holly’s eyes, so pretty when she smiled—

What was the rest of her name?

Hadn’t she heard that name somewhere else? Hadn’t someone had it in their thoughts? Not so long ago?

Holly. Holly, Holly, Holly—

Sam’s hands took hold of her fingertips and pulled them free of the metal. The terrible vibration cut out as if an OFF button had been pressed. She reeled backward and lost her balance, but by then his arms were around her. He was holding her and speaking softly.

“Are you alright? Rachel.”

She opened her eyes and looked at him. “Holly Ferrel,” she whispered.

“What?”

For a long moment she couldn’t reply. She was sorting it all out in her mind. Lining the ideas up, like toy cars on a track. Because she knew where she’d come across that name recently — and it was the worst place of all to hear it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Leland Hager had been in a good mood until thirty seconds before. He had been standing in his office, at the inward-facing window, looking down over the work floor. A few years earlier, when this compound was still being carved out of the wilderness, engineers had used this building as a garage for earthmovers. Now the earth movers were long gone, and the vast floor space was full of glass-walled rooms, twelve in all. From this window, Hager could look down on all of them in a single glance.

The rooms were arranged in three clusters of four. The three clusters corresponded to the three test sites in the continental United States.

Red City, Wyoming. Cold Spring, Utah. Cook Valley, North Dakota.

The three antennas.

In the eighteen months he’d been in charge of the compound, Hager had found he was at his happiest when he was standing there looking over the glass rooms — the stations, as everyone called them. In each occupied station lay a controller, flat on his back, electrodes stuck to his forehead with conductive gel. The stations were lit with dim red light, like darkrooms—like wombs, Hager sometimes thought.

It was quite the feeling, staring at all that through his own reflection in the office window — the reflection of a paunchy little bald man who’d come out of Dartmouth three decades earlier with a degree in finance. A hedge-maze of rational career choices later, here he was, like Oppenheimer out in the desert at Alamogordo with his tinted goggles on. Maybe his own name would end up in metaphors, decades down the road.

The work Western Dynamics was doing, at this place and others just like it, was exciting to the point of being scary. There were the antennas, and the controllers, and then there was the other thing — the thing that unnerved everyone who heard about it. Hager had to admit, at least to himself, that the other thing even unnerved him, a little. When it was finally rolled out and put to use — which could be any time now — there would be no putting the genie back in the bottle. Yeah, no question about it, it was scary as hell. All big things were scary, though. If you let that kind of fear get in your way, what would you ever amount to?

Hager had been in the middle of that thought when the commotion started, down in Cluster Two. The only controller on duty in that section, Seth Cobb, had suddenly sat upright as if someone had jolted him, and started yelling about something wrong at the antenna site.

Now, thirty seconds later, Hager was standing in Cobb’s station, trying to calm him. The kid had pulled the paddles off his forehead; one of them had smeared gel into his eyebrow.

“What happened?” Hager asked.

“I don’t know. It just felt like … somebody was reaching for me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Like there was somebody on the other end of the line — at Cold Spring. Like they were … coming right through the connection toward me.”

That didn’t make any sense, a fact Cobb seemed well aware of. The guy could only shrug, though, looking rattled. Whatever had happened, he wasn’t making it up.

Hager was about to speak when he stopped himself.

For a couple of months now, there’d been word coming down from those above him, in Washington and elsewhere, about a potential threat to the project. These conversations had been vague, in ways Hager had gotten used to during his time with Western Dynamics. The whole shady arrangement — two rival companies working with the government, each with its own friends in high places — had been a mess from the beginning. Some of those high-up friends had connections to one another that complicated the game. There were loyalties and there was bad blood, there were favors and paybacks owed, and most of those connections lay hidden in the murk. SHB, Hager called it. Standard human bullshit. He’d run into it his whole career, in one form or another. It didn’t matter how lofty your goals, how precise your planning or your actions. Every organization in the world was infested with the mildew of standard human bullshit. At times, the whole deal — the two companies and Washington — felt like a warped love triangle, operating by the rules of a damned Victorian courtship. Certain things were implied but never outright said. The risk of offending the wrong person was always there, hovering over everything. These warnings in the past two months were a prime example. As far as Hager could understand it, the danger was this: Somewhere out there, there was a loose end from the original research at Detrick, years back. A living subject who’d gotten away — a young girl, if the rumors were right. The girl may or may not have ended up in the custody of Martin Gaul’s people at Belding-Milner, down in California, but regardless, she posed a potential hazard to the testing going on at the three antenna sites. There was a risk of interference. That was as far from vague as the warnings had gotten.

“Describe what you felt,” Hager said. “As clearly as you can.”

“There was someone there,” Cobb said. “Right at the antenna.”

“It’s not the first time that’s happened,” Hager said. A handful of times, high school kids had shown up at each of the towers and tried to climb them, usually late on Friday or Saturday nights.

“This was different,” Cobb said. “I don’t know how, it just was. There was somebody there. Who shouldn’t have been there.”

Hager thought about it.

Risk of interference.

There were no security cameras at the antenna. No immediate way of seeing what was going on there in the desert. Hager had a friend in D.C. who could probably get access to satellite data, but it would take time; an hour, maybe. Now that he thought about it, he recalled that Gaul had especially close ties with that whole community, the kind of intel people who had spy sats at their fingertips — but he’d be damned if he’d involve Gaul or anyone else from Belding-Milner in this thing.

What to do, then?

He looked past Cobb to the reclined workstation chair behind him. The two gel-covered electrodes were lying across it where they’d fallen. Hager nodded to them.

“Put those back on.”

Dryden and Rachel were back in the car, heading north, within a minute of her letting go of the tower. The farther they got from it, the better Rachel appeared to feel. For an awful second or two, Dryden had believed the thing was electrocuting her.

She’d described in detail what she’d experienced. A sensation that she was hearing the thoughts of people up in Cold Spring, six or more miles from where the tower stood. Then the feeling of racing through a tunnel, of encountering somebody at the other end. Last, the visual sense of her own trapped memories trying to get free.

“It felt like the memory about Holly Ferrel was the most important,” Rachel said. “Like I was desperate to get it back. And then when I did, I recognized it. I’d heard it someplace.”

“Where?” Dryden said.

“El Sedero. The building with the blond man and the soldiers. A handful of times, I heard the name Holly Ferrel, or sometimes Dr. Ferrel, in their heads. Dr. Ferrel … in Amarillo, Texas. I remember one of them thinking he might have to go visit her, sooner or later. At the time I barely thought about it — someone going to visit a doctor, that just sounds like a medical problem. But looking back at it now…”

She trailed off, but Dryden saw what she meant. If people working for Gaul had been contemplating paying Holly Ferrel a visit, it could mean something very bad for her.

“You don’t remember anything else about her?” Dryden asked. “What kind of doctor she was? Was she a researcher who … worked on you?”

“I don’t know. There was nothing like that in the memory. Just the fact that she was nice. That she cared about me. A person can’t fake something like that. Not with me, anyway.”

Dryden took her point.

“I don’t know what her connection to Gaul is,” Rachel said, “but she knows me. She might know everything we’re trying to figure out. And if she’s in danger, we need to get to her—” She cut herself off. “Can we just call her? Look her up online in a library and—”

Dryden was already shaking his head. “If she’s really at risk from Gaul and his people, her phone’s already compromised.”

If she’s even still alive.

The thought was out before he could stop it. In his peripheral vision, he saw Rachel shudder.

“Sorry,” Dryden said.

“It’s okay. I’m thinking it, too.”

“We can still look her up on a library computer, but we’d have to contact her in person, one way or another. There are ways to do that without exposing ourselves to much risk, even if she’s being watched.” He considered the geography. Did the math in his head. “Amarillo’s probably ten or twelve hours from here.”

Rachel nodded. Her hands were fidgeting in her lap. Nervous energy.

For the next few minutes, neither of them spoke. At last the southern outskirts of Cold Spring emerged out of the heat shimmer. Dryden reached behind him and took the Oakleys and baseball cap from the backseat. He was just putting them on when Rachel screamed.

The pickup came out of nowhere, thirty feet ahead of the Honda. The road had been empty a second earlier, and suddenly the truck was there, lunging in from the side, from behind a shallow rise that had hidden its approach. Some local idiot out two-tracking in the desert — that was the impression Dryden’s mind instantly formed, based on the truck and the guy at the wheel. He got a tenth-of-a-second glimpse of overalls on top of a stained shirt, and a stubble-covered face the word yokel might’ve been coined especially for.

Dryden locked up the Honda’s brakes, and for an absurd second the truck actually veered toward the car instead of away, as if the driver in his panic had made exactly the wrong move. By then, though, the truck’s momentum had carried it right across the road, missing the Honda by a foot or two, spinning out sideways on the hardscrabble beyond.

On flat ground the truck probably would’ve just skidded to a stop, but the desert surface at that spot was sloped down at 10 degrees or more. The vehicle slid sideways another sixty or seventy feet, and then its wheels caught a rut and flipped it through a neat half-roll. The pickup came down on its roof, the cab pancaking almost flat with the hood and the truck bed.

Dryden brought the Honda to a stop and put it in park. He and Rachel stared at the crippled truck, a hundred feet away, its rear wheels still spinning under power. The door visible on this side — the passenger door — had been blown open by the crash, but against the desert glare Dryden could see only darkness in the crushed compartment beyond.

They had no cell phone in the car. They could tell someone in town to call an ambulance, if need be, but they themselves would have to be long gone before the authorities arrived.

Either way, they couldn’t leave here without checking on the guy. He could be choking on blood in there.

“Stay here,” Dryden said. “I’m coming right back.”

He opened the door and got out, then stooped and reached under the driver’s seat for the SIG. It was that last-minute swerve the truck had made toward the car — probably just a mistake, but damned strange all the same — that made him take the gun. He stuffed it into his rear waistband and stepped off the pavement into the desert.

Kill them, Owen. Crawl the fuck out of there and kill them. Right now.

Owen was hurting. Holy God, was he hurting. The pain was almost enough to distract him from the Gravel Man’s voice in his head. Almost.

You’re losing the advantage. What are you waiting for?

Owen twisted himself around; something in his shoulder popped, and it was all he could do not to scream.

At least that was his left arm. He used his right for the MP-5. He turned his head and saw it lying in a stir of dust, two feet away from his hand.

Outside, some distance off, a man called to him, “Are you hurt?”

Lucky you. He’s making it easy for you. Get the weapon and take care of him.

Owen reached for the gun with his right hand, but even that movement contorted the sore shoulder; he coughed at the pain and went still again.

You want me to hurt you? I thought we were past all that, Owen.

Then, muted almost to nothing, as if he were speaking to someone else, the Gravel Man said, He’s goddamn useless. Who else has a live asset near Site Two? Better get them in here.

Owen could make no sense of that. Then again, this whole thing had baffled him, starting a few minutes ago when the Gravel Man had spoken up out of the blue. Owen had been helping his grandfather swap out a radiator when it happened. It was the first time, in all these awful months, that the Gravel Man had troubled him while Grandpa was around. Owen had come to trust that it would never happen, that he would never be made to do anything crazy in front of his grandfather.

Owen, this is important, the Gravel Man had said. There was something in his voice Owen hadn’t heard there before. A kind of urgency. Maybe even fear. What did that mean? Get the machine gun from under your mattress, the voice said. Then get in the pickup and go to the old Lake Road south of town. Right now.

Grandpa had been staring at him by then, his head cocked. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Owen could only shake his head. He’d never even considered what he would say if a moment like this came along.

Owen, you motherfucker, go! GO!

“Gotta use the bathroom,” Owen muttered, and ran from the pole barn. He was in the truck half a minute later, with the gun beside him, rolling fast out of the dooryard. By then the Gravel Man was talking to him again.

Get on the Lake Road near the bottom end of town and head south on it. You’re going to find someone down at the radio tower, or maybe they’ll be coming north away from there. Whoever it is, stop them and kill them.

As it’d happened, he’d damn near done that in the moment he reached the road. He’d even swerved a bit there, thinking to hit the car once he saw it — a shitload of good that’d done him.

He looked at the MP-5 again. Right there within his reach. He got a fold of his shirt between his teeth, bit down hard against the pain, and made another move for the gun.

Dryden was thirty feet from the truck, about to call out again, when he saw movement in the dim interior. A second later a man’s foot eased out, followed by the other. The man was up on all fours and crawling out backward.

“You alright?” Dryden asked.

No answer.

“Can you hear me?”

When it happened, it happened fast — faster than he would have guessed it could. He supposed it was the strangeness of the situation that caught him off guard. The man eased fully out of the truck, his face still pointed inward at the crushed cab. His left collarbone looked broken, and he seemed to be cradling that arm in front of him with his right. All at once he heaved himself upward into a raised kneeling position, cried out in pain, and collapsed, spinning his body. And just like that he was sitting slumped with his back against the truck bed’s wall, with an MP-5 submachine gun pointed up at Dryden.

Dryden heard a gasp, far behind him. He turned to look — Rachel was standing at the open passenger door of the Honda.

“Rachel, stay there!” he shouted. “Get behind the car. Right now.”

For a moment she remained frozen, eyes huge and scared.

“Go!” he yelled.

She nodded and slipped around behind the trunk to the far side.

Dryden turned his attention back on the gunman. The weapon was shaking in his hand, but not enough that it would miss if the guy pulled the trigger.

Judging by the way his fingertip was flattened against it, the trigger was already under a few ounces of pressure.

There was simply no chance of drawing the SIG without the man opening fire.

“Who are you?” Dryden asked him.

The man said nothing. His eyes kept going back and forth from Dryden to the Honda. The guy was injured, but not so badly that he couldn’t get on his feet. If he killed Dryden, it would be a simple matter for him to get up and go after Rachel. She might be faster, but he had the gun, and there was nothing around but a mile of empty land.

“Take it easy,” Dryden said.

The guy’s expression hardened. His finger flattened a little more on the trigger.

Do it. Owen, do it!

Owen watched the man who was standing nearby, but he found his eyes kept wanting to go back to the car on the road. He had crawled out of the wreck all set to do his job, to quiet the Gravel Man for better or worse, but then—

The little girl. Lord in heaven, what could she be, ten or twelve?

The Gravel Man had sent him to kill a pretty little thing like that?

I will hurt you. I will make it hurt like you’ve never imagined. I won’t stop no matter how hard you beg.

“Please,” Owen whispered.

You know what to do. So do it.

Owen took a deep breath and let it ease back out. He felt the familiar — awful, but familiar — calm sink over him. What was the big word for that? Acceptance, he thought.

Dryden thought about going for the SIG anyway. He would be shot if he did it, no doubt about that, but he would probably have time, even after taking his hits, to bring the pistol around and get in at least a torso shot of his own. Enough to leave the guy right there, bleeding out where he sat, instead of chasing Rachel. It would probably work.

Probably.

Unless the MP-5 was set to full auto. Then a dozen rounds would leave its barrel within the first second. If even one of those caught Dryden in the head, then forget the whole plan. Rachel would be left defenseless.

Dryden watched the machine gun’s barrel. Watched it sway through tiny arcs in the man’s shaking hand. Waited for it to sway just far enough—

“I don’t got a choice,” the man said softly. “It ain’t that I mean it.”

There was a trace of pity in the guy’s eyes, though it seemed to Dryden the man was mostly feeling it about himself. But that was the least of what Dryden noticed about him. What struck him the most was that his early impression — even in that first glimpse as the pickup slid across the road — had been dead on. This man’s intelligence could hardly be above that of a child. Even taking into account that he might’ve been dazed by the crash, there was no mistaking the signs.

It was, in its own way, the strangest thing about the situation: Why would Gaul — or whoever had sent the man — trust critical work to a guy like this?

Dryden had found himself at gunpoint before, and many more times he’d faced adversaries who at least had weapons close at hand. Every one of those men, no matter his ideology or his coldness or his rank in whatever pecking order, had been smart. Not just smart — animal sharp and quick. You could always see it in the eyes. Hired guns lived a Darwinian life. You didn’t meet many stupid ones; they didn’t last.

“I don’t mean it,” the man in the overalls said again.

“You’ve got the safety on,” Dryden said.

The man didn’t exactly fall for it. His reaction was nothing as dramatic as turning the gun sideways and peering at the thing. All that happened was a twitch of his wrist. A reflexive move, so-called muscle memory, in the instant before he caught himself. The MP-5’s barrel turned maybe five degrees aside from Dryden, aiming itself at the desert floor ten feet behind him, but almost at once it began to pivot right back to where it had been. The whole flinch opened up no more than a third-of-a-second window of opportunity.

That was enough.

Dryden’s hand moved. The action was as practiced and unconscious as flipping the light switch in his own kitchen. He drew the SIG from his rear waistband, leveled it, and fired twice.

Both shots took the man in the forehead. The first was centered, and the second was an inch to the left. The double exit wound blew the back of the guy’s head open, the explosive force of it actually causing the head to jerk forward toward Dryden, as if the guy were trying to head-butt the space in front of him. He flopped face-first onto his own shins and lay still.

Dryden fell back two steps, then turned and sprinted for the Honda as fast as he could.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Some impulse, maybe just good old-fashioned paranoia, told Dryden to steer clear of the town. He took the Honda off-road over the hard scrubland and went east for two miles until they came to a county two-lane running north; it had signs for an on-ramp to U.S. 50. Five minutes after that they were on the freeway again, eastbound. They’d said almost nothing since the moment they left the pickup behind.

“I don’t know,” Dryden said at last. “I don’t have the first clue what that was.”

He didn’t start to relax for another hour or more. By then they were on I-70, on the east side of the state. They came to a small town called Sumner; from the freeway it looked just big enough to have a library somewhere in it. When they found it, on Main Street across from a school, its parking lot was close to empty. That boded well for the place not being full of potential eyewitnesses. All the same, Dryden wondered just how effective the Oakleys and baseball hat really were.

The thought of sending Rachel in by herself went against all his instincts, but sometimes instinct was wrong. If someone spotted him, if they simply picked up a phone and dialed 911—

“A girl my age by herself might raise eyebrows, too,” Rachel said. Then, softer: “I don’t want to be alone again.”

There was a single librarian at the checkout desk, just inside the entry. She offered a professional but friendly greeting. Dryden answered with a nod, keeping his face in profile to her. Rachel gave her an energetic wave and a smile; it drew the woman’s attention like a magnet.

Pretty smart, Dryden thought.

“Thanks,” Rachel said, when they’d gone by.

“Anything in her thoughts like Is that the guy on TV?”

Rachel shook her head.

They found a counter with three computer terminals in the back corner, all of them deserted. So far as Dryden could see, the only other visitor in the library was a kid of maybe fourteen, sitting alone in a sunlit reading area at the opposite corner of the huge room.

They pulled up two chairs and woke one of the computers from its sleep mode.

The obvious first move was a Yellow Pages search for Holly Ferrel in Amarillo, Texas.

No results.

Dryden tried the same search for all of Texas; maybe Holly lived outside of town and commuted.

No results.

He opened a Google map, zoomed in on Amarillo, and searched for hospitals. There were three large ones and a number of smaller practices, almost all of those simply named for a doctor working privately. None of the private doctors was Holly Ferrel.

Dryden checked the Web sites for each of the three big hospitals and navigated to the staff pages. The third one yielded an interesting result: a doctor named Holly Reese, whose bio was conspicuously missing a photograph. Every other doctor working in that hospital had included a face shot.

For the sake of being thorough, Dryden navigated through every page on the hospital’s site that might contain photos of its staff, promotional stills of doctors at patients’ bedsides or working in labs. He was on the next-to-last such page, about to click the BACK button, when Rachel’s hand shot out and stopped him from touching the mouse.

“What?” he asked.

Her finger went to the screen. In a photo at the bottom, an EMT crew and a few ER docs were rolling a stretcher in off a rooftop helipad. The chopper was visible in the background, bright red and filling most of the frame.

Rachel was pointing to a woman standing just inside the corridor, half turned away from the camera. Because the camera’s aperture had adjusted to deal with the sun-washed helipad, the hallway in the foreground appeared very dark. It would’ve been easy to look right at this photo and not even see the woman.

“Is it her?” Dryden asked.

Rachel leaned closer to the screen. She narrowed her eyes.

“I’m sure of it,” she said.

Dryden stared at the woman’s face a second longer, running the implications through his head. It wasn’t unheard-of for a relocated person to hold on to a first name; the risk was minimal, and it made the transition easier, psychologically.

Holly Ferrel.

Holly Reese.

Different last name, and no photo on her bio page.

She wasn’t just in danger. She was hiding from it.

At least she believed she was hiding.

Dryden went back to the Yellow Pages and searched for Holly Reese in Amarillo.

One entry. Complete with address.

Dryden found it on the Google map ten seconds later, the photographic overlay showing a marker right above the house.

Holly lived close to downtown, on a street of narrow homes jammed together. Dryden opened Street View and got a look at the place from eye level, out front. It was the Texas equivalent of a town house like you might see in Brooklyn or Georgetown. Others of the same size lined the street on both sides, most of them adjoining their neighbors, a few with narrow alleys in between.

“If she’s still alive, you think Gaul’s people are watching her,” Rachel said. Not asking.

Dryden nodded. “Have to assume it.”

“So how do we contact her?”

“I want to know more about her before we do that,” Dryden said. “I believe you when you say she’s someone who cared about you, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to go introduce ourselves.”

He studied the layout of the street, his thoughts going to the eavesdropping equipment he’d used so often in his time with Ferret. A good laser microphone would be useful; it could be pointed at one of Holly’s windows from down the block and pick up sound from inside by measuring vibrations on the glass. It was decades-old technology, very reliable.

Very hard to come by, too. You couldn’t get it at RadioShack or Best Buy.

Rachel put her hand to the screen again. She pointed to the narrow homes on either side of Holly’s. “Do you think we could get inside one of those? Maybe if no one was home?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible. A lot of buildings like that are broken up into apartments. If we got lucky, there might be a vacant one.” He turned to her. “What are you thinking?”

“How wide are those houses?”

Dryden shrugged. “Twenty-five, thirty feet.”

Rachel turned and stared on a diagonal across the library, to the young boy reading alone. “How far away do you think he is?”

Dryden considered the distance. “Sixty feet, maybe a little more.”

Rachel faced forward again and shut her eyes. She took on the expression of someone trying to make out a just-audible voice over a bad phone line. Then she spoke as if she were reading from a page. “Well, he’s dead now hisself. He knows the long and short on it now. And if ever a rough hand come to port, it was Billy. Right you are, said Silver. Rough and ready. But mark you here, I’m an easy man. I’m quite the gentleman, says you. But this time it’s serious. Duty is duty, mates. I give my vote. Death.”

She seemed about to continue, then let it go. She opened her eyes and met Dryden’s.

“Treasure Island,” Dryden said.

He stared at the distance for another moment, then looked at the houses on the screen again. Rachel wouldn’t need to be in the one right next to Holly’s to get in her head. She could do it from two or even three houses away. Maybe even from across the street.

“Interesting,” he said.

Rachel managed a smile.

Dryden opened a real estate site, entered Amarillo, selected the rental tab, and pulled up a map. Within thirty seconds he was staring at Holly’s house.

There were three apartments available within the necessary range. The best was a second-floor walk-up, two doors down. That would put Holly’s entire residence in a zone between thirty and sixty feet from Rachel.

“When can we be there?” Rachel asked.

Dryden looked at the clock in the corner of the screen. He did the math. “Midnight local time, give or take.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

He kept to five above the limit the whole way. They stopped twice for gas, and once at a hardware store to buy a metal file. Dryden burned another ten minutes using the tool on one of the house keys that hung from Dena Sobel’s key ring.

They pulled off I-40 into Amarillo at 12:35 Central Time. Dryden found a quiet parking lot a block and a half from Holly’s home. The night was cool and full of the smells of restaurant food and vehicle exhaust.

“Don’t look around for anyone watching,” Dryden said. “We’re two people walking home with groceries. Nothing more than that.”

They were on Holly’s street now, a hundred yards from the place they wanted. Dryden had the shopping bags Dena had bought in Modesto. The sidewalk was deserted and mostly dark. No sound in the night except the background hum of the city. The diesel groan of a bus trundling by, a few blocks over.

The building’s entry was locked, as expected. Dryden already had the modified key in his hand. A bump key, to use the common term. He had notched its blade into five equal-sized teeth, like little shark fins. With skill, a person could use one of these to bypass most of the standard door locks in the world. Dryden had used them in a dozen or more countries, at times when quiet entry into a structure was critical. In the years since his service, he’d never used anything less than a disc-tumbler lock for his own door. Those were immune to bump keys. They were also rare as hell.

The house two doors down from Holly’s had a standard lock. Dryden got through it about as quickly as he would’ve with the correct key. The apartment door, on the second-floor landing, was no more difficult.

The unit was bare of furniture. They left the lights off and locked the door behind them. The interior was like most empty apartments Dryden had seen: new paint on the walls, the air scented by carpet shampoo.

The moment they were inside with the door shut, Rachel went to the east wall — the closest she could get to Holly’s home — and shut her eyes. She stood there, leaning with her fingers splayed on the plaster, and said nothing for over a minute.

Dryden’s vision began adjusting to the gloom. The only light came from the glow of streetlamps against the closed window blinds and the blue LED display of the stove.

“You must be hearing fifty people from here,” Dryden said.

Rachel nodded. “It’s like trying to find one voice in a crowd.”

“It’s late. Maybe she’s sleeping.”

“I don’t think so. I can read people even when they’re asleep. Right now I’m getting a bunch of people in the building right beside us, and a few that are a lot farther away, in that direction. But in between, there’s a big space where there’s nobody. I think that’s Holly’s house. I think it’s empty.”

Rachel continued listening, waiting.

“Doctors keep strange hours,” Dryden said. “Don’t worry too much just yet.”

Rachel nodded again.

“You hearing anyone else?” Dryden asked. “Anyone Gaul might have sent?”

For a long time Rachel didn’t reply. Dryden saw her face tighten in concentration.

“Not that I can tell,” she said. “Even bad people’s thoughts are pretty normal, most of the time.”

She gave it another minute, then opened her eyes and turned from the wall.

Dryden went to the living room window; it faced out over the street in front of the building. He left the blinds closed but put his eye to the crack at their edge. From just the right angle he could see Holly’s front porch. A single newspaper lay atop the steps, in a plastic sleeve.

Dryden returned to the door, where he’d set down the groceries. He opened the bag with the gauze pads and disinfectant.

“Let’s have a look at your arm,” he said.

It was a quarter past two in the morning. Rachel had been asleep for an hour, curled on the floor near the wall. She’d made no sounds or sudden moves; that effect of the drug, at least, was long gone.

Dryden thought he could tell when she was dreaming, though: At times the chill at his temples seemed to intensify, doubling or tripling in strength. He’d gotten used to the steady background feel of it — it was there even when Rachel was asleep — but these swells and ebbs were something new. Some artifact of dream sleep, he guessed — uncontrolled activity, like rapid eye movement or night tremors.

He watched the blinds for the glow of headlights and listened for vehicles stopping or footsteps ticking on the sidewalk. Every time it happened he checked the window. So far, no arrivals at Holly Ferrel’s house. The paper lay right where it had been.

He’d familiarized himself with the apartment; it hadn’t taken long. There were five rooms: the kitchen, the living room, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. The second bedroom had a sliding door to a small balcony off the building’s rear. In the murky light outside, Dryden saw a narrow alley running east to west, paralleling the street in front. On the far side of the alley were a few more town houses, but mostly there were nondescript little buildings that could’ve been anything. Real estate offices. Travel agencies. Coffee shops. There were broad alleys between them, leading out to the next street over.

He was sitting now, his back to the wall beside the living room window. From this position he could check Holly’s porch just by turning his head.

He rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t slept in well over forty-eight hours. He dropped his hands to his sides and opened his eyes. If he kept them closed for any length of time he’d only get more tired.

He listened to the sounds of the building. The HVAC system humming. The dull bass of speakers somewhere upstairs. Laughter — drunk friends, men and women.

Life being lived.

“Do you ever think about trying again?”

He turned.

Rachel was lying with her head on her good arm, her eyes open. Regarding him.

“Having a family again, I mean,” she said.

“I don’t know. I guess I don’t. I haven’t, at least.”

He’d told her almost nothing about Trish and Erin — not by speaking, anyway.

“I’m sorry,” Rachel said. “There’s no way to keep from hearing it in your head, but I can shut up about it, if you want.”

He shook his head. “Don’t worry.”

The song upstairs ended and another started. Dryden thought he recognized the bass rhythm—“Undercover of the Night,” by the Rolling Stones.

“You should be someone’s dad again,” Rachel said. “You’d be good at it. You are good at it.”

She got up and crossed to the window and sat down beside him. She leaned her head against his shoulder. A minute later she was asleep again.

It was twenty to four. The party upstairs had ended. There was no sound but Rachel’s breathing.

In Dryden’s peripheral vision, faint light rimmed the window blinds. A vehicle slowed and stopped close by.

Dryden turned and put his eye to the gap.

A dark sedan. Right in front of Holly’s house.

Two men got out fast; the driver stayed at the wheel. The two outside scanned the street up and down.

“Rachel,” Dryden said.

He nudged her gently with his elbow.

She came awake, disoriented. Looked around in the darkness. Then she understood. She cocked her head as if listening, though not with her ears.

“Two men in front of her house,” Dryden whispered. “Another inside a car. Can you read them?”

She nodded.

“Anyone else in the car?” Dryden asked.

Rachel shook her head.

Dryden was still watching them. The two men finished surveying the street. They went up the front walk, unlocked Holly’s door, and went in. Dryden could almost see Rachel’s attention swinging to follow them, her head tilting, turning by tiny degrees.

“Their thoughts are like a checklist,” she said. “Kitchen clear. Front bath clear. Hallway clear.”

“Sounds like a security sweep,” Dryden said. “Making sure the place is empty before the owner comes home.”

Holly had bodyguards working for her. Interesting.

Rachel continued listening. Dryden pictured the two men checking the place, room by room, proceeding methodically upward through its stories.

They came back out five minutes later and stood sentry on the porch. One of them picked up the paper and set it inside. The sedan pulled away, and for a long time after that nothing happened.

At 4:05 by the clock on the stove, the sedan came back. One of the men on the porch went down the walk to meet it. He opened the vehicle’s back door, and a woman emerged. Forty years old, give or take. Small frame, delicate features. Though the light wasn’t great, Dryden could see it was the woman from the hospital Web site photo.

Rachel was already locked onto her.

Dryden watched the security officer escort Holly to the front door. She went in alone, and the man took up his position again.

Dryden thought of what Rachel had said the other night: how tricky it was to get useful information from a person’s thoughts. How often were thoughts even arranged into coherent sentences? How often were they just fragments of recent conversations, random images?

For five minutes Rachel said nothing. Sometimes she closed her eyes and seemed to concentrate harder.

“She’s writing an e-mail,” Rachel said. “It’s medical stuff about someone named Laney. I don’t know what half the words mean. I think some of them are the names of drugs.”

Dryden felt the cool sensation at his temples spike again. No doubt a result of Rachel’s intense focus. He said nothing about it — hardly thought about it, even. All his attention went to wondering what the next hour might tell them.

“Sent,” Rachel said.

She was quiet for another minute. Her concentration seemed almost to put her in a trance. Her eyelids slipped halfway shut.

Then they opened wide. She startled as if someone had prodded her.

Dryden didn’t ask. He waited.

Rachel got her feet under her and stood. She went to the east wall as if pulled there by whatever she was hearing in Holly Ferrel’s head.

“What the hell?” Rachel whispered.

Dryden stood, too. He was about to step away from the wall when he heard a sound: creaking wood.

Floorboards.

Someone was outside the apartment’s door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Rachel heard it, too. Her fix on Holly’s thoughts broke. She spun fast and stared at the door, then at Dryden.

Dryden stooped and took the SIG SAUER from where he’d set it on the floor. He moved out from the wall, putting himself diagonal to the door, ten feet away. Rachel came to his side.

Dryden’s eyes went to the gap where the door met the threshold. The dim stairwell light, just visible through the crack, was interrupted in two places.

Shadows of feet. Someone standing there. Not proceeding to higher floors or descending to the exit. Just standing right there on the landing, trying to be quiet.

For less than half a second Dryden considered the possibilities. Then he pushed all the questions away. No time.

He thought, Rachel, go to the back bedroom. Open the slider. I’m right behind you.

She didn’t hesitate. She turned and vanished into the darkness of the hall. Dryden followed, walking backward, keeping his eyes and the SIG trained on the door.

He heard the slider drag open as he entered the bedroom. Behind him, Rachel’s shoes padded onto the metal surface of the balcony — it was more like a fire escape without a ladder.

Dryden reached behind himself, felt the edge of the slider’s door frame, and backed through it. Across the bedroom and down the length of the hall, he could still see the apartment’s front door. Could still see the double shadow in the gap.

The doorknob rattled. Rachel flinched at the sound.

Dryden swung his head around and took in the space behind the row of town houses, the layout he’d studied earlier. He considered the buildings on the opposite side, and the offshoot alleys leading away between them. One alley was darker than the rest: a narrow passage between a four-story house and a two-story brick building. Dryden liked the look of it as an escape route. He’d liked it when he’d first seen it, hours before, and by force of habit had considered it repeatedly since then.

Forty feet away through the depth of the apartment, the knob rattled again.

Dryden put a leg over the rail and planted his foot at the balcony’s edge, pointed inward between the balusters. He followed with the other leg, then gestured for Rachel to do the same. He held her good arm with his free hand as she swung herself over.

Something — a shoulder or a foot — thudded hard against the apartment’s front door.

Dryden looked down: flat, empty pavement beneath the balcony, ten feet below them.

He stuffed the SIG in his rear waistband and took hold of Rachel’s wrist.

“Know what I’m doing?” he whispered.

She nodded, nervous but ready.

He lifted her clear of the balcony by the wrist, his other hand gripping the rail. He crouched fast, bringing his seat down onto his ankles, his arm extending as far down as he could reach, until Rachel’s feet were no more than eighteen inches above the pavement. He let go and heard her land lightly; her balance faltered and then she regained it and stepped back, clearing his way. He rose, pushed off the edge with his feet, swung down, and dropped to the ground.

Rachel was already moving, heading for the narrow channel Dryden had visualized. He drew the SIG again and caught up with her, nearly sprinting. They’d just rounded the corner of the brick building, into the alley beside it, when he heard the apartment’s door crash inward far behind them. He looked back over his shoulder toward the sound, and in the same instant he heard another, much closer:

The action of a pump shotgun being cycled, ten feet away in the pitch black of the alley.

A woman’s voice. “Don’t move. You swing the sidearm toward me, I’m going to shoot you.”

No hint of a bluff in her tone.

Dryden kept still.

Rachel was standing right up against him. Any shotgun blast that hit him would hit her, too, if the weapon was loaded with buckshot.

“Eject the magazine,” the woman said. “Then eject the chambered round. Then drop the gun.”

Out in the broader space between the rows of buildings, boot soles came down hard on the concrete. Someone had just dropped off the apartment balcony.

“Do it,” the woman said.

Dryden ejected the magazine. Then the chambered round. In the darkness beside him, he heard Rachel’s breath escape. Like hope. He let the SIG fall to the pavement.

Footsteps ticked toward the alley from beyond its mouth. They came to a stop just out of sight, the newcomer staying clear of the shotgun’s line of fire.

Something metallic jingled behind Dryden.

“Turn toward me,” the woman with the shotgun said.

Dryden turned. In the dull light he saw the glint of handcuffs. The woman threw them; he caught them out of the air.

“Cuff yourself. Behind the back.”

Dryden still couldn’t see the woman’s face. In the bleed of light from the wider alley he could just make out Rachel. Beyond the fear in the girl’s eyes he saw deep confusion, though at what, he couldn’t tell.

“Behind the back,” the woman said again. “Do it.”

Dryden put the cuffs behind his back and closed them around his wrists. A second later a flashlight came on, probably mounted to the shotgun’s barrel. Its beam played over Dryden’s lower back.

“He’s secure,” the woman said.

The newcomer stepped into view at the front of the alley. Another woman. Dryden got only a sense of her in the shifting beam of the flashlight.

Rachel was turning back and forth, her gaze going from one woman to the other.

“I can’t hear your thoughts,” Rachel said. “Either of you.”

“Of course not, sweetie,” the newcomer said.

She grabbed Dryden by the shirt and pulled him forward off balance, tripping him and shoving him down hard, chest-first onto the concrete. She sat astride his back, and he heard something plastic click open — some small container, it sounded like.

“What are you doing to him?” Panic saturated Rachel’s voice.

“Relax,” the woman said.

Rachel didn’t relax. She screamed, “What are you doing?”

The last word got cut off to a muffle; the other woman had clamped a hand over Rachel’s mouth.

An instant later Dryden felt a needle penetrate his neck. Heard the plunger slide down. Felt the rush of heat beneath his skin.

“Stop it!” Rachel screamed, pulling away the woman’s hand. “What are you doing to him?”

The second woman was already clambering off of him. Getting to her feet. Helping the first woman restrain Rachel back there in the dark. Dryden heard it all receding away as if into a fog. A place where all sounds were hollow and sourceless. He felt the heat spread up through his neck, across his scalp. Felt the pavement beneath him draw open into a kind of darkness. Rachel’s muffled screams followed him down into it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

At times he felt almost awake. Up near the surface of sleep, where he could hear. Where he could feel.

He was inside some kind of container. The lining felt like smooth cardboard against his cheek. Someone was carrying it, saying, Lift with your legs, easy, easy.

Something was whining. A steady droning sound. Jet engines, it sounded like. Small ones. A moment later there was movement, the container seeming to slide while his body wanted to hold still. Inertia, he thought, and the word seemed funny to him, though he couldn’t say why. He slid a few inches on the cardboard until his feet thudded up against the container’s end. A few seconds later the world seemed to pitch and tilt sickeningly, and something thumped dully beneath the floor. Landing gear folding up, he guessed, and then he was out again.

He’ll be fine. He’s coming out of it. Give him another thirty minutes.

Are you sure?

I’m sure, honey.

His throat felt like he’d been eating dryer lint. His head pounded like hell. He ran his tongue over his lips. It scraped.

“Drink this.”

Rachel’s voice.

He opened his eyes and saw a juice box six inches from his face, a little pink bendy straw stuck in it and aimed at him. Rachel pushed it forward, and he got his mouth closed around it. He pursed his lips and drank. High fructose corn syrup and artificial flavoring. Same way they’d made it when he was a kid. He sucked down the entire box, saw its sides cave in, let it go, and rolled onto his back.

He still had the cuffs on, but he was out of the container. He was lying on a couch somewhere. A little study. No windows. Bright, pale light washed in through the door, but from his angle he couldn’t see the room beyond.

“Where are we?” Dryden asked.

“Home,” Rachel said.

“Your home?”

She nodded, her eyes excited in a way he hadn’t seen them before.

Under the headache, Dryden felt the familiar cool pulse at his temples. It felt like it had at times the night before — double or triple the intensity he’d been used to in recent days.

He thought of the woman waiting in the dark alley. Waiting along the escape route he’d been considering for hours before that.

“They can hear my thoughts, too,” he said.

Rachel nodded again. “They came from Fort Detrick, like me. They said the three of us got away from there, about five years ago, and we’ve been in hiding since then. They told me a lot about it, and I told them about the last few days. They believe me, but they still want to talk to you. They want to know for sure they can trust you, and then they’ll take the cuffs off. Is that okay?”

Dryden shut his eyes hard. Compressed them repeatedly. It was the next best thing to rubbing them.

“Send them in,” he said.

“Thank you.” She got up to go.

“Wait,” Dryden said.

Rachel stopped. Turned back to him.

“Holly Ferrel,” Dryden said. “You heard something in her thoughts, right at the end. Right before we had to run for it.”

The happiness receded from Rachel’s eyes.

“What was it?” Dryden asked.

“She was thinking about a phone call she had to make. An important one. She was rehearsing the first part of it, over and over, the way people do.”

“What was she saying?”

“This is Holly Ferrel. I need to speak with Martin Gaul.”

Dryden stared. First at Rachel and then at nothing, trying to get a grasp on what it might mean.

A minute later the two women came into the room. Dryden saw them in detail for the first time. Both were in their thirties, lean, medium framed, medium height. Dryden got himself seated upright on the couch and faced them. One was blond, the other somewhere between blond and brunette. Their appearance was oddly unremarkable — it was, at least, far less remarkable than it could’ve been. Dryden got the impression they took great care to make themselves forgettable.

There was a second couch facing him across the small room. The two women sat on it.

“I’m Audrey,” the blonde said. “This is Sandra.”

The hostility they’d shown in the alley was long gone. They seemed sympathetic, if not quite regretful. Which was fine — it was stupid to regret things that had seemed necessary at the time.

Sandra nodded at the thought. “We just didn’t know who you were,” she said. “We’d been monitoring the area around Holly Ferrel’s house, and when the two of you showed up it was pretty hard to miss.”

“We can’t hear Rachel’s thoughts,” Audrey said, “any more than she can hear ours. But we could hear your thoughts, and most of the time you were thinking about her. We could tell she was there with you, and that you seemed to be helping her, though we weren’t sure why. We decided to just get her the hell out of there and get the details afterward.”

“Our questions won’t take long,” Sandra said. “Answer ours and then we’ll answer yours. Most of them, anyway, for the time being. Fair enough?”

Dryden nodded.

It took half an hour. They walked him through the same story they’d no doubt heard from Rachel. Everything from the boardwalk to the town house. Then they asked him about his past. His career. He saw no reason to hold anything back.

When they’d finished, Sandra took a key from her pocket and removed the cuffs. Dryden worked his shoulders in slow circles, easing out the cramps.

“You’re probably starving,” Sandra said. “We’ll tell you our side over lunch. While we get it ready, Rachel wants to show you around the place.”

Dryden had guessed the residence was a house, to the extent he’d thought about it. It hadn’t crossed his mind to think otherwise. The moment he stepped to the den’s doorway, he saw he’d been wrong.

Beyond the den was a broad living room with a wall of windows. Beyond the windows was Chicago, seen from what had to be eighty stories up. The view faced south across the tops of skyscrapers from a position near the north end of downtown. It was early afternoon, and the city gleamed in sunlight under a rich blue sky.

“We’re in the Hancock Center,” Rachel said. “This apartment takes up the entire eighty-third floor.”

Dryden looked at her, then at Audrey and Sandra, still standing just inside the den.

“This place is a hideout?” he asked.

“You’d be surprised how well it works,” Sandra said. “Rich people have shaped the law to suit their privacy needs. In some ways it’s easier to anonymously own a place like this than a split-level ranch in the suburbs.”

“There’s one other reason to live here,” Audrey said, “but if you’re lucky you won’t have to find out what it is.”

Rachel tugged Dryden’s arm, anxious to show him around. He turned to follow her—

“Wait,” Sandra said.

Dryden turned back.

Sandra was holding his SIG SAUER out to him. The magazine had been reloaded into the grip.

“All you’ve done for Rachel,” she said, “we can’t tell you what it means to us. The least we can do is trust you.”

Dryden took the pistol, checked the safety, and stuffed it in his waistband.

The apartment’s size and layout were surreal. The living room opened to the kitchen and dining room, merging into a vast space that extended to the southwest corner of the level.

The rest of the floorplan formed a giant rectangular doughnut, centered on the building’s core. Among the other rooms were a library that spanned most of the northern stretch, and three bedrooms filling out the east end. The bedrooms were more or less equal in size, which was to say that each was huge. The room at the southeast corner was Rachel’s. She led Dryden inside. He was briefly surprised by the casual state it was in — it looked as if it had seen regular use up until this very moment.

“The whole apartment was like this when we got here this morning,” Rachel said. “Cups on the counter, left sitting there for two months. Audrey and Sandra were afraid to stay here while Gaul had me captive. In case he got this location from me.”

She went to the bed, its covers lying askew. A stuffed blue triceratops lay on its side there, half obscured by the comforter.

“I keep thinking some of this stuff might help me remember,” Rachel said.

She pulled the dinosaur free and hugged it to her chest.

“Sandra told me it has a name,” she said. “I can almost feel it wanting to come back to me.”

She stared at the thing, and for a moment something rose in her eyes. Some fragile hope. Then her shoulders sagged. She set the dinosaur back on the bed.

“Give it time,” Dryden said.

Rachel nodded but looked unsettled about something.

“What is it?” Dryden said.

Rachel exhaled softly. “You’ll see.”

“When I was twenty-two,” Sandra said, “I went to prison. I’m not going to say what for.”

The four of them were seated at the dining room table, near the southwest corner of the residence. Outside, the day had become cloudy. Ragged knots of mist slipped among the tops of the towers. Whenever one enveloped the Hancock, the city briefly vanished into a whiteout.

“In part because of priors, my sentence was sixteen years. I could be paroled in twelve if I was lucky. I’d been in for a month when a man visited me. Not in the room with the glass partition and the phones. Right in my cell, in the middle of the night. The chief of the guards came in and stood with him, and looked very pissed, but didn’t say anything. The visitor said I could leave the prison that night, if I wanted. I could leave with him, right then, and live in a much nicer place, and I’d only have to serve two years there. Then I’d be free to go. This other place was a kind of dormitory, he said, where the army did medical trials. Like the FDA, but the military version of it. The deal was simple: I’d be given three injections of a new drug — an RNA-interference drug, he called it — in the first two weeks. After that, nothing. I could just relax, live there, watch TV, do anything I wanted. They would monitor me to see if the drug had any effect, but whatever it did, I’d be free after the two years were up. Free to start my life over, and not screw it up this time. I’d only be twenty-four years old when I got out. Or I could stay there in prison until my midthirties. That first month inside, I’d already been sexually assaulted twice. It was going to keep happening, too. No question about it. ‘Think it over,’ the guy said, but I’ll be honest — I didn’t really have to. I thought even if the medical trial killed me, that might be better than another twelve years in that place.”

“My experience was more or less the same,” Audrey said. “My decision process was the same.”

They took turns telling the story, handing it back and forth. The place where they ended up, a living facility at Fort Detrick, really did seem like a dorm on the inside — the dorms they’d seen in movies, at least. Neither had ever set foot inside a real one. The only difference was that they couldn’t leave. They were two of just ten women living there, all of whom got along well enough. The atmosphere was relaxed, relatively speaking. It sure as hell wasn’t prison.

They got their first injections on day one. Nothing much to it — no worse than tetanus shots. The medical technicians said they might experience fever or chills, but they didn’t. Not even after all three shots had been administered. There were no ill effects at all, and for the next two months it stayed like that. One of the girls in the dorm had done pretty well in science in high school, and remembered reading about something called a control group. Sometimes in an experiment, one group of subjects would get a certain drug, say, and another group would think they were getting the drug but instead just got sugar pills or shots of some neutral solution. Maybe that had happened here. Maybe they were just the control. That was a nice thought, and it lasted until about the middle of month three.

When the effect started, it came on slowly. Little bouts of it, at first. Even when it got stronger, it was hard to notice, because it didn’t work among the women themselves. It only seemed to work on outsiders, like the medical techs, or people who drove past the building within a certain distance. For probably a week or better, each woman in the dorm kept the phenomenon to herself, afraid she was imagining it. Afraid she was going crazy.

Then the strangest thing happened: One of the techs, during a routine physical — they performed them twice a week — asked one of the girls a question he’d never asked before.

Are you hearing things in your head that seem unfamiliar? Thoughts that don’t seem to be your own?

The girl’s eyes went wide. Yes, she said. Yes, what the hell is it? Other girls overheard. They crowded around and spoke up, relieved to know they weren’t alone with their symptoms. In the midst of it all, the tech took out a phone and dialed, and that was the end of life in the dorm.

Within the hour, the ten of them were in a different building — not so much like a dorm, very much like a prison, in fact. Each had her own barred cell. Different researchers came to look at them. Most of these were older men, some of them in military uniforms. They spoke among themselves, talking about the women as if they weren’t standing right there, in their cages. As if the women couldn’t hear them. Which was strange, really, since the women could do much more than hear them.

“They knew we weren’t leaving that place,” Sandra said. “Not in two years. Not ever. They didn’t care that we could hear it in their thoughts, either. It didn’t matter what we knew. They had us.”

“For a while we thought they might use us to spy on people,” Audrey said. “Put us in hotel rooms next door to important guests — VIP types from other countries, something like that — find out what they were thinking. Sounds plausible, right? For the rest of our lives we’d just be glorified listening devices.”

She looked away into the glare of sunlight off the nearest towers. The highest floors gleamed wet where clouds had touched them.

“It turned out we weren’t even going to be that, though,” she said.

Dryden looked at them, one and then the other. “What did they want you to be?”

“White mice,” Sandra said. “We were going to stay locked up the rest of our lives, so they could watch us and see what happened long-term. See if the effect changed over time — got stronger or weaker, anything like that. See if we all got cancer in three years, or seven, or ten. See if we got Alzheimer’s in our thirties.”

“They did want human listening devices,” Audrey said, “but they were going to choose those people very carefully. People who were just right for the job.”

“So that was going to be it for us,” Sandra said. “Except our ages, nothing in that building was going to change for the rest of our lives. And then something happened. A physical exam of one of the women — her name was Rebecca Grant — turned up a result no one had even been looking for. Rebecca was pregnant. She’d conceived right before going to prison.”

Both Sandra and Audrey looked at Rachel.

Though she’d already heard the story, the girl’s emotional response was evident. Dryden saw her throat tighten.

“Rachel was born on May 1, 2001,” Audrey said. “They allowed Rebecca to raise her, right there in the living facility with the rest of us. The researchers were very interested in how she would turn out — whether she’d have the same capability as her mother. Even though Rachel was conceived before Rebecca had the RNA treatment, the drug would’ve still affected her as a developing fetus. You already know it worked on her, but as it turned out, it didn’t work exactly the same way it had with everyone else. Rachel was different from her mother. Different from all of us, in one very important way.”

“Which was what?” Dryden asked.

Rachel turned to him. “They won’t tell me,” she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

For a few seconds the room stayed quiet. Then Audrey spoke. She addressed Dryden; it was clear Rachel had already heard this part.

“There are things we just don’t know how to explain to Rachel right now. Things that would be very hard for her to hear. Not just what makes her different. Other things, too. About what happened to her mother. About how we ended up free. About Holly Ferrel.”

“We will tell you,” Sandra said. “Both of you. All we’re saying is that we want Rachel to remember it for herself first.” Her eyes went to the girl. “Honey, if we tried to tell you now … we’re not sure you’d believe us. You sure as hell wouldn’t want to believe us. You can imagine they’re not happy stories.”

“You’ve kept a journal for the past few years,” Audrey said. “We debated showing it to you, letting you learn everything that way. But we really think your own memories would make it easiest on you … that when you remember the things you’ve been through, you’ll also remember that you’ve recovered from them. That’s the best we can do. We’ve given it all the thought in the world.”

“Gaul knows where Holly Ferrel lives,” Rachel said. “If she’s in danger, I don’t want to wait however long it takes—”

“Holly is in danger,” Sandra said. “Grave danger, but not immediate danger. I know that doesn’t make sense to you now, but I can say it with certainty. For the time being, this week for sure, nobody’s going to hurt her.”

“But how do you know?” Rachel asked.

“I know. I promise.”

Rachel looked as frustrated as Dryden had ever seen her. He couldn’t blame her. His own frustration was simmering.

“How did Gaul get to me?” Rachel asked. “Two months ago.”

“That’s tied into the rest of it,” Audrey said. “In a way, it’s all just one story — the things we’re holding back.” Her eyes went to Rachel and softened. “You don’t want to hear it right now, sweetie.”

Against his will, Dryden thought, Maybe you just don’t want to tell it right now.

He couldn’t call it back any more than he could’ve kept it in. He saw all three of them react as if he’d said it aloud.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Not your fault,” Audrey said. She added, “You’re not entirely wrong, either.”

“What about the cell tower in the desert?” Dryden asked. “Whatever it relates to … whatever so many people are afraid of.”

“It’s not really the towers they’re scared of,” Audrey said. “Or what the towers are being used for right now. It’s something else — and they’re right to be afraid of it.” Her eyes went back and forth between Dryden and Rachel. “The answers are coming soon enough, I promise. Bear with us, okay? When you know the rest, you’ll probably wish you didn’t.”

Darkness had slid down over Santa Monica Bay. Gaul stared at it from his patio, a mile inland and five hundred feet up. To the west, the Point Dume Headlands shone dull in the moonlight. To the east, twenty miles out in the night haze, lay LAX and the orange glow of the city beyond.

Gaul sank into a chair beside the pool. In the blue light rippling up through its surface, he looked at the bound document in his hands. In the months since he’d first read it, the block of text on its cover had come to embody stress itself.

Gaul shut his eyes and sank back into the seat cushion. His phone rang in his pocket. Lowry’s ringtone. Gaul took it out and answered without opening his eyes.

“The Chicago option is up and running, sir,” Lowry said.

Gaul acknowledged him, hung up, and set the phone on the paver bricks.

Two months before, in the days after Rachel had been captured, chemical analysis of her skin and hair had yielded a pollutant profile consistent with greater Chicago. That wasn’t where Gaul’s people had grabbed her, but it seemed to be where she’d spent much of her recent time. It seemed to be her home.

She likely wouldn’t remember her way back there for days yet, but in the name of caution the Chicago option was running now.

The thing was, it didn’t speak of caution. It spoke of desperation. It was as ridiculous as it was clever. That he was grasping for it only heightened the feeling that he was drowning.

“So you’re sleeping in the living room?” Rachel asked.

Dryden nodded. He stood in the doorway of her bedroom; she stood facing him from just inside, holding under her arm the triceratops whose name she couldn’t remember.

“I know I’m safe here,” Rachel said. “I just wish you were going to be closer.”

“Downside of owning a whole floor of a skyscraper,” Dryden said.

Rachel managed a smile. Dryden had seen precious few of them from her in the long hours since lunch. Even this one slipped away in a second or two. She looked down at her feet.

“Scary,” she said. “All this stuff. I wanted so much to remember. And now … I still want it, but in a different way. Like something bad I just want to get behind me.” She looked up at him. “But bad things can take forever to get behind you, can’t they.”

“They can.”

She nodded. Then she stepped forward and hugged him tightly. She held on for a long time, then said good night and closed her door.

Gaul flipped through the report, coming at last to the section he always stopped at. The one titled RACHEL GRANT. His fingertips traced over the page, passing slowly across the two words, as if they might cut him.

Audrey waited until Dryden had left the east hallway and gone to the living room. She stepped out of her bedroom and went to Sandra’s, slipping in and closing the door behind her.

In the darkness, Sandra stood in silhouette at the window, against the shimmer of pier lights on Lake Michigan. Audrey went to her.

“It hurts, not leveling with her,” Sandra said.

“It won’t be this way for long. A few more days.”

“What do you think it’ll be like? When she starts to get it all back?”

Audrey breathed a laugh. The sound was hard and cold, but not without amusement. “Interesting. To say the least.”

Gaul turned the pages slowly, making his way through the section about Rachel. Rachel and all that she’d done in her short life. Color photos filled some of the sheets. Gaul had a strong stomach for images of this sort, but these tested its limits. Still he stared at each in turn. He felt obligated to do so — to remind himself what the stakes were.

At last he let the report fall shut. He set it on the bricks beside the phone. As always, his hand came away shaking.