Runner

CHAPTER THIRTY

Deep in the night, Dryden woke. For a moment he felt sure something had roused him, a sound or a flash of light, but as the seconds drew out, the impression faded.

He rose from the couch, took the SIG SAUER from the end table, and made a quick, silent orbit of the living room, dining room, and kitchen. A quarter past four in the morning and all was well.

He went to the south windows. Here was the city at its most sedate, its streets as bare as they would ever be, its towers all but darkened, their rooftop beacons blinking a slow cadence.

The only thing in view that seemed awake was an intense white light fixed to a radio mast atop the tallest skyscraper — the Willis Tower, they were calling it these days. Against the sleepy backdrop of the city, this single point of light, the highest thing in the skyline, stabbed the darkness in a rapid and intermittent frenzy. It was as if its control board were shorting out. Something about this light drew Dryden’s attention, like a face in a crowd to which he couldn’t quite put a name. The more he studied it, the more out of place the thing seemed; it was easily three times brighter than any other light in Chicago.

Dryden turned and looked at the wall and couch behind him, bathed in the glow of the city. The flashing white light was bright enough to stand out within that glow, casting the shapes of the window frames across the room with each pulse.

This light had woken him.

He stared at it again. Logic told him he was obsessing over something meaningless; he’d woken up disoriented, and his judgment was off balance. Still he stared. Then he became aware of the strangest thing: Letters and words were forming in his mind, unbidden. He pictured them as if he were jotting them on a notepad, the vision he’d always used when deciphering Morse code—

Understanding hit him like ice water.

“How the fuck?” The words came out in a whisper, involuntary.

The light atop the radio mast was transmitting a message. Not Morse code, but an encrypted variant of it that Dryden and his men had developed for themselves in Ferret. In situations where signal transmission was too risky, they’d used handheld infrared units to flash this code to one another. As an added layer of precaution, they had never officially documented the code’s existence.

Only someone from his unit could have supplied it to whoever had programmed that light.

Now, as Dryden began to consciously process the message, all other thought fell aside. The words materialized, one every few seconds.

Dryden stood staring as the message looped again. He felt his mind trying to get a handle on it … and trying not to.

Denial wanted to assert itself. He wanted to let it. Wanted to believe it was a trap, or a trick, one that Cole Harris had simply been fooled into going along with. Cole was a smart guy, but anything was possible. Gaul was a smart guy, too.

The message cycled again. Dryden put his hand to the windowpane to steady himself. He shut his eyes. Through his closed lids he could still see the flashing.

In his mind Dryden saw Audrey and Sandra at the dining table.

All we’re saying is that we want Rachel to remember it for herself first. 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.

Rachel was different from her mother. Different from all of us, in one very important way.

What the hell did that mean? How would any amount of coercion have made Rachel murder people?

Dryden opened his eyes and pushed off from the glass.

Enough trying to make sense of what he couldn’t know. Life had taught him, by hard lessons, to act on what he did know.

He couldn’t just leave here without Rachel.

He knew that.

Irrational options spun up in his thoughts. Get her out of this place. Acquire a supply of the drug — any of the kinds used for sleep interrogation would do — and keep her on low doses forever. Keep the memory roadblock in place. Maybe the flashed message was bullshit, maybe it wasn’t, but with enough of the drug, he and Rachel would never need to find out. She’d understand. Hell, she’d insist.

Cooperating with Gaul was no option. Whatever he might do to Dryden, he would have Rachel killed on sight.

Only one move made any sense.

The SIG’s balanced weight felt reassuring in his hand. He left the windows, crossed the living room, and entered the hallway toward the east end of the apartment.

Rachel willed the triceratops to reveal its name. It returned her stare with its plastic eyes gleaming in the half-light and surrendered nothing.

“Fine,” she said.

She rolled onto her back and watched the glow of the city shimmer on the wall. Sleep had been fitful, more off than on. She missed Sam’s thoughts. Four times during the night, she’d stood and gotten halfway to her bedroom door, blanket and pillow in hand, meaning to go commandeer the second couch in the living room. All that had stopped her was embarrassment. It wasn’t that Sam would think less of her — nothing would make him do that — but that she would think far less of herself. If she couldn’t stand up to her own fears now, how would she handle whatever was coming? The things Audrey and Sandra couldn’t bring themselves to tell her.

She grabbed the triceratops again, pulled it tightly against her, and closed her eyes. Forget about looking at it; most of her memories of this thing probably involved hugging it. The soft fabric felt good against her arms. It felt … familiar.

What was its name?

A word swam up toward the surface of her consciousness, flashed below the waves, and vanished again. So close her mouth had nearly blurted it out — but it was already gone, back into the deep.

Damn.

The dinosaur’s name was the first domino; of that she was certain. This one detail from her past would unlock all the rest. Open it up like a blister, so she could just deal with whatever came out. It could happen any minute now. Any second. She hugged the triceratops to her chest as hard as she could.

Movement below the waves again. Here it came. Her lips strained to form the word.

It started with—

Her concentration suddenly broke like a thread. She sat up fast, the dinosaur falling away forgotten.

Sam was in the hallway.

His thoughts came to her like a voice from far away, fading in and out through gusting wind. She couldn’t catch the words — not yet — but the nature of his thinking was unmistakable: hyperalert, and saturated with tension.

The windowless hallway on the east end, running north and south past the three bedrooms, was the darkest place in the apartment. Dryden’s eyes were still adjusted to the bright skyline; he waited for details of the hallway to resolve. Rachel’s door emerged twenty feet ahead. Somewhere in the gloom farther along was Audrey’s door, and then Sandra’s.

He could feel the cool pulse at his temples, growing as he moved toward Rachel’s room. He supposed he was feeling a bit of it from the other two as well, even if all three were asleep.

If.

Dryden had led sneak incursions into a handful of intimidating places: container ships in which the crew knew every inch of the layout while he and his men did not; cave complexes that called to mind giant anthills. This place was worse. Beyond their built-in abilities, Audrey and Sandra were sure to have more conventional power at their disposal. Given the apartment’s defensive setup — the door leading in from the elevator was inch-thick steel — it would be naive to think there weren’t offensive measures, too.

He could rush both of their rooms and kill them right now. The first of the two would have only the briefest warning, and the second would have only the time between the gunshots and his arrival at her door, five seconds at most. He could do that.

Except he couldn’t. Killing anyone because of the flashed message would require certainty he didn’t have. Getting Rachel the hell out of here wouldn’t.

He went to her door, opened it as quickly as silence permitted, and found her sitting wide-awake, waiting for him. She looked like she’d been up for a while already. He stepped through the door, closed it quietly behind him, and crossed to her. No doubt she’d picked up on his fear even in the hallway, but now, as she got the details behind it from his thoughts, understanding twisted her expression into dread.

“No,” she whispered. “No, that can’t be right.” She was shaking her head, too rattled to cry yet. “Don’t even think things like that.”

He put a hand on her shoulder.

“We’ll sort it out later,” he whispered. “Right now we’re just going to get out of here. Come on.”

She didn’t seem to hear him. She was still processing all the things he wasn’t saying out loud. Her voice finally cracked as the heaviest of the ideas came through.

“You’re not sure I’m real?” she asked. “You think I’m someone bad?”

He knelt before her and looked into her eyes.

“You’re the girl who saved my life,” he said. “You knew that, didn’t you? I was the walking dead before you came along. You changed that. How could a girl do that if she wasn’t real? Do you trust me?”

She nodded quickly.

“Then trust me on this,” he said. “This is you, who you are right now, and we’ll find a way to keep it like that. But we have to get out of this place first. Okay?”

She nodded again, took his hand, and swung her feet to the floor.

The two of them had gone only a few steps when Dryden felt the chill at his temples intensify.

One or both of the others had just moved closer to this room.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Dryden stopped fast. Rachel collided with him and nearly lost her balance. He steadied her with one hand; with the other he leveled the SIG SAUER on her closed bedroom door.

Within seconds the cool sensation stepped up again. He pictured both Audrey and Sandra in the hall, not far away. Rachel put her hand on his gun arm, not pushing it down but begging him to reconsider.

“What if it’s not true?” she asked. “Let’s just talk to them. Maybe we can figure it out.”

Then came Audrey’s voice, right outside the door. “It’s not true, Sam. Think about it. Is there anything Gaul wouldn’t do to get to us?”

“We know you’re confused,” Sandra said. “Anyone would be, in your position. That’s why Gaul’s doing this; the trick is designed to force you into doubt.”

“Think of it this way,” Audrey said. “We have all the guns in the world here; I’m sure you know that. If we were bad, wouldn’t we have killed you long before this?”

Dryden thought about it. Their reasoning didn’t quite hold. Of course they could have killed him, but until now there’d been no reason to. He’d been no threat to them, and as mind readers, they would’ve had plenty of warning if he ever did become a threat. They would’ve always had the option of killing him before he could make a move against them.

He started to voice the objection, then stopped — they’d heard it loud and clear already.

“Sam…” Sandra said. Her voice was soft, sympathetic. That tone, more than any words she might say with it, eroded the edges of his caution. He kept the pistol steady on the door; God knew what they might be pointing at it from the other side.

The germ of an idea came to him.

Before it could crystallize into words, before the two women could capture it and react, Dryden threw himself forward, put his shoulder to Rachel’s dresser, and shoved it over. It hit the floor sliding, and he took advantage of its momentum, pushing it across the carpet until it lodged with a gratifying thud against the door.

Now they’d never come through fast enough to get the drop on him, and they obviously couldn’t risk firing through the wall with Rachel in here.

“If you’re telling us the truth,” Dryden said, “then prove it. Give us Rachel’s journal. Slide it under the door past the dresser. If I’m wrong, I’ll apologize a hundred times.”

Beside him, Rachel tensed, waiting for the answer.

It came: the sound of a rifle’s action being worked.

The girl reacted as if pierced. She sat down hard, looping an arm around Dryden’s leg for support. With his free hand he took hers and held it tightly.

He hoped his hate for the other two was transmitting through the door with razor-wire edges.

“This is temporary, Rachel,” Sandra said. Gone was every trace of kindness in that voice. “When you remember who you really are, you’ll laugh at this.”

Rachel suddenly lunged to her feet. Taking Dryden by surprise, she grabbed the SIG from his hand, trained it chest-level on the door, and opened fire. She put a row of three shots through the door and the wall beside it before Dryden could get it back from her. He heard someone land on her ass out in the hall, cursing, and the rifle clattered against the baseboard. A second later the icy feeling at his temples faded just perceptibly; the women had retreated some distance down the hallway.

“Why don’t you shoot back?” Rachel screamed at them. “You might even hit me!”

Dryden put an arm around her shoulders. “It’s okay,” he said.

She turned into him and pressed her face to his shirt, her body shaking hard.

“Wow, they didn’t see that coming,” he said.

She heard the smile in his voice and looked up at him, managing one of her own, through the tears.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

Dryden looked around the room. Two solid walls, and two made of windows — with nothing on the other side but a three-football-field drop. There was a private bath, but it offered no better options than the bedroom did. Crazy solutions came and went: shoot out a window, rappel on Rachel’s bedsheet to the apartment below and shoot their way into it. It didn’t matter that their odds of surviving that were one in a thousand. What mattered was that Audrey and Sandra would read his planning of it and have a wide-open chance to rush the room.

“What about me?” Rachel asked. “They can’t read my plans.”

“Do you have a plan?”

She hesitated, her expression flickering between thoughtful and terrified.

“Yes,” she said.

Audrey felt Dryden’s thought pattern flare with stress at what Rachel had just suggested. He trusted her, cared about her more than himself — but the idea of blindly following a plan of hers threw him, like a pilot asked to cede control to a passenger.

Then his logic came in, hard grid lines bisecting the discord of his emotions. Soldier logic. Fast and clear. Audrey had read this kind of thinking before in men and women tempered by combat. Dryden made his decision so quickly she almost couldn’t follow the steps. The man saw nothing but futility in using his own plans, given their transparency. Therefore any plan of Rachel’s was better.

He told her to do it, whatever it was, and then returned his full attention to watching the door.

No further knowledge would come out of that room.

In the darkness beside Audrey, Sandra’s breath rushed out. “Are you shitting me?”

Audrey heard fear in her voice. Felt it in herself, too. In the years since escaping confinement, she’d never once faced an enemy whose thoughts were hidden from her. She could not think of the last time she’d been reduced to guessing in a moment like this, and realized wearily that she didn’t even know how to do it. Her grip tightened on the heavy rifle in her hands.

She turned to Sandra and tried to be steady. “Someone upstairs or down will have called security about the gunshots. They’ll be in the anteroom any minute, so we won’t be leaving by elevator.”

“I’ll get the parachutes,” Sandra said.

“Bring the tandem harness for me.”

Sandra understood. She sprinted off down the dark hallway.

Rachel crossed the bedroom to the attached bath. She stopped in the doorway and looked back at Sam, standing with his back to her and the gun steady on the barricaded door. She wished she could tell him what it meant to her that he trusted her this completely — trusted her not to do something stupid.

She hoped she wasn’t about to.

Quietly taking the cordless phone from its cradle on her study desk, she stepped inside the bathroom and closed the door. In the silence, she stifled her own thoughts and focused on Sam’s. The message from the flashing light on the Willis Tower, visible to him even now as it pulsed on the walls of her bedroom, ran unbroken in the background of his mind.

The message was for Sam, and no one else. Her, they would kill. No question of that.

She stared at her dark reflection above the vanity. “Whoever you are,” she whispered, “you’re not coming back.”

She pressed the TALK button, and the phone’s keypad lit up. This was the only solution. It offered at least some chance Sam would live, and all but guaranteed Audrey and Sandra would die.

Rachel dialed the number. A man answered on the first ring. She set the phone on the counter with the line open, and slid down the door to sit on the cold stone tiles.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Dryden waited for it to happen, whatever it might be. There was no reason to even wonder what Rachel was doing — in fact, there was every reason not to.

The bathroom door opened, and she emerged, having been inside for perhaps three minutes. She came to him and for a moment said nothing.

“I won’t ask,” Dryden said.

“It won’t be much longer.”

Her tone chilled him like a night breeze in a cemetery.

Gaul finished pulling on his shirt as he entered his den. The telepresence screens were already up and running, showing him the computer room at his office in Santa Monica. The techs there were too busy to sit; they darted like bees among the workstations, configuring them for incoming data. The Mirandas were tasked and running feeds of Chicago, with the software drawing on street cameras to fill in the gaps — the deep steel canyons among the towers, where satellites couldn’t see.

The master frame was five miles wide, rendering the city as a thermal spiderweb against the cool span of Lake Michigan. Gaul could see both of the AH-6 Little Bird helicopters that had been staged on rooftops. The first had just lifted off, and the second, white hot on its pad, would rise any moment.

Lowry paced along the computer room’s south wall, near the heavy-gauge plastic sheet that had been stretched in place of the old window. Through his headset he fed instructions to both chopper pilots.

“The highest row of windows is the hundredth floor,” Lowry said. “Count down from there to the eighty-third. You’re weapons-free to engage any warm body on that entire level.”

“Thank you,” Rachel said.

She took Dryden’s hand, and he felt hers tremble in the moment before she tightened her hold.

“For what?”

“You love me,” she said. “It’s all you think, when you think about me. Even right now, you’re thinking how it’ll be okay if you can get me out of here, even if you die. You just … love me. Thank you.”

Against all instinct Dryden took his attention from the bedroom door. He turned to meet her eyes. He saw fear in them, but alongside it was something worse: resignation.

“Honey, what is it?” he asked. “What did you do?”

“I’m so sorry.” She put her arms around him and held on.

Over her shoulder, Dryden saw the lights of an aircraft cresting the skyline less than a mile to the south, coming in fast. Just audible, the blade rate faded in, familiar to him as an old ringtone. It was an AH-6 or a close variant; Dryden could picture the snipers belted in above its skids as easily as if the chopper were just outside the windows. Which it would be in forty seconds.

Through the open bathroom door he saw the cordless phone, its display glowing green, and understood.

Audrey’s fingers halted on the final clasp of the tandem parachute harness. She locked eyes with Sandra, who had also gone still, picking up the same thought from Dryden.

“She couldn’t,” Sandra said.

“She did,” Audrey said. “Watch the door.” She grabbed the rifle, threw it to Sandra, and left at a dead run.

Past Rachel’s bedroom she took the hallway corner and crossed the sitting room to the southern windows, slamming to a stop with her palms against the glass.

The helicopter was already north of the river, following a line up Michigan Avenue. Behind it, a second chopper lifted off from the rooftop of the RMC Plaza.

A soft ding announced the arrival of the elevator car, no doubt full of security and police. Beyond blocking the easy way out, they were meaningless; they could no more open the heavy door than they could morph through it.

The helicopters, however, would have to be dealt with. Audrey ran to the nearest closet, opened it, and pushed hard on the shelving unit inside, swinging it inward to reveal the cavity beyond the closet’s back wall.

Dryden had never felt this immobilized. For ten seconds, a stack of eternities under these conditions, he simply held on to Rachel and had no idea what to do. He kept the gun leveled on the door, and his eyes on the incoming helicopters — executioners to the scaffold.

“I’m sorry,” Rachel whispered again.

Dryden regained his composure and turned the girl’s face up toward his.

“You can’t do this,” he said. “You can’t give up. You’d be giving up for both of us, do you understand that?”

“If we get away,” Rachel said, “and if I turn into the other me … you might wish you had this moment back. That you hadn’t saved me.”

“Not a chance.”

He held her gaze a moment longer, hoping to see a glimmer of resolve there. She took a deep breath and nodded, looking stronger, if only by degrees.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Dryden said.

The lead chopper was twenty seconds out.

In the hall, one of the two women was still standing guard — Dryden had heard the other run past to verify the helicopters for herself. Whoever was in the hall would make a move on this room in the final seconds before the Little Birds reached sniper range. She would have no choice, by then, if she intended to keep Rachel alive.

That move would come any moment now.

Dryden’s eyes took in a long vertical split in the bedroom door, from the impact of the dresser. It followed the wood grain from the bottom of the door all the way to the top.

Don’t think. Do it. Now.

He turned his eyes on the south windows. He visualized himself shooting out the glass and plunging into open space.

Rachel jerked as if stung, reacting to the thought. By reflex she reached to stop him from doing it.

Dryden pushed her away and, keeping his mind focused on the plan to exit through the window, turned and sprinted for the cracked door instead. There was just enough room to get up to speed. He vaulted the dresser, brought his leg up, and pistoned it forward to exploit his body’s momentum. His foot connected with the door and broke it like a sheet of ice as he went through. The movement was awkward as hell. He ignored his balance — ignored everything but the SIG and the direction it had to be pointed.

The corridor was pitch black. He fired, even as he fell, and in the instant of the muzzle flash he saw Sandra ten feet away holding the rifle — a G-36. She wasn’t aiming it. She looked deeply confused. The distraction, rough as it had been, must’ve worked — she’d gotten the image of him diving out the window, the same as Rachel had.

Dryden landed in a crouch, retargeted on the darkness where Sandra’s face had been, and squeezed off three shots as fast as he could.

It was death by strobe light. Three snapshots within the deep black, Sandra taking the bullets to the neck, cheekbone, forehead. Crumpling like a dropped marionette.

Dryden heard screaming, somewhere. Not Rachel. Audrey. Along the south side of the apartment. Dryden scrambled for the heavy machine gun, groped for it in the darkness, and took it from Sandra’s hands. He raised it to a firing position facing the south end of the hall, where enough city light bled past the corner to show that there was no one there.

Rachel appeared at her doorway. Dryden took a step toward her and stopped — something metal had rattled at his feet. He realized he’d heard the same sound when Sandra had fallen, but had missed it for more pressing details. He felt a barrel-mounted flashlight on the G-36 and switched it on.

Sandra was wearing a parachute.

He killed the light beam and checked the south corner again. Still clear. Audrey apparently knew better than to approach from that way; she didn’t have to read his mind to know he had the machine gun now. With vague amusement, Dryden realized Audrey’s mind reading gave him a small tactical advantage: For the moment he felt only Rachel prodding his thoughts, and he would sense the change as soon as Audrey got close enough to round the corner.

He turned the other way, toward the north end of the hall. Skyline glow shone there as well, from the library’s windows. It was likely Audrey would circle the apartment to attack from that direction, but that would take her a minute or more. Her scream had placed her at the south side only seconds ago.

Rachel’s bedroom windows began to hum as the nearer of the two choppers closed in. Dryden glanced through the doorway and saw the lead aircraft pass over the roof of the white marble building one block to the south.

“Take this,” Dryden said, handing Rachel the SIG. It had two shots left in it. He nodded over his shoulder at the north end of the hall. “You see anything move up there, shoot at it.”

She nodded and raised the weapon. Dryden crouched over Sandra, keeping both the G-36 and his eyes on the south corner. By touch, he set to work removing the parachute harness from Sandra’s body.

Two monitors in the computer room showed helmet camera feeds from the snipers on Sparrow-Four-One, the first inbound chopper, which had just gone stationary near the south face of the tower. Gaul watched the viewpoints pan across the glass and steel edifice.

The pilot’s voice came over a speaker. “No movement on the target level.”

Above and below eighty-three, the occupants of nearly every residence were at their windows, woken by the hovering chopper. The pilot directed a spotlight into the seemingly deserted floor, sweeping most of the southern stretch in a few seconds. Nobody there.

“Sparrow-Four-One, make a slow orbit of the building,” Lowry said. “They’re in there somewhere. Neighbors called in gunshots. Sparrow-Four-Two, deploy your men.”

“Acknowledged, out.”

On a tightened Miranda frame, the second chopper arrived on-site. Gaul watched it settle into position above the southwest corner of the roof. The Little Bird didn’t need a proper landing pad; it was designed to off-load men onto rooftops in parts of the world where building codes weren’t exactly strict.

In the satellite image, it was impossible to tell exactly when the chopper touched down, but suddenly the four-man specialist team bailed from the troop bay and sprinted across the building’s roof. They reached a stairwell access and halted for a moment. Bright light flared as they torched out a lock, and then they were in.

Dryden released the final clasp and pulled the harness free from Sandra. Rising, he kept the machine gun trained on the near corner. Still no sign of Audrey, in his view or in his head.

He could hear both choppers now. The first was circling the building clockwise, moving up the west face. The second, having settled onto the rooftop moments earlier — its turbines sending vibrations down through the building’s core — now powered up and lifted off again. The team it must’ve put on the roof would be inside this apartment in no more than four minutes. They would cut through the ceiling from upstairs if need be.

They’d be three and a half minutes late.

Dryden slipped the chute harness on with automatic ease, adjusting for the tightness. He nodded to Rachel; reluctantly, she lowered the pistol and stepped into the bedroom. Dryden followed.

“All you have to do is hold on,” he said. “You’re going to put your arms around my neck and grab your wrists with your hands as tight as you can. Don’t focus on anything but holding on, okay?”

She nodded, already scared to death.

At that moment intense cold pressed at Dryden’s temples, like the touch of icicles. Audrey. Close now, coming fast. Determined and reckless.

Rachel understood. She threw her arms around him, lifting her feet off the floor. Dryden raised the G-36, thumbed the selector switch to autofire, and raked the south windows. The panes disintegrated into a curtain of shards, raining out of the frames even as Dryden sprinted toward them. Wind surged in like water, plastering Rachel’s hair across his face and spraying glass against them both. Two steps from the window he let go of the gun, locked his arms around Rachel, and dove.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The city. Out in it, above it. Lights and windows and streets spinning in a wind-tunnel scream of night air. The tower filling up the world beside him. The choppers pounding the darkness with their rotors.

Dryden’s senses stabilized. He turned his head to correct for the spin of his body and locked his eyes on the tower for reference. He and Rachel had fallen maybe ten stories, with seventy yet beneath them. He freed one arm from Rachel, pulled the release for the pilot chute, and had the arm tightly around her again before he felt the line go taut and rip the main chute from the pack.

A second later the straps of the harness wrenched his shoulders back, and the rush of air ceased. The night became silent except for the helicopters circling the tower high above.

Drifting now. The moment was deceptively peaceful. Dryden looked up at the canopy of the chute and saw the wind’s influence at a glance. It was pushing them toward the tower.

“Can you hold on if I let go of you?” he asked.

Rachel nodded, her forehead against the side of his jaw, and tightened her arms over the back of his neck.

Dryden let go of her and grabbed the chute’s steering lines, Velcroed to the straps above his shoulders. He pulled the left line and felt the canopy respond, turning hard counterclockwise, swinging him and Rachel outward like a pendulum. Within seconds they were facing away from the building and gliding just fast enough to beat the wind.

In the relative calm, Dryden considered their situation. It would take ninety seconds or more to reach the street. By then the choppers would spot the chute and report it to whatever ground units Gaul had dispatched along with them. Dryden had no sooner formed the thought than a trio of vehicles appeared to the south, veering fast through the sparse traffic on Michigan Avenue. It wasn’t even necessary to hazard a guess: Those units would be parked below the Hancock long before he and Rachel touched down.

Dryden sought other options. The white marble tower across the street, directly to the south, rose from a base structure wider than itself — a building that occupied its entire block and stood perhaps ten stories tall. The roof of the base building offered a broad and easy landing zone and, more importantly, the tactical advantage of the building itself. Within the labyrinth of its interior, he and Rachel would have at least a fighting chance to evade Gaul’s people. The layout almost certainly extended two or three levels beneath the street, with egress points into service tunnels through which neither satellites nor helicopters could track them.

The parachute’s glide angle was already taking them toward that rooftop. They were a minute above it — they would land on it around the time Gaul’s ground units arrived, or maybe sooner. This could work.

At that moment the parachute’s canopy flared bright, and in the street far below, the circle of a spotlight shone, with the chute’s rectangular shadow eclipsing its center. One of the choppers had spotted them.

The remaining sixty seconds it would take to reach the broad rooftop suddenly felt like an hour. It was enough time for the chopper to do a lot more than report them — it could attack them.

Already Dryden heard its turbines changing pitch and saw the spotlight angle swing: The chopper was coming down to their level.

A minute wouldn’t do. Dryden reached above his head, coiled his hand around three of the chute’s lines, and pulled hard. The effect was immediate. The canopy partially collapsed, dumping air, and he and Rachel began to plummet at twice the chute’s normal descent rate, spinning wildly as they did.

Spinning — and no longer gliding. No longer heading south, toward the rooftop of the white building far below. While in this spin, they were once again at the mercy of the wind; it was shoving them north, back toward the cliff face of the Hancock.

There was a judgment call to make: How long to drop like this before filling the chute again and trying to glide for the white building’s roof? Before Dryden could make the decision, the wind gusted. With each rotation he got another glimpse of the Hancock, and with each glimpse it was closer. A lot closer. They were going to hit it. He let go of the lines and held on to Rachel as tightly as he could. The chute reinflated and stopped spinning just a few yards from the tower’s face, but they were still closing distance with the building at something like twenty miles an hour. Dryden had just enough time to consider that this was about as fast as he could sprint on the ground. Which meant that this impact would be like running full speed into a wall. He spun to take the collision with his own body instead of Rachel’s, and tensed for it.

It felt like being hit by a bus. Every joint screamed. Rachel lost her hold around his neck, and for an instant — the instant that counted — momentum turned her eighty pounds into five hundred, and her body was wrenched from his arms. All pain vanished from Dryden’s mind under a flash of adrenaline. His hands shot out for her, felt one of her sleeves — for a horrible second he imagined getting only her shirt as she fell free of it — and then locked around her wrist.

They were sliding down the glass wall now, her eyes looking up at his, wide and intense. Below her was the abyss, easily forty stories of open space.

There was something else below her as well, rushing up to meet them: a horizontal stretch of the tower’s famous exterior bracing. There were diagonal beams that crossed to form X shapes, and there were lateral beams running sideways through them. One of these flat beams, forming a ledge maybe eighteen inches deep, lay thirty feet below their position. Thirty feet and coming on fast. Dryden looked up and saw the reason for their speed: The chute had partly caved against the building, losing over half of its drag.

Twenty feet to the ledge now.

Ten.

Dryden pulled Rachel up to his level and got his arms around her, once again meaning to take the collision himself first, though in this case there was no reason to think it would help.

They hit.

It was worse than he’d imagined. Once, in a training accident, Dryden had fallen three stories onto concrete. This impact on the ledge was at least that hard. He and Rachel were slammed downward into a tangled mass, his body cushioning her impact only slightly. He heard her breath rush out along with his own. He locked his arms around her before she could roll off him into open space.

She opened her eyes but took several seconds to focus on him, even though his face was nearly touching hers. She held on to consciousness for a moment, then lost it.

The dead chute fell past them, flapping uselessly against the tower in the straight-on wind. Seconds later it began shuddering violently in a different sort of wind, coming from above. Rotor wash.

Dryden looked past Rachel and saw the AH-6 directly overhead. It descended into a hover thirty feet to the side, filling all his senses. Even the taste of its exhaust reached him. It pivoted to give the sniper on its left skid a clear line. The man was close enough for Dryden to look into his eyes just before he raised his weapon.

Assuming Rachel would be the first target, and not willing to spend the last few seconds of his life soaked with her blood, Dryden cradled her against himself and turned inward. He put his back to the chopper, visually shielding her. It wouldn’t save her, but they would at least have to shoot him first. He studied her face, absorbing the details one last time. Even with her eyes closed, she was as beautiful a thing as he’d seen in his life. He kissed the top of her head. Reflected in the windowpane behind her was the chopper, and the man with the rifle. The scope lens gleamed.

Then, from high above, something screamed down out of the night on a vapor trail. It turned the chopper into an inferno, pounding it downward like a sledgehammer striking a child’s toy. Debris rained against the building, lit by the ghostly fire of the now-falling helicopter.

“What the fuck just happened?” Gaul shouted.

The pilot of Sparrow-Four-Two was yelling about a missile, and on the Miranda image, his chopper pulled hard to the west and sped away from the building.

The pilot of Sparrow-Four-One was not responding, probably because Sparrow-Four-One had become a flaming ball of metal. Gaul watched it hit the street with a bright puff of heat on all sides.

Audrey leaned as far out of the empty window frame as she could afford to, with the second FGM-148 Javelin resting in its launcher on her shoulder. The first launcher lay steaming on the carpet behind her.

No good. The other chopper was long gone; pilots were survivor types. She dropped the second launcher as well, held on to the window frame, and leaned farther out into the wind. Dryden’s parachute hung against the building far below.

Audrey retreated ten steps into the bedroom, came forward at a sprint, and leapt.

Dryden took his eyes off the wreckage and set his mind to the only thing that mattered now: getting into the building. The window beside him looked into a darkened office, visible only when he cupped his hand to his eye against the glass.

He had no gun, and nothing heavy with which to shatter the pane. His search for a solution was interrupted by the ruffle and snap of a parachute opening, and not his own. He turned to see a slim figure — it could only be Audrey — hanging from the lines of a second chute. It had opened less than a hundred feet above, and sixty feet out from the tower. Audrey was turning and coming around now, not fighting the wind but seizing it.

It was clear within seconds that Audrey’s control of the parachute was that of a master. While Dryden had made over two hundred jumps in his life, and could land on ground targets with the best of them, Audrey’s movements spoke of a specialized skill level, an acrobatic ability that came from years of narrowly focused training.

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

He understood. What other type of residence offered such a dynamic and unexpected escape route? All three of them — Audrey and Sandra, at the very least — had probably made a hundred aircraft jumps or more, in every kind of wind, until the controls of a chute were like extensions of their own bodies.

This was about to go bad.

He looked at Rachel again and found her eyes fluttering open, fixing on him. He could tell she’d read the danger in his mind.

“It’s not too late,” she whispered. “You can let me go.”

Her gaze went past him for a moment, beyond his shoulder to the wide-open drop.

Dryden pulled her face against his own, cheek to cheek, and just held on. He felt her tears spilling onto his temple, exactly where the chill always touched it.

A second later he heard the chute ruffle again. He looked up. Audrey had put herself into a dive; she stayed in it until she was almost lateral to their position, then pulled up and swung directly toward them. Twenty feet out and coming in fast.

Dryden readied himself. He’d killed with his hands before, but never while lying on a narrow ledge, forty stories up, with a child in his arms.

Audrey brought her feet up in the final seconds, coming toward Dryden like a battering ram. He raised his arm to block, knowing it would have almost no effect. Audrey’s left boot came into his viewpoint, connecting with his cheekbone hard enough to make the world flash white. Then she was atop him, kneeling right on Rachel, raining blows against Dryden’s face with some heavy steel tool in her hand. Blood everywhere now, in his mouth, his eyes.

With his left arm he blocked one of Audrey’s blows and blindly got hold of her wrist. He sent his other fist into her face; with deep satisfaction he felt her nose disintegrate beneath it in a shower of blood. She screamed. Then she took the tool into her other hand and landed the heaviest blow yet, right behind his ear. His muscles failed almost instantly; he felt like he was buried in sand and trying to move. It was all he could do to stay conscious.

He felt Rachel’s limp weight torn away from him, and then she was gone, along with Audrey.

He blinked, raised one lead-filled arm, and palmed the blood away from his eyes. Audrey had pushed off from the building and was gliding away. She held Rachel in one arm and with the other fastened a strap around the girl and locked her in place. Then she took to the controls again, spilling air out of the canopy and making what looked like a suicidal dive for the street.

Gaul’s three ground vehicles covered the last block on Michigan Avenue and swung around the corner, only to be confronted by the blazing roadblock of the downed AH-6. The vehicles made no attempt to look for survivors in the wreck; they tried to nose around it instead, but the strewn metal covered the entire path, from the base of one building to the other, with pooled fuel burning under all of it. The vehicles could not get through.

Audrey reached the street in less than twenty seconds, pulling up from the dive and flaring the chute for a soft landing. She released the harness the moment her feet touched, and the freed canopy drifted away down the street like a ghost. As Dryden watched, she set Rachel on the pavement, then used the steel tool to pry up a manhole cover. She lowered Rachel inside, followed her down, and replaced the lid behind her. Obviously, she would be prepared. She would have the tunnel system memorized, and a vehicle staged somewhere, ready to go.

Gaul’s vehicles didn’t reach the manhole until nearly a minute after Audrey had entered it. She and Rachel were gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The team that had landed on the building’s roof got to Dryden first. They entered the office, broke the window, and hauled him in. They zip-tied his wrists and ankles. As they did, he got a look at their weaponry: 9 mm Berettas holstered on their hips, but tranquilizer rifles slung on their shoulders. Looking back, he thought the sniper on the helicopter had been aiming the same kind of rifle.

They took him down to the SUVs and shoved him into the back of one. He asked them nothing and they volunteered nothing. He expected the vehicles to swing back south onto Michigan Avenue and return to the Willis Tower, but they didn’t. They went north instead, finally turning west on a street called Division. Three minutes later they got onto I-94 heading northwest out of the city, toward the glow of O’Hare on the horizon.

“Blink S-O-S for me.”

The medic — the man who seemed to be a medic, anyway — was leaning toward him, carefully watching his responses.

Dryden blinked S-O-S.

“Touch the tip of your tongue to the center of your front teeth.”

Dryden did.

“Are you having any double vision?”

Dryden shook his head.

“Are the lights in here causing any pain in your eyes?”

Dryden shook his head again.

He was seated in the cabin of a large private jet. It was pushing back from its hangar now, its turbofans whining. The predawn sprawl of the giant airport rotated past the nearest window.

His wrists and ankles were still zip-tied. He was secured to the seat as well, by a strap encircling his torso and the backrest. Across the aisle, ahead of and behind him, the men with the dart guns sat watching.

“Look directly into the overhead lights for me and count to three,” the medic said.

Dryden did. He squinted against the glare. Everything about it felt normal.

“No likely concussion,” the medic said, mostly to himself.

One of the gunmen took out a phone and dialed. He waited. Then he said, “We’re a minute from wheels up, sir.” Five seconds passed. “Copy that. We’ll have him ready when you get there.”

There turned out to be Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C. The jet touched down and taxied for a long time, winding its way among hangars and maintenance buildings. The structure it finally stopped near, Dryden couldn’t identify. It was single-story but sprawling. It had poured concrete walls and no windows. The men unbound his ankles, left his wrists tied, and led him off the plane into the early sunlight. They walked him into the building through the only door he could see in its wall; it opened on a sterile white corridor with a few doorways on either side. They guided him through the first one on the left, into a room the size of a basketball court. There were long metal tables here and there, folding chairs clustered around a few of them. There were aluminum-and-canvas cots stowed against a wall. The men grabbed one and locked its legs into position. They set Dryden down on it and zipped his ankles again.

“Sleep if you can,” one of them said.

Two stayed behind to guard him. They took chairs from the tables and sat next to the door. The others left and closed the door behind them.

Dryden shut his eyes.

Footsteps in the corridor. Dryden came awake in time to see the two men stand from their chairs. A second later the door swung inward, and a man in his fifties walked into the room. Athletic build. Black windbreaker over khaki slacks and an oxford shirt. Dryden got the impression the guy had been a soldier once but had been something else for a long time since.

“Martin Gaul,” Dryden said.

The man nodded. Behind him, half a dozen men entered the room. Some of them carried computer equipment: a ruggedized tower case, a keyboard, a big flat-panel display. They got to work setting it up on the nearest of the metal tables.

Last through the door was a man who reacted to the sight of Dryden’s bruised face.

“Christ, Sam.”

Cole Harris crossed to the cot and crouched beside it. He looked the same as he had the last time Dryden had seen him, a few months before. Six foot three, built like a tree trunk, the same haircut he’d had since basic training.

“Fuckers could’ve cleaned you up, at least,” Harris said.

“They checked me for a concussion. Nice of them, I guess.”

“Do me a favor,” Harris said.

“What?”

“Tell these guys everything. Every detail, the last three days. Everything you know.”

“I’d like to know what you know,” Dryden said.

“You will. They’re going to tell you.”

At the table, Gaul’s men had the display turned on. It showed a blank blue screen while they set up the computer.

Gaul came over to the cot.

“Why don’t you get these off him?” Harris said, indicating the zip-ties. “I don’t think he’s going to go next door and steal Air Force One.”

Gaul nodded. He gestured to one of the men at the door.

It took an hour to detail the three days. Dryden left out Dena Sobel’s name, along with anything that could allow her to be identified, but otherwise withheld nothing. While he spoke, Harris stepped out and came back with paper towels and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. He dabbed at the cuts and the swelling and cleared off the congealed blood.

When Dryden had finished, Gaul sat staring at nothing for a long time. He seemed to be marshaling his thoughts, preparing what he had to say.

“Why were your men armed with tranquilizer guns in Chicago?” Dryden asked. “Up until then you’d been trying to kill Rachel.”

“And you along with her,” Gaul said.

If there was any apology in the man’s tone, Dryden missed it.

“Let me just run through it in order,” Gaul said. “It’s best for me if you’re up to speed, and”—he glanced at Harris—“in any case, your friend insisted on it.”

Harris nodded.

“So here are the bullet points,” Gaul said. “I’m the head of a defense contractor, Belding-Milner. Our major rival is a company called Western Dynamics, and in the field of genetic R&D, they’ve been ahead of us for years. Two months ago I got Rachel in my custody; she was a remnant of the original military research, years back, that both of our companies had based their work on. Rachel was a valuable object to study. It wasn’t just about what she was; it also mattered what she knew. She and her two friends — I guess you met them — had been shadowing our two companies for years, keeping up on our progress. Easy enough for mind readers to do that, and they had good reason to: We might have developed things we could use against them, for one. In any case, when my people interrogated Rachel, she had no reason to hold back what she knew about our rival. She didn’t care if we learned that stuff. She told us all about them, including something new they had in development. Not just the antenna sites, and the current testing being done with them. Something else.”

“Something everyone’s afraid of,” Dryden said.

Gaul nodded. “You’ll understand why, when I get to it. You’ll also know why Rachel’s friends didn’t want to tell her about it. It’s tied pretty tightly to her own past. The people behind it — the thing everyone’s scared of — are actually afraid to use it while Rachel is alive. They think she might be able to affect it in some way, and I think they’re probably right. That was why the government ordered me to kill her. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but it wasn’t my call.”

“Just following orders,” Dryden said. “Nice defense.”

Harris chuckled. Gaul showed no reaction at all.

“I do what I do,” Gaul said. “After you and Rachel escaped El Sedero, I brought the head of Homeland Security on board, because I needed his help. I hoped he’d see the situation my way. And he did. For a while.”

“What do you mean?” Dryden asked.

Harris spoke up. “Head of Homeland’s a guy named Dennis Marsh. Turned out he had a little bit of conscience still sloshing in the tank. He went along with the bullshit, setting up the manhunt for you, Sam, but he also looked into your background. He got in touch with me and a few others from the unit. He got in touch with Holly Ferrel, too. The guy was right on the fence, with what was happening to you and Rachel. Like he just needed a good push to do the right thing. Maybe some backup, too. We obliged. All of us, including Holly and Marsh himself, contacted Gaul and told him the game was going to change. This was the night before last.”

Dryden thought about it. That would’ve been the night he and Rachel had waited in the empty apartment near Holly’s place. The night Rachel had heard Holly rehearsing a phone call to Martin Gaul.

“What’s Holly’s role in all this?” Dryden asked.

“You can ask her yourself soon enough,” Gaul said.

Dryden caught something in his voice. Petulance, it sounded like — that sharp little fragment of childhood some people held on to forever.

“We’re prepared to go public with every inch of this mess,” Harris said. He was speaking to Dryden, but the hard edge in his voice seemed to be for Gaul’s benefit. “We’re not stupid; we don’t expect to prevent the rollout of this technology, but we damn well mean to stop it from squashing one of our friends.”

The childish look stayed in Gaul’s eyes a second longer, and then he shoved it away and looked at Dryden. “So there it is. The game change is that you don’t die, and neither does Rachel, or else I get a world of attention I’d rather avoid. Okay. I can bloom where I’m planted.”

Gaul went to the table where the techs had set up the computer. On-screen, the Windows desktop was strewn with shortcut icons. He clicked one, and a photo slideshow player filled the screen. The first image was a simple white background with black text. It read FT. DETRICK—08 JUNE 2008.

For the moment Gaul made no move to advance to the next picture.

“There’s a lot you’d better know about Rachel,” Gaul said, “if we’re going to do what your friends have in mind. So here we go.”

Gaul stood there thinking a moment longer.

At last he said, “She’s a knockout. Your assumption about what it means is exactly right. The research goes back to long before Rachel was born. It started with gibbons in the biowarfare lab at Detrick, in 1990. They’d been doing sensory deprivation tests on these animals, keeping them in enclosures that were perfectly soundproof, lightproof, everything. Lab workers noticed that some of them — about five percent — somehow reacted to agitation of other gibbons in nearby labs. They reacted even while shut up in these sensory boxes, which should’ve made it impossible for them to be aware of the agitation in the first place.”

Gaul paced away from the computer. “Well, you already know how they were aware of it. At Detrick they didn’t know for another five or six years — not until genome sequencing got cheap enough to be widely applied. They found that the special gibbons, the ones that could react from inside sensory chambers, were naturally missing a gene called NP20. That gene suppresses a much older complex of genes: genes that we think allowed ancient, precursor animals to read each other’s alpha waves — brain activity.”

“The same thing an EEG machine reads,” Dryden said.

Gaul nodded. “If the gibbon is born without NP20, or has it knocked out with a drug, then those older genes are no longer suppressed. They become active genes, and they start altering synaptic patterns in the brain, creating structures that act like natural receivers and transmitters. They let primates read one another’s neural activity. Those same genes, the ones that code for mind reading in gibbons, exist in all the higher primates, too. Chimps. Gorillas. Human beings. We also have NP20 to block them, but where gibbons have only NP20, we have three extra genes that do the same job it does. Like redundant safeties on a bomb. Our evolution seems to have made a point of keeping us out of each other’s heads.”

“But why?” Dryden said. “Why would we evolve away from something like that?”

“We can only guess,” Gaul said, “but I think our guesses are pretty good. Alpha-wave reading probably started tens of millions of years ago, among the ancestors of modern primates. Maybe it was a kind of predator alarm, a way to spread a warning through the group without the risk of making noise. Easy to see the benefit in that. The running guess, though, is that mind reading carried a downside later on, when these animals started getting smarter. Fast-forward to gibbons, with social hierarchies and long-term memory, complex rivalries and emotions, and maybe it’s not a great idea to hear each other’s thoughts. In humans, capable of things like holding grudges for life, it might be a disaster.” Gaul’s face took on a kind of weariness. “Rachel’s a beautiful example.”

“What are you talking about?” Dryden asked.

“You need to know, first, what sets Rachel apart. Why she’s different than Audrey or Sandra, or anyone else they ever had at Detrick. Rachel can do a lot more than just read minds.” Gaul was looking at his hands. Now he looked up and met Dryden’s eyes. “You may already know about her other ability, without realizing it. Going by what you told us a few minutes ago, you’ve seen it in action yourself.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Both Gaul and Harris were watching him now, waiting for his response. He didn’t have one. He had no idea what Gaul was talking about.

“You said someone gave you two a ride out of Fresno,” Gaul said. “You and Rachel were in the trunk. A police officer demanded to search it, and then for no obvious reason he just gave up and waved the driver through.”

“I thought it was strange,” Dryden said. “What does it have to do with Rachel?”

“Everything,” Gaul said.

Harris leaned forward and spoke softly. “She doesn’t just read minds, Sam. She can influence them, too. Right now she doesn’t remember that she can do it, but she can.”

“The mind reading is passive,” Gaul said. “Like seeing and hearing. It just happens. But the other part, influencing other people’s minds, is different. It takes concentration and focus, and complicated mental routines. Same as playing chess or balancing a spreadsheet. Rachel spent years building up the ability, and at the moment she can’t recall any of it.”

“Based on observations of Rachel in captivity, in El Sedero,” Harris said, “these guys think she can exert a small amount of control even now, but only subconsciously. The effect would be minor, and it would only happen if she was emotionally stressed. She wouldn’t even realize she was doing it.”

Dryden thought of the checkpoint in Fresno: Dena trying to talk her way past the cop, digging the hole deeper by the second; Rachel beside him in the dark, gripping his hand, her body shaking.

Then the cop had just let them go.

I don’t get it, Dena had said. He was staring right at me and then … he just changed his mind.

“Jesus,” Dryden said.

“What you saw there is almost nothing,” Gaul said. “When she has real control of it, you can’t imagine what she can do. There’s a distinction I need to explain here. Those female prisoners at Detrick twelve years ago, including Rachel’s mom, were given the earliest generation of the knockout drug. It was primitive stuff; administered to adults, all it did was give them the capacity to hear thoughts. That’s all Audrey and Sandra could ever do. Twelve years on, now, Western Dynamics has a greatly improved version of that drug. They’ve given it to hired operatives of their own, and it allows them to read minds and exert a certain amount of control over people. Simple things, like putting a voice into someone’s head, or forcing certain emotional states, like guilt or disgust, cranked up to a level you’d never feel in regular life. Positive emotions, too — euphoria, erotic sensations, that kind of thing. It all adds up to sticks and carrots to make people follow commands. The total effect is powerful, if it’s used just right, and those antenna sites, like the one you found in Utah, are used to amplify the effect over a wide area, a radius of twenty or thirty miles from the tower.”

Dryden thought of the pickup almost crashing into him and Rachel, south of Cold Spring. The man with the MP-5.

“The guy in the desert—” he said, and saw Harris already nodding.

“Unwitting participant,” Harris said. “He’d probably endured months of conditioning by one of the people from Western Dynamics, by the time he attacked you.”

Dryden remembered the pity in the man’s eyes. Pity for himself, maybe, but that was understandable in its own way.

“The controllers at Western Dynamics are powerful,” Gaul said, “but they don’t hold a candle to what Rachel can do. Her skill set is that formidable.”

“But you said Rachel only got the first version of the drug,” Dryden said. “She got it when her mother got it.”

“That’s right. Rachel got it as a fetus at two months’ development. Which makes all the difference.”

Dryden began to understand. Seeing him grasp the idea, Gaul nodded.

“It matters,” Gaul said. “You better believe it matters. Adults are already formed. There’s only so much the drug can change in them. But Rachel had all her development still ahead of her. All the circuitry of the brain yet to be formed.”

Gaul glanced at the slideshow player on the computer again. The text frame was still there. FT. DETRICK—08 JUNE 2008. He made no move to click anything yet.

“You knew Rachel was born and raised in holding at Detrick,” Gaul said. “Staff there noted her ability to hear thoughts, like the other prisoners. Those symptoms presented at around eighteen months. In hindsight, we know the other ability showed up when she was about four, though no one at Detrick knew it at the time. They knew nothing about it until she was seven years old, and then they learned an awful lot, very quickly. But most of the details I’m giving you now, we only learned later — two months ago when we got to interrogate her. Some of it, I honestly think she wanted to tell us. It wasn’t quite bragging. It was mostly meant to intimidate us, I believe. Prisoners do that sometimes, don’t they?”

Dryden said nothing.

“In any case,” Gaul said, “Rachel described her ability in some detail. She has her own word for it: locking. Early on, at Detrick, she demonstrated it for her mother by making a lab tech scratch his head, across the room. By Rachel’s account, her mother had a fit. Grabbed the little girl and just about pulled her arms off, and told her she was never to show the doctors what she could do. Rebecca knew if anybody found out, she’d never see Rachel again. The kid would’ve been taken someplace else for separate testing, would’ve become some other team’s project. Probably still right there at Detrick somewhere, but to Rachel’s mother it would’ve been a million miles away.”

A cell phone rang close by. It belonged to one of Gaul’s men. The guy took it out and answered, spoke quietly for a few seconds, and hung up. He nodded to Gaul. “Landed five minutes ago. En route now.”

Gaul acknowledged with a wave of his hand, then turned back to Dryden.

“Rachel listened to her mom. She never told the researchers what she could do. But she practiced it. It was easy to do that without much risk. What you have to understand is that when Rachel locks somebody, that person has no idea it’s happening. If she makes you take off your glasses and clean them, you think it was your decision to do that. If she makes you get a cup of water from the cooler, same thing. She doesn’t make your limbs disobey you. She makes you want to do whatever she’s pushing you to do.” Gaul was quiet a beat, then said, “These days, she can do a lot more than make you clean your glasses.”

“Like what?” Dryden asked.

“She can sit in a hotel room in lower Manhattan, lock a portfolio manager from two blocks away, and make him wire ten million dollars to an account on the other side of the world. Then she can make him drink vodka until he passes out, and by the time he wakes up the money’s been bounced through a dozen stops and there’s no way to trace it.”

Dryden shut his eyes and tried to appreciate the power of an ability like that. The subtlety of it.

“Locking is entirely different from the short-range ability to hear thoughts,” Gaul said. “That’s important to understand. It’s a separate phenomenon altogether, stemming from different genes, different development. For one thing, the range is far greater. Rachel can lock you from as much as a mile away. And you don’t feel it — you don’t get the chill at your temples. When she locks in, she can see and hear with your senses, and read your thoughts … and she can make you do anything she wants. Anything.”

Thinking about that, Dryden felt certain dots begin to connect. Not all of them, but some.

He said, “Audrey and Sandra wouldn’t tell Rachel about the scary thing, because…”

“Because Rachel is the scary thing,” Gaul said. “In a sense, at least. She’s the first living example of it.”

“The first?” Dryden asked.

Gaul nodded. “Western Dynamics has its own generation of operatives whose development is based on Rachel’s. Subjects treated in utero. They dosed the first group not quite five years ago. Those subjects are four years old now, and all appear to have Rachel’s capabilities. Early trial runs with them, using the antennas, could start any day now. They might not be made to do very much at first, but in a few years’ time…” Gaul’s mouth seemed to have gone dry. He licked his lips. “In a few years’ time, I think we’re going to find ourselves in a very different world.”

Dryden felt as if the room had suddenly cooled by five degrees. The skin on his arms seemed to tighten. Before he could say anything, a heavy engine approached and stopped outside the building. Two of Gaul’s men left the room, and Dryden heard them speaking to someone down the hall. Footsteps followed — hard soles ticking lightly. When the door opened again, Holly Ferrel stepped through it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Gaul introduced her to Dryden. He’d seen her at a distance outside her town house in Amarillo; up close she looked like someone who’d been getting by on reduced sleep for a while. The skin was dark under her eyes, pale everywhere else. When she shook Dryden’s hand, her grip seemed almost powerless. He’d been right about her age: forty, give or take.

“Were you one of the researchers who worked on Rachel?” Dryden asked.

She spoke without meeting his eyes. “I wasn’t part of the project at first. I worked at NCI-Frederick, a branch of the National Cancer Institute, based there at Detrick. I’d been there for about a year when I was approached to get involved in … the other stuff. I was told that certain research grants I had pending at Frederick could be approved quickly if I helped with—”

She stopped. She shook her head. “That’s all bullshit. It’s true, but it’s still bullshit. I knew what I was saying yes to. I was scared to turn them down, and part of me really wanted to get involved. It was bleeding-edge stuff. It was fascinating. So I did it.”

She left it at that. Her gaze stayed on the floor.

Gaul spoke. “I’m going to tell you how Rachel and the other two managed to get free from Detrick, Mr. Dryden. It’s the last part of the story. But you should understand something about Audrey and Sandra — and Rachel’s mother. You knew all those subjects came from prison, felons with long-term sentences. In Rebecca Grant’s case, the crimes were drug related. Mostly possession, some minor trafficking. She wasn’t the best decision maker, but she was no monster. Audrey and Sandra were. Both had been convicted of murder. Both were almost certainly sociopaths.” He composed his thoughts, then said, “There were two escape attempts from Fort Detrick, actually. One failed and the other succeeded, but the first attempt was … the nice version. That was the one Rachel and her mother preferred. Keep in mind that Rachel was seven when all this happened.”

Dryden waited for him to go on.

Gaul turned to Holly. “Can you show him?”

Holly nodded. She reached into her pocket and withdrew a thick square of folded notepad paper. When she opened it, Dryden saw it comprised three sheets. The first was covered with writing. The penmanship looked like that of a child: messy and too careful at the same time. Holly separated it from the others and passed it to Dryden.

“What is this?” he asked.

Holly struggled for an answer.

“You’ll see,” Gaul said.

Dryden turned the sheet around in his hands and read.

Holly it’s me Rachel. I am afraid to ask you this when your here with us, because I know the people here are always watching, and my mom says there are probably machines recording sound in this place, day and night. This is the only way I know how to send you this message, and ask you for help. My mom thinks if you tell a reporter at a newspaper or on tv what is happening here, all the things you know, then it would make it so they have to let us go, my mom says it is illegal that they are keeping us here forever. Holly, please talk to a reporter and get them to let us out of here. I know you mean it when your nice to me, and you care. Please help us.

Dryden finished reading it and looked up.

“Rachel slipped you this note?” he asked. That was hard to believe, given the level of security there must’ve been in a facility like that.

Holly shook her head. “Not exactly. I was in my office at the other place, at NCI-Frederick, a few hundred yards from where Rachel and the others were kept. It was late at night. I was looking at lab work and then I just pushed it aside and picked up a pen and started writing that message myself. It didn’t feel like I was being forced to do it. I just … wanted to. It was like I’d had an idea for some kind of short story. The kind that are made up of people’s journals or letters — what do they call that, epistolary fiction? That’s what it felt like. Just some stream-of-consciousness thing I’d thought up, using Rachel and her mom as the basis for it, and I was jotting it down as it came to me. Bad handwriting and spelling and all, like it was part of the story.”

Dryden looked at the words again. He imagined Rachel in a cage, seven years old, every ounce of her hope tied to these words on Holly’s notepad.

“I had no idea what else to think of it,” Holly said. “I stared at it for five minutes and then put it aside. I had work to do.” She drew the second sheet from the stack. “Half an hour later, I picked the pen back up and wrote this one.”

You are not making it up. My mom says there is a way to show you its real. Your boss in this building has this email address, EGraham@detrick.usabri.mil and it takes two passwords to open it, first is leanne424miami and second is murphyhatesthevet87. If you were making this up in your head, you would not know his email passwords, we know them because we hear him think when he types them. Open his email with the passwords and you will know this is real, it is really me asking you to help us. Holly, please help us get out of here.

Dryden looked up at Holly again.

“I assume the passwords worked,” he said.

She nodded, looking miserable.

“Did you consider really going to the press?” Dryden asked.

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I was scared,” Holly said. “I’d had years to get used to them hearing my thoughts, as weird as that was, but this was different. Actually being controlled. It rattled the hell out of me.” She took a deep breath. “And I didn’t want to do it. That’s the no-bullshit answer. I was afraid. You know what could have happened to me, going public against the military on something like that. I thought of Bradley Manning. I thought of people we’ve probably never even heard of. Maybe I could have gotten the whole thing shut down, but … I just didn’t want to try. That’s all it came down to.”

She sounded like she could cry. Then she said, “What would you have done, if you were me? Honestly.”

Dryden thought about it. He gave her the only answer he could. “I don’t know.”

“I sat there for ten minutes getting more wound up,” Holly said, “and then I went to my superior at NCI-Frederick. He was somebody I trusted, and … I don’t know. I wanted someone’s advice. I didn’t want to be alone with all of it. It’s all I could think of.”

“Shit,” Dryden whispered.

“I’d take it back,” Holly said. “I’d give anything to take it back.”

“Your superior ran it further up the chain, I imagine,” Dryden said.

Another sharp little nod.

“What happened then?” Dryden asked.

Gaul went to the computer. “This,” he said, and clicked the slideshow’s PLAY button.

Holly turned away from it. She grabbed a chair and took it a few paces off and sat down, her hands balled tight in her lap.

Dryden watched the monitor.

A grainy color image appeared. It looked like it had been shot by a security camera inside the cell block of a prison. A viewpoint from up near the ceiling, looking out and down at a row of cells. Dryden could see women in black jumpsuits behind the bars. Nine of the cells had a single occupant each. A tenth held Rachel, seven years old, and her mother.

“These are frame grabs from inside the unit they were kept in,” Gaul said. “Building Sixteen at Detrick.”

Dryden scanned the row of cells again and picked out Audrey and Sandra. Each had a different hair color than he’d seen in Chicago.

Finally he took in the screen’s lower left corner, and the digital text stamp there: DETRICK 16—2008 06 08 23:30:52.07.

A moment later the slideshow skipped to the next image. Another angle on the same scene, time-stamped a few seconds later.

In the third image, seconds later still, everything changed. The women were suddenly alert in their cages. Some were on their feet. Rachel, already in her mother’s lap in the first two shots, now clung tightly to her.

In the fourth frame, a team of five men in security uniforms had just entered the room, moving toward Rebecca and Rachel’s cell. Everyone in the cages was up and screaming, mouths contorted. Rachel had her face buried in Rebecca’s shoulder.

Gaul began to narrate the progression, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. Dryden looked away from the slideshow and just listened.

“The security team is young and inexperienced. Unlike real prison guards, they’ve never actually encountered resistance from detainees. They have shotguns loaded with beanbag rounds, nonlethal at a distance but devastating at point-blank range. They enter the cell with their attention on Rachel and her mother. They pay almost no attention to the prisoners in adjoining units. Eleven thirty-one and nine seconds: The leftmost guard loses his weapon to prisoner seven through the bars. Within the next four seconds the situation falls completely apart; at the end of that time frame, two men are down and the rest are shooting. One man is still grabbing for Rachel. Eleven thirty-one and fifteen seconds: Rachel is being forcibly pulled from Rebecca’s arms, while the officer’s weapon is coming up to level on the woman’s face. Rachel is looking directly into her mother’s eyes at sixteen seconds, when the shotgun discharges into Rebecca’s forehead from less than six inches away.”

In her chair, Holly seemed almost to have shrunk. Her hands gripped her forearms, everything drawn inward as if she were sitting somewhere very cold.

“The shooter is himself struck fatally in the next frame,” Gaul said. “The rest withdraw. Rachel stays with her mother’s body while other prisoners use the dropped shotguns to compromise the locks on their cells. What happens next is crucial.”

Dryden looked at the screen again. Three security men were down. Rebecca was slumped forward, her face mercifully out of view to the camera. Both Audrey and Sandra had entered that cell by then and were holding Rachel, turning her away from Rebecca’s body.

“The two of them sit with the girl for over three minutes,” Gaul said, “while the other surviving prisoners — four in all — finish freeing themselves and gather the weapons. These four trade gunfire with security teams in the hallway, men who are now firing live ammo, and over the course of the three minutes, those women are dropped one by one. By eleven thirty-four and twenty-eight seconds, the only prisoners alive are Audrey and Sandra and Rachel. The two women make no move toward the remaining shotguns, though some still have shells in them. They continue to sit with Rachel, calming her and speaking continuously into her ear. They do this even as security advances in the corridor.”

The slideshow ended. It reset to the black-text-on-white frame it had begun with, and stayed there.

“What follows is later reported as a gas-line explosion on base,” Gaul said. “Maybe you remember seeing it on the news. Sixty-seven dead, burned to the point of requiring dental ID. But there is no explosion. No one is burned. What happens instead is that, without warning, the man leading the security advance in the hallway suddenly turns and opens fire into his own ranks. As they fall back in confusion, he fires his last shell into his own head. Seconds later another officer appears to suffer the same inexplicable breakdown. Like the first man, he fires on his own people until he has only one shot left and then uses it on himself. By this point the chaos is absolute. No one is thinking about the prisoners in the containment room. Everyone’s focus is on getting away. The violence spreads outside the building within the next minute. Footage from over a hundred cameras on base will later show how it unfolds. How the effect only ever touches one man at a time, jumping from one to the next at an interval of two to three seconds. It passes like a wave from Building Sixteen to the nearest gate out of the Fort Detrick campus, a quarter mile away. All sentries in its path are killed. All personnel at the outer gate are killed. This entire time, cameras in the holding block show Audrey and Sandra still sitting there with Rachel. Arms around her. Speaking into her ear. Talking her through it. Lip-reading analysis would later show them saying the word shoot several dozen times.”

Gaul had been staring at the text screen on the monitor. Now he turned back to Dryden.

“When it was over, four minutes later,” Gaul said, “there was no one to stop the three of them from taking a vehicle and simply driving away. Footage shows Rachel catatonic as Sandra carries her from the building. Brain-locked, I imagine, at what she’d seen in the cell, and what the two women had then made her do. Around the time they buzzed the gate open on their way out, Rachel did probably the only thing that was of her own free will. She made Holly write a third message, hiding in her office like everyone else on base.”

Dryden turned to Holly. The last sheet of notebook paper was just visible, crushed and twisted in one hand. She released it and handed it to him without looking up. Dryden saw what it said even before he’d smoothed the page.

Your fault.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Dryden thought of the conversation over lunch the day before, in the Chicago apartment. Rachel asking the others about Holly, terrified for her safety.

Sandra had tried to calm the girl’s fears. For the time being, this week for sure, nobody’s going to hurt her.

Dryden understood.

This week for sure.

The time it would take for Rachel’s memory to come back.

Because Rachel was the threat to Holly’s life.

The notion of it made the edges of Dryden’s vision darken.

“In the days that followed,” Gaul said, “a number of people closely involved with the research, living in and around D.C., committed suicide — appeared to, anyway. They were the very people the military needed alive, to advise them on what the hell was going on. From Audrey and Sandra’s point of view, it was tactically brilliant: Take out the key players as fast as possible, leave the government scratching its ass trying to piece it all together. It would be months and months before the military, and companies like mine and Western Dynamics, came up with any means of protecting against the threat Rachel posed.”

The computer was still on. Gaul reached under the monitor and switched off the display.

“You can never really stop them from spying on you,” he said, “but you can mostly keep your people safe. You need the right organizational structure; no one person can know too much, especially in the rank and file, in case their thoughts get compromised. And your research sites need to be in remote places, like islands far offshore, or little compounds in the middle of arctic wilderness. Places someone like Rachel couldn’t get close to without being spotted. You need to be paranoid, really. And in that sense, Holly was way ahead of us.”

Dryden glanced at her, sitting there with her arms around herself.

“Holly left D.C. within an hour of the violence at Detrick,” Gaul said. “She felt irrational doing it, at the time, but it probably saved her life.”

“A friend of mine had a vacation home in the Florida Keys,” Holly said. “I dropped off the planet for over six months, just trying to get my head back together. No one I’d worked with at Detrick knew where I was. I guess if they had, Rachel and the other two would’ve found me. By then, they wouldn’t have had any real logical reason to kill me. They’d done enough of that damage. But I think…” She shook her head. Whatever she had to say, it hurt.

“I understand that Rachel hated me,” she said, “but I don’t believe she meant to kill me, early on. She could have, when she sent that third message. She could’ve buried the pen in my throat instead. I think the real hate came later, over months and years. Audrey and Sandra made sure of that; they worked to fan whatever Rachel initially felt. Do you see the reason? They were always going to need Rachel, for what she could do. They needed her as a weapon, which meant they needed her to be cold, without remorse. They achieved that by keeping her focused on me. On the idea of finding me and killing me. Everything we now know supports that.”

“In time,” Gaul said, “once the military had set up special groups to hunt for Rachel and the others, and to protect people in danger from them, Holly was relocated to Amarillo with her new name.”

Dryden looked at the dark skin under Holly’s eyes. The hollows beneath her cheekbones. A face shaped by half a decade of living in fear.

He pictured Rachel standing in her bedroom doorway with her stuffed dinosaur. A scared little girl who just wanted her life to make sense. He saw her on the ledge, in that final moment, her eyes looking past him to the abyss.

It’s not too late. You can let me go.

He tried to reconcile that girl with the specter that had stalked Holly Ferrel’s nightmares, and all at once he felt like he wanted to throw up. He looked around but saw no door to a bathroom. He muscled the feeling down.

“How did you get Rachel?” he asked Gaul. “Two months ago.”

For the first time, a hint of shame edged into Gaul’s expression. Then he seemed to set it aside, as if he had some tried-and-true way of exorcising those kinds of feelings.

“I used Holly as bait,” he said. “Without her knowledge. A contact of mine in the military learned where Holly had been relocated to, and I saw the chance to benefit from that information. To get control of Rachel.”

Holly set her jaw and looked away. It was clear she’d known this already.

“There were certain government databases we believed Rachel and the other two had compromised at some point,” Gaul said. “We allowed Holly’s location to end up stored on one of those, like it was an accident, so Rachel would find it.” He shrugged with his eyebrows. “She found it.”

Dryden considered the logistics of the trap itself. It didn’t add up. How could Holly have been kept safe, if Rachel could kill her from anywhere in a one-mile radius? How would Gaul and his people pin down Rachel’s location within that radius, to catch her?

Holly seemed to recognize the confusion in his expression.

“They didn’t care if I got killed,” she said, “and they knew the odds of capturing Rachel were small, even if she got me. They risked my life just for a tiny chance of getting her.”

The little ghost of shame flickered through Gaul’s eyes again, though only briefly.

“It worked,” he said. “We had cameras hidden in Holly’s home and car and workplace. If we saw her kill herself, we would know with certainty that Rachel was within a mile of that location, in that moment. We had half a dozen drones on station above Amarillo for weeks, and the Miranda satellites tasked on the city 24/7. In the end, we just got lucky. One of the drones identified Rachel in a city park, two blocks from where Holly lived. The drones were armed with low-powered, nonfragmenting warheads. We targeted a spot five meters from where Rachel was standing. The blast wave broke three of her ribs and gave her a concussion. She was still unconscious when my people got to her and subdued her with narcotics.”

“Weren’t the other two with her?” Dryden asked.

Gaul shook his head. “If they were in Amarillo, they weren’t close by when the missile hit. It wasn’t ideal.”

“No, it really wasn’t ideal,” Holly said. “I’ve had armed security for the last two months, wondering every minute if those two women were watching me. Did you know they can gauge their distance just right, so you don’t feel the chill at your temples? Yeah, they’re old hands.”

Dryden considered telling her they had been watching. It made sense that they’d done that, after Rachel’s capture. Audrey and Sandra would’ve been desperate to learn where the girl had been taken. By monitoring Holly, they could eventually learn the names of the military people who’d changed her identity and hidden her in Amarillo. Those same people would have played some role in setting the trap for Rachel — or would know people who had. The daisy chain could’ve plausibly led to El Sedero someday.

Dryden kept it all to himself. Holly was rattled enough already.

“You’re really on board with trying to save Rachel’s life?” Dryden asked.

Holly nodded. “None of this is her fault. She’s a kid. She didn’t choose any of it.”

“She’s dangerous,” Gaul said. “Not just to you. To plenty of people.”

“That issue can be dealt with,” Holly said.

Gaul seemed to be already weary of whatever Holly was referring to.

Dryden looked back and forth between the two of them. “What do you mean?” he asked. “How can it be dealt with?”

“The same way it got started,” Holly said. “Genetic manipulation. We’ve got twelve years’ worth of progress over the drug that was used on Rachel. We know how to reverse it now.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Dryden stared. Holly held his gaze, unblinking.

“It would take months,” she said, “but it would work. If she could be taken alive again, and drugged like she was in El Sedero, it could be done.”

“You don’t know for certain it would work,” Gaul said. “Just because it’s worked in animal trials, that doesn’t—”

“It would work,” Holly said. “Afterward, she’d be a very screwed-up kid who needed years of therapy … but she’d be no more dangerous than anyone else. She could have a chance at some kind of life, anyway. Some kind of happiness, after all this.”

Gaul was shaking his head, looking off.

“So what’s the plan?” Dryden asked. “Assuming there is one.”

“There is one,” Harris said.

“Let’s hear it.”

A look passed between Harris and Gaul.

“What?” Dryden asked.

“It’s another bait trap,” Gaul said. “Using both you and Holly this time. You can opt out, if you like. If so, you’re free to go. The manhunt for the suspect with your face, the guy with the dirty bomb, will be resolved either way; we’ll make up a name for him and announce we’ve killed him. You can go home free and clear.”

“You already know I’m staying in this thing,” Dryden said. “How does the plan work?”

“Don’t you see?” Harris asked softly. “You can’t know that. If you two are the bait, you can’t have the details in your heads. Or Rachel will have them, too.”

Dryden laced his fingers behind his neck and shut his eyes. It was Rachel’s bedroom in Chicago all over again.

“I can tell you this much,” Gaul said. “The two of you will be in a house. It’s on farm land in eastern Kansas, half a mile from a busy street, where there are restaurants and twenty-four-hour stores.”

Dryden saw the point. “You want Rachel to be confident she can get within a mile of us and still be hidden in a crowd.”

Gaul nodded. “But I expect her to get closer, in the end. A lot closer.”

“What makes you say that?” Dryden asked.

Holly answered before Gaul could. “Under questioning in El Sedero, Rachel made her intentions toward me very clear. She has no interest in making me commit suicide. Remember how locking works: I would actually want to kill myself, in that final moment. That’s no good, for her.” Holly’s voice almost cracked on the next part. “Rachel wants to kill me. Really kill me. She wants to be looking me right in the eyes at the end.”

A silence fell over the huge room.

“I’m not naive, you know,” Holly said. “I know what I’m volunteering for.”

She went quiet again.

“That’s it for the briefing,” Gaul said. “We put you two in the farmhouse and you stay there. Holly’s employer in Amarillo will be given the address and a fake explanation for her departure. Rachel will easily get that information once she’s … herself again. Once her memory comes back. Beyond that, we wait.”

“Rachel’s going to see through that setup like it’s cling wrap,” Dryden said. “She’s going to know the farmhouse is a trap.”

“Yes,” Gaul said. “She was always going to find out anyway. When she’s close enough to lock the two of you, she’ll hear your thoughts. It would be impossible for you to hide why you’re really there.”

“So why the hell would she go for it?” Dryden asked.

“Maybe she won’t,” Gaul said, “but I expect her to. This time around she’ll know it’s a trap. She can watch for its teeth. Drones, for example — you can spot them with the right equipment, which she and Audrey can probably get. So those are out. Knowing it’s a trap may give Rachel confidence. She might think she can outsmart us.”

“She might be right,” Dryden said.

Gaul simply nodded.

“And Audrey’s going to just let her take this risk?” Dryden asked.

“Do you really suppose Audrey’s in charge of her?” Gaul said. “That she and Sandra were still calling the shots, after all these years? Here are three people: Two of them can hear thoughts across a room; the third can make anyone in the nearest mile do anything she can imagine. Over time, who do you think would emerge as the alpha?”

Dryden thought about that. It clashed so vividly with his own understanding of Rachel that it hadn’t even occurred to him.

“Don’t assume you really know her,” Gaul said. “We know what the real Rachel wants with Holly. As far as how she’ll feel about you, don’t even try to guess.”

The real Rachel.

Seeing the effect of that notion on him, Holly stood from her chair. “I’m like you,” she said. “I know what she would’ve been, if none of these things had ever happened to her. I believe she can be that way again.”

“Then let’s go,” Dryden said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Marcus Till rolled his old hatchback to the end of his driveway, stopped at the turnout, and stared back at the trailer he had called home for all his adult life. The place wasn’t much to look at, but it was his. He watched it and wondered if he would ever see it again, and then he pulled onto the county two-lane and headed east toward town, and didn’t look back.

He was forty-one years old. He had lived all of those forty-one years right here in the little backwater of Clover, Wyoming, ten miles from the somewhat larger backwater of Red City. For much of the early part of his life, he had struggled to stay out of trouble. The trouble had been brawling, mostly, always a result of drink or bad manners — the one led to the other, of course. Around thirty he’d left all that behind; you could only wake up in so many jail cells before you started to do some thinking. He had gone to work for his uncle in the woodshop, making custom cabinets and furniture for building contractors over in Cheyenne. Something in the work had appealed to Marcus at once. He liked putting in a day’s effort and having a new thing to show for it at the end, a desk or maybe a bookshelf. He liked to stay alone in the shop after hours, turn on this light or that one, and see how a newly finished piece gleamed from different angles. He had expected the rest of his life to play out on this clean, simple track he’d gotten it onto. He wasn’t going to be rich, but he also wasn’t going to wake up in jail ever again, and that was fine with him. Everything had been fine, really, until just shy of a year ago when the Ghost had gotten into his head. All these rotten months later — months of denying and resisting and finally giving in like a beaten dog with his snout turned down — here he was, following his orders. What else could he do?

They were strange, the orders he’d gotten today. They were always strange — and now and again they were as god-awful as anything Marcus could imagine — but these were especially unusual. Until today, the Ghost’s commands had always involved doing things right here in town, give or take a few miles. Now, out of the blue, the voice had commanded him to get in his car, get on the freeway, and head for Kansas. The instructions had specified a particular motel in a particular town, where he was to check in and stay and await further orders.

What those orders would be, he couldn’t guess. They’d be nothing good — he knew that much. Still, he would follow them. God help him, he would follow them.

CHAPTER FORTY

Just before midnight Dryden put aside the book he’d been reading and stepped out onto the farmhouse’s porch. The breeze coming in off the fields was warm and humid. He went to the top of the steps and looked out at the night. In front of the house, the land fell away in a long slope to the road, two hundred yards south. The driveway cut straight down the middle, the fields on either side lying fallow and choked with short grass. The same held for the land on all sides of the place: a vast zone of open visibility stretching at least six hundred feet in each direction, without so much as a tree growing in it. No doubt this geometry had been part of Gaul’s reason for choosing the site.

The house itself was probably a hundred years old, biding the decades out here in the sticks while Topeka grew north to meet it. It wasn’t far off — the busy street Gaul had spoken of lay directly south, running east-west across the near horizon like a scar of neon and sodium-lit parking lots. Rachel could be there right now; Dryden and Holly had been in the farmhouse for ten days.

In the darkness to Dryden’s right, the porch swing creaked in the wind. The swing was a big rough-beam construction, maybe as old as the house itself. He stood listening to it and watching the fields a while longer, then went back inside.

Holly was in her room, asleep. For the sake of staying vigilant, they’d staggered their schedules so they were never both sleeping at the same time. Gaul had given them very few instructions when they’d said good-bye to him, but among them were Stay close to each other and Stay alert. He’d given them each a cell phone, with his own number on the contact list. The first sign of anything happening, you call me, he’d said. That’d been it.

Dryden went to the kitchen. The big pantry leading off of it was stocked with easily two months’ worth of nonperishable food. In the attached garage were three giant chest freezers, also chock-full. There were two vehicles in the garage as well, a Ford Escape and a Chevy Malibu. Keys had been left in both ignitions, though Gaul had said nothing about leaving the place. Dryden had started both vehicles to make sure they ran and had found each to have a full tank of gas.

Holly’s laptop was on the counter, plugged in and charging. Gaul hadn’t objected to her bringing it, or even using it to stay in touch with friends and colleagues; it was a way of maintaining some semblance of normalcy, for what it was worth.

Earlier in the evening Holly had used the laptop to check e-mail. Afterward she’d closed it and gone out to sit on the porch swing, and through the screen door Dryden thought he’d heard her crying. She’d stayed out there for over an hour and gone to bed soon after coming back in.

Dryden slid the laptop aside and started making a sandwich. He got a brick of cheese from the fridge, took a chef’s knife from a block on the counter, and cut two slices. He held the knife a moment longer, studying its edge, its point. What would it be like if Rachel locked him right now? How would it feel to suddenly, inexplicably want this knife in his throat? To want it badly enough to put the tip under his Adam’s apple and shove. He set it in the sink and went back to making the sandwich.

Holly woke four hours later. Dryden went to his room and lay down. He had the window open to the screen, and lay listening to the sounds of crickets and katydids and the wind sliding over the grass. He began to drift, and in the vague space near sleep Rachel came to him. They were sitting in the dark town house again, and she was leaning against him, warm and shapeless and fragile. He tried not to move. Tried to keep the moment from changing as long as he could.

“That’s Arcturus,” Holly said.

It was two nights later. They were sitting side by side on the porch steps, looking at the stars. Even with the city’s outskirts so close, the night sky here was almost ink black.

“You can’t tell, but Arcturus is a giant star,” Holly said. “If you put our sun next to it, it would look like a cherry beside a beach ball.”

“You’ve studied astronomy?” Dryden asked.

Holly shook her head. “I knew someone who wanted to study it. She told me a lot of these little facts.”

She was quiet for a long time.

“What was Rachel like when you were with her?” she asked.

He considered his answer for a while. “Like a reminder that it’s worth it to be alive.”

Holly pulled her feet up to the step beneath the one she sat on. She hugged her knees. “It’s a hell of a thing to be truly sorry for something. Sorry with every part of yourself. Do you think she could ever accept that from me?”

Dryden heard needfulness in her voice. He wanted to tell her it was possible. Instead he pictured that last moment between Rachel and her mother, and said nothing.

The wind picked up. Holly shuddered and pulled her knees closer. Dryden looked at her. Her bangs hung past her temples. Her eyes were almost shut. Something in her vulnerability commanded his attention.

She looked up and met his eyes. For a few seconds she seemed almost afraid of him, the way he was looking at her. She was caught off guard, at least. Then she took a deep breath, and her eyes changed. Not afraid — intense. And still needful.

A second later they were kissing. Hands on each other’s backs, grabbing, clinging. Her knees dropping out of the way, her body turning, mashing against his as hard as she could manage. Her mouth alive with her excitement, her breathing accelerating to match his. They were moving, then. Pushing up past the steps, sprawling on the old wood planking of the porch, hands going to shirt buttons, fumbling, pulling. He found her bra clasp and got it undone. She pulled her mouth back from his just long enough to speak.

“I haven’t done this in a long time. If I seem—”

Dryden shook his head. “Same here. You don’t even want to know.”

Kissing again. Shirts coming off. Skin against skin with nothing in the way. Jesus, how had he waited this long to do this with someone again?

She pulled back once more, their foreheads still touching. “Is this a good idea?”

“It’s a great idea.”

“It’s not really staying alert.”

“It’s really staying close to each other.”

She breathed a laugh. Pushed in again. Kissed him. Her hands traced the contours of his ribcage. His sides. Moving downward—

Dryden opened his eyes. He pulled his face back six inches. All his excitement receded like hot water down a tub drain. His thoughts focused.

Holly reacted. “What?”

“Twelve days, and there hasn’t been any kind of spark between us. Not a thing.”

She looked confused. “It seems like there’s one now.”

“You’re not even close to my type,” Dryden said.

“Well — okay, thanks. Jesus Christ—”

“Think about what I’m saying,” Dryden said.

For another half second she remained baffled. Then it hit her like a shove.

“Oh shit,” she whispered.

Dryden nodded. “It’s not us. It’s her. She’s here.”

Dryden got out his phone even as they pulled their shirts back on. He brought up the contact list and tapped Gaul’s number. As it began to ring, he turned and scanned the grassy field south of the house. Holly was already doing the same thing.

It was almost pointless, though. In the near-total lack of moonlight, the terrain lay deep in darkness.

The call rang a second time. Then a third.

Sensing the delay, Holly turned and looked at him.

Four rings.

Five.

“What if she already got to Gaul?” Holly asked. Her eyes were wide at the implications. “What if he’s dead and there’s no plan anymore? No help coming?”

Six rings.

Seven.

Dryden turned and crossed to the front door, keeping the phone at his ear. Holly followed him into the house.

Eight rings.

Dryden hung up and pocketed the phone; Gaul could call back as easily as he could answer.

They stood in the middle of the living room, all indoor lights doused, the night visible through the windows of every room that surrounded it.

“She locked you and then me,” Holly said. “Right? The way you looked at me on the steps — you felt it first, and I didn’t. And then I did.”

Dryden nodded. “She can only lock one person at a time, but — I guess with something like that, you give people a push and they’ll probably keep going.”

“It worked.”

“Yeah.”

She went to the screen door and looked out again. “She wanted us distracted for a long time. Long enough for her to cross the open space to this house.”

Holly turned and faced him.

She wants to be looking me right in the eyes at the end.

Dryden nodded, seeing her point.

All the same, something about the situation didn’t add up. Rachel had locked them each just long enough to turn them on to each other, but she wasn’t locking them now. Why not? If she wanted them preoccupied while she herself approached the farmhouse, she could’ve just kept locking them, alternating from one to the other, and made them sit on the floor helplessly. That would’ve been the surest move. So why hadn’t Rachel done it? Dryden had no answer to that. Which put him on edge.

He took out his phone again. Stared at the blank display.

“What the hell are we going to do?” Holly asked.

Two thousand thirty-one miles above the southern Great Plains, Miranda Twenty-six trained its instruments on the countryside north of Topeka, Kansas. Its lens platform made microscopic adjustments, keeping its viewing frame on the target it had been commanded to cover whenever it was in range. The target was a house centered in a broad square of uniform surface vegetation, a grass 97.441 percent likely to be Bouteloua gracilis, given the region and time of year. There were two human beings outdoors within the target frame, just entering the broad square of grass from the southern edge and moving north toward the house at walking speed. Their shapes suggested an adult and an adolescent, both female. Miranda Twenty-six relayed the image stream to the secure downlink designated 0814-13151, as instructed 12 days, 4 hours, 27 minutes, 41 seconds earlier. Since that time, there had been no further contact from the human operator.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Three minutes since Dryden had tried calling Gaul. No response. Holly had tried, too, with the same result. Then she’d called Dryden’s phone to make sure the damn things worked at all. She’d gotten through immediately.

They moved from window to window, staying on opposite sides of the house from one another, watching the dark fields for any sign of approach.

“This is stupid,” Dryden said. He came out of the kitchen and met Holly in the living room. “Even if we spot her, so what? What good would it do?”

“What are we supposed to do?”

Dryden turned and looked back toward the kitchen — then past it to the door leading to the garage.

“What if we just get the hell out?” he asked. “Get in one of the cars, leave the headlights off, and make a run for it across the fields.” He looked through the screen door, toward the porch and the south field. “If they’re coming from the edge of town, we’d want to go north. We could be out of her range in less than a minute.”

“Unless she hears the engine and locks us again.”

“We stay here, it’s going to happen anyway.”

Holly shut her eyes hard, thinking. “Even if Gaul’s dead, we don’t know the plan is off. We can’t even be sure he is dead. If it’s still on, and we leave, we’re going to screw it up. We may not get another chance at this.”

Dryden started to respond but stopped. Out in the dark beyond the porch, two hundred feet from the house: movement. Two silhouettes. He didn’t need detail to recognize their size and shape.

Holly turned and followed his gaze. Dryden heard her breathing go shallow.

Her hand found his and took hold of it. He squeezed back.

The silhouettes came on, still deep in the darkness beyond the house’s glow. As Dryden watched, something in their movement struck him, but he couldn’t place what it was. He didn’t get the chance. A second later the night flashed blinding white, and then a blast front of sound slammed down over the house, blowing in the windowpanes on the south side. Holly screamed and threw her arms around Dryden. A second flash followed, and over Holly’s shoulder Dryden saw the two silhouettes turn to run. A moment later the flashes were coming one after another like strobe pulses at a light show, and the sky sounded like the inside of a machine-gun barrel.

“What is it?” Holly screamed.

“The plan,” Dryden said.

In the wild flickers of light, he saw Rachel and Audrey still running away. Running south, back the way they’d come from. They covered sixty feet and made it no farther. Thick white streamers of powder were raining down over the field, as if a giant were slinging handfuls of flour into the wind. Where the stuff hit the ground it billowed out in all directions. Rachel and Audrey were right in the middle of it. In the last of the flashes, Dryden saw them both double over and fall.

Darkness. Silence.

Dryden’s ears were keening. He almost missed the ringtone of the phone in his pocket. He took it out; Gaul’s number showed on the display. He answered.

“Where the hell were you?” Dryden asked.

“Sorry about that,” Gaul said. “I wanted you both panicking, in case Rachel was reading you. Better to keep her confident.”

There was a noise in Gaul’s background. It sounded like chopper turbines powering up.

“Go to the couch and tear the middle cushion off,” Gaul said. “There are two gas masks underneath.”

Dryden turned and crossed to it. The cushion came off as if it had been held by fewer than a dozen threads. He reached into the space below and took out the masks.

“I’m ten miles south,” Gaul said. “I’ll be on-site in three or four minutes. Rachel and Audrey should be unconscious a lot longer than that, but as a precaution I want Holly to leave right now. Have her take either vehicle and just go anywhere, any route. Best if she doesn’t tell you where she’s going. Again, as a precaution.”

“Good enough,” Dryden said.

“See you when I get there.” Gaul hung up.

The gas was already swirling into the house through the empty window frames. Smoky clumps of it, twisting and snaking. Holly had her mask on; in the last of the clear air, Dryden picked up his own and secured it to his face.

He nodded out through the screen door. “Gas mortar shells.” His voice sounded filtered and mechanical in his own ears. “The launchers can be remote operated. Firing range can be several miles.”

They went out through the screen door and stood atop the porch steps. Against the backdrop of lights at the edge of town, the gas cloud hovered like a fog over the field.

Dryden relayed Gaul’s last instruction. Holly stared off into the cloud a moment longer, considering it.

“I’ll stay with her,” Dryden said. “I’ll make sure she’s okay. Go.”

Holly nodded at the gas. “Could that much of it kill someone? Especially a kid?”

“I don’t think so.” He said it confidently, though he wasn’t sure at all. He’d been wondering the same thing since almost the first detonation.

“Go,” he said again. “I’ll call you when it’s safe to come back.”

She hesitated a few seconds longer, then nodded. She went past him, back into the house. Thirty seconds later he heard one of the vehicles start. The garage door opened, and the Malibu rolled out into the haze. At the end of the driveway it turned right; Dryden watched its taillights disappear to the west. He descended the steps and started into the field.

Gaul made another phone call, even as he strapped into the chopper. He connected the phone to his headset, and over the rotors he heard the call begin to ring.

A man answered. “This is Hager.”

“Everything’s set,” Gaul said. “Rachel’s neutralized on-site, and Dryden’s with her. I sent Holly away, but I can call her back when the time comes. She and Dryden are fully in the dark.”

Gaul pictured Hager on his end of the line. The little compound in the Canadian Rockies. It was tough to keep his envy in check, thinking of the place — like imagining your enemy’s trophy on its pedestal. It made this uneasy cooperation all the harder.

You had to do what you had to do, though. Whatever it took to bloom.

“Understood,” Hager said. “Control asset will be airborne in five; expect it on-station above the target area in thirty minutes. We’ll go live as soon as we’re in range.”

Gaul had seen an example of the control asset before, bolted to its cell tower at the test site in Cold Spring, Utah. The one coming into play tonight wasn’t attached to a tower; it was strapped down in the cargo hold of a C-5 Galaxy.

We can’t guarantee we’ll tie off every loose end you’re worried about, Hager had told him, days before. Marsh, Harris, Dryden’s other friends. It’s not on me if they still go public against you.

Would they, though? After what happened at the farmhouse in the next hour, would people like Dennis Marsh really have the nerve to stand up and make waves?

We’ll see about that, Gaul thought.

Just over a thousand miles away, in his office in Washington, D.C., Dennis Marsh stared at his computer, his mouth going dry.

On-screen, the phone-intercept program read TRANS-LINK INIT. — CALL STATUS LIVE—0 MIN, 24 SEC.

At twenty-five seconds he heard Gaul say, “Copy that. We’ll talk after.”

The call went dead with a click.

It occurred to Marsh to wonder what his own expression looked like right now. Not quite one of surprise, he guessed. Maybe just that of a man bitten by a snake he’d been handling.

He reached for his own phone; he already knew the numbers for the phones Sam Dryden and Holly Ferrel had with them. He brought up the on-screen number pad and then stopped.

Gaul had given them those phones. There was no question Gaul’s people could monitor voice traffic on them.

Shit.

How to warn Dryden and Holly without tipping off anyone else?

Marsh leaned forward in his chair and shut his eyes hard.

Think. Think.

Down in the field, the gas was thicker than it had been on the porch, but it would be gone in a matter of minutes; the wind was moderate but moving steadily, shoving the whole cloud mass slowly east.

Dryden was a hundred feet out from the house now. Watching his step. The gas was visibly thinning already.

Over the ringing that still throbbed in his ears, he heard the chopper coming in. Far south yet, not even visible.

He picked up his speed.

One hundred fifty feet from the house. The cloud was slipping away by the second.

He saw Audrey and Rachel. Straight ahead, a few dozen yards. Lying facedown in the grass. He broke into a run, his feet kicking up swirls of chalky gas residue.

It came to him even before he reached them that something was wrong. Something was missing. He realized what it was in the last five yards: no chill at his temples.

Their minds should’ve generated that sensation even if they were asleep.

What did it mean? That they were more than asleep?

Comatose?

Worse than that?

“Goddammit.” Through the mask, the mutter sounded almost animal.

The chopper was louder now. He looked up and saw it coming north over the city lights, less than two miles out.

He got to Rachel and knelt down beside her. Her hair lay in a tangle around her neck. He reached through it, to her jawline, and pressed his finger to the carotid artery pulse point.

Her pulse was strong.

Still no chill touching him. Not even a trace.

Understanding hit him a second before he rolled her over. He thought of the silhouettes’ movements in the field, before the barrage started. Something strange in the way they were walking. All at once he knew what it had been.

They had only been moving one at a time.

He let go of the pulse point, grabbed the shoulder, and shoved hard. The unconscious body rolled onto its back, the hair cascading away from its face.

Which wasn’t Rachel’s.

He was on his feet in half a second, tearing off the mask, pulling his phone from his pocket as he sprinted into the wind — into the thinnest reaches of the gas. He pulled up the recent call list, stabbing Gaul’s number even as the sound of the rotors swelled.

One ring. Two. It connected.

“Turn the chopper around!” He screamed it without even listening for a reply. “Turn around! She sprung the trap! Turn the fucking chopper around!”

He saw it happen even as he shouted, the aircraft passing over a point maybe a mile south of the farmhouse — well within Rachel’s reach, wherever the hell she was. The chopper’s pitch and attitude changed abruptly, and as they did Dryden heard men screaming over the phone’s earpiece. He pictured the pilot or copilot — it really didn’t matter which — taking his hands off the controls and attacking the man beside him. Either way, there was suddenly no one flying the aircraft. It tipped steeply to one side, the tail whipping around like a boom, and a second later the chopper simply plunged. It dropped three hundred feet and exploded in the city sprawl like a percussion bomb. Orange flame and thick black smoke rolled up and away.

Dryden stared. He still had the phone at his ear, but the call had gone dead. He watched the flames seethe and curl.

Five seconds passed.

He had no idea what to do.

What was there to do, under the circumstances?

He thought about it a few seconds longer and found he had an answer. He turned off the phone and slipped it back into his pocket and let the gas mask fall at his feet. He glanced at the crash site one last time, then turned and faced east across the field. Around him the gas haze had thinned to nothing, but fifty yards east it was as thick as ever. Thick enough to put him to sleep, if he simply walked into it.

He couldn’t say why it made sense to do that — only that he wanted to. It was all he wanted.

He got moving, each stride putting him deeper into the cloud, sucking in breath after breath as the air thickened around him.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

He woke with his heart pounding, his body spasming under a surge of ice water. A bucket clattered to the floor. He opened his eyes and found himself handcuffed to a chair in the farmhouse’s dining room. The table had been shoved aside. The room was clear, and he was sitting in the middle of it.

Rachel stood before him, watching him.

For a second Dryden couldn’t understand how he’d gotten here. He remembered seeing the chopper crash, with Gaul on board, and he remembered walking into the gas cloud afterward because—

Because why? Why the hell had he done that?

The answer settled over him. He shut his eyes for a long beat, getting his head around it. When he opened them again Rachel was still watching him, her eyes large, maybe curious.

Was she in there somewhere? The girl who’d fallen asleep on his shoulder? The hope felt like a blade twisting in his chest.

Rachel blinked, and the curiosity was gone. In its place Dryden saw only cool appraisal.

“Had to let Holly drive away,” she said. Her voice was soft, but there was no emotion in it. “If I’d stopped her, you would’ve had time to warn off the chopper.”

She went to a chair near the wall and picked up a cell phone; Dryden realized it was his own. She turned it on and opened the call list and showed it to him.

“One of those is Holly’s number,” she said. “I want you to call her and tell her it’s okay to come back.”

“I’m not doing that. Force me if you want. I’m not doing it on my own.”

She stared at him, impassive. For a second he expected her to simply lock him again. He waited for the change of mind to come over him — the desire, out of nowhere, to make the call.

Seconds passed. Nothing happened.

Rachel turned aside. She stared off at empty space as if considering options.

“It comes out better if I don’t have to make you say it,” she said.

“What?”

“Did Holly show you the notes? I bet she did.”

Dryden nodded.

“Her hand,” Rachel said. “My handwriting.”

Dryden started to ask what the point was, but stopped. He thought he saw it.

“It’s the same with talking,” Rachel said. “I can force you if it comes to it, but—” She stopped. She turned to him. “It won’t be as convincing as I’d like. I’d rather you did it yourself.”

“I’m not going to. You’re wasting your time asking.”

“I think you will,” she said. There was something almost like sadness in her voice.

She set the phone back down on the chair. As she did, Dryden glimpsed a surgical scalpel next to it.

“You’ve tortured people before,” Rachel said. “You’ve been there, at least. You’ve stood and watched it happen.”

Dryden said nothing.

“You’ve also been trained to resist torture,” Rachel continued. “But I have to think this is one of those areas where training is different than the real thing.”

“I’m not calling her,” Dryden said. “Nothing you do to me is going to change that.”

“It’s not what I’m going to do to you. It’s what you’re going to do to me.”

She came forward and sat astride his knees, facing him with her arms draped behind his neck. Her face hovered six inches from his own.

“You were very good to me,” she said. “Even I can appreciate that. I don’t really want to see you hurting. I think you should call her, before this gets bad.”

She waited for a response.

He offered none.

“Okay,” she said.

Her arms slipped down behind him, to the handcuffs binding him to the back of the chair. He heard the lock disengage, and then his arms were free.

Rachel stood and stepped back from him. She reached behind her and picked up the scalpel, studying its blade in the light.

Dryden considered the distance between himself and her. Five or six feet. He could cross it in far less than a second and knock her unconscious with a blow to the head. Audrey, wherever she was, would be armed, but he’d deal with that problem in its own—

The will to do any of that simply left him. Blew away like a piece of lint in the wind.

“Not even worth thinking about,” Rachel said. “Any plan you come up with, I can stop you from even wanting to try it.”

He looked up at her. What he’d heard in her voice earlier — that edge of sadness — was in her eyes now. Just barely, but it was there.

“In a few seconds you’re going to take this scalpel out of my hand and attack me with it,” she said. “You won’t be able to help yourself.”

Dryden stared. There was no point pleading out loud.

“All you have to do is call her,” Rachel said.

“You can hear what I’m thinking. Can’t you already tell I’m not going to do this?”

“I know what you’re thinking right now. I have no idea what you’ll be thinking in thirty seconds. Neither do you.”

“I’m not going to call her.”

“We’ll see.”

It happened before he could say anything more. The change came over him so quickly it altered the color saturation of his vision, as if the blood vessels in his eyes had distended. Then contemplation itself was gone and there was only the girl, standing before him, flinching back as he exploded from the chair and grabbed the scalpel from her hand. Her eyes were huge and terrified, her breath rushing in. He grabbed her and pivoted and threw her across the table, slamming her onto it, feeling it buckle and snap beneath the two of them. Her arms came up, fighting him, both of her hands grappling for one of his — the one that held the scalpel. He broke the grip and slashed the top of one of her forearms, shirt fabric and skin opening up, blood spilling fast. He could hardly think of it as blood, though. It seemed more like nectar, her whole body a vessel full of it, pulsing with it, intense as her desperation to live. He grabbed a fistful of her hair and wrenched her head back, baring her throat, and his teeth had just touched her skin there when—

As quickly as it had come, the mindset vanished. As if she’d pushed a button and released him from it. Dryden threw himself off of her and fell backward, propelling his body across the floor until his back hit the wall. Not stopping even then; pushing away until he’d reached the corner, the farthest he could physically get from her.

He could remember it all: the intensity of the compulsion, the almost erotic craving to put his teeth into her skin, to feel her blood gush inside his mouth.

Tears now, stinging his eyes, the first tears he’d cried since the day he buried his family. Within seconds he could see nothing but the swimming colors of the room.

Rachel sat up. She turned sharply toward the sound of footsteps crossing the house, stopping just out of sight.

“I’m fine,” Rachel said. “Go back to your watch. Now.”

The footsteps retreated. The screen door opened and banged shut.

Rachel stood. She pulled back her shirt sleeve and studied the slash wound. It was bleeding steadily, but she seemed unfazed. She went to the chair in the middle of the room. She spun it around and sat in it, leaning forward and staring down on him.

“Call Holly,” she said.

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can.”

Dryden shook his head and looked down, still trying to get control of the tears.

For a long time Rachel didn’t speak. When she finally did, her voice was softer than before.

“Ever heard of a place called Lucero, Colorado?”

Dryden shook his head again.

“My mom told me about it, in Building Sixteen. In our cell. She talked about it all the time. Her own mom and dad took her camping there when she was a little girl. It’s up in the mountains, and there are horses you can ride, and trails you can walk on. But what my mom really liked was that you could rent canoes at the lake above town. You could rent them even at night, and that was the best thing, because at night all this cold air would come spilling down out of the mountains higher up, and the lake water would still be warm, so this little fog layer would rise up off the surface, just about as high as the canoe. It would cover the whole lake, and in the moonlight it looked like you were riding on a cloud. The last thing my mom said to me, before I sent Holly those messages, was that we were going to go there, to Lucero. Soon as we got out we were going there, and we were going to rent a canoe and go out on the lake the very first night.”

Her voice had changed pitch, just noticeably. Her throat was constricting.

“That’s all she wanted,” Rachel said. “A regular life, with her little girl, where she could take her to see a place like that when she felt like it.”

“Holly didn’t know what would happen to your mom, Rachel. How could she have—”

“All she had to do was what I begged her to do. Just talk to someone, any reporter in the world. That e-mail address, the things they would’ve seen in it—”

“She was scared out of her mind. Anyone else would’ve been, too.”

“I didn’t ask anyone else. I asked her.”

“She regrets what she did. She’d take it back if—”

“I finally went there, you know. To Lucero. About a year ago. They still rent out canoes. Even at night.”

“Holly Ferrel didn’t kill your mom. The people who made all that happen are dead. You got them. It’s over.”

Rachel swallowed and forced resolve back into her voice. Her eyes hardened again.

“Call her,” she said.

“You know I’m not going to.”

“You might change your mind. There are other things I can make you do to me. Some of them, you’d rather die than do.”

Dryden understood. At the thought of it, his insides seemed to contract. Like filthy rags being twisted.

“You better call her,” Rachel said.

“Please don’t do this—”

“It’s up to you—”

“I’m not going to fucking betray her!”

Rachel took a deep breath. Steadied herself.

“Don’t,” Dryden said.

“Sorry.”

Dryden fixed in his mind the image of Rachel in the first moment he’d met her, pleading with him to trust her, to protect her. Maybe if he could hold on to that picture, maybe—

“Headlights!”

Audrey’s voice, out at the screen door.

Dryden felt the change of mind brush past him like a wing. There and gone. Rachel had already let it go. She rose from the chair.

“Chevy Malibu,” Audrey said. “Coming up the driveway.”

Rachel crossed toward the doorway to the living room.

“This isn’t you,” Dryden said.

She stopped. Looked down at him.

“This is only what those two trained you to be,” he said. “You wouldn’t be this person if your mom had raised you.”

If it stung her, she didn’t show it. She held his gaze and spoke evenly. “She didn’t, though.”

Headlights washed through the house as the car pulled up in front. Rachel turned back to the doorway, and a second later she was gone.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Dryden got to his feet and followed. He entered the living room in time to see Rachel reach the screen door. Audrey was holding it open with her shoulder; in her hands she had a 12-gauge shotgun. Looking past Rachel, she saw Dryden start across the room.

“We’re done with him, right?” Audrey said. She was already turning, raising the weapon toward him.

“Leave him alone,” Rachel said.

Audrey looked at her. “Why?”

“Because I told you to.”

Rachel said it like she was used to giving orders. Audrey reacted like she was used to taking them. After Rachel went through the doorway, Audrey turned to face Dryden again, the gun falling away to her side.

“Keep your distance,” she said, then followed Rachel.

Dryden crossed to the door as it banged shut. He pushed it open and stepped out into the darkness and the cool air of the porch. A mile south, several blocks of the town had become a sea of police and fire response flashers. Tendrils of smoke still rose from the crash site. Closer, the field had cleared entirely of the gas. There was no sign of the two decoys where they’d been lying. There’d been more than enough time for them to wake up and leave, no doubt confused as all hell.

The Malibu was parked and idling in the dooryard, its lights stabbing through the dust it’d kicked up.

Rachel stood at the top of the porch steps. Audrey had descended them and stood five feet out from their base, training the shotgun on the car.

The headlights cut out.

The engine died.

Holly Ferrel shoved open the driver’s door and stood. She ignored Audrey and stared up at Rachel.

Seconds passed.

Holly stood there, saying nothing. Her arms were low at her sides, her posture the embodiment of defenselessness.

Dryden couldn’t read Holly’s thoughts, but he knew what she had to be thinking. It occurred to him that he was watching the most honest apology a person could offer. Words could be bullshit. Thoughts and feelings couldn’t. Holly was just standing there, letting Rachel take it all in. Here’s what’s in my head. Take it for what it is.

Down in front of the steps, Audrey was looking back and forth from Holly to Rachel. She seemed unnerved, and Dryden thought he knew why: Though Audrey could hear everything coming out of Holly’s mind, she could only guess what Rachel might be thinking in response.

To Rachel, Audrey said, “What are you waiting for?”

Rachel didn’t answer.

Dryden moved to the porch rail near the old swing, putting himself ten feet to Rachel’s right. He could see her in profile. Could see her eyes reflecting the distant city light.

They were filmed with tears.

Audrey crossed to the foot of the steps and looked up at the girl. “This is what you wanted. It doesn’t matter if she feels bad. It doesn’t even matter if she means it — that doesn’t undo what she did.”

Rachel made no reply. She didn’t even look down at Audrey. She was staring at Holly, and Holly was staring back.

“Hey,” Audrey said.

Rachel flinched. She blinked away the moisture and looked at Audrey.

“It has to happen,” Audrey said. “You know it. There’s no reason to keep listening to all this.”

For a moment Rachel didn’t respond. Then she took a hard breath and nodded.

Audrey looked relieved. “How do you want to do it?”

Rachel pointed to the shotgun. “Put it in her hands.”

Audrey smiled at the idea. She turned, crossed the dooryard, and shoved the weapon at Holly.

Holly made no move to take it. She continued staring at Rachel, her eyes searching. Begging.

Then they simply went slack.

She turned and took the shotgun from Audrey.

Dryden doubted Holly had ever touched a firearm in her life, but she cradled this one with casual ease. She turned it in the light spill from the house and clicked off the safety, pressed the slide release, and opened the action just enough to see that there was a shell in the chamber. She racked it back shut with authority.

Then she shouldered the weapon, swung it to the side, and blew the top half of Audrey’s head off.

She’d cycled another shell into the chamber by the time the body dropped. She turned toward the steps then and leveled the weapon straight at Rachel.

“No!” Dryden shouted.

Rachel spoke just above a whisper. “It has to end.”

The girl had her eyes closed. She sank to a sitting position on the top step. Drew her knees against herself. Bowed her head.

Holly advanced with the shotgun shouldered and aimed at her.

Dryden crossed to Rachel in two long steps. He dropped himself in front of her, shielding her from the gun’s firing angle.

Holly changed her position in response. She ascended the broad steps along the opposite handrail, keeping the gun out of Dryden’s reach. Its barrel stayed centered on Rachel’s head as she climbed.

It was impossible to keep Rachel shielded from all sides. Dryden settled for simply pulling her against himself, her head to his chest, so that any shot pattern that hit her would also hit him.

“It has to end,” Rachel whispered again. It came out high and cracked, and Dryden felt her body begin shaking with quiet sobs. “I want it to end. I’m sick of it all.”

The shotgun trembled in Holly’s hands but remained leveled.

“Let Holly go, Rachel,” Dryden said softly. “You’re going to be okay now. Audrey and Sandra are both gone.”

Holly was on the plank surface of the porch, the shotgun aimed down at Rachel’s face from three feet away. Dryden saw her snug it tightly into her shoulder.

“Let her go,” he whispered to Rachel. He kissed the top of her head. “It’s already over. Let her go.”

He felt her tears soaking through his shirt. She was shaking harder. Losing control.

“It’s over,” he said.

Holly gripped the shotgun tighter — then faltered.

Rachel took her arms from around her knees, turned, and hugged Dryden. She held on with what must’ve been all her strength.

A second later Holly exhaled deeply and lowered the gun. Her body sagged as if she’d just been cut from restraints. She went to the rail and pitched the weapon into the grass, then turned and stared at Rachel. For a moment she hesitated, unsure what to do — maybe unsure what to feel. Then she crossed to the top of the steps and sat down against the two of them. Sensing her, Rachel turned in place and put her arms around her. Holly pulled the girl close and held her as she cried.

For the next minute none of them spoke or moved. Dryden heard Rachel’s breathing become rhythmic, regular, as if she’d fallen asleep. He guessed it was something more than that, though. He thought of the surveillance video from outside Building 16: Rachel being carried out to the car, in the first moments after the nightmare part of her life had begun. Brain-locked, Gaul had said. Maybe this moment was the other end of the tunnel she’d entered that night. Maybe she would sleep for a day and a half. She had every right to.

Somewhere inside the house, a ringtone sounded. Dryden’s phone, in the dining room where Rachel had left it.

It rang a second time, the sound filtering out through the screen door and into the night.

“I’ve got her,” Holly whispered.

Dryden nodded, separated from the two of them, and got to his feet. He crossed the porch and entered the house and got the phone on its fifth ring.

“This is Dryden.”

Cole Harris’s voice came over the line. “Sam.”

“Cole. Where are you—”

“Please just listen,” Harris said. “I’ve heard from Dennis Marsh, and I need to tell you something. No matter what happens, you have to sit tight there at the farmhouse. Don’t leave. Okay?”

Dryden had made his way back across the house to the front door. He pushed it open and stepped out onto the porch planking. Holly was staring at him. Rachel was still unconscious in her arms.

“Sam?” Harris said. “Did you hear me?”

“Don’t leave the farmhouse,” Dryden said. “That’s the whole message?”

“That’s the whole message.”

“I understand,” Dryden said.

He ended the call, pocketed the phone, and went to the porch rail. He looked at the road to the south. He turned left and right to study where it led to the horizon in each direction.

The glow of headlights appeared beyond a low rise, a mile west. To the east was a more diffuse light, farther out, but definitely there — another vehicle or more coming in.

“We need to get out of here,” Dryden said. “Right now.”

He was already moving, crossing to where Holly sat with Rachel.

“What is it?” Holly asked.

Dryden crouched and got Rachel in his arms, lifting her and cradling her as Holly stood. The girl remained unresponsive.

“Get the shotgun,” Dryden said. “And get in the car.”

He descended the steps to the dooryard, jogging for the Malibu. Holly, coming down right behind him, picked up the 12-gauge as she followed.

“Passenger side,” Dryden said.

Holly went past him, rounding the front of the car. She opened the door and got in and rested the shotgun across the console and the backseat. Dryden hunched down and eased Rachel into her arms.

“Tell me what’s going on,” Holly said.

“That was Harris on the phone.”

“And?”

“And he didn’t say goldenrod.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

They were halfway down the long gravel drive when the twin pinprick of headlights finally crested the rise to the west. It was clear at a glance the vehicle was approaching fast, from a distance of maybe a quarter mile. A second later another set appeared just behind them.

Dryden looked east in time to see the lights in that direction break into view. Half a mile away, give or take.

In both directions, the incoming vehicles were closer than any available cross street.

Dryden pictured the road as he’d seen it when he and Holly had first arrived here. It was like a million others out in farm country: two-lane blacktop with waist-deep runoff ditches on either side. If he pulled out onto that road, they would be trapped on it as if it were a suspension bridge.

“Hold on to her,” Dryden said.

He jammed his foot hard on the brake. The Malibu skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust, swirling gray in the moonlight — Dryden had kept the car’s headlights off.

Now he dropped it into reverse and stepped on the gas. The vehicle shot backward. When it was doing twenty, he took his foot off the accelerator, jerked the wheel counterclockwise, and shoved the selector to neutral. The front end went sideways and the nighttime fields spun 180 degrees around them. When the world stabilized, the car was pointed back toward the farmhouse. Dryden put it in drive and accelerated again, as fast as the vehicle could go. He veered to the right at the top of the drive, passing the garage on its east side and heading north into the grassland behind the farmhouse.

He considered the viewpoints of the approaching drivers; at their distance they couldn’t have seen the Malibu yet — a dark shape against dark terrain — but they would see the dust above the driveway when they turned in, and the tire tracks denting the grass beyond. They would follow. No question of that.

“Who are they?” Holly asked.

In her arms, Rachel still had her eyes closed.

Dryden glanced in the mirror; the nearest of the vehicles braked and slowed before the foot of the driveway.

He had only a hunch as to who they were. He hoped he was wrong about it.

Hager was in his favorite spot again. The big window in his office, overlooking the work floor with its glass-walled stations.

The place was hopping tonight. All twelve stations were occupied. Within each of them, in the deep bloody light, lay a controller, eyes closed and focused on the work. Each was connected to a human subject — a mark, to use the popular term — down there in rural Kansas.

More than a week ago, after Martin Gaul had gotten in touch to lay out his proposal, each controller had chosen a mark from one of the three test areas — the unlucky little towns hosting the antennas. The controllers had given their marks special instructions, sending them on road trips to the boondocks north of Topeka, to hole up in run-down motels or to pitch tents in campgrounds, and to await further instructions.

Hager had been more than a little nervous about the whole thing. Once the marks actually left their hometowns and got out of range of their respective towers, there would be no way to get into their heads again until Gaul called with the go-ahead.

Until the airborne asset got into position.

More than a few nights, Hager had lain awake wondering if the marks would really be there when the controllers tried to reach them again. Maybe they would all slip away into the ether, after a week or more of freedom from the voices in their heads. Time and again, he’d found his mind full of Yeats’s falcon in its widening gyre.

Watching the controllers now, Hager felt the deepest kind of relief — and a little amusement. Every last one of the marks had turned up where they were supposed to. Any dog trainer would’ve been proud.

Dryden turned on the headlights a hundred yards beyond the farmhouse. There was no advantage in leaving them off any longer — the pursuers couldn’t miss the Malibu’s trail through the grass — and there was plenty of risk in going without them.

The moment the beams came on, a distant line of trees appeared out of the dark, a quarter mile ahead.

Ahead was north. They were driving toward the back of the property the farmhouse sat on. Presumably there was someone else’s property butted up against it — some other plot of farmland stretching farther north, until it tied into the next blacktop two-lane.

By the time they’d covered half the distance to the trees, it was clear they would never reach the next road north. The dense tree line ran unbroken across the landscape ahead of them. A perfect barricade marking the back of the property. Dryden veered left and right, sweeping the headlights like search beams. There was no gap visible anywhere in the woods.

Behind them, the first pair of lights rounded the farmhouse and came on straight toward them. A second and third set followed.

Dryden swung the Malibu left, toward the west edge of the property. Another farm bordered it there, and beyond it should be a road running north to south. There would be a ditch before the road, but with any luck there would be a break in it somewhere — a place meant for tractors and other vehicles to come and go. The trick would be finding one of those points before the pursuers caught up with them.

Dryden checked the mirror. Four sets of lights back there now, strung out in a line, snaking their way up the field.

He turned his attention forward again—

Something was wrong.

He couldn’t place it, but the grass straight ahead was different in some way that made his scalp prickle. Something in how it caught the headlights.

“What is that?” Holly asked.

Dryden knew the answer half a second later. Which was too late.

The Malibu’s front end dropped sickeningly, and water surged up over the hood onto the windshield. Holly screamed as she and Rachel were thrown forward by the instant deceleration. Dryden reached for them; he caught some of their momentum with his arm as his own body was slammed against the steering wheel.

Then everything was still — or almost still. The car was bobbing in place, rocking side to side and front to back.

All around it were the tops of the weeds that fully choked the shallow pond, their height just about perfect to match the ankle-high grass in the surrounding field. There was no open water at all. In the headlights, the pond had been all but invisible.

The car settled another six inches and touched bottom; the water level was midway up the side windows. The engine stuttered and then died; its intake ports were underwater. The beams from the headlamps shone out through the murk beneath the surface.

But already there was other light playing over the tops of the weeds. Brightening by the second as the pursuing cars closed in.

“What do we do?” Holly asked. She pulled the handle and tried to shove open the door on her side. It wouldn’t budge. There were thousands of pounds of water pressure working against it.

Rachel’s breathing remained steady and slow. She clung to Holly unconsciously, like a sleeping infant.

Dryden twisted in his seat and got hold of the shotgun. In the tight space of the car it was almost impossible to maneuver the thing; before he’d even gotten it past the seatback, he heard the first of the other vehicles come to a stop somewhere close behind them. Its engine went idle, and a door opened and closed.

Both he and Holly went quiet. They turned and looked at each other, listening.

A rifle cracked like a stick of dynamite going off almost on top of them. The bullet whined off the car’s roof and hit the water twenty feet ahead.

“Down!” Dryden said. “Flat as you can get.”

Holly was already moving, shoving Rachel even lower than herself, down into the footwell on the passenger side. She lay her own body flat on the seat, curled fetal.

The rifle fired again. The bullet punched through the back window near the top, went through the seatback above Holly, and smashed into the glove box. In the same moment Dryden heard another vehicle brake and slide to a stop. Another door opened and shut, and the sound that followed was unmistakable: a pump shotgun being cycled. A second later the passenger window exploded, and water surged down into the space where Rachel lay.

Rachel had been hovering somewhere warm inside herself. She had a vague memory of a feeling she associated with fireplaces. A feeling that rolled off somebody and pressed comfortably around her, like a hot bath. Was it Sam? Yes — Sam had sent out that feeling from almost the moment she’d met him. Now there was someone else doing that. Someone holding her, protecting her.

Holly. It was Holly.

Coming from her, the feeling had a different flavor. It took Rachel back to a time when someone else had held her this way. It felt wonderful, and for minutes on end she’d simply clung to the sensation of it. She’d let the rest of the world fade out to nothing. This was all she wanted, for now. This was—

Freezing cold.

Rachel blinked. Her eyes stung.

What was happening?

She was underwater, and hands were grasping for her, pulling at her while voices screamed.

Something boomed, like a sharp drumbeat, though she knew that wasn’t it.

She blinked again and shook her head, and the world came all the way back to her, crisp and hard and clear.

She was with Sam and Holly in the car. The car was stuck in deep water, which was flooding in through a broken-out window. Another gunshot sounded — a high-powered rifle, she thought. She turned toward the sound of the weapon, and felt her mind automatically running the complex formulas for locking.

Marcus Till worked the bolt action of his Winchester 70. He heard the spent casing land in the grass to his right, not far from the man with the Mossberg 500, who’d just arrived.

That there might be other people working in the service of the Ghost had never crossed Marcus’s mind until ten minutes ago, when he’d found he wasn’t alone on the backcountry roads leading to this place. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that development, though in some deep part of himself he seemed to be relieved at it. It meant there were other hands to help carry the weight of guilt. He supposed it might even mean he could let himself off the hook entirely, looking back on a night like this: He would never know for sure that his bullets had killed the people in this car, whoever they were. It was possible the Mossberg’s shots would actually do the killing. It would be something to tell himself, anyway.

Marcus shouldered the Winchester. He just had to buckle down and do this, that was all. He lowered his eye to the sights and took a steadying breath — then cocked his head.

He turned to the man with the shotgun. The guy had it braced on his thigh for reloading. He hadn’t so much as glanced in Marcus’s direction, and yet—

There was something grating about the man.

Something in the way he carried himself, or maybe in the look on his face. He seemed like a smug little son of a whore, the kind that’d lipped off to Marcus in bars, back in the day, and gotten his blood up. Marcus stared. He couldn’t say why he suddenly felt so riled, only that he did, and that he had a mind to do something about it.

Sensing eyes on him, the guy turned. “What?”

Marcus stepped forward, drew his arm back, and brought one fist looping down into the guy’s face like a ten-pound sledge.

He felt the bridge of the man’s nose crunch like a walnut shell. The guy screamed, but only briefly — he blacked out and flopped on his back in the short grass. Still pissed at him, Marcus swiped up his shotgun, turned, and heaved it out into the pond. Even as he did so, the headlights of the next two arrivals swept the ground around him. He turned to them, the glare of their high beams only fanning his anger.

He shouldered the rifle again and took aim high on the windshield of the nearest of the two cars — no need to kill anyone, he just wanted them to bug the fuck off.

He fired. The top of the windshield cratered and pulled loose from its frame. From inside the car someone screamed.

“Get out of here!” Marcus shouted. He racked the rifle’s bolt again, and past the glare of the car’s headlights he saw the driver fumbling for his gear selector. A second later the vehicle lurched backward, turned clumsily around, and then sped away across the field. The second car had come to a stop thirty yards shy of the pond. Marcus swung the rifle toward it and simply waited. He could almost sense the driver struggling against himself in there. Or struggling against the Ghost, maybe. Which Marcus could sympathize with. He meant to send the jackass away all the same. He kept the rifle leveled, watching for a response.

Rachel had only the smallest part of her attention on her surroundings inside the car. She knew her head was above water now. Sam and Holly had pulled her up. They were asking if she was okay, and she was nodding, but she was only barely aware of doing so. All the rest of her attention was outside the vehicle, locking the big man with the rifle. Through his eyes she watched the last car suddenly reverse itself, its tires briefly spinning in the grass before they dug in. The vehicle backed around in a half circle and lumbered away toward the farmhouse. Rachel watched it go, then turned the big man toward the pond again. She regripped the rifle, holding it like a spear, and chucked it far out into the weed-filled pond. She heard the splash with her own ears as well as his.

There wasn’t much left to do. This man, and the one who’d brought the shotgun, could be sent away without any more trouble—

Rachel cut herself off in the middle of the thought.

The big man had something strange going on in his head. The effect was hard to notice; Rachel had missed it at first, but it was there. It seemed almost that his mind had a second doorway leading away from it, different than the one she’d entered through. This second doorway was open. She had no real sense of what lay on the other side of it, but—

She’d encountered something like it before. Only it hadn’t been in a person’s head. She’d felt it … at the tower. In Utah. That day in the desert, with Sam.

The thing beyond the door was a kind of tunnel. The one in the desert had seemed to plunge away beneath her, deep into the ground. This one went up. It stretched up like a kite string, toward something high in the night above the dark farm fields.

Rachel followed it, her mind climbing through it like a bullet along a gun barrel. She caught a mental glimpse of some sort of airplane, and then she was shooting away down another tunnel, which connected the plane to some distant place — this second tunnel was very long.

She had done this in the desert, too. She had found a man’s mind at the far end of the long tunnel, but—

But that day, she’d had no idea what any of it meant. This time was different. She had her memory back. She knew who the people at the other end of the tunnel were. She knew the sorts of things they did — how they treated the people they took control of.

Most important of all, this time she had her old tricks handy.

Hager had just turned from the window to pick up his phone from his desk — Gaul should’ve long since gotten back to him — when he heard someone yelling down on the work floor.

He spun to face the window again.

The shouting was coming from one of the stations; it belonged to a controller named Leonard Bell. But it was an assistant who was making the noise — a young woman standing in the station’s doorway.

Leonard Bell was no longer lying down with electrodes pasted to his forehead. He was up on his feet, and his face was covered with blood; it looked black in the red light of the workroom. Hager wondered for only a moment where the blood had come from — it was obvious a second later. Calmly, even methodically, Bell was digging his own fingernails into his face and raking deep gouges into the skin. Hager could see the muscles in his forearms strain under the force he was using — like a man applying steady but immense pressure to a wrench handle. Tearing open his own face as if it were a simple chore to be done.

All at once Bell seemed to notice the assistant. He pivoted and lurched toward her, and the girl turned and ran, screaming.

Hager was already moving. He shoved open his office door, crossed the landing, and took the stairs down to floor level, three at a time. He saw the assistant coming more or less in his direction; he dodged past her and crashed head-on into Bell, bear-hugging the guy and bringing him down onto the concrete floor. Christ, the man’s face was a shredded mess. He strained and bucked against Hager’s hold, little red droplets flying as he shook his head.

“What the fuck’s wrong with him?”

Hager looked up. The question had come from Seth Cobb, standing in the doorway of his own station, nearby.

Before Hager could answer, Bell went slack in his arms. In almost the same instant, the man seemed to become aware of the damage to his face — aware of the pain. He took a hissing breath, worked a hand free, and put it delicately to one ripped-up cheek. He made a low moaning sound, full of fear and confusion.

Cobb stepped out of his doorway. He seemed to be coming to help, but then he stopped. He turned in place and surveyed his surroundings. His eyes settled on a steel support column that came up out of the floor and rose to the ceiling, forty feet above. The column was an I beam standing upright, each of its flat faces about twelve inches wide. Cobb took two long strides to the beam and grabbed the edges of the nearest side, like a karate student holding a pine board he meant to break with his head.

Hager saw what he planned to do, absurd as it was.

“No!” Hager shouted.

Cobb reared back and swung his whole upper body forward, like an upside-down pendulum. He didn’t take the impact with his forehead; he took it with his face. His nose and chin and cheekbones hit the steel with a sickening crack. To Hager it sounded like ceramic coffee mugs being crunched under a tire.

Cobb’s grip on the steel didn’t so much as falter. He leaned back — there was blood coming out of his mouth and nose like a trickle from a tap — steadied himself, and rammed his face once more into the steel, harder than before. Hager saw a tooth skitter onto the concrete at Cobb’s feet, and a second later the man blacked out and dropped in a heap where he’d stood.

All the controllers were watching now, along with the assistants and the few technicians present. Everyone stood frozen, unable to process what they were seeing.

Hager, still lying on top of Bell, looked around and found all eyes turning to him for answers. Never in his life had he felt so unable to offer any.

Except—

Well, there were a few things he could do, he supposed, now that he thought about it. Yes, he did have the answers. They were all coming to him, just like that.

He let go of Bell, pushed himself up, and got on his feet.

“Everybody out!” he shouted. “Right now. That’s a direct order.”

Thirty seconds later he had the building to himself; the others had even carried Cobb and Bell away. Hager went to the metal staircase that led to his office and climbed halfway up — just high enough that he could see out above the tops of the glass-walled workstations. He swept his gaze over the vast chamber and found it drawn to something in the far corner, in the shadows near the restrooms and the supply closet.

It was the fuel tank for the furnace and the generator. The thing was massive — it was, in fact, simply the trailer of an 18-wheel tanker truck, flown up here aboard a C-5 and rolled into position. Various hoses now connected it to the building’s heating and power systems. Hager descended the stairs again and sprinted across the huge room toward it.

The hoses were secured to the tank’s outflow ports with heavy-duty clamps, and though Hager had no expertise working with any of this hardware, he could see at a glance what it would take to unfasten them. There were bolts securing the clamps. The tools to loosen them — no doubt the same tools that had been used to tighten them — lay on utility shelves twenty feet away. Hager went to the shelves, grabbed the only three wrenches he could see, and took them to the nearest port sticking out of the tank. The first wrench he tried fit snugly and turned the bolt with no effort at all.

A dozen turns later, the clamp gave way. Fuel erupted from the port like a sideways geyser, blasting the hose and clamp away and spraying in a gush toward the open space of the work floor. The stink of it filled Hager’s sinuses and lungs. It made his eyes water. Some kind of alarm began sounding at the front end of the tank. It was like the beeping of a forklift backing up, only deeper and maybe a bit faster. It sounded frantic.

None of it was any cause for concern. Hager had never felt so confident of purpose before.

He dropped the wrenches and walked away from the tank, back the way he’d come from. The shower of fuel soaked his back as he crossed through it. He paid the sensation no mind. He sloshed through the puddles that were filling every concavity in the concrete floor. The first glass-walled workstations went by on his left. He ignored them. He was headed for one station in particular, the one where he was sure to find what he needed.

Cobb’s station.

Hager reached it and passed through the open doorway. Even this far from the tank, a film of the spreading fuel had begun seeping under the walls.

Hager went to the desk on the far side of the station. He opened the shallow tray drawer at the top, and saw immediately what he was after.

A Bic cigarette lighter.

Dryden watched Rachel. It was clear her attention was directed somewhere far away, though who or what she was focusing on, he couldn’t guess.

The shooting had stopped more than a minute ago. Since then, there’d been no more sounds from outside the submerged car. Dryden and Holly had simply waited, keeping Rachel above the water and letting her do whatever she was doing.

All at once the girl blinked. She looked around, meeting Holly’s eyes and then Dryden’s.

“That’s the end of that problem,” Rachel said.

Before either of them could ask what she meant, she turned her focus away again. After a moment, Dryden heard movement out at the edge of the pond. Little grunts of exertion and words of encouragement. One man helping another to his feet.

In succession, two car doors opened and closed. Engines, already running, revved and slipped into gear. Less than a minute later the vehicles were gone, and there was nothing to hear but the chirping of night insects in the field.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The Ford Escape was still in the farmhouse’s garage. They changed into dry clothes in the house. Holly’s shirts and pants, though too big for Rachel, worked well enough with the cuffs and sleeves rolled. Before they left, Dryden took his phone from his soaked pants and dried it out the best he could. It still worked. He pulled up the recent call list and tapped Harris’s number at the top.

“Remember the cop that was going to nail you for public intoxication,” Dryden said, “and she let you go because you sang her Stevie Wonder’s ‘Isn’t She Lovely?’”

“Sure.”

“You remember the exact place it happened?”

“Yes.”

“Meet us there Wednesday at two in the afternoon. And bring Marsh.”

“Is that the whole message?” Harris asked.

“Goldenrod,” Dryden said.

He ended the call and tossed the phone in the trash. Holly left hers behind, too; the phones were a type that had built-in GPS and could be tracked by the phone company.

It was plausible enough that the Escape had some kind of tracking on board, too. They left it in a parking lot in downtown Topeka and paid cash for three bus tickets.

The meeting place was a café on the waterfront in Galveston, Texas. The day was hot, and the Gulf of Mexico lay sharp and blue under a clear sky.

The five of them took a table on the patio, far from any other diners. Rachel seemed shy around Harris and Marsh; she sat between Dryden and Holly and leaned on one or the other in turn.

There was an idea circling at the edges of Dryden’s thoughts. An unwelcome stray, scratching to be let in. It had been there since around the time they’d left Kansas. He was sure Rachel had picked up on it by now, though he’d done his best to keep it at the margins. But there was no holding it back forever. In the next few minutes, the door would open wide for it.

“A couple of nights ago,” Marsh said, “Western Dynamics suffered a major setback with its program. Maybe the three of you already knew that.”

“No great loss for the world,” Dryden said.

“The tower sites are shut down indefinitely,” Marsh said. “We don’t know the status of any of the company’s operatives, including the next-gen group — the children who were given the drug in utero. Presumably they’re all sequestered away somewhere. The people in charge won’t want to plug anyone into the towers again while Rachel’s still an existing threat.” Marsh glanced at the girl, then continued. “The three of you need to understand, this is only a setback for these people. Not the end of the road. Even if it were the end for this company, someone else would pick up the ball. The technology in play here is like drone aircraft; it’s never going back in the box. The kinds of powerful interests that want to see it developed — they always get their way, eventually. In this case, those people will always want Rachel out of the equation. The deal Gaul pretended to make with you — allowing Rachel’s genetic changes to be reversed — would probably have been impossible to implement, even if he’d honored it. Not that the treatment wouldn’t work, but someone would’ve had her killed before it was over.”

Harris said, “She needs to hide for the rest of her life. There’s no place she’d ever be safe in the open. Foreign countries with nonextradition policies — nothing like that would be good enough.”

Dryden didn’t bother nodding. All of those things were obvious. He imagined they were obvious to Rachel, too.

“For starters,” Marsh said, “my guess is they’ll relaunch the manhunt for the guy with the dirty bomb, who happens to look just like you, Mr. Dryden.”

“How can they do that?” Holly asked. “They went on TV and said the suspect was dead.”

Marsh shrugged. “They’ll say they got it wrong. The government screwing up — it’s not a hard thing to convince people of. And that’s only one of the means they’ll use to hunt you. In time they’ll whip up a reason to put your face on the news, Miss Ferrel. My point is that you three need to go deep under, if you want to stay alive. If you’re thinking of some little village in the Ivory Coast where you can help dig wells or teach English, you better pick some place where Western newspapers never show up. Some place where there’s no Peace Corps presence. No tourism. The three of you need to do more than get off the grid. You need to vanish off the earth. I’ll be honest: I’m not sure it’s possible.”

Dryden could almost hear the hinges creaking inside his mind. The scrape of claws scrabbling through.

Rachel took hold of his arm and shook her head. She knew. Of course she knew.

“You’re right,” Dryden said to Marsh. “But it won’t be the three of us vanishing. Just two.”

He saw Holly turn to him, at the edge of his vision. “What are you talking about?”

Dryden kept his eyes on Marsh. “You know some of these people, don’t you. The people at the tops of these companies, and the people in government who serve them.”

Marsh nodded. “I know a few.”

“You know other kinds of people in government, too,” Dryden said. “The kind who aren’t corrupted all the way. Who aren’t so cozy with these interests. You can’t be the only Boy Scout left.”

“Not quite.”

“Then here’s what’s going to happen,” Dryden said.

He spent two minutes laying out the idea. By the time he’d finished, Marsh’s expression had gone slack. For the longest time, the man only sat there, thinking.

At last Marsh said, “If I help you do that, it’ll be the end of my career.”

“It will be,” Dryden said.

“Even setting that aside, it’s a tall order.”

“You’re the secretary of Homeland Security,” Dryden said. “You answer to the president of the United States. Don’t tell me you can’t make the phone calls to get these people together in a room.”

“I can do it, one way or another. What I can’t do is ensure your safety, if you go through with this.”

“It’s not my safety I’m trying to ensure,” Dryden said. He nodded to Rachel and Holly. “It’s theirs.”

Marsh shrugged with his eyebrows. “Them, it would help. You … you could end up dead. Or detained at Guantanamo Bay. They’d probably make me sign the transfer forms. I’ve sent people there before.”

“So have I,” Dryden said, “but I don’t think I’ll be there when this is over. I don’t think I’ll be dead, either.”

Beside him, Rachel was holding it together, though it was a struggle. Then he felt her hand tighten on his arm — a reaction to what he would say next.

“What do you expect to be?” Marsh said.

“Bait,” Dryden said. “What else? Maybe they’ll rough me up for a while at first. Maybe they’ll use enhanced interrogation techniques, and have a mind reader from Western Dynamics present, for good measure. They might get a lot out of me that way, but they won’t find out where Rachel and Holly have gone, because I won’t know. Once these people figure that out, I’ll be of no more value to them. At which point they’ll probably kill me, if they’re stupid — but they’re not stupid. So what I expect them to do is send me home, and watch me for the rest of my life, in the hope Rachel shows up at my door someday.” He paused. Now that it came to saying the last part, he found he had to force the words. “For her sake, she can never do that.”

Rachel started to shake her head, but stopped herself, and a moment later she was simply crying, saying nothing at all. Dryden realized why: She couldn’t even have a bit of denial to comfort herself with. Not with the thoughts of every adult at the table washing over her. Their awful agreement with what Dryden had said. There was nothing for her to do but sit there and take it. Dryden pulled her against himself, and she held on as if the patio were going to drop out from under her.

For more than a minute, no one spoke. Then, by silent agreement, Holly and Marsh and Harris stood from the table. They wandered off to leave the two of them alone.

Dryden found himself focusing on taking in the moment: Rachel in his arms, her face against his shoulder. The details he would come back to for the rest of his life — he had to experience them as much as he could, this last time they would ever be real.

“You know there’s another way this could go,” Rachel whispered. There was more in her voice than the strain of tears. There was an edge there — a trace of the other Rachel.

“Yes, I know,” Dryden said.

“I could take it to these people, instead of hiding. I could hole up in D.C., a mile from the Capitol, and get into the heads of everyone who helps these companies. I wouldn’t need to kill anyone. There are lots of ways I could end their careers. Make them buy drugs and get caught. Make them say the wrong word near an open microphone. Make them tear off their clothes on a street corner and scream at the traffic. I could rip their lives to pieces without hurting a hair on their heads. If their replacements are no better, I could get rid of them, too. I could do it forever.”

“It wouldn’t be wrong, either,” Dryden said. “It’s exactly what they deserve. But it’s not what you deserve — that life.” He eased her away from his shoulder and tilted her face up to his own. The edge was in her gaze, too. The ghost of what she’d been, all those lost years. “What you deserve is a childhood,” Dryden said. “And I mean for you to have one.”

Rachel nodded, blinking as new tears formed. They seemed to clear her eyes of everything that didn’t belong there.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

The plan unfolded two days later, at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. Marsh booked a small hearing room on the fifth floor, for three in the afternoon. He accompanied Dryden into the building an hour beforehand, ushering him through the security checkpoint.

“Thanks for this,” Dryden said. “You really will lose your job over it.”

“If I’m losing it for finally doing the right thing, I guess that should give me a moment of pause.”

“Thanks, all the same. I’ll owe you one. That’s not just a figure of speech, coming from me. If there’s something I can help you with, someday, get in touch.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

At 2:58 Dryden stood alone in a small hallway behind the dais of the hearing room. He listened to the murmur of the crowd in the seats; Marsh had invited more than forty people, the most powerful he could get. Among them were six senators, nine representatives, four cabinet officials, and staffers for all of them. They’d been told only that the event was a presentation related to intelligence-gathering technology, which was true in a roundabout way.

2:59.

Close enough.

Dryden stepped through the doorway into the chamber, and the buzz of voices died away. He crossed to the podium at the center of the dais and faced the crowd. Behind and above him, a projector screen showed a bright white expanse — the empty first slide of a PowerPoint presentation.

For a long moment Dryden said nothing. He kept his expression blank and stood there, letting the crowd get a good look at his face.

The expected reaction kicked in at three seconds. A woman near the front narrowed her eyes, then turned and spoke quietly to the man beside her. The man, still staring at Dryden, suddenly flinched.

By ten seconds everyone had picked up on it, either on their own or by way of being told. Everywhere in the crowd, heads swiveled, looking for the exits, or maybe an authority figure of some kind.

“You recognize me,” Dryden said.

The whisper of voices died again. All eyes settled on him.

“I’m the guy with the dirty bomb,” Dryden continued. “I’m also dead. Two good reasons I shouldn’t be standing here.”

The remote for the projector lay atop the podium. Dryden picked it up and pressed the SLIDE ADVANCE button. His own face filled the screen above him — the so-called composite image that had gone out on the airwaves back when the manhunt began.

“My name is Sam Dryden,” he said. He pressed the ADVANCE button again, and the composite was replaced by the original version of the photo. Bright colors instead of grayscale. A smile instead of a deadpan. Trish beside him, and the Embarcadero and San Francisco Bay behind him, instead of empty space.

Confusion filtered through the crowd.

“Here’s a few more, for the hell of it,” Dryden said.

He pressed the button five times in slow succession, cycling through the other snapshots that had captured that moment. Trish was blinking in one of them, Dryden in another.

“You and the rest of the world were lied to about this,” Dryden said. “In the coming weeks or months, it may happen again.”

Another press of the button. A photo of Holly and Rachel came up, taken with a disposable camera in Galveston after they’d left the café.

The next photo was a closer shot of their faces.

“Get a good look,” Dryden said. “Somewhere down the road, if CNN says there’s a woman running around with weaponized smallpox, you might see one or both of these faces in the coverage.”

In the crowd, Dryden began to see the second reaction he’d expected. The split. In almost every set of eyes there was only confusion, but in a few he saw other things: concern, tension, calculation. The eyes of people who weren’t confused at all. As Dryden watched, those people traded looks with one another. Two or three of them took out cell phones.

Not much time left now.

“I don’t expect most of you to believe the next thing I’m going to tell you,” Dryden said. “I wouldn’t believe it, in your place. But if this woman or this girl become the subject of a manhunt next month, or next year, you’ll have to wonder, won’t you? You might even sit down with a friend from The New York Times and have a long chat about it.”

He saw the calls begin to connect. Men cupped their hands over their phones and spoke urgently.

How long did he have? Two minutes? One?

Well, that would do. He’d rehearsed the bullet points with a stopwatch. He had the spiel down to thirty-five seconds — time enough to rattle off names and places and locations, and repeat them so that no one would forget.

He got all the way through it twice before the Capitol Police stormed the room.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Sam Dryden’s house in El Sedero stood empty for more than seven weeks. The lawn grew out of control. The entry floor beneath the mail slot piled up with flyers and credit card offers and bills. Neighbors knocked on the doors and tried to see in through the windows, but all the shades were drawn. In seven weeks, no relatives showed up to see about him. No friends.

It was foggy the night he came back. He stepped out of the taxicab with nothing in his hands, and walked up the concrete path to his front door. The key was behind the cedar shake next to the light, where he’d left it.

As soon as he stepped inside, the smell hit him. Flies buzzed in a cloud above the kitchen wastebasket, and all the drain traps had evaporated, letting in air from the sewer.

Dryden tied off the trash bag and hauled it out, ran the taps, and then opened every window in the place. Moist night air pressed through the house, scented with evergreens and sea salt.

In the master bath he disrobed and studied himself in the mirror. He’d lost ten or fifteen pounds, and there were faint red marks where the shock paddles had touched his skin. He stared at the beard he’d grown, ragged and unkempt beneath the hollows of his eyes, then opened the vanity drawer where he kept his razors and shaving cream.

An hour later, showered and dressed in clean clothes, he walked the rooms of his home. The smell of decay was gone, but he kept the windows open. He tried to remember the last time he’d opened any of them, in all the years he’d lived here, but couldn’t recall a single time. How often had he even bothered to pull up the shades?

When he finally closed all the sashes again, the house’s silence surprised him. Had it always been like this? So dead that every metal tick of the air ducts stood out?

He went to his bedroom and stretched out on the sheets. Exhausted as he was, it took forever for sleep to find him.

He stood on the wet sand margin of the beach, watching the sunset. The day had been hazy, and the sun was deep red by the time it touched the horizon.

Behind him was the boardwalk, and up and down the shore, campfires burned. There was a dog barking, a couple hundred yards up the beach. Little kids were throwing a Frisbee for it to catch.

“Hey.”

A woman’s voice. Dryden turned. She was standing there, twenty feet away, next to the fire he’d started a few minutes before.

Her name was Riley. She worked at an art gallery in town. Dryden had met her there three months ago, a few days after he’d come home and shaved his beard.

He crossed the sand to her, and she sank into him; they stood that way a long time, arms around each other, listening to the firewood popping and the kids laughing and the dog barking. He wasn’t sure how it was shaking out with the two of them, but he liked being with her. She seemed to like being around him, too. For now, that was enough.

They sat on a blanket and watched the twilight melt away. As the first stars showed through, Dryden’s neighbors from two houses down came onto the beach with their nine-year-old son. Dryden waved them over, and the five of them sat talking as the night darkened and cooled beyond the halo of the fire.

It was a quarter to four in the morning. Dryden lay awake, Riley breathing softly against him. He slipped her arm off of his chest, eased out from under the covers, and stood.

In the den off the kitchen he found a notepad. He sat down at the desk with it, opened the tray drawer, and looked for something to write with, but all he could find was a Sharpie. He popped off the cap and began to print in rough-scrawled penmanship. The words bled dark into the paper.

Hi Sam. Don’t say anything out loud. There are laser microphones aimed at your windows most of the time, but there’s nothing hidden inside the house. No bugs. No cameras.

By the time he’d finished writing it, his pulse was slamming in his ears.

You shouldn’t be anywhere near me, he thought. You should be halfway around the world.

He put the marker to the page again.

I’ve been that far away, most of these months. I will be again, soon. I had to check on you, though. I had to find out if the people watching you had any other plans in mind. I had to know if you were in danger. But I think you were right — they’re just watching you in case I show up. Sooner or later I think they’ll even give up on that. They seem bored with it.

You can never risk meeting me in person, Dryden thought. Even if you think it’s safe. I’d give anything to see you, but you can’t take the chance.

I know, promise.

Are you and Holly safe?

Yes. That’s the other part of why I’m here — to tell you we’re okay. We’re more than okay. It’s warm where we live. Holly works as a doctor for the local people, and we’re both learning the language. There are so many kids my age. My life has never been like this before. Never this happy.

Dryden stared at the words on the pad. They warmed him every bit as much as the fire on the beach had. Their meaning sank deep into his skin.

You seem happier, too, Sam. I haven’t been watching you for long, but I can tell. I’m glad you met someone. Are you going to take my advice? Are you going to be somebody’s father again?

He laughed under his breath. Slow down, he thought. She and I have toothbrushes at each other’s places. That’s all the further along we are.

He drew a smiley face on the page, and next to it he wrote,

I know, I know, none of my business.

For the longest time he found he couldn’t form a thought in reply. His mind was simply full of feelings, a whole storm of them. The reality of the moment suddenly hit him: Rachel was here. She was right here, within a mile of where he was sitting. They could sprint to each other in a matter of minutes—

Except they couldn’t. Ever.

His eyes stung. He blinked and pushed the feeling away; Rachel could probably pick up on it.

He found himself writing again.

I miss you too, Sam. I keep waiting for it to not hurt so much, but part of me doesn’t want the pain to go away, because it’s ours. It’s only ours, yours and mine, and I don’t want to lose it. If that makes any sense.

It makes perfect sense, Dryden thought.

The Sharpie was still for a few seconds. Then:

There’s something I need to tell you about.

What?

Have you ever heard people say to each other, it wasn’t an accident we met?

Yes.

You and me, it wasn’t an accident.

Dryden waited for more.

All the things I can do, that I didn’t know about when my memory was gone — deep down, I could still do them without knowing it.

The roadblock in Fresno, Dryden thought. The cop who let us go.

Yes. But there was another time I did it.

Seconds passed. Dryden imagined Rachel, somewhere out there, working out what she wanted to say.

Then he started writing.

The two months they had me in that little room, here in El Sedero, I had a game I’d play in my head. I did it whenever I got scared or felt too alone. The game was, I’d imagine I could feel other people, far away outside the building. A whole town full of them. I told myself I could feel their emotions — little kids were like puppies, old people were like deep water without any waves. But there was one person in town I liked focusing on more than all the rest. Someone who seemed strong. Someone hard, like the soldiers who watched over me in that place, but not cold like them. Everything about that person seemed good, and at the worst times, that’s who I kept my mind on, to make myself feel less afraid. I never knew if I was making it all up or not.

Another pause.

So many times, I thought about trying to get away from that place. I even knew where I’d run if I did it. I’d seen the boardwalk in the soldiers’ thoughts, all the time. But the idea of it was scary, being alone out in the dark, being chased. So I had this fantasy, almost every night. I imagined myself running away, and I pictured that spot where one boardwalk meets the other. In my fantasy, that person in town, the one who made me feel safe, would be waiting for me when I got there.

Dryden smiled, in spite of the pain.

The night jogs.

Compulsions that came on like fits.

Drawing him out to the boardwalk at all hours of the night. Out to the junction, to stand for minutes on end, for reasons he could never quite place.

All at once he was sure Rachel was smiling, too. Even laughing. Through tears.

Sorry about all that.

“I’m not sorry,” Dryden whispered in the silence.

I know.