Runner (Sam Dryden Novel)

  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.

  THE - GIRL - DOES - NOT - KNOW - WHO - SHE - REALLY - IS

  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.

  SHE - HAS - A - CAPABILITY - GREATER - THAN - MIND - READING

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

  SHE - HAS - USED - IT - TO - KILL - INNOCENT - PEOPLE - THE - TWO - WOMEN - HAVE - MADE - HER - DO - THIS

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

  I - HAVE - SEEN - THE - EVIDENCE

  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 no
t 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.

  COME - TO - GAULS - PEOPLE - AT - WILLIS - TOWER - SECURITY - OFFICE - OR - CALL - THEM - 062-585-0184 - HIS - PEOPLE - WILL - NOT - KILL - YOU

  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.

  T
he 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.