Runner (Sam Dryden Novel)

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

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

  The girl sniffled. Dryden realized she was crying.

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER TWO

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

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

  He couldn’t imagine what else it could be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Then explain it to me.”

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

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

  The girl looked up at him. “Rachel.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER THREE

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

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

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

  Curren’s team had lost the girl.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Tell me you got her,” he said.

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

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

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

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

  “In trouble, I would say.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Sir?” Curren said.

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

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

  “Clay’s on it now.”

  “Help him,” Gaul said, and hung up.

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

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

  “What do you need?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER FOUR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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