Runner (Sam Dryden Novel)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Gaul thought about it. “Roughly. Yes.”

  “Tell me.”

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

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

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

  Silence on the line. Gaul heard the man breathing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “It has to be.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Let’s hope.”

  * * *

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

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

  All appeared to be asleep, understandably at this hour.

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

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

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

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

  “Oh shit,” Gaul said.

  * * *

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

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

  “You know what to do?” he asked.

  Rachel nodded.

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

  “I understand,” she said.

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

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

  * * *

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

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

  * * *

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

  “Dryden thought of that,” Gaul said.

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER EIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Was it just one certain drug?”

  Rachel nodded.

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

  Another nod.

  “What color was it? The liquid.”

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

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

  “Yes.”

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

  She stared at him. “Yes.”

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

  “For what?”

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

  “Don’t be. It’s okay.”

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

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

  She stopped talking and held his gaze.

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

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

  * * *

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

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

  “How did you escape?” he asked.

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

  Dryden waited.

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