Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (18 page)

“Who’s that?” Rachel asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“What does it mean?”

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dryden cursed under his breath.

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

An hour passed.

Nothing happened.

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

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

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

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

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

*   *   *

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

“Anything?” she asked.

“Nothing I could make sense of.”

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

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

*   *   *

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

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

Cold.

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

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

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

Sam noticed.

“We can turn back,” he said.

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

*   *   *

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

“Are you alright?” Sam asked.

She nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

“No!” she said.

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

“Rachel—”

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

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

“Rachel?”

Have to hold on. Any second now—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone else. Someone at the far end.

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

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

Panic soaking the man’s thoughts now.

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

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

What was it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello, Rachel. How are you feeling today?

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

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

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