Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (27 page)

*   *   *

“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.”