Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (28 page)

Dryden thought of the pickup almost crashing into him and Rachel, south of Cold Spring. The man with the MP-5.

“The guy in the desert—” he said, and saw Harris already nodding.

“Unwitting participant,” Harris said. “He’d probably endured months of conditioning by one of the people from Western Dynamics, by the time he attacked you.”

Dryden remembered the pity in the man’s eyes. Pity for himself, maybe, but that was understandable in its own way.

“The controllers at Western Dynamics are powerful,” Gaul said, “but they don’t hold a candle to what Rachel can do. Her skill set is that formidable.”

“But you said Rachel only got the first version of the drug,” Dryden said. “She got it when her mother got it.”

“That’s right. Rachel got it as a fetus at two months’ development. Which makes all the difference.”

Dryden began to understand. Seeing him grasp the idea, Gaul nodded.

“It matters,” Gaul said. “You better believe it matters. Adults are already formed. There’s only so much the drug can change in them. But Rachel had all her development still ahead of her. All the circuitry of the brain yet to be formed.”

Gaul glanced at the slideshow player on the computer again. The text frame was still there.
FT. DETRICK—08 JUNE 2008
. He made no move to click anything yet.

“You knew Rachel was born and raised in holding at Detrick,” Gaul said. “Staff there noted her ability to hear thoughts, like the other prisoners. Those symptoms presented at around eighteen months. In hindsight, we know the other ability showed up when she was about four, though no one at Detrick knew it at the time. They knew nothing about it until she was seven years old, and then they learned an awful lot, very quickly. But most of the details I’m giving you now, we only learned later—two months ago when we got to interrogate her. Some of it, I honestly think she
wanted
to tell us. It wasn’t quite bragging. It was mostly meant to intimidate us, I believe. Prisoners do that sometimes, don’t they?”

Dryden said nothing.

“In any case,” Gaul said, “Rachel described her ability in some detail. She has her own word for it:
locking
. Early on, at Detrick, she demonstrated it for her mother by making a lab tech scratch his head, across the room. By Rachel’s account, her mother had a fit. Grabbed the little girl and just about pulled her arms off, and told her she was never to show the doctors what she could do. Rebecca knew if anybody found out, she’d never see Rachel again. The kid would’ve been taken someplace else for separate testing, would’ve become some other team’s project. Probably still right there at Detrick somewhere, but to Rachel’s mother it would’ve been a million miles away.”

A cell phone rang close by. It belonged to one of Gaul’s men. The guy took it out and answered, spoke quietly for a few seconds, and hung up. He nodded to Gaul. “Landed five minutes ago. En route now.”

Gaul acknowledged with a wave of his hand, then turned back to Dryden.

“Rachel listened to her mom. She never told the researchers what she could do. But she practiced it. It was easy to do that without much risk. What you have to understand is that when Rachel locks somebody, that person has no idea it’s happening. If she makes you take off your glasses and clean them, you think it was your decision to do that. If she makes you get a cup of water from the cooler, same thing. She doesn’t make your limbs disobey you. She makes you
want
to do whatever she’s pushing you to do.” Gaul was quiet a beat, then said, “These days, she can do a lot more than make you clean your glasses.”

“Like what?” Dryden asked.

“She can sit in a hotel room in lower Manhattan, lock a portfolio manager from two blocks away, and make him wire ten million dollars to an account on the other side of the world. Then she can make him drink vodka until he passes out, and by the time he wakes up the money’s been bounced through a dozen stops and there’s no way to trace it.”

Dryden shut his eyes and tried to appreciate the power of an ability like that. The subtlety of it.

“Locking is entirely different from the short-range ability to hear thoughts,” Gaul said. “That’s important to understand. It’s a separate phenomenon altogether, stemming from different genes, different development. For one thing, the range is far greater. Rachel can lock you from as much as a mile away. And you don’t feel it—you don’t get the chill at your temples. When she locks in, she can see and hear with your senses,
and
read your thoughts … and she can make you do anything she wants. Anything.”

Thinking about that, Dryden felt certain dots begin to connect. Not all of them, but some.

He said, “Audrey and Sandra wouldn’t tell Rachel about the scary thing, because…”

“Because Rachel
is
the scary thing,” Gaul said. “In a sense, at least. She’s the first living example of it.”

“The first?” Dryden asked.

Gaul nodded. “Western Dynamics has its own generation of operatives whose development is based on Rachel’s. Subjects treated in utero. They dosed the first group not quite five years ago. Those subjects are four years old now, and all appear to have Rachel’s capabilities. Early trial runs with them, using the antennas, could start any day now. They might not be made to do very much at first, but in a few years’ time…” Gaul’s mouth seemed to have gone dry. He licked his lips. “In a few years’ time, I think we’re going to find ourselves in a very different world.”

Dryden felt as if the room had suddenly cooled by five degrees. The skin on his arms seemed to tighten. Before he could say anything, a heavy engine approached and stopped outside the building. Two of Gaul’s men left the room, and Dryden heard them speaking to someone down the hall. Footsteps followed—hard soles ticking lightly. When the door opened again, Holly Ferrel stepped through it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Gaul introduced her to Dryden. He’d seen her at a distance outside her town house in Amarillo; up close she looked like someone who’d been getting by on reduced sleep for a while. The skin was dark under her eyes, pale everywhere else. When she shook Dryden’s hand, her grip seemed almost powerless. He’d been right about her age: forty, give or take.

“Were you one of the researchers who worked on Rachel?” Dryden asked.

She spoke without meeting his eyes. “I wasn’t part of the project at first. I worked at NCI-Frederick, a branch of the National Cancer Institute, based there at Detrick. I’d been there for about a year when I was approached to get involved in … the other stuff. I was told that certain research grants I had pending at Frederick could be approved quickly if I helped with—”

She stopped. She shook her head. “That’s all bullshit. It’s true, but it’s still bullshit. I knew what I was saying yes to. I was scared to turn them down, and part of me really wanted to get involved. It was bleeding-edge stuff. It was fascinating. So I did it.”

She left it at that. Her gaze stayed on the floor.

Gaul spoke. “I’m going to tell you how Rachel and the other two managed to get free from Detrick, Mr. Dryden. It’s the last part of the story. But you should understand something about Audrey and Sandra—and Rachel’s mother. You knew all those subjects came from prison, felons with long-term sentences. In Rebecca Grant’s case, the crimes were drug related. Mostly possession, some minor trafficking. She wasn’t the best decision maker, but she was no monster. Audrey and Sandra were. Both had been convicted of murder. Both were almost certainly sociopaths.” He composed his thoughts, then said, “There were
two
escape attempts from Fort Detrick, actually. One failed and the other succeeded, but the first attempt was … the nice version. That was the one Rachel and her mother preferred. Keep in mind that Rachel was seven when all this happened.”

Dryden waited for him to go on.

Gaul turned to Holly. “Can you show him?”

Holly nodded. She reached into her pocket and withdrew a thick square of folded notepad paper. When she opened it, Dryden saw it comprised three sheets. The first was covered with writing. The penmanship looked like that of a child: messy and too careful at the same time. Holly separated it from the others and passed it to Dryden.

“What is this?” he asked.

Holly struggled for an answer.

“You’ll see,” Gaul said.

Dryden turned the sheet around in his hands and read.

Holly it’s me Rachel. I am afraid to ask you this when your here with us, because I know the people here are always watching, and my mom says there are probably machines recording sound in this place, day and night. This is the only way I know how to send you this message, and ask you for help. My mom thinks if you tell a reporter at a newspaper or on tv what is happening here, all the things you know, then it would make it so they have to let us go, my mom says it is illegal that they are keeping us here forever. Holly, please talk to a reporter and get them to let us out of here. I know you mean it when your nice to me, and you care. Please help us.

Dryden finished reading it and looked up.

“Rachel slipped you this note?” he asked. That was hard to believe, given the level of security there must’ve been in a facility like that.

Holly shook her head. “Not exactly. I was in my office at the other place, at NCI-Frederick, a few hundred yards from where Rachel and the others were kept. It was late at night. I was looking at lab work and then I just pushed it aside and picked up a pen and started writing that message myself. It didn’t feel like I was being forced to do it. I just … wanted to. It was like I’d had an idea for some kind of short story. The kind that are made up of people’s journals or letters—what do they call that, epistolary fiction? That’s what it felt like. Just some stream-of-consciousness thing I’d thought up, using Rachel and her mom as the basis for it, and I was jotting it down as it came to me. Bad handwriting and spelling and all, like it was part of the story.”

Dryden looked at the words again. He imagined Rachel in a cage, seven years old, every ounce of her hope tied to these words on Holly’s notepad.

“I had no idea what else to think of it,” Holly said. “I stared at it for five minutes and then put it aside. I had work to do.” She drew the second sheet from the stack. “Half an hour later, I picked the pen back up and wrote this one.”

You are not making it up. My mom says there is a way to show you its real. Your boss in this building has this email address, [email protected] and it takes two passwords to open it, first is leanne424miami and second is murphyhatesthevet87. If you were making this up in your head, you would not know his email passwords, we know them because we hear him think when he types them. Open his email with the passwords and you will know this is real, it is really me asking you to help us. Holly, please help us get out of here.

Dryden looked up at Holly again.

“I assume the passwords worked,” he said.

She nodded, looking miserable.

“Did you consider really going to the press?” Dryden asked.

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I was scared,” Holly said. “I’d had years to get used to them hearing my thoughts, as weird as that was, but this was different. Actually being controlled. It rattled the hell out of me.” She took a deep breath. “And I didn’t want to do it. That’s the no-bullshit answer. I was afraid. You know what could have happened to me, going public against the military on something like that. I thought of Bradley Manning. I thought of people we’ve probably never even heard of. Maybe I could have gotten the whole thing shut down, but … I just didn’t want to try. That’s all it came down to.”

She sounded like she could cry. Then she said, “What would you have done, if you were me? Honestly.”

Dryden thought about it. He gave her the only answer he could. “I don’t know.”

“I sat there for ten minutes getting more wound up,” Holly said, “and then I went to my superior at NCI-Frederick. He was somebody I trusted, and … I don’t know. I wanted someone’s advice. I didn’t want to be alone with all of it. It’s all I could think of.”

“Shit,” Dryden whispered.

“I’d take it back,” Holly said. “I’d give anything to take it back.”

“Your superior ran it further up the chain, I imagine,” Dryden said.

Another sharp little nod.

“What happened then?” Dryden asked.

Gaul went to the computer. “This,” he said, and clicked the slideshow’s
PLAY
button.

Holly turned away from it. She grabbed a chair and took it a few paces off and sat down, her hands balled tight in her lap.

Dryden watched the monitor.

A grainy color image appeared. It looked like it had been shot by a security camera inside the cell block of a prison. A viewpoint from up near the ceiling, looking out and down at a row of cells. Dryden could see women in black jumpsuits behind the bars. Nine of the cells had a single occupant each. A tenth held Rachel, seven years old, and her mother.

“These are frame grabs from inside the unit they were kept in,” Gaul said. “Building Sixteen at Detrick.”

Dryden scanned the row of cells again and picked out Audrey and Sandra. Each had a different hair color than he’d seen in Chicago.

Finally he took in the screen’s lower left corner, and the digital text stamp there:
DETRICK 16—2008 06 08 23:30:52.07.

A moment later the slideshow skipped to the next image. Another angle on the same scene, time-stamped a few seconds later.

In the third image, seconds later still, everything changed. The women were suddenly alert in their cages. Some were on their feet. Rachel, already in her mother’s lap in the first two shots, now clung tightly to her.

In the fourth frame, a team of five men in security uniforms had just entered the room, moving toward Rebecca and Rachel’s cell. Everyone in the cages was up and screaming, mouths contorted. Rachel had her face buried in Rebecca’s shoulder.

Gaul began to narrate the progression, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. Dryden looked away from the slideshow and just listened.