Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (3 page)

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-if
s. 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 turned 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.

Dryden listened for twenty seconds longer but heard nothing. It didn’t mean they were in the clear.

He stared across the freeway toward the commercial and industrial parts of town. Chopper or no chopper, they still had to hide. He was about to start down the embankment when something stopped him—an instinctive impulse, deep in his mind, like the feel of the hair on his neck standing taut.

A response to a threat. But what threat?

He held still and listened again. There was no sound but the traffic. He scanned the darkness and saw nothing.

The fear hadn’t come from anything he’d seen or heard—it had only been a thought, just below conscious awareness. Some sense of an extra wrinkle in the danger they faced. What was it?

He waited, but the idea stayed out of reach. All that came to him was a sudden conviction: Hiding in El Sedero was the wrong move.

Rachel watched him. Her eyes were full of concern, though she said nothing.

Dryden nodded across the interstate. Beyond the trees on the far side, a quarter mile away, the lights of a twenty-four-hour superstore shone in the humidity.

“Time to go,” he said.

*   *   *

The computer room, one level below Gaul’s office, was lit only by the glow of its plasma monitors—nine in all. Gaul paced while his chief technical officer, Lowry, prepped them for the image streams from the Miranda satellites. There was no actual image data coming down yet, just blank screens configured and waiting. Gaul had yet to receive access to the birds, and every additional minute of delay made his pulse louder in his ears.

“Signatures locked,” Lowry said. “Ready whenever we get the streams.”

The Mirandas were the most impressive machines humans had ever put into orbit. Their thermal imaging capability was ten years ahead of what even the most optimistic science journalists supposed it was. A Miranda could distinguish a fat man from a skinny man anywhere on earth, day or night, although that wasn’t what made them special. Lots of spy birds could do that. The difference was that a Miranda could do it from an orbit fifteen times higher: 2,000 miles up instead of the standard 130 for most recon platforms. That meant each one of them had a very wide area in which to hunt.

The full constellation of Mirandas had overlapping coverage of the entire planet at all times, like the GPS network. The system could watch any spot on earth, at any moment, from at least three satellites, and often four or five. It could lock onto a moving target, whether it was a jogger or a cruise missile, and follow it with ease. There was nowhere to run from it, and sure as hell nowhere to hide.

Of course, you had to find your target before you could follow it. Gaul would only be able to spot Rachel and her new friend if they were still on foot in the countryside around El Sedero by the time he got access to the Mirandas, and every second he had to wait, that window of opportunity slipped closer to shut.

Suddenly message boxes bloomed on all nine of the monitors; Lowry snapped to attention. A second later, Gaul’s phone rang. He answered.

“They’re all yours,” the man on the line said.

*   *   *

Dryden and Rachel reached the edge of the superstore’s lot at a run, and stopped to survey the scattered cars parked there. Most were clustered at the front of the building, probably belonging to the store’s third-shift employees, but a handful were parked out at the periphery. Maybe they’d been left there by workers pulling a double shift, who’d arrived last evening when the lot was full.

Dryden led the way to the nearest of the outlying vehicles, a dark green Taurus. The more commonplace the model, the better; anything they took would be reported stolen within hours, and Rachel’s pursuers had access to police communications. Blending in would be critical. Dryden gave the Taurus only a passing consideration, however, because it was new enough that it almost certainly had a smart key; it couldn’t simply be hot-wired.

They moved on, skirting the rim of the lot toward the next group of vehicles, forty yards away.

*   *   *

Lowry muttered his thoughts aloud as he entered commands to target the satellites. “Number twelve, frame at three by three kilometers. Number fifteen, slave to twelve, index outdoor biologics, human. Number four, slave to twelve, ditto command.”

Complementing the Mirandas’ remarkable hardware was a software suite right out of a conspiracy theorist’s worst nightmare. A Miranda could be instructed to canvass an area the size of a town, and isolate all human figures who were not inside man-made structures. One satellite could count the targets in a wide frame, while another two or three could set to work zooming in on each of them for close-up shots. Throughout the process the birds could communicate with one another so as to efficiently divide up the workload. The whole operation would take less than thirty seconds.