Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (7 page)

“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.”

“Christ.”

“I told him I knew what it was. He got flustered, but he didn’t stop what he was doing. So then I told him something else. Something I’d heard in the soldiers’ thoughts when they strapped me down for the night. The fact that it was true must’ve helped me sound convincing.” She was quiet a beat. “They had orders to restrain him and put him in a van with my body, and drive us both to a gravel pit thirty miles north of El Sedero. Along the way they were going to wrap his head in cling wrap to suffocate him, and then bury him right on top of me.”

Dryden imagined it. The guy standing there, hearing that, knowing it was true. Knowing the kind of man he worked for.

“What happened then?” he asked.

“I asked if he knew how the building’s security system worked. He said he didn’t. I told him I knew as much as the soldiers knew about it—which was everything. I said I’d help him escape if he’d let me go, once we were out. He agreed. He even meant it; I guess he knew he couldn’t lie to me. So we went. We got as far as the building’s back door. I gave him the code to disarm the door alarm. I didn’t tell him there were motion detectors behind the building, and that there was no way to shut them off.”

Dryden thought he knew what was coming. If she really didn’t feel good about it, he was prepared to feel good about it on her behalf.

“I told him we had to run,” she said. “We opened the door and counted to three, and then he went. He got about twenty feet before the lights came on and everything started blaring—around the time he realized I hadn’t followed him. He turned around and saw me still standing in the doorway, and he understood. But by then there was nothing he could do about it. He had no choice but to keep running. I stepped out and hid in a shrub beside the wall, and right after that the soldiers came out and went after him. I waited until they were out of sight before I made my own run, in the other direction, and I heard the gunshots about ten seconds later. I don’t know how much of a lead I got by doing all that. A minute, maybe. I saw their flashlights behind me pretty soon after the shots.”

Her voice had dropped to nearly a breath by the time she finished.

“I know he deserved it,” she said. “I just don’t like telling myself people deserve it.”

*   *   *

They got back on the road. They came to Highway 58 and took it west toward the San Gabriels. Toward Bakersfield. Climbing into the foothills, Dryden glanced in the rearview mirror. The outlying sprawl of the Mojave glittered in the sun like a spill of broken glass. Like the shattered ruin of a city.

Whatever the information is that’s in my head, those people are terrified of it. They’re scared the way people get when it comes to really big things. Like diseases. Like wars. It’s like there’s … something coming.

In the passenger seat, Rachel shivered. She glanced at Dryden.

“It’s scary waiting a week to find out what I know,” she said. “Whatever it is, maybe I could warn people about it, if I could remember.”

Dryden thought of the drug they’d given her. Thought of the places he’d seen it used—little cinder-block rooms in Cairo and Tikrit, the holds of ships anchored at Diego Garcia. For a few seconds his background seemed almost to be another passenger in the Jeep, leaning forward into the space between himself and Rachel. He ignored the feeling and focused on the drug again. Focused on the specifics he knew about it.

“There might be a faster way to get to your memories,” he said.

CHAPTER NINE

Bloom where you’re planted.

The saying had become a kind of mantra for Gaul, over the years. The moral equivalent of a shoehorn, he supposed, though he preferred not to think of it that way. It was an assessment of reality, that was all. An organizing principle.

He’d gotten the phrase from a college buddy who’d gone on to be a successful defense attorney. This old buddy had once cross-examined a fifteen-year-old girl who’d been raped at a fraternity party. The girl was poor southern white trash, and the defendants were Tulane students from wealthy families—one had a federal judge for an aunt. Gaul’s buddy had explained to him over drinks, years after the fact, the mindset it took to put a teenaged girl on the stand and rip her to pieces in front of her family. There was a meticulous strategy to it. There was no question she’d end up crying in front of the jury, but that was okay, as long as you made her look like a liar before that happened. Yes, the jury was going to feel protective of her, and yes, those feelings would kick into higher gear when the tears came, but as long as you tripped her with her own story first, as long as you did it
just right,
then it wouldn’t look like you’d bullied the poor little thing. If you played it perfectly, put a little English on it, as they say, then the crying would actually work against her. It would lend weakness to her testimony. There was all that to consider, while in the back of your head, humming like an old fridge, was the knowledge that your clients had actually done it. Had held her down in a hallway off the frat house’s kitchen, the music so loud she could feel the bass in her shoulders and hips where they were pressed to the floor, so loud that people in the next room couldn’t hear her screaming when all three of the defendants fucked her. It wasn’t your job to wonder why they’d done it. Heat of the moment, too much alcohol, alphas being alphas and all that. Neither was it your job to find it fake as all hell when they looked contrite in your office a week later, their eyes full of nothing but fear for their own futures. No, your job was to help them salvage those futures. And if that meant shredding a little girl on the witness stand—violating her again, your conscience would say if you let it—well, what of it? You had to do your job. You had to bloom where you were planted.

Gaul had found the notion as useful as a machete in jungle foliage whenever life had put him somewhere tricky. In career terms, there were all kinds of problems you could hack your way out of—and opportunities you could hack your way toward—if you had that idea in your grip. It even helped him bury old guilts, like that ugly splash in the water under Harvard Bridge, which sometimes came to him in the darkness before sleep.

Gaul had the saying in his head now, as he stood under the palms near the overlook, three hundred feet above Topanga Beach. The Pacific Coast Highway curved past, far below. Beyond, the ocean lay soft blue in the late morning haze. Gaul watched a black SUV swing off the highway onto the canyon road. It made its way up through the switchbacks and took the turn onto Overlook Drive, and came to a stop next to Gaul’s BMW. There were no other vehicles or people around.

The SUV’s back door opened, and a man named Dennis Marsh stepped out. He was fifty, trim, his hair just going thin. The wind coming off the ocean set his tie and the legs of his dress pants flapping. Marsh crossed to where Gaul stood, put his palms to the wooden top of the railing, and stared at the sea. No handshake.

Gaul didn’t ask how his flight from D.C. had been. Marsh had gotten here in the backseat of an F-16 trainer, the needle pegged at Mach 2, in order to have this conversation in person. There were things you shouldn’t talk about even on secure phone lines.

Gaul studied the man’s face. He’d known Dennis Marsh for more than twenty years. The guy was a realist when he had to be—he wouldn’t have become the secretary of Homeland Security otherwise—but he was very far from being a subscriber to the
bloom where you’re planted
philosophy. A fact that made Gaul just a little nervous, given the man’s stature.