Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (8 page)

If small people created problems, they could be dealt with easily enough. Like the idiot doctor who’d been overseeing Rachel in El Sedero. The man had taken a lunch meeting with a guy from the
L.A. Times
a week ago. Audio recordings of the conversation had picked up nothing damning, and it had turned out the reporter was the doctor’s cousin, but all the same, Gaul had opted to play it safe. Why leave a troubling door open even a crack? But such easy solutions weren’t on the table when you were dealing with someone at Marsh’s level.

“I heard from our friend,” Marsh said. His gaze stayed fixed on the ocean. “He explained what you want me to do.”

Gaul said nothing.

“There’s not a chance I’m doing this blind,” Marsh said. “You know that. You need to tell me what I’m dealing with here. I want to know everything.”

“I can’t tell you everything. I don’t know everything myself.”

“If I do what you’re asking, I’m risking a lot more than prison,” Marsh said. “I’m risking household-name status as a bad guy. Tell me.”

Gaul wanted to tell him to relax. Wanted to remind him that there were very large political boulders rolling and grinding around over this thing, and that among the men who wanted to see it resolved was Marsh’s boss, the one with the rose garden outside his house. Wanted to tell him, in short, that his cooperation was in no sense a fucking favor he could call in later on. Instead Gaul kept his voice respectful and said, “I appreciate the position I’m putting you in, Dennis. I’ll owe you for this.”

Marsh finally turned to face him. Zero tolerance for friendly bullshit in his expression. “Tell me.”

Gaul rested his elbows on the rail and looked down at the highway. How much to really give him? Where to start?

“I know parts of it already,” Marsh said. “I know it’s not really Sam Dryden you’re after. I know there’s a girl, and I know you had her in your custody for two months, and I know this is tied to research at Fort Detrick, more than a decade ago.” Marsh’s voice went quieter, as if the specks of people on the beach below might hear him. “I came out of military intel, Martin. All kinds of interesting watercooler talk in that field. I know about the animal testing at Detrick, way back. The gibbons. I’m aware there were human trials later, trying to get the same effect, and I’ve heard from more than one good source that it worked. Have I got all of it right so far?”

Gaul nodded without looking at him. He heard a little hiss of breath from the man in response.

“Christ,” Marsh whispered. Then: “Is she one of them? Is she a mind reader?”

Gaul kept his reaction hidden. Kept his jaw set and his eyes on the sweep of the ocean.

If you think all she can do is read minds, then your sources aren’t half as good as you imagine. Hearing thoughts is the least damn thing Rachel can do, when she gets in your head.

“Yes,” Gaul said. “She can hear thoughts.”

In its own temporary way, he supposed, that was the whole truth. Until her memory came back, Rachel
would
be limited to mind reading. That was a passive ability, like hearing, or feeling pain. The rest of her capabilities were active, focus-intensive skills. With her memory blocked, she didn’t even know she had them.

“So lay it out for me,” Marsh said. “What exactly is happening? What are you asking me to step into?”

For a moment Gaul didn’t respond. A bright yellow open-top Humvee went by, down on the highway. As it passed below the overlook, the three girls inside screamed laughter, the sound of it immediately washed away in the same wind that blew their long hair around. Gaul watched the vehicle slip away down the coast toward Santa Monica. What would it feel like to be that carefree? To not know how much the world was about to change.

“Martin?”

Gaul blinked. He turned back to Marsh and stood up from the rail.

“I won’t go into the details of what happened at Detrick,” Gaul said. “Except to say the research there ended five years ago, and the work was taken up by private interests instead. Defense contractors.”

“Plural?”

Gaul nodded. “Two of us. My company, Belding-Milner, along with Western Dynamics.”

Something flickered through Marsh’s expression at that. He looked like a chess player assessing some new arrangement of pieces on the board. Easy enough to guess what had struck him: Belding-Milner and Western Dynamics had been rivals forever. Bitter ones. Everybody knew that. Marsh’s eyes narrowed for a tenth of a second as he filed the news away.

“You both took over the research,” he said.

“We
each
took it over,” Gaul said. He watched Marsh pick up the subtle point of the wording.

“Each company working independent of the other, you mean. No sharing.”

“No sharing,” Gaul said. “I’m sure the government was happy enough to run it that way. In spite of what you hear, they’re okay with a little competition now and then.”

“So who won?”

Gaul looked down. He felt his jaw tighten. Bullshit for the sake of saving face had never much appealed to him. “The other guys. In five years our research has yielded almost nothing. Western Dynamics had success right from the start.”

Marsh waited for him to go on.

“As of now, they’re beyond just doing research. They’ve got a finished product in final trials.”

“What kind of product?” Marsh asked.

“People. I don’t mean test subjects—actual operatives. Loyal personnel.”

“And these operatives are … also mind readers.”

Gaul nodded.

Mind readers, among other things.

The operatives at Western Dynamics could technically do all the same things as Rachel, though that was like comparing junior high chess club kids to Gary Kasparov. Rachel was almost a god next to them.

“So where do you come into this?” Marsh asked.

“I come into it a few months ago, with a phone call from a good friend at Detrick. Head of a small working group following up on the old research there. He had information about a test subject from back then—a girl. The events that ended the research at Detrick were … traumatic. But this girl had not only survived them, she’d escaped. She’d been free all this time since then, five years, but there was a chance to … reacquire her. My friend wondered if Belding-Milner wanted to head up that effort.”

“And gain something you could use against your competition.”

“All’s fair.”

“She’s a kid, Martin. What were your people going to do with her?”

Bloom where we were planted.

“Nothing harsher than necessary. Most of the tests we had in mind could be done with a few drops of her blood, or functional MRI scans. But our first move was to set up narcotic interrogations. Her knowledge alone had to be worth looking into.”

“And?”

Gaul sighed. “She knew something, alright.”

“What did she know?”

Gaul was quiet a long time. Far to the southeast, a big yacht slid out of Marina del Rey, turning away into the haze.

“What did the girl know?” Marsh repeated.

Gaul told him. By the time he’d finished, three minutes later, Marsh’s face had paled a shade or two. A sheen of sweat sharpened the lines on his forehead.

“This is real?” Marsh asked. “This isn’t just some tech proposal someone worked up—”

“I’m told it’s standing by to go active anytime. Do you understand, then, why the girl can’t be left alive? Under the wrong circumstances, she could interfere with it. There would be serious problems. This is bigger than a pissing match between defense contractors, Dennis. My orders to kill her came down from on high. I have to follow them.”

Marsh nodded weakly. His mouth worked, his tongue trying to wet his lips.

“Are you on board with this?” Gaul asked. “Are you going to help me?”

Another nod, just perceptible. Marsh was staring past Gaul, his gaze taking in the spread of Los Angeles. Maybe he was seeing it in the light of what was coming.

“Then we’re done here,” Gaul said. “You know what to do.”

He didn’t wait for Marsh to nod again. He turned and crossed to his BMW, got in, and started it. He backed around in a semicircle, pointing the car’s nose downhill, then craned his head to look at Marsh again. The man was still standing there at the rail, lost in what he’d just learned. For a moment Gaul felt the same tinge of nervousness he’d had when Marsh first got out of the SUV. Just how much of a realist was the guy? How willing to play along? Then Marsh turned, his expression set with acceptance, and strode back to his vehicle.

That’ll have to do,
Gaul thought. He took his foot off the brake and coasted down toward the canyon road.

CHAPTER TEN

The man behind the counter in the sporting goods store was looking at a magazine with naked women in it. Rachel couldn’t actually see the magazine—the man had it down behind the countertop, out of view—but she could more or less see the pictures in his head. There were lots of tattoos in the images. There were metal rings and spikes stuck through skin. Now and again the man would turn his attention on a woman in the store. Rachel could feel his eyes tracking over the the smooth lines of girls’ legs, following them up to the hems of their shorts. Over these mental pictures came his thoughts, crude and simple. They seemed almost like animal noises.
Nice nice nice, fuck yeah …

Rachel tried to keep herself out of his sight as best she could. She stuck close to Sam as he pushed the shopping cart around. The sporting goods store was in Bakersfield. It was just past ten in the morning, and through the big glass wall up front, Rachel could see the parking lot and the city beyond, everything blazing in the sunlight.

Right there, parked at the near edge of the lot, was the used car they’d bought down the street. A Toyota something, a RAV4, she thought Sam had called it. It was old, but he was satisfied with how it ran. They’d left the stolen Jeep in a long-term parking lot at the airport and walked to the dealership from there—after first hitting a Payless to get Rachel a pair of sneakers. But before they’d done any of that, before they’d even reached Bakersfield, they’d driven up a dirt road in the mountains southeast of town. At the base of a pine tree in the middle of the woods, Sam had dug up a plastic box with three things inside it. First was an envelope containing ten thousand dollars in fifties and twenties. Next was a handgun and a box of bullets. Last was a cardboard sleeve with three sets of fake identities inside it. All of these had Sam’s picture but different names.

It helps to have friends in dark places,
he had said.

Rachel had asked him why he had this stuff hidden up here. He’d explained that with his old job, he’d sometimes worked against very powerful people. In a perfect world, those people would never learn his name, but in the real world, stuff happened—
shit happened
was how he’d phrased it in his thoughts.

What I mean is, this isn’t the first time I’ve had to think about vanishing,
he’d said.

Which had made her wonder about something: Was it strange that she’d run into someone—she had literally run into him—who was this good at keeping her safe from Gaul and his people? Wasn’t that a doozy of a coincidence?

On the heels of that thought came another, this one from somewhere deep in her mind:
Had
it been a coincidence?

She couldn’t imagine what else it could’ve been, but the question unsettled her.

They were standing in front of a shelf full of something called freeze-dried meals: foil packets with pictures of hikers on the fronts, labeled with dish names like
Lasagna with Meat Sauce
and
Chicken Teriyaki with Rice.

“Fair warning,” Sam said. “This stuff’s all going to taste terrible. Very light to carry, though.”

He filled half the cart with them. The other half was already full of clothing, his size and hers. Atop the clothing were two items: a propane cookstove the size of a CD spindle, and a hand-pumped water purifier. Tucked into the space beneath the cart were two backpacks, two sleeping bags, and two pair of hiking boots. Everything they would need to stay in the woods for a week or more. By the time they emerged again, she would know who she really was—if they didn’t find out sooner.

A middle-aged woman walked by. Rachel caught the fragmented spill of her thoughts:
Still like the gray one, but … what’s over here? No, those are men’s.

Way in the background, like a radio turned down but endlessly droning, the man at the checkout was still staring at the dirty magazine.

Sam pushed the cart to the next aisle. Rachel followed. She’d found she didn’t like getting too far away from him. Compared to everyone else she’d been near today—even people in other cars on the highway—Sam’s thoughts were unique. No matter what he was thinking at any one moment, there was a feeling that was always there, a feeling that seemed to be pointed right at her. It made her think of the warmth near a fireplace. That was how Sam’s thoughts felt. Like protective heat. Like arms around her.

*   *   *

They were heading north through the city, ten minutes later, when it happened. They had two more stops to make: an electronics store here in Bakersfield, to buy an audio recorder, and a specialty shop in the city of Visalia, an hour away. What they needed in Visalia were two unusual items—Sam had spent ten minutes on a pay phone, calling places to ask about them. These items would be for emergency use only; Rachel hoped like crazy they wouldn’t need them.

Sam made a left toward a Best Buy half a mile down a cross street. The moment he’d completed the turn, Rachel felt her breath catch. It was like someone had driven an elbow hard into her chest. A choked little sound came out of her mouth.

Sam turned to her. Concern flared in his thoughts.

“What’s wrong? Rachel?”

She forced out a breath, sucked in another.

“I’m fine,” she said. She heard how she sounded, though. She didn’t sound fine. She didn’t really feel fine, either. For another second she had no idea what she
did
feel. Fear, it seemed like, but why? What was she afraid of?