Runner (Sam Dryden Novel)

by Patrick Lee

  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.

  It was already under way.

  On the first monitor was the wide frame of the town, the land and ocean showing up as cool black. Sharp points of bluish white light indicated homes and other heat sources.

  On the next three monitors, still frames began to pop up: the tight snapshots of human targets, coming in from the other satellites. The first image showed a group of people encircling a superbright thermal source.

  “Beach campfire,” Lowry said. “Tell it to ignore?”

  Gaul nodded. Lowry instructed the system to disregard that target.

  Other snaps showed Curren’s team rendezvousing with him at the van. Gaul had ordered them back to it moments earlier, so they could move on Rachel and Dryden as soon as their location was available.

  As more still shots came in—a woman walking a dog, a tall man taking out the trash—it became apparent that the Mirandas were choosing their targets in a progression from west to east. In this case it meant they’d started at the shore and proceeded inland. Probably a default setting of the software. Gaul stared at the monitor showing the wide image of the town. It extended about a mile and a half in from the coast to some kind of shopping center on the far right. The Mirandas had now indexed all of the outdoor targets on the left half, and would have the right side finished in another ten to fifteen seconds.

  * * *

  There was only one vehicle in the outer reaches of the lot worth considering; Dryden settled on it even before getting close enough to know whether it was locked. It was a Ford F-150 pickup from the early nineties, possibly the eighties; it would have nothing in the ignition but copper wires and insulation. He found the driver’s door locked—no surprise there—but, ducking to look through the cab, saw that the passenger side was not. Rachel, running ten feet behind him, understood; she diverted to the passenger side, got in, and reached across to open Dryden’s door. He slid in behind the wheel.

  * * *

  Two thousand thirty-one miles above the Rockies, fleeing southeast toward the Gulf of Mexico at just under four miles per second, Miranda Fifteen kept its lens platform pointed at El Sedero and snapped rapid-fire shots of the human targets on its list. Target seven, captured and sent. Target eight, captured and sent. Target nine—the onboard computer faltered. There was no target nine at the stated location. Miranda Fifteen automatically communicated this error to Miranda Twelve, the satellite running the master frame and assigning targets. Miranda Twelve replied that target nine had vanished 2.315 seconds earlier; there was no longer a signature of two human beings outdoors at that location, but instead a signature of two human beings inside a vehicle, 99.103 percent likely to be a Ford model F-150 manufactured in 1988. The last command string from the operator had specified only human targets outdoors; therefore target nine was no longer valid.

  Miranda Fifteen considered this dilemma for 485 nanoseconds, the time required to run all three of its what-if algorithms, and determined that this was not a problem the human operator needed to be troubled with. It ignored target nine and moved on.

  * * *

  Dryden found a screwdriver in the truck’s glove box. He used it to crack open the ignition housing; it took only a few seconds more to hot
-wire the vehicle.

  “Not stealing,” Dryden said. “Borrowing.”

  “It’s pretty old,” Rachel said. “How upset can they be?”

  Dryden pulled out of the lot and turned left. Just ahead lay the southbound on-ramp to the 101. Rachel looked back at the town’s lights, diffused in the mist, and exhaled deeply.

  “Let’s hear the rest of your story,” Dryden said.

  * * *

  Gaul stared at the completed batch of satellite snaps like a man staring at a slot machine on which he’d lost his last dollar. Fourteen human beings were outdoors in the target area. None of them were children.

  She was gone.

  Lowry was already retargeting a wider search frame, but Gaul had no hope for it. The first frame had covered as much area as anyone on foot could have gone in the time allowed. Their absence meant they’d found transportation.

  Gaul sat in a chair and rested his forehead on his hands.

  Rachel, out of his reach.

  Out there in the world.

  She couldn’t remember anything important, but that was only temporary. With the drug out of her system, her memory would begin stitching itself back together within a week. Soon enough after that, she’d remember everything.

  The taste in his mouth thickened. For a few seconds he was back in Boston, in that shitty little flat on West Ninth Street, waiting for the day the police would knock on his door.

  “Sir?” Lowry said.

  “What is it?”

  “One of the Hail Mary processes might give us something.”

  Gaul raised his head. On the first computer, Lowry had run an option—actually, he’d simply agreed to an option the program had recommended. The software suite had drawn the same conclusion as Gaul: Failure to locate someone on foot probably meant they’d found a vehicle.

  “Part of the latest software bundle,” Lowry said. “Sometimes there are heat trails on pavement if a vehicle has just left the search area. It’d be pretty faint, but the Mirandas can turn up their sensitivity and detect the heat for up to sixty seconds, depending on how fast the vehicle was going. If anyone drove out of the area recently, we might get lucky.”

  The wide image of El Sedero remained motionless while the satellites carried out the new task. Suddenly the image reframed to tighten on the right side, a close-up of the shopping center. Faint, and fading even as Gaul watched, a twin set of dark blue lines snaked from the parking lot to the road, then to the freeway’s on-ramp.

  “Show me that parking lot sixty seconds ago,” Gaul said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dryden changed lanes to pass a semi, keeping the pickup just above the speed limit to avoid drawing attention. Visibility on the 101 was better than it had been in town. As the freeway followed the coast, it also climbed above the fog.

  For now, his goal was simply to put distance between themselves and El Sedero. He would decide on a destination after hearing the rest of Rachel’s story. She’d been quiet for the past minute, contemplating how to tell it. Finally she turned to him.

  “Before I say anything, I need to do something so you’ll believe me,” she said.

  “There are men with machine guns after you. Whatever’s going on, you don’t need to convince me it’s real.”

  “You might feel different after you’ve heard more of it.”

  She looked down at her hands. They were drumming a pattern on her knees. Whatever she was about to do, it was making her nervous.

  “This is going to weird you out,” she said. “Just so you know.”

  “More than what’s already happened tonight?”

  “Way more.”

  She exhaled hard, and before Dryden could respond, she said, “Think of a four-digit number. A random one, not part of your phone number or anything else someone might know. Don’t say it out loud, just think of it. Clamp your lips together, too, so you don’t accidentally mouth it.”

  Dryden glanced at her, wondering if it was a joke. It wasn’t. She was staring at him, anxiety running through her like an electric current.

  Dryden focused on the road again and went with it. He closed his mouth. He ignored numbers that meant anything to him. He let his mind spin up one that was purely random: 6,724. The idea of it had hardly formed when Rachel spoke again.

  “Six thousand seven hundred twenty-four.”

  Dryden turned and stared at her. She stared back. The truck strayed onto the rumble strip, and he jerked the wheel back to the left and watched the road again. For a few seconds he couldn’t think of what to say. Never before had he encountered something unbelievable and undeniable at the same time.

  He glanced at her again. She was still watching him for his reaction.

  He faced forward and thought, Say antelope if you’re hearing this.

  “Antelope,” Rachel said.

  * * *

  Curren accelerated to ninety, veering through the light traffic on the freeway.

  “They’re four and a half miles ahead,” Gaul said over the cell phone. “They’re doing just about exactly the speed limit, so you’ll catch up to them in a matter of minutes. Next exit is more than twenty miles out.”

  “Copy,” Curren said, though he could tell Gaul had already hung up.

  Working for Gaul sometimes felt like working for God. The man’s knowledge resources seemed to border on omnipotent, while remaining almost entirely shrouded. Also, you didn’t want to piss him off. Curren wouldn’t have been surprised to learn Gaul could turn people into salt pillars.

  * * *

  “You can just … read me?” Dryden asked.

  He felt his mind trying to get a fix on all of it, and not quite managing.

  “Reading might be the wrong word,” Rachel said. “That makes it sound like I’m doing it on purpose. It’s more like hearing. It just happens. I can’t even shut it off.”

  “And you hear everything. Every thought. Every idea.”

  Rachel nodded. “As far as I know. Sometimes it’s confusing, if I can’t tell my own thoughts from someone else’s. If I find myself thinking, It would suck to get shot right now, it’s hard to know if that’s your thought or just mine. But most thoughts, yeah, I can tell they’re yours.” Then, softer: “I can tell you’re a nice person, and that you like me, and that being with me reminds you of someone. And that makes you happy and sad at the same time.”

  Tension crept into Dryden’s mind: Would he have to censor his thoughts now? Every stupid, random thing that leapt into his head? Could he even do that?

  “Don’t worry about it,” Rachel said.

  It took a second for him to realize what had just happened—that she’d replied to something he hadn’t even said aloud.

  “Sorry,” Rachel said. “I can wait for you to actually say things, if you like.”

  For a long moment Dryden said nothing. He watched the lines on the pavement sliding past.

  “How do you do it?” he asked. “How does it work?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve always been able to?”

  “For the past two months, at least. How long before that, I have no idea.”

  In her own way, she sounded as confused as he felt. No doubt she was.

  “I know it doesn’t work over much distance,” she said. “If you ever need some privacy, a short walk would do it.”

  The strange chill at Dryden’s temples was still there. It hadn’t faded at all since he’d first noticed it, near the freeway. Now that he thought about it, he wondered if it had been there even before that—back in town, back on the boardwalk even, in the first moments after he’d encountered Rachel.

  “The chill comes from me,” she said. “Whatever it is my brain does, that’s what it feels like to the other person.” The way she said it—quiet and vulnerable, apologetic—Dryden could almost read her thoughts. Don’t think I’m a freak. Don’t abandon me. Please.

  “I barely feel it,” Dryden said. “Don’t worry.”

  She nodded, then
drew her knees against her on the seat and hugged them. She seemed tiny, sitting there like that.

  * * *

  Four minutes until they would overtake the pickup. Curren couldn’t see its taillights yet, through the rises and turns of the coast highway, but he’d done the math in his head.

  He looked over his shoulder at the van’s middle bench seat, where three of his men sat with their weapons ready.

  He saw no pleasure in their expressions, and felt none himself. The job needed doing; nothing more to it than that.

  “Don’t bother disabling the vehicle,” Curren said. “Start with killshots. The girl first.”

  * * *

  “The place they had me in was like a hospital,” Rachel said. “Except it was empty. There was just me, and the people keeping me there.”

  “This was the place you were running from tonight?”

  Rachel nodded.

  Dryden tried to picture it. El Sedero was a pretty small town; it was hard to envision anything like an abandoned hospital there. He thought of the district Rachel’s pursuers had seemed to come from: the area just inland from the dune ridge. There was an office park over there—a hundred acres of well-kept grounds, with an array of sprawling one- and two-story buildings. The kind of structures you could drive past every day for twenty years and never so much as think about. You could work in one of them and not have a clue what went on in the place next door.

  “Those were the buildings,” Rachel said. “The one they had me in was off by itself, way in back.”

  Dryden waited for her to go on. She still had her arms around her legs. She was staring ahead at the night rolling toward them.

  “I woke up there, two months ago,” she said. “I was strapped to a hospital bed. I didn’t know where I was, or who I was. A doctor with blond hair would show up sometimes, either to hook an IV to my arm or take one away. Other times, different men would come in, the same ones who were chasing me tonight, and they’d untie my bed straps. Then they’d come in later and strap me down again. Nobody would ever speak to me, no matter how much I asked. Nobody would tell me what was happening to me, or why.”