Runner (Sam Dryden Novel)

by Patrick Lee

  The slideshow ended. It reset to the black-text-on-white frame it had begun with, and stayed there.

  “What follows is later reported as a gas-line explosion on base,” Gaul said. “Maybe you remember seeing it on the news. Sixty-seven dead, burned to the point of requiring dental ID. But there is no explosion. No one is burned. What happens instead is that, without warning, the man leading the security advance in the hallway suddenly turns and opens fire into his own ranks. As they fall back in confusion, he fires his last shell into his own head. Seconds later another officer appears to suffer the same inexplicable breakdown. Like the first man, he fires on his own people until he has only one shot left and then uses it on himself. By this point the chaos is absolute. No one is thinking about the prisoners in the containment room. Everyone’s focus is on getting away. The violence spreads outside the building within the next minute. Footage from over a hundred cameras on base will later show how it unfolds. How the effect only ever touches one man at a time, jumping from one to the next at an interval of two to three seconds. It passes like a wave from Building Sixteen to the nearest gate out of the Fort Detrick campus, a quarter mile away. All sentries in its path are killed. All personnel at the outer gate are killed. This entire time, cameras in the holding block show Audrey and Sandra still sitting there with Rachel. Arms around her. Speaking into her ear. Talking her through it. Lip-reading analysis would later show them saying the word shoot several dozen times.”

  Gaul had been staring at the text screen on the monitor. Now he turned back to Dryden.

  “When it was over, four minutes later,” Gaul said, “there was no one to stop the three of them from taking a vehicle and simply driving away. Footage shows Rachel catatonic as Sandra carries her from the building. Brain-locked, I imagine, at what she’d seen in the cell, and what the two women had then made her do. Around the time they buzzed the gate open on their way out, Rachel did probably the only thing that was of her own free will. She made Holly write a third message, hiding in her office like everyone else on base.”

  Dryden turned to Holly. The last sheet of notebook paper was just visible, crushed and twisted in one hand. She released it and handed it to him without looking up. Dryden saw what it said even before he’d smoothed the page.

  Your fault.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Dryden thought of the conversation over lunch the day before, in the Chicago apartment. Rachel asking the others about Holly, terrified for her safety.

  Sandra had tried to calm the girl’s fears. For the time being, this week for sure, nobody’s going to hurt her.

  Dryden understood.

  This week for sure.

  The time it would take for Rachel’s memory to come back.

  Because Rachel was the threat to Holly’s life.

  The notion of it made the edges of Dryden’s vision darken.

  “In the days that followed,” Gaul said, “a number of people closely involved with the research, living in and around D.C., committed suicide—appeared to, anyway. They were the very people the military needed alive, to advise them on what the hell was going on. From Audrey and Sandra’s point of view, it was tactically brilliant: Take out the key players as fast as possible, leave the government scratching its ass trying to piece it all together. It would be months and months before the military, and companies like mine and Western Dynamics, came up with any means of protecting against the threat Rachel posed.”

  The computer was still on. Gaul reached under the monitor and switched off the display.

  “You can never really stop them from spying on you,” he said, “but you can mostly keep your people safe. You need the right organizational structure; no one person can know too much, especially in the rank and file, in case their thoughts get compromised. And your research sites need to be in remote places, like islands far offshore, or little compounds in the middle of arctic wilderness. Places someone like Rachel couldn’t get close to without being spotted. You need to be paranoid, really. And in that sense, Holly was way ahead of us.”

  Dryden glanced at her, sitting there with her arms around herself.

  “Holly left D.C. within an hour of the violence at Detrick,” Gaul said. “She felt irrational doing it, at the time, but it probably saved her life.”

  “A friend of mine had a vacation home in the Florida Keys,” Holly said. “I dropped off the planet for over six months, just trying to get my head back together. No one I’d worked with at Detrick knew where I was. I guess if they had, Rachel and the other two would’ve found me. By then, they wouldn’t have had any real logical reason to kill me. They’d done enough of that damage. But I think…” She shook her head. Whatever she had to say, it hurt.

  “I understand that Rachel hated me,” she said, “but I don’t believe she meant to kill me, early on. She could have, when she sent that third message. She could’ve buried the pen in my throat instead. I think the real hate came later, over months and years. Audrey and Sandra made sure of that; they worked to fan whatever Rachel initially felt. Do you see the reason? They were always going to need Rachel, for what she could do. They needed her as a weapon, which meant they needed her to be cold, without remorse. They achieved that by keeping her focused on me. On the idea of finding me and killing me. Everything we now know supports that.”

  “In time,” Gaul said, “once the military had set up special groups to hunt for Rachel and the others, and to protect people in danger from them, Holly was relocated to Amarillo with her new name.”

  Dryden looked at the dark skin under Holly’s eyes. The hollows beneath her cheekbones. A face shaped by half a decade of living in fear.

  He pictured Rachel standing in her bedroom doorway with her stuffed dinosaur. A scared little girl who just wanted her life to make sense. He saw her on the ledge, in that final moment, her eyes looking past him to the abyss.

  It’s not too late. You can let me go.

  He tried to reconcile that girl with the specter that had stalked Holly Ferrel’s nightmares, and all at once he felt like he wanted to throw up. He looked around but saw no door to a bathroom. He muscled the feeling down.

  “How did you get Rachel?” he asked Gaul. “Two months ago.”

  For the first time, a hint of shame edged into Gaul’s expression. Then he seemed to set it aside, as if he had some tried-and-true way of exorcising those kinds of feelings.

  “I used Holly as bait,” he said. “Without her knowledge. A contact of mine in the military learned where Holly had been relocated to, and I saw the chance to benefit from that information. To get control of Rachel.”

  Holly set her jaw and looked away. It was clear she’d known this already.

  “There were certain government databases we believed Rachel and the other two had compromised at some point,” Gaul said. “We allowed Holly’s location to end up stored on one of those, like it was an accident, so Rachel would find it.” He shrugged with his eyebrows. “She found it.”

  Dryden considered the logistics of the trap itself. It didn’t add up. How could Holly have been kept safe, if Rachel could kill her from anywhere in a one-mile radius? How would Gaul and his people pin down Rachel’s location within that radius, to catch her?

  Holly seemed to recognize the confusion in his expression.

  “They didn’t care if I got killed,” she said, “and they knew the odds of capturing Rachel were small, even if she got me. They risked my life just for a tiny chance of getting her.”

  The little ghost of shame flickered through Gaul’s eyes again, though only briefly.

  “It worked,” he said. “We had cameras hidden in Holly’s home and car and workplace. If we saw her kill herself, we would know with certainty that Rachel was within a mile of that location, in that moment. We had half a dozen drones on station above Amarillo for weeks, and the Miranda satellites tasked on the city 24/7. In the end, we just got lucky. One of the drones identified Rachel in a city park, two blocks from where Holly lived. The drones
were armed with low-powered, nonfragmenting warheads. We targeted a spot five meters from where Rachel was standing. The blast wave broke three of her ribs and gave her a concussion. She was still unconscious when my people got to her and subdued her with narcotics.”

  “Weren’t the other two with her?” Dryden asked.

  Gaul shook his head. “If they were in Amarillo, they weren’t close by when the missile hit. It wasn’t ideal.”

  “No, it really wasn’t ideal,” Holly said. “I’ve had armed security for the last two months, wondering every minute if those two women were watching me. Did you know they can gauge their distance just right, so you don’t feel the chill at your temples? Yeah, they’re old hands.”

  Dryden considered telling her they had been watching. It made sense that they’d done that, after Rachel’s capture. Audrey and Sandra would’ve been desperate to learn where the girl had been taken. By monitoring Holly, they could eventually learn the names of the military people who’d changed her identity and hidden her in Amarillo. Those same people would have played some role in setting the trap for Rachel—or would know people who had. The daisy chain could’ve plausibly led to El Sedero someday.

  Dryden kept it all to himself. Holly was rattled enough already.

  “You’re really on board with trying to save Rachel’s life?” Dryden asked.

  Holly nodded. “None of this is her fault. She’s a kid. She didn’t choose any of it.”

  “She’s dangerous,” Gaul said. “Not just to you. To plenty of people.”

  “That issue can be dealt with,” Holly said.

  Gaul seemed to be already weary of whatever Holly was referring to.

  Dryden looked back and forth between the two of them. “What do you mean?” he asked. “How can it be dealt with?”

  “The same way it got started,” Holly said. “Genetic manipulation. We’ve got twelve years’ worth of progress over the drug that was used on Rachel. We know how to reverse it now.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Dryden stared. Holly held his gaze, unblinking.

  “It would take months,” she said, “but it would work. If she could be taken alive again, and drugged like she was in El Sedero, it could be done.”

  “You don’t know for certain it would work,” Gaul said. “Just because it’s worked in animal trials, that doesn’t—”

  “It would work,” Holly said. “Afterward, she’d be a very screwed-up kid who needed years of therapy … but she’d be no more dangerous than anyone else. She could have a chance at some kind of life, anyway. Some kind of happiness, after all this.”

  Gaul was shaking his head, looking off.

  “So what’s the plan?” Dryden asked. “Assuming there is one.”

  “There is one,” Harris said.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  A look passed between Harris and Gaul.

  “What?” Dryden asked.

  “It’s another bait trap,” Gaul said. “Using both you and Holly this time. You can opt out, if you like. If so, you’re free to go. The manhunt for the suspect with your face, the guy with the dirty bomb, will be resolved either way; we’ll make up a name for him and announce we’ve killed him. You can go home free and clear.”

  “You already know I’m staying in this thing,” Dryden said. “How does the plan work?”

  “Don’t you see?” Harris asked softly. “You can’t know that. If you two are the bait, you can’t have the details in your heads. Or Rachel will have them, too.”

  Dryden laced his fingers behind his neck and shut his eyes. It was Rachel’s bedroom in Chicago all over again.

  “I can tell you this much,” Gaul said. “The two of you will be in a house. It’s on farm land in eastern Kansas, half a mile from a busy street, where there are restaurants and twenty-four-hour stores.”

  Dryden saw the point. “You want Rachel to be confident she can get within a mile of us and still be hidden in a crowd.”

  Gaul nodded. “But I expect her to get closer, in the end. A lot closer.”

  “What makes you say that?” Dryden asked.

  Holly answered before Gaul could. “Under questioning in El Sedero, Rachel made her intentions toward me very clear. She has no interest in making me commit suicide. Remember how locking works: I would actually want to kill myself, in that final moment. That’s no good, for her.” Holly’s voice almost cracked on the next part. “Rachel wants to kill me. Really kill me. She wants to be looking me right in the eyes at the end.”

  A silence fell over the huge room.

  “I’m not naive, you know,” Holly said. “I know what I’m volunteering for.”

  She went quiet again.

  “That’s it for the briefing,” Gaul said. “We put you two in the farmhouse and you stay there. Holly’s employer in Amarillo will be given the address and a fake explanation for her departure. Rachel will easily get that information once she’s … herself again. Once her memory comes back. Beyond that, we wait.”

  “Rachel’s going to see through that setup like it’s cling wrap,” Dryden said. “She’s going to know the farmhouse is a trap.”

  “Yes,” Gaul said. “She was always going to find out anyway. When she’s close enough to lock the two of you, she’ll hear your thoughts. It would be impossible for you to hide why you’re really there.”

  “So why the hell would she go for it?” Dryden asked.

  “Maybe she won’t,” Gaul said, “but I expect her to. This time around she’ll know it’s a trap. She can watch for its teeth. Drones, for example—you can spot them with the right equipment, which she and Audrey can probably get. So those are out. Knowing it’s a trap may give Rachel confidence. She might think she can outsmart us.”

  “She might be right,” Dryden said.

  Gaul simply nodded.

  “And Audrey’s going to just let her take this risk?” Dryden asked.

  “Do you really suppose Audrey’s in charge of her?” Gaul said. “That she and Sandra were still calling the shots, after all these years? Here are three people: Two of them can hear thoughts across a room; the third can make anyone in the nearest mile do anything she can imagine. Over time, who do you think would emerge as the alpha?”

  Dryden thought about that. It clashed so vividly with his own understanding of Rachel that it hadn’t even occurred to him.

  “Don’t assume you really know her,” Gaul said. “We know what the real Rachel wants with Holly. As far as how she’ll feel about you, don’t even try to guess.”

  The real Rachel.

  Seeing the effect of that notion on him, Holly stood from her chair. “I’m like you,” she said. “I know what she would’ve been, if none of these things had ever happened to her. I believe she can be that way again.”

  “Then let’s go,” Dryden said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Marcus Till rolled his old hatchback to the end of his driveway, stopped at the turnout, and stared back at the trailer he had called home for all his adult life. The place wasn’t much to look at, but it was his. He watched it and wondered if he would ever see it again, and then he pulled onto the county two-lane and headed east toward town, and didn’t look back.

  He was forty-one years old. He had lived all of those forty-one years right here in the little backwater of Clover, Wyoming, ten miles from the somewhat larger backwater of Red City. For much of the early part of his life, he had struggled to stay out of trouble. The trouble had been brawling, mostly, always a result of drink or bad manners—the one led to the other, of course. Around thirty he’d left all that behind; you could only wake up in so many jail cells before you started to do some thinking. He had gone to work for his uncle in the woodshop, making custom cabinets and furniture for building contractors over in Cheyenne. Something in the work had appealed to Marcus at once. He liked putting in a day’s effort and having a new thing to show for it at the end, a desk or maybe a bookshelf. He liked to stay alone in the shop after hours, turn on this light
or that one, and see how a newly finished piece gleamed from different angles. He had expected the rest of his life to play out on this clean, simple track he’d gotten it onto. He wasn’t going to be rich, but he also wasn’t going to wake up in jail ever again, and that was fine with him. Everything had been fine, really, until just shy of a year ago when the Ghost had gotten into his head. All these rotten months later—months of denying and resisting and finally giving in like a beaten dog with his snout turned down—here he was, following his orders. What else could he do?

  They were strange, the orders he’d gotten today. They were always strange—and now and again they were as god-awful as anything Marcus could imagine—but these were especially unusual. Until today, the Ghost’s commands had always involved doing things right here in town, give or take a few miles. Now, out of the blue, the voice had commanded him to get in his car, get on the freeway, and head for Kansas. The instructions had specified a particular motel in a particular town, where he was to check in and stay and await further orders.

  What those orders would be, he couldn’t guess. They’d be nothing good—he knew that much. Still, he would follow them. God help him, he would follow them.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Just before midnight Dryden put aside the book he’d been reading and stepped out onto the farmhouse’s porch. The breeze coming in off the fields was warm and humid. He went to the top of the steps and looked out at the night. In front of the house, the land fell away in a long slope to the road, two hundred yards south. The driveway cut straight down the middle, the fields on either side lying fallow and choked with short grass. The same held for the land on all sides of the place: a vast zone of open visibility stretching at least six hundred feet in each direction, without so much as a tree growing in it. No doubt this geometry had been part of Gaul’s reason for choosing the site.