Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) Page 12

  As Dryden watched, the dead cop’s face appeared on-screen. He’d seen it there a few times now, accompanied by the man’s name and a slug for a bio: Glen Carlton, 47 years old, 23-year veteran of Kern County Sheriff’s Department.

  “Is that part true?”

  Dryden turned. Dena was standing at the near end of the hallway, watching him.

  Dryden nodded. “That part’s true.” He looked at the screen again. Looked at the man’s face. A guy who’d done nothing worse than risk—and lose—his life for what he’d believed was a valid reason. “In the moment I couldn’t see what he was.”

  He could think of nothing else to say about it. He stared until the image had left the screen again.

  “She’s resting,” Dena said, nodding back down the hall. In her hands she held a spool of surgical thread and the needle she’d used for the stitching. “I want to know everything. You, her—everything.”

  She crossed to the open kitchen, set the needle and thread down, and rinsed the blood from her hands.

  Earlier, after Rachel had demonstrated her ability in the driveway, they’d told Dena a few of the basics. The fact that the manhunt was really for Rachel. The memory loss.

  Dena dried her hands with a towel, came around the island that divided the kitchen from the living room, and leaned back against it, facing Dryden.

  “Everything,” she said.

  * * *

  He told her. It took twenty minutes. He finished by taking the digital recorder from his pocket and playing back the audio from the cabin.

  Until arriving at Dena’s house, Dryden hadn’t spent even a minute thinking of what Rachel had said in her sleep. There hadn’t been a minute he could spare. Once Dena had begun tending to Rachel’s injury, and Dryden had gone to the living room to watch the news, he’d revisited the girl’s words. He did it again now as the recording played. He watched Dena’s reactions to the key passages.

  Rachel Grant. Molecular Biology Working Group, Fort Detrick, Maryland, RNA-Interference Cohort, Knockout One One.

  I told you where it is.

  Elias Dry Lake, in Utah.

  Any time now they’re going to stop test driving that new toy and really give it the gas … and if I’m still alive when that happens … talk about a wrench in the gears …

  When it was over, neither of them spoke for thirty seconds. Dryden could see Dena taking it all in, or trying to.

  Finally she said, “What the hell could it be? I don’t assume it’s really a vehicle—that sounded like a figure of speech, but … Jesus.”

  “If Gaul didn’t build it,” Dryden said, “then the government or some other company did. Maybe another defense contractor. It sounds like a weapon system of some kind, doesn’t it?”

  Dena nodded. “Something related to what Rachel can do.”

  “And they’re afraid to crank up the juice to it while she’s alive.”

  As to the reason for that, Dryden couldn’t even guess. The gaps remaining in their knowledge were maddening.

  “I don’t think you’ll get another shot at questioning her,” Dena said. “She’s resting now, but I wouldn’t expect her to sleep again for some time, after what she’s been through. And if this drug you described is making its way out of her system—”

  “No, the cabin was the only chance,” Dryden said. “We were lucky to get that much.”

  They were quiet another long while. Then Dryden said, “Do you have a computer?”

  Dena nodded. She crossed to the end table beside the couch, opened a drawer and took out a touch-screen tablet. She turned it on, brought it to the island, and set it in front of Dryden.

  It occurred to him that any use of the Internet could be a serious risk. Even back when he’d been with Ferret, technology had existed that could monitor local ISPs for search-engine queries. Certain keywords typed into Google within a specified area—a city, maybe a county—would trigger flags and give up the computer’s location.

  There was a lot he could learn without doing a text search, though. He opened the tablet’s default Web browser, went to Google Maps, and switched to the photographic overhead view. He dragged and zoomed the image until Utah filled the frame.

  Elias Dry Lake.

  If he’d ever heard of it, he couldn’t remember it now. He zoomed the map in until terrain features with labeled names were visible—small rivers, lakes, mountains—and began methodically dragging it left and right in narrow search bands, working his way down from the state’s northern edge.

  He found it three minutes later. The arid lake bed lay toward the southern end of a huge desert region west of the Rockies. U.S. 50 passed by five miles to the north; a single narrow two-lane led south from the highway to the lake’s northern rim and simply ended there. Even in a wide frame of the entire lake bed—it measured maybe three miles by three—it was clear that no buildings stood anywhere near it. The whole expanse lay glaring white and vacant, empty even by the standards of a desert.

  “What’s that?” Dena asked.

  She pointed to a single pixel in the middle of the screen, just dark enough to stand out from the background. Whatever it was, it stood almost centered in the lake bed. Dryden had missed it at first glance.

  He zoomed in until the thing took up half the screen, though he’d known what it would be even before it resolved.

  It was a cell phone tower. The structure itself was nearly invisible from overhead; only its shadow on the sand gave it away.

  “False alarm,” Dena said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Dryden told her about Rachel’s panic attack in Bakersfield, at the sight of an ordinary cell tower there. Then for good measure he dragged the map to show the freeway again, and the small town clustered around the nearest interchange. It took less than a minute to find the cell tower that served it; it was located right at the north edge of town, near the off-ramp. Dryden scanned the freeway itself for several miles in each direction and found additional towers that served traffic along its route. All were within a few hundred yards of the road.

  “The tower on the lake bed doesn’t serve U.S. 50 or the nearest town,” Dryden said, “and there’s no other town of any kind for twenty miles. There’s no reason to put a real cell tower in that spot. It would make no sense at all.”

  “What do you think it is, then?”

  He had no answer to that. He centered the lakebed again, stared at it for thirty seconds, and then straightened up and paced away from the island.

  “Most of what Rachel said in the recording is lost on me,” Dena said. “But one word rang a bell. Knockout.”

  “You know what it means?” Dryden asked.

  “I know one meaning of it. I’d almost bet my life it’s the relevant one.”

  Dryden waited for her to go on.

  “It’s not in my field of expertise,” Dena said, “but lots of people in medicine have heard the term. Usually it refers to mice. Knockout mice. It means they’ve been genetically modified—that a specific gene has been switched off. Knocked out.”

  Dryden considered what that implied. It fit well enough with the rest of what Rachel had said. Molecular biology. RNA interference. Dryden had no serious background in science, but clearly those terms came from the world of genetic research.

  “Why would turning off genes give someone a new ability?” he asked.

  Dena shrugged. “Because DNA is a mess. People call it a blueprint, but it’s more like a recipe—one that nature’s been tinkering with for a few billion years. That’s how a professor of mine described it: an old recipe, where outdated instructions get lined out instead of erased. When an animal evolves away from having a certain trait, like when we lost our tails or most of our fur, the genes for that trait wouldn’t have been deleted. Instead, what usually happens is that a new gene is created that blocks those genes. Those new genes are like the pen lines crossing out older parts of the recipe. So if you knock out those genes, the new ones, then the old instructions won’t be
crossed out anymore. They come back into the mix. Does that all make sense?”

  Dryden went back over it in his head. He nodded. “More or less.”

  He paced to the sliding glass door at the back of the room. He stared over the pool and the golf course beyond.

  “Mind reading,” he said.

  Sprinklers were wetting down the fairway. The grass glistened in the glow of landscaping lights.

  “I go to conferences a few times a year,” Dena said. “You should see some of the PowerPoint talks people give. There are animals that can naturally regrow limbs—newts can do it. Amputate a foreleg just below the shoulder, the newt grows the whole thing back. The elbow joint, the humerus, all the bones and muscles and nerves in the hand. All the skin. Everything. They’ve always been able to do it. There are researchers who think all vertebrates have it in their DNA to do that, too, including us. There are just other genes suppressing the ability. The trick would be to identify them and knock them out.”

  Dryden turned from the sliding door. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would we have evolved away from being able to do something that important?”

  “Best guess I’ve heard is that it’s better to just take the loss. A new limb is weak for a long time; the skin is raw, vulnerable to infection. Survival odds probably go up if you just scab over the stump and get by with three limbs instead. What’s that old line? Mother Nature’s a bitch but you gotta love her?” She shrugged. “But why evolution would ditch something like mind reading, I can’t begin to guess.”

  On TV, a few emergency vehicles were still clustered around the Black Hawk. Dryden went back to the computer and stared at the image on its screen: the dry lake and the tiny speck of the tower’s shadow.

  “You’re planning to go there,” Dena said. It wasn’t a question.

  Dryden nodded.

  “Why not just wait for her memory to come back?” Dena asked. “You can both stay here as long as you need to.”

  “Can she stay here without me for the next day or two?”

  “Of course. But why risk going to that place?”

  Dryden’s eyes were still on the display.

  “Because I don’t like flying blind. I don’t like spending the next week with these people knowing everything, and us knowing almost nothing. Rachel said herself the answers are there.”

  “You’d only have to wait six or seven days—”

  “And Gaul knows that. He knows that once she remembers, she’ll have a whole range of options, maybe something as simple as going public with her information—but Gaul has a full week to plan for every move Rachel can make, before she even knows what they’ll be. What he might not be prepared for is her making a move sooner than that.”

  Dena indicated the tower. “Gaul knows about that place. Rachel told him. I wouldn’t think he’d expect her to show up there again, but how hard would it be for him to keep watch on it, just in case?”

  Dryden thought of the satellites. “Not hard at all. But I’m going.”

  “Not without me.”

  Dryden and Dena both turned. Rachel stood at the mouth of the hallway. Dryden saw the bandage Dena had applied to her wound: heavy gauze pads on the front and back of her arm, wrapped together with white tape. Her new clothes, a pair of jeans and a purple T-shirt, were only a little too big on her.

  Dena went to her. “Honey, you need to be lying down—”

  “I’ll sit,” Rachel said. “This is important.”

  Dena started to respond but held back. She could see the same thing in Rachel’s eyes that Dryden could: The girl was determined to make her point.

  “I want you to take it easy,” Dena said.

  Rachel nodded and followed her back to the island. Dena pulled out a chair, and the girl sat carefully in it.

  “Did you hear the recording playback?” Dryden asked.

  “In your thoughts, when you both listened to it.”

  Dryden glanced at Dena. Despite her earlier exposure to Rachel’s ability, she still appeared shoved off balance by it.

  When Dryden looked back at Rachel, he saw her eyes fixed on the computer. She put her fingertips tentatively to the screen and zoomed in until the cell tower filled it.

  “You know I can’t take you there,” Dryden said. “It’s one thing to risk my own life. Yours, no way.”

  “We can get within a few miles of it without any risk,” Rachel said. “If you want to look closer then, by yourself, I’ll understand, but you can’t leave me a thousand miles behind. Besides, there are good reasons to take me along. There might be things there that jump out at me that wouldn’t stick out to you at all. That place might jog a memory.”

  For a long time Dryden didn’t respond. He looked at Rachel, then the computer screen, then nothing at all.

  “I think there’s a lot more at stake here than us,” Rachel said softly. “Don’t you? I think we should go. Right now.”

  Dryden rubbed his eyes.

  “Christ,” he said.

  Silence drew out. It was Dena who broke it. “You both know what I think, but I won’t try to change your minds. I’ve got a second car that my daughter uses when she’s home from school. It’s old, but it’s reliable. There’ll be roadblocks set up all around Fresno, I imagine, but … I could get you past those. You can hide in the trunk, and I’ll drive you north to Modesto and take a train home. If you’re caught, you’ll have to say you broke in and stole the car while I was gone.”

  Dryden traded a glance with Rachel, then looked at Dena again.

  “I don’t know how we could ever thank you,” he said.

  “Don’t die,” Dena said. “That would do it.”

  Dryden kept the unpleasant reply to himself: For almost any outcome he could imagine, Dena would never find out what became of him and Rachel. The girl said nothing in response to that thought, but she shivered as if a chill had crossed her skin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  They left five minutes later.

  The car was a Honda Accord, ten or twelve years old. Its backseats could be folded down to open up the trunk space to the passenger compartment, but for the moment there was no reason to do that. Dryden lay curled on one side of the trunk, Rachel on the other. Three minutes and five turns after leaving the house, Dena called back to them, her voice muffled by the foam of the seatbacks. “They’re stopping drivers at the on-ramp. Stay quiet until I say it’s clear.”

  The car braked thirty seconds later, then crept forward, start-and-stop. Dryden pictured a long line of clotted traffic, all of it washed in the LED flare of police lights. A moment later he heard the crackle of two-way radios. In the darkness, Rachel found his hand and held it tightly. Footsteps clicked on asphalt. Dena’s window buzzed down, and the sounds of the city came through.

  A man said, “Evening.” Sharp voice, a practiced balance between hard and polite.

  “Hi,” Dena said. “Is this about that thing on TV?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Can you show me your ID?”

  Seconds of silence. Then white light shone at the seam where the seatback met the trunk. It darted and roamed. The officer was shining a flashlight beam around the car’s interior.

  “Can I ask where you’re headed tonight?” the man said.

  “Just getting out of here for a couple days. If that guy’s here in town with that thing—you know—I’d rather not be here.”

  It sounded like something Dena had been rehearsing in her head for the past several minutes. No doubt it was. Her delivery of the line was dramatic—too much so. Dryden tensed.

  Another five seconds passed, and then the officer said, “Do me a favor and pop your trunk for me.”

  Rachel’s hand convulsed around Dryden’s.

  “Is that really necessary?” Dena asked.

  “It won’t take long. Go ahead and open it.”

  Dena said nothing.

  Dryden had the SIG SAUER in his rear waistband, but he made no move to draw it. There was simply nothing he could do with it that
would make any difference. There would be a dozen or more officers within twenty yards of the car, all of them prepared to encounter trouble tonight. There would be multiple choppers, local and federal, stationed above the city. There was no possibility of escape.

  “Ma’am?” the officer said.

  No response. In his mind, Dryden saw Dena at the wheel, her mouth working to speak, but nothing coming out. Everything falling apart right in front of her.

  “Ma’am.”

  “I have personal things in the trunk,” Dena said. “I’d prefer not to have someone going through it. Can I please just go?” Her voice was high and stretched. Everything about it would be a big red flag to a cop.

  “Ma’am, I need you to open your trunk. Now.”

  “Don’t you need a warrant for that?”

  “I can have one on my phone screen in about thirty seconds. Would you like me to do so?”

  “I just want to get out of Fresno,” Dena said. “I’m just scared out of my fucking mind being here, and none of this is helping me.”

  “Ma’am, I’m not going to say it again—”

  All at once the cop cut himself off. For an awful second Dryden imagined Dena had done something to make him do that—like reach for the gear selector to dump the car back into drive.

  But there was no sudden lurch of the vehicle. No sound or movement at all. Just silence playing out. Dryden could feel Rachel shaking, the sensation traveling through her hand into his own.

  The silence held. Like fingers gripping a cliff edge.

  Then the officer spoke again. “Alright, it’s fine. You can go on through. Have a good night.”

  For another moment Dena said nothing. Maybe she thought the guy was kidding. Then his footsteps moved off along the pavement, right past the trunk to the next car in line.

  Dryden heard Dena exhale shakily, and a second later the Honda was moving, weaving through the blockade and picking up speed. It crept through one last turn and then accelerated rapidly, and even over the revving engine Dryden could hear Dena up front, breathing.