Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) Page 4

  Dryden felt his hands tighten on the steering wheel.

  “Sometime in the first few days,” Rachel said, “I noticed strange thoughts in my head. For a while I thought they were my memories coming back, but not for long—they were just too bizarre. They didn’t seem like my own thoughts at all. Like, some of them were a man’s thoughts about his wife, from his own point of view. These thoughts got a lot louder whenever the blond man or the others came into the room, and at some point I understood what I was really hearing.”

  Dryden passed another semi. Ahead of it, the road lay empty and dark for a mile or more.

  “Everything I know, I got from their thoughts,” Rachel said. “The people in that building. It wasn’t much; they hardly knew anything at all. They’d been assigned to keep me there, but they didn’t know where I came from. They knew I could hear thoughts—they’d been warned about that—but no one had told them how I could do it, how I got this way. So I don’t know, either.”

  “They must have known other things. Who they worked for—the government, a company, something like that.”

  “It was hard to get anything like that from them. Most of the time they weren’t close enough for me to hear them thinking. Even when they were, it almost never helped. You’d be surprised how scattered people’s thoughts are. You hear little chunks of an argument they had with someone, looping over and over. Probably stuff they wish they’d said. Sometimes you just hear a song in their head. You hardly ever hear important things about their lives: their name, their job, anything like that. Like, how often do you actually think of your own name?”

  “I guess I can see that.”

  “When people do focus their thoughts, they mostly think about what they don’t know. What they’re unsure of. So with these guys, a lot of their questions were the same ones I had. Like who I was. Where I came from. They didn’t know. I did get the name of someone they work for, someone pretty powerful, I think—a man they thought of as Gaul.”

  The name struck Dryden. He’d heard it before, though he couldn’t quite place it. Someone at the top of one of the big defense contractors, he thought. Way up in the overlap between corporate America and the government. That wasn’t a world Dryden swam in himself, but he’d learned more about it than he cared to, during his active years.

  “The people in that building wondered about him a lot,” Rachel said. “They were always nervous about him. Especially the blond man. He’s the one I mostly learned things from. He had a room down the hall from me—his office, I guess. He was in there a lot. Maybe he thought it was out of my range, but it wasn’t. Not quite.”

  “What did you learn from him?”

  Rachel shut her eyes. Dryden got the impression again that she was framing her thoughts, trying to put them in some order that would make sense.

  “That they were supposed to get information from me. Things I know—things I knew, anyway, when I could remember.”

  Dryden waited for her to continue.

  “That’s what the IV drugs were for. To make me talk—in my sleep. Only it was more than that. The drugs were supposed to make it so I could have conversations in my sleep. Someone could ask me questions, and I’d answer. Like if I was hypnotized, I think. My memory problems come from the drugs, too. The way the blond man understood it, that was a side effect that only kicked in while I was awake. When I was asleep—talking in my sleep—I could still remember what I knew.” She breathed out softly. Dryden heard emotion in the sound of it. An edge of fear, for some reason.

  “Did you find out, after a while, what they’d gotten from you?” Dryden asked. “Did you hear it in the blond guy’s thoughts?”

  Rachel shook her head. “It was never them questioning me. What I heard in his thoughts was that he and the others always had to leave the building as soon as the drugs knocked me out, and that other people would be coming in to question me. Those people would always be gone before I woke up. The blond man and the others had no idea who they were—never even saw them. So I had no way of knowing what I’d said in my sleep.” She was quiet for a second. “I guess that all sounds pretty strange to you.”

  Dryden watched the highway. What Rachel had said didn’t sound strange at all. Dryden could name three different narcotic agents that had the effects she’d described. He’d seen each of them used on people, time and again. All three carried the side effect Rachel now suffered: a roadblock in the memory, usually lodged right at the point when the drugs were first administered.

  Rachel turned to him. He glanced at her and saw her eyebrows knit toward each other—confusion at what she’d just heard in his thoughts.

  “There’s a lot about me I’ll have to explain to you sometime,” Dryden said. “If you want to know.”

  She nodded and faced forward again.

  “This information they were trying to get from you,” Dryden said. “It sounds like it scares you.”

  Rachel nodded again, and Dryden heard the same tremor in her breath he’d heard before.

  “Why are you afraid of it?” he asked.

  “Because they were afraid. The blond man, and the others there, the soldiers. They didn’t know anything themselves, but they knew other people who had some of the details. Other people who worked for Gaul, higher up. And 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.”

  The chill in the girl’s voice seemed to radiate into Dryden’s bones.

  “That’s it,” Rachel said. “That’s all I know about it. And I’m scared.”

  Before Dryden could ask anything else, a new set of headlights appeared in the mirror, far back along the freeway. The newcomer changed lanes to pass another vehicle, moving fast.

  Rachel reacted—either to Dryden’s sudden alertness or to the thoughts beneath it. She turned and leaned forward and looked into the passenger side mirror.

  Dryden kept his eyes on his own mirror, watching the road ahead only as much as he had to. The new arrival slipped through the headlights of the vehicle it’d passed, becoming a silhouette for a fleeting moment.

  It looked like a van.

  * * *

  Gaul watched the F-150, its engine compartment and cab lit up in ghostly blue-white thermal, from three separate viewing angles. A fourth Miranda had a wider view, which included the van containing Curren and the team. The van was closing distance easily, and there was no sign that Sam Dryden had spotted the pursuers. The pickup maintained its speed.

  Gaul’s cell phone rang; it was Hollings, the man he’d assigned to dig into the classified part of Dryden’s background. Gaul ignored the call; nothing in the world mattered right now as much as the drama about to unfold on these monitors, hopefully with brutal speed and efficiency. Dryden was a well-trained soldier, but all the training in the world couldn’t counter the odds he faced. Curren and his team were six men with state-of-the-art weapons and training, and the element of surprise.

  The van closed to within five hundred yards. There was no escape.

  The cell phone quit ringing.

  * * *

  Dryden watched the van close in. It had slowed a bit after first appearing, maybe to keep from standing out, but had still halved its distance in the past sixty seconds.

  “How did they find us?” Rachel asked.

  Dryden thought of the unformed suspicion he’d felt earlier, when he was listening for a helicopter. Now it took shape fully in his mind. He’d overlooked the answer initially; he hadn’t known that anyone as powerful as Gaul was involved.

  “They’re using a satellite,” he said. “Maybe more than one.”

  He sorted through the implications of that fact, trying to stay rational even as the van closed in. Depending on how good Gaul’s birds were, he and his techs might be able to watch the entire conflict that was about to unfold. In that case, it would be no use stopping and fleeing on foot in
to the hills; thermal satellite cameras would easily follow them, and Gaul could direct his men on the ground accordingly. In fact, any kind of escape would be pointless as long as the pursuers were in any shape to follow. That left a limited range of options, none of them friendly.

  Dryden felt old mental tricks coming back to him. Ways of keeping his pulse down and his mind cold. The sensation was strangely pleasant, like the bass rhythm of a song not heard in years.

  “I’m getting a reassuring vibe from you,” Rachel said, “but I have to wonder why you’re still going the speed limit.”

  “It keeps them thinking surprise is on their side,” Dryden said. “Which means it’s really on ours.”

  Ahead loomed yet another semi. There would be just enough time to pass it before the van caught up. And that was going to be critical, because Dryden suddenly understood what he had to do. The road was perfect for it: two lanes, bordered on the left by a concrete median divider, and on the right by a guardrail and then a 45-degree drop to the sea. No shoulder on either side. The freeway might as well have been the Lincoln Tunnel—exactly what he needed.

  He glanced at Rachel. “You already know my plan, don’t you,” he said.

  “I think so,” she said. She gripped the armrest on the passenger door, bracing for things to get rough.

  Dryden risked a slight increase in speed to pass the semi, even using his turn signal when he changed lanes. Behind them, the van changed lanes, too, and began the final push to close the gap.

  * * *

  Gaul leaned in toward the nearest monitor. All the night’s stress and anxiety would end within the minute, right there in a pixelated blaze.

  At that moment, footsteps came sprinting down the corridor outside, and a technician appeared in the doorway with a cordless phone.

  “Sir,” the man said, “it’s Hollings. He says it’s critical.”

  Keeping his eyes on the monitor, Gaul took the phone from the tech.

  “Can it wait thirty seconds?” Gaul said into the phone.

  “I’m not sure it can, sir,” Hollings said. “I tried calling your cell, but I couldn’t get through—”

  “You’re wasting seconds now. Just tell me,” Gaul said.

  “I have part of Sam Dryden’s restricted file. He is significantly more advanced than Delta. If Curren’s men are still pursuing him, they need to be told.”

  “What did Dryden do after Delta?” Gaul asked.

  “A federal program called Ferret. It might’ve been under Homeland, I’m still trying to figure that out.”

  “What sort of work did he do in Ferret?”

  “The only thing Ferret does at all. Extraordinary rendition.”

  The two words seeped into Gaul like winter drafts.

  His eyes went to the monitors again. The pickup, cruising along at the speed limit. The man at the wheel carrying six years’ experience in abducting people for the United States government. Six years honing a skill set that would include violent conflict in every possible civilian environment.

  Gaul’s focus went to the van, closing fast on the truck, and he saw the absurdity that had been right in front of him for minutes: There was essentially zero chance a man like Sam Dryden would fail to spot trouble on his tail.

  Gaul dropped the cordless unit and grabbed his cell phone in the same movement.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Curren watched the F-150 slip past the nose of the semi ahead. He could see Dryden and the girl in silhouette above the pickup’s seatback.

  “When he gets back in the right lane,” Curren said, “I’ll stay in the left and come up just shy of passing. Clear to fire when I say go.”

  The three shooters on the bench seat took position. A fourth prepared to slide open the door.

  Curren’s cell rang—Gaul. He reached to answer it, then simply ignored it. Taking his attention off the action now would be the wrong move.

  Ahead, Dryden merged back into the right lane. Curren accelerated along the length of the semi and beyond it. He would overtake the pickup in less than ten seconds. The man at the side door slid it open; wind roared into the vehicle. The shooters brought their MP-5s to the ready.

  In the last moments before it would all go down, Curren found himself wondering how a man like Sam Dryden—a former Delta operator, not to mention whatever the hell he’d been for those six black years—could end up this naive.

  Then Dryden did something strange.

  He put the truck’s turn signal back on and merged once more to the left, though there was nothing ahead of him to pass. The pickup was directly in front of the van again.

  “What the fuck is this?” Curren said.

  * * *

  Dryden watched the van and the semi in his rearview mirror. The timing was going to come down to tenths of a second, though there was no way to be that exact in the execution. This was going to be messy as hell.

  Beside him, Rachel pulled her seat belt tight.

  The van was behind the pickup, a single car length from its tailgate. The semi was another two lengths behind the van, in the next lane.

  “Close enough for government work,” Dryden said, and slammed his heel on the brake.

  The effect was all he could have asked for.

  At freeway speed, the van’s driver had nowhere near the time or space he needed to react. There was no place for him to go but the open lane to the right, directly in front of the semi. The van swerved hard for it, missing the pickup’s back end by inches.

  In the same instant, Dryden took his foot off the brake; his speed had dropped to forty. When the van passed the pickup’s back end, Dryden veered right as well, ramming the van’s nose from the side and sending it into the guardrail at an angle.

  At more than seventy miles per hour.

  All that was left was the physics: mass, momentum, friction, velocity, no forgiveness in any of it. The van’s front end dug into the guardrail, and its tail swung outward. It spun more than 360 degrees, and then its tires got a grip on the pavement when the vehicle was more or less sideways, pitching it into a tumble along the freeway. In the mirror, Dryden saw at least two bodies thrown from the vehicle, from what looked like an open side door.

  All of this had happened within three seconds of Dryden hitting the brakes. For those same three seconds, the driver of the semi had been trying to stop—unsuccessfully. The semi plowed into the tumbling van and partially rolled up over it, finally grinding both the van and the semi to a stop in a shower of sparks. The van, which had ruptured its fuel tank at some point during its acrobatics, was ablaze by the time it slid to a halt.

  Dryden stopped the pickup fifty yards beyond the wreckage. He stepped out onto the freeway and looked back. He saw the semi driver open his door, drop to the pavement, and run like hell, no doubt expecting the van to go off like a bomb. But the van’s fuel was mostly spread along the freeway, and what remained in the tank was already burning. Dryden squinted into the glare and saw the van’s occupants trapped inside, fully engulfed. The two who’d been thrown lay far from the wreck, on the asphalt. It was possible they were alive. It was not possible they would be of any use to Gaul in the near future, if ever again.

  Dryden got back in the truck. He found Rachel staring at him, scared, her eyes huge.

  “I’m sorry that had to happen,” Dryden said.

  He considered saying more in the way of justifying it, but didn’t. She wasn’t stupid, and in any case, it was time to get going. Without a doubt, Gaul was already sending whatever else he could mobilize—probably something with wings or rotors this time. The only way to survive the next hour was to lose the satellites, though at the moment Dryden had no idea how he was going to do that. Whatever he came up with, it would take time to do it, and there was no telling how long they really had. He put the truck in gear and got moving. He pushed it up to eighty this time, the fastest he could go without risking a blown cylinder.

  He glanced at Rachel. She was staring straight ahead, her eyes rimmed with tea
rs. She wiped at them and said, “I don’t mean to make you feel bad. You protected me, and there was no other way. I understand that. What I’m crying about is weird, and … stupid. It’s just me.”

  “If you want to talk about it, you can.”

  For a moment she said nothing. Then: “When you hit them from the side, in that little bit of time afterward, before they hit the guardrail, they were close enough that I could read them all. And right before they hit, they all knew they were going to die. Going that fast, and suddenly out of control like that, they just knew. It was every bad feeling at the same time. All the hardness about them was gone, all the training, everything. There was nothing but fear, and knowing they were dead.”

  Dryden saw her turn to him.

  “I loved it,” she said. “I loved that it was that bad for them. I thought, This is what you get, I hope it hurts. I felt all that for about a second, and then it hit me—how bad it was to think something like that, and I just lost it.”

  She wiped at her eyes again. She looked miserable.

  “If anyone in this world has earned a little vindictiveness,” Dryden said, “it’s you.”

  “It still doesn’t feel right.”

  She rested her head on her knees.

  “You need me to stop talking for a while,” she said. “You need time to think.”

  Dryden nodded. “I need time to think.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The computer room bustled. Gaul had summoned four techs, in addition to Lowry, to pore over maps of the cities that lay ahead of Sam Dryden on the 101. Predicting his next move, or at least narrowing the possibilities, was critical. It would be stupid now to assume any amount of naiveté on Dryden’s part. Certainly he knew he was being watched by satellites, even after his disposal of Curren’s team. Obviously Dryden’s primary goal now was finding a way to throw the birds off his trail.