Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (15 page)

Dryden had taken this as a cue to step out of the room. Now, half an hour later, he’d seen enough of CNN and Fox to understand what’d been airing all day.

It was bad.

Very bad.

The bullet points, repeated every few minutes, were straightforward enough: Based on solid but still-undisclosed evidence, Homeland Security believed there was a man inside the United States with a working radiological bomb—a dirty bomb. This man had all the knowledge and tools necessary to arm and detonate the weapon, and there was credible intelligence that he intended to do so. The money quote had come from the Homeland secretary himself:
We are working in a time frame of perhaps hours. We need everyone looking for this man.

There was no official name for the suspect, but there was a picture. A digital composite, they called it—purportedly a high-tech version of a police sketch, computer generated based on surveillance images that weren’t being released to the public.

The picture was no composite, though; Dryden recognized it at once. Gaul’s people had gotten it from the hard drive of his home computer in El Sedero. It was a picture that had originally contained his wife, Trisha; the two of them had taken a trip to San Francisco, a few months before Erin was born, and had asked a passerby to snap the shot of them standing together on the Embarcadero. Someone had now erased everything in the image except Dryden’s head, reshaped his mouth to turn his smile deadpan, and filtered the whole picture to make it look less like a photo and more like something compiled by software.

For all that, it was a dead-on image of him. It was no wonder Dena had recognized him so quickly.

Others had recognized him, too, it seemed. The salesman he’d bought the used car from in Bakersfield. A clerk at the sporting goods store. The image had gone into rotation on the news probably just a couple of hours after they’d left that city. The car dealership had contacted authorities early in the afternoon, and the vehicle’s description had gone into the news mix immediately. Once the hiker had found the car at the trailhead, it would’ve been an obvious move for police to check the few human-made structures in the surrounding miles.

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.