Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (23 page)

“My experience was more or less the same,” Audrey said. “My decision process
was
the same.”

They took turns telling the story, handing it back and forth. The place where they ended up, a living facility at Fort Detrick, really did seem like a dorm on the inside—the dorms they’d seen in movies, at least. Neither had ever set foot inside a real one. The only difference was that they couldn’t leave. They were two of just ten women living there, all of whom got along well enough. The atmosphere was relaxed, relatively speaking. It sure as hell wasn’t prison.

They got their first injections on day one. Nothing much to it—no worse than tetanus shots. The medical technicians said they might experience fever or chills, but they didn’t. Not even after all three shots had been administered. There were no ill effects at all, and for the next two months it stayed like that. One of the girls in the dorm had done pretty well in science in high school, and remembered reading about something called a control group. Sometimes in an experiment, one group of subjects would get a certain drug, say, and another group would
think
they were getting the drug but instead just got sugar pills or shots of some neutral solution. Maybe that had happened here. Maybe they were just the control. That was a nice thought, and it lasted until about the middle of month three.

When the effect started, it came on slowly. Little bouts of it, at first. Even when it got stronger, it was hard to notice, because it didn’t work among the women themselves. It only seemed to work on outsiders, like the medical techs, or people who drove past the building within a certain distance. For probably a week or better, each woman in the dorm kept the phenomenon to herself, afraid she was imagining it. Afraid she was going crazy.

Then the strangest thing happened: One of the techs, during a routine physical—they performed them twice a week—asked one of the girls a question he’d never asked before.

Are you hearing things in your head that seem unfamiliar? Thoughts that don’t seem to be your own?

The girl’s eyes went wide.
Yes,
she said.
Yes, what the hell is it?
Other girls overheard. They crowded around and spoke up, relieved to know they weren’t alone with their symptoms. In the midst of it all, the tech took out a phone and dialed, and that was the end of life in the dorm.

Within the hour, the ten of them were in a different building—not so much like a dorm, very much like a prison, in fact. Each had her own barred cell. Different researchers came to look at them. Most of these were older men, some of them in military uniforms. They spoke among themselves, talking about the women as if they weren’t standing right there, in their cages. As if the women couldn’t hear them. Which was strange, really, since the women could do much more than hear them.

“They knew we weren’t leaving that place,” Sandra said. “Not in two years. Not ever. They didn’t care that we could hear it in their thoughts, either. It didn’t matter what we knew. They had us.”

“For a while we thought they might use us to spy on people,” Audrey said. “Put us in hotel rooms next door to important guests—VIP types from other countries, something like that—find out what they were thinking. Sounds plausible, right? For the rest of our lives we’d just be glorified listening devices.”

She looked away into the glare of sunlight off the nearest towers. The highest floors gleamed wet where clouds had touched them.

“It turned out we weren’t even going to be that, though,” she said.

Dryden looked at them, one and then the other. “What did they want you to be?”

“White mice,” Sandra said. “We were going to stay locked up the rest of our lives, so they could watch us and see what happened long-term. See if the effect changed over time—got stronger or weaker, anything like that. See if we all got cancer in three years, or seven, or ten. See if we got Alzheimer’s in our thirties.”

“They
did
want human listening devices,” Audrey said, “but they were going to choose those people very carefully. People who were just right for the job.”

“So that was going to be it for us,” Sandra said. “Except our ages, nothing in that building was going to change for the rest of our lives. And then something happened. A physical exam of one of the women—her name was Rebecca Grant—turned up a result no one had even been looking for. Rebecca was pregnant. She’d conceived right before going to prison.”

Both Sandra and Audrey looked at Rachel.

Though she’d already heard the story, the girl’s emotional response was evident. Dryden saw her throat tighten.

“Rachel was born on May 1, 2001,” Audrey said. “They allowed Rebecca to raise her, right there in the living facility with the rest of us. The researchers were very interested in how she would turn out—whether she’d have the same capability as her mother. Even though Rachel was conceived
before
Rebecca had the RNA treatment, the drug would’ve still affected her as a developing fetus. You already know it worked on her, but as it turned out, it didn’t work exactly the same way it had with everyone else. Rachel was different from her mother. Different from all of us, in one very important way.”

“Which was what?” Dryden asked.

Rachel turned to him. “They won’t tell me,” she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

For a few seconds the room stayed quiet. Then Audrey spoke. She addressed Dryden; it was clear Rachel had already heard this part.

“There are things we just don’t know how to explain to Rachel right now. Things that would be very hard for her to hear. Not just what makes her different. Other things, too. About what happened to her mother. About how we ended up free. About Holly Ferrel.”

“We
will
tell you,” Sandra said. “Both of you. All we’re saying is that we want Rachel to remember it for herself first.” Her eyes went to the girl. “Honey, if we tried to tell you now … we’re not sure you’d believe us. You sure as hell wouldn’t
want
to believe us. You can imagine they’re not happy stories.”

“You’ve kept a journal for the past few years,” Audrey said. “We debated showing it to you, letting you learn everything that way. But we really think your own memories would make it easiest on you … that when you remember the things you’ve been through, you’ll also remember that you’ve recovered from them. That’s the best we can do. We’ve given it all the thought in the world.”

“Gaul knows where Holly Ferrel lives,” Rachel said. “If she’s in danger, I don’t want to wait however long it takes—”

“Holly
is
in danger,” Sandra said. “Grave danger, but not immediate danger. I know that doesn’t make sense to you now, but I can say it with certainty. For the time being, this week for sure, nobody’s going to hurt her.”

“But
how
do you know?” Rachel asked.

“I know. I promise.”

Rachel looked as frustrated as Dryden had ever seen her. He couldn’t blame her. His own frustration was simmering.

“How did Gaul get to me?” Rachel asked. “Two months ago.”

“That’s tied into the rest of it,” Audrey said. “In a way, it’s all just one story—the things we’re holding back.” Her eyes went to Rachel and softened. “You don’t want to hear it right now, sweetie.”

Against his will, Dryden thought,
Maybe you just don’t want to tell it right now
.

He couldn’t call it back any more than he could’ve kept it in. He saw all three of them react as if he’d said it aloud.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Not your fault,” Audrey said. She added, “You’re not entirely wrong, either.”

“What about the cell tower in the desert?” Dryden asked. “Whatever it relates to … whatever so many people are afraid of.”

“It’s not really the towers they’re scared of,” Audrey said. “Or what the towers are being used for right now. It’s something else—and they’re right to be afraid of it.” Her eyes went back and forth between Dryden and Rachel. “The answers are coming soon enough, I promise. Bear with us, okay? When you know the rest, you’ll probably wish you didn’t.”

*   *   *

Darkness had slid down over Santa Monica Bay. Gaul stared at it from his patio, a mile inland and five hundred feet up. To the west, the Point Dume Headlands shone dull in the moonlight. To the east, twenty miles out in the night haze, lay LAX and the orange glow of the city beyond.

Gaul sank into a chair beside the pool. In the blue light rippling up through its surface, he looked at the bound document in his hands. In the months since he’d first read it, the block of text on its cover had come to embody stress itself.

U.S. ARMY BIOWARFARE RESEARCH INSTITUTE (USABRI)

LIVING WEAPONS INITIATIVE—COHORT 23.3

ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION REPORT—“SNAPDRAGON”

Gaul shut his eyes and sank back into the seat cushion. His phone rang in his pocket. Lowry’s ringtone. Gaul took it out and answered without opening his eyes.

“The Chicago option is up and running, sir,” Lowry said.

Gaul acknowledged him, hung up, and set the phone on the paver bricks.

Two months before, in the days after Rachel had been captured, chemical analysis of her skin and hair had yielded a pollutant profile consistent with greater Chicago. That wasn’t where Gaul’s people had grabbed her, but it seemed to be where she’d spent much of her recent time. It seemed to be her home.

She likely wouldn’t remember her way back there for days yet, but in the name of caution the Chicago option was running now.

The thing was, it didn’t speak of caution. It spoke of desperation. It was as ridiculous as it was clever. That he was grasping for it only heightened the feeling that he was drowning.

*   *   *

“So you’re sleeping in the living room?” Rachel asked.

Dryden nodded. He stood in the doorway of her bedroom; she stood facing him from just inside, holding under her arm the triceratops whose name she couldn’t remember.

“I know I’m safe here,” Rachel said. “I just wish you were going to be closer.”

“Downside of owning a whole floor of a skyscraper,” Dryden said.

Rachel managed a smile. Dryden had seen precious few of them from her in the long hours since lunch. Even this one slipped away in a second or two. She looked down at her feet.

“Scary,” she said. “All this stuff. I wanted so much to remember. And now … I still want it, but in a different way. Like something bad I just want to get behind me.” She looked up at him. “But bad things can take forever to get behind you, can’t they.”

“They can.”

She nodded. Then she stepped forward and hugged him tightly. She held on for a long time, then said good night and closed her door.

*   *   *

Gaul flipped through the report, coming at last to the section he always stopped at. The one titled
RACHEL GRANT.
His fingertips traced over the page, passing slowly across the two words, as if they might cut him.

*   *   *

Audrey waited until Dryden had left the east hallway and gone to the living room. She stepped out of her bedroom and went to Sandra’s, slipping in and closing the door behind her.

In the darkness, Sandra stood in silhouette at the window, against the shimmer of pier lights on Lake Michigan. Audrey went to her.

“It hurts, not leveling with her,” Sandra said.

“It won’t be this way for long. A few more days.”

“What do you think it’ll be like? When she starts to get it all back?”

Audrey breathed a laugh. The sound was hard and cold, but not without amusement. “Interesting. To say the least.”

*   *   *

Gaul turned the pages slowly, making his way through the section about Rachel. Rachel and all that she’d done in her short life. Color photos filled some of the sheets. Gaul had a strong stomach for images of this sort, but these tested its limits. Still he stared at each in turn. He felt obligated to do so—to remind himself what the stakes were.

At last he let the report fall shut. He set it on the bricks beside the phone. As always, his hand came away shaking.

PART THREE

LUCERO

Let us alone. What is it that will last?

All things are taken from us, and become

Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.

—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

CHAPTER THIRTY

Deep in the night, Dryden woke. For a moment he felt sure something had roused him, a sound or a flash of light, but as the seconds drew out, the impression faded.

He rose from the couch, took the SIG SAUER from the end table, and made a quick, silent orbit of the living room, dining room, and kitchen. A quarter past four in the morning and all was well.

He went to the south windows. Here was the city at its most sedate, its streets as bare as they would ever be, its towers all but darkened, their rooftop beacons blinking a slow cadence.

The only thing in view that seemed awake was an intense white light fixed to a radio mast atop the tallest skyscraper—the Willis Tower, they were calling it these days. Against the sleepy backdrop of the city, this single point of light, the highest thing in the skyline, stabbed the darkness in a rapid and intermittent frenzy. It was as if its control board were shorting out. Something about this light drew Dryden’s attention, like a face in a crowd to which he couldn’t quite put a name. The more he studied it, the more out of place the thing seemed; it was easily three times brighter than any other light in Chicago.

Dryden turned and looked at the wall and couch behind him, bathed in the glow of the city. The flashing white light was bright enough to stand out within that glow, casting the shapes of the window frames across the room with each pulse.

This light had woken him.

He stared at it again. Logic told him he was obsessing over something meaningless; he’d woken up disoriented, and his judgment was off balance. Still he stared. Then he became aware of the strangest thing: Letters and words were forming in his mind, unbidden. He pictured them as if he were jotting them on a notepad, the vision he’d always used when deciphering Morse code—