Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (31 page)

He took out his phone again. Stared at the blank display.

“What the hell are we going to do?” Holly asked.

*   *   *

Two thousand thirty-one miles above the southern Great Plains, Miranda Twenty-six trained its instruments on the countryside north of Topeka, Kansas. Its lens platform made microscopic adjustments, keeping its viewing frame on the target it had been commanded to cover whenever it was in range. The target was a house centered in a broad square of uniform surface vegetation, a grass 97.441 percent likely to be Bouteloua gracilis, given the region and time of year. There were two human beings outdoors within the target frame, just entering the broad square of grass from the southern edge and moving north toward the house at walking speed. Their shapes suggested an adult and an adolescent, both female. Miranda Twenty-six relayed the image stream to the secure downlink designated 0814-13151, as instructed 12 days, 4 hours, 27 minutes, 41 seconds earlier. Since that time, there had been no further contact from the human operator.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Three minutes since Dryden had tried calling Gaul. No response. Holly had tried, too, with the same result. Then she’d called Dryden’s phone to make sure the damn things worked at all. She’d gotten through immediately.

They moved from window to window, staying on opposite sides of the house from one another, watching the dark fields for any sign of approach.

“This is stupid,” Dryden said. He came out of the kitchen and met Holly in the living room. “Even if we spot her, so what? What good would it do?”

“What
are
we supposed to do?”

Dryden turned and looked back toward the kitchen—then past it to the door leading to the garage.

“What if we just get the hell out?” he asked. “Get in one of the cars, leave the headlights off, and make a run for it across the fields.” He looked through the screen door, toward the porch and the south field. “If they’re coming from the edge of town, we’d want to go north. We could be out of her range in less than a minute.”

“Unless she hears the engine and locks us again.”

“We stay here, it’s going to happen anyway.”

Holly shut her eyes hard, thinking. “Even if Gaul’s dead, we don’t know the plan is off. We can’t even be sure he
is
dead. If it’s still on, and we leave, we’re going to screw it up. We may not get another chance at this.”

Dryden started to respond but stopped. Out in the dark beyond the porch, two hundred feet from the house: movement. Two silhouettes. He didn’t need detail to recognize their size and shape.

Holly turned and followed his gaze. Dryden heard her breathing go shallow.

Her hand found his and took hold of it. He squeezed back.

The silhouettes came on, still deep in the darkness beyond the house’s glow. As Dryden watched, something in their movement struck him, but he couldn’t place what it was. He didn’t get the chance. A second later the night flashed blinding white, and then a blast front of sound slammed down over the house, blowing in the windowpanes on the south side. Holly screamed and threw her arms around Dryden. A second flash followed, and over Holly’s shoulder Dryden saw the two silhouettes turn to run. A moment later the flashes were coming one after another like strobe pulses at a light show, and the sky sounded like the inside of a machine-gun barrel.

“What is it?”
Holly screamed.

“The plan,”
Dryden said.

In the wild flickers of light, he saw Rachel and Audrey still running away. Running south, back the way they’d come from. They covered sixty feet and made it no farther. Thick white streamers of powder were raining down over the field, as if a giant were slinging handfuls of flour into the wind. Where the stuff hit the ground it billowed out in all directions. Rachel and Audrey were right in the middle of it. In the last of the flashes, Dryden saw them both double over and fall.

Darkness. Silence.

Dryden’s ears were keening. He almost missed the ringtone of the phone in his pocket. He took it out; Gaul’s number showed on the display. He answered.

“Where the hell were you?” Dryden asked.

“Sorry about that,” Gaul said. “I wanted you both panicking, in case Rachel was reading you. Better to keep her confident.”

There was a noise in Gaul’s background. It sounded like chopper turbines powering up.

“Go to the couch and tear the middle cushion off,” Gaul said. “There are two gas masks underneath.”

Dryden turned and crossed to it. The cushion came off as if it had been held by fewer than a dozen threads. He reached into the space below and took out the masks.

“I’m ten miles south,” Gaul said. “I’ll be on-site in three or four minutes. Rachel and Audrey should be unconscious a lot longer than that, but as a precaution I want Holly to leave right now. Have her take either vehicle and just go anywhere, any route. Best if she doesn’t tell you where she’s going. Again, as a precaution.”

“Good enough,” Dryden said.

“See you when I get there.” Gaul hung up.

The gas was already swirling into the house through the empty window frames. Smoky clumps of it, twisting and snaking. Holly had her mask on; in the last of the clear air, Dryden picked up his own and secured it to his face.

He nodded out through the screen door. “Gas mortar shells.” His voice sounded filtered and mechanical in his own ears. “The launchers can be remote operated. Firing range can be several miles.”

They went out through the screen door and stood atop the porch steps. Against the backdrop of lights at the edge of town, the gas cloud hovered like a fog over the field.

Dryden relayed Gaul’s last instruction. Holly stared off into the cloud a moment longer, considering it.

“I’ll stay with her,” Dryden said. “I’ll make sure she’s okay. Go.”

Holly nodded at the gas. “Could that much of it kill someone? Especially a kid?”

“I don’t think so.” He said it confidently, though he wasn’t sure at all. He’d been wondering the same thing since almost the first detonation.

“Go,” he said again. “I’ll call you when it’s safe to come back.”

She hesitated a few seconds longer, then nodded. She went past him, back into the house. Thirty seconds later he heard one of the vehicles start. The garage door opened, and the Malibu rolled out into the haze. At the end of the driveway it turned right; Dryden watched its taillights disappear to the west. He descended the steps and started into the field.

*   *   *

Gaul made another phone call, even as he strapped into the chopper. He connected the phone to his headset, and over the rotors he heard the call begin to ring.

A man answered. “This is Hager.”

“Everything’s set,” Gaul said. “Rachel’s neutralized on-site, and Dryden’s with her. I sent Holly away, but I can call her back when the time comes. She and Dryden are fully in the dark.”

Gaul pictured Hager on his end of the line. The little compound in the Canadian Rockies. It was tough to keep his envy in check, thinking of the place—like imagining your enemy’s trophy on its pedestal. It made this uneasy cooperation all the harder.

You had to do what you had to do, though. Whatever it took to bloom.

“Understood,” Hager said. “Control asset will be airborne in five; expect it on-station above the target area in thirty minutes. We’ll go live as soon as we’re in range.”

Gaul had seen an example of the control asset before, bolted to its cell tower at the test site in Cold Spring, Utah. The one coming into play tonight wasn’t attached to a tower; it was strapped down in the cargo hold of a C-5 Galaxy.

We can’t guarantee we’ll tie off every loose end you’re worried about,
Hager had told him, days before.
Marsh, Harris, Dryden’s other friends. It’s not on me if they still go public against you.

Would they, though? After what happened at the farmhouse in the next hour, would people like Dennis Marsh really have the nerve to stand up and make waves?

We’ll see about that,
Gaul thought.

*   *   *

Just over a thousand miles away, in his office in Washington, D.C., Dennis Marsh stared at his computer, his mouth going dry.

On-screen, the phone-intercept program read
TRANS-LINK INIT.—CALL STATUS LIVE—0 MIN, 24 SEC.

At twenty-five seconds he heard Gaul say, “Copy that. We’ll talk after.”

The call went dead with a click.

It occurred to Marsh to wonder what his own expression looked like right now. Not quite one of surprise, he guessed. Maybe just that of a man bitten by a snake he’d been handling.

He reached for his own phone; he already knew the numbers for the phones Sam Dryden and Holly Ferrel had with them. He brought up the on-screen number pad and then stopped.

Gaul had given them those phones. There was no question Gaul’s people could monitor voice traffic on them.

Shit.

How to warn Dryden and Holly without tipping off anyone else?

Marsh leaned forward in his chair and shut his eyes hard.

Think. Think.

*   *   *

Down in the field, the gas was thicker than it had been on the porch, but it would be gone in a matter of minutes; the wind was moderate but moving steadily, shoving the whole cloud mass slowly east.

Dryden was a hundred feet out from the house now. Watching his step. The gas was visibly thinning already.

Over the ringing that still throbbed in his ears, he heard the chopper coming in. Far south yet, not even visible.

He picked up his speed.

One hundred fifty feet from the house. The cloud was slipping away by the second.

He saw Audrey and Rachel. Straight ahead, a few dozen yards. Lying facedown in the grass. He broke into a run, his feet kicking up swirls of chalky gas residue.

It came to him even before he reached them that something was wrong. Something was missing. He realized what it was in the last five yards: no chill at his temples.

Their minds should’ve generated that sensation even if they were asleep.

What did it mean? That they were more than asleep?

Comatose?

Worse than that?

“Goddammit.” Through the mask, the mutter sounded almost animal.

The chopper was louder now. He looked up and saw it coming north over the city lights, less than two miles out.

He got to Rachel and knelt down beside her. Her hair lay in a tangle around her neck. He reached through it, to her jawline, and pressed his finger to the carotid artery pulse point.

Her pulse was strong.

Still no chill touching him. Not even a trace.

Understanding hit him a second before he rolled her over. He thought of the silhouettes’ movements in the field, before the barrage started. Something strange in the way they were walking. All at once he knew what it had been.

They had only been moving one at a time.

He let go of the pulse point, grabbed the shoulder, and shoved hard. The unconscious body rolled onto its back, the hair cascading away from its face.

Which wasn’t Rachel’s.

He was on his feet in half a second, tearing off the mask, pulling his phone from his pocket as he sprinted into the wind—into the thinnest reaches of the gas. He pulled up the recent call list, stabbing Gaul’s number even as the sound of the rotors swelled.

One ring. Two. It connected.

“Turn the chopper around!”
He screamed it without even listening for a reply.
“Turn around! She sprung the trap! Turn the fucking chopper around!”

He saw it happen even as he shouted, the aircraft passing over a point maybe a mile south of the farmhouse—well within Rachel’s reach, wherever the hell she was. The chopper’s pitch and attitude changed abruptly, and as they did Dryden heard men screaming over the phone’s earpiece. He pictured the pilot or copilot—it really didn’t matter which—taking his hands off the controls and attacking the man beside him. Either way, there was suddenly no one flying the aircraft. It tipped steeply to one side, the tail whipping around like a boom, and a second later the chopper simply plunged. It dropped three hundred feet and exploded in the city sprawl like a percussion bomb. Orange flame and thick black smoke rolled up and away.

Dryden stared. He still had the phone at his ear, but the call had gone dead. He watched the flames seethe and curl.

Five seconds passed.

He had no idea what to do.

What
was
there to do, under the circumstances?

He thought about it a few seconds longer and found he had an answer. He turned off the phone and slipped it back into his pocket and let the gas mask fall at his feet. He glanced at the crash site one last time, then turned and faced east across the field. Around him the gas haze had thinned to nothing, but fifty yards east it was as thick as ever. Thick enough to put him to sleep, if he simply walked into it.

He couldn’t say why it made sense to do that—only that he wanted to. It was
all
he wanted.

He got moving, each stride putting him deeper into the cloud, sucking in breath after breath as the air thickened around him.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

He woke with his heart pounding, his body spasming under a surge of ice water. A bucket clattered to the floor. He opened his eyes and found himself handcuffed to a chair in the farmhouse’s dining room. The table had been shoved aside. The room was clear, and he was sitting in the middle of it.

Rachel stood before him, watching him.

For a second Dryden couldn’t understand how he’d gotten here. He remembered seeing the chopper crash, with Gaul on board, and he remembered walking into the gas cloud afterward because—

Because why? Why the hell had he done that?

The answer settled over him. He shut his eyes for a long beat, getting his head around it. When he opened them again Rachel was still watching him, her eyes large, maybe curious.

Was she in there somewhere? The girl who’d fallen asleep on his shoulder? The hope felt like a blade twisting in his chest.