Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (35 page)

“Is that the whole message?” Harris asked.

“Goldenrod,” Dryden said.

He ended the call and tossed the phone in the trash. Holly left hers behind, too; the phones were a type that had built-in GPS and could be tracked by the phone company.

It was plausible enough that the Escape had some kind of tracking on board, too. They left it in a parking lot in downtown Topeka and paid cash for three bus tickets.

*   *   *

The meeting place was a café on the waterfront in Galveston, Texas. The day was hot, and the Gulf of Mexico lay sharp and blue under a clear sky.

The five of them took a table on the patio, far from any other diners. Rachel seemed shy around Harris and Marsh; she sat between Dryden and Holly and leaned on one or the other in turn.

There was an idea circling at the edges of Dryden’s thoughts. An unwelcome stray, scratching to be let in. It had been there since around the time they’d left Kansas. He was sure Rachel had picked up on it by now, though he’d done his best to keep it at the margins. But there was no holding it back forever. In the next few minutes, the door would open wide for it.

“A couple of nights ago,” Marsh said, “Western Dynamics suffered a major setback with its program. Maybe the three of you already knew that.”

“No great loss for the world,” Dryden said.

“The tower sites are shut down indefinitely,” Marsh said. “We don’t know the status of any of the company’s operatives, including the next-gen group—the children who were given the drug in utero. Presumably they’re all sequestered away somewhere. The people in charge won’t want to plug anyone into the towers again while Rachel’s still an existing threat.” Marsh glanced at the girl, then continued. “The three of you need to understand, this is
only
a setback for these people. Not the end of the road. Even if it were the end for this company, someone else would pick up the ball. The technology in play here is like drone aircraft; it’s never going back in the box. The kinds of powerful interests that want to see it developed—they always get their way, eventually. In this case, those people will always want Rachel out of the equation. The deal Gaul pretended to make with you—allowing Rachel’s genetic changes to be reversed—would probably have been impossible to implement, even if he’d honored it. Not that the treatment wouldn’t work, but someone would’ve had her killed before it was over.”

Harris said, “She needs to hide for the rest of her life. There’s no place she’d ever be safe in the open. Foreign countries with nonextradition policies—nothing like that would be good enough.”

Dryden didn’t bother nodding. All of those things were obvious. He imagined they were obvious to Rachel, too.

“For starters,” Marsh said, “my guess is they’ll relaunch the manhunt for the guy with the dirty bomb, who happens to look just like you, Mr. Dryden.”

“How can they do that?” Holly asked. “They went on TV and said the suspect was dead.”

Marsh shrugged. “They’ll say they got it wrong. The government screwing up—it’s not a hard thing to convince people of. And that’s only one of the means they’ll use to hunt you. In time they’ll whip up a reason to put
your
face on the news, Miss Ferrel. My point is that you three need to go deep under, if you want to stay alive. If you’re thinking of some little village in the Ivory Coast where you can help dig wells or teach English, you better pick some place where Western newspapers never show up. Some place where there’s no Peace Corps presence. No tourism. The three of you need to do more than get off the grid. You need to vanish off the earth. I’ll be honest: I’m not sure it’s possible.”

Dryden could almost hear the hinges creaking inside his mind. The scrape of claws scrabbling through.

Rachel took hold of his arm and shook her head. She knew. Of course she knew.

“You’re right,” Dryden said to Marsh. “But it won’t be the three of us vanishing. Just two.”

He saw Holly turn to him, at the edge of his vision. “What are you talking about?”

Dryden kept his eyes on Marsh. “You know some of these people, don’t you. The people at the tops of these companies, and the people in government who serve them.”

Marsh nodded. “I know a few.”

“You know other kinds of people in government, too,” Dryden said. “The kind who aren’t corrupted all the way. Who aren’t so cozy with these interests. You can’t be the only Boy Scout left.”

“Not quite.”

“Then here’s what’s going to happen,” Dryden said.

He spent two minutes laying out the idea. By the time he’d finished, Marsh’s expression had gone slack. For the longest time, the man only sat there, thinking.

At last Marsh said, “If I help you do that, it’ll be the end of my career.”

“It will be,” Dryden said.

“Even setting that aside, it’s a tall order.”

“You’re the secretary of Homeland Security,” Dryden said. “You answer to the president of the United States. Don’t tell me you can’t make the phone calls to get these people together in a room.”

“I can do it, one way or another. What I can’t do is ensure your safety, if you go through with this.”

“It’s not my safety I’m trying to ensure,” Dryden said. He nodded to Rachel and Holly. “It’s theirs.”

Marsh shrugged with his eyebrows. “Them, it would help. You … you could end up dead. Or detained at Guantanamo Bay. They’d probably make me sign the transfer forms. I’ve sent people there before.”

“So have I,” Dryden said, “but I don’t think I’ll be there when this is over. I don’t think I’ll be dead, either.”

Beside him, Rachel was holding it together, though it was a struggle. Then he felt her hand tighten on his arm—a reaction to what he would say next.

“What do you expect to be?” Marsh said.

“Bait,” Dryden said. “What else? Maybe they’ll rough me up for a while at first. Maybe they’ll use enhanced interrogation techniques, and have a mind reader from Western Dynamics present, for good measure. They might get a lot out of me that way, but they won’t find out where Rachel and Holly have gone, because I won’t know. Once these people figure that out, I’ll be of no more value to them. At which point they’ll probably kill me, if they’re stupid—but they’re not stupid. So what I expect them to do is send me home, and watch me for the rest of my life, in the hope Rachel shows up at my door someday.” He paused. Now that it came to saying the last part, he found he had to force the words. “For her sake, she can never do that.”

Rachel started to shake her head, but stopped herself, and a moment later she was simply crying, saying nothing at all. Dryden realized why: She couldn’t even have a bit of denial to comfort herself with. Not with the thoughts of every adult at the table washing over her. Their awful agreement with what Dryden had said. There was nothing for her to do but sit there and take it. Dryden pulled her against himself, and she held on as if the patio were going to drop out from under her.

For more than a minute, no one spoke. Then, by silent agreement, Holly and Marsh and Harris stood from the table. They wandered off to leave the two of them alone.

Dryden found himself focusing on taking in the moment: Rachel in his arms, her face against his shoulder. The details he would come back to for the rest of his life—he had to experience them as much as he could, this last time they would ever be real.

“You know there’s another way this could go,” Rachel whispered. There was more in her voice than the strain of tears. There was an edge there—a trace of the other Rachel.

“Yes, I know,” Dryden said.

“I could take it to these people, instead of hiding. I could hole up in D.C., a mile from the Capitol, and get into the heads of everyone who helps these companies. I wouldn’t need to kill anyone. There are lots of ways I could end their careers. Make them buy drugs and get caught. Make them say the wrong word near an open microphone. Make them tear off their clothes on a street corner and scream at the traffic. I could rip their lives to pieces without hurting a hair on their heads. If their replacements are no better, I could get rid of them, too. I could do it forever.”

“It wouldn’t be wrong, either,” Dryden said. “It’s exactly what they deserve. But it’s not what you deserve—that life.” He eased her away from his shoulder and tilted her face up to his own. The edge was in her gaze, too. The ghost of what she’d been, all those lost years. “What you deserve is a childhood,” Dryden said. “And I mean for you to have one.”

Rachel nodded, blinking as new tears formed. They seemed to clear her eyes of everything that didn’t belong there.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

The plan unfolded two days later, at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. Marsh booked a small hearing room on the fifth floor, for three in the afternoon. He accompanied Dryden into the building an hour beforehand, ushering him through the security checkpoint.

“Thanks for this,” Dryden said. “You really will lose your job over it.”

“If I’m losing it for finally doing the right thing, I guess that should give me a moment of pause.”

“Thanks, all the same. I’ll owe you one. That’s not just a figure of speech, coming from me. If there’s something I can help you with, someday, get in touch.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

*   *   *

At 2:58 Dryden stood alone in a small hallway behind the dais of the hearing room. He listened to the murmur of the crowd in the seats; Marsh had invited more than forty people, the most powerful he could get. Among them were six senators, nine representatives, four cabinet officials, and staffers for all of them. They’d been told only that the event was a presentation related to intelligence-gathering technology, which was true in a roundabout way.

2:59.

Close enough.

Dryden stepped through the doorway into the chamber, and the buzz of voices died away. He crossed to the podium at the center of the dais and faced the crowd. Behind and above him, a projector screen showed a bright white expanse—the empty first slide of a PowerPoint presentation.

For a long moment Dryden said nothing. He kept his expression blank and stood there, letting the crowd get a good look at his face.

The expected reaction kicked in at three seconds. A woman near the front narrowed her eyes, then turned and spoke quietly to the man beside her. The man, still staring at Dryden, suddenly flinched.

By ten seconds everyone had picked up on it, either on their own or by way of being told. Everywhere in the crowd, heads swiveled, looking for the exits, or maybe an authority figure of some kind.

“You recognize me,” Dryden said.

The whisper of voices died again. All eyes settled on him.

“I’m the guy with the dirty bomb,” Dryden continued. “I’m also dead. Two good reasons I shouldn’t be standing here.”

The remote for the projector lay atop the podium. Dryden picked it up and pressed the
SLIDE ADVANCE
button. His own face filled the screen above him—the so-called composite image that had gone out on the airwaves back when the manhunt began.

“My name is Sam Dryden,” he said. He pressed the
ADVANCE
button again, and the composite was replaced by the original version of the photo. Bright colors instead of grayscale. A smile instead of a deadpan. Trish beside him, and the Embarcadero and San Francisco Bay behind him, instead of empty space.

Confusion filtered through the crowd.

“Here’s a few more, for the hell of it,” Dryden said.

He pressed the button five times in slow succession, cycling through the other snapshots that had captured that moment. Trish was blinking in one of them, Dryden in another.

“You and the rest of the world were lied to about this,” Dryden said. “In the coming weeks or months, it may happen again.”

Another press of the button. A photo of Holly and Rachel came up, taken with a disposable camera in Galveston after they’d left the café.

The next photo was a closer shot of their faces.

“Get a good look,” Dryden said. “Somewhere down the road, if CNN says there’s a woman running around with weaponized smallpox, you might see one or both of these faces in the coverage.”

In the crowd, Dryden began to see the second reaction he’d expected. The split. In almost every set of eyes there was only confusion, but in a few he saw other things: concern, tension, calculation. The eyes of people who weren’t confused at all. As Dryden watched, those people traded looks with one another. Two or three of them took out cell phones.

Not much time left now.

“I don’t expect most of you to believe the next thing I’m going to tell you,” Dryden said. “I wouldn’t believe it, in your place. But if this woman or this girl become the subject of a manhunt next month, or next year, you’ll have to wonder, won’t you? You might even sit down with a friend from
The New York Times
and have a long chat about it.”

He saw the calls begin to connect. Men cupped their hands over their phones and spoke urgently.

How long did he have? Two minutes? One?

Well, that would do. He’d rehearsed the bullet points with a stopwatch. He had the spiel down to thirty-five seconds—time enough to rattle off names and places and locations, and repeat them so that no one would forget.

He got all the way through it twice before the Capitol Police stormed the room.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Sam Dryden’s house in El Sedero stood empty for more than seven weeks. The lawn grew out of control. The entry floor beneath the mail slot piled up with flyers and credit card offers and bills. Neighbors knocked on the doors and tried to see in through the windows, but all the shades were drawn. In seven weeks, no relatives showed up to see about him. No friends.

*   *   *

It was foggy the night he came back. He stepped out of the taxicab with nothing in his hands, and walked up the concrete path to his front door. The key was behind the cedar shake next to the light, where he’d left it.

As soon as he stepped inside, the smell hit him. Flies buzzed in a cloud above the kitchen wastebasket, and all the drain traps had evaporated, letting in air from the sewer.