Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (6 page)

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 tears. 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.

The one advantage Gaul could exploit was the degree to which satellites had improved in the years since Dryden had been familiar with them in Ferret. The Mirandas were orders of magnitude more powerful, and adaptable, than anything in the skies during Dryden’s service. He probably had a dodging move in mind, and it would probably be clever enough to fool any of the satellites he’d ever worked with. It would almost certainly not fool the Mirandas.

It was only necessary to keep Dryden in sight for another half hour at most, and then it would all be over. Gaul had already made the calls—he’d been on the phone before Curren’s van had even stopped tumbling—to get his second play off the ground, literally. Within minutes, an AH-6 Little Bird had lifted off from a pad in Los Alamitos. It was now speeding north across L.A. at 150 miles per hour, almost head-on toward Dryden, who was north of the city and coming south.

Gaul paced and silently berated himself for not sending the chopper earlier, when the girl had first gotten away. Had he done so, the damn thing could have been on-site above the pickup by the time things had gone bad on the freeway. But there had been no reason to think Curren could fail, once the Mirandas had located Rachel and her new friend. With all the stress over simply finding her, it hadn’t occurred to Gaul that the team might be defeated.

He sank into a chair before the bank of monitors running the Miranda feeds. One had a wide angle on the AH-6, crossing over Century City now. Three others were locked onto the speeding pickup containing Dryden and the girl. The truck was within a mile of its first chance to exit the freeway since El Sedero. Gaul’s techs looked up from their maps as the pickup closed in on it. They had compiled a list of possible places toward which Dryden might be headed, in order to ditch the satellites. The consensus was that Dryden would have to get underground somehow, into the basement of a large building, or even into a sewer tunnel. If he chose a large enough building, or a complex enough tunnel network, he would have his choice of dozens of possible exits, some of them separated by hundreds of yards. This was exactly the kind of move Gaul hoped he would make: overwhelming for a satellite from a few years ago, a cakewalk for the Mirandas.

On the monitors, the F-150 passed the exit without taking it. The techs immediately discarded two pages of material and focused on the exits farther ahead.

The software was continually updating the distance between Dryden and the AH-6, the two closing toward one another at a combined 230 miles per hour. If Dryden kept going south on the freeway, the chopper would intercept him that much sooner. Unfortunately, he’d reached a densely populated area, with half a dozen exits available in the next few miles.

Gaul stood and paced again. His own confidence unnerved him; he’d been confident that Curren would finish the job, after all, and as a result he’d been slow to make his next move. While it was close to impossible for Dryden to evade the Mirandas, prudence called for having a backup plan anyway. Gaul stepped into the corridor and called the D.C. number again. It was answered on the second ring.

“If Dryden gets free of these birds,” Gaul said, “he will vanish off the face of the earth. It won’t be worth the time to stake out the houses of old friends and relatives; he won’t make a mistake like that. He won’t make any mistake at all, and there’ll be no loose end for us to grab.”

“What’s your point?” the man asked. He sounded more awake. Limbered up by the alcohol, maybe.

“If we lose him, it’s going to take something extreme to get him back. We would have to turn the eyes of the civilized world on him. Do something guaranteed to command headlines for days.”

There was a silence on the other end. Gaul pictured the man moving away from listening ears.

“Do you have something in mind?” the man asked.

Gaul thought about it. “Roughly. Yes.”

“Tell me.”

Gaul explained it to him. He covered it in broad strokes in thirty seconds.

“If we do this and it goes badly,” the man said, “we’re in a lot of trouble.”

“We’re in more trouble if she gets away from us.”

Silence on the line. Gaul heard the man breathing.

“I’ll talk to Marsh at Homeland,” the man said. “Let me know when this goes from the back burner to the front.” He hung up before Gaul could reply.

Gaul returned to the computer room. The techs were animated, sending a flurry of command strings to the available Mirandas, all four of which were now targeted on the F-150.

“He’s off the freeway,” Lowry said. “Moving toward a cluster of five candidate locations. Highest probability is a four-story hospital, half a mile away.”

One of the Mirandas had already been tasked on the hospital; the software had pulled up the building’s schematics from a database. There were twelve exits, including one into an underground tunnel connecting to a second hospital across the street, which itself had seven exits. Between the two buildings, there were five access points into service tunnels below street level.

The other candidate buildings were almost as complex, and there would be no telling which Dryden would choose until the last moment. The very fact that he was moving toward them was a good sign, though. So far, he was doing as the techs had predicted.

“Come on, asshole,” Gaul said. “Step into the trap.”

*   *   *

Dryden coasted through the nearly empty streets. The sky was still ink black, the first hint of dawn probably an hour away. Ahead, the shapes of a few office midrises stood above a sprawl of low-slung buildings—shops, restaurants, warehouses.

He could feel the eyes of the satellites on him like crosshairs. Since leaving the wreck site, he’d thought of little else but the various spy platforms he’d worked with in Ferret—and the performance improvements he’d witnessed during those six years. Several more years had passed since then.

Rachel remained quiet. She sat with her hands in her lap, no doubt nervous but containing it well.

Just ahead, a green light went yellow. Dryden slowed and stopped.

“We’ll be where we’re going in less than a minute,” he said.

Rachel nodded. “I like your plan. It’s … different.”

“It has to be.”

Rachel stared forward through the windshield, looking for the destination.

“How do you know about this place?” she asked.

“My wife and I met there, when we were kids.”

“Is this going to be dangerous? I mean, for the people inside?”

Dryden shook his head. “They practice for this all the time, in case the real thing ever happens. This’ll be just another drill.”

“It’s going to make them really mad, though.”

“I’ll send them a donation when this is all over.”

“Let’s hope.”

*   *   *

On the monitors, the pickup got moving again, rolling through the intersection. It coasted along for another thirty seconds, then slowed and pulled to the curb. It was three blocks shy of the hospital, and no closer to any other building the techs had predicted. Instantly they started shuffling their handwritten notes while Lowry pulled up database programs, frantically trying to identify the building Dryden had stopped in front of.

The pickup’s doors opened; Dryden and the girl emerged, already running. They sprinted up the long walkway toward the building’s main entrance. Gaul stared at the monitor showing the widest image of the place. Its layout and profile suggested a single-story hotel: long hallways lined with small rooms. The satellites could roughly image the shapes of bodies inside, reading the infrared right through the roof. The clarity was starkly reduced, to something like a view through pebbled glass, but was still good enough to establish the size and outline of each figure.

All appeared to be asleep, understandably at this hour.

Gaul leaned closer to the nearest monitor. Something about the sleepers bothered him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

“Got it,” Lowry said. “It’s a boarding school.”

The techs traded looks. What the hell kind of place was that to dodge the satellites?

Gaul suddenly understood what had caught his attention about the sleepers: They were small. They were all kids.

“Oh shit,” Gaul said.

*   *   *

The doors would all be locked, of course. It didn’t matter. Getting in quietly was not the point, and in fact couldn’t have been further from it. Midsprint, Dryden stooped and picked up a heavy landscaping rock from beside the walkway. As he and Rachel reached the entrance, he heaved it through the glass-block window beside the left door. The suddenly empty frame was too narrow for Dryden to slip through, but Rachel made it easily. A second later she opened the door from inside.

They ran to the nearest hallway intersection, and then Dryden stopped, turning to her.

“You know what to do?” he asked.

Rachel nodded.

“Alright,” Dryden said. “When you get outside, run in the direction we were driving—that’s east. I’ll meet you five blocks from here. But even then, we’re going to keep distance between us for a while.”

“I understand,” she said.

He patted her on the shoulder. “Let’s make some noise.”

They split up down the divergent corridors. Dryden spotted a fire alarm handle twenty yards ahead, but even before he could reach it, the calm was shredded by the hundred-decibel bass drone of the alarm system. Rachel had beaten him to it.

*   *   *

Gaul didn’t need audio to know what was happening. Every sleeper in the building jolted awake in perfect unison. It was a surreal thing to watch from an overhead view. Within seconds they flooded into the hallways.

Just like that, the Rachel shape was lost in a sea of similar shapes. Dryden should have been easier to distinguish, being taller than the kids, but with enough people in a confined space, the hallways became solid rivers of blue-white thermal glow. Worse, the shapes of other adults—teachers or whoever the hell lived there full-time—were now converging from various wings of the school, seeking to manage the chaos. There would be no way to distinguish them from Dryden when the crowd exited the building.

*   *   *

Dryden moved among the flood of kids making their way to the nearest exits. As he did, he heard the message that was spreading through the crowd far faster than anyone could walk. Spreading from person to person like a blast wave from its point of origin—wherever Rachel had begun saying it:
It’s not a fire. It’s a gas leak. Get as far from the building as you can.

*   *   *

Gaul stood back and watched it all come apart. People were leaving the school en masse and running away. Had they stopped at a distance of a block or two, the Mirandas could have probably kept track of them as a group and noted any stragglers leaving its outskirts. That would have enabled them to spot Rachel and Dryden.

The fleeing kids and teachers weren’t stopping after a block or two, though, or even five. And secondary effects were kicking in now: People in other buildings, seeing the evacuation in progress—third-shift workers, early arrivals—were joining in the flight.

The search area was simply too large, and too busy. It was information overload, for the satellites and for the techs.

“This is fucked,” Lowry said. His hands flew over the keyboard, commanding the birds to widen their frames. “Aren’t kids supposed to just line up outside when there’s a fire drill? That’s how we did it at my school.”