Runner (Sam Dryden Novel)

by Patrick Lee

  He had no gun, and nothing heavy with which to shatter the pane. His search for a solution was interrupted by the ruffle and snap of a parachute opening, and not his own. He turned to see a slim figure—it could only be Audrey—hanging from the lines of a second chute. It had opened less than a hundred feet above, and sixty feet out from the tower. Audrey was turning and coming around now, not fighting the wind but seizing it.

  It was clear within seconds that Audrey’s control of the parachute was that of a master. While Dryden had made over two hundred jumps in his life, and could land on ground targets with the best of them, Audrey’s movements spoke of a specialized skill level, an acrobatic ability that came from years of narrowly focused training.

  There’s one other reason to live here, Audrey had told him, but if you’re lucky you won’t have to find out what it is.

  He understood. What other type of residence offered such a dynamic and unexpected escape route? All three of them—Audrey and Sandra, at the very least—had probably made a hundred aircraft jumps or more, in every kind of wind, until the controls of a chute were like extensions of their own bodies.

  This was about to go bad.

  He looked at Rachel again and found her eyes fluttering open, fixing on him. He could tell she’d read the danger in his mind.

  “It’s not too late,” she whispered. “You can let me go.”

  Her gaze went past him for a moment, beyond his shoulder to the wide-open drop.

  Dryden pulled her face against his own, cheek to cheek, and just held on. He felt her tears spilling onto his temple, exactly where the chill always touched it.

  A second later he heard the chute ruffle again. He looked up. Audrey had put herself into a dive; she stayed in it until she was almost lateral to their position, then pulled up and swung directly toward them. Twenty feet out and coming in fast.

  Dryden readied himself. He’d killed with his hands before, but never while lying on a narrow ledge, forty stories up, with a child in his arms.

  Audrey brought her feet up in the final seconds, coming toward Dryden like a battering ram. He raised his arm to block, knowing it would have almost no effect. Audrey’s left boot came into his viewpoint, connecting with his cheekbone hard enough to make the world flash white. Then she was atop him, kneeling right on Rachel, raining blows against Dryden’s face with some heavy steel tool in her hand. Blood everywhere now, in his mouth, his eyes.

  With his left arm he blocked one of Audrey’s blows and blindly got hold of her wrist. He sent his other fist into her face; with deep satisfaction he felt her nose disintegrate beneath it in a shower of blood. She screamed. Then she took the tool into her other hand and landed the heaviest blow yet, right behind his ear. His muscles failed almost instantly; he felt like he was buried in sand and trying to move. It was all he could do to stay conscious.

  He felt Rachel’s limp weight torn away from him, and then she was gone, along with Audrey.

  He blinked, raised one lead-filled arm, and palmed the blood away from his eyes. Audrey had pushed off from the building and was gliding away. She held Rachel in one arm and with the other fastened a strap around the girl and locked her in place. Then she took to the controls again, spilling air out of the canopy and making what looked like a suicidal dive for the street.

  Gaul’s three ground vehicles covered the last block on Michigan Avenue and swung around the corner, only to be confronted by the blazing roadblock of the downed AH-6. The vehicles made no attempt to look for survivors in the wreck; they tried to nose around it instead, but the strewn metal covered the entire path, from the base of one building to the other, with pooled fuel burning under all of it. The vehicles could not get through.

  Audrey reached the street in less than twenty seconds, pulling up from the dive and flaring the chute for a soft landing. She released the harness the moment her feet touched, and the freed canopy drifted away down the street like a ghost. As Dryden watched, she set Rachel on the pavement, then used the steel tool to pry up a manhole cover. She lowered Rachel inside, followed her down, and replaced the lid behind her. Obviously, she would be prepared. She would have the tunnel system memorized, and a vehicle staged somewhere, ready to go.

  Gaul’s vehicles didn’t reach the manhole until nearly a minute after Audrey had entered it. She and Rachel were gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The team that had landed on the building’s roof got to Dryden first. They entered the office, broke the window, and hauled him in. They zip-tied his wrists and ankles. As they did, he got a look at their weaponry: 9 mm Berettas holstered on their hips, but tranquilizer rifles slung on their shoulders. Looking back, he thought the sniper on the helicopter had been aiming the same kind of rifle.

  They took him down to the SUVs and shoved him into the back of one. He asked them nothing and they volunteered nothing. He expected the vehicles to swing back south onto Michigan Avenue and return to the Willis Tower, but they didn’t. They went north instead, finally turning west on a street called Division. Three minutes later they got onto I-94 heading northwest out of the city, toward the glow of O’Hare on the horizon.

  * * *

  “Blink S-O-S for me.”

  The medic—the man who seemed to be a medic, anyway—was leaning toward him, carefully watching his responses.

  Dryden blinked S-O-S.

  “Touch the tip of your tongue to the center of your front teeth.”

  Dryden did.

  “Are you having any double vision?”

  Dryden shook his head.

  “Are the lights in here causing any pain in your eyes?”

  Dryden shook his head again.

  He was seated in the cabin of a large private jet. It was pushing back from its hangar now, its turbofans whining. The predawn sprawl of the giant airport rotated past the nearest window.

  His wrists and ankles were still zip-tied. He was secured to the seat as well, by a strap encircling his torso and the backrest. Across the aisle, ahead of and behind him, the men with the dart guns sat watching.

  “Look directly into the overhead lights for me and count to three,” the medic said.

  Dryden did. He squinted against the glare. Everything about it felt normal.

  “No likely concussion,” the medic said, mostly to himself.

  One of the gunmen took out a phone and dialed. He waited. Then he said, “We’re a minute from wheels up, sir.” Five seconds passed. “Copy that. We’ll have him ready when you get there.”

  * * *

  There turned out to be Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C. The jet touched down and taxied for a long time, winding its way among hangars and maintenance buildings. The structure it finally stopped near, Dryden couldn’t identify. It was single-story but sprawling. It had poured concrete walls and no windows. The men unbound his ankles, left his wrists tied, and led him off the plane into the early sunlight. They walked him into the building through the only door he could see in its wall; it opened on a sterile white corridor with a few doorways on either side. They guided him through the first one on the left, into a room the size of a basketball court. There were long metal tables here and there, folding chairs clustered around a few of them. There were aluminum-and-canvas cots stowed against a wall. The men grabbed one and locked its legs into position. They set Dryden down on it and zipped his ankles again.

  “Sleep if you can,” one of them said.

  Two stayed behind to guard him. They took chairs from the tables and sat next to the door. The others left and closed the door behind them.

  Dryden shut his eyes.

  * * *

  Footsteps in the corridor. Dryden came awake in time to see the two men stand from their chairs. A second later the door swung inward, and a man in his fifties walked into the room. Athletic build. Black windbreaker over khaki slacks and an oxford shirt. Dryden got the impression the guy had been a soldier once but had been something else for a long time since.

  “Martin Gaul,�
� Dryden said.

  The man nodded. Behind him, half a dozen men entered the room. Some of them carried computer equipment: a ruggedized tower case, a keyboard, a big flat-panel display. They got to work setting it up on the nearest of the metal tables.

  Last through the door was a man who reacted to the sight of Dryden’s bruised face.

  “Christ, Sam.”

  Cole Harris crossed to the cot and crouched beside it. He looked the same as he had the last time Dryden had seen him, a few months before. Six foot three, built like a tree trunk, the same haircut he’d had since basic training.

  “Fuckers could’ve cleaned you up, at least,” Harris said.

  “They checked me for a concussion. Nice of them, I guess.”

  “Do me a favor,” Harris said.

  “What?”

  “Tell these guys everything. Every detail, the last three days. Everything you know.”

  “I’d like to know what you know,” Dryden said.

  “You will. They’re going to tell you.”

  At the table, Gaul’s men had the display turned on. It showed a blank blue screen while they set up the computer.

  Gaul came over to the cot.

  “Why don’t you get these off him?” Harris said, indicating the zip-ties. “I don’t think he’s going to go next door and steal Air Force One.”

  Gaul nodded. He gestured to one of the men at the door.

  * * *

  It took an hour to detail the three days. Dryden left out Dena Sobel’s name, along with anything that could allow her to be identified, but otherwise withheld nothing. While he spoke, Harris stepped out and came back with paper towels and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. He dabbed at the cuts and the swelling and cleared off the congealed blood.

  When Dryden had finished, Gaul sat staring at nothing for a long time. He seemed to be marshaling his thoughts, preparing what he had to say.

  “Why were your men armed with tranquilizer guns in Chicago?” Dryden asked. “Up until then you’d been trying to kill Rachel.”

  “And you along with her,” Gaul said.

  If there was any apology in the man’s tone, Dryden missed it.

  “Let me just run through it in order,” Gaul said. “It’s best for me if you’re up to speed, and”—he glanced at Harris—“in any case, your friend insisted on it.”

  Harris nodded.

  “So here are the bullet points,” Gaul said. “I’m the head of a defense contractor, Belding-Milner. Our major rival is a company called Western Dynamics, and in the field of genetic R&D, they’ve been ahead of us for years. Two months ago I got Rachel in my custody; she was a remnant of the original military research, years back, that both of our companies had based their work on. Rachel was a valuable object to study. It wasn’t just about what she was; it also mattered what she knew. She and her two friends—I guess you met them—had been shadowing our two companies for years, keeping up on our progress. Easy enough for mind readers to do that, and they had good reason to: We might have developed things we could use against them, for one. In any case, when my people interrogated Rachel, she had no reason to hold back what she knew about our rival. She didn’t care if we learned that stuff. She told us all about them, including something new they had in development. Not just the antenna sites, and the current testing being done with them. Something else.”

  “Something everyone’s afraid of,” Dryden said.

  Gaul nodded. “You’ll understand why, when I get to it. You’ll also know why Rachel’s friends didn’t want to tell her about it. It’s tied pretty tightly to her own past. The people behind it—the thing everyone’s scared of—are actually afraid to use it while Rachel is alive. They think she might be able to affect it in some way, and I think they’re probably right. That was why the government ordered me to kill her. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but it wasn’t my call.”

  “Just following orders,” Dryden said. “Nice defense.”

  Harris chuckled. Gaul showed no reaction at all.

  “I do what I do,” Gaul said. “After you and Rachel escaped El Sedero, I brought the head of Homeland Security on board, because I needed his help. I hoped he’d see the situation my way. And he did. For a while.”

  “What do you mean?” Dryden asked.

  Harris spoke up. “Head of Homeland’s a guy named Dennis Marsh. Turned out he had a little bit of conscience still sloshing in the tank. He went along with the bullshit, setting up the manhunt for you, Sam, but he also looked into your background. He got in touch with me and a few others from the unit. He got in touch with Holly Ferrel, too. The guy was right on the fence, with what was happening to you and Rachel. Like he just needed a good push to do the right thing. Maybe some backup, too. We obliged. All of us, including Holly and Marsh himself, contacted Gaul and told him the game was going to change. This was the night before last.”

  Dryden thought about it. That would’ve been the night he and Rachel had waited in the empty apartment near Holly’s place. The night Rachel had heard Holly rehearsing a phone call to Martin Gaul.

  “What’s Holly’s role in all this?” Dryden asked.

  “You can ask her yourself soon enough,” Gaul said.

  Dryden caught something in his voice. Petulance, it sounded like—that sharp little fragment of childhood some people held on to forever.

  “We’re prepared to go public with every inch of this mess,” Harris said. He was speaking to Dryden, but the hard edge in his voice seemed to be for Gaul’s benefit. “We’re not stupid; we don’t expect to prevent the rollout of this technology, but we damn well mean to stop it from squashing one of our friends.”

  The childish look stayed in Gaul’s eyes a second longer, and then he shoved it away and looked at Dryden. “So there it is. The game change is that you don’t die, and neither does Rachel, or else I get a world of attention I’d rather avoid. Okay. I can bloom where I’m planted.”

  Gaul went to the table where the techs had set up the computer. On-screen, the Windows desktop was strewn with shortcut icons. He clicked one, and a photo slideshow player filled the screen. The first image was a simple white background with black text. It read FT. DETRICK—08 JUNE 2008.

  For the moment Gaul made no move to advance to the next picture.

  “There’s a lot you’d better know about Rachel,” Gaul said, “if we’re going to do what your friends have in mind. So here we go.”

  Gaul stood there thinking a moment longer.

  At last he said, “She’s a knockout. Your assumption about what it means is exactly right. The research goes back to long before Rachel was born. It started with gibbons in the biowarfare lab at Detrick, in 1990. They’d been doing sensory deprivation tests on these animals, keeping them in enclosures that were perfectly soundproof, lightproof, everything. Lab workers noticed that some of them—about five percent—somehow reacted to agitation of other gibbons in nearby labs. They reacted even while shut up in these sensory boxes, which should’ve made it impossible for them to be aware of the agitation in the first place.”

  Gaul paced away from the computer. “Well, you already know how they were aware of it. At Detrick they didn’t know for another five or six years—not until genome sequencing got cheap enough to be widely applied. They found that the special gibbons, the ones that could react from inside sensory chambers, were naturally missing a gene called NP20. That gene suppresses a much older complex of genes: genes that we think allowed ancient, precursor animals to read each other’s alpha waves—brain activity.”

  “The same thing an EEG machine reads,” Dryden said.

  Gaul nodded. “If the gibbon is born without NP20, or has it knocked out with a drug, then those older genes are no longer suppressed. They become active genes, and they start altering synaptic patterns in the brain, creating structures that act like natural receivers and transmitters. They let primates read one another’s neural activity. Those same genes, the ones that code for mind reading in gibbons, exist in all the higher prima
tes, too. Chimps. Gorillas. Human beings. We also have NP20 to block them, but where gibbons have only NP20, we have three extra genes that do the same job it does. Like redundant safeties on a bomb. Our evolution seems to have made a point of keeping us out of each other’s heads.”

  “But why?” Dryden said. “Why would we evolve away from something like that?”

  “We can only guess,” Gaul said, “but I think our guesses are pretty good. Alpha-wave reading probably started tens of millions of years ago, among the ancestors of modern primates. Maybe it was a kind of predator alarm, a way to spread a warning through the group without the risk of making noise. Easy to see the benefit in that. The running guess, though, is that mind reading carried a downside later on, when these animals started getting smarter. Fast-forward to gibbons, with social hierarchies and long-term memory, complex rivalries and emotions, and maybe it’s not a great idea to hear each other’s thoughts. In humans, capable of things like holding grudges for life, it might be a disaster.” Gaul’s face took on a kind of weariness. “Rachel’s a beautiful example.”

  “What are you talking about?” Dryden asked.

  “You need to know, first, what sets Rachel apart. Why she’s different than Audrey or Sandra, or anyone else they ever had at Detrick. Rachel can do a lot more than just read minds.” Gaul was looking at his hands. Now he looked up and met Dryden’s eyes. “You may already know about her other ability, without realizing it. Going by what you told us a few minutes ago, you’ve seen it in action yourself.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Both Gaul and Harris were watching him now, waiting for his response. He didn’t have one. He had no idea what Gaul was talking about.

  “You said someone gave you two a ride out of Fresno,” Gaul said. “You and Rachel were in the trunk. A police officer demanded to search it, and then for no obvious reason he just gave up and waved the driver through.”

  “I thought it was strange,” Dryden said. “What does it have to do with Rachel?”