“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.
Dryden tied off the trash bag and hauled it out, ran the taps, and then opened every window in the place. Moist night air pressed through the house, scented with evergreens and sea salt.
In the master bath he disrobed and studied himself in the mirror. He’d lost ten or fifteen pounds, and there were faint red marks where the shock paddles had touched his skin. He stared at the beard he’d grown, ragged and unkempt beneath the hollows of his eyes, then opened the vanity drawer where he kept his razors and shaving cream.
An hour later, showered and dressed in clean clothes, he walked the rooms of his home. The smell of decay was gone, but he kept the windows open. He tried to remember the last time he’d opened any of them, in all the years he’d lived here, but couldn’t recall a single time. How often had he even bothered to pull up the shades?
When he finally closed all the sashes again, the house’s silence surprised him. Had it always been like this? So dead that every metal tick of the air ducts stood out?
He went to his bedroom and stretched out on the sheets. Exhausted as he was, it took forever for sleep to find him.
*
He stood on the wet sand margin of the beach, watching the sunset. The day had been hazy, and the sun was deep red by the time it touched the horizon.
Behind him was the boardwalk, and up and down the shore, campfires burned. There was a dog barking, a couple hundred yards up the beach. Little kids were throwing a Frisbee for it to catch.