Rachel shook her head. “It was never them questioning me. What I heard in his thoughts was that he and the others always had to leave the building as soon as the drugs knocked me out, and that other people would be coming in to question me. Those people would always be gone before I woke up. The blond man and the others had no idea who they were—never even saw them. So I had no way of knowing what I’d said in my sleep.” She was quiet for a second. “I guess that all sounds pretty strange to you.”
Dryden watched the highway. What Rachel had said didn’t sound strange at all. Dryden could name three different narcotic agents that had the effects she’d described. He’d seen each of them used on people, time and again. All three carried the side effect Rachel now suffered: a roadblock in the memory, usually lodged right at the point when the drugs were first administered.
Rachel turned to him. He glanced at her and saw her eyebrows knit toward each other—confusion at what she’d just heard in his thoughts.
“There’s a lot about me I’ll have to explain to you sometime,” Dryden said. “If you want to know.”
She nodded and faced forward again.
“This information they were trying to get from you,” Dryden said. “It sounds like it scares you.”
Rachel nodded again, and Dryden heard the same tremor in her breath he’d heard before.
“Why are you afraid of it?” he asked.
“Because they were afraid. The blond man, and the others there, the soldiers. They didn’t know anything themselves, but they knew other people who had some of the details. Other people who worked for Gaul, higher up. And whatever the information is that’s in my head, those people are terrified of it. They’re scared the way people get when it comes to really big things. Like diseases. Like wars. It’s like there’s … something coming.”
The chill in the girl’s voice seemed to radiate into Dryden’s bones.
“That’s it,” Rachel said. “That’s all I know about it. And I’m scared.”
Before Dryden could ask anything else, a new set of headlights appeared in the mirror, far back along the freeway. The newcomer changed lanes to pass another vehicle, moving fast.
Rachel reacted—either to Dryden’s sudden alertness or to the thoughts beneath it. She turned and leaned forward and looked into the passenger side mirror.
Dryden kept his eyes on his own mirror, watching the road ahead only as much as he had to. The new arrival slipped through the headlights of the vehicle it’d passed, becoming a silhouette for a fleeting moment.
It looked like a van.
*
Gaul watched the F-150, its engine compartment and cab lit up in ghostly blue-white thermal, from three separate viewing angles. A fourth Miranda had a wider view, which included the van containing Curren and the team. The van was closing distance easily, and there was no sign that Sam Dryden had spotted the pursuers. The pickup maintained its speed.
Gaul’s cell phone rang; it was Hollings, the man he’d assigned to dig into the classified part of Dryden’s background. Gaul ignored the call; nothing in the world mattered right now as much as the drama about to unfold on these monitors, hopefully with brutal speed and efficiency. Dryden was a well-trained soldier, but all the training in the world couldn’t counter the odds he faced. Curren and his team were six men with state-of-the-art weapons and training, and the element of surprise.
The van closed to within five hundred yards. There was no escape.
The cell phone quit ringing.
*
Dryden watched the van close in. It had slowed a bit after first appearing, maybe to keep from standing out, but had still halved its distance in the past sixty seconds.
“How did they find us?” Rachel asked.
Dryden thought of the unformed suspicion he’d felt earlier, when he was listening for a helicopter. Now it took shape fully in his mind. He’d overlooked the answer initially; he hadn’t known that anyone as powerful as Gaul was involved.
“They’re using a satellite,” he said. “Maybe more than one.”
He sorted through the implications of that fact, trying to stay rational even as the van closed in. Depending on how good Gaul’s birds were, he and his techs might be able to watch the entire conflict that was about to unfold. In that case, it would be no use stopping and fleeing on foot into the hills; thermal satellite cameras would easily follow them, and Gaul could direct his men on the ground accordingly. In fact, any kind of escape would be pointless as long as the pursuers were in any shape to follow. That left a limited range of options, none of them friendly.
Dryden felt old mental tricks coming back to him. Ways of keeping his pulse down and his mind cold. The sensation was strangely pleasant, like the bass rhythm of a song not heard in years.
“I’m getting a reassuring vibe from you,” Rachel said, “but I have to wonder why you’re still going the speed limit.”