At more than seventy miles per hour.
All that was left was the physics: mass, momentum, friction, velocity, no forgiveness in any of it. The van’s front end dug into the guardrail, and its tail swung outward. It spun more than 360 degrees, and then its tires got a grip on the pavement when the vehicle was more or less sideways, pitching it into a tumble along the freeway. In the mirror, Dryden saw at least two bodies thrown from the vehicle, from what looked like an open side door.
All of this had happened within three seconds of Dryden hitting the brakes. For those same three seconds, the driver of the semi had been trying to stop—unsuccessfully. The semi plowed into the tumbling van and partially rolled up over it, finally grinding both the van and the semi to a stop in a shower of sparks. The van, which had ruptured its fuel tank at some point during its acrobatics, was ablaze by the time it slid to a halt.
Dryden stopped the pickup fifty yards beyond the wreckage. He stepped out onto the freeway and looked back. He saw the semi driver open his door, drop to the pavement, and run like hell, no doubt expecting the van to go off like a bomb. But the van’s fuel was mostly spread along the freeway, and what remained in the tank was already burning. Dryden squinted into the glare and saw the van’s occupants trapped inside, fully engulfed. The two who’d been thrown lay far from the wreck, on the asphalt. It was possible they were alive. It was not possible they would be of any use to Gaul in the near future, if ever again.
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.