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.