Evening came to the forest and brought with it a change of soundtrack, from chaotic birdsong to the sedate rhythm of a billion insects. Dryden sat on the small porch of the cabin and watched the shadows deepen among the sequoias. Through the open door he could hear Rachel breathing softly in her sleep. If she began speaking, it would take only seconds to step inside and switch on the audio recorder next to her.
The cabin, a simple one-room structure, was an old Fish and Game Department outpost Dryden had found while backpacking, years earlier. Department field workers probably stayed in it a few nights a year; the rest of the time it was left unlocked for the use of any backcountry hiker that happened by. No harm in that—there was nothing of value kept inside. Dryden sat with his back against the exterior wall, waiting for answers to emerge from Rachel’s dreams.
For the first hour that she’d slept, Dryden had sat on the floor next to her sleeping bag, though for reasons that had little to do with listening in on her. He was concerned with keeping her from hurting herself: The drug they’d used on her worked by inhibiting something called REM atonia, a kind of natural sleep paralysis—the body’s own countermeasure against sleepwalking. Under the drug, that paralysis was blocked. Subjects would act out their dreams: moving their limbs, which wasn’t helpful for interrogators, and moving their lips, which was.
Sleep interrogation wasn’t especially new. Dryden had heard firsthand accounts of the practice going back forty years or more, with older and less sophisticated narcotics. The principle had always been the same, though: Get the subject dreaming, get him talking, and then interact with him. Try to influence the dream by suggestion. Dryden had seen interrogators sit at bedsides and whisper in Farsi or Arabic, pretending to be a subject’s brother or father or son. Subtlety was everything. Dreams were fragile, evanescent things; the surest way to end one was to let the subject realize he was dreaming.
Rachel had less than the normal dose of the drug in her system right now, but there was no question she still had some of it left in her. It took forever for the kidneys to filter the stuff out of the blood. The subjects Dryden had seen during his years with Ferret had always been tied to their beds for at least one more night after their last interrogation session. In almost all cases they moved and talked that extra night, if only a little. Sometimes the interrogator would try to get a bit more out of them on those occasions; why not?
Dryden turned and looked in on Rachel. She lay on one side with the sleeping bag pulled up around her chin.
So many questions. Who was she, really? Where had she come from, before her time in that building in El Sedero? Did she have a family somewhere? Did she have anyone? Rachel herself had rattled these questions off before lying down, and then she’d surprised Dryden.
Don’t ask me any of those things in my sleep. Like you said, if this works at all, it’ll be just barely. You might only have time for a question or two. I can wait a week to find out who I am. Just ask about the other stuff.
When she’d said it, the fear beneath her expression had been palpable. Above the edge of her sleeping bag, her face was relaxed now. Soft features, untroubled. The face of a child, at last. Part of Dryden hoped she’d just sleep through the night. She sure as hell deserved to.
Less than a hundred yards from the cabin, a jay scolded and flew from a low branch. Dryden turned fast and studied the place it had flown from. He watched for movement, more out of instinct than any real fear that Gaul could have tracked them here. Dryden’s precautions had been a few degrees beyond paranoid, even under these circumstances.
For starters, there was nothing to link him to this location. His hiking trips had always been personal outings, never related to his military service—wilderness training or anything else on record. Of all the documents in Dryden’s past for Gaul to dig up, there could be nothing to indicate he’d ever been to Sequoia National Park, much less to this nameless little structure more than a mile from any marked trail. There was simply no way anyone could know he and Rachel were here.
Yet Dryden kept his eyes on the spot from which the jay had fled.
A fern swayed.
It wasn’t the wind; the weeds around it were still.
The pistol, a SIG SAUER P-226, was two feet from Dryden’s hand, on a shelf inside the door.
The fern shook harder, and then a fox kit sprang from it, tackled a second later by its sibling. They wrestled in the clear patch for a few seconds, then tumbled into brush on the far side.
Dryden let his nerves rest. It felt nice, if only for a minute, to see the forest the way he might have seen it as a kid. Or as a father. Erin would have been six years old this month, maybe a little young to come out here backpacking overnight, but not by much.
His mind sometimes made a picture of her, the way she might look now. He imagined her standing here under the sequoias, staring up with her eyes wide, feeling six inches tall.