He crossed the porch, stepped to the ground, and knelt over the officer. The man was still breathing, but Dryden could tell from the sound that his lungs were shredded. They were filling with blood. The guy had a minute at most.
There was a 9 mm on the cop’s hip. Dryden popped the holster strap, pulled the gun out, and slid it far from the man’s reach. As he did, he saw the guy’s head move. Dryden met his eyes just as they opened and fixed on him.
He thought to ask the man if he was alone, then decided it was a waste of fading seconds; if there was another cop within a hundred yards, there’d be bullets coming out of the woods already.
The officer struggled to take a breath. When he let it out, his body was racked with a violent coughing fit. Blood came out of his mouth; it looked black in the moonlight.
“How did you find us?” Dryden asked.
“Hiker saw your car … trailhead. You stupid fuck.”
“How would a hiker know to look for it?”
The cop’s voice grew fainter on each word. “Whole world’s looking for it. You were on TV all day.”
Dryden sat back on his knees, as if pushed by the force of the strange information.
“On TV for what?”
“You know for what,” the cop said. Another coughing fit seized him, worse than the first. When it ended, his breathing went fast and shallow. Then it stopped. The man convulsed once and went still. Gone.
Dryden stood and turned toward the cabin. Rachel was standing in the doorway, shaking; she couldn’t take her eyes off the body.
“Rachel—”
Dryden stopped himself.
He turned and listened.
The sound was right at the edge of his hearing. Rising and falling against the night wind. Then it solidified, and there was no doubting it.
Rotors. Far away but coming in. The drumming reverberated off the mountains on both sides of the valley, masking its direction and even its distance. It didn’t matter. It was already too close. Dryden went to Rachel and turned her face away from the dead man. He spoke softly but urgently.
“They’re coming,” he said. “We need to go.”
She nodded, still looking dazed. Dryden stepped past her into the cabin, put the SIG in its holster, and clipped it around his waist. Then he picked up the duffel bag containing the two emergency items from Visalia. The last thing he took was the audio recorder; he put it in his front pocket and left the sleeping bags and other gear behind.
Rachel, already following his lead and putting on her shoes, indicated the duffel bag in his hand. “Shouldn’t we get those out now?”
“Not yet,” Dryden said. He went to the doorway and listened to the drumbeat of the incoming chopper, so much louder already. “Not just yet.”
Rachel finished tying her shoes, and they left the cabin at a run.
*
Gaul was ready to put a chair through a window. He went so far as to pick one up, then slammed it back down, his hands gripping the armrests hard enough to whiten his knuckles.
He was in the computer lab again. The window, spared for the moment, looked out on the same L.A. nightscape as his private balcony upstairs.
Lowry and the others were at their stations. They sat transfixed by what the Mirandas were showing from four separate angles. Dryden and the girl were sprinting through trackless backcountry in Sequoia National Park while the body of the officer cooled in the dirt far behind them.
Gaul’s people had been explicit in their instructions to local authorities, from the moment the hiker’s tip had come in: They were not to interfere. Apparently this one hadn’t been able to resist getting his name on Fox News. Well, mission accomplished.
The element of surprise was gone. Granted, it wouldn’t have lasted much longer anyway; Dryden still would have heard the chopper coming. But he wouldn’t have known it was hostile and would have lost precious minutes weighing the choice of whether to run for it. In truth, though, none of that mattered. There was no possible exit for Dryden and the girl this time.
There were only seven roads within a twenty-mile radius of the cabin they’d been holed up in. All of those roads were now blocked by local and federal authorities whom Gaul had control of, in a roundabout way, but those personnel were a redundancy; Dryden had no chance of reaching even the nearest road. The helicopter, a Black Hawk, carried ten specialists who answered directly to Gaul. They were his new sword point, promoted to fill the vacuum left by Curren’s group. The Black Hawk’s pilot had been instructed not to risk getting close to Dryden; there was no telling what sort of weaponry he was packing right now, having been free and unaccounted for all day. Instead, the pilot would circle Dryden and the girl at a distance of half a mile, guided by the techs watching the Miranda feeds, and deploy the ten-man specialist team into the forest at different points along the circle. They would form a mile-wide ring around the prey. Then it was just a matter of tightening in on them.