Dena nodded. She crossed to the end table beside the couch, opened a drawer and took out a touch-screen tablet. She turned it on, brought it to the island, and set it in front of Dryden.
It occurred to him that any use of the Internet could be a serious risk. Even back when he’d been with Ferret, technology had existed that could monitor local ISPs for search-engine queries. Certain keywords typed into Google within a specified area—a city, maybe a county—would trigger flags and give up the computer’s location.
There was a lot he could learn without doing a text search, though. He opened the tablet’s default Web browser, went to Google Maps, and switched to the photographic overhead view. He dragged and zoomed the image until Utah filled the frame.
Elias Dry Lake.
If he’d ever heard of it, he couldn’t remember it now. He zoomed the map in until terrain features with labeled names were visible—small rivers, lakes, mountains—and began methodically dragging it left and right in narrow search bands, working his way down from the state’s northern edge.
He found it three minutes later. The arid lake bed lay toward the southern end of a huge desert region west of the Rockies. U.S. 50 passed by five miles to the north; a single narrow two-lane led south from the highway to the lake’s northern rim and simply ended there. Even in a wide frame of the entire lake bed—it measured maybe three miles by three—it was clear that no buildings stood anywhere near it. The whole expanse lay glaring white and vacant, empty even by the standards of a desert.
“What’s that?” Dena asked.
She pointed to a single pixel in the middle of the screen, just dark enough to stand out from the background. Whatever it was, it stood almost centered in the lake bed. Dryden had missed it at first glance.
He zoomed in until the thing took up half the screen, though he’d known what it would be even before it resolved.
It was a cell phone tower. The structure itself was nearly invisible from overhead; only its shadow on the sand gave it away.
“False alarm,” Dena said.
“I don’t think so.”
Dryden told her about Rachel’s panic attack in Bakersfield, at the sight of an ordinary cell tower there. Then for good measure he dragged the map to show the freeway again, and the small town clustered around the nearest interchange. It took less than a minute to find the cell tower that served it; it was located right at the north edge of town, near the off-ramp. Dryden scanned the freeway itself for several miles in each direction and found additional towers that served traffic along its route. All were within a few hundred yards of the road.
“The tower on the lake bed doesn’t serve U.S. 50 or the nearest town,” Dryden said, “and there’s no other town of any kind for twenty miles. There’s no reason to put a real cell tower in that spot. It would make no sense at all.”
“What do you think it is, then?”
He had no answer to that. He centered the lakebed again, stared at it for thirty seconds, and then straightened up and paced away from the island.
“Most of what Rachel said in the recording is lost on me,” Dena said. “But one word rang a bell. Knockout.”
“You know what it means?” Dryden asked.
“I know one meaning of it. I’d almost bet my life it’s the relevant one.”
Dryden waited for her to go on.
“It’s not in my field of expertise,” Dena said, “but lots of people in medicine have heard the term. Usually it refers to mice. Knockout mice. It means they’ve been genetically modified—that a specific gene has been switched off. Knocked out.”
Dryden considered what that implied. It fit well enough with the rest of what Rachel had said. Molecular biology. RNA interference. Dryden had no serious background in science, but clearly those terms came from the world of genetic research.
“Why would turning off genes give someone a new ability?” he asked.
Dena shrugged. “Because DNA is a mess. People call it a blueprint, but it’s more like a recipe—one that nature’s been tinkering with for a few billion years. That’s how a professor of mine described it: an old recipe, where outdated instructions get lined out instead of erased. When an animal evolves away from having a certain trait, like when we lost our tails or most of our fur, the genes for that trait wouldn’t have been deleted. Instead, what usually happens is that a new gene is created that blocks those genes. Those new genes are like the pen lines crossing out older parts of the recipe. So if you knock out those genes, the new ones, then the old instructions won’t be crossed out anymore. They come back into the mix. Does that all make sense?”
Dryden went back over it in his head. He nodded. “More or less.”
He paced to the sliding glass door at the back of the room. He stared over the pool and the golf course beyond.
“Mind reading,” he said.