“A friend of mine. One of the only people in the world I trust. I was in the army with him, and we stayed friends afterward.”
He turned and studied the hillside above the overlook. It rose another two hundred feet to the crest of the ridge, the whole climb shallow and forested. There were no roads above this point. No houses or other structures, either.
“I want you to wait here,” he said. “Go about halfway up the slope between this spot and the top. Stay in the trees, out of view and out of the sun, but keep an eye on the lake bed. After I’m there, if you see anything happening, a line of cars heading down there, a helicopter landing, then you go into town and call that number. Walk into a store and say you have to call your parents. No one will give you a problem with it.”
All the way from Modesto they’d tuned in to the news wherever they could get a signal. The manhunt was almost the only story being covered, and at no point had there been any mention of a young girl travelling with the suspect. Dryden supposed Gaul had his reasons for keeping it that way; if the plan was to kill Rachel, it wouldn’t help to have the whole country praying for her safety while the search played out.
“Cole Harris lives in San Jose, California,” Dryden said. “You call him and tell him your name, and tell him Sam Dryden wants him to come here and get you. And say this word: goldenrod. Okay? Remember it. Say goldenrod and he’ll understand.”
“What does it mean?”
“It’s called a nonduress code. We used them in the army. It means This isn’t a trick, nobody has a gun to my head. Or more generally, This isn’t BS. It’s a word he and I agreed on, and no one else knows about it. If you say it, then he knows the message is coming from me.”
Rachel was staring at the number on her hand. Dryden hoped like hell she wouldn’t need to call it.
“I think this is one of those moments when I can’t tell your thoughts from mine,” Rachel said.
*
Up close, it was hard to tell exactly where the desert ended and the lake bed began. Whatever shoreline there’d once been had long since been smoothed out by the wind. All that gave away the transition was that the ground suddenly got a lot flatter under the Honda’s tires, and the sage and desert grass all but vanished.
Out ahead, the cell tower was visible now, a standard steel lattice mast with guy wires stabilizing it. Hard to tell its height with no trees or buildings for reference, but it had to be two hundred feet tall at least. From this distance, still a mile or more away, nothing about the thing struck Dryden as unusual.
*
That perception had changed by the time he parked and got out of the car. In his years in the service, especially later on with Ferret, Dryden had encountered transmitter towers a handful of times. Once or twice he’d installed eavesdropping equipment on them, piggybacking it into cables at the base. In those cases he’d worked from instructions provided by a technician; he himself had no real expertise with industrial comm stuff like this. He had wondered, right up until getting within thirty feet of this thing, whether he would even know if something about it was strange. He wasn’t wondering anymore.
He stopped within arm’s length of the structure’s nearest corner. The steel frame of the tower itself looked like all the rest he’d ever seen: triangular cross-bracing, the welded joints infused with copper connectors to help with conductivity. And like other towers, it had a metal tube bolted to one of its legs, running up inside the corner, protecting sensitive cables from the elements and from tampering. In most cases Dryden had seen, these tubes were made of steel or even aluminum—they usually escaped notice. This one had caught his eye right away; it was made of neither of those metals. He stepped closer to it. In the desert sunlight, the tube’s surface gleamed a dull silver. The last time he’d seen this kind of material, there’d also been desert sun shining on it. A different desert, far away from here.
He rapped on the tube with his knuckles. It was like knocking on a thick slab of granite—the same way it’d felt that other time, tapping on the side of an M-1A1 Abrams where a bomb blast had stripped away the paint. The cell tower’s cables were protected by a thick sleeve of depleted uranium. Tank armor.
Dryden stepped back again, getting a better angle on the higher portions of the tower. The uranium tube climbed to about half the structure’s height and then connected to a large black cylinder; the thing had the shape of a beer keg but was maybe five times the size of one. Dryden couldn’t remember seeing anything like it on a radio tower before. Whatever it was, he could hear it humming in the still air like a transformer.