Hager was about to speak when he stopped himself.
For a couple of months now, there’d been word coming down from those above him, in Washington and elsewhere, about a potential threat to the project. These conversations had been vague, in ways Hager had gotten used to during his time with Western Dynamics. The whole shady arrangement—two rival companies working with the government, each with its own friends in high places—had been a mess from the beginning. Some of those high-up friends had connections to one another that complicated the game. There were loyalties and there was bad blood, there were favors and paybacks owed, and most of those connections lay hidden in the murk. SHB, Hager called it. Standard human bullshit. He’d run into it his whole career, in one form or another. It didn’t matter how lofty your goals, how precise your planning or your actions. Every organization in the world was infested with the mildew of standard human bullshit. At times, the whole deal—the two companies and Washington—felt like a warped love triangle, operating by the rules of a damned Victorian courtship. Certain things were implied but never outright said. The risk of offending the wrong person was always there, hovering over everything. These warnings in the past two months were a prime example. As far as Hager could understand it, the danger was this: Somewhere out there, there was a loose end from the original research at Detrick, years back. A living subject who’d gotten away—a young girl, if the rumors were right. The girl may or may not have ended up in the custody of Martin Gaul’s people at Belding-Milner, down in California, but regardless, she posed a potential hazard to the testing going on at the three antenna sites. There was a risk of interference. That was as far from vague as the warnings had gotten.
“Describe what you felt,” Hager said. “As clearly as you can.”
“There was someone there,” Cobb said. “Right at the antenna.”
“It’s not the first time that’s happened,” Hager said. A handful of times, high school kids had shown up at each of the towers and tried to climb them, usually late on Friday or Saturday nights.
“This was different,” Cobb said. “I don’t know how, it just was. There was somebody there. Who shouldn’t have been there.”
Hager thought about it.
Risk of interference.
There were no security cameras at the antenna. No immediate way of seeing what was going on there in the desert. Hager had a friend in D.C. who could probably get access to satellite data, but it would take time; an hour, maybe. Now that he thought about it, he recalled that Gaul had especially close ties with that whole community, the kind of intel people who had spy sats at their fingertips—but he’d be damned if he’d involve Gaul or anyone else from Belding-Milner in this thing.
What to do, then?
He looked past Cobb to the reclined workstation chair behind him. The two gel-covered electrodes were lying across it where they’d fallen. Hager nodded to them.
“Put those back on.”
*
Dryden and Rachel were back in the car, heading north, within a minute of her letting go of the tower. The farther they got from it, the better Rachel appeared to feel. For an awful second or two, Dryden had believed the thing was electrocuting her.
She’d described in detail what she’d experienced. A sensation that she was hearing the thoughts of people up in Cold Spring, six or more miles from where the tower stood. Then the feeling of racing through a tunnel, of encountering somebody at the other end. Last, the visual sense of her own trapped memories trying to get free.
“It felt like the memory about Holly Ferrel was the most important,” Rachel said. “Like I was desperate to get it back. And then when I did, I recognized it. I’d heard it someplace.”
“Where?” Dryden said.
“El Sedero. The building with the blond man and the soldiers. A handful of times, I heard the name Holly Ferrel, or sometimes Dr. Ferrel, in their heads. Dr. Ferrel … in Amarillo, Texas. I remember one of them thinking he might have to go visit her, sooner or later. At the time I barely thought about it—someone going to visit a doctor, that just sounds like a medical problem. But looking back at it now…”
She trailed off, but Dryden saw what she meant. If people working for Gaul had been contemplating paying Holly Ferrel a visit, it could mean something very bad for her.
“You don’t remember anything else about her?” Dryden asked. “What kind of doctor she was? Was she a researcher who … worked on you?”
“I don’t know. There was nothing like that in the memory. Just the fact that she was nice. That she cared about me. A person can’t fake something like that. Not with me, anyway.”