Rachel managed a smile. Dryden had seen precious few of them from her in the long hours since lunch. Even this one slipped away in a second or two. She looked down at her feet.
“Scary,” she said. “All this stuff. I wanted so much to remember. And now … I still want it, but in a different way. Like something bad I just want to get behind me.” She looked up at him. “But bad things can take forever to get behind you, can’t they.”
“They can.”
She nodded. Then she stepped forward and hugged him tightly. She held on for a long time, then said good night and closed her door.
*
Gaul flipped through the report, coming at last to the section he always stopped at. The one titled RACHEL GRANT. His fingertips traced over the page, passing slowly across the two words, as if they might cut him.
*
Audrey waited until Dryden had left the east hallway and gone to the living room. She stepped out of her bedroom and went to Sandra’s, slipping in and closing the door behind her.
In the darkness, Sandra stood in silhouette at the window, against the shimmer of pier lights on Lake Michigan. Audrey went to her.
“It hurts, not leveling with her,” Sandra said.
“It won’t be this way for long. A few more days.”
“What do you think it’ll be like? When she starts to get it all back?”
Audrey breathed a laugh. The sound was hard and cold, but not without amusement. “Interesting. To say the least.”
*
Gaul turned the pages slowly, making his way through the section about Rachel. Rachel and all that she’d done in her short life. Color photos filled some of the sheets. Gaul had a strong stomach for images of this sort, but these tested its limits. Still he stared at each in turn. He felt obligated to do so—to remind himself what the stakes were.
At last he let the report fall shut. He set it on the bricks beside the phone. As always, his hand came away shaking.
PART THREE
LUCERO
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
CHAPTER THIRTY
Deep in the night, Dryden woke. For a moment he felt sure something had roused him, a sound or a flash of light, but as the seconds drew out, the impression faded.
He rose from the couch, took the SIG SAUER from the end table, and made a quick, silent orbit of the living room, dining room, and kitchen. A quarter past four in the morning and all was well.
He went to the south windows. Here was the city at its most sedate, its streets as bare as they would ever be, its towers all but darkened, their rooftop beacons blinking a slow cadence.
The only thing in view that seemed awake was an intense white light fixed to a radio mast atop the tallest skyscraper—the Willis Tower, they were calling it these days. Against the sleepy backdrop of the city, this single point of light, the highest thing in the skyline, stabbed the darkness in a rapid and intermittent frenzy. It was as if its control board were shorting out. Something about this light drew Dryden’s attention, like a face in a crowd to which he couldn’t quite put a name. The more he studied it, the more out of place the thing seemed; it was easily three times brighter than any other light in Chicago.
Dryden turned and looked at the wall and couch behind him, bathed in the glow of the city. The flashing white light was bright enough to stand out within that glow, casting the shapes of the window frames across the room with each pulse.
This light had woken him.
He stared at it again. Logic told him he was obsessing over something meaningless; he’d woken up disoriented, and his judgment was off balance. Still he stared. Then he became aware of the strangest thing: Letters and words were forming in his mind, unbidden. He pictured them as if he were jotting them on a notepad, the vision he’d always used when deciphering Morse code—
Understanding hit him like ice water.
“How the fuck?” The words came out in a whisper, involuntary.
The light atop the radio mast was transmitting a message. Not Morse code, but an encrypted variant of it that Dryden and his men had developed for themselves in Ferret. In situations where signal transmission was too risky, they’d used handheld infrared units to flash this code to one another. As an added layer of precaution, they had never officially documented the code’s existence.
Only someone from his unit could have supplied it to whoever had programmed that light.