“Sir?” Curren said.
The girl was gone, probably being assisted by a man whose training surpassed even Curren’s. Gaul could make two calls and have access to the blacked-out portion of Sam Dryden’s file within half an hour—he would do that as soon as he ended this conversation—but the details hardly mattered. The fact that Dryden had done anything worth blacking out meant he had a formidable skillset, even if it was outdated by a few years.
“Turn the house inside out,” Gaul said. “Every name, every e-mail address, run everything through the system.”
“Clay’s on it now.”
“Help him,” Gaul said, and hung up.
He made the calls to get his people working on Dryden’s file, and then he made another call. The voice that answered sounded rough and cracked. Its owner had probably been awake already—it was after six in the morning in Washington, D.C.—but likely by no more than a few minutes.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Gaul said.
“What do you need?”
Gaul had long admired the man’s directness. Late-night television comics had the guy all wrong, playing him as an affable buffoon. He was off balance in front of a microphone, that was all.
Gaul spent ninety seconds filling him in, sugarcoating none of it. When he was done the line stayed silent a long time. Then something sloshed in a glass. Not water, Gaul knew—not even at this hour.
“I need satellite coverage,” Gaul said. “I need the Mirandas, the whole constellation. I need full control of them, I need Homeland and DoD locked out, and I need it to stay that way until I say otherwise.”
The man on the other end sighed. Something—maybe a couch—creaked and settled.
“I’ll have to take that up the chain,” the man said.
Gaul didn’t ask how long it would take. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of chain above the guy.
“I’ll call you back,” the man said. “Fifteen minutes.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Dryden stared out through the boughs of a cedar at the edge of a small park. He and Rachel had traveled only three blocks from the yard they’d first hidden in. They were still deep inside the residential back streets of El Sedero, with Rachel’s pursuers everywhere.
Within sixty seconds of the last radio transmission, the rest of the men had filtered into the neighborhood like shadows. When they wanted to be quiet, they were good at it. They’d also stowed their flashlights, making it much harder to pinpoint their locations. Each time Dryden had led Rachel from one piece of cover to the next, he’d studied the open ground for at least a minute first. Even at that, they’d been lucky to make it this far; these people had elite training in their backgrounds. Dryden could see it in the moves they made—and didn’t make. No wasted motion. Nothing extraneous. He’d had the same principles drilled into him years before.
He studied the park. One side butted up against a row of backyards; another lay open to the street. As he watched, a silhouette passed through the space between the jungle gym and the swing set, forty yards away.
Dryden turned his attention toward the adjacent homes. They lay east of where he and Rachel were hiding—inland, away from the sea. The plan, so far as he had one, was to move in that direction, into the broad commercial district across the interstate. If nothing else, that part of town was much larger, with storefronts and warehouses and industrial lots. Easier to hide in. Harder to seek in. The plan could evolve from there.
The man in the park slipped away to the street, crossed it, and vanished into the shadows between houses on the far side. Dryden turned the other way again, scrutinizing the open ground between the cedar shrub and the east-side row of homes. The distance he and Rachel would have to cross was seventy feet, give or take. It lay mostly in darkness, but there was no cover at all. Anyone watching might see them, once they went for it.
He gave the street and the yards beyond one last survey. No one moving. No one there at all, that he could see. He was already holding Rachel’s hand; he turned to her and nodded in the direction they would run. She nodded back, scared but ready. Dryden was tensing to move when she squeezed his hand sharply, a convulsive action that could only be a warning. He didn’t even look toward her. He didn’t move at all. He held dead still and took quiet breaths through his mouth.