The germ of an idea came to him.
Before it could crystallize into words, before the two women could capture it and react, Dryden threw himself forward, put his shoulder to Rachel’s dresser, and shoved it over. It hit the floor sliding, and he took advantage of its momentum, pushing it across the carpet until it lodged with a gratifying thud against the door.
Now they’d never come through fast enough to get the drop on him, and they obviously couldn’t risk firing through the wall with Rachel in here.
“If you’re telling us the truth,” Dryden said, “then prove it. Give us Rachel’s journal. Slide it under the door past the dresser. If I’m wrong, I’ll apologize a hundred times.”
Beside him, Rachel tensed, waiting for the answer.
It came: the sound of a rifle’s action being worked.
The girl reacted as if pierced. She sat down hard, looping an arm around Dryden’s leg for support. With his free hand he took hers and held it tightly.
He hoped his hate for the other two was transmitting through the door with razor-wire edges.
“This is temporary, Rachel,” Sandra said. Gone was every trace of kindness in that voice. “When you remember who you really are, you’ll laugh at this.”
Rachel suddenly lunged to her feet. Taking Dryden by surprise, she grabbed the SIG from his hand, trained it chest-level on the door, and opened fire. She put a row of three shots through the door and the wall beside it before Dryden could get it back from her. He heard someone land on her ass out in the hall, cursing, and the rifle clattered against the baseboard. A second later the icy feeling at his temples faded just perceptibly; the women had retreated some distance down the hallway.
“Why don’t you shoot back?” Rachel screamed at them. “You might even hit me!”
Dryden put an arm around her shoulders. “It’s okay,” he said.
She turned into him and pressed her face to his shirt, her body shaking hard.
“Wow, they didn’t see that coming,” he said.
She heard the smile in his voice and looked up at him, managing one of her own, through the tears.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
Dryden looked around the room. Two solid walls, and two made of windows—with nothing on the other side but a three-football-field drop. There was a private bath, but it offered no better options than the bedroom did. Crazy solutions came and went: shoot out a window, rappel on Rachel’s bedsheet to the apartment below and shoot their way into it. It didn’t matter that their odds of surviving that were one in a thousand. What mattered was that Audrey and Sandra would read his planning of it and have a wide-open chance to rush the room.
“What about me?” Rachel asked. “They can’t read my plans.”
“Do you have a plan?”
She hesitated, her expression flickering between thoughtful and terrified.
“Yes,” she said.
*
Audrey felt Dryden’s thought pattern flare with stress at what Rachel had just suggested. He trusted her, cared about her more than himself—but the idea of blindly following a plan of hers threw him, like a pilot asked to cede control to a passenger.
Then his logic came in, hard grid lines bisecting the discord of his emotions. Soldier logic. Fast and clear. Audrey had read this kind of thinking before in men and women tempered by combat. Dryden made his decision so quickly she almost couldn’t follow the steps. The man saw nothing but futility in using his own plans, given their transparency. Therefore any plan of Rachel’s was better.
He told her to do it, whatever it was, and then returned his full attention to watching the door.
No further knowledge would come out of that room.
In the darkness beside Audrey, Sandra’s breath rushed out. “Are you shitting me?”
Audrey heard fear in her voice. Felt it in herself, too. In the years since escaping confinement, she’d never once faced an enemy whose thoughts were hidden from her. She could not think of the last time she’d been reduced to guessing in a moment like this, and realized wearily that she didn’t even know how to do it. Her grip tightened on the heavy rifle in her hands.
She turned to Sandra and tried to be steady. “Someone upstairs or down will have called security about the gunshots. They’ll be in the anteroom any minute, so we won’t be leaving by elevator.”
“I’ll get the parachutes,” Sandra said.
“Bring the tandem harness for me.”
Sandra understood. She sprinted off down the dark hallway.
*
Rachel crossed the bedroom to the attached bath. She stopped in the doorway and looked back at Sam, standing with his back to her and the gun steady on the barricaded door. She wished she could tell him what it meant to her that he trusted her this completely—trusted her not to do something stupid.