“Something everyone’s afraid of,” Dryden said.
Gaul nodded. “You’ll understand why, when I get to it. You’ll also know why Rachel’s friends didn’t want to tell her about it. It’s tied pretty tightly to her own past. The people behind it—the thing everyone’s scared of—are actually afraid to use it while Rachel is alive. They think she might be able to affect it in some way, and I think they’re probably right. That was why the government ordered me to kill her. I wasn’t thrilled about it, but it wasn’t my call.”
“Just following orders,” Dryden said. “Nice defense.”
Harris chuckled. Gaul showed no reaction at all.
“I do what I do,” Gaul said. “After you and Rachel escaped El Sedero, I brought the head of Homeland Security on board, because I needed his help. I hoped he’d see the situation my way. And he did. For a while.”
“What do you mean?” Dryden asked.
Harris spoke up. “Head of Homeland’s a guy named Dennis Marsh. Turned out he had a little bit of conscience still sloshing in the tank. He went along with the bullshit, setting up the manhunt for you, Sam, but he also looked into your background. He got in touch with me and a few others from the unit. He got in touch with Holly Ferrel, too. The guy was right on the fence, with what was happening to you and Rachel. Like he just needed a good push to do the right thing. Maybe some backup, too. We obliged. All of us, including Holly and Marsh himself, contacted Gaul and told him the game was going to change. This was the night before last.”
Dryden thought about it. That would’ve been the night he and Rachel had waited in the empty apartment near Holly’s place. The night Rachel had heard Holly rehearsing a phone call to Martin Gaul.
“What’s Holly’s role in all this?” Dryden asked.
“You can ask her yourself soon enough,” Gaul said.
Dryden caught something in his voice. Petulance, it sounded like—that sharp little fragment of childhood some people held on to forever.
“We’re prepared to go public with every inch of this mess,” Harris said. He was speaking to Dryden, but the hard edge in his voice seemed to be for Gaul’s benefit. “We’re not stupid; we don’t expect to prevent the rollout of this technology, but we damn well mean to stop it from squashing one of our friends.”
The childish look stayed in Gaul’s eyes a second longer, and then he shoved it away and looked at Dryden. “So there it is. The game change is that you don’t die, and neither does Rachel, or else I get a world of attention I’d rather avoid. Okay. I can bloom where I’m planted.”
Gaul went to the table where the techs had set up the computer. On-screen, the Windows desktop was strewn with shortcut icons. He clicked one, and a photo slideshow player filled the screen. The first image was a simple white background with black text. It read FT. DETRICK—08 JUNE 2008.
For the moment Gaul made no move to advance to the next picture.
“There’s a lot you’d better know about Rachel,” Gaul said, “if we’re going to do what your friends have in mind. So here we go.”
Gaul stood there thinking a moment longer.
At last he said, “She’s a knockout. Your assumption about what it means is exactly right. The research goes back to long before Rachel was born. It started with gibbons in the biowarfare lab at Detrick, in 1990. They’d been doing sensory deprivation tests on these animals, keeping them in enclosures that were perfectly soundproof, lightproof, everything. Lab workers noticed that some of them—about five percent—somehow reacted to agitation of other gibbons in nearby labs. They reacted even while shut up in these sensory boxes, which should’ve made it impossible for them to be aware of the agitation in the first place.”
Gaul paced away from the computer. “Well, you already know how they were aware of it. At Detrick they didn’t know for another five or six years—not until genome sequencing got cheap enough to be widely applied. They found that the special gibbons, the ones that could react from inside sensory chambers, were naturally missing a gene called NP20. That gene suppresses a much older complex of genes: genes that we think allowed ancient, precursor animals to read each other’s alpha waves—brain activity.”