“What you saw there is almost nothing,” Gaul said. “When she has real control of it, you can’t imagine what she can do. There’s a distinction I need to explain here. Those female prisoners at Detrick twelve years ago, including Rachel’s mom, were given the earliest generation of the knockout drug. It was primitive stuff; administered to adults, all it did was give them the capacity to hear thoughts. That’s all Audrey and Sandra could ever do. Twelve years on, now, Western Dynamics has a greatly improved version of that drug. They’ve given it to hired operatives of their own, and it allows them to read minds and exert a certain amount of control over people. Simple things, like putting a voice into someone’s head, or forcing certain emotional states, like guilt or disgust, cranked up to a level you’d never feel in regular life. Positive emotions, too—euphoria, erotic sensations, that kind of thing. It all adds up to sticks and carrots to make people follow commands. The total effect is powerful, if it’s used just right, and those antenna sites, like the one you found in Utah, are used to amplify the effect over a wide area, a radius of twenty or thirty miles from the tower.”
Dryden thought of the pickup almost crashing into him and Rachel, south of Cold Spring. The man with the MP-5.
“The guy in the desert—” he said, and saw Harris already nodding.
“Unwitting participant,” Harris said. “He’d probably endured months of conditioning by one of the people from Western Dynamics, by the time he attacked you.”
Dryden remembered the pity in the man’s eyes. Pity for himself, maybe, but that was understandable in its own way.
“The controllers at Western Dynamics are powerful,” Gaul said, “but they don’t hold a candle to what Rachel can do. Her skill set is that formidable.”
“But you said Rachel only got the first version of the drug,” Dryden said. “She got it when her mother got it.”
“That’s right. Rachel got it as a fetus at two months’ development. Which makes all the difference.”
Dryden began to understand. Seeing him grasp the idea, Gaul nodded.
“It matters,” Gaul said. “You better believe it matters. Adults are already formed. There’s only so much the drug can change in them. But Rachel had all her development still ahead of her. All the circuitry of the brain yet to be formed.”
Gaul glanced at the slideshow player on the computer again. The text frame was still there. FT. DETRICK—08 JUNE 2008. He made no move to click anything yet.
“You knew Rachel was born and raised in holding at Detrick,” Gaul said. “Staff there noted her ability to hear thoughts, like the other prisoners. Those symptoms presented at around eighteen months. In hindsight, we know the other ability showed up when she was about four, though no one at Detrick knew it at the time. They knew nothing about it until she was seven years old, and then they learned an awful lot, very quickly. But most of the details I’m giving you now, we only learned later—two months ago when we got to interrogate her. Some of it, I honestly think she wanted to tell us. It wasn’t quite bragging. It was mostly meant to intimidate us, I believe. Prisoners do that sometimes, don’t they?”
Dryden said nothing.
“In any case,” Gaul said, “Rachel described her ability in some detail. She has her own word for it: locking. Early on, at Detrick, she demonstrated it for her mother by making a lab tech scratch his head, across the room. By Rachel’s account, her mother had a fit. Grabbed the little girl and just about pulled her arms off, and told her she was never to show the doctors what she could do. Rebecca knew if anybody found out, she’d never see Rachel again. The kid would’ve been taken someplace else for separate testing, would’ve become some other team’s project. Probably still right there at Detrick somewhere, but to Rachel’s mother it would’ve been a million miles away.”
A cell phone rang close by. It belonged to one of Gaul’s men. The guy took it out and answered, spoke quietly for a few seconds, and hung up. He nodded to Gaul. “Landed five minutes ago. En route now.”
Gaul acknowledged with a wave of his hand, then turned back to Dryden.
“Rachel listened to her mom. She never told the researchers what she could do. But she practiced it. It was easy to do that without much risk. What you have to understand is that when Rachel locks somebody, that person has no idea it’s happening. If she makes you take off your glasses and clean them, you think it was your decision to do that. If she makes you get a cup of water from the cooler, same thing. She doesn’t make your limbs disobey you. She makes you want to do whatever she’s pushing you to do.” Gaul was quiet a beat, then said, “These days, she can do a lot more than make you clean your glasses.”
“Like what?” Dryden asked.
“She can sit in a hotel room in lower Manhattan, lock a portfolio manager from two blocks away, and make him wire ten million dollars to an account on the other side of the world. Then she can make him drink vodka until he passes out, and by the time he wakes up the money’s been bounced through a dozen stops and there’s no way to trace it.”
Dryden shut his eyes and tried to appreciate the power of an ability like that. The subtlety of it.
“Locking is entirely different from the short-range ability to hear thoughts,” Gaul said. “That’s important to understand. It’s a separate phenomenon altogether, stemming from different genes, different development. For one thing, the range is far greater. Rachel can lock you from as much as a mile away. And you don’t feel it—you don’t get the chill at your temples. When she locks in, she can see and hear with your senses, and read your thoughts … and she can make you do anything she wants. Anything.”
Thinking about that, Dryden felt certain dots begin to connect. Not all of them, but some.
He said, “Audrey and Sandra wouldn’t tell Rachel about the scary thing, because…”
“Because Rachel is the scary thing,” Gaul said. “In a sense, at least. She’s the first living example of it.”