“Rachel slipped you this note?” he asked. That was hard to believe, given the level of security there must’ve been in a facility like that.
Holly shook her head. “Not exactly. I was in my office at the other place, at NCI-Frederick, a few hundred yards from where Rachel and the others were kept. It was late at night. I was looking at lab work and then I just pushed it aside and picked up a pen and started writing that message myself. It didn’t feel like I was being forced to do it. I just … wanted to. It was like I’d had an idea for some kind of short story. The kind that are made up of people’s journals or letters—what do they call that, epistolary fiction? That’s what it felt like. Just some stream-of-consciousness thing I’d thought up, using Rachel and her mom as the basis for it, and I was jotting it down as it came to me. Bad handwriting and spelling and all, like it was part of the story.”
Dryden looked at the words again. He imagined Rachel in a cage, seven years old, every ounce of her hope tied to these words on Holly’s notepad.
“I had no idea what else to think of it,” Holly said. “I stared at it for five minutes and then put it aside. I had work to do.” She drew the second sheet from the stack. “Half an hour later, I picked the pen back up and wrote this one.”
You are not making it up. My mom says there is a way to show you its real. Your boss in this building has this email address, [email protected] and it takes two passwords to open it, first is leanne424miami and second is murphyhatesthevet87. If you were making this up in your head, you would not know his email passwords, we know them because we hear him think when he types them. Open his email with the passwords and you will know this is real, it is really me asking you to help us. Holly, please help us get out of here.
Dryden looked up at Holly again.
“I assume the passwords worked,” he said.
She nodded, looking miserable.
“Did you consider really going to the press?” Dryden asked.
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I was scared,” Holly said. “I’d had years to get used to them hearing my thoughts, as weird as that was, but this was different. Actually being controlled. It rattled the hell out of me.” She took a deep breath. “And I didn’t want to do it. That’s the no-bullshit answer. I was afraid. You know what could have happened to me, going public against the military on something like that. I thought of Bradley Manning. I thought of people we’ve probably never even heard of. Maybe I could have gotten the whole thing shut down, but … I just didn’t want to try. That’s all it came down to.”
She sounded like she could cry. Then she said, “What would you have done, if you were me? Honestly.”
Dryden thought about it. He gave her the only answer he could. “I don’t know.”
“I sat there for ten minutes getting more wound up,” Holly said, “and then I went to my superior at NCI-Frederick. He was somebody I trusted, and … I don’t know. I wanted someone’s advice. I didn’t want to be alone with all of it. It’s all I could think of.”
“Shit,” Dryden whispered.
“I’d take it back,” Holly said. “I’d give anything to take it back.”
“Your superior ran it further up the chain, I imagine,” Dryden said.
Another sharp little nod.
“What happened then?” Dryden asked.
Gaul went to the computer. “This,” he said, and clicked the slideshow’s PLAY button.
Holly turned away from it. She grabbed a chair and took it a few paces off and sat down, her hands balled tight in her lap.
Dryden watched the monitor.
A grainy color image appeared. It looked like it had been shot by a security camera inside the cell block of a prison. A viewpoint from up near the ceiling, looking out and down at a row of cells. Dryden could see women in black jumpsuits behind the bars. Nine of the cells had a single occupant each. A tenth held Rachel, seven years old, and her mother.
“These are frame grabs from inside the unit they were kept in,” Gaul said. “Building Sixteen at Detrick.”
Dryden scanned the row of cells again and picked out Audrey and Sandra. Each had a different hair color than he’d seen in Chicago.
Finally he took in the screen’s lower left corner, and the digital text stamp there: DETRICK 16—2008 06 08 23:30:52.07.
A moment later the slideshow skipped to the next image. Another angle on the same scene, time-stamped a few seconds later.
In the third image, seconds later still, everything changed. The women were suddenly alert in their cages. Some were on their feet. Rachel, already in her mother’s lap in the first two shots, now clung tightly to her.
In the fourth frame, a team of five men in security uniforms had just entered the room, moving toward Rebecca and Rachel’s cell. Everyone in the cages was up and screaming, mouths contorted. Rachel had her face buried in Rebecca’s shoulder.