Dryden thought of the conversation over lunch the day before, in the Chicago apartment. Rachel asking the others about Holly, terrified for her safety.
Sandra had tried to calm the girl’s fears. For the time being, this week for sure, nobody’s going to hurt her.
Dryden understood.
This week for sure.
The time it would take for Rachel’s memory to come back.
Because Rachel was the threat to Holly’s life.
The notion of it made the edges of Dryden’s vision darken.
“In the days that followed,” Gaul said, “a number of people closely involved with the research, living in and around D.C., committed suicide—appeared to, anyway. They were the very people the military needed alive, to advise them on what the hell was going on. From Audrey and Sandra’s point of view, it was tactically brilliant: Take out the key players as fast as possible, leave the government scratching its ass trying to piece it all together. It would be months and months before the military, and companies like mine and Western Dynamics, came up with any means of protecting against the threat Rachel posed.”
The computer was still on. Gaul reached under the monitor and switched off the display.
“You can never really stop them from spying on you,” he said, “but you can mostly keep your people safe. You need the right organizational structure; no one person can know too much, especially in the rank and file, in case their thoughts get compromised. And your research sites need to be in remote places, like islands far offshore, or little compounds in the middle of arctic wilderness. Places someone like Rachel couldn’t get close to without being spotted. You need to be paranoid, really. And in that sense, Holly was way ahead of us.”
Dryden glanced at her, sitting there with her arms around herself.
“Holly left D.C. within an hour of the violence at Detrick,” Gaul said. “She felt irrational doing it, at the time, but it probably saved her life.”
“A friend of mine had a vacation home in the Florida Keys,” Holly said. “I dropped off the planet for over six months, just trying to get my head back together. No one I’d worked with at Detrick knew where I was. I guess if they had, Rachel and the other two would’ve found me. By then, they wouldn’t have had any real logical reason to kill me. They’d done enough of that damage. But I think…” She shook her head. Whatever she had to say, it hurt.
“I understand that Rachel hated me,” she said, “but I don’t believe she meant to kill me, early on. She could have, when she sent that third message. She could’ve buried the pen in my throat instead. I think the real hate came later, over months and years. Audrey and Sandra made sure of that; they worked to fan whatever Rachel initially felt. Do you see the reason? They were always going to need Rachel, for what she could do. They needed her as a weapon, which meant they needed her to be cold, without remorse. They achieved that by keeping her focused on me. On the idea of finding me and killing me. Everything we now know supports that.”
“In time,” Gaul said, “once the military had set up special groups to hunt for Rachel and the others, and to protect people in danger from them, Holly was relocated to Amarillo with her new name.”
Dryden looked at the dark skin under Holly’s eyes. The hollows beneath her cheekbones. A face shaped by half a decade of living in fear.
He pictured Rachel standing in her bedroom doorway with her stuffed dinosaur. A scared little girl who just wanted her life to make sense. He saw her on the ledge, in that final moment, her eyes looking past him to the abyss.
It’s not too late. You can let me go.
He tried to reconcile that girl with the specter that had stalked Holly Ferrel’s nightmares, and all at once he felt like he wanted to throw up. He looked around but saw no door to a bathroom. He muscled the feeling down.
“How did you get Rachel?” he asked Gaul. “Two months ago.”
For the first time, a hint of shame edged into Gaul’s expression. Then he seemed to set it aside, as if he had some tried-and-true way of exorcising those kinds of feelings.
“I used Holly as bait,” he said. “Without her knowledge. A contact of mine in the military learned where Holly had been relocated to, and I saw the chance to benefit from that information. To get control of Rachel.”
Holly set her jaw and looked away. It was clear she’d known this already.
“There were certain government databases we believed Rachel and the other two had compromised at some point,” Gaul said. “We allowed Holly’s location to end up stored on one of those, like it was an accident, so Rachel would find it.” He shrugged with his eyebrows. “She found it.”
Dryden considered the logistics of the trap itself. It didn’t add up. How could Holly have been kept safe, if Rachel could kill her from anywhere in a one-mile radius? How would Gaul and his people pin down Rachel’s location within that radius, to catch her?