He jammed his foot hard on the brake. The Malibu skidded to a halt in a cloud of dust, swirling gray in the moonlight—Dryden had kept the car’s headlights off.
Now he dropped it into reverse and stepped on the gas. The vehicle shot backward. When it was doing twenty, he took his foot off the accelerator, jerked the wheel counterclockwise, and shoved the selector to neutral. The front end went sideways and the nighttime fields spun 180 degrees around them. When the world stabilized, the car was pointed back toward the farmhouse. Dryden put it in drive and accelerated again, as fast as the vehicle could go. He veered to the right at the top of the drive, passing the garage on its east side and heading north into the grassland behind the farmhouse.
He considered the viewpoints of the approaching drivers; at their distance they couldn’t have seen the Malibu yet—a dark shape against dark terrain—but they would see the dust above the driveway when they turned in, and the tire tracks denting the grass beyond. They would follow. No question of that.
“Who are they?” Holly asked.
In her arms, Rachel still had her eyes closed.
Dryden glanced in the mirror; the nearest of the vehicles braked and slowed before the foot of the driveway.
He had only a hunch as to who they were. He hoped he was wrong about it.
*
Hager was in his favorite spot again. The big window in his office, overlooking the work floor with its glass-walled stations.
The place was hopping tonight. All twelve stations were occupied. Within each of them, in the deep bloody light, lay a controller, eyes closed and focused on the work. Each was connected to a human subject—a mark, to use the popular term—down there in rural Kansas.
More than a week ago, after Martin Gaul had gotten in touch to lay out his proposal, each controller had chosen a mark from one of the three test areas—the unlucky little towns hosting the antennas. The controllers had given their marks special instructions, sending them on road trips to the boondocks north of Topeka, to hole up in run-down motels or to pitch tents in campgrounds, and to await further instructions.
Hager had been more than a little nervous about the whole thing. Once the marks actually left their hometowns and got out of range of their respective towers, there would be no way to get into their heads again until Gaul called with the go-ahead.
Until the airborne asset got into position.
More than a few nights, Hager had lain awake wondering if the marks would really be there when the controllers tried to reach them again. Maybe they would all slip away into the ether, after a week or more of freedom from the voices in their heads. Time and again, he’d found his mind full of Yeats’s falcon in its widening gyre.
Watching the controllers now, Hager felt the deepest kind of relief—and a little amusement. Every last one of the marks had turned up where they were supposed to. Any dog trainer would’ve been proud.
*
Dryden turned on the headlights a hundred yards beyond the farmhouse. There was no advantage in leaving them off any longer—the pursuers couldn’t miss the Malibu’s trail through the grass—and there was plenty of risk in going without them.
The moment the beams came on, a distant line of trees appeared out of the dark, a quarter mile ahead.
Ahead was north. They were driving toward the back of the property the farmhouse sat on. Presumably there was someone else’s property butted up against it—some other plot of farmland stretching farther north, until it tied into the next blacktop two-lane.
By the time they’d covered half the distance to the trees, it was clear they would never reach the next road north. The dense tree line ran unbroken across the landscape ahead of them. A perfect barricade marking the back of the property. Dryden veered left and right, sweeping the headlights like search beams. There was no gap visible anywhere in the woods.
Behind them, the first pair of lights rounded the farmhouse and came on straight toward them. A second and third set followed.
Dryden swung the Malibu left, toward the west edge of the property. Another farm bordered it there, and beyond it should be a road running north to south. There would be a ditch before the road, but with any luck there would be a break in it somewhere—a place meant for tractors and other vehicles to come and go. The trick would be finding one of those points before the pursuers caught up with them.
Dryden checked the mirror. Four sets of lights back there now, strung out in a line, snaking their way up the field.
He turned his attention forward again—
Something was wrong.
He couldn’t place it, but the grass straight ahead was different in some way that made his scalp prickle. Something in how it caught the headlights.
“What is that?” Holly asked.