Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (17 page)

That test lasted an hour, and when it was over, the man behind him stood up and left, taking out a phone as he went. Twenty minutes later Cobb had been ushered into the back room at last, and he spent the next four hours getting poked and scanned and being buzzed into the claustrophobic tunnels of diagnostic equipment. That day had ended in a little office outside the hangar, with Cobb seated across from two men he’d never seen before. Both were fortyish and hard and leathery. He never learned their names.

“If you accept this job offer, you’ll be working for a company called Western Dynamics. You know it?”

Cobb nodded. “Big defense contractor.”

“You’ll be required to take three doses of a drug, a simple pill, the first one tonight if you’re on board.”

“Is this a drug trial?”

“Not at all.”

“What does the drug do?”

“Nothing dangerous. You won’t know what it’s for until later. That’s part of the deal. And the flyer wasn’t bullshitting about losing contact with your kin. You won’t have a phone. You won’t have Internet access or mail service either.”

“What’s the generous pay?”

“Two hundred thousand a year, all of which you can bank, because room and board will be provided for you.”

Cobb whistled and sat back in his chair. He asked if he’d have a stack of nondisclosure forms to sign if he took the job. No, the men told him. When it came to that, the situation was very simple: If he ever shared the details of this job with any outsider, he would be killed, and no one would ever be prosecuted for killing him. Cobb looked into their eyes and saw that it wasn’t a joke. Which made him believe the rest of it, too.

“Let’s have the first pill,” he said.

A funny thing had happened that same night, back at his housing unit on the other side of Ramadi. A messenger came by with a thick three-ring binder, and Cobb laughed, because here was the paperwork after all. Of course. Only it wasn’t paperwork. Inside the folder were detailed profiles of over one hundred women; no names for any of them, just reference codes. All of the women were between the ages of eighteen and twenty, and every last one was a heartbreaker. The profiles included high-res face photos as well as nude shots. Tucked inside the folder’s front flap was a handwritten note:
Pick any two, and submit your choices to the hiring office tomorrow at 0800.

Less than twenty-four hours later, Cobb had been in the air aboard a C-17 transport. He’d dozed en route, waking when the plane touched down here at the compound—the place he’d called home ever since. Even now he had no idea where it was located. Somewhere in northern Canada, he guessed. There were mountains, and it was cold as hell year-round, and there were no roads connecting the compound to anything else. Nothing surrounding the place but northern wilderness as far as you could see. The compound itself consisted of the airport, with its array of buildings and hangars, and then a single road looping out into the woods, skirting the rim of the valley and accessing the dozen houses that stood there overlooking the drop-off. Each house was a hundred yards from the next, every one of them screened from its neighbors by the intervening forest.

The wind shifted and partly blew the steam cloud away from the patio. Cobb took in what it revealed, then smiled around his cigarette.

Callie was still at it, her eyes closed, lost in the moment; Cobb couldn’t see her mouth, but he could tell she was smiling. All at once she opened her eyes and looked up at him. She raised one hand from Iola’s thigh and beckoned him with it. Cobb nodded and took another deep drag.

The two girls had arrived here the day after he had. By then he’d all but forgotten having picked them from among the profiles; he’d mostly figured that was just another psych test. That first day here, on his own, he’d simply marveled at the house; he had it all to himself. It was brand-new—you could still smell the carpet and the paint—and it looked like something you’d see on
MTV Cribs.

EXCELLENT LIVING CONDITIONS.

No shit. There was the heated pool, with a hot tub at one end; the patio itself was heated by electrical coils under the paver bricks. There was a home theater with 7.1 surround sound. There was a sauna. There was a Sub-Zero fridge in the giant kitchen, and on the granite counter there was a tablet computer dedicated solely to a list of foods and drinks. You could scroll down that list and tap two dozen items—or just one, if you had a craving for it—and the groceries would show up at the door thirty or forty minutes later, no charge. Cobb had been soaking it all up, wondering what in the name of hell he was supposed to do here, when the doorbell rang and he met Callie and Iola for the first time.

Those first few weeks, it remained unclear what exactly the job would be. An older guy named Hager stopped by a few times, early on, to explain some of the ropes. There were two more scheduled dosages of the drug, he said, which would be brought to the house at the necessary times. It was fine if Cobb used the available alcohol and marijuana, within reason; those substances would not conflict with the drug, either now or later on when his work began.

“What sort of work?” Cobb had asked.

“That’ll come later. Another few weeks. For now, just settle in. Enjoy yourself. There are marked hiking trails that go up on some of the ridges close by. Take the girls out for a walk, if they feel like it. If you ever encounter any of your neighbors, it’s fine if you want to say hello, exchange pleasantries, but keep it to a minimum. They’ll all be doing the same work as you, but you’re not to discuss it. I’ve had this same talk with them, so it’ll be fine.” Hager had ended the conversation somewhat cryptically. “There’s a landline phone in the basement. I’m sure you saw it. It connects to my office here at the compound, and nowhere else—you just push the red button. In time there’ll be something you want to ask me about. When it happens, give me a ring.”

That was all.

In the weeks that followed—very, very nice weeks—Cobb did as Hager had said. He settled in. It was clear from the start that communication was never really going to happen between him and the girls; he didn’t know what language they spoke, but he thought it was something from Eastern Europe. Maybe they were Romanian—they reminded him of the cute little gymnasts from there that he’d always tuned in for when the Olympics were on. In any case, how much talking did you really need? You could share an emotional connection well enough without words. Some nights the three of them would get bombed out of their minds and load up a foreign film from the theater’s digital library, something in French or German so that none of them could understand it. They’d try to follow along and end up laughing so hard it actually hurt, and then the clothes would come off and for the next few hours Cobb’s whole world would just be smooth skin and moisture and heat, clenching little hands and sighs and screams, and before he finally passed out in a tangle of their limbs, he’d think,
I feel sorry for every last person on earth right now, stuck living their lives and not this one.

When it finally happened—the thing that would make him pick up the phone downstairs—he didn’t immediately recognize what was going on. This was a month or so after he’d taken the last of the three pills, and in fact he hadn’t thought about those pills in days. He was high when the effect started, and his first thought on the matter was that he was hallucinating. True, pot had never made him do that before, but there had to be a first time for everything. Anyway, this wasn’t a full-on hallucination. Not a visual one, at least. Just an auditory thing—Callie’s and Iola’s voices in his head, chattering away in the same language they spoke. It was about six hours before he put it together, enough time for the high to be long gone and for his thinking to crystalize. It was early evening, and he was standing in the kitchen with Callie. By then he’d realized he was getting images in his mind alongside the girls’ voices. One of these images suddenly stood out vividly: a can of Pepsi being popped open. Not three seconds later, Callie turned and crossed to the fridge and took out a can of Pepsi. A minute after that, Cobb was in the basement pushing the red button.

Hager walked him through it as if he were talking to a man on a ledge. Yes, he said, those were the girls’ thoughts he was getting in his head. Like stray radio stations. Yes, the pills had done that to him. Yes, the condition was permanent. There was more to it, though, than hearing thoughts. The pills had given Cobb other capabilities, but these were active skills that would have to be trained up. Hager would send a man over in the morning to begin said training.

“What other capabilities?” Cobb asked.

“Think of it as sending instead of just receiving. Ship to shore, shore to ship, that sort of thing.”

“You mean putting thoughts in other people’s heads, not just hearing theirs.”

“Thoughts, but more importantly feelings, deep emotional impulses, like guilt or disgust, or even elation. Forcing people to feel those things.”

“What the hell for?” Cobb asked.

“For lots of reasons. It’s useful in all kinds of ways.”

Cobb had grasped the meaning of it then, like something sharp and jagged in his hands. A sculpture made of broken glass.

“I’m a weapon,” he said into the phone. “You’re going to send me all over the world to fuck with people’s heads.”

“You’re going to fuck with people’s heads,” Hager said, “but we won’t need to send you anywhere.”

Leaning on the balcony rail now, finishing the cigarette, Cobb thought of how the weeks after that day had played out. The early training. The understanding of what he could really do. The abilities were limited, of course—while mind reading seemed to work on everyone, the more advanced skills only worked on certain people. Then there was the technology, all of it spooky as hell. Even Hager had confided he had no idea how it worked; the company had little teams of genius engineers squirreled away in places—maybe compounds just like this one, with their own Callies and Iolas—designing the stuff. It was easy enough to see what the equipment did, though even now, more than a year into the work, the whole project was still in testing. Still in beta, as the techs said. But it was growing fast, taking on momentum, and Cobb often felt there were angles to it that he was still being kept in the dark about. Things to come.

He shivered. Just the cold air, he told himself. Nothing more to it. His nerves were fine with all this stuff. He and Hager had settled the morality angle way back when, in that first phone call.

“You want to take your time and think hard about this,” Hager had said. “Right now you’re surprised by it all, you’re rattled, and that’s only human. What I want you to do is go back upstairs and take a good look at your situation. The house. The girls. You’d have to agree we’ve been good to you. Haven’t we, Cobb?”

“Yes. Yes, sir. Everything here is amazing.” Cobb found the words coming out fast; he was tripping over them like a kid. All at once it occurred to him that he’d never thanked Hager—never thanked
any
of these people. Jesus, how had he overlooked that? “Sir, I just want to say how much all this means to me, and I’m sorry I haven’t—”

“Don’t worry about that, Cobb. Just listen to me. This work you’ll be doing for us, it’s going to be hard sometimes. You’re going to do things to people—bad things, that they don’t deserve. You’ll have to do it, though. It’s just going to be that way. You have to help us out, like we’ve helped you out, alright?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When it gets tough, you’re going to think about that house, and those girls, and you’re going to do whatever it takes to keep them.”

“I will, sir.”

“And you want to remember something: The bad stuff that’s coming, it’s not your fault, ’cause if you weren’t doing it, we’d just have someone else in your place. It would happen either way, so you might as well be the one to benefit. Does that make sense?”

“Perfect sense.”

“Alright, Cobb. Go on back upstairs now. Everything’s going to be fine.”

Cobb stubbed the cigarette out on the balcony rail. Down on the patio, Iola’s moans had turned into soft, ragged cries. She’d drawn her feet up out of the water, her toes gripping the pool’s edge and her knees bouncing rhythmically. She reached down and laced her fingers into Callie’s hair, then sucked in one deep breath and screamed. The sound rolled across the pool and out into the darkness over the valley. A few seconds later, her body spent like a wrung sponge, Iola sagged flat on the bricks. Callie took her hands, helped her sit up, eased her into the water, and hugged her.

Cobb dropped the cigarette at his feet. Yeah, his nerves were just fine with the work. He crossed the balcony to the steps leading down, pulling his shirt off as he went.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It was a quarter past noon when Dryden and Rachel arrived in Cold Spring, Utah. The off-ramp T-boned into the town’s main drag, a strip of chain stores and gas stations and fast-food places, all of it weathered and faded. There was high country half a mile east—a line of hills marching away south at a diagonal, their tops crowned with pine forests and scrub. Otherwise the landscape was low-rolling desert as far as Dryden could see.

He took a side street off the strip and crossed to the east edge of town and saw what he was looking for almost at once: a dirt lane running out toward the hills. Three minutes later he and Rachel were parked at an overlook halfway up the nearest incline, maybe two hundred feet above the desert floor and the town. U.S. 50 was visible for twenty miles or more, stretching away into the shimmer, back toward Nevada and California. Just as visible was the two-lane that formed Cold Spring’s central strip, leading south out of town into the wastes. Five miles off in that direction, vast and stark and nearly blinding white, lay Elias Dry Lake. Dryden squinted but couldn’t make out the tower at its center.

He leaned into the car and took a pen from the console tray.

“Give me your hand,” he said.

Rachel held it out, and Dryden wrote a phone number on the back. Above it he wrote the name Cole Harris.