“What do you expect to be?” Marsh said.
“Bait,” Dryden said. “What else? Maybe they’ll rough me up for a while at first. Maybe they’ll use enhanced interrogation techniques, and have a mind reader from Western Dynamics present, for good measure. They might get a lot out of me that way, but they won’t find out where Rachel and Holly have gone, because I won’t know. Once these people figure that out, I’ll be of no more value to them. At which point they’ll probably kill me, if they’re stupid—but they’re not stupid. So what I expect them to do is send me home, and watch me for the rest of my life, in the hope Rachel shows up at my door someday.” He paused. Now that it came to saying the last part, he found he had to force the words. “For her sake, she can never do that.”
Rachel started to shake her head, but stopped herself, and a moment later she was simply crying, saying nothing at all. Dryden realized why: She couldn’t even have a bit of denial to comfort herself with. Not with the thoughts of every adult at the table washing over her. Their awful agreement with what Dryden had said. There was nothing for her to do but sit there and take it. Dryden pulled her against himself, and she held on as if the patio were going to drop out from under her.
For more than a minute, no one spoke. Then, by silent agreement, Holly and Marsh and Harris stood from the table. They wandered off to leave the two of them alone.
Dryden found himself focusing on taking in the moment: Rachel in his arms, her face against his shoulder. The details he would come back to for the rest of his life—he had to experience them as much as he could, this last time they would ever be real.
“You know there’s another way this could go,” Rachel whispered. There was more in her voice than the strain of tears. There was an edge there—a trace of the other Rachel.
“Yes, I know,” Dryden said.
“I could take it to these people, instead of hiding. I could hole up in D.C., a mile from the Capitol, and get into the heads of everyone who helps these companies. I wouldn’t need to kill anyone. There are lots of ways I could end their careers. Make them buy drugs and get caught. Make them say the wrong word near an open microphone. Make them tear off their clothes on a street corner and scream at the traffic. I could rip their lives to pieces without hurting a hair on their heads. If their replacements are no better, I could get rid of them, too. I could do it forever.”
“It wouldn’t be wrong, either,” Dryden said. “It’s exactly what they deserve. But it’s not what you deserve—that life.” He eased her away from his shoulder and tilted her face up to his own. The edge was in her gaze, too. The ghost of what she’d been, all those lost years. “What you deserve is a childhood,” Dryden said. “And I mean for you to have one.”
Rachel nodded, blinking as new tears formed. They seemed to clear her eyes of everything that didn’t belong there.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The plan unfolded two days later, at the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. Marsh booked a small hearing room on the fifth floor, for three in the afternoon. He accompanied Dryden into the building an hour beforehand, ushering him through the security checkpoint.
“Thanks for this,” Dryden said. “You really will lose your job over it.”
“If I’m losing it for finally doing the right thing, I guess that should give me a moment of pause.”
“Thanks, all the same. I’ll owe you one. That’s not just a figure of speech, coming from me. If there’s something I can help you with, someday, get in touch.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
*
At 2:58 Dryden stood alone in a small hallway behind the dais of the hearing room. He listened to the murmur of the crowd in the seats; Marsh had invited more than forty people, the most powerful he could get. Among them were six senators, nine representatives, four cabinet officials, and staffers for all of them. They’d been told only that the event was a presentation related to intelligence-gathering technology, which was true in a roundabout way.
2:59.
Close enough.
Dryden stepped through the doorway into the chamber, and the buzz of voices died away. He crossed to the podium at the center of the dais and faced the crowd. Behind and above him, a projector screen showed a bright white expanse—the empty first slide of a PowerPoint presentation.
For a long moment Dryden said nothing. He kept his expression blank and stood there, letting the crowd get a good look at his face.
The expected reaction kicked in at three seconds. A woman near the front narrowed her eyes, then turned and spoke quietly to the man beside her. The man, still staring at Dryden, suddenly flinched.
By ten seconds everyone had picked up on it, either on their own or by way of being told. Everywhere in the crowd, heads swiveled, looking for the exits, or maybe an authority figure of some kind.