Three seconds later a man passed in front of the cedar shrub, less than ten feet from where they crouched. He’d come from behind and to the side, his approach hidden by the bush itself. His footsteps were entirely silent on the damp grass. Even now, watching each step, Dryden could hear nothing. How Rachel had detected him, he couldn’t imagine. She was maybe three feet closer to where the guy had appeared from, and kids’ ears tended to be better than those of grown-ups, but for all that, her senses had to be unreal.
Dryden waited. The man moved deeper into the park. He stopped there and turned a slow circle, briefly swinging his gaze past the place where Dryden and Rachel were hiding. It occurred to Dryden that only the sheer number of such shrubs—hundreds throughout the park and the surrounding blocks—prevented the searchers from systematically checking them all. They were watching open ground for movement instead.
The guy finished his sweep and moved on, following the same path as the man before him. When he’d gone, Dryden scanned the street again. Empty—at least as empty as it had seemed before. He looked at Rachel. She nodded, ready as ever. They ran.
*
They didn’t stop running until nearly ten minutes later. When Rachel slowed, five minutes in, Dryden picked her up and kept going at almost full speed. He only stopped when they reached the top of an embankment high above the freeway.
He was winded and felt a vague headache at his temples: not quite pain, but a kind of chill. Whatever it was, it meant he’d slipped a bit since his prime. Back in his days in the unit, he’d routinely knocked out ten-mile runs hauling gear that weighed as much as Rachel.
He recovered enough to breathe quietly and listened to the night around them. Above the whisper of traffic, sparse at this hour, he strained for what he hoped he wouldn’t hear: a helicopter. Someone who could assemble a team of men with silenced machine guns—and was brazen enough to deploy them on civilian streets—might be able to call in other resources. A chopper with a thermal camera would spot him and the girl as easily as if they were glowing.
Dryden listened for twenty seconds longer but heard nothing. It didn’t mean they were in the clear.
He stared across the freeway toward the commercial and industrial parts of town. Chopper or no chopper, they still had to hide. He was about to start down the embankment when something stopped him—an instinctive impulse, deep in his mind, like the feel of the hair on his neck standing taut.
A response to a threat. But what threat?
He held still and listened again. There was no sound but the traffic. He scanned the darkness and saw nothing.
The fear hadn’t come from anything he’d seen or heard—it had only been a thought, just below conscious awareness. Some sense of an extra wrinkle in the danger they faced. What was it?
He waited, but the idea stayed out of reach. All that came to him was a sudden conviction: Hiding in El Sedero was the wrong move.
Rachel watched him. Her eyes were full of concern, though she said nothing.
Dryden nodded across the interstate. Beyond the trees on the far side, a quarter mile away, the lights of a twenty-four-hour superstore shone in the humidity.
“Time to go,” he said.
*
The computer room, one level below Gaul’s office, was lit only by the glow of its plasma monitors—nine in all. Gaul paced while his chief technical officer, Lowry, prepped them for the image streams from the Miranda satellites. There was no actual image data coming down yet, just blank screens configured and waiting. Gaul had yet to receive access to the birds, and every additional minute of delay made his pulse louder in his ears.
“Signatures locked,” Lowry said. “Ready whenever we get the streams.”
The Mirandas were the most impressive machines humans had ever put into orbit. Their thermal imaging capability was ten years ahead of what even the most optimistic science journalists supposed it was. A Miranda could distinguish a fat man from a skinny man anywhere on earth, day or night, although that wasn’t what made them special. Lots of spy birds could do that. The difference was that a Miranda could do it from an orbit fifteen times higher: 2,000 miles up instead of the standard 130 for most recon platforms. That meant each one of them had a very wide area in which to hunt.
The full constellation of Mirandas had overlapping coverage of the entire planet at all times, like the GPS network. The system could watch any spot on earth, at any moment, from at least three satellites, and often four or five. It could lock onto a moving target, whether it was a jogger or a cruise missile, and follow it with ease. There was nowhere to run from it, and sure as hell nowhere to hide.
Of course, you had to find your target before you could follow it. Gaul would only be able to spot Rachel and her new friend if they were still on foot in the countryside around El Sedero by the time he got access to the Mirandas, and every second he had to wait, that window of opportunity slipped closer to shut.
Suddenly message boxes bloomed on all nine of the monitors; Lowry snapped to attention. A second later, Gaul’s phone rang. He answered.
“They’re all yours,” the man on the line said.