“There should have been a whole team of doctors and nurses watching over you two,” he said, “after I gave you the drugs. But it wasn’t like that. It was all just kind of thrown together, jury-rigged. It felt like … like none of it was official. Like it couldn’t afford to be. So no team of doctors and nurses. No, it was just me there. For the next thirty-six hours I was in that tent, monitoring your heart rates and breathing and everything else.”

Moss looked up at Danica, and Dryden saw that his eyes had filmed over.

“Three hours in, Danica, you went into V-fib—cardiac arrest. I had to use the defibrillator on you two different times. I didn’t think there was a chance in hell you’d get through that first day.”

He glanced at Dryden. “You seemed to respond a little better, but it was still touch-and-go for a while. I didn’t start to feel confident about either one of you until midway through the next morning. Finally, when you were both in the clear, they took you away somewhere, and that was that. They gave me a nondisclosure form to fill out, and told me I’d face capital punishment if I ever talked about what happened. I signed the form, and then I turned in my resignation. I told myself I could put all this shit behind me, go be a doctor like I always planned, and not let the memory get under my skin.”

He wiped at his eyes with the knuckles of one hand, blinked a few times, breathed out through his teeth.

“I should’ve asked them to use those fucking drugs on me,” he said.

“I should’ve asked them to use those fucking drugs on me.”

Not quite a mile away from Russell Moss’s campfire, by line-of-sight, a man in a dark green coat listened to those words through his headset.

The man was looking down on the encampment in Somber Valley from a pine-covered hillside to the east, his elevation maybe six hundred feet higher.

The audio was coming to him by way of a Wraith 406 quad-rotor drone, tricked out with surveillance hardware; the drone was the size of a Saltine cracker and not much heavier. It made zero sound, and it was engineered so that the draft from its rotors would cool all the working components to ambient temperature; even high-end thermal cameras could not detect it in flight. At the moment, the Wraith wasn’t in flight anyway: five minutes earlier, the man in the green coat had landed it on top of Russell Moss’s camper.

The man had been stationed up here in the pines all day long, and now into the night; he and his team had been sent to recon this place soon after Danica Ellis evaded her second attempted kidnapping, this morning in Thousand Oaks, probably with help from the other target, Dryden.