Signal

CHAPTER ONE

The smell hit Marnie Calvert even before she got out of the car. The vents sucked it in from outside: a mix of charred wood and oxidized metal and melted plastic — maybe from linoleum or carpet backing. Then there was the other smell, beneath all those. That smell reminded her of backyard gatherings and nice days at the park. It made her want to throw up.

She wasn’t going to throw up. She never had, in eight years with the Bureau. She killed the engine and shoved open the door and stood up into the desert night.

There were already ten or twelve vehicles at the crime scene. State Police, San Bernardino County sheriff’s cruisers, three fire trucks out of Palmdale. Most of the units were idling, their flashers strobing and their headlights aimed inward on a focal point: the burned-out husk of a mobile home, all by itself next to a gravel road in the middle of the Mojave.

Outside the car, the smells were all stronger. Marnie gave her stomach ten seconds to relax; she turned in place and took in the landscape. Far to the west, the lights of Edwards Air Force Base dotted the plain before the foothills of the San Gabriels. The mountains stood in faint contrast against the lit-up haze above Los Angeles, maybe seventy miles away. The only nearer light was Barstow, a dim smudge off to the north. Everywhere else, the desert was black and empty and baking hot — four in the morning, early August.

“Agent Calvert?”

Marnie turned. A sheriff’s deputy came toward her, out of the glare of the scene. He was fifty, give or take, a stocky guy just going soft. The nameplate above his badge read HILLER. Marnie had spoken to him on the phone.

She shut the door of her Crown Vic and crossed to him. Her shoes crunched on the hardpan.

“My forensics people are on their way,” she said.

Hiller nodded and led her between the nearest cruisers. Past their stabbing light, Marnie got her first full look at the ruin of the trailer. The hand she’d been shielding her eyes with fell away, and she stood staring.

There was almost nothing left of the thing. The walls and roof were gone, and even much of the base had collapsed between the cinder-block stacks that’d supported the place. A few structural metal uprights still stood, connected by shallow roof arches, like blackened ribs.

There were four body bags arrayed on the ground beside one of the fire trucks. Nothing in them yet.

Marnie knew the whole story already. She’d heard the first details in her office, at the federal building in Santa Monica. The rest had come by phone while she’d driven out here, including an audio file sent to her by e-mail: a recording of a 9-1-1 call that had come from this trailer, just about two hours ago now. She had listened to it three times, then opened the Crown Vic’s windows and let the oven air of the desert rush in around her. As far as she could remember, her thoughts had simply gone blank for the few minutes after that.

9-1-1 Emergency —

Can you trace this? A girl’s voice. Almost whispering.

What’s the nature of the emergency —

I’m on a cell phone. Can you trace where I am?

Are you in danger right now?

No answer.

Miss, are you in danger?

Three more seconds of silence.

Then: My name is Leah Swain. I’m here with three other —

The girl cut herself off with a rush of breath, high-pitched and scared.

Miss?

We didn’t call anyone! the girl screamed. It sounded like she had the phone away from her mouth, her voice aimed at someone in the room. We didn’t call anyone! I promise —

That was it. The line went dead on that word, at 2:04 A.M. and 20 seconds, by the time stamp on the dispatcher’s computer screen. Also on the screen were the caller’s GPS coordinates; the phone had sent them by default, in response to 9-1-1 being dialed. Within the next thirty seconds, a state patrol unit on I-15 had been routed toward the location. Five minutes later, when the trooper was still two miles out, he reported seeing the flames. The trailer was an inferno by the time he arrived, and its listed owner, Harold Heeley Shannon, white male, age sixty-two, history of criminal sexual misconduct, was nowhere to be seen. Only tire impressions remained where his car, a red Ford Fiesta, had been.

Marnie crossed the empty space of the trailer’s dirt yard. She tracked around the wreckage clockwise until she was no longer downwind. She was close enough now to see the collapsed debris that had settled into the structure’s footprint. The soggy remnants of the walls and ceiling and floor, and all that they’d enclosed.

Only one thing had held its shape: a cage with thick metal bars, forming a cube maybe six feet on each side. Marnie covered the last few yards and stopped at the boundary where the trailer’s end wall had been. The cage stood just inside, canted atop the burned rubble of the floor it had rested on.

Marnie had been to bad scenes before. She’d found a body in a plastic drum once, decomposed after being sealed inside for two years. The bones had lain cluttered like discarded hand tools, submerged in a soup of fluids that’d leaked and separated and settled. Another time she’d seen a crawl space where a woman, thirty-one years old, had been kept for a weekend before her captor strangled and buried her. On a pine beam in the corner, where she must’ve hoped the police would someday see it, the woman had written with her fingernail, Becca I love you, grow up to be happy no matter what happens. With a child counselor’s help, Marnie had delivered that message in person. Days like that one usually ended in her basement in West Hills. She had an old catcher’s mitt from her days in Little League, twenty years back, and she would sit in the dark down there for an hour or more, feeling the stitching and the worn-smooth leather. She didn’t know why she did it. Didn’t care why, either, on those kinds of nights.

There were four bodies in the metal cage. They were blackened, with only shreds of clothing stuck to them. All lay pressed flat to the barred floor of the cage, positioned the way they’d died: trying to breathe the last air in the room.

Marnie became aware of Hiller standing next to her.

“All kids,” he said softly. “Not even in their teens, that size.”

The wind shifted, just for a second. It was long enough to send the smell at Marnie again before she could think to exhale — the smell that was awful because it was familiar, even pleasant. The smell of cooked meat.

Leah Swain had disappeared from a playground in Irvine just over three years ago, when she was eight. Marnie had put in time on the case back then, along with a dozen other agents in L.A. and San Diego. The girl’s parents had done interviews on local and national news, begging whoever had their daughter to return her. Maybe those interviews had played on a TV set here in this trailer, where Leah had sat in her cage. Where she had lived for these past three years. Where, tonight, she had somehow gotten hold of Harold Shannon’s cell phone. Where she had burned.

“We’ve got the plate and vehicle description out to every cruiser in California and Nevada,” Hiller said. “Shannon’s DMV photo, too.”

Marnie had seen the man’s picture herself, on her phone. It looked like a mug shot. Gaunt face, sunk-in eyes, long hair and beard the texture of steel wool.

At the edge of Marnie’s vision, distant headlights appeared. She watched them come in. They were half a mile out, taking it slow on the washboard ruts of the gravel road. Probably her forensics guys. She walked back to her car to wait for them, but by the time she got there she saw that it wasn’t an FBI vehicle arriving. Just an uplink truck for ABC7 News out of L.A.

She leaned against her Crown Vic and rubbed her eyes. When she opened them again, some of the cops nearby were watching her. Maybe they thought she was crying. Maybe they thought she looked too soft for the job. That was fine. Their thoughts were their business. She stood upright again and walked away from the scene, out into the pitch black, where it would be okay to let her hands shake. She wasn’t going to throw up, wasn’t going to cry, either, but her hands were going to shake like hell as soon as she let them. The rage had to go somewhere, that was all.

A hundred yards west of the trailer, she stopped — there was a deep, wide arroyo channel carved into the desert floor there, running south from a culvert under the road. The arroyo’s depth was filled with years’ worth of trash: jagged metal engine parts, broken appliances, plastic garbage bags torn open by animals. All of it lay in shadow beneath the plane of the surface, leaving the arroyo nearly invisible in the dark. Even with the lit-up crime scene casting its glow over the desert, Marnie had almost walked right into it.

She sank to a crouch and sat on the channel’s edge. In the faint light, the strewn trash made her think of a lion’s den scattered with bones. Leah Swain had ended up in a lion’s den because she’d gone to a playground during the wrong ten minutes. There would never be any better answer than that.

Marnie turned her gaze up to the horizon and watched for the forensics team, and felt the first tremors in her hands coming on.

CHAPTER TWO

Four hours earlier, when Leah Swain was alive and waiting for Harold Shannon to go to bed, when she was staring at the cell phone he’d left on the coffee table, just reachable with the strip of quarter-round wood molding she’d pried off the base of the wall behind the cage, Sam Dryden was staring at the ocean.

He was two miles inland, in the hills above El Sedero, California. He could see the lights of the shore road and the marina; beyond those, the ocean was a vast black nothing. Closer in, the town was buttoned down and quiet, a few minutes after midnight at the end of a Friday.

Dryden stood on the balcony of a cottage, its yard boxed in on the sides by hundred-year-old evergreens. The air was saturated with the smells of pine and cedar, the boughs wet from the rain shower that had come through an hour before. Now the stars were showing, sharp as pinpricks on the black sky.

The cottage wasn’t his home; he could see his home from here, way down on the waterfront. This cottage was a second place he’d bought to fix up and sell — the third such purchase in the past two years, each one a little bigger as he got more comfortable with the work. It was far from the skill set his background had given him, but that was fine. He never wanted to use any of those skills again.

The wind picked up. Droplets of water shook loose from the trees and pattered the ground. Dryden stood listening for a while, then turned and went back inside.

The cottage’s living room was gutted to the studs. When he’d bought the place, it had still had its original wiring from probably the 1930s: push-button switches, knob-and-tube wires sheathed with fabric, not a ground wire to be found in the house. It was a miracle it hadn’t burned down fifty years ago. Dryden had torn everything out and redone it to code. Same story for the plumbing.

He’d reshaped the cottage’s layout while he was at it. Opened the kitchen up to the living room. Made the doorways and the windows bigger. More light. More airflow.

Tonight he’d finished putting in fiberglass insulation throughout the place. He’d worn a respirator mask and goggles, but his hair and skin had been coated with the stuff by the time he was finished. Half an hour ago he’d showered — the bathroom was gutted, too, but the new clawfoot tub was in place, with a blue tarp hung around it for a makeshift curtain — and now he was clean again, walking the rooms of the cottage, taking in the day’s effort. This morning his footsteps had echoed through the house; now they were dampened and muted, the reverb all soaked up by the fiberglass. Difference. Progress.

He wondered sometimes why more people didn’t do this kind of work. It could be a pain in the ass, no doubt — you might tear the plaster off a wall and find the uprights inside rotted, and just like that you were looking at days and days of added labor — but even so, the job had everything going for it. It had tangibility. You could see your work take shape as you went. And when you got dirty, getting clean was a literal thing. Sawdust and insulation and drywall mud on your skin — all those things came off in shower spray and went down the drain, simple as that. Not every line of work offered that kind of clarity.

He came to the master bedroom. Some of the finish material for the closet had been delivered this week: shelving and a big framed wall mirror. It was all leaning in the corner for now. He caught his reflection from the doorway. He’d been in good shape even before taking up construction, but the physical work had done him some good all the same. He liked the way he looked. Not bad for thirty-eight.

He switched off the bedroom lights and returned to the balcony. He stared away at the town again, and the ocean. He could see the strobing lights of an airliner way out over the water, probably coming in toward LAX, an hour down the coast from El Sedero. He was still watching it when his phone rang in his pocket. He took it out and looked at the display: The number was unfamiliar. Dryden tapped the answer button, forgoing cleverness for a simple hello.

A woman responded. “Are you at your place?”

Dryden recognized the voice instantly — it belonged to a friend: Claire Dunham.

Something in her tone. Urgency and adrenaline.

“I’m close to it,” Dryden said. “Why?”

“You’re in El Sedero?”

“Yeah. Why?”

For the second time, Claire seemed not to hear the question. She said, “How fast can you get to Barstow? Two hours?”

Dryden thought about it. The straightest route came to mind easily enough, and this time of night there would be hardly any traffic.

“Something like that,” Dryden said.

“I need you to meet me near there. You have to go right now. Meet me south of Barstow on the Fifteen. There’s a town called Arrowhead, just an off-ramp with a gas station. Park there and wait.”

Over the call, Dryden heard a sound fade in: the drone of heavy tires on pavement. It swelled and then tailed off to nothing in the space of a few seconds. He got the impression of Claire in her car, passing a semi on a freeway at high speed. If she was coming from her own home, up in the Bay Area, and hoping to be in Barstow by two in the morning, then she must be halfway there already.

“What the hell is this about?” Dryden asked.

When Claire answered, Dryden realized there was more than just stress in her voice. There was fear — deep and real.

“Tell you when I see you,” Claire said. “Don’t bring your phone. Thanks, Sam.”

The call ended. Dryden stood there a moment longer, replaying it in his head. The instruction about the phone implied nothing good. A cell phone had built-in GPS and was constantly updating the network with its current location. Whatever Claire Dunham had going on near Barstow, she didn’t seem to want an official record of their presence there.

Claire was not the sort of person who sought out trouble for no reason. Far from it: She was one of the few people on earth Dryden fully trusted.

You have to go right now.

Dryden stepped in off the balcony, closed the sliding door behind him, and was at the wheel of his Explorer twenty seconds later.

CHAPTER THREE

Arrowhead was exactly what Claire had described. An off-ramp to a crumbling two-lane that ran west to east, out of the desert and back into it. Pitch-black emptiness in both directions. Northeast, where the freeway led, the near edge of Barstow was ten miles out.

Close to the off-ramp stood a shabby diner and a Sunoco station. Only the latter was open for business, casting a milky pool of light over the scrubland around it.

Dryden took the exit at 1:58 A.M. He rolled into the darkened lot of the diner and parked. Except for the attendant inside the station, there was no sign of life anywhere.

Dryden watched the road and the freeway, and waited.

Claire Dunham.

What could she be caught up in?

Dryden had met her ten years before, back in the life he mostly tried to forget these days. Claire had been a technician, an expert with the electronic hardware Dryden and his people had used all over the world, and in many cases she’d been right there in harm’s way with him and the others.

Lots of those who had known her — men, especially — had found her nearly impossible to read. They assumed she was cold, indifferent to others. Dryden had assumed it, too, early on, but he’d understood later that he was wrong about that. The truth was that Claire Dunham’s unreadability was a two-way street. She could make no sense of people, a fact she must have come to terms with long ago, probably way back in childhood, and at some point she’d stopped trying. Probably anyone would have, in her shoes. But she wasn’t cold. Once a stray dog had wandered into the visiting officers’ quarters at Bagram Airfield, and Claire had taken to it. The thing had looked like a burlap sack full of wrenches, its fur matted and its ribs showing. Dryden had expected it to die, despite Claire’s efforts — not just feeding it, but tracking down meds for three or four different afflictions the thing was riddled with — but he’d been wrong about that, too: The dog had lived another eight years, mostly lying around by the pool at Claire’s place up in San Jose, soaking up the sun.

A mile or more west of the freeway interchange, headlights crested a rise, coming in fast.

Dryden killed his engine and got out. He could hear the hiss of tires and the whine of a powerful vehicle running in high gear. A moment later it passed into the halo of light from the Sunoco, and Dryden recognized the outline of Claire Dunham’s Land Rover. It braked hard and came to a stop in the road close by. Claire leaned over and shoved the passenger door open and gestured fast for Dryden to get in.

Dryden had hardly done so when Claire gunned it again; within seconds they were beyond the overpass and into the darkness, following the two-lane out into the empty desert east of I-15. Claire pushed the engine to 95 miles per hour.

She didn’t look good. In the light from the instrument panel, her face gleamed with sweat, though the A/C was blasting. Her eyes — large and green, normally expressing nothing but calm — kept going to the digital clock on the console, which now showed 2:01.

Dryden could think of only a handful of times he’d ever seen her look rattled before, and those had always been awkward social situations. To see her off-balance like this bordered on unthinkable.

“What’s happening?” Dryden asked.

Claire ran a hand over her forehead, wiped it on her shirt, and gripped the wheel again.

“I couldn’t explain it right now. You’ll know pretty soon.” Her eyes went to the clock once more. “Fuck.”

“Why don’t you give it a try?”

Instead of answering, Claire reached into the backseat and hauled a black duffel bag forward into her lap. It was already open. She reached in and withdrew a Beretta 9mm and held it out to Dryden.

“Loaded, one in the chamber,” she said.

Dryden took the weapon, checked that its safety was on, and rested it on his thigh. He glanced over and saw that Claire had a Beretta of her own already holstered in a shoulder harness.

She reached into the duffel again and took out something larger than a pistol. It was a squat black instrument the size of a lunchbox, with a minitripod folded up beneath it. Dryden recognized the thing at once; he and Claire had used them often, back in their old lives. It was a laser microphone. Its beam could measure sound vibrations on a pane of glass — you pointed it at the outside of a window, and you could hear noises from inside the building.

It was no surprise Claire owned one; she had gone into the private security business after the two of them had left the military, eight years before. She was well sought after these days, working for tech firms in Silicon Valley, securing company sites and even the homes of executives. As Dryden understood it, corporations also sometimes hired her to snoop on employees they didn’t trust, and very often their mistrust turned out to be well placed.

Claire snapped the tripod’s legs into position with one hand, getting the machine ready. At that moment the pavement gave way to gravel, and the Land Rover, doing just under 100 miles per hour, rattled and slewed violently. Stretches of chatterbumps came and went, making the whole vehicle shudder like a washing machine with a brick in it.

“Goddammit,” Claire hissed.

They came over a shallow ripple in the landscape, and Dryden saw a single point of light far ahead in the dark. A bare bulb over somebody’s porch, he guessed, maybe a mile ahead.

“There,” Claire said. Her eyes were locked on the distant light. She eased off the gas, slowing to 70 and then 50. The Land Rover’s engine scream fell away to a low growl, and Dryden understood: Claire didn’t want their approach to be heard.

Taking a hand off the wheel again, she opened a compartment on the side of the laser mic. Inside were half a dozen wireless earpieces; she gave one to Dryden, then took another for herself and fixed it to her ear. Dryden did the same.

The porch light was half a mile away now. Dryden could just make out the shape of the building it was attached to, low-slung and boxy. A mobile home. A red compact car sat in front of it.

Claire kept the Land Rover at 50 until they were three hundred yards out, then killed the headlights. Any closer and the lights’ glow might have been visible from inside the trailer, even if there were curtains over the windows.

With the beams off, the desert became ink black. It was impossible to see even the road. Claire cursed softly, took her foot off the gas, and rolled to a stop. She didn’t bother shutting off the engine; she just dumped it into park and was out the door half a second later, stepping around it and setting the microphone on the hood. Dryden got out on his own side. Already he could see the red laser dot jittering back and forth in the trailer’s distant yard, as Claire steered it.

She leaned over and sighted down the length of the instrument and brought the beam to rest on a window near the trailer’s north end. She steadied it and let go, then drew her sidearm and advanced toward the trailer at just shy of a full run. Dryden followed. Their footfalls were almost silent. They had learned long ago how to move quietly and quickly on desert ground.

Through his earpiece, Dryden began to hear noises from inside the trailer. Strange noises. A kind of softened clicking sound — it made him think of a cat’s claw tearing at upholstery, catching and slipping, again and again.

Then the noise stopped.

For the next few seconds there was no sound at all.

He and Claire were two hundred fifty yards from the trailer now. The bare porch bulb cast a weak yellow light, sixty watts if that. It left the terrain pitch black between the two of them and the trailer’s dooryard.

All at once, over the earpiece, Dryden heard something unmistakable: the digital click of an iPhone being switched on. To his left, he saw Claire react to it, picking up her speed.

Three tones came over the earpiece in rapid succession, the first one high-pitched, the next two lower and identical to each other.

Someone in the trailer had just dialed 9-1-1.

Two hundred yards to go.

The ringing of the outgoing call was just perceptible. It trilled once, and then a tinny voice answered on the other end. Dryden couldn’t make out the words, though he could guess them well enough.

Then came another voice, almost whispering, but much easier to discern. A young girl’s voice, inside the trailer. “Can you trace this?”

The 9-1-1 operator started to respond, but the girl cut her off.

“I’m on a cell phone. Can you trace where I am?”

A quick spill of words from the dispatcher. One of them sounded like danger.

This time the girl made no reply.

The dispatcher spoke again, but still there was no answer from inside the mobile home. Seconds passed.

Then the girl said, “My name is Leah Swain. I’m here with three other—”

She broke off, exhaling hard, the sound full of fear.

Dryden thought he heard one last syllable from the dispatcher, and then the girl began screaming, high and terrified.

“We didn’t call anyone! We didn’t call anyone! I promise, it’s okay! We didn’t call anyone!”

For a moment it sounded like the girl was somehow talking and screaming at the same time. Then Dryden realized what he was actually hearing: There was another girl inside the trailer. Maybe several.

Even as he registered that fact, a man began shouting over the girls. “What did you do? What the fuck did you do?”

Next to Dryden in the dark, Claire swore and broke into a full sprint. Dryden matched her. Though Claire had told him nothing about the people in the trailer, the key points of the situation were as clearly defined as razorwire tips.

The man’s screaming became almost indiscernible over the girls’ cries, but the phrase kill you stuck out more than once. The man’s shrieks sounded more animal than human. That was the last thought that crossed Dryden’s mind before the ground dropped out from under him.

His feet had been pounding the desert surface, and suddenly one of them came down on empty space. He pitched forward and threw his arms ahead of him, aware of Claire doing the same thing to his left. For a sickening half second he imagined there was nothing beneath him but a hundred-foot drop, and then one knee smashed hard against a metal edge and pain exploded through his leg. His hands landed amid trash bags and scattered pieces of plastic — broken casings of machinery and who knew what else. He heard Claire crash down into similar debris, five feet away, already fighting to climb up the other side of the trench they’d fallen in — an arroyo strewn with garbage.

Dryden moved his leg and found it wasn’t injured. He’d banged the kneecap badly, but nothing was broken.

In the trailer, the man’s screams continued. “—gonna fucking kill you, do you understand that?”

Dryden was still holding the Beretta Claire had given him. With his free hand he pushed himself upright and scrambled toward the far side of the arroyo —

And found himself yanked to a halt by his other leg.

The calf of his jeans was hung up on something. Some jagged metal corner that’d pierced the fabric and now held like a barbed hook.

Five feet away, Claire was struggling to move, too. Dryden could hear something like rusted bedsprings warping and straining under her exertion, the whole mass shifting amid clutter as she fought to free herself.

Inside the trailer, the man’s voice had taken on a lunatic chanting quality — “Kill you … kill you…” — as if he were speaking only to himself now. There came a wooden banging noise over the audio: cabinet doors being flung open, it sounded like, one after the next. Cans and boxes being shoved aside in a mad search for something.

Dryden yanked his trapped leg toward himself with all his force, meaning to rip the fabric free. It was no good; the trash simply shifted beneath him, giving him no purchase from which to pull.

“Kill you … kill you … HERE!”

The slamming of the cabinet doors ceased, along with the voice. All that followed was the sound of the girls screaming.

Dryden jammed the pistol into his waistband and groped in the darkness for any solid handhold. One elbow thumped lightly against a metal surface, the sound of the impact blunt and reverberant. A washer or dryer, half-sunk into the dirt wall of the arroyo. He wrapped both his hands around an edge of the appliance, as if it were the lip of a cliff he meant to scale. He wrenched his body upward and felt the jean fabric tear and give way. Both legs came up fast; he drew them up to his chest, braced his feet where his hands had been, and exploded from the crouch like a runner out of the blocks. Half a second later he was on the surface again, landing on all fours, coming up and sprinting as fast as his body could move.

One hundred yards to the trailer.

Seventy-five.

Fifty.

“Want to see what you get?” the man inside screamed. “This is what you fucking get!”

Dryden drew the Beretta and covered the last fifty yards in an adrenalized surge that felt more like flying than running.

There was a low wooden porch in front of the trailer’s door — two steps and a shallow platform. The door was hinged to swing outward, but it was also rusted and damn near falling off its frame. Dryden vaulted onto the porch without slowing and hit the door with his shoulder; the cheap frame buckled and the door burst inward, and just like that he was inside, the details of the space coming at him all at once.

A big steel cage with four young girls in it, screaming and holding on to each other.

A skeletal man with long gray hair and a long gray beard, holding a bottle of lighter fluid and picking at the cap with his fingertips. Trying to open it.

The man jerked around at the crash of the door. His face seemed caught between expressions — rage and surprise. As the guy’s voice had done over the earpiece, that face gave Dryden the impression of something not quite human. Some predatory thing, instinctive and feral.

The man’s eyes darted away from Dryden, to the filthy countertop that separated the living room from the kitchen. Amid the clutter there, five feet away, lay a twelve-inch hunting knife.

The guy’s attention came back to Dryden, the eyes narrowing in fast calculation. Dryden didn’t wait for him to finish it. He centered the guy up and put two shots through his forehead. The man spasmed and fell back, collapsing at the base of the wall.

The bottle of lighter fluid landed beside him.

Still sealed.

Near silence fell over the room. The girls had stopped screaming. They were only staring now, eyes huge, their breath hitching.

Running footsteps outside. Claire landed on the porch, crossed the threshold, and came to a stop just behind Dryden. The girls’ eyes went back and forth between the two of them.

All four were just kids, somewhere between eight and twelve years old. They wore simple T-shirts and sweatpants. They had long hair brushed straight, and trimmed nails, and clean skin.

Groomed pets, Dryden thought, and felt like emptying the rest of the Beretta into the dead man’s face.

He saw an iPhone lying on the floor inside the cage, and a long strip of quarter-round molding just sticking out through the bars. A single nail remained at one end of the molding — the end that lay outside the cage. Dryden considered the nail and the phone, and thought of the cat’s-claw-on-upholstery sound he’d heard before the 9-1-1 call: the sound of the nail catching on the carpeting, as the girls dragged the phone toward them from wherever it’d been. They had made the call the moment they had the phone in hand.

“We need to go,” Claire said.

Dryden turned to her. Claire’s anxiety was gone — most of it, anyway. Dryden pictured her during the last minutes of the drive, constantly checking the clock, keenly aware that time was running out.

“How the hell could you have known?” Dryden asked.

“Later,” Claire said. “It’s time to leave.”

Dryden made no move. He looked from Claire to the girls, and then to the phone on the ground, trying to make any of it fit.

“I’ll explain,” Claire said. “I’ll show you. But not now.”

Dryden continued staring at her. It was the first time tonight that he’d seen her in bright light. Though the immediate tension was gone, in other ways she looked far worse than Dryden had realized earlier. She had dark hollows beneath her eyes, and her skin was pale. She hadn’t lost any weight — she was the same lean-framed five foot eight she’d always been — yet she seemed diminished in some way. She looked physically exhausted, far more than a long drive and a short sprint could account for.

“I’ll explain,” Claire said again. She made as if to leave, then seemed to catch herself. She turned and scanned the carpet to Dryden’s right, stooped and picked up the two spent shell casings from the Beretta. She pocketed them and moved past Dryden, out onto the wooden porch.

Dryden turned his attention back to the cage. Steel bars welded roughly together. A crude door, made of the same bars, latched with a heavy padlock.

The whole situation still landing on him, one miserable piece after another.

The four girls stared out through the bars, their eyes still wet from crying.

From outside, Claire said, “They’ll be fine when the cops get here. We won’t. Come on.”

Dryden hesitated a moment longer, then turned and stepped through the doorway. Claire was already running for the gravel road and the Land Rover. From far away in the night, in the direction of the freeway, came the keening of a police siren. Dryden stepped off the porch and sprinted after Claire.

CHAPTER FOUR

The smell hit Marnie Calvert even before she got out of the car. The vents sucked it in from outside: a mix of alkaline dust and aviation fuel exhaust. A helicopter had just touched down close by; she’d watched it descend as she covered the last half mile of the drive.

She killed the engine and shoved open the door and stood up into the desert night.

There were already ten or twelve vehicles at the crime scene. State Police, San Bernardino County sheriff’s cruisers, three ambulances out of Palmdale. Most of the units were idling, their flashers strobing and their headlights aimed inward on a focal point: a decrepit old trailer with a red Ford Fiesta parked in front of it, all by itself next to a gravel road in the middle of the Mojave.

Outside the car, the kicked-up dust was thicker, but it was already drifting away into the scrublands. The desert was black and empty and baking hot — four in the morning, early August.

“Agent Calvert?”

A sheriff’s deputy came toward her, out of the glare of the scene. He was fifty, give or take, a stocky guy just going soft. The nameplate above his badge read HILLER. Marnie had spoken to him on the phone.

She shut the door of her Crown Vic and crossed to him. Her shoes crunched on the hardpan.

“The kids are right this way,” Hiller said.

The four girls were sitting on a metal bench the paramedics had set up beside one of the ambulances. Each looked dazed, certainly scared, but it was clear at a glance there was no immediate medical trauma. The EMTs were as relaxed as such people could be at a crime scene, crouching beside the girls and simply talking to them. No doubt they’d done some basic physical assessments, and the girls would still be taken to a hospital, but those were formalities.

Marnie crossed the dirt yard and knelt down to eye level with the girl on the left end of the bench. The girl whose face had stared at her from her office bulletin board for six months, back when she’d disappeared. Even in the years since then, Marnie had revisited the case file often.

“Leah?” Marnie said.

The girl had been looking at her own hands in her lap. Now she lifted her gaze and met Marnie’s eyes. She’d been eight the last time Marnie — or anyone else outside this trailer — had seen her. She was eleven now.

Her eyes looked older than that. A lot older. She nodded and said nothing.

“Hi, Leah. My name’s Marnie. I’m an FBI agent.”

“Are my mom and dad coming?”

“They’re going to be at the hospital when you get there, and that’ll be soon. The police are going to drive you there.”

“I don’t want to go to the hospital. I want to go home.”

Leah’s voice cracked, but she kept her composure. She looked practiced at doing so.

“Hey,” Marnie said softly. “You’re going to be home before you know it. And guess what. Pretzel’s still there.”

At the mention of that name, a trace of happiness flickered through the girl’s eyes. The emotion seemed to surprise her.

Pretzel, a golden retriever, had been a three-month-old puppy when Leah Swain disappeared in the summer of 2012. Marnie had seen the dog herself when she’d interviewed the parents back then. Half an hour ago, speaking to Mr. Swain on the phone, Marnie had heard the retriever barking like hell in the background, the wife calling its name and telling it to sit. Dogs were emotional antennas — it was hard to imagine the vibe it must be picking up in that house tonight.

Leah blinked repeatedly. Her eyes were just noticeably moist now.

“I promise I won’t bother you with too many questions,” Marnie said, “but can I ask you just three or four? They might be important.”

Leah nodded.

Off at the far edge of the lit-up scene, Marnie heard men’s voices greeting someone. She turned and saw a man she recognized: the chief of the LAPD, walking in from where the chopper had touched down. She was pretty sure the desert south of Barstow was hell and gone from the guy’s jurisdiction, but this was one of those cases where all the boundaries were sure to get blurred. And it had ended happily, which meant politicians would want their faces associated with it. Marnie wondered whether the guy would have flown out here if the night had turned out differently.

For a moment that image forced itself into her head: the scene she might have rolled up to, if Harold Heely Shannon had gotten his way. The awful picture was unusually vivid in her thoughts.

Marnie pushed it away and turned back to Leah.

“You told the police two people came into the trailer and stopped Mr. Shannon from starting a fire,” Marnie said. “A man and a woman. Is that right?”

Leah nodded.

“Did you ever see those people before?” Marnie asked. “Did Mr. Shannon know them?”

The girl shook her head.

“Did they say anything to you or the other girls?”

Another head shake.

“What about names?” Marnie asked. “Did they call each other anything?”

Leah thought about it. Her eyebrows drew closer together. “I don’t think so.”

“Can you remember anything they did say?”

“They were in a hurry to go. The lady kept saying they had to leave before the police came. So they did.”

The girl thought about it a moment longer, then simply shook her head again. Even through the mask of shock and suppressed emotion on her face, it was clear the girl was keeping nothing back. She had no idea who the man and woman had been, or how they’d managed to arrive at that exact moment, seconds after a 9-1-1 call nobody on earth could have anticipated.

Two minutes later, in a caravan of police SUVs and cruisers, the girls left the scene. Hiller waved Marnie into the trailer, where the cops had so far treaded lightly; an FBI forensics team from Santa Monica was still en route to process the place.

Inside, the cage held Marnie’s attention for a full ten seconds. Then her gaze fell on Harold Shannon, his eyes open and pointed at the ceiling, his brains and most of his blood soaking the carpet in a tacky puddle. The first responders had noted that the exit wounds suggested hollow points and that the shooter must have taken the shell casings. So much for ballistics evidence — fragmented scraps of bullets weren’t going to tell them anything.

Hiller was standing at the mouth of a hallway leading off to the trailer’s back rooms.

“You got a strong stomach?” he asked.

“I’ve seen worse corpses,” Marnie said.

“I wasn’t talking about the body.” Hiller nodded behind himself, down the hall. “There’s something back here I guess you’ll need to see. Or … know about, anyway.”

She wondered at the odd choice of words but followed him as he led the way out of the living room.

There were only two rooms off the hall: a tiny bathroom, and then Shannon’s bedroom.

There was nothing special about the bathroom, beyond that it was filthy. Marnie gave it a glance and continued along the hall. She found Hiller standing just inside the doorway to the bedroom, yet keeping his gaze pointed back into the hallway. He didn’t want to look at the room. Marnie stepped past him and saw why.

The furniture was basic enough: a bed and a nightstand, both about as disgusting as the rest of the trailer. The bedsheets appeared to have never been washed. The nightstand was covered with beer bottles full of cigarette butts, and paper plates and bowls caked with rotted food scraps. There was a single window, with dark green curtains pulled over it. There was a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Marnie saw all those things and forgot them in the same half second, as she took in the reason Hiller had his eyes pointed away from the room.

The space was wallpapered with photographs. Digital shots, home printed on 8½"-by-11" sheets of high-gloss paper. The pictures were lined up on the walls in a grid that covered them floor to ceiling, corner to corner. Their edges met with absurd precision, though not a scrap of tape was visible anywhere. Maybe the paper sheets were spray-glued to the wall. A labor of obsession.

Marnie realized she was keeping her viewpoint moving. Unwilling to let it stop on any single image. All the same, she saw them. Saw what they were. After a few seconds she blinked and aimed her gaze at the doorway. Hiller was still standing there. Marnie could hear his breath hissing in and out through his teeth.

Her own breathing stayed quiet, but she could feel her hands wanting to shake.

When she stepped back out onto the porch she saw an uplink truck for ABC7 News parked at the edge of the scene. No sign yet of the forensics team.

She walked to her car, then went past it into the darkness, away from all the eyes. A hundred yards west of the trailer she came upon an arroyo channel — almost walked into it, in the trace light. The thing was strewn with garbage and broken machinery. She sat on its edge, her gaze fixed on the horizon, and let the tremors in her hands set in.

She was still sitting there five minutes later when headlights topped a rise to the west, her team rolling in at last. She squinted and turned away — her eyes had adjusted to the darkness — and found herself staring at the arroyo’s edge beside her.

Where she could just make out what she’d been unable to see a few minutes before: scuff marks and scrapes from hands and shoes. Like someone had landed on all fours here, maybe after vaulting over the arroyo. Or out of it.

Marnie took a miniflashlight from her pocket and switched it on. She studied the scour marks on the desert hardpan, then swung the beam to the far side of the arroyo. Nothing particular jumped out at her over there, but in the beam’s peripheral light something else did.

A scrap of fabric, caught on jagged metal in the arroyo’s depth.

She shone the light down onto it. It was a torn piece of denim, hanging from the spearlike point of a broken axle.

In almost the same moment, something closer drew Marnie’s attention. She adjusted the light again and blinked in surprise.

Three feet below her, an old washing machine lay half-submerged in the arroyo’s dirt wall. Along the nearest edge of the washer were two shapes stamped with desert dust: the impressions of a pair of shoe soles, from the balls of the feet forward.

And maybe something else.

Marnie lit up the channel’s wall beneath her, dug one of her feet into it, and slid carefully down to the washing machine. She crouched over the thing, putting the flashlight and her eyes three inches from the shoe impressions.

They were flanked by handprints, just visible in the light glare. Eight fingers, pressed to the metal. Eight fingerprints.

CHAPTER FIVE

The man who called himself Mangouste stepped out the back door of his home and closed it behind him. The night was cool and moist, unseasonable for this part of California. He crossed the rear yard to a gate at the back, opened it, and stepped through into the forest beyond. Here the air was thicker still, the undergrowth looming out of a ground fog that had settled into the lowest parts of the wood.

There was a way through the brush — not quite a trail, but close enough. Mangouste followed it a hundred yards, to where it opened to a clearing fifty feet across.

In the center of the clearing was a place where the ground hummed with a vibration from below. He could only just feel it; a person who didn’t know better could walk over this spot a dozen times and not notice.

Mangouste moved in small steps until he found the place where the hum was strongest, then sat down there, on the damp leaves. He spoke under his breath in French and ran a hand through his hair. His fingertips passed over the faint remnant of a scar hidden there. He’d had it since childhood, more than thirty years back — the result of a brick swung by another child who had probably meant to kill him.

He had lived in France then, in Caen, eleven years old, long since orphaned. There were places for orphans in the city, but those places were worse than being alone on the street, so he had stayed away from them whenever possible. Being on your own was dangerous, of course, but danger could be adapted to. He had been homeless for nearly two years when the incident with the brick happened. He remembered it almost perfectly, even now — how quietly the attack had come, how nothing more than stupid luck had made him turn his head just then, taking a glancing blow instead of a dead-on impact. He recalled how instinctively he’d reacted. What it had felt like to put the blade of his knife into the other boy’s throat. How that strange moment had been intimate, in its own way: holding the boy down on top of the trash bags, pinning his arms and listening to him whimper as the blood came from his neck in hot little spurts. When the police found him there, an hour later, he was sitting with the dead boy’s hand in his lap, moving the digits one by one, mesmerized by the absence of life in them.

He had expected to go away to prison, but it didn’t happen that way. What happened was that he spent two days in a jail cell, and then in the middle of the night a policeman woke him up and took him out through the back door. The man put him into a van and drove him away; he rode for hours, lying on the backseat, truly afraid for the first time — he simply did not know what would happen to him at the end of the ride.

What happened was that he fell asleep in the van, and woke in a very comfortable bed in a room overlooking a resort town of some kind — a hillside full of enormous villas sweeping down to a lakefront. It turned out to be Lake Como in Italy. There was no sign of the policeman when he woke, but there were plenty of other people in the giant house — grown-ups and children, too. They were kind to him. They understood his mistrust and allowed him to come slowly out of his shell. They knew where he had come from, and how he had lived. They knew more than that, actually.

Your father was a soldier, they said. Did you know?

He nodded. Yes, he knew. It was just about all he knew of his parents — that one sentence.

Your father was a very good soldier. A loyal one, who helped us. You’re here because we owe it to him to look after you. This is your home now.

This had seemed too good to be the whole truth, and it hadn’t been. He had learned the rest of it in time: Yes, his father had done something for these people, but he himself would also be expected to do something for them, years down the road. He would be expected to do a great many things, as it would turn out. That was why they had taken him in.

But that was fine.

It was more than fine, in fact. By the time he understood the whole picture, he had come to agree with it. He had lived among those people for years by then, in their beautiful homes all over Europe, and their view of the world had persuaded him.

Some people call us a movement, they said, but that’s the wrong word. We’re something purer than that. We’re an idea — the most important idea in the world. We came very close to changing the world, once upon a time. What we want now is another chance to try.

Toward that end they were using all their power, which was considerable. They had what must have been billions of dollars. They had their own airliners, done up inside like yachts. They had powerful friends who visited sometimes and stayed up late into the night, sitting around the table, talking about what might have been, had things gone differently all those years ago. And talking about what might still be, somewhere down the road.

If we’re patient. If we can bide our time and stay low.

Some of their powerful friends were minor politicians from countries in Europe and even the United States. A few were not minor. There was even a famous American actor who came around now and again to pledge his financial support to the cause; he would drink Grey Goose and sit poking the embers in the giant fireplace in the den. Think of what the world could be, he would say, his eyes reflecting the guttering flames. Think how beautiful it could be.

The boy was in his teens by then. He spoke five languages and had developed a gift for regional accents capable of fooling native speakers. His American English was especially good — midwestern, the way all the newscasters talked. He was tall and lean and fair-haired, the scar from the brick long-since buried away. He was shaping up to be everything his caretakers had dreamed of.

By then, they had given him his nickname: Mangouste. Mongoose. He’d liked the sound of it, and insisted on it whenever he was among friends. He chose to believe it had always been his name, even when he had lived alone on the streets — especially then. The name was like a heartbeat, like something real and true at the center of him, a thing to remain constant across the years and miles and lies that would make up his life.

All this time later, half a world away, Mangouste leaned back and pressed his hands to the forest floor behind himself. He felt the vibration in his palms. The thrum of heavy machinery, deep in the ground.

If we’re patient.

If we can bide our time.

Mangouste closed his eyes. The time for patience was over.

CHAPTER SIX

Highway 395 was empty. This stretch of it, far north and west of Barstow, lay nowhere near any inhabited place. Dryden was in his Explorer, following Claire. They passed an old billboard positioned at ground level, its face just blank wood, baked white by years of exposure in the desert. A quarter mile farther on, the Land Rover braked and turned off onto the flat hardpan. In the sweep of its headlights, Dryden saw nothing but open country and a few low hills.

He followed the Land Rover. It rolled another two hundred feet and then Claire killed its headlights. Dryden pulled up beside her and did the same. The Mojave was pitch black, one horizon glowing faintly red in the predawn like a heated blade.

When they’d left the trailer they’d gone east, away from the incoming police units, then made a wide backroad loop to reach Arrowhead from the other side and retrieve Dryden’s Explorer; now they were an hour’s drive away from the crime scene.

Claire opened the Land Rover’s door and got out. In the glow of the dome light, she walked forward and crouched at the base of a Joshua tree and came back up with a cell phone in her hand. It looked like a cheap pay-as-you-go model, the kind you could use a few times and throw away, without leaving any trail that led back to your real name. No doubt it was the same phone she had used to call Dryden earlier, before reaching this spot and stowing it here.

A disposable phone, and still Claire had felt the need to leave it behind when she went to the trailer. Dryden considered the degree of paranoia that would inform such precautions.

Claire pocketed the phone and returned to the SUV, waving for Dryden to join her. Dryden shut off the Explorer, stepped out, and got into the Land Rover on the passenger side.

Even in the near dark, Dryden could sense the condition Claire was in: the same exhaustion she’d shown in the trailer. Her breathing sounded wrong. In silhouette against the dim horizon, she sat slumped at the wheel, all but holding on to it for support.

“I’ve barely slept for the past three days,” she said. “Couple hours total, maybe.”

“Tell me what this is,” Dryden said. “All of it.”

Claire nodded but didn’t speak for a long time. Dryden had the impression that only stress had been propping her up earlier. She took a deep breath, then let go of the wheel and turned in her seat. She reached down behind the seatback, took something from the floor in front of the middle bench seat, and set it on the console between herself and Dryden. In the dark it sounded like a hard plastic case.

Claire opened it and reached inside, and a second later the screen of a tablet computer flared to life, bathing the Land Rover’s interior with pale light.

The plastic container was the size of a briefcase, its interior and lid both padded with gray foam. The tablet computer was strapped to the lid’s underside, facing upward now because the lid lay fully open.

The other half of the case contained a machine Dryden couldn’t identify. It was the size of a small cereal box, lying in its padded indentation. The machine was made of black plastic, with ventilation slats on its top and sides. Faint red light shone through the slats, from an LED somewhere inside. The machine emitted a deep, just-audible hum that rose and fell in its pitch. A slender wire, probably a USB cable, connected the device to the tablet computer.

For the moment Claire ignored the strange machine. She tapped an icon on the tablet’s screen, labeled ARCHIVE. A file window opened, displaying a long list of what looked like audio clips — the icons were all tiny speaker symbols. Claire scrolled to the bottom of the list and tapped the second-from-last file.

An audio program opened and the file began to play.

Dryden heard a woman’s voice speaking, indiscernible beneath a wash of static. It stayed like that for five seconds or more, and then it cleared just enough that he could make out most of the words.

“… have said they will not release any names until the families have been notified. A spokesperson for the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department told us they know the identity of only one of the victims, based on the 9-1-1 call that came in just after two in the morning. Medical examiners will attempt to identify the other three by dental records. I’m going to go back to Richard Amis, who’s still out at the scene. Richard.”

A second of hissing silence followed, and then a man began to speak.

“Tamryn, it’s still a very active scene out here. Any normal day, you could drive past this place and not see another car for miles, but this morning there are upward of a dozen vehicles on-site, local and federal officials, including arson investigators. Based on what I’m hearing, the evidence supports what the first responders assumed. The trailer’s owner, Harold Heeley Shannon, was keeping the four victims in a cage, and when he discovered they’d called the police, he set fire to the trailer and fled, leaving them locked inside. Tamryn, I have to tell you, I’ve seen a number of investigators at this site become outwardly emotional. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen in more than ten years of reporting.”

Another pause, and the woman’s voice came back.

“I want to give our listeners the description of the perpetrator again, Harold Heeley Shannon, he’s a white male, age sixty-two, long gray hair, gray beard, there’s a red Ford Fiesta registered in his—”

A burst of static drowned out her words for a few seconds.

“—come back to you with any developments on that story as we get them. For ABC7-FM, I’m Tamryn Bell. It’s eleven minutes past eight o’clock.”

The first notes of a commercial came through the static; Claire tapped the stop button and closed the audio player.

Dryden stared at the tablet screen, unblinking. All that he’d heard — and all that he’d seen at the trailer — felt both real and intangible at the same time. Like thumbtacks stuck to empty space where a wall should have been.

His thoughts went to the specifics: The woman on the radio had said it was eleven minutes past eight, and the reporter at the scene had described it as morning — 8:11 in the morning. It wasn’t even 4:30 in the morning yet. The stars were still out over the Mojave.

Dryden stared at the time stamp on the file: 09:47 PM — 08/07/2015.

That was last night, around a quarter to ten, a couple of hours before Claire had called him.

Dryden looked up from the screen and found Claire watching him, gauging his response. Dryden met her gaze for a moment, then simply shook his head.

I’m lost. Explain it.

Claire seemed about to speak but stopped. She shut her eyes, leaned back into her headrest. Then she opened them again and closed the list of audio recordings.

On the tablet’s screen, she tapped a program icon labeled simply MACHINE. It seemed to be the only other application the computer had. When it opened, Dryden saw a bare-bones program window featuring four labeled buttons: ON, OFF, RECORD, and STOP.

At the moment, OFF was highlighted in bold. Claire tapped ON.

For a second or two, nothing happened. Then the red glow inside the black plastic box disappeared, and a green glow replaced it. The deep, cyclic hum sped up, rising and falling through its frequency range at two or three times its earlier speed.

Like something waking up, Dryden thought.

Then, from the computer’s speakers, came static. Steady, hissing, like an aerated faucet.

“Give it a minute,” Claire said.

But it took only ten or fifteen seconds for the static to recede. A song faded in: ZZ Top’s “La Grange.” Almost at once it sank back into the hiss. Gone.

For more than a minute after that, there was nothing to hear. Claire kept tilting her head, as if picking up subtle changes in the static.

Then the distortion faded again, and a man’s voice came through, deep and measured, speaking calmly about something. Within seconds his words became discernible.

“… two and two on Almodovar, who has a four-game hitting streak coming into this one. Curve ball outside, that’ll make it three balls, two strikes. We’ve got one out and one runner on, top of the second, score is one-nothing San Diego.”

“Think the Padres are playing at four thirty in the morning?” Claire asked.

Dryden stared at her, waiting for more. Between them, the play-by-play continued.

“Fastball, Almodovar gets a piece of it, pop-up foul left, still three and two.”

Claire touched the clock display on the Land Rover’s instrument panel. Ran her fingertip across the glowing numbers: 4:27.

“Give or take a minute,” she said, “I’m gonna say Almodovar hits that pop-up around two fifty-one this afternoon.”

Dryden understood and didn’t. The thumbtacks were still stuck to nothing. He shook his head again.

Claire countered by nodding.

“You’re listening to something that hasn’t happened yet,” she said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Dryden had stopped shaking his head. He was only staring now. At Claire, then at the black box, then at the tablet computer. From its speakers the announcer was still talking. Almodovar got a fourth ball and walked.

“Ten hours, twenty-four minutes,” Claire said. She rested her hand on the black box, the green light through the slats silhouetting her fingers. “It picks up radio signals ten hours and twenty-four minutes before they’re transmitted.”

Dryden stared and tried to see how it could be a joke. The trailer had been real. The man he’d killed there had been real. This part, though — no. It had to be some kind of joke, hard as it was to imagine Claire Dunham doing that. It was a hundred eighty degrees from her character.

“You’re reacting the same way I did,” Claire said, “when I first saw it. Anyone would.”

“What you’re talking about isn’t possible,” Dryden said.

“You said it yourself in the trailer: How could I have known? No one in the world, outside that metal cage, could have expected that 9-1-1 call.”

Dryden’s mind went back to the recorded news broadcast. He said, “That audio clip, the reporters talking about the girls being dead—”

“I recorded it last night at nine forty-seven,” Claire said, “when this machine received it.”

“And you’re saying that report will actually be on the radio at eight eleven this morning?”

Dark amusement crossed Claire’s face. “Not now it won’t be.”

Dryden looked away into the night. The red edge of the horizon was brighter than before, but the faint light smudge of Barstow was still visible to the south of it.

Static crept back in over the baseball game, washing it out to nothing. Dryden’s thoughts seemed to go with it. Out into the ether.

“I don’t know how it works,” Claire said. “No one does, exactly — not even the people who built it. The way I understand it, they stumbled onto this effect.”

“What people?”

“A company I started working for, just over a month ago. It’s called Bayliss Labs. They’re a spin-off from a big defense contractor, up in the Valley. They were separated off for security reasons — Bayliss works on really sensitive technology. Bleeding-edge stuff.”

Dryden realized most of her words were going right past him. He was stuck on what she’d already said. He was stuck on the machine.

Claire opened her mouth to go on, but Dryden shook his head. “It’s just not possible,” he said. “What you’re saying this thing can do … it’s not possible. This isn’t something you stumble onto.”

“It is. They did.”

Dryden could only shake his head again.

Claire started to say something, then stopped. She seemed to be marshaling what she wanted to tell him. Finally she looked up. “Do you remember a story in the news, a few years ago, about a kind of particle called a neutrino?”

“I’ve heard that word. I don’t remember any news about it.”

“There was a big dustup in the scientific community, all over the world. There was an experiment that seemed to suggest neutrinos can travel faster than light. Remember now?”

Dryden thought about it. He nodded. “Vaguely.”

“It wasn’t exactly front-page stuff, but it was kind of everywhere. It would have been a very big deal if later experiments proved it was true, but there was no slam dunk in either direction. A lot of people wrote it off. A lot of other people kept working on it. Bayliss had a few minor projects devoted to the concept, using novel materials to try interacting with neutrinos — that in itself was tricky; neutrinos are strange, even to physicists who are used to strange things, like quantum mechanics. Neutrinos barely interact with most other matter; they’re emitted by the sun, and the ones that hit the earth usually pass through it without striking so much as an atom. Think about that — they slip right through the planet without touching it. The projects at Bayliss were aimed at finding materials that would capture neutrinos like an antenna. They were using sheets of graphene layered with other materials I couldn’t name now if I tried. They started seeing results after about a year of working at it.”

“What would be the point of that?” Dryden asked. “What would they gain by capturing these things?”

“Who knows? Usually discoveries come first, and applications follow. People always think of some use for a new toy. I know they weren’t expecting this outcome, though.” She indicated the machine.

Dryden stared at the thing again. “But how could it do what you’re talking about? How could it pick up radio signals that don’t even exist yet?”

“I can only explain it the way I heard it, and all I heard were educated guesses.”

“Like what?”

“Did you ever read Stephen Hawking? A Brief History of Time?”

“I gave it a shot. That was probably twenty years ago. I don’t remember any of it now.”

“I’m probably going to mangle some of this,” Claire said, “but the main parts are about time itself. What time actually is. It’s a physical thing; it’s not just some human construct to measure hours and years. Time is something tangible, like gravity and light. And it’s not just like those things — it’s tied to those things. People like Einstein and Lorentz worked out the basics a hundred years ago. Things like time dilation — how the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time slows down for you. That’s a nailed-down fact. No one disputes it.”

“Okay,” Dryden said.

“The guys at Bayliss came to believe neutrinos — some of them, at least — really do travel faster than light, and when they do, they actually move against the direction of time.”

Dryden stared at her. “You mean back in time.”

Claire nodded. “And it’s possible they can carry information with them. It’s possible they’re absorbing the energy of radio waves in the future, and releasing that same energy when this machine picks them up in the present. If they absorbed enough of it — a pattern of it, the kind of pattern that makes up a radio signal — then that pattern could show up when this machine absorbs the neutrinos. Those particles would just be acting like a relay. Like a booster.”

Dryden let the idea sink into him. His eyes dropped to the black box, the ghostly light from inside it seeming to ripple with the deep hum.

“I told you,” Claire said, “those are guesses. It’s the best they could come up with. Maybe it doesn’t work like that at all, but it does work. And once the people at Bayliss realized what they had, it scared the shit out of them.”

She was looking his way. Dryden raised his eyes and met her gaze, and when she spoke again, her exhaustion was palpable. “I need you to believe me.”

Dryden was quiet for a moment. Then he spoke, almost surprising himself.

“Alright. Jesus … alright.”

He saw relief rise in Claire’s expression.

“They hired your firm to handle their security?” Dryden asked. “When they got scared?”

Claire shook her head. “Not my firm. Me personally. They hired me to be their internal security chief. The executive in charge at Bayliss was a friend of mine, Dale Whitcomb. He and I met a few years ago, when I did home security for him — I saved his life, probably his family’s lives, too. He asked me to come on board at Bayliss last month because he trusted me, and because I was an outsider to the company. He wanted someone like that. Someone he could be sure didn’t have hidden loyalties to anyone else there.”

Dryden thought he saw where she was going. He waited for her to continue.

For a moment it looked like she wouldn’t be able to. Another wave of fatigue seemed to pass through her — not so much tiredness as simply emptiness. Then she blinked and took a breath and made herself continue the story.

“Dale said he was terrified from the moment they realized what this thing did. That very first afternoon, he and a few of the techs in the lab, listening to the first signals coming through, putting it all together. He said you could see the goosebumps on their arms. He said the moment that finally broke the spell for him was just a weather report. That night’s weather — ten and a half hours in the future, but not a prediction of it. Just a present-tense rundown. He said just like that, it finally hit him in full. The power of the thing, and what it meant, and everyone who would come out of the woodwork to claim it, if he and the others weren’t careful. He said he felt like he was in that Steinbeck book, The Pearl.”

After a moment, Claire went on.

Dale Whitcomb had seen the machine’s potential for good right away, she said. It was so obvious: ten hours’ notice about airline crashes, say, or any kind of disaster that came without warning. It would change the world.

Its potential for bad was every bit as clear. The wrong people could create all kinds of misery with a machine like this. What they could do with financial markets was easy to imagine, but that was probably just scratching the surface.

The first unnerving question showed up immediately: Whom to tell about this thing?

On paper there was an easy answer to that. There were proper channels to go through — certain people at the Defense Department that Bayliss Labs was supposed to report to, when they came upon any kind of breakthrough.

“And that would’ve been fine if all they’d created was a better radar system for drones,” Claire said. “But this stuff … For God’s sake, Bayliss’s official contact at Defense was a man who’d been investigated for fraud less than a year before. What was the right move? Tell that guy everything and hope for the best? Or go over his head to someone else, and basically still just cross their fingers?”

Whitcomb had settled on a different route, she said. He had personal connections in D.C., people he’d had lunches and dinners with, time and time again during his long career in the gray space between business and government. At least some of them were decent people, he believed, beneath all the politics. Whitcomb decided the safest move was to set up a meeting with several of them all at once and demonstrate the technology for them. Show it to those hand-picked safe bets and enlist their help and guidance on how to proceed.

He would need prep time to line it all up. Time to be sure he had the right people in mind, then more time to get them all together without telling them anything in advance. Given the schedules of people like that, it would take some number of weeks to arrange. Maybe as much as a month.

Which scared him just a bit.

A month was a long time for a whole company to keep a secret.

Bayliss Labs wasn’t large by any count: fewer than twenty people, the whole enterprise housed at a single site in Palo Alto. The lab space, the offices — everything under one roof. But even with so few in the loop, Whitcomb was terrified of leaks. He had good reasons for that. Some of his employees were on close terms with powerful outsiders. One of the financial guys had gotten his job because he was a nephew of a major shareholder. It was hard not to picture the guy telling his uncle at least some of the big news. There were half a dozen other weak spots like that, mostly connections back to the original company, the big defense contractor.

“Dale asked me to come on board within the first three days after the breakthrough,” Claire said. “I guess he just wanted an ally there with him. At least one person he could absolutely trust.”

“What happened when you hired on?” Dryden asked.

“For a while, nothing. Everyone was saying all the right things. They agreed with Dale’s ideas on how to approach the government, and in the meantime the research continued. They built other prototypes of the machine. They tried tweaks in the design, but always got the same results. The time difference is always ten hours and twenty-four minutes. And there’s no way to tune it — you can’t go up and down the dial or anything. You just hear what you hear. But anyway, yes, everything seemed fine at the beginning.”

“Seemed,” Dryden said.

Claire nodded. “And then it didn’t.”

Dryden waited.

Claire leaned forward and folded her arms atop the steering wheel. She rested her forehead on them. Enough time went by that Dryden thought she might have passed out. Then she began speaking again.

She and Dale had done their best to be vigilant for leaks, she said. To the point of being paranoid. They’d enlisted one of the computer techs, a guy named Curtis whom Dale had known longer than anyone else in the company, to help snoop on all the rest. The snooping included personal communications in employees’ homes, illegal as it was. There was just so much at stake.

But for nearly four weeks, nothing struck the three of them as suspicious. Nothing seemed wrong. Until three days ago.

Claire’s phone had rung at five minutes before six, Wednesday morning. Dale calling, sounding panicked.

Get out of your house right now. Get in your car and go somewhere.

What is it? Dale, what’s happening?

Curtis found something. Evidence of something going on.

What do you mean?

We think there are people at Bayliss who’ve been working with someone on the outside, sharing the designs for these machines, maybe since the first days after the breakthrough. Someone out there with high-level resources, we don’t know who it is yet.

Dale —

Jesus, Claire, just get in your car —

I’m going right now.

Do you remember the safe location you picked out, when you protected my family? The place we’d all meet up if something happened?

Yes.

I’m going to hide one of the machines there. I want you to pick it up later today.

Dale, what are you going to do?

Nothing too risky if I can help it.

Where’s Curtis?

He’s going to meet me later. He says he copied a huge amount of data from these people — some kind of secure server they were using for all their communication. He already told me some of what he found. It’s scary stuff, Claire.

Like what?

They’ve built their own copies of the machine, but there’s more to it than that. They’ve got some kind of system they created, to exploit this technology in ways we never thought of.

Exploit it how?

Claire raised her head from her forearms and met Dryden’s eyes. Hers looked haunted.

“Dale told me some of what Curtis had told him,” she said. “Details about this system these people built, whoever the hell they were. It scared the shit out of me, just hearing about it. It’s … brilliant. And horrible. Dale told me that much, and then he said he had to go. He told me to ditch my phone and get a throwaway. He said he’d get one, too, and he’d leave the number with the machine I was supposed to pick up.”

Her gaze dropped to the open case. The tablet computer and the strange black box.

“This machine was there when I got to the place,” she said. “And the phone number. But when I called it, thirty seconds later, there was no answer. I gave it a minute and tried again, and then I ditched that phone, too, and got out of there. Six hours later, on the news, I found out what had happened. Maybe you heard about it, too, in a way.”

Dryden thought about it. Three days ago, the Bay Area — some memory flickered but didn’t quite light up. Some big story he’d just caught the end of, flipping past the news.

“Chemical fire and explosion,” Claire said. “A company called Empire Services. All employees dead or simply unidentifiable. Empire Services was the public name of Bayliss Labs. The building that was destroyed was Bayliss’s entire facility. I have no idea if Dale or Curtis is still alive somewhere. I don’t have any safe way of looking for either of them, and I guess they could say the same for me.”

For a long time she just sat there, holding the wheel again. Like it was the gunwale of a lifeboat. Like her own weariness would drag her into the deep if she let go.

“Whatever you need help with,” Dryden said, “I’m in. You know that. You had to know that before you even called me.”

She looked at him. An edge of sadness twisted her features.

“What?” Dryden said.

“I had no intention to involve you in all this,” Claire said softly. “Not for something random like the guy in the trailer, and not for the rest of this, either. I never meant to drag you into it at all.”

“Then why did you?”

Claire’s eyes went back to the machine.

“I didn’t, actually,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

Claire started to respond, but stopped. A pair of headlights broke into view to the south, coming up 395 in the same direction Dryden and Claire had driven a few minutes before. The vehicle’s outline was just visible against the dim sky — a low shape with a light-bar on its roof. A police cruiser.

None of its flashers were on. The car was going the speed limit, maybe a little faster. Nothing about it suggested urgency or purpose. Just a random patrol.

“Shit,” Claire whispered.

She closed the plastic case, blacking out the glow of the tablet screen and plunging the Land Rover’s cab into darkness. Already its headlights and instrument panel were off. Along with Dryden’s Explorer, the Land Rover sat two hundred feet off the road where the cop would pass. The two vehicles were unlikely to be visible to the officer, though they would have to arouse suspicion if they were spotted.

Closing in now, the cruiser passed through a long, gentle curve where the road skirted some shallow rise in the desert. Dryden had hardly noticed the curve when he’d driven it himself. He noticed it now because it sent the police cruiser’s high beams swinging ten degrees west of the highway, out into the darkness where he and Claire were parked. An unwitting searchlight.

The brightest portion of the beams came nowhere near the two parked vehicles, but the beams’ periphery cast a faint glow through the nearby scrub, setting shadows beneath each chaparral bush. Dryden instinctively looked down to keep his eyes from shining. Claire did the same. Nothing could be done about the reflective metal and glass of the two SUVs.

Claire’s fingertips drummed on the wheel, the uncharacteristic tension running through her again.

“It’s not a problem if he sees us,” Dryden said.

“It’s a big problem.”

“We’re seventy miles from the trailer. There’s nothing to connect us to it.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.”

“What, then?” Dryden asked.

Claire didn’t answer. She raised her eyes just enough to watch the cruiser coming on. It was a few hundred yards south now, its headlights finally swinging back onto the road as it moved beyond the curve. A few seconds later, without slowing, it blasted by and continued north into the darkness.

Then its brake lights came on.

Claire’s breath hissed out like air from a ruptured pneumatic line.

The cruiser came to a stop. For five seconds it just sat there in the road, maybe three hundred yards to the north, its taillights glowing. Like the officer was weighing the decision. Wondering if he’d really seen something.

In the same moment, Claire did something Dryden couldn’t understand. She ignored the cruiser entirely and turned her gaze on the surrounding desert. She scanned the darkness, her eyes going everywhere, as if she suddenly believed something dangerous was out there. It made no sense — she had shown no such fear until now, after all the minutes they’d been parked here.

The cruiser’s brake lights stayed on. Like a tossed coin, tumbling in the air. Stay or go.

The brake lights went out.

The officer goosed the vehicle forward.

And brought it around in a tight U-turn.

Its headlights lit up the world, filling the Land Rover’s cab with harsh glare that made Dryden squint.

The effect on Claire was immediate. She turned the key in the ignition and shoved the selector into drive.

“What are you doing?” Dryden shouted.

Claire had not taken her foot off the brake yet. She turned to Dryden, and when she spoke, her voice was saturated with fear. “Get back in your vehicle and go. Now.”

“Claire, this is—”

“I can’t explain it! Go! Please!”

The way she screamed the words, it sounded like she was begging. Like she was kneeling beside a ditch with a pistol to her head. The sound of it pierced Dryden — a needle into the deepest part of his brain, the reptile complex where fight-or-flight decisions were made in thousandths of a second.

He decided.

He reached for the door handle.

But before he could pull it, everything changed.

A hundred yards away off the vehicle’s left side, far from both the Land Rover and the police cruiser, a pinprick of light flared. A millisecond pop, like a flashbulb — but it wasn’t a flashbulb.

The windows on both sides of the Land Rover’s middle bench seat shattered, and Dryden heard the buzzing whine of a bullet cutting the air, passing through the vehicle maybe a foot behind him.

On instinct, Claire took her foot off the brake and shoved the accelerator to the floor. The Land Rover lurched forward into the dark, its headlights still doused.

Way out in the night, the muzzle flash came again, followed by others in unison, like spastic fireflies. Three shooters, maybe four, clustered tightly together, all firing at once.

Claire had the SUV doing 40 now, jostling over the scrubland. She was driving by the indirect glow from the police cruiser, still a couple hundred yards behind them. All at once the cruiser’s beams swung sharply away. Dryden turned in the passenger seat and looked back. The patrol car had jerked sideways and stopped. In the faint interior glow of its dashboard equipment, Dryden could see that its windows had all been blown out. As he watched, one of its headlights burst. The cruiser was taking the brunt of the rifle fire; the cop was almost certainly dead.

Claire cursed under her breath, pushing the Land Rover to 50. Without the patrol car’s headlights, the desert surface was nearly pitch black. The only visible detail was the road, a faint asphalt ribbon reflecting the predawn sky. Claire veered toward it across the hardpan but had gone only a few hundred feet when another bullet hit the Land Rover, punching through metal somewhere toward the back. A second later the concentrated fire from all the shooters began to rain against the vehicle, blowing out the rear windows, punching through the panels of the body. Clearly the shooters had night-vision scopes of one kind or another.

A tire blew; the vehicle slewed violently to the left before Claire got it back under control. The road was close now, fifty feet away as she angled toward it.

Then the driver’s-side window shattered, and Claire gasped, losing hold of the wheel. The Land Rover pulled hard left again, much too sharply for this speed. Dryden reached for the steering wheel, got his hands on it in the darkness —

Too late. The world heaved sickeningly beneath him as the big vehicle pitched onto its side and then its roof, tumbling hard enough that he had to hang on to keep from being thrown clear. He felt the strange machine in its plastic case, his own body pinning it to the console as he leaned across and clung to the steering wheel. Then the rolling vehicle came down on its roof for a second time, and Dryden’s head smacked against something, and all sensation switched off.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“She’s breathing. I think she’s good.”

A man’s voice, somewhere in the dark and the choking dust. No concern in his tone. Just flat assessment.

Dryden cracked his eyes. He was lying in the half-crushed cab of the Land Rover, which lay on its roof. Claire’s midsection was beside him; someone had dragged her halfway out of the wreck. Flashlight beams cut through the dust — a talclike powder in the air, probably from the air bags. Ragged scraps of plastic hung from the blown-open steering wheel and the passenger-side dashboard.

The hard plastic case with the strange machine inside it lay next to him. Through the closed lid he could faintly hear it still working, the static hissing out through the seam.

“Wake up,” the man outside said.

A slapping sound followed, a hand to a face, over and over. A different man laughed, high and jittery.

Claire murmured in response to the slapping. She took a sharp breath. The laughter continued another few seconds.

Dryden’s head cleared the rest of the way.

The Berettas. Where were they? Claire had stowed them behind the seat after they left the trailer, but now —

The answer came by way of a metallic clatter, someone fishing something out of the crushed vehicle, just behind Dryden.

“That’s two weapons,” a man said. “I don’t see anything else.”

“He awake in there?”

“He’s coming around.”

“Who the hell is he?”

“Get him out of there, let’s see.”

Four different voices — two on each side of the vehicle.

A second later, hands gripped Dryden’s ankles and pulled. He slid out into the clear air and the darkness, the flashlight beams blinding him. Through their glare he saw a rifle aimed down on him, far enough out of reach that he could make no move against it. Smart men. Well-trained men, anyway.

Someone rolled him over and patted his pockets. Found his wallet and then his keys, and took both. One of the light beams swung away as the man flipped open the wallet and studied his ID.

Dryden turned and stared through the blown-out window frames of the flipped SUV. The dust inside had mostly cleared. He could see all the way through and out the far side, where Claire was now fully conscious. It looked like she had a bullet graze across the back of one hand — the one she’d had on the steering wheel — but no other visible injury.

“I got his name,” the man above Dryden said. “Want me to call it in?”

“Not out here.” This voice belonged to the first man who’d spoken, standing over Claire on the other side of the Land Rover. He seemed to be in charge. “Throwaway phones or not, they don’t want the cops tracking anything at this site. Keep them switched off until you’re on a freeway.”

“What do we do with him?” the man with Dryden’s wallet asked.

The leader was silent for a few seconds, thinking. Then: “They want the girl taken to the interrogation site, but they want the thing in the hardcase brought directly to them. So we’ll take the girl, and you take the case. Take the man with you; they can decide what to do with him. Use his vehicle, it’s not damaged.”

A third man spoke up. “We need to go. Dispatch keeps trying to raise that cop. Every minute we spend out here—”

“We’re set,” the leader said. “Move.”

The man crouched down over Claire, wrenched her arms behind her back, and zip-tied her wrists. Then he and the other man on that side of the Land Rover hoisted her up by her arms and dragged her away toward a vehicle Dryden could just make out: an open-top Jeep Wrangler.

The man standing over Dryden pocketed his wallet, then squatted down and grabbed his forearms; he shoved them together behind Dryden’s back. Five feet away, the man with the rifle repositioned, keeping his friend out of the line of fire and the barrel squarely on Dryden’s center of mass. Dryden felt a zip-tie encircle his wrists and pull tight enough to dig into the skin. Finally the second man lowered the gun. He crouched at the Land Rover’s passenger window and pulled the hard plastic case out into the light.

They marched him back toward his Explorer at nearly a jog, keeping one of the Berettas tight against his rib cage. The Jeep Wrangler started up before they’d gone even ten paces; Dryden craned his neck and watched it go. It pulled around in a tight arc and raced away southbound on 395.

The pistol barrel dug into him like a spur. “Move, goddammit.”

He picked up his speed. He had his own reasons to go as fast as possible, but it was just fine to let them think he was compliant.

As they neared the Explorer, his eyes picked out the police cruiser. It sat dark and steaming a hundred yards farther back, its windows shattered and its radio squawking. A woman’s voice, clear and urgent. The word respond kept coming through the hiss.

They covered the last stretch at a run. The man with the Beretta gripped Dryden’s arm tighter; the second opened the Explorer’s back door on the passenger side. Together they shoved him through, headfirst, onto the floor behind the front seats. For maybe two seconds, one of them stood staring down on him, studying the vehicle’s interior in the dome-light glow. There were scraps of construction materials everywhere in back: lengths of two-by-four lumber, spools of sheathed electrical cable, PVC piping.

“Who is this guy?”

“Who gives a shit? Come on.”

They slammed the door and climbed into the front seats. In the seconds it took them to do that, Dryden positioned himself so that his hands, bound behind him, were pointed back into the space beneath the middle bench seat. He could feel the bottom of the seat’s cushion pressing against his side, the whole length of his torso. Which meant his hands would be blocked from the passenger’s view — and free to grope for anything he might reach beneath the seat.

A second later the vehicle roared to life. Dryden expected it to veer only slightly as it made for the road; it had been parked already facing south.

Instead it took a hard turn, a hundred eighty degrees, the movement sliding his body roughly on the matted carpet. Then the vehicle straightened out and accelerated.

They were going north on 395, not south.

Opposite the direction of the men who’d taken Claire.

CHAPTER NINE

“You see flashers ahead, get off the road,” the man in the passenger seat said. “Kill the lights and get out into the scrub — slow, no dust trail.”

“I know.”

Tension in their voices. From his viewpoint down behind the driver’s seat, Dryden could see the passenger looking forward and backward every few seconds, watching for distant police units, but also watching Dryden, his eyes dropping to take stock of him on every pass from front to back.

Dryden still had his bound wrists under the bench seat behind him. He kept his shoulders dead still, except for the rhythmic movement of his breathing, which he exaggerated. The best things to project now were fear and defeat. He let his head sag to the carpet and clenched his teeth. He blinked rapidly. He made his breath hiss in and out, just perceptibly shuddering. I’m cowed. I’m not going to be any trouble. Go ahead and relax.

Some of this stuff was pretty basic — psy-ops 101. The man in the passenger seat seemed to eat it up. The evidence was subtle, but it was there. Longer glances out the front and back windows, shorter glances down at Dryden. On some passes he didn’t look down at all. The guy was relaxing.

Maybe thirty seconds had gone by since they’d left the scene — maybe ninety since the Jeep with Claire in it had departed. Two vehicles doing 60 or 70 in opposite directions. The math got uglier by the second.

Dryden kept his shoulders moving steadily with his breathing. Kept his head sagging. And moved his wrists.

His hands could feel plenty of things beneath the bench seat. A slip of paper that was probably a Home Depot receipt. One end of a short length of two-by-four lying sideways under the seat. A six-inch scrap of wire sheathing he’d stripped from a cable, last week when he rewired the cottage.

And the trailing edge of a plastic bag. Again, from Home Depot.

Not an empty bag. What was in it? He thought he could remember stowing it here, a few weeks back, before the wiring and before the plumbing, too. Back when he’d still been doing framing work, putting in the new closet in the master bedroom.

He got his fingertips around the plastic and pulled it closer, the crinkling sound lost under the roar of the engine and the drone of the tires.

Something heavy in the bag. He knew what it was — a tight stack of one particular item he’d bought in bulk: framing brackets. Little L-shaped pieces of galvanized steel, stamped out and press-bent and sold with the factory grease and metal shavings still clinging to them. They were practical and unfancy and cheap. And sharp, at least to a degree. Dryden could think of a dozen things that would have been better to find under the seat — a drywall knife would have been nice. But the brackets might do.

He worked the stack out of the bag. Contorted his wrists, gripping the stack, feeling for how best to position the thing to slide it against the zip-tie.

There was no good angle. No way to work the stack against the plastic band without also cutting the hell out of his skin.

So be it.

“I think this thing’s on,” the passenger said.

Two minutes now, since they’d left the scene. Three since Claire had been taken south.

Dryden could feel blood slicking his wrists. He thought he could feel the zip-tie beginning to give, too. He hoped.

“Don’t open it,” the driver said.

The passenger was no longer sparing any attention for Dryden. The guy was glancing up occasionally through the windshield, but mostly his focus was on something down near his own feet.

“It’s on,” the passenger said. “I can hear something. Static, I think.”

“Doesn’t matter. Don’t open it.”

The zip-tie broke with a snick — louder than Dryden had wanted. He tensed and watched the passenger for a reaction.

Nothing.

He separated his hands. Groped in the dark again, beneath the seat, and got hold of the two-by-four. It was at least two feet long; he could feel the far end of it resting against the back of his knee.

He glanced up at the passenger. The man was only staring forward now, chewing on his lower lip. Maybe he was stewing about being shut down by the driver. Maybe there was an ongoing dynamic between them, alpha and beta, aggressive and passive-aggressive. No doubt it was fascinating.

Dryden pulled the two-by-four tight against himself, then raised his hip upward just an inch or two, his body forming a long, shallow arch with his feet at one end and his shoulder at the other. He eased the two-by-four through the gap until it lay in front of him, then brought his hands around to his front side.

His head was still resting on the floor. He directed his gaze forward, at the space beneath the driver’s seat. The Explorer was fairly new, just two years old, but it was the base model for the most part. No special electronics under the seat cushions. No motorized adjustments, no warming coils. Nothing but steel supports set in glide tracks, and a release bar to let the driver scoot the seat forward or back.

And empty space. Four vertical inches of it. Enough to admit the two-by-four, along with his forearm. Dryden could see all the way through to the footwell in front of the driver. Could see the man’s foot on the gas, and the brake pedal beside it.

The man at the wheel was named Richard Conklin, at least as far as his current employer was concerned. It was not his real name, but he’d used it often enough that he sometimes slipped into thinking of it as a kind of alter ego. Under his real identity, he was twice divorced and paying out a great deal of money in child support for kids who hated him, and toward whom the feeling was very nearly mutual.

Richard Conklin, though. Richard Conklin was a killer.

He was a killer when the job called for it, anyway.

Other times, the job might be to break into a house and steal something — some piece of paperwork, say — or simply drive a vehicle from one location to another and not look in the trunk. Above all, Richard Conklin did precisely what he was paid to do, and never asked why. He never even knew who he was actually working for. There were always go-betweens. Double-blind connections. One-time-use phones and carefully couched language for instructions. Paranoia was everybody’s friend. That was how Richard Conklin had always done business.

Until last month. Until the meeting up in Silicon Valley, with the people he was working for now. The people who wanted what they called a rapid response team, a term that sounded like private army to Richard Conklin’s ears.

The work had begun right away, sometimes solo jobs, other times team efforts like tonight. It was steady work, which was nice, and the pay was excellent, which was even nicer.

Richard Conklin was thinking that very thing when something collided with the side of his foot — not painfully, more like a solid thump from a mallet. It smacked his foot sideways, right off the accelerator; he jerked his head down to see what was happening. He never got the chance.

In the next instant the vehicle’s brakes locked up as if he’d jammed his heel on them. The tires bit the road and shrieked, the whole chassis dipping at the nose as if its back end had lifted half a foot off the pavement. He and the passenger were slammed forward against their seat belts. He felt the air compress out of his lungs, and then the awful rubber screech finally halted and the world went still.

He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t get the air back into his chest. Couldn’t —

Movement, a blur of it, right between the front seats. The guy they’d tied up. Richard turned in time to see the stranger throw a hard punch into the passenger’s temple, about as savage a hit as he’d ever seen. The passenger’s head snapped sideways and cracked against the side window — unconscious, just like that. Richard forgot about getting his breath back; his focus jumped to the two Berettas he’d taken from the wrecked Land Rover. One of the handguns was tucked into his partner’s waistband, the other in his own. Richard’s hand darted for it even as the stranger turned to him.

Dryden saw the hand moving. Saw what it was moving toward. In the fraction of a second he had to work with, he considered what he had seen in the previous instant: The now-unconscious passenger had Claire’s other Beretta, and the man’s rifle was leaning upright in the footwell, against the door. Neither gun was a useful option — not in the time it would take the driver to draw his own gun, at which point everything was going to get messy. Grappling for a firearm, especially in a confined space, was clumsy as hell at the best of times. Too many variables. Too much luck involved.

The driver’s hand reached the Beretta. Closed around it. Dryden gave up on grabbing for it himself.

He reached for the driver’s head instead. He looped his left arm around it and got a grip on the guy’s chin. He braced his other hand on the back of the skull. He twisted the head counterclockwise, facing it toward the driver’s-side window, as far as it would turn before the neck stopped it. He tightened his grip, locked his elbows to his own sides, and pivoted explosively at the waist, wrenching the head through another forty-five degrees of turn. He heard a vertebra crack like a walnut shell, and the man’s hand went slack around the Beretta. Dead, or within seconds of it. Good enough.

Dryden thought of the Jeep Wrangler, probably five miles south now, doing 70. He could feel the seconds draining away. There were no more to spare.

He swept the Beretta forward off the seat, into the footwell, then unclipped the driver’s seat belt. He grabbed the guy by the waistband of his pants and hauled the body over the console into the middle bench seat. A second later he’d clambered behind the wheel himself. The engine was still running; the Explorer was, in fact, rolling gently forward at idle.

Ten seconds since he’d stopped the vehicle.

Dryden glanced at the passenger. The man was still breathing but showed no sign of waking anytime soon. Dryden took the second Beretta from the man’s waistband, then cranked the wheel and made a tight U-turn. When the Explorer was pointing south, he floored it, pushing the speed up through 50, 70, 90. The needle edged past 110 and hovered there, the engine screaming like it might blow something if he pushed it any harder.

The man in the passenger seat shuddered. Dryden glanced at him again, considering the layout of the situation.

He had a decent chance of catching the Jeep. The desert was big and mostly flat, and still mostly dark — he would see the Jeep’s taillights if he got within even a couple of miles.

But if he didn’t …

Dryden kept one hand on the wheel and kept the other poised to backhand the passenger if he woke. If he didn’t catch the Jeep, he would need the man alive for questioning.

He kept the speedometer near 110 and divided his attention between the passenger and the road blurring by.

He passed the shot-up police cruiser ninety seconds later. The eastern sky was just bright enough now to cast a bit of light over the desert. The cruiser was still steaming, hunkered in the dark like a smashed insect.

He watched the road to the south, though he didn’t expect to see the Jeep’s taillights for another couple of minutes at best.

The needle wavered up and down near 110. The yellow lines on the highway looked unnatural, sliding by at this speed. Like a bad special effect in a movie.

Thirty seconds past the cruiser.

Sixty.

Nothing ahead but darkness.

Ninety seconds.

Then he topped a rise and saw a light. Not red. Pale yellow, a single pinpoint in the black landscape.

Half a mile later he knew what it was. He felt his chest tighten. He let off the accelerator.

The keening whine of the Explorer’s engine cycled down — 80 miles per hour, 60, 40.

He rolled to a stop twenty feet shy of the white light. It hung high above the roadbed on a rusty arm sticking out from a wooden post. In its glow, a second paved road bisected 395, running east and west into the desert.

The men in the Jeep Wrangler would have had every reason to get off 395 as soon as possible. There were sure to be police coming up the highway any time now, closing in on the stricken cruiser with the unresponsive driver.

The Jeep could have gone east or west from here.

West seemed more likely. It would lead toward the coast, and eventually Silicon Valley, several hours north, if that was where they were going.

But the men in the Jeep weren’t necessarily going straight back to wherever they’d been sent out from. They were taking Claire to the interrogation site, wherever that was.

Dryden put the Explorer in park and shoved open his door. He reached across the unconscious passenger and took hold of the man’s rifle, a Remington 700 with a scope the size of a small coffee can.

A night-vision scope.

Dryden got out and clambered onto the Explorer’s hood, then onto its roof. He stood upright and first scanned the three directions with his own eyes. East. South. West. Nothing out there. Just black country under a brightening sky.

He found the power switch for the scope and turned it on. It was a Zeiss, a little newer than the hardware he’d used back in the day, but familiar enough in its operation.

He found the selector switch for its thermal-vision setting, and the optical magnification ring. He twisted the ring to its most powerful zoom, 12x, then shouldered the rifle and put his eye to the lens.

He glassed the southern route first — 395 running down toward Barstow.

The landscape looked ghostly in the blue-white false-color image. Even now, after hours of night air, the road held a different temperature than the surrounding land. Maybe an effect of humidity or soil acidity. Whatever the case, Dryden could see the road easily, snaking away for miles.

There was no vehicle to be seen on it.

He turned in place and studied the western stretch of the crossroad.

Nothing there.

And nothing to the east.

He’d just lowered the rifle when he felt the Explorer rock lightly on its shocks — movement in the cab, beneath his feet.

“Goddammit,” he hissed.

He slung the weapon on his shoulder, vaulted down to the hood and then the asphalt, and drew the Beretta from his waistband.

But he saw at once there would be no need for it.

The man in the passenger seat wasn’t coming around. He was seizing. His shoulders jerked forward and back; his head hung to one side, a pencil-thick line of blood coming from his nose and one ear.

Dryden thought of the punch he had hit the man with, seconds after freeing himself and locking up the brakes.

He had thrown the punch too hard. Had centered the impact too much on the temple. In that moment, he had been in no frame of mind for restraint. His only thought had been to immobilize both men as quickly as possible.

Careless. Too many years past his training — even a couple of years back, he would’ve reined in his emotions better than that.

All at once the seizure stopped. Dryden was pretty sure he knew why. He tracked around to the open driver’s-side door, leaned in, and pressed a finger to the man’s carotid artery pulse point. For a second or two he thought he felt something, weak and fluttering. Then nothing.

He withdrew his hand. Stared at the dead man in front, and the dead man in back, and then at the darkness and the three roads leading into it.

Three choices. A shell game.

He slid behind the wheel again, slammed the door, and shoved the selector into drive. He turned hard right and floored it, skidding and then accelerating west on the crossroad — the best bet of the three, though not by much.

For the next four minutes he kept the vehicle’s speed above 100 miles per hour. He passed another crossroad but didn’t stop. A mile farther on, he passed another. He crested a rise and at last saw a pair of taillights far ahead, like cat’s eyes in the near-dark. He overtook the vehicle within sixty seconds: an old pickup with a gray-haired man at the wheel. Nothing ahead of it but wide open miles of nothing.

He kept the needle over 100 for another five miles. Until long after the math had become undeniable. He denied it anyway and kept going, mile upon mile.

Nothing. Just empty road and empty land. Nothing else to see.

Dryden let off the gas. He coasted to a stop on the shoulder. He rolled the window down and sat gripping the wheel, his palms slick and his breath coming in fast surges. He could hear the low, rhythmic chorus of insect noises in the desert scrub.

And beneath that, another sound: the hiss of static from the passenger footwell.

CHAPTER TEN

It was twenty minutes later. Dryden was parked at an overlook in the foothills; he had come to it by way of a two-track that probably hadn’t seen traffic in weeks.

The overlook faced east across the desert, into the sunrise. Ten miles out on the plain, Highway 395 gleamed dully in the light. There had been a steady procession of emergency vehicles moving north on it, the whole time Dryden had been watching. Farther up in that direction, he could see them clustered at the place where he and Claire had been attacked.

He opened his door and got out. He went around to the passenger side, opened both doors there, and dragged the dead men into the weeds. He went through their clothes and found three wallets — one of them his own. In the other two he found a combined two hundred thirty-one dollars in cash, and no IDs. He pocketed the money, wiped his prints from the wallets, and tossed them after their owners.

Each dead man had a phone on him, the models identical and cheap. Throwaways, for sure, though they’d been modified with some add-on software. When Dryden pulled up the recent call logs, all the phone numbers were simply lines of asterisks. Only the time stamps remained visible. Neither man had made or received a call in more than an hour — long before the attack on Claire and himself.

Dryden pulled the phones’ batteries, wiped his prints as he’d done with the wallets, and left the phones with the dead men. He got back behind the wheel but left the engine off. He sat staring at the distant crime scene, thinking.

What kept coming back to him was Claire’s behavior right before the shooting started. The way she had suddenly scrutinized the darkness around them, seconds before the first shots were fired. She had somehow known those men were out there — had known someone was out there, anyway — but she had only known it once the cop arrived.

Before that, she hadn’t seemed concerned at all that someone might be watching them.

It made no sense.

How had the random arrival of a patrol car, one that had damn near driven past without incident, tipped her off to the ambush?

It wasn’t as if the cruiser’s headlights had given the attackers away. Claire had not turned her attention to any one spot. She had seemed to respond on a more fundamental level: The very fact that the cop car had shown up, that the officer was about to stop and question them, had somehow told her those men were out there.

Dryden considered it, and got nowhere.

After a minute he turned his attention to a more basic question: How had those men set up the ambush in the first place?

How had they found the spot where Claire had left that phone? There was zero chance they had tracked the phone itself. If Claire Dunham wanted to be electronically invisible, she could do it in her sleep. Data security was her world. Big companies — tech companies — paid her large sums to teach them about it.

She had purchased the disposable phone so she could be untrackable. She would have paid cash for it in some store she’d chosen at random. And before she stashed the phone near that tree in the desert, she would have detached its battery to keep it from pinging nearby towers. She would have done that before she got within thirty miles of the place where she hid the thing.

The shooters hadn’t found that spot by tracking the phone.

So how had they done it?

Dryden thought about it as the minutes passed. Nothing came to him.

The plastic case still lay in the passenger footwell. The machine was still turned on inside it, hissing.

Dryden stared at it. Something about it nagged at him. Some loose thread, trailing from the tangle of things Claire had shown him, though he couldn’t seem to place it.

He picked up the case, set it on the console, and opened it.

The tablet computer’s display was still lit up, showing the bare-bones program that controlled the strange machine.

Ten seconds passed. The static faltered. A twangy voice and a steel guitar faded in, then back out.

Dryden tapped the OFF button on the screen, and the hissing cut out. He closed the program and tapped the only other icon he could see: the file folder of audio clips.

As soon as the list of files opened, he saw the loose end that had been bugging him.

Right below the clip Claire had played earlier, about the burned trailer and the dead girls, there was one last audio file.

Something she must have recorded later on.

Dryden traced his finger over the time stamps for each file; they were displayed on the right side of the screen.

Claire had recorded the news clip about the girls at 9:47 last night. That was a little over two hours before she had called Dryden.

The time stamp on the final clip read 11:56.

Ten minutes before she’d dialed his number.

I had no intention to involve you in all this, Claire had said when they were parked in the desert. Not for something random like the guy in the trailer, and not for the rest of this, either. I never meant to drag you into it at all.

Then why did you?

I didn’t, actually.

Dryden tapped the last recording. The audio app opened, and the clip began to play.

Light static, already receding. A man speaking in the steady cadence of a newscaster:

“… just getting this now, CHP has released the name of the victim in that homicide from earlier this morning. The incident, a shooting, taking place outside a residence just after 7:30 A.M. Neighbors heard gunfire and afterward saw a black sedan and a white SUV leave the scene, though police have said nobody reported a license number. The victim is a resident of El Sedero, a thirty-eight-year-old male named Samuel Dryden.”