Signal

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Dryden listened to it three more times. He found himself parsing the details, breaking it down logically, and finally just letting the thing hit him in full.

His death, rendered in a sound bite that people would skip past on their drives to the mall.

His whole future, everything he ever wanted to do, and to be — all of it gone, two hours from now.

His death.

He let it sink in just that deep and then forced himself back into logic.

His death was not going to happen. Claire had contacted him to prevent it. She had heard that clip when she was already en route to handle the trailer situation by herself.

Dryden closed the audio player and the file listing. He switched off the tablet and closed the case and sat staring out the windshield for a full minute.

He believed what Claire had said: that she hadn’t meant to involve him in any of this, and yet —

What were the chances that his death two hours from now was unrelated to her problems?

Questions, rising and falling in his thoughts.

Possible answers, way out at the edge of his contemplation.

He looked at the dashboard clock. 5:34. He could be in El Sedero by 7:15 if he risked a speeding ticket.

Traffic was light on the freeway. He set cruise control to ten over the limit and focused again on the previous hour.

Certain logistics came to mind: Was it safe to be driving his own vehicle right now? It would only be a matter of time before Claire’s enemies started looking for him. They would realize something had gone wrong — that the men bringing the machine back to them weren’t responding to phone calls, that the prisoner they had been transporting was now unaccounted for, and must have the machine in his possession.

They would want to find him, just as badly as they had wanted to find Claire.

One difference: They didn’t know who he was.

They had not learned his name by way of the events in the Mojave. Of the four attackers, only one had seen Dryden’s identity: the man who had taken his wallet. That man had not spoken the name aloud to the others, nor had he called the information in to anyone. Now that man was dead, and the wallet was safely back in Dryden’s pocket.

Neither was there any official record for Claire’s enemies to search. The doomed patrol car had never been close enough to see Dryden’s plate number, and no other cruiser had come within a mile of him as he’d left the area. There was no way the cops could tie him to anything.

Therefore Claire’s enemies couldn’t know his name, if they hadn’t somehow known it before the events in the desert. Which didn’t seem to be the case. The four attackers sure as hell hadn’t known who he was.

There were other ways, of course, that these people could try to get a fix on him — to guess who Claire might have turned to for help, in a jam. They would look for personal and professional contacts of hers, going back years. Dryden’s name would appear in both categories. There would be old military files showing them serving together, and Claire’s phone records would show calls made to Dryden’s house and cell over the years since.

Except none of those documents would be easy to get to. Maybe impossible.

The military unit Dryden and Claire had served in had been about as secret as anything in the United States government, in part because much of what they’d done had been illegal. There might be records on paper somewhere, in a safe room underground in D.C. — or more likely in Langley, Virginia. There was close to zero chance any information on that unit existed in a computer database with a physical link to the outside world. Someone who golfed with the president might be able to figure it out. Anyone else would be out of luck.

Claire’s phone records would be even harder to find, if they existed at all. In her work in the private sector these past eight years, she had made enemies of a number of tech-savvy people with the means to do harm. As a result, she’d had every reason to make her digital footprints hard to follow. Dryden had seen for himself, on a few occasions, the lengths she went to: the specialized e-mail and phone services she used, the records encrypted or outright purged on a regular basis.

The people now holding Claire would do everything they could to find the unknown man she had been with in the Mojave. They might even see the news about a man and woman saving four girls in a trailer, an hour earlier, and connect the dots. The coverage would probably dwell on the near-impossible nature of the rescue, which would be a hell of a giveaway to Claire’s enemies.

But it wouldn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know about him: unidentified male, white, average height and build.

For the time being, driving his Explorer seemed safe enough. If that changed, he would react accordingly.

He rolled into El Sedero at twelve past seven. The streets were mostly empty, the diners and coffee shops along the waterfront just waking up. The ocean was slate gray with stark white breakers coming in, its horizon blurred out to nothing by a marine fog that hadn’t yet burned off.

His house was right up against the beach, a one-story saltbox with cedar siding worn gray over the years. He had been born and raised in Los Angeles, his childhood divided between a high-rise condo in Century City and a boarding school in Oxnard. He’d become good friends with a girl at that school whose family lived out here in El Sedero, and he’d been taken with the town from the first time he saw it. Years and years later, toward the end of his time in the service, he had lost both of his parents in the same miserable summer. When he finally left the military, he sold the condo in the city and bought this house. He ended up reconnecting with the girl he’d known in high school — ended up marrying her soon after that, and settling into the happiest part of his life. It didn’t last very long.

He coasted along a street two blocks in from the shore now, keeping well clear of the house. He nosed into the terraced parking lot of a used-book store, and into a space at the edge of the overlook, maybe two hundred yards up the incline from his front door. He could see the whole house from here, like a stage set viewed from high in the nosebleeds.

7:16.

He pulled the Remington 700 into his lap, took a dime from the console tray, and used it to unscrew the scope mounts. He set the rifle aside and kept the scope, but switched it from thermal vision to its standard optical view.

He braced his elbows on the wheel and put his eye to the scope, and waited.

There was a kind of pressure he’d felt only a handful of times, back in his years on the job. Times when he and his people were actually working against the clock. Maybe someone way up high received credible word from an informant — news of some very big, very bad thing in the offing, the fuse burning down on a scale of hours. When that sort of threat came along, things happened quickly. Agencies talked to each other. Phone calls passed through the back channels. Strings got pulled. There was never anything exhilarating about days like that. No good side to it at all. Just tension and dread, and the near-certainty that your phone would go off anytime: Turn on CNN, it just happened.

He felt it now, thinking about Claire.

How much time did he have to find her? How short was the fuse?

He kept thinking of a day probably nine years back, downtime on some airbase, waiting for orders. He and a few of the guys had been playing baseball, and someone had goaded Claire into joining. She looked uncomfortable with it — not the game, just the interaction. Being around that many people, even though she knew them all. Her first time at bat she hit one deep into left, way past the outfielder, and made it to third. The next batter hit a single and Claire made it home, and Dryden, playing catcher, had seen up close the way she reacted to the high fives and cheers of her team.

The image was pretty sharp in his mind, even now. How she’d tried to smile and only partly succeeded, as if the muscles in her face wouldn’t cooperate. He remembered what she’d looked like a minute later, sitting alone at the end of the bench, trying not to have a panic attack. Hands in her lap, shoulders hunched, her breathing forced and careful.

She had spent her childhood in foster care; he knew that from her file, and from people she’d worked with before. There were reference tags to old police investigations from back when she was ten years old — abuse of some type, unspecified but long-term. Dryden had thought about all that, watching her that day, this twenty-three-year-old kid who looked like she wanted to crawl under a blanket and hide, all because people had slapped her palm and told her she’d done great. She had spent her life learning to do without those things, and couldn’t handle them now that they’d finally come along.

Dryden had never had siblings, but he remembered thinking, in that moment, that this must be what it felt like to have a little sister. Someone you were irrationally protective of. Someone you would kill for, just because. He had felt that way about Claire Dunham ever since.

7:21.

He could go to the authorities. He had a few personal contacts he could talk to. A buddy from his and Claire’s old unit was a state cop here in California now, pretty high up in the ranks. But the last Dryden had heard, the guy was mostly in charge of coordinating mass media alerts: missing child notifications and emergency broadcast system reports. Technical work, without much authority to investigate anything.

In any case, the FBI would be the right people to talk to. He could simply bite the bullet and show them the machine. Let them see it in action, and tell them everything Claire had shared with him. They wouldn’t believe him, at first. Not for a while. But they would — after ten hours and twenty-four minutes. Then everything would change. Their attention would focus like the seeker head of a guided missile.

Maybe that would be enough.

Maybe sending the federal government after the people who’d killed everyone at Bayliss, and who’d kidnapped Claire, would save her life. There was no question the government would go after those people, whoever they were. This kind of technology, showing up out of nowhere — the government’s first priority would be to clamp down on it, get control, contain the situation. Maybe in the course of doing that, they would find Claire Dunham alive and well.

Maybe.

Or maybe the official action against these people would be less than perfectly choreographed. Maybe at the first sign of trouble, whoever was holding Claire would get a panicked call. Get rid of her, burn everything, get out.

The higher you stacked a pile of maybes, the less likely it was to fall the way you wanted.

7:24.

Of all these considerations, one eclipsed the rest: the fact that Claire herself had chosen not to go to the authorities. For three days she had been in hiding, in possession of the machine, and she hadn’t taken it to the FBI or anyone else. She must have had her reasons.

Dryden watched his house, the Zeiss scope ready, and waited for another course of action to present itself.

At 7:27 a blue compact car slowed in front of his house.

Dryden steadied the scope and trained it on the driver. A woman, middle-aged, short blond hair. She took something from her passenger seat and flung it out the window onto his driveway.

A newspaper in an orange plastic sleeve.

She rolled on to the next house and did the same.

Dryden exhaled and lowered the scope. Watched the street as the delivery car made its way along, one house after another.

At 7:29 another vehicle turned onto his street, coming on slow and tentative. A white Chevy Tahoe.

Neighbors heard gunfire and afterward saw a black sedan and a white SUV leave the scene.

Dryden put his eye to the scope again.

The driver was male and young, maybe five years out of college. Short hair, light brown. Glasses. He coasted along, looking at street numbers on mailboxes.

The kid stopped in front of Dryden’s house, then pulled in and parked and got out. He was tall and lanky, his body language full of hesitation. For five seconds he just stood there beside his SUV, his hands at his sides. He raised one and rubbed his forehead with it.

He was wearing khaki pants and a gray T-shirt, which was tucked in. There was no weapon stowed in his waistband, or anywhere else Dryden could see.

Dryden lowered the scope and scanned the street.

Halfway down the block, a black Taurus angled into a space at the curb. Even with unaided eyes, Dryden could see the driver pick up a pair of binoculars and aim them at the white Tahoe.

Dryden raised the Zeiss and took a better look.

There were two men in the black Taurus. The passenger he could only see from the jaw down, but the driver’s face was in full view. A stocky guy, fortyish, dark hair cropped close to the scalp.

Both of them watching the kid.

Tailing the kid — that much was clear. These men had not been anywhere in the vicinity of Dryden’s house until just now, when the kid arrived. Wherever the young man had come from, the guys in the Taurus had followed him from there. They had not been watching the house itself.

Dryden swung the scope back to his house. The kid was still standing there beside his vehicle, unsure of himself. Five seconds passed. Then he crossed to the front door and pressed the button for the doorbell. He stood waiting.

Dryden pictured the way it would have played out if Claire had never called him. He would have been up by 6:45, because he always was. Breakfast, a bowl of cereal, would have been done by 7:00, and he would have been out of the shower and dressed by now, ready to head back up to the cottage and get started for the day. He would have answered the doorbell right away.

The kid on the porch waited fifteen seconds and pushed the button again. He looked fidgety. He paced. He checked his watch and rang the bell a third time.

Dryden aimed the scope at the Taurus again.

The men inside were talking, nodding. The driver cut the wheel to the left, angling the front tires to pull away from the curb. Getting ready to accelerate toward the house, where the kid stood waiting on the porch.

The man in the passenger seat raised a pistol and worked the slide. His free hand went to the door handle and pulled it. He pushed the passenger door open just slightly.

The Taurus eased forward in starts and stops, a few inches at a time. Prepared to move. Like a big cat, low in the weeds, tensed and ready.

At the front door of the house, the kid rubbed his forehead again, nervous as hell.

It crossed Dryden’s mind only briefly to consider that the kid might be working with the men in the Taurus. That he might be willing bait, a harmless-looking figure to make Dryden open his front door and let his guard down. It didn’t fly. If the kid was working in concert with the men, the two of them would have been standing right against the siding next to the front door, ready to move against Dryden as soon as he opened it.

They were halfway down the block because they were hiding from the kid, too. It was clear he had no idea they were watching him.

Dryden took in the geometry of the scene. The dynamics waiting to play out — the dynamics that would have played out. He imagined himself opening the front door, the kid turning to him, just beginning to speak. Imagined the Taurus angling out from the curb and simply rolling the hundred yards to his driveway — not fast, not revving or screeching, not doing anything unusual at all. It would have escaped his attention like any random car moving down his street, until the moment the passenger door opened and a man with a gun stepped out, thirty feet away.

Neighbors heard gunfire …

… saw a black sedan and a white SUV leave the scene.

Maybe the gunman would have tried to force both Dryden and the kid into the Tahoe. Maybe the kid would have panicked and done something stupid. Maybe the guy would have just started shooting from the outset. The news report had not mentioned a second murder victim — just Dryden. Maybe the kid would have ended up forced back into his Tahoe at gunpoint.

However it played out, it would have done so in seconds, brutal and unexpected. All Dryden’s training would have done nothing for him. You could prepare for some things. Others you couldn’t.

Down at the house, the kid tried the doorbell one last time.

The men in the Taurus traded looks, a few words. More nods.

The pistol dropped back out of sight.

The kid turned from the front door and went back to his Tahoe. He got in and reversed out of the driveway and drove off toward downtown.

The black Taurus pulled out and followed.

Dryden set the Zeiss on the passenger seat and started the Explorer.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Apparently the kid was hungry. He parked at a restaurant off the main drag, got a booth by the window and ordered, and when his meal showed up it looked like he’d asked for about a dozen pancakes and half a plate of eggs.

Dryden watched from a Walmart lot a hundred yards away; he was parked in its outer reaches but concealed well enough by a cluster of vehicles there.

The two men in the black Taurus had been less cautious; they were right at the edge of the restaurant’s lot. Dryden could see the passenger better now, a blond guy roughly the same age as the driver.

Dryden moved the Zeiss back and forth between the Taurus and the kid in his booth. The kid was mostly done with his meal now. He somehow pulled off looking nervous even while stuffing his face.

In the Taurus, more quick discussion. More nods.

The passenger’s gun came back into view.

Then the man shoved open his door and got out and closed it again, tucking the gun into his rear waistband and letting his shirt fall over it.

He crossed the lot to a bank of newspaper boxes just beside the restaurant’s entrance, no more than twenty feet from where the kid had parked his Tahoe. He paid for a USA Today and leaned his back against the brick wall of the building, two paces from the door where the kid would come out.

In his booth, the kid called the waitress over and asked her something. A tight sequence of words. Maybe Can I get the check?

The waitress nodded and moved off.

Dryden lowered the scope and took in the layout of the restaurant’s lot. The entrance, the Tahoe, the Taurus, the man with the newspaper.

The geometry of the scene.

The dynamics waiting to play out.

He saw himself standing in his own doorway, entirely unprepared for these men.

About as unprepared as they were for him, right now.

The whole thing had a kind of nasty symmetry he could almost enjoy.

Inside the restaurant, the waitress walked past the kid’s booth again. She gave him a little gesture, an extended index finger, like Wait one, I haven’t forgotten.

There would be a minute at least before the kid stepped out the restaurant’s front door.

Time enough for Dryden to roll into the restaurant’s lot and get in position. Not revving. Not screeching. He had his hand on the ignition key, about to lower the Zeiss from his eye, when movement in the restaurant caught his attention.

The kid was standing partly from his seat, feeling both his back pockets, then his front ones. Then turning to stare out at his Tahoe in the parking lot, mouthing something that had to be Shit.

He’d left his wallet in the vehicle.

“Oh hell,” Dryden said.

The kid caught the waitress’s eye and said something fast. She smiled and nodded. No problem.

Like that, the kid was heading for the door.

“Fuck,” Dryden whispered.

It happened so smoothly, nobody in the restaurant noticed. The kid stepped outside, and the blond man tapped him on the shoulder. One of the guy’s hands went to his rear waistband and retrieved the gun, though Dryden never caught sight of it. The blond man kept it low, mostly hidden by the newspaper, though visible to the kid.

The guy said something. It took about three seconds. It ended with now.

The kid nodded and continued to the Tahoe. He got in on the driver’s side, and the blond man got in on the passenger side.

Just like that.

The Tahoe started and rolled out of the lot, the Taurus pulling out ahead of it and taking the lead.

For the second time, Dryden fell into place behind them.

The two vehicles stayed tight together. They turned inland on a two-lane that led out of town toward the low, parched foothills of the mountains.

Seeking a quiet place to stop and tie the kid up properly, Dryden was sure — or simply kill him. Holding a victim at gunpoint and making him drive was not a good strategy in the long term. It was good for a few minutes, maybe. Not even then, if the victim was clever enough or desperate enough.

If the kid was who Dryden guessed he was — he was far from sure — then the clever part might be covered. Maybe the desperate part, too.

Dryden took the turn and hung back two hundred yards. The traffic wasn’t sparse enough yet to give him away, if he kept some distance.

He had no real plan for when it did get sparse. There was nothing to build a plan around. If they spotted him, they would react, one way or another, and he would improvise.

A mile inland from town, the Taurus put on its blinker and turned right onto a gravel lane that led upward into the hill country. An old logging road from a hundred years back, maintained now for hikers and the fire department. The Tahoe followed.

Dryden took the turn and saw the two vehicles ahead of him, passing through the outlying trees of the forest that covered the higher slopes.

Just beyond the first curve among the trees, the Taurus passed a white pine on the right side of the road, as thick as a telephone pole.

The Tahoe didn’t.

It jerked to the right and slammed into the tree trunk at 40 miles per hour, taking the impact on the passenger side.

Even from far behind, Dryden could see the windows on that side of the vehicle burst and spray pebbles of glass from buckled frames.

The SUV’s back end kicked around to the left, like a toy vehicle struck by a hammer. It swung out into the narrow road, kicking up a dust cloud off the gravel and coming to rest with just enough room to get past its back corner.

Dryden floored the Explorer, pushing it to 60. The wrecked SUV and the dust cloud obscured his view of everything beyond the crash site — but he already knew what he would see there: the Taurus, stopped, the dark-haired man shoving his door open, pistol already in hand.

Dryden steered past the Tahoe’s back bumper, burst through the dust cloud, and saw those things exactly.

The dark-haired man was ten feet from the Taurus’s open door, gun low at his side, running toward the wreck.

At the sight of the oncoming Explorer, the man froze. His brain was trying to process the new arrival, what it meant, and what he might do about it. He was a quarter second into that endeavor when Dryden hit him, still doing 60. The Explorer’s grille caught him low in the chest, punching him backward off his feet. His neck snapped downward and his face hit the vehicle’s hood with a heavy thud. An instant later the body was airborne, flung out ahead in a long, low arc, like the path of a thrown horseshoe.

He landed deep among the trees beside the road, dead beyond any doubt.

Dryden braked, skidded to a halt, dropped the Explorer into park, and shoved open his door. He sprinted for the crashed Tahoe, drawing one of Claire’s Berettas as he ran.

The wreck was spectacular. The passenger side was compressed around the pine trunk as if its hood were made of aluminum foil. The crumple zones in the front three feet of the vehicle had done their job, but all the same, hitting a tree at 40 brought all kinds of unforgiving physics into play.

Dryden reached the driver’s-side door. The window there had burst, too, though the door itself was mostly undamaged.

His eyes went to the details of the vehicle’s interior, logging them in rapid succession.

The blond gunman was dead. He had worn his seat belt, but the passenger air bag had apparently been switched off. Maybe the kid had known that. Maybe he’d even hit the button to disable it, in the instant before jerking the wheel. Either way, the gunman’s head had collided with the metal windshield column, which had bent inward in the crash. The guy’s body hung slack, leaning forward over the footwell with his arms and head draped. There was blood coming out of his head at about half the volume of a faucet tap, pattering the floor with a sound like rain spilling from a downspout. Cerebral hemorrhaging. The guy was long gone.

The kid was alive.

His eyes were open and he was staring through the window frame at Dryden.

And holding his stomach, just below his diaphragm. There was blood seeping out between his fingers.

“You’re the guy,” the kid said. His tone was flat and matter-of-fact, the way people often talked when they were in shock. “You’re Dryden.”

Dryden was still staring at the bloodstain, expanding through the fabric of the kid’s shirt. Then his eyes picked out something on the passenger side floor, gleaming in the darkness there. A single brass shell casing.

“He got me,” the kid said. “Christ, he got me.”

Beneath the kid’s hands, the blood was running in rivulets down the front of his T-shirt. Pooling in the folds of his pants, and on the Tahoe’s leather seat cushion. A huge amount of blood.

Dryden knew human anatomy from training and from experience. He knew about the thoracic artery, running down through the abdomen and branching to form the two femoral arteries in the legs. A person stabbed or shot through just one femoral artery could bleed out and die inside of sixty seconds, if nobody was around to apply a tourniquet.

The thoracic artery carried twice that much blood, and no tourniquet could be applied to it.

The kid’s face had lost a bit of color even in the ten seconds Dryden had been standing there. He was going fast.

“Are you Curtis?” Dryden asked.

The kid’s eyes had begun to drift. Now they fixed on him again. He looked surprised to hear that name spoken, but only a little.

The kid nodded.

“Came to find Claire,” Curtis whispered. “I thought she might be with you. She told me all about you.”

A shiver went through Curtis’s body. The morning air was easily seventy-five degrees, but the kid reacted as if it were forty. To him, it was. He forced himself to keep talking. “I guess she found you, then.”

Instead of verifying the statement, Dryden leaned in through the empty window frame and spoke carefully.

“Curtis, the people who attacked Bayliss Labs have a place they call the interrogation site. Have you heard of that? Do you know where it is?”

Curtis’s eyes narrowed. Then he shook his head.

“Are you sure?” Dryden said. “Think as clearly as you can.”

Curtis nodded, and when he spoke again, his voice was only a whisper. “All their language is careful. All their e-mails, the stuff on the server. No locations. No names. I copied all of it, though. Took it with me. Figured a lot of it out…”

He was losing strength by the second. Fading.

“Curtis,” Dryden said.

“I’ve been hiding three days,” the kid said. “I printed it all, got it organized.” He nodded weakly toward the space behind the front seats. “It’s all in a bag back there, for Claire. I even wrote a letter to go with it. It’s everything I know.”

The shivering was getting worse.

“I tried to be careful,” Curtis said. “I made sure they couldn’t find me with their … system. Maybe they found me the old-fashioned way. Jesus, I went to my old coffee shop this morning. Maybe they were just watching…”

His eyes were wet now. The shock was losing ground to the pain, or else the fear.

Then something changed. Curtis blinked and exhaled hard and forced himself into a state of alertness. He turned and stared out through the shattered passenger window, then swept his gaze left in a slow arc, eyes darting everywhere.

Looking for some threat out there in the woods.

Like Claire had done in the desert.

Exactly like Claire.

Dryden’s scalp prickled. He turned fast and raised the Beretta, studying the surrounding trees.

Nothing there.

He pivoted slowly counterclockwise, his eyes and the pistol tracking around, a few degrees per second.

He ended up facing back the way they’d come from: toward the paved two-lane road, which was just hidden from view by the curve in the gravel lane through the forest.

A hand seized his arm. He spun toward it, reflexively.

Curtis had reached out through the driver’s-side window frame and taken hold of him. The kid’s eyes were intense, keenly aware.

“Hide our bodies,” Curtis said.

“What?”

“You can’t leave any record for anyone to pick up on. The people we’re up against … if there’s anything tying me to this place and time, then … they’ll send other killers here. They’ll have … already sent them. Hours ago. They’d already be here waiting.”

As crazed as the kid sounded, his words lined up eerily well with what had happened in the desert.

The gunmen there had already been in place. Claire had begun looking for the threat once it was clear the cop was going to stop and question the two of them.

Once it was clear there would be a record of their presence there.

At that place and time.

Dryden felt the dots trying to connect. In some sense they did, but only partly.

“Hide our bodies,” Curtis said again. “Me and these two guys. Put us in their car and hide it someplace. It has to stay lost for a long time.”

The kid’s burst of alertness was leaving him. The skin of his face was paper white. His voice was back to a whisper.

Dryden said, “But this Tahoe—”

Curtis shook his head. “Can’t be traced to me. I was already careful about that. Stolen plates. Filed off the VIN. Just burn it.”

He took a deep breath. It looked like it hurt.

“Do it,” Curtis sighed. Then a strange little smile crossed his face. “I already know you’ll manage it. ’Cause they’re not here right now killing you.”

The odd smile stayed on his face as his eyes went still.

Gone.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

When Aubrey Deene pulled into the carport in front of her apartment, one of the maintenance guys was mowing the lawn. Her eyes fixed on the mower: an old Husqvarna, like the kind her father had beaten to hell every summer of her childhood back in South Bend. Sometimes a fouled spark plug would set him off, and he’d burn up a day’s worth of anger in five minutes of wrench throwing in the garage. Other times the mower would only get him warmed up, and then Aubrey and her sister and her mother would have a long night in store for them. Rod Deene had been dead for five years now — heart attack a month before Aubrey finished undergrad at Iowa State — but the damnedest things could shove him right back into her head.

The engine of her ancient Miata coughed and threatened to die. She killed the ignition and pocketed the key, then turned and rummaged through the textbooks and folders on the passenger seat. Any day now, the car was going to give up the ghost and leave her hitchhiking. Which would be fitting, in its own way. Her life had taken on a distinctly hitchhiker kind of feeling lately. Like her future was no more plotted than that of a paper cup in the wind.

Not so far off the mark, you know.

That internal voice had an irritating, teen-angst edge to it. If there was anyone less welcome in Aubrey’s head than her father, it was her own younger self, two months out of high school, pulling out of her parents’ driveway in her rusted-to-shit VW Beetle. Leaving South Bend and heading for the world. Iowa State, then MIT, then whatever Ph.D. program looked right. The girl with all the answers, all the dominoes lined up and ready to fall.

They had fallen. For a while. Iowa State had gone swimmingly, and MIT had played out like a well-rehearsed dance number, exhilarating and challenging, leaving her winded but with her feet right on the intended marks. She’d had her choice of doctoral programs, and she’d picked Cornell, and for a time, things there had followed the game plan, too. She could remember feeling like it was all still clicking along. There were beautiful afternoons on the plaza, maybe her favorite place in the whole world. Sometimes she would take her textbooks and sit inside Sage Chapel, though she had never been religious and never would be. Most of the time the chapel was empty except for a few tourists, moving in little groups, whispering, taking pictures of the beautiful architecture. Aubrey had sat in the shadowy pews, way back from the lit-up altar, and let the silence of the place envelop her like water.

She supposed the doubts had started creeping in around that time. Little uncertainties that gave her pause now and then, like static lines flickering in the movie of her life. There were social issues, for one. She was twenty-four and had never had a boyfriend — nothing that’d lasted beyond a few weeks, anyway. She knew she was pretty, and it wasn’t hard getting the attention of boys. Yet the few times she’d let someone in — nice guys from her classes who didn’t push for things to get physical right away — had ended horribly. Three or four dates along, she would make the first move. Things would happen, enjoyable things if a little clumsy and brief, and then she’d find herself lying awake all night next to a sleeping body, her mind trying like hell to avoid the unwelcome truth: that she felt nothing for this person; that she wished she was back at her place, alone with her books and her lab notes; that she had no idea what to say in the morning.

Then, two months into her time at Cornell, a different kind of boy had come along. His name was Daryl, and he didn’t wait for her to make the first move, and when things happened they were neither clumsy nor brief, and they were way the hell past enjoyable. Sometimes Aubrey had still lain awake all night next to him, but only to worry that she might do something wrong and lose him. That fear had been there from the moment she’d met him, the sense that she had never quite won him over, though she couldn’t define it more clearly than that.

She found her interest in the books and lab notes waning just a bit in the months after meeting Daryl, though her academic work didn’t suffer much for it. Instead, her time with Daryl came at the cost of time with her friends, a fact Daryl seemed just fine with. He didn’t like her friends all that much. He certainly didn’t like her spending time with them. In hindsight, that should’ve been a red flag, but it hadn’t been. She had not been looking for any flaws on his side of the equation; all her focus was on worrying about her own flaws.

Other flags should have been more obvious. Like when he would pick her phone up off the table and check whom she’d called that day, right in front of her, as casually as if he were reading the newspaper.

You talked to Laney? he would say. What was that about?

Some little spark inside of her wanted to reply, She’s my best friend, and it’s none of your fucking business what it was about.

Then another part of her would think, Don’t lose him, don’t lose him, don’t lose him, and when she opened her mouth all that came out was the answer to his question, in detail, and somehow in the tone of an apology.

They’d been together six months when he suggested she drop out of the program. She wouldn’t need an income, he said; his own would be mid-six by the time he was thirty. They had never talked about getting married, but the possibility of it had been there for months already, in the subtext of their conversations.

It was in the days after that talk — days she spent giving the idea real consideration — that younger Aubrey started piping up in her head. Younger Aubrey with that old Beetle packed full of clothes and books, rolling out of South Bend on a summer morning. She began to call that version of herself Proust Girl, because among those books in the Volkswagen had been a boxed set of all Proust’s published work. Proust Girl had not read a word of the man’s writing yet, back then, but fully intended to. She had meant to have it deeply absorbed by Christmas break of freshman year, not just so she could whip out quotes and look brilliant, but for the light it would shine on her understanding of human nature. Proust Girl couldn’t have known that she would get fifty pages into the first book and throw the whole goddamned set in the trash. She couldn’t have known the writing would feel like ham-fisted overacting on the page, any more than she could have known that nice boys would never be able to get her off — would never even be able to make her smile. Proust Girl was none too happy at the idea of dropping out of Cornell, but what the hell did she know? Proust Girl could’ve never seen Daryl coming.

When it finally happened, it did so in the most mundane of places: the kitchenware aisle of a Target, just off campus. She and Daryl had been out to dinner and had stopped for groceries afterward. Aubrey saw a vegetable steamer she’d looked at two or three times before; it was on sale now, a hundred dollars instead of one fifty. She set it in the cart, and Daryl took one look at it and told her to put it back on the shelf.

Don’t worry, she said. I’m paying for it.

No you’re not. You can’t afford it. Put it back.

No joke in his tone, and nothing in his eyes but sternness, and the expectation of obedience.

That look from him wasn’t quite unprecedented, but it caught her off guard this time.

Daryl, it’s my money, I’m buying it.

Never taking that locked gaze off of her, Daryl took the steamer from the cart and set it back onto the shelf. When Aubrey reached to pick it up again, his hand clamped around her forearm hard enough to dig into the muscles. Hurting her. On purpose. And still there was that gaze drilling into her. In that moment she realized she’d seen it before she ever met him. Long before.

And no, Proust Girl really would not have seen Daryl coming, she thought. Not if he’d been standing in a garage with an old Husqvarna, beating it with a wrench.

It ended right there in that aisle full of pots and pans, with Aubrey screaming at him to let go of her, screaming even after he complied, her hands coming up and covering her head, the brink of a nervous breakdown right there in front of a dozen shoppers.

That had been four years ago. She had finished up at Cornell and taken a postdoc appointment at Texas A&M. A year later she’d found herself here, at Arizona State, where she was now contemplating starting over and getting a law degree.

A paper cup in the wind.

She gathered the books she wanted from the passenger seat, stuffed them into her backpack, and got out of the car. On the front walk she nodded hello to the guy with the lawn mower, put her key in the lock, and stepped into her unit.

Her unit — no one else’s. There had been no more Daryls, though there had been a few more sleepless, guilt-heavy nights lying awake beside nice guys, in the endless hope that one of them would somehow light up enough of her buttons.

The thing was, she didn’t crave her academic work on those nights anymore. She didn’t crave much of anything, really, on any night. Which was unnerving as hell, at twenty-eight. Where had all the old rocket fuel gone? Where had Proust Girl gone? She existed only as a nagging thought now and again, all criticism and no advice.

Maybe the law degree would be a way to hit reset. A friend in D.C. had told her she should come out east and get into policy work. Advocate for something. Find a cause. Maybe. Or maybe there was something else she could do in D.C. Something she wasn’t even thinking of yet.

Aubrey set her bookbag on the carpet, stepped out of her shoes and —

Flinched, her breath coming out in a sharp little convulsion.

There was someone in her apartment.

Right there in the kitchen doorway.

Holding something.

These thoughts, in the tiniest sliver of a second.

In the next sliver her eyes locked on to the object: a handgun with a silencer on the barrel.

The first three shots felt like fingertips jabbing her chest, hard enough to shove her backward — and little balloons of ice water popping inside her, deep behind her ribs.

She didn’t feel the fourth shot. It broke the center band of her glasses and punched through the bridge of her nose.

The man with the gun watched her fall in a heap of limbs. Watched the carpet become soaked around her head, as if someone had tipped over a pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid.

Her face was just visible in profile, where she lay. She was pretty. Her chin was tiny, and she had a little button nose. It crossed his mind to wonder what she’d done to deserve this, but only for a second. It wasn’t his job to wonder about things.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Dryden felt strange doing what the kid had asked. He would have felt stranger not doing it.

He had the dead men’s Taurus backed up close to the wrecked Tahoe, the trunk lid open. The bodies of the two attackers were already stuffed inside, along with their wallets and phones. The phones were identical to those he’d found on the earlier pair of gunmen, and had the same redaction software blotting out the numbers in the call logs. As before, neither man had made a call or sent a text in the past hour — which was good. It meant they had not phoned their superiors and passed along Dryden’s address after tailing Curtis there. It meant Claire’s enemies still had no idea who Dryden was.

Also as before, the gunmen carried cash and no IDs. Dryden took the money and wiped down the wallets and left them with the corpses.

Crossing back to the Taurus for Curtis’s body, Dryden could see the glint of traffic on the nearby two-lane — tiny reflections off chrome and glass, stabbing through the concealing trees.

But no vehicle turned off that road to approach along the gravel route. No random tourist or Forest Service vehicle, the arrival of which would lead to a 9-1-1 call and a police presence within minutes.

He had the strangest sense of assurance that it wouldn’t happen. He kept thinking of the kid’s last words.

I already know you’ll manage it. ’Cause they’re not here right now killing you.

Dryden opened the driver’s-side door — it groaned at first, lightly jammed by the warping of the vehicle’s structure — and pulled Curtis’s body out onto the ground. He dragged it to the Taurus’s crowded trunk, lifted, and forced it inside, then went through the kid’s pockets and found nothing. No phone and no wallet.

The wallet was in the Tahoe, where Curtis had left it when he went into the restaurant.

There was no ID in the wallet, and no credit card or registration either. Nothing with Curtis’s name on it. Just cash — ninety-six dollars. Dryden took it, feeling only marginally like a thief. No point leaving it.

He opened the Tahoe’s back door on the driver’s side. On the floor sat a black messenger bag, stuffed full of something bulky and square-edged. Dryden opened it and saw five white plastic binders, the kind that held three-hole-punched paper. You could buy them at any office store. At a glance he saw that each binder held a thick stack of pages, maybe a couple hundred each.

The information Curtis had stolen from the people who’d attacked Bayliss. The stuff from the secure server, which he’d printed and organized in the past three days while lying low.

In addition to the five binders, there was a slim stack of pages by itself, fifteen or twenty sheets stapled at the top corner.

I even wrote a letter to go with it. It’s everything I know.

Staring into the bag, Dryden pictured a kind of thread connecting himself to Claire, wherever she was. A delicate strand drawn wire-taut, its tiny fibers straining and snapping, but the line itself still holding.

Whatever chance he had to find her lay in those pages.

Another kind of assurance suddenly came to him — far less comforting than the belief that no stray vehicle would come barreling down the gravel road.

The second assurance was that Claire’s captors would not kill her anytime soon.

If they had no other way to find out who he was — the unknown man who had the machine they wanted — then interrogating Claire would be their only recourse. As long as she didn’t tell them anything, they would keep her alive and under questioning. If anything, they would have her on suicide watch.

The notion brought him no relief; it brought only the hope that he could still get to her. That the fuse had length yet to burn.

He closed the messenger bag and took it to his Explorer. He set it on the passenger-side floor, beside the hard plastic case with the machine inside it.

Then he opened the Explorer’s back end and grabbed the emergency kit he kept there. Among the items inside were three road flares and a towing rope.

It took only a minute to secure the rope from the Explorer’s hitch to the Taurus’s frame, at the front end.

He spent another minute giving the entire scene one last look. He had already kicked dirt and dust over the blood drops the bodies had left when he’d dragged them, and scuffed the ground further to erase the drag marks themselves. Not a perfect solution, but good enough.

There would sure as hell be no useful forensic evidence found in the wrecked Tahoe. For good measure he wiped his fingerprints from the door handles, and held the road flares without the pads of his fingers touching them. He popped off the igniter caps and struck the flares alight one after another. He lobbed two of them into the vehicle — one up front, one into the rear seats — and set the third against the front tire on the driver’s side, its white-hot flame directly against the rubber.

By the time he’d sprinted to the Explorer, climbed in, and put it in drive, there were already black tendrils of smoke coming through the Tahoe’s open windows, where the upholstery had begun to burn.

Ten minutes later and two thousand feet higher in the hills, he stopped. He was no longer on a gravel road, but a mostly overgrown two-track that punched like a ragged tunnel through the evergreens. On the left side of the path, the land pitched upward at forty-five degrees. On the other side it dropped away just as steeply, toward a brush-choked pond thirty feet below. During summers when he was a teenager, Dryden had been up here lots of times with friends, usually at night. The pond was more than sixty feet deep in the middle, its sides like a funnel angling down into the murk. He’d heard rumors that there were old logging trucks down at the bottom, but he’d never heard of anyone going in with scuba gear to find out for sure.

He unhooked the tow rope and stowed it and pointed the Taurus at the edge of the dropoff. He put the car in neutral and shoved it over the lip. It bounced and jostled its way down the slope, crashed through the shrubs lining the pond, and hit the water with an explosion of mud and foam. Giant ripples rolled outward, crisscrossed, settled. For thirty seconds the car looked like it wanted to float. It bobbed with its front end pulled under by the engine’s weight, and drifted out away from the shore. Then physics asserted itself. The passenger compartment flooded and the car pitched farther forward, its back end tilting up, and within another minute the whole thing had gone under. Dryden studied the gap in the brush at the water’s edge, where the car had punched through. Most of the plants had simply bent and were springing back now. The scrub-covered earth showed no tire tracks. Someone standing here five minutes from now wouldn’t suspect a thing.

From far away through the trees, in the direction of town, came the sound of sirens. Police and fire units responding to the burning Tahoe, the origin of which would forever be a mystery to them.

Dryden got back in the Explorer and pulled away.

He returned to the paved two-lane by a different route than he’d taken to the pond, avoiding the Tahoe.

He drove back into El Sedero and pulled into the broad parking lot of a strip mall three blocks in from the shore. He took a spot at the periphery, far from the packed rows closer in.

He hauled the messenger bag up onto the passenger seat and opened it, and took out the five binders and the stapled letter. Everything I know.

It was 8:45 in the morning.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

At 8:46, Marnie Calvert stood at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the computer lab in the Wilshire Federal Building. From twenty-three stories up, the window faced south over the 405 freeway. Marnie leaned lightly on the glass with the knuckles of one hand. Far below, a bright red sports car merged onto the freeway from Wilshire. She watched it slip away into the morning haze toward Marina del Rey.

Twenty minutes earlier she’d been in her office, pacing, her mind doing 60. Then her computer had dinged with an incoming e-mail, a positive match on the fingerprint search she’d sent in hours before.

The mystery man who’d saved the girls at the trailer had exactly one blemish on his record: an arrest for assault when he was eighteen years old, the charge dropped almost immediately on grounds of self-defense. He’d flown pretty straight since then: army service immediately following high school, including time with the Rangers and then 1st SFOD-Delta. Then, apparently, he’d vanished into another dimension for six years, because his military record simply went blank for that stretch of time. Not even redacted. Just nonexistent. From age twenty-four to thirty, there was no Sam Dryden.

The paperwork picked up again with his honorable discharge at thirty. Within the next year there was a marriage license and a birth certificate — in that order, but just barely. Then came two death certificates, the wife and the daughter, and reference tags pointing to police reports about the traffic accident that had taken their lives.

After which Sam Dryden’s document trail went almost blank again, though not by way of secrecy this time. Rather, his life seemed to dial itself down to the lowest burner setting. He worked, but only a little: private security stuff here and there, putting his background to use. He didn’t generate much income, but then again he didn’t need to. He had inherited a significant chunk of money from his parents, back during his time in the service. But for those years after he lost his wife and child, he didn’t spend much of the money. His credit card records showed him paying his bills and his property taxes and buying groceries. He didn’t do much else. For the better part of five years, there was no sign that he’d traveled or purchased much more than basic essentials. To the extent that paper records could show a man’s world shrinking down to a solitary confinement cell, Sam Dryden’s seemed to do so.

Then something had changed — not quite two years ago, toward the end of 2013. There was no indication of what had triggered it, but all at once Sam Dryden seemed to begin living his life again. There were airline tickets — flights to places like Honolulu and Vail and Grand Cayman. There were weeklong hotel stays at those places, and boat rentals, and payments for all the things people did on vacations just for the hell of it. The plane tickets were always for two, and the other ticket was always for a woman: someone named Riley Walker for the first seven or eight months, then a few others in succession. Dating. Living. Taking in the world. Something or someone had come along and jolted Sam Dryden out of his exile.

He was working again, too. Buying and fixing and then selling houses, from the look of his financials. Pretty damn nice houses, if the prices and locations were any sign.

And apparently, maybe just for kicks, he had now taken up the hobby of preventing horrifying tragedies no human could have predicted.

“How the hell did you know to be there?” Marnie whispered.

She watched a light business jet take off out of Santa Monica Municipal Airport, a few miles to the south and west. Watched it climb and bank out over the Pacific, a white speck and then nothing.

“You wanted to see me?”

Marnie turned. Don Sumner stood in the doorway of his office, where he’d been on the phone for the past three minutes.

Marnie nodded and crossed to the door. Sumner stepped back and let her through.

Sumner was fifty and going gray at the temples. One wall of his office was lined with deep shelves, on which were arrayed detailed models of mid-twentieth-century automobiles. There was a ’64 Mustang, a ’51 Bel Air, a ’42 Packard Super Eight. Even some kind of Studebaker from the ’30s. Sumner had built the models from kits, then airbrushed them and done all kinds of intricate detail work; some of the cars were actually made to look weathered and worn. Marnie had studied the collection up close before, and had concluded that Sumner could have been a special effects guy for one of the movie studios, back before CGI had become the norm.

“Have a seat,” he said, dropping into his own chair. “What do you need?”

“Help on this Mojave thing.”

There was no need to specify which Mojave thing she was talking about. The story was already in heavy circulation locally, and was beginning to get traction on CNN and Fox. It had all the right ingredients: a miracle rescue, a very nasty, very dead bad guy, and two mysterious saviors who had appeared out of thin air and vanished back into it. The networks would feed on it for days — maybe longer if the two rescuers remained unknown.

“What do you have?” Sumner asked. He nodded at the printout in Marnie’s hand: Dryden’s info.

She unfolded the thin stack of pages and slid them across the desk. “This is a match from a set of prints I found at the scene. When I ran the search, I didn’t tell anyone where the prints came from. As of now, this guy has no official connection to the case. Outside of you and me, there’s nobody who can leak his name. I’d like to keep it that way until I know more.”

Marnie ran through the details of how she’d found the prints while Sumner’s eyes tracked down over the material, his eyebrows edging up once or twice.

“Prints on a washing machine,” he said. “Maybe he owned the thing. Maybe it broke down and he decided to dump it out in the desert.”

“Two hours’ drive from his address?”

“Maybe he was that pissed off at it. Wanted to make sure it didn’t find its way home like in that movie The Incredible Journey.”

“I think it was two dogs and a cat in the movie. Anyway, the scuff marks I found with the prints were new. Dryden was there last night.”

Sumner exhaled and slid the printout back across his desk. “So what is he? A vigilante?”

“Even if he is,” Marnie said, “how did he know enough to show up at that exact moment? Those girls snagged a cell phone off the coffee table and called 9-1-1. That was the trigger for the whole thing. How could Dryden or anyone else have known that would happen?”

“Got a theory?”

Marnie pinched the bridge of her nose. Rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. “Not even a stab at one. After hours of banging my head against it.”

“Want to tell me why you’re keeping his name off the books?”

Marnie opened her eyes. “Because there’s an easy leap people will make. And I think it’s bullshit. I think it doesn’t fit the facts of his background, but people will consider it anyway.”

“The idea that Dryden might have known the guy?” Sumner asked.

Marnie nodded.

“Might have been old pals with the guy who kept four little girls in a cage,” Sumner said. “Knew all about it, and finally got around to doing something.”

“You know how things get covered. What passes for journalism now. Send us your tweets, America, tell us what you think happened.”

“He did manage to show up there,” Sumner said. “There’s something behind that.”

“Something, yeah. But none of the girls had ever seen this guy before — or the woman. Who I’ve still got nothing on. I want to know more about this before I open the doors and let the circus in.”

“What are you asking me?”

“I want to set up surveillance on Dryden. Without anyone knowing.”

“By anyone, you mean the judge that would have to sign the warrant.”

“Yes,” Marnie said. “Judges have staffers and assistants. Staffers and assistants have cell phones. Things get out.”

Sumner leaned back in his chair. Swiveled it ten degrees clockwise and then back. He looked very tired.

“All I need from you are a few pieces of information,” Marnie said. “A couple of access strings you can look up from right here. I’ll do the surveillance myself, no assets, no support. If I get busted, there’s no proof you set it up.”

Sumner rocked his chair forward again and put his elbows on his desk.

He said, “This kind of intrusion into someone’s life—”

“I’m doing it to prevent an intrusion into his life. Unless it turns out he deserves one.”

Sumner stared into the woodgrain of his desk. In the silence, Marnie heard the wall clock ticking. Five seconds. Ten.

“Christ,” Sumner whispered. Then: “What kind of surveillance?”

“Phone and vehicle, for now. He drives a 2013 Explorer, base model judging by the price, except it has satellite navigation. Which means we can ping it and track him.”

Sumner thought about it for another long moment. Then he nodded and swiveled to face his computer.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Still parked in the strip-mall lot, Dryden turned his ignition key partway and cracked open the Explorer’s windows. The smells of sea salt and fast food and hot blacktop tar streamed through.

Curtis’s five binders were mostly indecipherable. Much of the content inside them was simply computer code, hundreds of pages of it, printed out and arranged in some kind of logical order. Dryden had a passing knowledge of programming, enough to recognize which language this code was written in, but could make no real sense of it. Even the programmers’ comments — plain English lines peppered throughout the code as useful labels and reminders — were little help.

This part waits for the sort algorithm to return any value of 5 or higher.

This boolean returns true if both CroA1 and CroA2 are true.

Hundreds of those, scattered like confetti throughout the pages. They must have made sense to the people who’d written this stuff. Maybe they’d made sense to Curtis, too, after hours of paging through the material, jotting down the names of variables and strings and classes, drawing connections Dryden couldn’t see on any given page.

He flipped through the first four binders in a couple of minutes and set them aside.

The fifth didn’t contain computer code. It was full of printed e-mails instead, but they weren’t much easier to make sense of.

All their language is careful, Curtis had said.

Every e-mail address in the message headings was a meaningless string of numbers and letters. Maybe the accounts had been created and discarded on a daily basis, out of paranoid caution. The digital equivalent of throwaway cell phones.

The messages themselves were a little better; they were at least made of words and sentences. But the language was carefully couched and allusive, an extra layer of security by the people who’d written and sent these e-mails.

Still, thumbing through the first of maybe two hundred pages in that binder, Dryden got the impression that there was real information to be gleaned from it. It would require reading the entire thing repeatedly, and scrutinizing key parts more carefully still, but there were probably loose ends to pick at, somewhere in the tangle.

He closed it for the moment, set it with the other four, and picked up the thin, stapled stack of pages. Curtis’s letter to Claire.

It was neatly typed, composed on whatever computer Curtis had used when he’d printed the stuff in the binders. Dryden pictured the kid sitting with a laptop in a cheap motel room, bags from an office store all over the bed. The binders, a few reams of paper, maybe an eighty-dollar inkjet plugged in on the nightstand.

The letter began:

Dryden raised his eyes from the letter and stared away over the parking lot, through the heat ripples coming up off the rows of cars.

Curtis’s description of the system seemed to break open in front of him, like an egg sac full of a thousand little spiders. Implications scurrying away to all corners, too many to follow.

He kept reading:

The dots Dryden had felt trying to connect earlier now fused together as if arc-welded.

Claire in the Mojave, terrified at the sight of the approaching cop.

Staring in all directions, searching inexplicably for some threat in the darkness around them.

“Jesus Christ,” Dryden whispered.

He tried to get his mind around it: what it meant to be up against an enemy who knew your mistakes before you even made them.

Then he kept reading the letter, and saw that the problem was a lot bigger than that.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Far away across the parking lot, in the direction of the beach and the boardwalk, kids’ voices shouted and laughed. Something about a Frisbee. Dryden brushed his hair off his forehead. He felt his hand just perceptibly shake.

Movement at the edge of Dryden’s vision. He glanced up. A couple in their twenties walked to a minivan, five cars over. He stared at them without quite seeing them. His mind was far away, trying to grasp the scale of the situation Curtis had described.

After a few seconds he dropped his eyes to the letter again.

There was more to it. A lot more.

He turned the page and kept reading.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Marnie was on the freeway, passing Thousand Oaks, thirty minutes yet from El Sedero.

She had her phone in its dash mount, switched on. The map application was open, showing not her own location but that of Sam Dryden — the location of his Explorer, anyway: a little red thumbtack symbol currently positioned in what looked like a strip-mall parking lot.

Dryden had been there since Marnie had left the federal building.

She had the radio on. She flipped through the stations, one every second or two. She caught the tail end of a U2 song that gave way to a news report: the latest on the Miracle in the Mojave. The whole mediasphere had begun calling it that about two hours ago. Now as Marnie listened, she heard a sound bite that had become the go-to clip for all the networks. It was Leah Swain’s mother, being interviewed at the hospital where she’d just been reunited with her daughter. Through tears that cracked her voice almost beyond discernibility, she had a message for the man and woman who had rescued her little girl.

Thank you. Whoever you are.

Then someone — maybe a reporter, but more likely a random onlooker — yelled, Do you think they were angels?

There was no answer to that, because by then — as Marnie had seen in the televised version of this clip — Leah’s mother had turned to go back into the hospital.

“Let’s just go see,” Marnie said.

She pushed the Crown Vic to 90 and changed lanes.

She was five minutes from El Sedero when the little red thumbtack on the map started moving. She watched the phone’s display in glances as she drove: Dryden left the strip-mall parking lot and headed east on a surface street, away from the oceanfront. He crossed under the 101 freeway, then turned onto the northbound on-ramp, accelerating and merging in. The map screen automatically scaled out to a wider zoom as Dryden sped along, moving up the coast toward Santa Barbara.

A data tag popped up next to the thumbtack, showing Dryden’s speed: just above the posted limit. Marnie still had the Crown Vic doing 90. Watching the map, she did the rough math in her head: She would overtake him within five or ten minutes. Well, she’d catch up, anyway. She had no desire to overtake him. Better to hang back half a mile, just in visual range.

Dryden had his windows all the way down, the ocean air rushing through the Explorer’s cab. As he drove, the last portion of Curtis’s letter cycled through his thoughts, key passages standing out from the rest:

It was 10:30 in the morning now. Four and a half hours until the meeting in the scrapyard. Dryden could reach Avenal by then without any trouble.

He watched the freeway rolling by, the white line segments coming at him like distinct thoughts.

Whitcomb.

The Group.

He says there may be a way to go after these guys, off the record.

A way to shut them all down in one shot.

Dryden saw the delicate thread again. The one connecting himself to Claire. Wire-taut under a world of strain.

But holding.

He felt the edge of weariness creeping in on him as he drove. He did the math: thirty-some hours now without sleep, and probably twelve without food. Five miles farther on, an off-ramp sign advertised a McDonald’s. He took the exit and hit the drive-through, then parked in an Albertson’s lot next door, with a double order of sausage biscuits and hash brown patties and a large coffee.

He reached to turn on the Explorer’s radio out of habit, then stopped himself. He leaned over and grabbed the hard plastic case instead, lifted it onto the passenger seat, and opened it.

He turned on the tablet computer and pulled up the program that controlled the machine. The machine itself was off, silent except for the low cyclic hum from deep inside it.

Dryden tapped the ON button on the tablet screen. He heard the machine’s hum speed up and change pitch, as it had done when Claire had switched it on before. A second later the computer’s speakers began playing the familiar static. Dryden heard something trying to break through it right away: some ’80s song he couldn’t quite put a name to. A few seconds later it was gone, lost in the hiss.

Somehow, it felt right to have the thing turned on.

No — that wasn’t quite true. Dryden thought about it a few seconds longer, then understood the feeling better: It wasn’t that it felt right having the thing on, it was that it felt wrong having it off.

His mind kept going back to the four girls in the trailer. If Claire hadn’t been listening to this thing last night —

All at once he pictured her, sitting at the wheel of her Land Rover, dark hollows under her eyes after three days of hardly any sleep.

Maybe this machine was like a drug, once it got in your head. Something you couldn’t let go of. You would never know when you might hear about a car accident that killed a mother and two little kids — three people still alive and well, somewhere out there in the here and now.

Maybe Claire had saved other lives before the trailer last night. There were all kinds of bad things reported on the radio, around the clock.

Three days without sleep.

Had she just been unable to turn away from the damn thing?

Knowing what she might miss by five minutes?

Dryden listened to the steady hissing from the speakers and thought of metal bars and tiny hands gripping them, and lighter fluid and blue flame and smoke and screams.

He pushed the images away — but left the machine on.

Marnie saw the Explorer from two hundred yards away. She pulled into the parking lot of a Pizza Hut that bordered the much larger Albertson’s lot, and parked the Crown Vic. She took a pair of binoculars from her center console compartment and fixed them on Dryden’s vehicle.

He was sitting at the wheel, eating a little breakfast sandwich — probably fast food from the McDonald’s right next door. His gaze stayed trained mostly through the windshield, out past the edge of the parking lot, to the sharp blue water of the Pacific below. The morning haze had nearly gone, leaving a choppy surface that glittered in the early light.

Marnie’s phone rang in its dash mount. She lowered the binoculars and answered the call on speaker.

Don Sumner’s voice came through. “I’ve got something you want to hear. Might be about your guy.”

“Let’s have it.”

Dryden felt the coffee taking the edge off the weariness. If that was a placebo effect, he didn’t care.

Way out on the ocean, maybe five miles offshore, a giant container ship crept by. It was moving south, gradual as the minute hand of a clock at this range, maybe heading for the Port of Long Beach.

“I’m looking at a story about a dead cop in the Mojave,” Sumner said. “About an hour’s drive from the trailer where the little girls were being held.”

“That’s a long way,” Marnie said. “Who says there’s a connection?”

“No one, but the cop’s dash cam says the cruiser was approaching two parked vehicles off the roadside. One of which looks like a Ford Explorer, recent model.”

“Do we have a plate number?”

“The cop didn’t get close enough for that before he was killed.”

Marnie was silent, still watching Dryden.

“What I’m saying,” Sumner said, “is there’s probably enough here to bring Dryden in for questioning, if you want to.”

“I’ve got prints on a junked washing machine at one scene,” Marnie said, “and a vehicle that kind of looks like his at another. That’s pretty thin.”

“We don’t need enough to charge him with a crime. I’ve seen someone detained as a person of interest on less than this.”

Marnie lowered the binoculars. Even without them, she could see Dryden pretty well.

“I can have the assistant U.S. attorney on the phone in thirty seconds,” Sumner said. “He can fax me the signed warrant in another minute or two. You’d be free to arrest Dryden yourself at that point.”

“I’m not ready to drag him in over the trailer thing,” Marnie said. “Not on the record.”

“Then drag him in over the cop in the desert. It’s only for questioning. What’s the downside?”

A dark green Ford Fusion rolled past Marnie and coasted into the lot Dryden was parked in. It pulled into a space thirty yards behind him, two men up front, the back windows tinted.

Marnie took note of the car absently, her mind working through the decision in front of her.

“Why don’t I go ahead and set up the warrant,” Sumner said. “And instead of you making the arrest, I’ll give Dryden’s current location to police dispatch and let them take him down. That’s a better approach, given his background — he’s potentially dangerous. He’d still be yours to question, either way.”

Marnie thought about it, still idly staring at the Fusion. The men inside were just sitting there, talking about something.

Marnie returned her gaze to Dryden, who was still staring off at the ocean.

“It’s your call, Marnie,” Sumner said.

Dryden heard a commercial flit through the static. Something about a pizza place where kids’ meals were half off on Fridays. The signal cleared for five or six seconds, then washed out.

He finished the last hash brown patty and stuffed the wrapper into the bag everything had come in. He rolled the bag down into a compact shape and set it on the floor in front of the passenger seat. He was reaching for his coffee again when another signal began to fade in. For a second he thought it was a weather report, or maybe a station identification — it was a man’s voice, still too choppy to make out.

Then the static cleared entirely.

“… death toll is confirmed at twelve, but with nine critically injured, it’s likely to go higher, Katelyn.”

Dryden turned toward the machine.

“Yes or no,” Sumner said. “It’s not a hard question.”

Marnie barely heard him. Her attention had suddenly locked on to Dryden.

There was something going on.

Dryden had turned his head and was now focused intently on something on his passenger seat.

Dryden studied the tablet computer’s screen, filled by the application that ran the machine. He hadn’t tried recording with it yet, but there was no question about how to do it. The four buttons could not have been simpler: ON, OFF, RECORD, and STOP.

He pressed RECORD as the news report continued.

“With an incident like this,” the male reporter said, “we know we’re going to hear lots of questions in hindsight. Was the construction site as safe as it could have been? Any time you’ve got heavy equipment, with people milling around, folks are going to be asking whether all the guidelines were followed—”

“Are there guidelines that could have prevented this type of accident?” a woman, presumably Katelyn, asked. “Has there been any statement from the construction firm managing the site?”

“There’s been no statement all day, and nothing from the developer except the press release earlier, offering thoughts and prayers.”

Watching Dryden, Marnie was only dimly aware of the men in the dark green car getting out. The driver opened the back door on his side and leaned in, reaching for something out of view in the rear seats.

“Let’s give his information to the cops, Marnie,” Sumner said. “You want to question him, so let’s just do it.”

She chewed her lip, thinking. Felt herself leaning in Sumner’s direction.

“It’s possible the developer is worried about the legal risks of saying anything public right now,” the male reporter said. “Certainly the equipment failed, but of course there were extenuating circumstances, so—”

“Right,” Katelyn said, “and the project itself was considered controversial even before today. Mission Tower has gotten a lot of pushback from Santa Maria residents just for its size. It’s really not the type of building you expect in a town like that—”

“That’s absolutely right—”

Static began to edge back in, distorting the man’s words.

“—but obviously on a day like this, all we’re hearing from the community is consolation for those killed and their—”

The signal dropped away into the hiss.

Dryden stared at the tablet’s screen a second longer.

Santa Maria. An hour’s drive north of here, he thought — he had been there before but couldn’t remember the exact directions to reach it. It was definitely not along the route he’d planned to take to Avenal, but it couldn’t be far off of it, either.

There was some amount of time to spare — not a hell of a lot, but probably enough, depending on what had happened in Santa Maria. What would happen.

Death toll is confirmed at twelve.

Likely to go higher.

Dryden swore under his breath and reached for the glove box, where he kept a small road atlas.

Even with naked eyes, Marnie saw Dryden lean over in the telltale movement of someone opening a glove compartment. A second later he had a booklet in his hands, flipping through its pages rapidly.

Thirty yards behind him, the driver of the dark Fusion was still leaning into his backseat. The passenger was just standing there on his own side of the car, staring forward in Dryden’s direction.

“I need an answer, Marnie,” Sumner said. “Let’s set up the warrant. Let’s bring him in.”

She opened her mouth to say yes —

Then stopped herself.

Dryden had the booklet braced on his steering wheel, tracing a hand over one of its pages, like someone following a route on a —

“He’s going somewhere,” she said.

“What?”

“He’s got an atlas out. He’s about to go somewhere.”

“He was on the freeway. He was already going somewhere.”

“Something just changed, though,” Marnie said. “He looks amped up for some reason.”

“And?”

“And I want to know why,” Marnie said. “I’m going to see where he’s going. So no warrant, okay? Not yet.”

Over the speakerphone, Sumner exhaled. “Fine.”

Thirty yards behind Dryden, the man leaning into the Fusion drew back and straightened up. He had a toddler in his arms. A baby girl in a pink outfit. He bounced her gently in the crook of his elbow, which made her laugh. He shut the door, and he and the passenger headed toward the Albertson’s.

By then Dryden had set the atlas aside. A second later he started the Explorer. He pulled out of his space and accelerated across the lot to the nearest exit.

Marnie put the Crown Vic back in drive and followed.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The atlas had confirmed what Dryden had already guessed: The 101 was the fastest route. Along the coast through Santa Barbara, then inland through the mountains. Total drive time would be just over an hour, at the speed limit. A bit less, if he pushed it.

The lack of a timeline was maddening. For all the details he’d heard in the broadcast, there had been nothing to say when the accident would happen.

Well, there had been a hint.

Has there been any statement from the construction firm managing the site?

There’s been no statement all day …

All day.

Dryden had heard the broadcast around 10:40 in the morning. That put the actual time of the broadcast around 9:04 tonight.

No statement all day, as of 9:04 tonight.

Whatever was going to happen at Mission Tower, whatever was going to kill twelve people and injure nine more, it would happen early in the day. Anytime now.

Could he just call somebody? Walk into a gas station right now and ask to use their phone for an emergency? It would take only a few phone calls, starting with 4-1-1, to track down whoever was building Mission Tower in Santa Maria, but when he got through to someone, what exactly could he tell them?

Something to make them clear the construction site?

Would that fix the problem?

Maybe. If the accident was going to be caused by some one-off human error, like someone dropping an air-nailer and rupturing a fuel line, or pulling the wrong lever of an earth mover, then simply shuffling the deck might change everything. If it were that simple, then the solution might be as easy as calling in a bomb threat. Shake up the whole day, shut down the site for hours while cops scoured the place. By the time the crew got back to work, the fluke accident would probably never happen.

If it was a fluke.

And if it wasn’t? If the danger was some loose bolt in a machine — say, the pulley of a construction elevator? Something sure to go wrong, given a few more hours of use?

Then a bomb threat would only delay the tragedy — and make it that much harder to address the real problem. How would Dryden call in later and urge someone to inspect all the site hardware, if they’d just gotten a crank bomb threat the same day?

How would he even know whether to make that call? How would he know if the bomb scare had solved the problem or not?

He had the Explorer doing 90, the Saturday morning traffic sparse enough to permit it.

Fifty minutes, give or take, and he could be there to look around for himself.

On the passenger seat, the machine was still on. Maybe he would get lucky and catch another update. Twelve people dead was a big story. Lots of coverage.

He passed a semi and veered back into the right lane.

Marnie stayed half a mile behind him. No need to get close enough to risk him spotting her. On her phone’s display, the little red thumbtack traveled neatly along the 101.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Mangouste had five cell phones on the desk in his den. One was a smartphone he’d had for a year. The other four were burners — throwaway units he replaced daily, whether he ended up using them or not. Every morning at 6:00 he dumped the previous day’s collection into an industrial blender in the basement, grinding them to plastic crumbs, and at 6:15 his courier would arrive with four new ones. Each phone had a white sticker on the back, with a list of names — well, alphanumeric codes that stood for names — of the people who could reach him via that unit.

Caution was like money: More was more.

The third of the four burners rang at 10:55 in the morning. Mangouste got to it on the second ring.

The caller said, “We’re getting some headway on the trailer in the desert. Not sure if any of it’s going to pan out, but we’re trying.”

In the background, over the line, Mangouste could hear a keyboard clicking — his people hard at work, using the system. His jaw tightened at the notion of it: all that numinous power, sidetracked for three days now to play cat-and-mouse. The hunt for Claire Dunham and Dale Whitcomb and Curtis Wynn. Like using an aircraft carrier to dredge for clams.

Until today there had been no leads at all, and then in a span of hours, in the middle of the night, there had been two: A stakeout team had pegged Curtis at a coffee shop, and the system had found Claire in the Mojave — had picked up a police report describing a run-in between her and a patrol unit out there, several hours before the event took place.

That police report, describing the original version of the incident — with no intervention by Mangouste’s people — made it obvious that Claire knew about the system. She knew the danger of having her name and location officially logged by the police.

She had very nearly avoided that outcome.

According to the report, a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy, doing a routine patrol, had spotted two vehicles parked in the darkness, far off of a remote highway in the Mojave. The deputy had stopped to investigate, at which point one of the two vehicles left the scene before the cruiser’s dash cam could resolve its plate number. The other vehicle, a Land Rover, U-turned and rammed head-on into the deputy’s patrol car to disable it.

This crash also crippled the Land Rover, whose female occupant then fired several shots from a handgun toward the deputy’s car, forcing him to take cover behind it. The woman fled the scene on foot and was picked up by the unidentified second vehicle several hundred yards away.

The crashed Land Rover turned out to have stolen license plates on it, and its VIN had been physically removed. Only a fluke had allowed authorities to identify its owner at all: The oil filter had a unit-specific identifier stamped into it, traceable to a point-of-sale record at a service garage in San Jose, where the Land Rover’s owner, Claire Dunham, had gotten an oil change six months before.

All of which had been enough for Mangouste’s purposes. The police report included a time stamp and GPS data for the incident, from the patrol car’s dash computer. It gave Mangouste enough information to send a team to that spot, in advance. Which he had done, immediately.

The report also tantalized him, though. It offered no further information about the person who had been with Claire in the desert — the driver of that second vehicle. The police had not yet identified that suspect at the time the report was filed.

Might it be Dale Whitcomb? Was that too much to hope for?

It couldn’t have been Curtis. He was already accounted for at that moment, being tailed by the stakeout team that had spotted him, hundreds of miles away.

It made good sense, of course, that Claire would be with Whitcomb, and for a while there, when that possibility seemed solid, Mangouste had let himself believe he had all the loose ends in reach. All three strands, right there in front of him, ready to be tied off forever. Curtis, Claire, Whitcomb. Easy as that.

It would have been nice to know for sure, in the moments after first seeing that police report. It would have been helpful to run further searches with the system, and find later reports detailing the police manhunt for Claire Dunham and her unknown friend, in that original version of the future. Maybe some document would eventually name Whitcomb as the second suspect.

Except there was no chance of finding any later reports like that.

No chance at all.

Here was one bona fide weakness the system had, and would always have: Once it showed you a useful piece of the future — some bit of knowledge you were sure to act on — then the future itself changed accordingly. How could it not? From the moment you saw that information — in this case, the time and place at which to attack Claire — then the old future no longer existed. You could run all the searches you wanted, but all you’d find would be information from the new future.

Mangouste had searched anyway. And had seen what he expected: a police report about a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy stopping in the desert to investigate two vehicles, only to be killed seconds later by rifle fire from unseen assailants. By the time police reinforcements descended on the remote site, more than twenty minutes later, there were no other people in the vicinity. Just a wrecked Land Rover, eventually traceable to Claire Dunham by way of the same trick with the oil filter. No identity for any second person at the scene. No other info at all.

Mangouste hadn’t minded seeing that report. It told him enough. It told him the attack would work: that his men would capture Claire and her friend and escape the scene. Good news, all around.

And the attack had worked. His men followed protocol and kept their phones switched off while they were in the desert, so that authorities couldn’t later check the cell network and see that multiple unknown parties had been out there. Burner phones were untraceable, in theory, but why give the cops anything more than you had to?

Mangouste had watched the clock, starting from the point when his men would carry out the attack. He guessed it would be another half hour after that before they would reach the crowded safety of a freeway, switch on their phones, and report in.

Two of them had. They had Claire and were en route to the interrogation site. They said the other team was bringing the stray machine home, along with Claire’s companion — a man in his thirties, by their description, which told Mangouste it was most certainly not Dale Whitcomb. Who the hell was he, then?

Mangouste waited for the second team to report in and tell him the rest of the story. They never did. Neither did they respond to calls made to their cells, even long after they should have reached the interstate.

There was no pleasant way to interpret that set of facts. No way to fill in the blanks without assuming the two men were dead and the stranger was loose out there somewhere. With the machine.

Mangouste had set his people to work using the system, scouring the future for news reports of unidentified bodies. Assuming the worst — that the stranger had left the dead men someplace remote — it might be weeks before they were found. By that point their fingertips would be too decomposed to identify them, and they had no official ID on their bodies.

The system had found a result right away — and then about three dozen more. As it turned out, Southern California produced a fair number of unidentified corpses in a given month or two. Even when you narrowed by age range and race, it was information overload. It occurred to Mangouste that it wouldn’t help much anyway to find where the mystery man had left the bodies. That moment must have already come and gone.

Even as that search had begun to prove pointless, other news reports started filtering in — ordinary news on TV, in the present time. Reports about the miraculous rescue of four little girls at a trailer in the Mojave, by a man and woman who had shown up just in time to prevent a tragedy. Authorities seemed baffled as to how the two, who had quickly fled the scene, had known to show up there at all.

Into the phone, Mangouste said, “Tell me what you’ve got on the trailer. Tell me the cops eventually have a name for this guy.”

“In a way, they do,” the caller said. “Two days from now, a man named Clay Reynolds comes forward claiming he and his girlfriend were the ones who saved those kids.”

Mangouste’s eyes narrowed. “He identifies himself?”

“Proudly, according to the articles we’ve seen. But later the same day, a second couple speaks to reporters and says Reynolds is lying — claiming they saved the kids, not him. By the next afternoon there are two other couples taking credit.”

Mangouste pressed a hand to his forehead, shutting his eyes hard. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“It ends up being a real sideshow for the next month or more. Something like fifty different people swear they were the ones — anyone who even loosely matches police sketches the girls provide. It’s like that time all the Z-list celebrities ran for governor of California. We found a Newsweek rundown of Jimmy Fallon and Conan O’Brien’s best jokes about it, dated six weeks from now.”

“There have to be real leads the police end up following. There must be something.”

“We’re still working on it. It’s just … kind of a busy haystack to sift through.”

Mangouste didn’t reply. He stood there, gripping the phone, thinking it all over.

Hours earlier, everything had seemed to be in the bag. Three targets, three apparent leads. Now two of those had come up empty. There was no sign of Dale Whitcomb, and even Curtis Wynn had slipped away, somehow taking the stakeout team with him. There had been a final check-in from those men, tailing the kid down the Pacific Coast Highway around 6:00 in the morning, but that was the last contact. They had vanished as completely as the guys who’d been transporting the stranger from the Mojave. Even a search using the system had proved fruitless: There was no record of their vehicle being found anywhere, at any point in the foreseeable future.

“What is this?” Mangouste asked softly.

“Sir?” the caller said.

Mangouste opened his eyes. “Keep working on the trailer,” he said. “Call me when you have something.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Dryden took the first exit for Santa Maria at 11:35. He could already see the building.

Mission Tower has gotten a lot of pushback from Santa Maria residents just for its size. It’s really not the type of building you expect in a town like that.

From the elevated exit ramp, the whole city appeared spread out like a carpet; Mission Tower could not have looked more out of place in the sprawl if it were a pyramid with a sphinx guarding it. Standing at least twenty stories tall, it was probably the only structure in the city that topped out above forty feet.

Structure seemed like the right word for it — not so much a building as the skeleton of one, a framework of steel uprights and concrete slab floors, like a parking structure without perimeter walls.

Dryden put its distance at just over a mile. He could see a tower crane braced to the north side. The crane’s mast, standing three hundred feet tall, looked as delicate as a vertical truss of glued-together toothpicks. The long horizontal jib and counterjib, balanced atop the mast, swung slowly around as the operator lowered some kind of load onto the building’s rooftop. Dryden couldn’t see the workmen from this distance, but they had to be there.

He turned off the exit ramp onto the surface street.

Marnie managed to stay one light behind him, all the way across town. She watched Dryden turn onto the main drag that ran east-west through the city, at the far end of which stood a huge building under construction. Two minutes and three stoplights later, she saw the Explorer pull to the curb twenty yards from the build site, its boundary protected by orange mesh fencing and NO TRESPASSING signs.

Marnie pulled over half a block behind him. She killed her engine and sank down a little in her seat.

Dryden was out of his vehicle within seconds of stopping. He had something in his hand — a hard plastic case of some kind.

Without so much as looking around, Dryden crossed the distance to the construction zone, shoved down the mesh fence, and stepped over it into the site.

Marnie stared after him, as confused as she had been at any point since arriving in the Mojave at four in the morning.

She got out of her Crown Vic and followed.

Twelve dead. Nine injured.

None of that was going to happen on the ground floor of the tower, Dryden saw. There was nobody at all on the first level. Not inside, anyway. He could hear men shouting to each other outside the structure, way on the other side. Crewmen positioning the heavy loads that remained for the tower crane to pick up.

Dryden could see the crane’s reinforced base, midway along the north side of the building. A massive footing of steel and concrete, probably bolted to foundation piles that punched fifty feet down into the earth.

Whatever was going to go wrong, the crane’s base was not going to be a part of it. It looked solid enough. It looked like it would stay right there for five hundred years, even if everyone went away and left it to the elements.

Certainly the equipment failed, but of course there were extenuating circumstances …

What sort of equipment — and what extenuating circumstances?

And why of course?

Something in that phrasing had troubled Dryden since he’d first heard it.

He came to an exposed stairwell — there were no walls yet boxing it in; it was wide open to the surrounding space of each floor. The stair treads were bare steel that would someday hold ceramic tile or padded carpet. He stopped at the bottom and cocked his head. From high above came the sound of voices echoing down through the vertical space. All of them seemed to come from way up in the building, closer to the top than the bottom.

Distracting him from the sound was the static coming from the plastic hardcase in his hand. He had cranked the tablet computer’s volume to its highest setting, loud enough that he could hear it even with the case shut.

He started up the stairwell.

Marnie waited for him to disappear up the stairs before crossing the orange fencing outside the site. She walked softly on the concrete, her footfalls all but silent.

She started toward the stairwell Dryden had gone into, then saw another, twenty yards to the left. She made her way across to it and climbed to the first landing. She stopped and listened, and found she could hear Dryden easily. He was making no attempt to be quiet as he climbed through the structure.

She kept thinking about the hard plastic case.

What the hell was in it?

Obvious possibilities came to mind. Drugs. Money.

Other scenarios were less likely, but uglier. Like a bomb.

None of those things made any sense at all, but neither did anything else about Sam Dryden.

Marnie started up the next flight, unsnapping the safety harness of the Glock 17 holstered beneath her jacket.

For the first fifteen stories, Dryden saw nothing that could pose a threat to anyone. Just one empty floor after another, each one a wide-open concrete space running out to its edges. Beyond was blue sky and the spread of Santa Maria planing away to the mountains that encircled it.

Equipment failure.

Extenuating circumstances.

Of course.

No equipment on any of these floors. No people around to be killed by it, even if there had been; the voices were all still above him.

He was turning to start up to the sixteenth level when the static from inside the case guttered. He stopped, knelt down, and cracked the case open an inch.

He heard the Red Hot Chili Peppers singing about a girl named Dani California. He clicked the case back shut and kept climbing.

The first floor that wasn’t empty was Level 22, the one directly below the rooftop. On this floor there were still no people, but there were stacks of building materials everywhere: plywood and granite slabs and huge volumes of Sheetrock, which were plastic-wrapped against exposure to moisture.

And here at last was the equipment. Giant air compressors with tanks the size of couches. Table saws of all kinds, only some of which Dryden recognized. These were specialized, heavy-duty tools built for cutting metal and masonry and high-density composites.

None of the equipment looked like it was about to kill anyone. Most of the machines weren’t even plugged in — to electrical power or pneumatic lines.

Maybe one of the big air tanks could go off like a bomb. It seemed plausible until Dryden walked among them and eyeballed each pressure gauge. The tanks were empty. They were about as capable of exploding as the stacks of Sheetrock.

He could hear all the workers on the rooftop above him. Their voices, shouting and sometimes laughing, rang clear in the late morning air.

Atop one of the stacks of granite slabs, a dozen men had left their jackets. Four had left hard hats, and three had left cell phones.

Dryden turned and stared out past the north edge of the floor, into empty space. The crane’s mast was right there, hugging the building, fifty feet from where he stood. At this range it didn’t look like it was made of glued-together toothpicks. The steel members of the truss structure were as big around as Dryden’s leg, and fused together by welds and bolts that looked unlikely to spontaneously come loose.

He walked to the north edge. Put his feet right to the lip, beyond which a drop of two hundred and fifty feet yawned. He’d never had much of an issue with heights. Respect for them, sure. He braced a hand on the nearest corner of the crane’s mast and leaned out over the void, looking up.

A hundred feet above him, the crane’s jib arm stuck out almost straight north, away from the building. The jib’s cable trolley was positioned about a third of the way out on the arm, bearing the pulley system from which the lifting cables extended down — all the way down to the hook, which was currently lowered to ground level. Dryden couldn’t see anyone down there hustling to attach a new load. What he could see were men sitting around, eating from lunch boxes and drinking from thermoses. Break time. The voices he heard just above him, on the roof, suggested it was break time there, too.

Dryden stepped back from the edge. He turned and looked up, as if he could see right through the concrete above him. Could see the men up there, sitting around on stacks of materials like the ones down on this level. Then he imagined he was looking up beyond the men, a hundred feet higher, to what was hanging directly above the building right now. The crane’s counterjib arm. The short arm that balanced out the long one. Balanced it out because it weighed just as much, by way of the counterweight attached to it: a massive concrete block assembled in sections, the whole thing weighing — what? A hundred thousand pounds? More?

He was still looking up when the static crackled and receded again. He looked down at the case, and even before he opened it, he heard a man’s voice coming from the tablet computer’s speakers.

Not a commercial. A news report. The cadence was a dead giveaway.

Then he cracked the case open, and realized he recognized the man’s tone, though the words themselves were still too distorted to make out.

The man speaking was Anderson Cooper.

Dryden had heard local radio stations carry CNN reports at times. Some kind of affiliate deal. Usually it happened during large-scale events. Election-night coverage. Maybe a hurricane.

When the static began to clear a few seconds later, the first words Dryden discerned from Anderson Cooper were Santa Maria.

His stomach gave itself a little twist.

What the hell was about to happen in this place?

Equipment failure.

Extenuating circumstances.

Of course.

Anderson Cooper said, “I mean, you can just see it behind me. The power is still out throughout the entire city, and the only lights we’re seeing are the worklamps of the search teams, obviously all of them working at just the one site.”

Anderson Cooper wasn’t just talking about Santa Maria. He was in Santa Maria. He was here. Would be here. Ten hours and twenty-four minutes from right now.

Worklamps of the search teams.

Just the one site.

“I want to bring in Aaron Spencer again,” Anderson said. “You’ve got something new?”

“Anderson, yeah, I’ve just gotten the latest revised numbers from USGS. They’re mostly dialing it in at this point, but they’re now saying the magnitude was 6.1, the depth was very shallow, only about nine miles, and the epicenter was close to the city, striking just minutes before noon today.”

Dryden looked at his watch.

11:54.

“Again,” Anderson said, “not a massive quake, not a great deal of shaking, but enough to trigger the accident that brought that high-rise down.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

He could run.

He could just run for it, right now.

The stairwell was right there, thirty feet away.

Twenty-two flights, two to three seconds each, he could be out of the building in about one minute.

One minute, out of six remaining, at most. A one-in-six chance of surviving. Russian roulette odds, even if he hauled ass immediately.

He clicked the case shut and ran, but not for the stairs. He ran to the stack of granite slabs with the jackets and hard hats and cell phones on it.

He set down the plastic case and grabbed the nearest of the phones. He switched it on and hit the phone icon and punched 9-1-1.

Marnie moved slowly, keeping low among the stacks of Sheetrock and the industrial tools. She stuck her head up and saw that she was just twenty feet from Dryden. He was facing the other way, holding a phone to his ear.

A moment earlier she’d heard him listening to what sounded like a radio with bad reception. She hadn’t caught any of the transmission — some kind of news clip, she thought, but she’d been too far away then to tell.

Over the short distance to where Dryden now stood, Marnie heard the phone call connect. Heard the other party answer: a rapid little burst of syllables through the earpiece, rehearsed and automatic.

Into the phone Dryden said, “I just parked a panel truck full of high explosives at the corner of Second and Palm.” He spoke clearly but kept his voice low, inaudible to the men talking and laughing on the rooftop above. “Second and Palm,” Dryden said again. “Right by that big tower they’re building.”

On the last word he hung up and tossed the phone onto some guy’s jacket, and in the same movement he scooped up a yellow hard hat and ran for the stairs, putting the hat on as he went.

Dryden hit the first tread and vaulted upward, taking the steps three at a time, running, forcing himself to hyperventilate, making it look and sound like he’d just sprinted up the full height of the stairwell.

He burst into sunlight atop the structure and started yelling even as he took in the men sitting there.

“Everyone listen!” he shouted. “I have an evacuation order from the police!”

Marnie crossed to the stack of granite slabs where Dryden had left the hard plastic case. There was static coming from inside it — the radio with the bad reception.

One level up, she could hear him yelling at the work crew, talking about a bomb threat, telling them to vacate the site. He made it sound like the real deal. Marnie heard one of the men start to ask a question, but the guy cut himself off after the first word.

The reason was obvious.

From far away over the city, a police siren had begun wailing. An instant later a second one started up, and then a third. Coming in from all over, converging toward the building. From the rooftop, it had to be a damn convincing visual.

In the next second Marnie heard the scraping and thudding of men on the roof getting to their feet and running.

Dryden stood atop the stairs and waved them down ahead of him, his eyes automatically doing a head count as they passed.

Twelve men exactly, one of who had to be the crane operator; the cab atop the mast was empty now.

The report had described twelve dead, nine injured. The nine must have been bystanders in the street.

As the last of the men went by, Dryden swept his gaze over the roof for any possible straggler.

No one there.

He threw aside the hard hat and ran full-out down the steps, one flight behind the workers. He reached the twenty-second floor, turned toward the granite slabs where he’d left the machine in its case —

And stopped.

A woman had just stepped out from behind a stack of plywood, ten feet away.

She had the plastic case in one hand, and a pistol in the other — leveled at his chest. She looked shaken but held the weapon steady enough.

“Keep your hands out,” she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Marnie thought of her training at Quantico, with regard to holding a subject at gunpoint by yourself. You stayed out of the subject’s reach — that much was obvious. You allowed no ambiguity into your voice or your physical presence. Above all —

When Dryden moved, maybe a second after she’d spoken to him, it was like nothing she had ever seen before. It was sure as hell nothing she’d trained for.

A friend of hers in college had tried to give her a few boxing tips once. Had shown her how a jab was supposed to be launched, the leading shoulder pointed at the target, the back foot pushing off, the jab coming up directly inward along the opponent’s sightline, because the human brain was slower to react to inward movement than side-to-side movement.

Dryden didn’t throw a jab at her, but he sure as hell moved in along her sightline. Beyond that, she didn’t know what he did. What she knew was that in one instant she had him at gunpoint, and in the next she was being slammed bodily backward into the plywood stack she’d stepped out from behind.

He had one hand around her neck, his fingertips applying just a bit of pressure to her carotid arteries. His other hand was holding her Glock 17 — when exactly had he taken it? — with the barrel touching her cheekbone.

Just like that, he had every advantage on her.

Yet he looked scared.

He looked rattled all to hell, for some reason.

His eyes narrowed. He looked like a man trying to work something out in bare seconds. Like some huge piece of bad news had just been dropped in his lap, and he was trying to grasp its implications.

The moment lasted maybe two seconds, and then he seemed to shove all the confusion away and refocus on her.

“When I let go,” he said, “you’re going to run down the stairwell as fast as your body can move. Or else you’re going to die.”

No ambiguity in his voice. Or his physical presence.

“And hang on to the case,” he said.

Marnie found herself nodding, the movement difficult with his hand tight under her jaw.

Then he let go of her, grabbed her by one shoulder, and shoved her toward the stairs leading down.

She got her balance under her and kept moving, taking the steps three and four at a stride.

Dryden didn’t count the flights as they descended. There was no reason to. They would make it or they wouldn’t.

He had the woman’s Glock stuffed in his rear waistband now, his hands free to grab for her if she lost her footing.

From a few flights below, he could hear the thunder of the workers’ boots, the metal of the stairwell transmitting the vibration upward in strange harmonics and shudders.

Preview of the coming attraction, Dryden thought.

Coming soon.

Maybe thirty seconds had passed since he and the woman had started down. Hard to tell. He didn’t look at his watch. No reason to do that either.

Flight after flight, they ran. A controlled plummet, palms shoving off against steel uprights as they rounded each landing. Down and down. Every second feeling borrowed.

All at once the boots-on-metal thudding from below them ended, replaced by the flat, dampened slapping sound of sprinting footfalls on concrete. The workers had reached the bottom.

Ahead of Dryden, the woman rounded the final landing and took the last flight in three falling strides, catching up to her center of gravity at the bottom and sprinting across the ground floor. Dryden closed distance and then stayed one pace behind her.

The orange mesh fence loomed just past the edge of the foundation slab. They vaulted it together, and then Dryden grabbed her by the upper arm, steering and propelling her farther.

“The Explorer, up ahead,” he said. “Get in.”

“What are you—”

“Just do it!”

She nodded. She wasn’t even looking back at him. Maybe she assumed he was still pointing the gun.

They covered the distance to the SUV in another five seconds, the woman still holding the hard plastic case. Dryden, still gripping her arm, pushed her toward the driver’s-side door, and she fumbled it open and climbed in. He got in right after her, the two of them briefly tangled up in the space behind the wheel; then she clambered over the center console and dropped herself into the passenger seat.

Dryden shoved the key into the ignition and started the vehicle, then spared half a second to lean forward and crane his neck up at the tower’s bulk. With its base just twenty yards away, the thing loomed over them like a man over an insect.

Dryden threw the Explorer into reverse, turned in his seat, and floored it. In his peripheral vision he saw the woman thrown forward at the dashboard, just getting her hands up in time to keep from banging her head.

“Goddammit,” she said.

Dryden ignored her. He watched out the back window as he reversed, doing 25, veering left and right as cars braked and steered out of his way.

“What are you doing?” the woman yelled.

“We need distance,” Dryden said.

“I already know the bomb is bullshit. I heard you call it in.”

They’d covered a block and a half now, a greater distance than the building’s height. Safe enough. Dryden came to a stop with the vehicle centered in the one-way road, blocking traffic from approaching the building. He put the selector in park and hit his hazard lights.

The woman in the passenger seat was staring at him, any initial fear now replaced by anger and confusion.

“It’s fake,” she said. “I know it’s fake. I heard the call.”

Dryden nodded. He wasn’t looking at her. He leaned forward over the steering wheel and stared at the tower.

From this distance he could see the whole structure, including the crane — and its counterweight. It was exactly as Dryden had pictured it: The giant weight hung dead-centered over the building, a hundred feet above the roof. The sword of Damocles.

Behind him, someone honked a horn. The traffic leading toward the building had clotted six or seven cars deep.

Far ahead, around the building’s base, men from the site were yelling at bystanders to get back, waving off cars, and getting the hell away themselves.

At the edge of his vision, Dryden saw the woman staring at him, her eyes narrowed. She opened her mouth to say something, but didn’t get the chance.

The first shock wave of the tremor felt like an impact against the underside of the Explorer. Like the vehicle was on a lift, and someone had come along and hit it with a battering ram from below. The SUV rose up on its shocks and slammed back down. The woman grabbed the armrests for support.

A second and third jolt followed immediately, and before Dryden could process them, the lateral shaking started — the signature movement of a big quake. The whole world was suddenly shuddering, sliding violently left and right. A city on a card table, with a giant gripping its edges and wrenching it forward and backward, again and again and again.

The Explorer rocked side to side on its suspension. Dryden could see every other car on the street doing the same. He saw people on sidewalks throw themselves down on the grass. Saw the stoplights over every intersection jerk and twist and swing.

And Mission Tower.

Twenty-two stories. Concrete and steel. Swaying and pitching and reeling — but handling it.

It actually looked like it was doing fine. There were ripples racing up and down its height, the whole structure just visibly moving in a kind of belly-dance sway; Dryden had the distinct impression that it was designed to do this. Engineered to move in precisely this way, to dissipate the shock waves. To bend so it wouldn’t break.

The tower crane was a different story.

There were ripples racing up and down its height, too. It did not look like it was handling it.

As Dryden watched, he could see a kind of cumulative effect building up, each oscillation of the crane’s mast just a little more pronounced than the one before it. Like a child on a swing going a bit higher with each pass.

And then it failed.

Midway up the mast’s freestanding portion — the part above the building, anchored to nothing — something gave way. Some bolt or weld, marginally weaker than the rest, let go, and in an instant the failure cascaded up and down through the mast, turning rigid steel into something that looked more like cable.

The giant horizontal arm that formed the top of the crane — the jib and counterjib — simply dropped. Like a two-by-four held out flat and then released.

The counterweight punched through the tower’s roof without stopping. A massive block of dumb, dead weight, probably twenty mixer trucks’ worth of concrete, it obeyed the primeval physics of gravity and acceleration and momentum. It didn’t even slow down; it crashed through floor after floor, as if the building weren’t there at all. It tore a ragged tunnel straight downward, and left a dust-choked wake above itself, and even as Dryden watched it smash into the ground beneath the tower, his eyes were drawn back up to the building’s top.

Where the floors were failing. The highest one first. It sagged at its center like a collapsing pie crust, settling its weight onto the floor beneath it. After only a few seconds, both floors gave way; they crumbled and pancaked downward and took the whole building with them, compressing it into its own footprint with brutal speed and efficiency. The collapse kicked out a cloud of concrete dust. It surged outward, channeled through the spaces between buildings, as ugly a déjà vu as Dryden had ever experienced. In a matter of seconds the dust cloud had reached the Explorer and engulfed it, plunging the inside into a murky twilight.

In the light that remained, Dryden turned to the woman in the passenger seat.

She was staring at him.

Her mouth hung slack.

Her lower eyelids ticked upward once, and then again, as if she were thinking of something to say. But she said nothing. She just stared.