Signal

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Ghosts emerged out of the dust from the collapsed building. The shapes of people, dark gray against the light gray. They materialized from the gloom three feet from the Explorer’s hood, drifted past, vanished behind its back bumper.

Wind scoured the vehicle. It moaned in the wheel wells and the complex spaces of the underside. It scurried little snakes of soot across the windshield.

Dryden felt the adrenaline leaving him. Felt the live-wire thrum in his limbs settling out, calming. He forced his breathing back to normal — and felt his attention go back to where it had been earlier, in the moment after he’d disarmed the woman.

Who was she?

A cop of some kind.

The implications of that came at him from every angle. Made him want to look around outside for some sign of a threat, in spite of the dust choking off the visibility.

If the authorities knew enough to be looking for him, what else did they know? If they had his name tied to Claire’s in any official way, then surely the Group would have already learned about him.

Dryden turned to the woman. “Tell me who you are. Tell me how you found me.”

For a second it didn’t seem like she’d heard him. She was staring forward into the haze, as if still trying to take it all in. The quake and the collapse. The fact that she’d been inside the building twenty seconds before that. She kept looking up at where the tower had stood.

She was thirty, give or take. Brown eyes, and brown hair to her shoulders.

Dryden grabbed her arm. “Hey.”

She turned to face him. Her eyes widened a little.

“Are the police looking for me?” Dryden asked. “Is there an investigation with my name on record?”

The question seemed to go right past her. She blinked, and when she spoke, she still sounded half-dazed. “How are you doing this? How are you showing up in these places before things … happen?”

Places. Plural.

How much did she know?

Dryden gripped her arm tighter, and found his voice getting louder of its own accord. “Are the police looking for me? How did you find me?”

She drew back from him, scared again.

“Tell me,” Dryden said.

She blinked. “The trailer in the desert. You left fingerprints. In the arroyo.”

Dryden opened his mouth to tell her that wasn’t possible. There had been nothing in the arroyo except strewn trash and —

The washing machine.

Christ.

“I was there,” the woman said. “I’m an FBI agent.”

Dryden felt his mind working rapid-fire, like he was mapping a minefield while driving through it at freeway speed.

He let go of the woman’s arm and willed himself to speak evenly, but he locked his eyes onto hers and didn’t blink.

“I need to know how much you know about me,” he said. “You need to tell me everything, right now. This is life and death, maybe for both of us.”

She stared. “I don’t understand—”

“Everything,” Dryden said.

She looked into the eddying dust again, toward the unseen rubble of Mission Tower. “But how are you—”

“Look at me.”

She turned back to him. Met his eyes.

“If someone could access police computers,” Dryden said, “and FBI computers, what would they see about me right now? What is my name attached to, in the past twelve hours?”

The woman shook her head, thrown by the question.

“What would they see?” Dryden asked.

“Nothing. Well … no, nothing.”

“What were you going to say?”

The woman hesitated.

“Tell me.”

“There was almost a warrant.”

“Almost?”

“We wanted to question you. We were going to name you a person of interest—”

“For the trailer?”

The woman started to answer, but checked herself.

“For the trailer?” Dryden asked again.

The woman shook her head. “A cop that got killed, out in the Mojave.”

Icy little needles seemed to pierce Dryden’s skin. Down to his bones, where the chill spread deep and wide.

The Group knew all about the dead cop in the desert. Obviously. If Dryden’s name was linked to that on any police computer —

“We held back on it,” the woman said. “There’s no warrant. There’s nothing official at all.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me and one other person. There’s no official—”

“What other person?”

The woman shook her head. “I don’t understand what’s going on—”

“Someone you work with?”

“Yes.” The woman looked baffled as to why he was asking.

Dryden stared at her. His mind was still flooring it across the minefield, jostling and bouncing.

“Call them,” he said. “Whoever this person is. Call and make sure they don’t still go through with creating the warrant. You don’t understand how much this matters.”

For a long moment she just stared at him. She was calming a bit, but still entirely lost. “What is this? What the hell is any of this?”

He held her gaze for a beat. Then he turned and stared away over the hood, thinking.

There was only so much he could push her to do. Or not do. He couldn’t hold her against her will.

He exhaled deeply. Rested his arms across the wheel. Lowered his forehead to them. He was tired. Maybe not as tired as Claire had been, but getting there.

“You want to understand all this?” he asked.

From the corner of his eye he saw the woman nod. “It’s why I followed you.”

From the passenger footwell, Dryden could hear the machine hissing in its case. He drew upright again, reached into his rear waistband, and took out the woman’s Glock 17. He held it out to her, grip first.

“Make the phone call,” he said, “and I’ll show you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

She called. She put her phone on speaker and talked to a guy named Sumner. She told him she was looking into something, and told him to hold off on doing anything with the name Sam Dryden until he heard from her again. She made him promise.

When she hung up, Dryden said, “I need you to put your phone in airplane mode, so no one can ping it to track your location. Call it paranoia if you want, you’ll see the point in a few minutes.”

She didn’t argue. She switched the phone’s setting, then pointed to the Explorer’s dashboard, and the satellite navigation screen built into it.

“If you’re paranoid,” she said, “you should disable the GPS for that.”

For a second or two, Dryden only stared at it. The idea that the vehicle’s navigation system might be a liability had never crossed his mind. He rarely used the thing, and today it hadn’t once struck him as a means for tracking him. Staying unidentified in the first place had taken up all his attention.

“Jesus,” he said.

He knew how to cut the GPS unit’s power. There was a dedicated fuse for it in the panel below the glove box. He leaned over and looked up under the dash, found the fuse, and pulled it out. Then he pressed the nav system’s power button to be sure. The screen stayed dormant, dead.

When he turned to the woman again, she was staring at him. Waiting.

“My name’s Marnie Calvert,” she said.

“Sam Dryden.”

“I know.”

She continued to hold his gaze. Still waiting.

Dryden pointed to her feet. “Hand me the case.”

It took half an hour to show her, and to tell her everything he knew. By ten minutes in — around the time she seemed to get past her denial over the machine itself — the dust was clear enough that Dryden could see to drive. He retraced his route back to the 101 and took it north again. The freeway would lead to U.S. 46 at Paso Robles, which would take them east toward I-5 and then to the town of Avenal. They would be there comfortably ahead of the meeting at 3:00 P.M.

When Dryden finished speaking, Marnie sat for over a minute saying nothing at all. She had Curtis’s letter in her lap, and her eyes kept going from its pages to the machine, back and forth. Outside, the landscape slid by: low hills dotted with scrub vegetation.

At last she said, “All the men on top of that building would have been dead.” She wasn’t asking. Just firming up her grip on it.

Dryden nodded anyway.

For another long beat Marnie was quiet. Then: “I would have died, too.”

“Yes and no,” Dryden said.

“What do you mean?”

“The way it would have originally happened, you wouldn’t have been there at all. You were only there because I was trying to stop it.”

She shut her eyes. “Right. Christ…”

“You don’t have to be part of this,” Dryden said. “I understand why you wanted answers, but now you have them. If you want to walk away, you can.”

It took her a long time to respond. Most of her attention was still on the machine, her mind trying to come to terms with it. Dryden imagined he had looked the same way when Claire had first shown him the thing.

“I can stop in the next town and let you out,” Dryden said. “You can forget you ever heard of all this.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“You know what I mean.”

Marnie nodded. She turned to him. “I know what you mean. I don’t want out.”

Dryden glanced at her. “You understand what’s going to happen, right? What this guy Whitcomb is talking about doing? There’s not going to be any due process. We’re going to track these people down and kill them. There’s no other way it would work.”

Marnie nodded again. Her eyes dropped to Curtis’s letter, in her lap. Her fingertips brushed over a paragraph in the middle of the page. Dryden saw what it was: the passage about the murders. Victims who had been killed for things they hadn’t done yet.

“I know,” Marnie said. “And I don’t want out.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The third burner phone on Mangouste’s desk rang again. He grabbed it.

“Tell me you have something.”

“It’s not about the trailer,” the caller said.

“What, then?”

“One of the trip wires caught something.”

Mangouste was silent a moment, taking in the news. The so-called trip wires were a series of routine searches to be carried out using the system, once an hour by default. Mangouste had come up with the idea not long after getting the system up and running, weeks before. These routine searches were defensive in nature — a quick digital survey of his own bank accounts, and certain accounts belonging to the Group at large, to see if any outside party had tried to gain access.

To see if someone was snooping around — and getting close.

Banks and other companies had used such technology for years: flagged files and the like. What made the system’s trip wires special was obvious, of course: If somebody tripped one of them, you could learn about it in advance.

“Tell me,” Mangouste said.

“Tomorrow morning, just before ten o’clock, someone at a private security firm in Las Vegas tries to access one of our offshore holdings.”

Mangouste sat down. He took a notepad and pen from the tray drawer and set them in front of himself. He said, “Do we have a name? An IP address?”

“Not yet, but we’re narrowing it. We’re hoping to get something actionable on a tighter timeline — something we can move on today instead of tomorrow.”

“Tell me everything,” Mangouste said.

He picked up the pen and began writing notes as the caller spoke.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Dryden exited I-5 at Avenal ten minutes before two o’clock. The small town hugged the transition between the mountains to the west and the vast plain of Central Valley to the east, a flat checkerboard of farmland, green and gold, extending to the horizon.

They could already see the scrapyard; it had been visible even before Avenal itself. It lay south of town, overlooking the freeway, a series of ascending shelves cut into the side of a foothill ridge. It looked like an Incan terrace farm that somehow grew rusted-out vehicles and piles of sheet metal.

There was a single road leading south from Avenal toward the yard, winding with the curve of the foothill slope. A quarter mile short of the yard’s front gate, Dryden stopped the Explorer on a rise. He pulled to the shoulder, reached down, and took the Zeiss scope from the floor near Marnie’s feet. He rested his elbows on the steering wheel and studied what he could of the site.

It didn’t appear to be in operation. Not today, at least, and probably not any day in recent years. Just inside the gate — a metal fence section on rollers, closed at the moment — Dryden could see a double-wide trailer that must have once served as a kind of management office. Its windows were broken out, and waist-high weeds had grown up all around it, blocking the one visible entry door.

Beyond the trailer lay the expanse of the scrapyard itself, row upon row of stacked wreckage: crushed cars, appliances, torn and twisted structural metals that might have come from demolished buildings. Dryden pictured dump trucks loaded with scrap, rolling in from torn-down shopping malls and office mid-rises all over central California. Material just valuable enough to escape the landfill, but not urgently needed by anyone right now. There was probably a few decades’ worth of it here.

The yard formed three terraces, like broad, shallow stair treads cut into the hillside, the whole thing stretching maybe half a mile down the face of the slope. Wide empty lanes ran between the stacked piles of junk, big enough to admit the heavy machinery that must have piled it all up, long ago.

There was no sign of Dale Whitcomb, but that was what Dryden had expected — and not just because they were early. If Whitcomb was here, he had probably been here for hours. He would almost certainly be watching the approach road right now, from some concealed place in the ruins.

“This is going to be tricky,” Marnie said. “He’s not expecting us. How do we convince him we’re on his side?”

“If he’s smart, it won’t be a problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“We have the machine with us. That should demonstrate well enough that we’re the good guys.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because if the bad guys had the machine, they wouldn’t bring it here and risk losing track of it again. And they wouldn’t need to, anyway. If they were to recover this thing, I don’t think they’d worry about loose ends like Whitcomb anymore. What damage could he do, if he didn’t have the machine himself? Who could he convince to help him, if all he had were stories? He’d sound like a nutcase in a tinfoil hat.”

“So if Whitcomb is smart,” Marnie said, “we don’t have to worry about him shooting us.”

“Something like that.”

“What if he’s not smart?”

“If he’s made it this far, I’m not worried.”

Dryden set the scope aside, put the Explorer back in gear, and accelerated forward.

Where the rolling gate met the scrapyard’s perimeter fence — an eight-foot-high chain-link affair, no barbed wire at the top — the latch mechanism was secured with what looked like a bicycle lock. Which wasn’t locked. Dryden slipped the thing out of the way and rolled the gate aside. It creaked and whined on bearings that hadn’t been oiled in a very long time.

There was no way to tell whether anyone had driven through the entrance recently. The dry, hardpan ground might as well have been concrete. Dryden walked back to the Explorer and rolled through the opening.

They drove a single loop of the scrapyard, just inside the fence. At each place where one terrace met another, there were shallow gravel ramps to allow passage. The rows of piled scrap were enormous, standing three stories high in places. It was like a scaled-up version of a supermarket, with the stock shelves rearing high above twenty-foot-wide aisles.

Passing the end of each open lane, they slowed and stared down its length as far as they could see. Most lanes ended in blind turns, suggesting a random maze of unseen passages beyond.

There was no sign of Whitcomb, or anyone else — until they came to the lot’s southeast corner.

Dryden stopped. He was looking to his left, out the driver’s-side window. He heard Marnie lean forward to look past him. He buzzed the window down and stared.

Twenty feet in past the mouth of an open lane was a makeshift fire pit: an old steel tractor rim that had been rolled into the middle of the channel and laid flat.

Thin tendrils of smoke snaked up from inside it.

“Let’s take a look,” Dryden said.

He killed the engine and got out, taking one of the Berettas in one hand and the plastic hardcase in the other. Leaving the machine unguarded for even a minute felt like a very bad idea.

He shut the driver’s door behind him as Marnie came around the hood. She had her Glock held ready.

There was no sign of anybody near the fire pit. Beyond it, the open lane between the stacks of scrap metal stretched away for nearly a hundred feet, to where it bent ninety degrees to the right, out of view. Between the fire pit and the distant corner, there were no openings leading away on either side.

Dryden crossed to the tire rim and crouched next to it. There was a bed of mostly cooled embers at the bottom, the carbonized remnants of what might have been plywood scraps — whatever firewood had been available amid the heaps of junk in this place.

There was an improvised grill suspended across the rim, some kind of grate that might have covered an air return duct in a building, years or decades ago. On the stony ground beside the rim, two metal cans stood open and empty. Their labels were gone, either torn off or burned off. It was clear the cans themselves had been used as makeshift pans to cook whatever had been inside them.

“Looks like he spent some time here,” Dryden said.

“We don’t know this was Whitcomb. Maybe high school kids come out here to party. Seems like the kind of place for that.”

“I don’t see any beer cans or cigarette butts,” Dryden said.

Marnie shrugged. “Litter-conscious high school kids.”

“Funny.”

Dryden turned in a slow circle, studying the rows of scrap metal on both sides. They seemed to form unbroken walls running from one end of the lane to the other. Except —

“Look at this,” Dryden said.

He went to the north-side wall, twenty feet farther in from the fire pit. There was a sheet of corrugated metal, the kind people used for pole barn roofs, leaning against the wall of scrap. The sheet stood upright, easily four feet by eight. Dryden took hold of one edge and pulled it sideways.

Behind it was a framed doorway leading into the scrap pile itself.

“What the hell?” Marnie said.

She came up beside Dryden. They stood and stared.

It was clear within seconds what they were seeing. Embedded in the base of the huge scrap pile was a standard-sized shipping container — the kind of modular unit that could serve as a train car, a semitrailer, or a massive cargo crate aboard a ship.

This one had been set down at a rough angle at the bottom of the stack of wreckage, and then mostly covered by it over time; only one corner of the container was visible, exposed like a portion of a fossil jutting from a shale outcropping.

The framed metal doorway was wide open; its door appeared to have been torched off and discarded ages ago. Where the hinges had been cut through, the exposed metal was long since rusted and pitted.

The space beyond the threshold loomed black like the depth of a cave. Dryden could smell the air inside — lots of smells, and none of them good.

“Got a flashlight?” he asked.

He glanced at Marnie and saw that she was already holding a pocket Maglite. She clicked it on and aimed its beam into the darkness. Dryden ducked and stepped through the opening, and Marnie followed.

The inside of the container was more claustrophobia-inducing than Dryden had guessed. In a normal one of these units, an adult could stand upright with headroom to spare. Not this one. It had been compressed by the tons of weight piled atop it. The metal roof sagged in bulges, reducing the ceiling height to maybe five feet. The walls bowed outward to compensate. Here and there, where the sides met the top, the welded seams had torn like foil under the stress; scrap metal crowded inward through the ripped openings.

The floor of the unit was pooled with rainwater in places, all of it rusty brown. Half submerged in the farthest of these, just visible in the light beam, lay the remains of some animal, probably a raccoon. Dryden could see a rib cage and a few tufts of fur.

Much closer, only a few feet from the doorway, someone had made a crude bed out of a bench seat from a pickup truck. There were ratty old movers’ blankets hanging off one end, as if kicked there after a night’s sleep.

Dryden put a hand on Marnie’s arm and guided the light to a point beside the bed.

Where the floor was spotted with blood.

“Shit,” Marnie whispered.

“Hand me the light.”

Marnie pressed it into Dryden’s hand; he crossed to the bench seat and knelt beside it. The blood was mostly dried on the metal floor, in little dime-sized spatters. But a small amount had filled an indentation in the surface, some kind of stamped rivet hole about as deep as a tablespoon. The blood that filled it wasn’t exactly liquid, but it wasn’t dry either. In the harsh glare of the Maglite beam, it looked tacky.

Marnie crouched next to him, her eyes fixed on the same indentation.

“I’ve seen plenty of blood,” Dryden said, “but I never had to guess how long it’d been there. This is more like your line of work.”

Marnie leaned closer, narrowing her eyes. “Maybe twelve hours. Maybe longer.” She pointed to the sides of the indentation, discolored by a kind of high-water mark of dried blood. The tacky portion was lower down in the dimple. “It’s had time to settle. Time for some of the water content to evaporate off. I never know for sure until I hear from forensics, but after a while you get pretty good at guessing what they’re going to say.”

At the edge of the light beam, beneath the makeshift bed, something caught Dryden’s eye. He reached under and drew the object out into the light: a leather wallet. He flipped it open.

Most of its contents appeared to have been taken. There were only empty slots where credit cards would have been. Only a bare plastic sleeve in place of a driver’s license. No cash, of course.

All that remained was a ticket stub from a movie theater: AMC CUPERTINO SQUARE 16.

“Cupertino is a few miles from San Jose,” Marnie said.

Dryden nodded. “Where Dale Whitcomb lived. Where he worked, anyway.”

He stared at the stub, then at the dried and congealing blood.

“If the Group figured out that Whitcomb was coming here,” Marnie said, “then they could have known about the meeting, too. Including the time it was supposed to take place. They could be hidden somewhere outside right now.”

“If it’s the Group that got him. If it wasn’t just some transient that lived in this container, and attacked him out in the scrapyard and dragged him back here. Granted, that doesn’t sound all that damned plausible, when you look at the odds. I mean, if someone killed him, I guess the smart money should be on the people hell-bent on killing him. Except…”

He trailed off, his attention suddenly fixing on the wallet. The empty sleeve where the driver’s license would have been. And the ticket stub.

“Interesting,” Dryden said.

“What is?”

Before Dryden could answer, the space around them darkened. On impulse, they both looked at the flashlight, but its beam still shone as bright as before.

Then, from behind them, came a man’s voice. “Weapons down. Slowly.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Dryden felt his hand tense around the Beretta. Felt Marnie’s entire body go rigid beside him, the sensation transmitting through the point of contact between their shoulders.

“Do it,” the man in the doorway said.

Marnie turned her head halfway toward Dryden, her breath coming in fast, shallow bursts.

Dryden pictured the sequence of moves it would take to open fire on the newcomer. Four things to do: spin in place from his kneeling position, raise the Beretta, center it on the target, pull the trigger.

The man in the doorway only had to do one thing — assuming he had his weapon leveled already. Or two things. Two shots in rapid succession. Dryden and Marnie, right there in the guy’s field of fire, at can’t-miss distance. Damn near punching distance.

No contest.

“We’re putting them down,” Dryden said. “Stay calm.”

Marnie’s head turned the rest of the way, her eyes locking onto his. Are you sure?

“It’s okay,” Dryden said. He lowered his shoulder and eased the Beretta onto the metal floor, and let it go. Marnie hesitated, her breathing still fast, then did the same.

“Stand up and turn toward me,” the newcomer said.

Dryden got his feet beneath him and stood. He turned and saw a man maybe sixty years old, dark hair going gray, hard features, sharp eyes. The guy was just outside the doorframe, lit by the indirect sunlight in the channel between the scrap piles.

A second man stood behind the first, ten years younger, blond hair going thin on top.

Both men held pistols. The man in the doorway had his leveled on Dryden, but the guy’s gaze was pointed elsewhere. It was focused on the plastic case Dryden still held in his other hand.

“You know what this is, don’t you,” Dryden said.

The man nodded just visibly. “Open it.”

Dryden unlatched the case. He eased the lid open with his free hand, so neither the machine nor the tablet computer would come loose.

The man stared into the red glow shining through the machine’s slats. For a moment he seemed almost entranced by it. Then he raised his eyes and looked back and forth between Dryden and Marnie. “Who are you people?”

Dryden said, “We’re on your side — Dale. But you’re a smart guy, right? So you must already know that.”

The man seemed to consider these words, holding Dryden’s gaze. Then he exhaled softly and nodded, and lowered his gun.

“Where are Curtis and Claire?” Dale Whitcomb asked.

“Curtis is dead,” Dryden said. He watched the news hit Whitcomb like an elbow to the chest. Watched him brace for whatever was next.

“Claire’s been abducted,” Dryden said. “I believe she’s alive. I believe we can get her back.”

Whitcomb stood there in the metal doorway, trying to process it all. At last he stepped back to let the two of them exit.

“Let’s talk,” Whitcomb said.

The four of them sat on the hard ground around the improvised fire pit. The wind coming down out of the mountains was chilly, coursing through the shadowy channels of the scrapyard. Dryden found a few short lengths of two-by-four lumber in the back of the Explorer, and set them on the bed of embers. Within a minute they began to blaze.

He also brought the bag with Curtis’s binders in it.

Whitcomb addressed Dryden and Marnie. “You know my name. I’d like to know yours — and how you’ve ended up here.”

Dryden took stock of the man. Dale Whitcomb looked exhausted, though not the same way Claire had. Whitcomb was stressed, not tired. Instead of sleep, he needed half an hour with a punching bag, pounding it until his knuckles were cracked and bleeding. Beyond the frayed nerves, he looked like a decent enough guy. Claire had trusted him; that counted for a lot.

“Fair enough,” Dryden said.

He introduced himself and Marnie, then spoke for ten minutes, covering the basics of what had happened since midnight. Claire’s phone call, the race to the trailer in the Mojave, Claire’s abduction, Curtis’s death. Then Santa Maria, the tower, Marnie.

When Dryden finished, Whitcomb introduced the blond man. His name was Cal Brennan, and he and Whitcomb had known each other for more than thirty years.

“We served together, way back,” Whitcomb said. “Our careers took different paths, but we kept in touch. Brennan’s here because I trust him, and because he can put together the kinds of resources we need, to go after the people we’re up against. I’ve brought him up to speed on everything I know. He hasn’t seen one of these machines in action yet, but … he’s aware of the kind of work I do. We’ll turn this one on and demonstrate it, as soon as we’re done talking.”

Brennan’s gaze kept going to the plastic case that held the machine. It was sitting on the ground between Dryden and Marnie, along with the bag full of binders.

Brennan, fifty years old, give or take, looked like a guy who rarely smiled. There were no laugh lines around his eyes. He looked like a hardass. He was also tanned in a way that suggested he had recently come from someplace even sunnier than California. He had a pair of Oakleys hanging from his shirt collar, their plastic bands scratched to hell as if someone had taken steel wool to them. Dryden had seen that effect before, in places where windblown sand was a constant feature of life. He would have put serious money on Cal Brennan having some connection to the world of private security contractors. He had the look.

Whitcomb turned to Dryden and Marnie. He seemed about to speak but then stopped himself, struck by something. He glanced at the nearby shipping container, its empty doorframe still exposed, and then looked back at Dryden.

“When you first saw me from inside there,” Whitcomb said, “you knew who I was. Had you seen a picture of me somewhere?”

Dryden shook his head.

“Then how did you know?” Whitcomb said.

“Because of the wallet,” Dryden said. “It was missing everything that could identify you in any official way, but it had a movie ticket stub from Cupertino in it. That was strategic, on your part. You knew the Group might get to Curtis, and learn about this meeting. And if they showed up here, you wanted them to find something that made it look like you were dead. Something they’d have to wonder about, at least. Blood on the ground, a wallet with a ticket stub from where you live — the Group would have picked up on that. They know where you live. But if the Group didn’t find this place … if some random person came along instead, and saw the blood and the wallet, and called the cops … you’d never want them to tie your name to this location, on some official record. That really would bring the Group straight here. They might have shown up at this place days ago, if the cops found your wallet here today. Right? So that’s why there was a ticket stub and nothing else. Something the Group would associate with you … but the police wouldn’t. Best of both worlds.”

Whitcomb nodded, studying Dryden.

“You’re already looking at this game the way I do,” Whitcomb said. “Chess in four dimensions.”

Something in the way the man said it chilled Dryden, though he tried not to show it. He only nodded, and waited for him to start talking.

“The way Claire understood it,” Whitcomb said, “and the way she explained it to you, this technology was discovered by a fluke. Bayliss Labs stumbled onto it without any idea what they were looking for. Right?”

Dryden nodded.

Whitcomb leaned over the improvised fire pit, holding his hands out to the heat. “It wasn’t a fluke,” he said. “It wasn’t just a fluke. My people at Bayliss may have stumbled onto the design, but they were being pushed toward it. They were looking for it without knowing it.”

Dryden traded a glance with Marnie, then looked at Whitcomb again and waited for him to go on.

“I need to start a little further back,” the man said. “Actually a lot further back, but it won’t take long. Please bear with me.”

Far away to the west, in the wooded foothills rising above the scrapyard, a crow screamed and took to the air. Dryden turned and saw it, a tiny speck of black against the early afternoon sky.

“My father served in World War II,” Whitcomb said, “in North Africa and Europe. He landed in Morocco under Patton, November 1942. My dad was infantry, but a few weeks into the invasion he was transferred to a group under the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, which was military intelligence. He had a background they liked: radio engineering, pretty advanced work at Stanford before the war. OSS had a job for him right away. Scout planes had seen something out in the desert in northern Algeria, some small German installation, all by itself in the middle of nowhere. Someone up the chain wanted to know what the hell it was, so my dad and his guys went in with a commando unit. The Germans defending that site must have thought it was pretty important, because they fought to the last man. When my father and his team finally got in to look at the place, they found most of it demolished. But not all of it. From what they could see, it had been some type of research station. There was one machine in particular that seemed to be the main event. A great big thing, the size of a pool table, with cables running out to speakers beside it. A radio of some kind, they thought. Its power supply had been cut, and someone had put a few bullets through its casing, but nothing vital had been hit. They got it powered up and switched it on, but at first all they heard was static. Then, every so often, they’d hear radio traffic coming through. Mostly it was music, sung in local languages, like what they’d heard on the streets in Moroccan towns. It was strange as hell to hear that stuff being broadcast on the radio, though, in German-occupied North Africa.”

A knot in one of the two-by-fours popped in the firepit, sending an ember arcing out onto the dirt beside Whitcomb. He hardly seemed to notice.

“My father and his people only had control of that site for a day before word came that heavier German forces were en route. Other teams from OSS had arrived by then. They boxed up all the paperwork they could salvage and carted it off, but the equipment itself was too heavy to move on short notice. The commando unit rigged everything with high explosives, including the big machine with the speakers. They blew it all to scraps, and then everyone got out of there. In those hours that my father had been able to listen to the machine, and the static, he only heard one thing he could actually make sense of. One thing in English: the chorus of a song apparently titled ‘She Loves You.’ He heard those three words and then the word yeah repeating a few times before he lost the signal.”

Dryden had been staring down into the flames. His gaze snapped up now, meeting Whitcomb’s. Beside him, Marnie did the same.

Whitcomb nodded. “He heard that in the desert in North Africa, in 1942. At the time, he had no reason to think it was anything strange. Just some song he wasn’t familiar with. How it was being broadcast in Algeria, he couldn’t imagine. Maybe someone was transmitting English music out of occupied France. Maybe the machine could pull in signals from that far out, all the way across the Mediterranean. Or farther. Maybe Britain.”

Whitcomb took hold of a two-by-four sticking out of the tire rim on his side. He used it like a poker, prodding at the bed of coals below.

“I saw for myself the moment it hit him,” he said. “I remember the date. February 9, 1964. I was ten years old. I guess just about anyone my age remembers the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, but it’s not the show itself I remember now. What I remember is my dad getting up off the couch, his expression like I’d never seen it before. I remember him going into the kitchen and splashing water on his face, and my mom asking him what was wrong, and I remember that he couldn’t answer her. He went up in the attic and got out some old boxes of his stuff from the war. Journals he’d kept at the time. In 1964, he was still in the military. Still working in intelligence. I remember him putting his coat on, after he came back downstairs, and saying he had to go to work. And then he left, and I didn’t see him again for weeks.”

Whitcomb set aside the two-by-four and went on. “I learned the whole story years later, when I was in military intel myself, and working with him. In the days after that television broadcast, my father tracked down some of the former OSS men who’d been with him in North Africa. Men who’d gone to that site. Together they got clearance to dig into the old paperwork that had been found there, and even to lead an expedition out to that spot in the Sahara where the site had been. They didn’t find much there. They had better luck with the boxes of papers, which were lab notes by the Germans who’d built that machine, in 1942. But the notes were incomplete. Most of them had been burned before the American commandos secured the site. What was left was … frustrating. Like a treasure map missing half the route, including the X to mark the spot.”

“The U.S. military wanted to build their own version of that machine?” Dryden asked. “If they could figure it out?”

Whitcomb nodded. “But there was more to it than that. Think of all the questions they had to consider. Had those few Germans out in the desert really been the only ones who knew about this technology, or did others know? If there were others, what happened to them? When the U.S. and Russia divided up Nazi scientists after the war, like battle spoils, could the Russians have gotten someone who knew how to build one of those machines? In 1964, when my father and his colleagues started digging into this, the Cold War was pretty close to its worst days. It was like the whole government ran on paranoia. There were serious incentives to look into this matter. But … there was also no proof any of it was true. Just my father’s say-so, versus all common sense. The one bit of evidence he had was his journal from the North Africa campaign; he’d actually written that Beatles line in it. In ’64, the military went as far as running chemical analysis on the ink he’d used to write it, and they determined it was a hell of a lot older than the song ‘She Loves You.’ I think that test bought my father and his friends more credibility than anything else, but only to a point. Try looking at it from the military’s perspective, back then. What’s the more likely explanation? That an intel officer really heard a message from the future, back in 1942, or that he found a way to make ink that could fuck with the chemical tests? What would you believe?”

Marnie said, “So what happened?”

“A half measure,” Whitcomb said. “The military analyzed the paperwork from that site and pulled from it everything they could make sense of. Everything that offered a hint of how the machine might have worked. They weren’t willing to spend money on trying to build another one; there had to be a million ways to interpret those technical notes. A million different machines you could build, on the off chance one would be the right one. If there was a right one. If the whole thing wasn’t a fantasy.”

“So what was the half measure?” Dryden said.

“Sitting back and watching. Watching the world, and watching new communication technologies emerge naturally, over the decades. Scrutinizing the details, seeing if some new field of work started to look oddly familiar — along the lines of those old German tech notes. I’ve always thought it was a smart approach. Whether the Germans back then just made a shot in the dark, or even if they had some equivalent of a Nikola Tesla, way ahead of his time, it stood to reason someone else would eventually discover the same technology again. We figured by watching closely enough, we might actually see it coming. Some project at a place like MIT or Caltech might be stumbling in the right direction and not even realize it … but we would. For that matter, we could give them a little push now and then, this way or that way, based on the notes from 1942. Like that kids’ game, warmer or colder, only they wouldn’t know they were playing it. That’s how I ended up at Bayliss Labs. Their work with neutrinos, starting a few years back … the devices they were building … it was uncanny how well they matched those old notes. They were on the right track without knowing it. Once I became head of the company, I was able to give them a few nudges. Educated guesses that were more educated than I let on. Like I said, the end result wasn’t a fluke. Not just a fluke, anyway.”

“So the military knows what Bayliss created,” Marnie said. “If they sent you to oversee it—”

Whitcomb shook his head. “They sent me to try. I never told them I succeeded. When the damn thing finally worked, my reaction was genuine. It scared the hell out of me. I could see then how dangerous it could be, and what people would do to get control of it. The approach Claire told you about — my putting together a list of powerful people I trusted — that was all I could think of. At the time, I wasn’t seeing it in terms of destroying the thing, disinventing it. I just wanted to get it into safe hands. I thought that was possible, then. I don’t anymore. This technology needs to disappear. If we’re lucky, it’ll be another half a century before someone else invents it. Maybe the world will be readier for it by then.”

He said the last part like he didn’t put much stock in it. He started to say more, but Dryden cut him off.

“Wait a second. The machine your father found, in 1942 … how did it hear something more than twenty years in the future? Are you saying the Germans had a system like the Group has today? How could they? It takes computers, search engines—”

Whitcomb shook his head again. “If you want to control what you hear in the future, then you need search engines. But to just hear the distant future, a pretty crude feedback loop between two of these machines could be rigged up. That’s what the Germans had. It would have been primitive, compared to what we’re up against now.”

“Let’s get to that part,” Marnie said. “The Group. Curtis said in his letter that you know something about them.”

Whitcomb’s eyes went past the fire pit to the machine in its plastic case.

“I’ve known about them for years,” he said. “In a way, they’re the original owners of this technology.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“There was another side to the work my father did,” Whitcomb said, “and that I later did. It wasn’t just about trying to re-create these machines. There was all that paranoia I mentioned. The fear that some other government would build one of these things, if it were possible. We wondered if anyone in Germany remembered this research. If they’d shared it with others. We did a lot of snooping to find out — human intel, eavesdropping, anything we could manage. Over the years we picked up a few crumbs. We ended up pretty certain nobody else in the world knew how to build one of these. But we also learned there were people just like us out there: people who knew there had been a working model once and wanted to reinvent it.”

“Were they from the original project?” Dryden said.

“Not really. I don’t believe any of the initial researchers survived the war — but some of their knowledge did. As far as we could piece it together, we think there were detailed project files kept somewhere in Berlin, and in the last days before the city fell, somebody who understood the value of those files got them out of there. Out of harm’s way and into a hiding place. We think it was a German soldier, probably someone who’d done security for the project along the way. Then at some point in the postwar, he took that information to people who could make use of it. His own idea of safe hands to put it in, I suppose.”

“What kind of hands?” Marnie said.

“Rich ones. Old money, aristocratic types. That’s what all our sources pointed to. We never had absolute certainty on every last name, but we had very solid hunches. I got the impression they were people who weren’t all that happy with how the war turned out.”

Dryden fixed his gaze on Whitcomb. “You’re saying the Group are—”

“I don’t think they fit any simple category. I think they’re a mix of a lot of things that most of the world has tried to leave behind. My father used to say power has a good memory for bad ideas. The people this German soldier took the project files to … it makes sense he would have chosen people whose views he agreed with. These days, the Group is made up of their children and grandchildren; who knows what exactly their goals are. We’ve seen for ourselves what they’ll do to achieve them. That’s enough for me.”

To the west, above the hills, the crow screamed again. Dryden could see it circling, catching some kind of updraft coming off the terrain.

“In any case,” Whitcomb said, “those old files weren’t enough to let them actually rebuild one of these machines. Same problem we had. So they settled on the same strategy: watch and wait. I didn’t appreciate how good they might be at it. Not until it was too late.”

Marnie put her hands to her face and rubbed her eyes. “Maybe they just want money. Maybe it’s not anything ideological, or political. Just money. Isn’t that all that matters to people like that, in the end?”

There was a wishfulness in the way she said it.

In response, Whitcomb pointed at the black bag with Curtis’s binders sticking out of the top. “Did either of you look at that material? I know you read Curtis’s letter, but did you get to the printouts?”

Dryden shook his head. “I glanced at the binders, but that was it. We haven’t had time to do more than that.”

“It’s interesting reading,” Whitcomb said. “Curtis e-mailed me copies of those files before we broke contact. I didn’t bother with the computer code stuff — I’m not a programmer — but the last batch there, all the Group’s internal e-mails … there’s a hell of a lot to learn from it.”

“The few e-mails I read didn’t make much sense,” Dryden said.

Whitcomb nodded. “Most of them don’t. Some do.” He held his hand out toward the open bag. “Let me show you something.”

Dryden slid the fifth binder out of the bag and handed it to Whitcomb. The man opened it and paged quickly through the bound stack of printed e-mails, zeroing in on some particular passage. Finally he stopped.

“There’s a chain of messages here that contain file attachments,” Whitcomb said. “Text files. Curtis was able to open those attachments and print them. The e-mails themselves are vague and pretty meaningless, but the attachments are clips from newspaper articles. Future articles. Take a look.”

He passed the open binder to Dryden and Marnie.

The first article began at the top of the printed page. The headline read: EVERSMAN WINS 54–46

The first sentences of the article removed any doubt over what the headline was referring to:

At the stroke of 11:00 P.M. Eastern Time, as polls closed in California and Oregon and Washington, Hayden Eversman officially became the next president of the United States. Thirty minutes later, before a jubilant crowd at Boston’s Fenway Park, Eversman took to the podium to declare victory.

The snippet of the article ended there. Dryden looked up at Whitcomb, along with Marnie.

“This is the outcome of the next election?” Marnie asked.

“I’ve never heard of Hayden Eversman,” Dryden said. “How is he the next president, when the election is a year from this fall? Everyone who’s running is already in the race.”

“He’s not the next president,” Whitcomb said. “Look at the dateline.”

Dryden looked down and focused on what he’d skipped over before: the slug of text just below the article’s headline.

AP — Wednesday, November 6, 2024.

CHAPTER THIRTY

“Keep reading,” Whitcomb said. “There’s more to it.”

Dryden turned the page to the next printed article. This one came from the same year as the first, 2024, but from an earlier point in time: four weeks before the election — October 8. In the simple text format of the attachment, the headline was the same size and font as the rest of the article, though in an actual newspaper, this headline would have screamed from the page in letters three inches tall:

“What the hell?” Marnie said.

As with the previous article, only the first several sentences were included, but that was enough to cover the basics. According to the story, Eversman had been speaking at an outdoor venue in Des Moines when he was killed. The bullet had come from some distance away, probably a rifle shot, and as of print time, no suspect had been named. Hayden Eversman, the Democratic candidate, had held a comfortable lead over his Republican opponent, whose name didn’t appear in this part of the story.

Marnie looked up at Whitcomb. “How can both of these articles exist?” she asked. “How does this man win the election and also get killed a month earlier?”

“The articles are from different versions of the future,” Whitcomb said. “Just like there would have been different articles about the death toll from that building collapse in Santa Maria. Different outcomes, different news reports.”

Marnie nodded slowly, getting the idea squared in front of her. “In one future,” she said, “Hayden Eversman gets elected president, and in a different version, he gets killed a few weeks before that.”

Whitcomb nodded. “In the construction site, you two changed something that was a few minutes from happening. These articles show how the Group changed something that was nine years away.” He nodded at the binder. “In fact, they changed it more than once. Keep going.”

Dryden turned to the next attachment: a third article about Eversman. Another headline that would have been shouted across the printed page in real life:

This article was dated September 15, 2024, another few weeks before the previous one. The text told of Eversman’s campaign jet going down just minutes after takeoff from Richmond International Airport in Virginia. The crash investigation had not yet begun, but even this article, written within hours of the incident, reported that the wreckage was a debris field more than a mile long — indicating the plane had exploded in midair.

The next article, the fourth one, was dated June 26. The headline and story had Eversman once again being shot and killed, this time while speaking to a crowd in Tampa.

The fifth article was similar: another shooting death, though it took place on June 5 in Chicago.

The sixth article described another midair explosion of Eversman’s campaign jet, after takeoff from LAX on May 23 — just two weeks after he’d officially claimed the Democratic nomination.

The seventh and final article was dated Wednesday, May 1, 2024. Both the headline and the text drew allusions to Robert F. Kennedy, for obvious reasons. Hayden Eversman, minutes after making a victory speech upon winning the California primary, was shot and killed. It didn’t happen in a hotel kitchen. It happened on the sidewalk five feet from the limousine he was walking toward. No suspect had been detained in the few hours before the article was published.

“What the hell is all this?” Marnie asked. “They’re trying out different ways to kill someone who would have become president nine years from now? And how are they doing that? How are they arranging an assassination almost a decade in the future?”

“It could be done,” Dryden said. “You could use sealed orders, blind go-betweens. Tell someone, ‘Hold this envelope for nine years and then deliver it to so-and-so.’ If you pay people enough, you can get them to do anything. Obviously it works. It looks like they did it six times.”

“Which in itself doesn’t make sense,” Marnie said. She looked around at the others. “Why find six different ways to kill him? After it worked once, wouldn’t that be enough?”

Whitcomb managed a smile. “You’d think so.”

“Why do this at all?” Dryden asked. “I don’t mean why kill him, I mean why kill him then? In 2024. If the Group wants this guy dead before he becomes president, it would be easier to kill him right now, when he’s nobody.”

“Much easier,” Whitcomb said. “And they’ve already done that with other people. You read as much in Curtis’s letter, and I’ve seen the e-mails that reference some of those murders.”

“So why is Hayden Eversman different?” Marnie asked.

Whitcomb shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve racked my brains over it, and all I’ve got are half-assed maybes. Like maybe it’s not Eversman they care about. Maybe they want his running mate to be president, and killing Eversman right at the end is a way to pull that off. But—”

“But that doesn’t work,” Marnie said.

Dryden nodded, flipping back through the preceding articles. “If they wanted his running mate in office, they’d sit back and let Eversman win like he was supposed to, and then kill him.”

“That’s right,” Whitcomb said. “So I have no idea. I only showed you this to make the point that these people are thinking in terms of politics. They have big plans, and they’re going to achieve them if we don’t shut it all down.”

On those words, Whitcomb turned to Cal Brennan. Dryden looked at him, too. Sized him up again. The hard skin, the result of sunburn after sunburn. The sandblasted Oakleys. Dryden pictured the guy on a plane, maybe yesterday or the day before, flying in from Iraq or Syria or one of half a dozen other places.

“What sort of resources do you deal in, Brennan?” Dryden asked.

Brennan’s eyes turned toward him. The eyes without laugh lines. “Human resources.”

“Guys with guns,” Dryden said.

Brennan nodded. “Among other hardware.”

Whitcomb spoke up. “There’s no clean way to go about this. It comes down to killing these people. All of them, if we can. Do either of you have a problem with that?”

He aimed the question at Dryden and Marnie.

“No,” Dryden said.

Marnie hesitated. Whitcomb and Brennan watched her.

“I’d want to know about collateral damage,” she said. “Some of these people will have children around—”

“We’d be careful within reason,” Brennan said. He rattled it off like he was used to saying it. Spoken boilerplate.

“You need to find them all first,” Dryden said. “Every location where they’re set up. Wherever they’ve got their own versions of the machine, wherever their system is.”

Whitcomb was nodding. “There’s an intelligence aspect to it. We can manage it — between the printed e-mails and what I already knew of these people, there’s a base of facts to start from. Besides … they’ve made it easy for us, in at least one way.”

Dryden waited for him to go on.

“Though the e-mails don’t mention any names, they make it clear there’s one person in charge of the Group’s activities in California, maybe the whole western U.S. A kind of regional head, you could call him. Like a caporegime in the Mafia. All the e-mails come across as if … well … as if the only people writing them are this man and a few others below him. Not a word from anyone above him.”

“You don’t think they told the rest of the Group about the machines,” Dryden said, not asking. “About the system, or any of it.”

“I’d almost guarantee it,” Whitcomb said. “Why the hell would this guy hand that kind of power up to his superiors, anyway? He’s the superior if he’s got all this to himself.”

Dryden thought about that. It fit everything he’d ever learned about human nature. It was almost reassuring, in its own ugly way: a scrap of normalcy in the four-dimensional chess game.

“I still plan to take out as much of the Group as I can,” Whitcomb said, “but as far as shutting down the system, erasing this technology right out of the world … I believe we can do all that here in California.” He pointed to the binder full of e-mails. “I’ve read that material at least ten times now. I’ve made notes. I’m convinced they’ve got their entire system, including every machine they’ve built, in a single secure location. We find that site and hit it, it’s game over. Then we destroy our own machine for good measure.”

“Wherever their machines are,” Dryden said, “that’s not where they took Claire. They were taking me to the machine site, before I got free. Claire was going someplace else. We need to know where. We need to hit that site at exactly the same time we hit the other place, if we’re going to save her.”

Whitcomb nodded. “We will. We’ll do this right.”

Dryden looked back and forth between Whitcomb and Brennan. “So what’s the first move? Whatever it is, we start right now.”

Brennan shook his head. “No. We start ten and a half hours from now, at the soonest.”

The man was looking at the machine in its case as he finished saying it.

Dryden stared at him. Saw what he meant. Felt his pulse accelerate as his adrenaline spiked.

“You’re not serious,” Dryden said.

“I am,” Brennan said. He turned his gaze on Whitcomb. “I’ve listened without rejecting this, because I do know the kinds of projects you work on, and because in thirty years I’ve never heard you lie about anything. But you can’t expect me to commit my people until I’ve seen for myself that this is real.”

Dryden took a step toward him, past the edge of the fire pit. “My friend is locked in a room somewhere, being interrogated. I’m not burning ten and a half hours for nothing.”

Brennan shrugged. “Have at it. I’ll help as soon as I’ve seen proof.”

Dryden turned to Whitcomb. “We start now. If your friend wants to wait—”

Whitcomb was already shaking his head. “We can’t do this piecemeal. We get one shot at it—”

“If Claire dies because we wasted half a fucking day—”

“If you were him,” Whitcomb said, nodding at Brennan, “would you believe the rest of us? Think about it.”

Dryden started to answer, but stopped. He saw himself in Claire’s Land Rover, in the darkness of the Mojave, right after she’d shown him the machine. He’d already seen the proof by then — the trailer and all that had happened there — but the fact was, he still hadn’t believed her. Not right away.

Dryden ran a hand through his hair. “Goddammit…”

He turned in place, saw Marnie looking at him, her own frustration palpable.

Then Dryden’s eyes narrowed. A thought had come to him. Another memory from those few minutes in Claire’s SUV.

“What is it?” Marnie asked.

Dryden shook his head. “I need to think for a second.”

He stepped away from the fire, pacing, his gaze going everywhere and nowhere. He shut his eyes and let the memory come all the way through.

Then he opened them again and looked at his watch.

2:37 P.M.

“It was going to be two fifty-one,” he said. “Two fifty-one this afternoon.”

“What’s at two fifty-one?” Whitcomb asked.

Dryden ignored him. He turned and looked at Brennan again. “You need proof? Fine. But we’re not waiting for it. Fifteen minutes is all it’ll take.”

“What do you mean?” the man asked.

Dryden said, “You follow baseball?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Dryden leaned into his Explorer, put the key in the ignition, and turned on the radio. He stood there at the driver’s-side door, using the seek button to cycle through the stations.

Marnie came up beside him, Whitcomb and Brennan close behind.

“What are you looking for?” Marnie asked.

“The Padres are playing right now,” Dryden said. “Or they’re about to be. At two fifty-one they’ll be in the top of the second inning. I heard part of it on the machine ten and a half hours ago.”

He gave up on the seek button and used the knob, clicking one step at a time through the frequencies. Here and there, barely audible songs filtered through the distortion. He’d almost made it back around the dial when he heard a man’s voice coming through the static, deep and measured, unmistakably familiar.

The game itself hadn’t started yet. The announcer was talking about a sponsor, some insurance company in San Diego.

Dryden sat behind the wheel and opened the glove box; he found a pencil, then tore out the last page of his road atlas for something to write on. He pressed the page to the flat top of the center console, then stopped. He shut his eyes and put himself back in Claire’s vehicle again, listening to the game.

“Almodovar,” he said. “It was two balls, two strikes when I first heard it.”

He opened his eyes and began writing in the margin as the details came back.

“There was a curve ball — outside. That made it three-two. After that he hit the pop-up — two fifty-one, Claire said. It was foul, to the left. Count was still three-two, and then…”

He went quiet again, thinking. What had happened after the pop-up?

At the edge of his vision he saw the others watching him, waiting.

“Ball four,” Dryden said. “The pitch right after the pop-up was ball four. Almodovar walked.”

He jotted it down, dropped the pencil in the cup holder, and got out of the vehicle. He held the page out to Brennan.

“That’s more than a person could guess at,” Dryden said. “Keep listening to the game. In a few minutes you’ll be up to speed with the rest of us.”

Brennan took the page. From the Explorer’s speakers the announcer kept talking, static-laden but easily discernible. Dryden’s watch showed 2:40.

They waited. They stood near the vehicle as the game began and the minutes passed.

At 2:45, Marnie looked up and met Dryden’s eyes, then Whitcomb’s. Something had occurred to her — whatever it was, it made her breath catch.

“What?” Dryden said.

“These people,” Marnie said, “the Group … their system lets them get information from the future — even years away. Police records, articles, anything. They learn about the future so they can change it, right?”

“Right,” Dryden said.

“So why don’t they use it to change the past? Why don’t they send a message to themselves one week ago, before things went wrong for them? Before Whitcomb and Claire and Curtis got away? Any kind of warning to themselves would fix everything, and that would be easy to do, the way the system works.”

Dryden thought about it. The idea hadn’t occurred to him, in all the clamor of the day’s thoughts, but Marnie was right. There was no reason the Group couldn’t do that, given the system Curtis had described in his letter.

For a second he wondered if the Group could send a message even further back in time — months or years — but then he caught himself. That wasn’t possible. The earliest point they could send a message back to would be the day they first had the system working. Before that, there would be no machinery to receive such a message. They could send something back a few weeks, no further.

But Marnie had nailed it: Even one week would change everything.

So why hadn’t the Group done that already?

Whitcomb was shaking his head. “I worried about it, too, until I read their e-mails. There’s a long exchange where they go over this very point. They could do what you’re describing … but they never will.”

Dryden and Marnie both stared at him, waiting for more.

“There’s something you have to appreciate here that’s not so obvious. It wasn’t obvious to me. The people we’re dealing with … they’ve been obsessed with the idea of this technology for their entire lives. They grew up with the secret of it, and the talk of it, like it was a religion: this impossible thing that existed once, and might return someday — like a savior. It was different for my father, and later myself. For us it was a technical goal, like stealth planes or cruise missiles. Something we wanted for the military — for the country. It was never going to be just ours. But the Group did want it for themselves. It was a personal obsession, and they’ve had seventy years to dwell on it. To dream up the things they would do with it — and the things they wouldn’t.”

“Why wouldn’t they send information back in time to themselves?” Marnie asked. “That would be the most powerful way to use this stuff. By far.”

“Because they’re terrified of trying it,” Whitcomb said. “I’ll show you the e-mails later. You’ll see what I mean. It’s the one thing they absolutely will not do.”

“But why?” Dryden asked. “Why does that scare them?”

“Picture yourself doing it,” Whitcomb said. “Imagine you type a text message to send to yourself one week in the past — a warning about something. Maybe you’re in Florida on vacation, and the weather’s sucked all week, so you’re going to tell your past self to go to Colorado instead.”

“Okay.”

“You’ve got the message ready to go. All you have to do is tap SEND. Now think about it. What exactly is going to happen when you hit that button? From your point of view, standing there in Florida … what’s going to happen? Are you going to disappear from there, and reappear in Colorado? Something is going to happen. But what?”

Dryden stared. He thought about it. He traded a look with Marnie and saw her wrestling with it, too.

At last he said, “I don’t know what would happen to me.”

“Neither do they,” Whitcomb said. “Seventy years trying to get their heads around it, and they don’t have a clue. The only way to find out would be to try it, and nobody wants to do that. It scares them like nothing else in the world.”

“But you wouldn’t always be a thousand miles from where you would have been,” Marnie said. “It wouldn’t have to be that extreme.”

Whitcomb shrugged. “What if it’s a foot? The problem is the same. There would always be some difference in the present, if you changed your past. The instant switchover to that difference … what it would feel like to you … that’s the unknown. I wouldn’t try it myself for a million dollars.”

A few feet away, the name Almodovar came over the Explorer’s speakers. Next up to bat.

Brennan, leaning beside the open driver’s door, glanced down at the page in his hand.

It was 2:49 by Dryden’s watch.

“I think it’s important to know their weaknesses,” Whitcomb said. “Again, like a chess game. Their fear of screwing with the past is a big one.”

“Do they have any other weaknesses?” Marnie said.

Whitcomb smiled. “Oh, yes.”

“Like what?”

Before Whitcomb could answer, Dryden said, “Radio waves.”

He had voiced the thought even as it crossed his mind. The others turned to him.

“What do you mean?” Marnie asked. “Radio is how it all works in the first place. How would it be a weakness—”

She cut herself off, catching at least part of what he meant.

“Exactly,” Dryden said. “It is how it all works. So it’s a weakness. The Group uses radio station broadcasts to grab information from the future. Could we use that against them somehow? Jam the signals, set up some kind of interference?”

“It might have worked in the beginning,” Whitcomb said. “Not anymore.”

“Why not?” Dryden asked.

Over the speakers, Almodovar came to the plate.

“Because they knew that was a vulnerability,” Whitcomb said. “Using radio stations. It was a weak link. Sooner or later, some stations would have noticed the software hacks. Or routine upgrades would erase them. Or a hundred other problems. Too much room for error, especially in the long run — like using the system to get news articles from ten years in the future.”

Almodovar swung and missed. Strike one.

“But how could they avoid using radio stations?” Marnie asked.

“They built one for themselves,” Whitcomb said. “Sort of. This system of theirs … it’s a boxed-in setup: their own little antenna sending out FM signals, with their machines right there to receive them. All of it together in a package about the size of a refrigerator, buried underground. According to the e-mails, it has a geothermal generator to power it, zero maintenance. They wanted it to be … future-proof. That way, in any version of the future, their system will still be there, underground, doing its job. That’s why they can look ten years ahead in time.”

Fastball, low inside. Ball one.

“They said this thing would keep working,” Whitcomb said, “even if the rest of the secure site burned down and took everyone there with it. Even the system’s Internet connection, which it obviously needs, would survive. It’s a pirated access, separate from the service for the rest of the buildings, and basically untraceable. They thought of everything.”

Another swing and a miss. One ball, two strikes.

“Pretty clever,” Dryden said.

Whitcomb nodded. Then: “It’s also very, very stupid. It creates their biggest weakness of all. It’s how we’re going to beat them.”

“What are you talking about?” Marnie asked.

Breaking ball, high over the plate. Ball two.

“This is it,” Brennan said.

Dryden looked at his watch. 2:51.

For a moment he returned his gaze to Whitcomb and thought of continuing the conversation.

Then Whitcomb waved it off. “Tell you in a minute,” he said, and turned his attention to the game broadcast.

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

Every word, every stressed syllable, matched what Dryden had heard in the Mojave ten hours and twenty-four minutes earlier. It was as though he’d been looking down a tunnel then, and was seeing down it from the other end now. The feeling was surreal in a way he had not expected.

Marnie turned to him. “You okay?”

Dryden nodded. He blinked and took a hard breath to clear his head.

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

Brennan was staring at the page of jotted notes in his hand. The paper shook, just visibly, picking up a tremor in his arm.

“What do you say, Cal?” Whitcomb asked.

Brennan didn’t answer. Didn’t seem to have even heard him. He stared at the page as the crackling audio washed over him.

“Low and inside, and that’ll do it. Ball four. Runners on first and second, Watkins comes to the plate.”

Brennan kept his eyes on the sheet of paper for another five seconds, though there was nothing more on it.

“Is that enough?” Whitcomb asked.

No reply.

A second later Brennan dropped the page on the Explorer’s driver’s seat, then turned and crossed to the fire pit twenty feet away. The binder full of e-mails was lying on the ground beside the closed plastic case with the machine inside it. Brennan stooped, picked up both the binder and the case, and tucked them under his left arm.

Then with his right hand he drew a pistol from his rear waistband and leveled it at the three of them.

“You’re not destroying this thing,” Brennan said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

For a long moment no one said a thing. The static-choked baseball game continued to wash from the Explorer’s speakers.

Then Whitcomb spoke. “What are you doing, Cal? What is this?”

“You’re not destroying it,” Brennan said again.

His voice had none of its previous reserve. He was breathing quickly, and his cheeks had reddened even behind the rough surface of his tan.

Whitcomb spoke as if talking to a jumper on a ledge. “Why don’t you put the gun away? We’re all rational here.”

“I’m rational,” Brennan said. “You three are out of your minds.” He nodded to the case under his arm. “It works. Christ, it works. Everything you said was true. Why would you want to throw this thing away?”

“Because it’s dangerous,” Whitcomb said, “and we’ll never get another chance to put the genie back in the bottle. We can do that right now, if we destroy all of these things. The world will never know it existed.”

Whitcomb took a step forward. Brennan took a step back. He pressed his left arm tightly toward himself, holding the machine and the binder of e-mails securely.

“There’s too much that can go wrong with this stuff,” Whitcomb said. “You know that.”

Brennan shook his head. “Too much goes wrong without it.” His eyes went from Whitcomb to Dryden and Marnie, back and forth. “Listen to your own stories, for God’s sake. Those four little girls out in the desert. The guys on the roof of that build site. All those people would be dead if it wasn’t for this thing. And that’s just one day’s worth of using it.”

“The downside is still bigger,” Whitcomb said. “What happens when governments get ahold of this technology? What about corporations? Political groups. We’ve already got people being murdered for things they haven’t even done yet. You want a hundred different special interests using this stuff?”

“It doesn’t have to come to that,” Brennan said. “I can keep this one working copy, and never tell anyone. Why shouldn’t I?”

“And leave the Group out there running around?”

Brennan shook his head. “I’ll do what we already planned. That was going to come down to me anyway. My firm, my manpower. I don’t need your help for that.”

“You do,” Whitcomb said. “You need my intel to do it the right way. If you get it wrong, you have no idea what’s going to come down on you.”

Brennan tapped the binder of e-mails with his free hand. “Everything you know came from this.”

Whitcomb shook his head. “I know a lot more than what’s in that binder. Don’t do this, Cal. You’re going to make a mistake, and then—”

“My firm has its own intelligence assets. Our Vegas office alone does counterintel work for three of the top twenty companies in the U.S. We know what we’re doing.”

He took another step backward, moving away from the three of them while keeping the gun leveled. It was clear he meant to back up some farther distance and then turn and run down the long channel between the scrap piles, to where it angled blindly to the right, a hundred feet away. His car was probably parked somewhere deep in the maze. If he made that corner, there would probably be no catching him. Getting in the Explorer and racing to block the exit road would be useless; Brennan could crash through the chain-link fence anywhere and drive away down the broad slope of the hillside. The freeway was right there at its base, a few hundred yards down.

Brennan took another step back. And another.

Dryden had one of Claire’s Berettas in his own rear waistband, but going for it was pointless while Brennan had them all covered. When he turned to run, shooting at him would be easy. Accidentally hitting the machine would also be easy.

The man took another step back. He was ten feet beyond the fire pit now, thirty feet from where the three of them stood.

Whitcomb said, “If you slip up at some point, next month or next week or tomorrow, these people will learn about it today. You don’t understand what you’re up against.”

“I’m a quick study,” Brennan said.

On the last word, Dryden saw a pinprick of light flash behind the man, high in the wooded hills west of the scrapyard. Half a second later, Brennan’s head blew apart above his eyes.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Dryden was moving even before the shot hit Brennan. He got a hand on Marnie’s shoulder and shoved her sideways. The two of them, and Whitcomb, were standing at the mouth of the long channel between the scrap rows. To their left and right, the ends of the rows would provide cover from the shooter on the hillside.

Marnie staggered, caught her balance, and threw herself the rest of the way past the end of the row. Dryden caught a glimpse of Whitcomb going in the other direction, dropping flat, scrabbling fast for cover on the other side of the channel.

Adrenaline-rush math flashed through Dryden’s thoughts in a tiny fragment of a second. How many shooters up there in the woods? Logic said it was just one, because two shooters would have synchronized their first shots — an easy opportunity to drop two targets before all the rest scattered.

There had only been one first shot, though.

Therefore, one shooter.

How much time would there be between shots?

Two seconds, maybe, if the shooter was skilled. Which seemed to be the case. Brennan could vouch for it.

Dryden threw himself after Marnie, behind the cover of the scrap metal stack. In the same quarter second that he cleared it, he heard the insectile whine of a rifle bullet passing close by, cutting through the space his head had just occupied.

He turned and looked back. He saw Whitcomb standing behind cover on the far side of the open lane, looking across at him and Marnie.

Between their two positions, in the wide space of the channel’s mouth, the Explorer sat parked like an offered sacrifice. Its driver’s-side door still hung open. The baseball game was still playing over the sound system.

Dryden stared at the vehicle. He expected a shot to punch through its front quarterpanel into the engine block. Or the fuel tank. Or the tires. Or all of the above.

Five seconds passed. Nothing happened.

Dryden understood. From the shooter’s point of view, it was temporarily better to leave the vehicle drivable. To leave it as bait.

Across the lane, Whitcomb edged up to the corner of the stack he was hiding behind. He lowered his eye to a narrow horizontal gap between a pair of crushed car bodies, and looked through into the empty space of the channel. Toward the fire pit. Toward where Brennan had fallen.

“Brennan drove here in a rental,” Whitcomb called out. “Parked it somewhere in these stacks. Probably has GPS on board. Whatever slipup he was going to make, looking for these people — next week, whenever — they probably saw it hours ago now. They would have narrowed down his name after that, and then where his car would be. Chess in four dimensions.”

Twenty seconds had passed since the last shot.

“If we get away,” Marnie said, “would they have learned that a few hours ago? Would that make them send extra people to compensate?”

“They’ll have seen police records and news articles showing someone died out here,” Whitcomb said. “If those documents don’t say anything about us … then no, the Group won’t have known about us until right now.”

Whitcomb dropped his eye to the narrow gap again. Stared once more into the open channel.

“We can’t leave without the machine,” he said. “If they get it, the whole game’s lost.”

He took a deep breath, then another. His body language made it clear what he intended to do.

“Don’t be stupid,” Dryden said.

Whitcomb’s eyes stayed locked on the plastic case. “It’s only thirty feet. Sixty there and back.”

“You won’t make it fifteen.”

“I might. He’s sighting on the vehicle right now, waiting for someone to run for it.”

“Takes about a second for a sniper to retarget,” Dryden said. “Maybe less.”

“I’ll be moving the whole time.”

“Yeah, straight toward him and then straight away. That’s an easy lead.”

“We need the machine. There’s no choice.”

“Whitcomb—”

“After the first shot, you should go for the vehicle. Move it to cover while he’s distracted with me.” Whitcomb managed a smile. “Or maybe he’ll shoot you, and I’ll survive. It’s all good.”

The man turned and met Dryden’s gaze across the space between them. He took another deep breath.

“Now or never,” Whitcomb said.

And ran.

Dryden watched the moment unfold in awful clarity. Saw it in a kind of precision that wasn’t quite slow motion but might as well have been. Whitcomb was ten feet from cover when the zip of another bullet passed through the channel. Dryden saw the man flinch and draw to his right — which meant the sound must have passed just to his left — without breaking stride as he sprinted.

Then Dryden forgot about him and turned his focus on the Explorer, and broke from cover himself.

Behind him, Marnie was suddenly screaming.

He couldn’t process the sound.

The world had scaled down to the strip of space between himself and the open door of the vehicle, fifteen feet away. His thinking had scaled down to the sequence of moves he needed to make. Simple actions in linear order. Planting each foot, pistoning with his legs, tilting his upper body forward, hurling himself at the Explorer.

The window in the open door burst right in front of him, close enough to shower his face with crumbs of tempered glass.

He rounded the door, didn’t bother shutting it, crammed his body behind the wheel, ducked and turned the ignition the rest of the way forward. Heard the baseball game momentarily cut out. Heard the engine rev and catch and roar. Heard the passenger-side window explode. Felt another shower of glass bits. He reached up and worked the selector, already jamming his foot on the gas. Beneath him, the vehicle lurched forward like a living thing. Its momentum slammed the door shut beside him, and a second later the shadow of the tall scrap pile slid over everything.

Dryden braked.

Sat upright.

The Explorer was behind cover and running smoothly. No damage to anything except the two windows.

He looked down at himself. No injury. Nothing.

He sat there for five seconds, letting his pulse stabilize, letting his thoughts become words again. He took a breath and released it. It came out sounding like a laugh. Maybe it was. He had drawn the fire off Whitcomb after all. He’d have to give the guy some shit for that.

He opened the door and stood, and saw Marnie sitting ten feet away.

She was holding on to Whitcomb, who’d been shot through the neck.

Dryden ran to them and dropped to a knee.

Whitcomb had the plastic case in his hands — he even had the binder full of e-mails.

His blood was all over both things. It was coming out of the bullet wound in pulses. The carotid artery on the right side of his neck had been ripped open.

“They don’t know you,” Whitcomb said. His voice was high and reedy; his windpipe had taken part of the hit.

Marnie had an arm around his shoulder, and one of his hands in her own.

“Don’t try to talk,” she said, though she had to know it was pointless; Whitcomb would be gone in another minute. Two at best.

The man shook his head, his eyes hardening. Whatever he was saying, it mattered to him.

“They don’t know you,” he said again. “The Group. Don’t know your names. Don’t let them find out.”

Dryden nodded, if only to make the guy feel better in these last moments. Whitcomb’s words made sense, but they were also obvious. Maybe it was some simple thought Whitcomb’s brain had fixed on, as he faded.

The guy looked at Dryden. Seemed to read the patronizing thought in his expression. Whitcomb’s eyes narrowed further. He looked angry.

“License plate,” he whispered. Then with great effort he jerked his head in the direction of the distant shooter. “He’ll see it when you go. Cover it. Put…”

His breath hissed out. He sucked in another, and then his body was racked with a coughing fit. By the time it passed, he’d lost consciousness. He wasn’t going to regain it. His breathing rattled in and out, weakening.

“We need to go,” Dryden said.

Marnie nodded, but her eyes stayed on Whitcomb.

“Do we bring him?” she asked.

Dryden thought about it. Then he thought of the man’s last words. Whitcomb was right: The license plate had to be covered before they made their break. But with what? The dirt all around them was dry and sandy. Not so much as a handful of mud or clay to smear on the plate. Dryden scanned the nearest parts of the scrap pile. Nothing useful there.

Cover it.

Dryden looked at Whitcomb’s unconscious body, each breath a little shallower.

“Christ…” Dryden said.

Marnie looked at him. “What?”

Dryden only shook his head. Then he took the plastic case and the binder from Whitcomb’s hands. He gave them to Marnie.

“Can you take those and buckle up in the passenger seat? We don’t have much time.”

She stared. “What are you going to do?”

“Please just do it,” Dryden said.

She hesitated another second. Maybe she knew what was about to happen — more or less — and maybe she could have stomached seeing it. Dryden had no doubt she’d seen worse things before. In her line of work, she might have seen even worse things than he had.

But he didn’t want her to see this. He didn’t want anyone to see it.

“Please,” he said.

Marnie stared — then nodded and stood with the case and binder. She took them around the back of the Explorer to the passenger side.

Dryden turned his attention on Whitcomb.

Still breathing, just audibly.

Still unconscious.

Never coming back.

Dryden grabbed a fistful of the man’s shirt, below the collar. He dragged him around to the back end of the Explorer, then lifted him so that his back was positioned against the license plate.

Still breathing. Barely.

Dryden drew the Beretta from his waistband, put it to Whitcomb’s chest and fired. Four times. The hollowpoints made small holes on the way in, and huge ones coming out. They ripped through the back of Whitcomb’s shirt, spraying a thick sheet of blood onto the license plate and the metal around it.

Dryden dropped the body and ran for the driver’s door.

Twenty seconds later, doing 70, they crashed through the roller gate, fishtailed, and then accelerated north on the access road.

A single, wildly aimed shot hit the vehicle a second later. It skipped like a stone off the front corner of the hood, denting the metal. That was it. In another ten seconds they were beyond any possible range.

They got back on I-5, northbound. No goal at the moment but distance. Wind roared through the vehicle, through the blown-out front windows on each side.

For five minutes neither spoke.

The roadbed caught and scattered the hard sunlight, rendering it painful.

“He would have told you to do it,” Marnie said. “Almost did tell you. There wasn’t any other choice.”

Dryden kept his eyes on the road.

Marnie turned to him. “Focus on what’s next. What are we going to do?”

Dryden didn’t answer right away. He thought of something Claire had said: that she had arranged security for Whitcomb and his family, a couple years back. In these past few days, when everything had gone bad, he must have hidden his family away somewhere safe. Someplace where, right now, they were waiting for him to come back.

“Hey,” Marnie said.

Dryden blinked. Glanced at her.

She indicated the machine and the binder of e-mails. “He died to get these back. It can’t be for nothing. What’s our next move?”

Dryden nodded. He exhaled hard and pushed away every thought that wasn’t practical.

“Hayden Eversman,” he said. “The guy they want to stop from being president in nine years.”

“But who they’re not killing in the present.”

Dryden nodded. “They plan to kill him eventually, but they’re afraid to try it now. There has to be a reason for that. I’d love to know what it is.”

“So would I.”

“Then let’s find out where he is in 2015.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Where Hayden Eversman was, at that moment, was a hundred and twenty miles north and west of them, watching his four-year-old daughter try to put a pink cape on a shih tzu. The daughter’s name was Brooke; Eversman and his wife had chosen it carefully after two weeks of considering every option they could think of. The shih tzu’s name was Meatball; Brooke herself had picked that one, after five seconds of considering probably zero alternatives.

So far, Meatball didn’t seem to grasp that the cape was supposed to go around his neck. As a result, the spectacle playing out on the living room carpet looked like the least dangerous bullfight in the history of the world.

Above the dog and the girl, the TV on the wall was tuned to C-SPAN. The current broadcast was sedate, even by C-SPAN’s standards: live coverage of oral arguments before the Supreme Court. Because cameras weren’t allowed in the courtroom, the coverage was simply an audio feed spruced up with still photos. Whenever someone was talking, that person’s name and picture filled the screen.

Softly, so that his daughter wouldn’t hear, Eversman said, “These assholes should have bowls of tea leaves on their shelves instead of law books.”

He was leaning back against the kitchen island that bordered the living room, watching the TV.

Nearby, seated on a stool and looking over documents spread on the island’s marble countertop, was Eversman’s business partner, Neil Chatham.

“They do seem to come in with their minds already made up,” Chatham said.

“Made up for them.” Eversman pushed off from the island and crossed to the sliding doors that overlooked the pool and the grounds.

He was forty-one years old and had been in the venture capital business since his late twenties. He’d had more ups than downs in that time; his net worth at the moment hovered around the three-quarters-of-a-billion mark.

It could have been higher by now — a hell of a lot higher — if he hadn’t limited himself to the world of renewable energy, though he didn’t regret that decision in the least.

On TV, Justice Scalia interrupted one of the lawyers and started droning on about a case from thirty years back, Fenley v. Oregon, which was about — well, what the hell did it matter what it was about? It was another tea leaf. One of tens of thousands of cases that a justice could pluck out of the stockpile to prop up a premade decision.

Eversman wasn’t directly tied to today’s case — in the sense that he had no stake in any of the parties involved.

Yet the outcome would affect him. No question about that. It would also affect everyone in America who felt like putting solar panels on their roofs, and the effect would not be positive.

It would be plenty positive for other people: enterprises that had tens of billions of dollars tied up in pipelines and tanker ships and refineries. For them, it would be time to pop open bottles of wine that cost more than most people made in a year.

Not that the Court’s decision was going to surprise them. Or anyone. It was going to be five to four. In fact, it already was, in every practical sense.

Why even have the arguments?

From the island, without looking up from his array of documents, Chatham said, “It’s Washington, Hayden. What are working stiffs like us going to do about it?”

Eversman didn’t answer, but he thought about the question. The fact was, he’d been thinking about it for a very long time.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Dryden saw the problem five seconds after they walked into the Coalinga Township Library. It hit him as abruptly as the rush of cold air they encountered when the automatic doors sucked open.

“Dammit,” he whispered.

“What?”

They were still moving, slowing now, crossing the broad entryway that opened up to the central space beyond. Dryden stopped.

The library was essentially one giant room, sixty by sixty feet, with white stucco columns here and there supporting the ceiling. The different sections of the place — reading area, bookshelves, periodical racks, computer terminals — were all visible from anywhere in the room. And the place was packed, 3:10 on a Saturday afternoon.

“What is it?” Marnie asked.

Dryden swept his eyes over the space. There might have been fifty people or more. Two-thirds of them were kids. Of the adults, most seemed to be there with their children, but more than a few of the grown-ups were by themselves. There were men browsing the shelves or the magazine racks, or seated at computers. They wore jeans or shorts, with their shirts untucked and hanging loose. Any one of them might have a gun stuffed into his waistband — Dryden had one of the Berettas in his.

In any case, potential threats weren’t limited to the crowd. Dryden turned in place and took in the glass front wall of the building, facing onto the parking lot. Dozens of vehicles out there. Many with tinted windows. Anyone could be in one of them, watching the interior of the library.

“Hayden Eversman’s not a very common name,” Dryden said.

“No, it’s not. That’s good. If the guy in the articles was named Robert Smith, we’d never figure out who he is in 2015.”

“It’s bad, too, though,” Dryden said. “It makes it easy for someone to monitor Web traffic to watch for text searches of that name.”

Marnie seemed to consider it.

“We should assume the Group has the resources to do that,” Dryden said. “They were smart enough to catch Brennan, whatever kind of snooping he would have done. He was going to trip some kind of alarm, at some point in the future.”

“And the Group found out about it today,” Marnie said.

“Yes.”

Marnie shut her eyes for a second, exhaled slowly. “Okay. So he dug into some account of theirs, and a flag went up, and they found out. Sorry, he would have dug into some account. But personal accounts are one thing — you really think these people could have flags for Google searches?”

“For certain keywords, maybe,” Dryden said. “You’re an FBI agent, you must know about monitoring ISPs for suspicious activity. People looking up how to make nerve gas, that kind of thing.”

Marnie nodded. “We have software for it. I guess the Group could, too. But why would they flag that name?”

“Because they know Curtis stole their e-mails. And they should assume anyone he met with has read through them, and seen those articles about Eversman. Googling him would be an obvious move, on our part. And a predictable one.”

Marnie thought it over. Her eyes went past him, tracking slowly along the row of computers nearby.

Dryden said, “We might be easy for their system to spot, if we Google that name. There might be nobody else running searches for it these days. Eversman doesn’t get elected for another nine years. How many people were looking up Barack Obama in 1999?”

“If they really are monitoring it,” Marnie said, “and we sit down and do a search…”

“Then they would have known about it hours ago. Whoever they sent to kill us would already be here right now. They’d probably know the exact time of the search, and which computer would be used, based on its ISP address. Someone in here, or in the parking lot, would be watching that computer and waiting to see who comes along and sits down at it.”

Dryden stood staring at the computers, thinking it all through. Would the Group have sent people to both the scrapyard and this library, two locations within a few miles of each other, in the span of an hour or less? Why not? Multiple leads, multiple responses.

He rubbed his eyes.

“What do you think?” Marnie asked.

“I think Claire’s going to die if I don’t find her, and I think if the tables were turned, she’d take this risk for me.” He looked at Marnie. “But that doesn’t mean you should have to risk it, too. I’ll take a shot at it myself. I’ll try to play it safe — just Eversman’s last name and whatever keywords seem worth a try. Wait near an exit. If it goes bad, just get out. Get the machine and get away, okay?”

He took his keys from his pocket and pressed them into her hand.

For a second she made no move to take them. Then she simply nodded.

Dryden browsed a table of old books on sale for a quarter apiece while Marnie made her way to the shelves off to the left side of the room. There was a fire exit over there. Dryden waited another minute and then turned to the computers, twenty feet away.

It crossed his mind to wonder if choosing one at random would make any difference, in terms of faking out whoever might be watching, but the idea fell apart almost at once. There was no way to pull a feint here: Whichever computer he chose, that would be the one the Group learned about, hours before. Cause and effect, presented by M. C. Escher.

He thought about it another five seconds and then gave it up and walked straight to the nearest computer. He pulled the chair out and —

A girl in the reading area screamed, and someone shoved a table hard, scraping its legs on the floor.

Dryden spun fast, his eyes locking like gun sights on the commotion, even as his hand shot for the Beretta hidden under his shirt —

It was just kids screwing around.

A ten-year-old boy had scared a teenaged girl with a picture in a science book: a full-page blowup of an insect’s face.

Her cheeks flushed, the girl straightened her chair and table back out, then swatted the kid on top of his head.

Dryden turned and spotted Marnie among the shelves. She was staring at him, her face tense, her own hand just dropping back from under her coat, where her Glock was holstered.

She held his stare for another second — and then she walked out from the shelves into the open space of the library. She cleared her throat and spoke loudly enough for the entire room to hear:

“Excuse me, everyone?”

Chair legs scraped. Fifty-plus heads turned toward her.

“Sorry to bother you,” Marnie said, “but can anyone here tell me who Hayden Eversman is? I’ve got it stuck in my head and I can’t remember where I heard it.”

Most of the crowd just looked annoyed. An older woman who looked like she might be the librarian stood up, maybe meaning to give Marnie a scolding, but a male voice spoke up first.

“He’s a green energy guy.”

Dryden and Marnie both turned. The speaker was a college kid with long hair tied back in a ponytail, standing among the shelves Marnie had just come from. He had answered her without looking up from the book he was paging through. He looked supremely calm.

“Are you sure the name is Hayden Eversman?” Marnie asked.

The guy nodded, eyes still on his book. “I read about him in Wired.”

“Thanks,” Marnie said.

The guy offered a nod and said nothing more.

Marnie crossed to Dryden, smiling a little. “Low-tech approach,” she said. “Let’s see them monitor that.”

“Don’t tempt them,” Dryden said.

In ten minutes of manual searching in the periodical section, they found four different articles about Hayden Eversman. One was the Wired write-up the college guy must have seen. The other three were in Forbes, Scientific American, and Business Week.

Dryden and Marnie split the articles between them to scan through them more quickly. Dryden started with the Forbes article, which was actually a long interview. He found what he was looking for almost immediately: The interviewer described arriving at Eversman’s fifteen-million-dollar home in Carmel, California. There was even a photo of the place, a sprawling ten-acre estate surrounded by wooded highlands above the seaside town. The grounds were fenced in by a brick property wall, and centered in the space was a colonial brick house that looked more suited to New Hampshire than California. One feature in particular seemed to explain why this photo accompanied the article: The house’s roof was covered entirely by solar panels.

“We got it,” Dryden said.

They spared another three minutes photocopying all four articles, then got back on the road. Carmel was two hours away if they pushed it. Dryden drove while Marnie read the copied articles aloud.

Hayden Eversman was forty-one years old. He had a wife and a young daughter. He had spent most of his adult life funding green energy start-ups, and clearly had made good at it. He was a scratch golfer and a private pilot, though by his own admission it was hard to make time for flying. He was notoriously protective of his privacy, especially with regard to his family.

There was no mention of an interest in politics.

There was nothing that hinted at a conflict with anyone powerful — beyond the obvious understanding that big oil companies were no fans of his.

That was it.

Marnie folded the articles and stuffed them into the center console compartment.

They rode in silence for a minute, and then she opened the plastic case and turned the machine on. Static, soft and inexorable as the flow of a stream. As the flow of time.

“Feels weird not to have it on,” Marnie said. “Like we might … miss something. Doesn’t it?”

Dryden thought of the hollows under Claire’s eyes again. He leaned and glanced at himself in the rearview mirror, and saw the faint beginnings of his own dark circles.

“It does,” he said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

“I keep coming back to the news report about the trailer,” Marnie said.

They were an hour from Carmel, rolling north along a valley that snaked among baked-brown hills.

“The news report that ended up not being true,” Marnie said. “About how the girls were dead. Burned in that cage.”

She was quiet for a while, then said, “In some way, it really must have happened, right? That original version. It happened, and it got reported, and because of that … it didn’t happen — you stopped it that time.”

“I guess you could think of it that way.”

“Some version of me really showed up at that scene,” Marnie said.

Dryden imagined she was picturing it, whether she wanted to or not: the nightmare she would have rolled up to if things had gone differently. The trailer, probably burned away to nothing but a few blackened supports. The cage intact within the charred ruin. The bodies. The smell.

Marnie stared forward at the road and the valley, the folds of the terrain revealing themselves one by one, like secrets.

“What Whitcomb said about the Group,” she said, “that they’re afraid to change the past … would you ever try it? I mean, if you had to? If something bad happened … something you couldn’t live with … would you change the past to fix it? Even if you had no idea what would happen to you in the present?”

Dryden thought about it. Whitcomb’s description of the idea — and Whitcomb’s own fear of it — had made perfect sense. What would it feel like, to do a thing like that?

“I don’t know if I would,” Dryden said. It was the only honest answer he had.

“I can think of times I would have been tempted to do it,” Marnie said.

The static from the machine ebbed. Some kind of gospel station came through. Dryden caught the words shepherd and praise before it faded back out.

“I’ve worked kidnapping cases for six years,” Marnie said. “I had one that made me come close to giving it all up, finding some other job. It started with a home invasion at a house in the Central Valley, middle of nowhere, broad daylight. A woman and her daughter, ten years old, lived there. The mom called 9-1-1 and screamed for about a second and then the call cut out. The first black-and-whites got there twelve minutes later and found the house empty. There was a bathroom off the little girl’s bedroom that had been locked from inside, and broken in around the latch. Like the girl tried to hide in there, and the intruder kicked it in. But while she was in there, in those seconds or whatever time she had, she tried to write something on the vanity mirror for the police to find.”

Dryden glanced at Marnie. She had her hands balled tightly in her lap, but he saw them shaking, just noticeably.

“It was the letters COI,” Marnie said, “written with her fingertip. She must have been smart enough to not breathe on the mirror first, so her attacker wouldn’t see it.”

“COI. Did she get cut off in the middle of writing a name?”

“I might have thought so,” Marnie said, “but she wrote it big, right across the mirror. There wouldn’t have been room for a fourth letter, so … COI seemed to be the whole message. We thought it might be someone’s initials, strange as that would be for a ten-year-old to write. We made a list of everyone the girl and her mother might know, and started working through it. I was on-site about an hour after the first responders. I took over the case, and the list. I thought about the girl’s teachers, her friends’ parents and relatives, anyone and everyone. But we didn’t find one person with those initials.”

She unballed her hands and pressed them flat to her pantlegs. The shaking was still visible.

“We tried license plates, even though it didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. The girl couldn’t have seen the driveway from that bathroom, and anyway, not many license plates use the letters O or I; witnesses mix them up with 1 and 0 too often. That approach came up empty right away. Then, about two hours in, we thought we had a lead. We found out the mom had been dating her boss and keeping it secret from her co-workers. A week earlier, she and the boss had been out at dinner with the little girl, and there had been some kind of fight between the couple — bad enough that the restaurant called the cops. An officer showed up and talked to them, took down their names but didn’t arrest anyone. It made the boss at least a hell of a maybe in my book, even though his initials didn’t match the three letters. And then we found out he’d been at a conference two hundred miles away when the break-in happened. He had about a hundred people to vouch for him.”

Out ahead, the hills flanking the road drew aside. Dryden could see broad, flat expanses of farmland planing away to the north.

“COI,” Marnie said. “I sat in that woman’s living room all that afternoon and evening, while the crime scene techs came and went, and I tried to figure it out. I kept going into that little bathroom and picturing the girl in there, scared out of her mind, listening to her mom being attacked down the hall. I asked myself what could be so damned obvious and simple that even a little kid, under that kind of stress, would think to write it on the mirror. And then, about six hours in, it just hit me.”

She was about to go on, when the static broke again. Dryden heard a man speaking slowly, his tone flat and calm. It reminded him of the baseball game. Almodovar at the bat. Then the last of the static fell away and the man’s words came through. It wasn’t a play-by-play.

“… minutes from now, so that you’ll hear it at present. We look forward to meeting you and reaching a fair agreement. Message begins here: Whoever has the machine, we hope you’re listening to it. We will trade your friend for the machine. At nine this evening, bring it to the place where you last saw her. We are programming our system to compromise multiple broadcast stations and play this message ten hours and twenty-four minutes from now, so that you’ll hear it at present. We look forward to meeting you and reaching a fair agreement. Message begins here: Whoever has the machine, we hope you’re listening to it. We will trade your friend for the machine. At nine this evening…”

Dryden listened as static slid back over the transmission, washing it away.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Neither of them said anything for thirty seconds. There was no sound but the rushing static. An exit came up on the right. Dryden took it and pulled to the shoulder at the end of the off-ramp.

Even as he coasted to a stop, he heard the static falter again. What came through was the same message, no doubt from some other radio station. The same man’s voice, speaking the same words clearly and slowly. The message looped back to the beginning, and then it cut out; an automated recording announced that the station was experiencing technical difficulties. A moment later it all faded into the hiss.

Dryden was already doing the math in his head. It was just past 4:00 in the afternoon. That allowed five hours to reach the place in the Mojave where he and Claire had been attacked. He could get there with time to spare — if he turned around and headed south right now.

“You know you can’t just do it,” Marnie said. “You can’t just show up out there, like they want. And obviously not with the machine.”

“I know that.”

Dryden shut his eyes and rubbed them. He considered the problem, and all the jagged edges of it that he could feel.

“What are you thinking?” Marnie asked.

“That it’s still a lead. That I can’t ignore it.”

For a third time, the hiss from the speakers withdrew; Dryden heard another transmission of the message. He felt a grudging admiration for the Group’s thoroughness.

“Going up against these people blind is suicide,” Marnie said. “We’re an hour from talking to Hayden Eversman. What if that ends up telling us something that changes everything? There’s some reason they’re afraid to make a move on the guy.”

“There’s no time to meet with Eversman and still reach the Mojave before the deadline,” Dryden said.

“Not by road there isn’t, but I have some discretion to use FBI assets, including choppers. I’d have a bit of explaining to do later on, but I can make it happen.” Marnie turned in her seat and leaned closer. “If we come up empty with Eversman, you can still reach the meeting site in time to do … something. If you can think of something.”

Dryden stared forward. Way out on the flat farmland ahead of them, a combine harvester made a turn at the end of a field. Its metal edges and panels winked in the sun.

Dryden hardly saw it; all his focus had suddenly gone back to the message from the Group, the audio replaying in his mind. One line stood out from all the rest, revealing maybe a bit more than the Group had intended. Dryden almost smiled, but didn’t.

“What is it?” Marnie said.

Dryden turned to her. “I don’t have to think of anything. I know exactly what I’m going to do in the Mojave, no matter how things go with Eversman.”

He put the Explorer in gear and rolled across the two-lane to the on-ramp, accelerating north, back onto the highway.

“Turn your phone back on and make the call about the chopper,” he said. “Arrange a pickup in Carmel, two hours from now.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Three times, during the rest of the drive, they switched off the machine and listened to the Explorer’s radio for news reports. Coverage of the quake was everywhere, and already the central story was the stranger who’d shown up yelling about a bomb threat just before Mission Tower came down in the tremor. So far, the word miracle hadn’t been appended to the story; most newscasters were treating it with skepticism, though the fact that a bomb threat had also been phoned in to 9-1-1 lent some credibility to it.

They reached Carmel just before five o’clock. Dryden already knew where to go. After arranging the helicopter, Marnie had used her phone’s map application — set to satellite imagery — to find Eversman’s house. There were only so many neighborhoods with fifteen-million-dollar homes, and only so many fifteen-million-dollar homes with solar panels covering their roofs; in fact, there was just one. Marnie had found it in less than five minutes’ worth of dragging the map around, without ever risking a text search.

They rolled up to the gate, a heavy wood-and-iron structure hung on massive hinges. To its left and right, the brick property wall blocked all view of the estate beyond.

There was an intercom mounted on a post beside the entry drive, with a small camera atop it. Marnie traded places with Dryden at the wheel, then held her badge out for the camera and pushed the talk button. She identified herself by name to the voice that answered.

After that, nothing happened for a long time. Minutes passed. Dryden pictured someone inside calling the FBI field office in Santa Monica and verifying her information. He thought of the digital paper trail generated by those kinds of calls. Database entries. Computer records.

There was no obvious reason to think the Group could connect any of these dots. Up to now, they knew nothing of either him or Marnie.

All the same, Dryden turned and swept his gaze up and down the street. He saw other property walls lining the road, making a narrow canyon of its winding route. He saw rooftops beyond the walls, and other gates with their own intercoms and cameras. He saw nothing moving. No cars creeping along. Nothing at all.

In front of them, Eversman’s gate suddenly hummed and came to life. It swung inward, drawn by an unseen mechanism, revealing a driveway of paver bricks leading up to the house Dryden had seen in Forbes. Red brick with black shutters, a huge central mass flanked by symmetrical wings leading away to the left and right. The place had to be ten thousand square feet. It had a guesthouse off to the left, thirty yards from the end of that wing, its exterior matching the look of the larger structure. Maybe it served as living quarters for a waitstaff, or security guards.

Marnie put the Explorer in drive and rolled through the gateway toward the main house.

Dryden expected an attendant of some kind to meet them in front of the place. Instead, the man who stepped out the front door as they parked the Explorer was the same one they had seen in all four magazine articles.

Hayden Eversman was six foot one, athletically built. He wore jeans and an oxford shirt, untucked. Even at a glance, Dryden saw in him the natural confidence that came from a lifetime of being the smartest person in the room. Eversman crossed to the edge of the porch and stood watching them, waiting.

Dryden and Marnie got out of the vehicle.

“What’s this about?” Eversman asked. He directed the question to both of them, his eyes going back and forth. Dryden noted that the voice was the same one that had answered over the gate intercom a moment earlier.

“Have you caught much of the news today?” Dryden asked.

“Some.”

“You heard about the earthquake?”

“Yes. What about it?”

Dryden reached into the vehicle and pulled out the hard plastic case. Marnie had wiped most of Whitcomb’s blood off of it during the drive, using a work glove she’d found in the back of the Explorer. The machine was silent, switched off for the moment.

“We need to sit down and talk to you,” Dryden said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

To Claire Dunham, everything in the room where she was tied up seemed to have heat shimmers above it. Like sun-scorched blacktop, though it wasn’t especially hot inside this place. No hotter than the forest she could see outside, she guessed.

The shimmers were an illusion. That much was obvious. They were in her head — a side effect of the drug she’d been given.

As it happened, Claire knew all about this drug. She knew about most of the drugs people employed when it came to making other people give up their secrets. For a while, back in the day, she’d been in the interrogation business herself. She’d been tech support for people who did it, anyway.

The shimmers were beautiful. They rose up even from objects that weren’t quite objects: a knothole on the wall to her left, the rough-hewn trimwork above the doorway leading out of the room. Sometimes vivid colors swam up into the ripples: reds and purples and greens, like little rainbow patterns on a soap bubble.

The shimmers were one of two classic side effects of this drug; the other was a different story altogether, though still pleasant in its own way.

Claire had encountered this drug and its effects before, years back, during training with Sam Dryden and his guys. Someone way up in the political ranks at Homeland had decided field operatives like herself should be familiar with interrogation drugs — intimately familiar — just in case they themselves were grabbed off a street corner in Yemen and found the tables turned.

A whole school of thought had grown up around the idea, and terms like counternarcotics training and chemical agent preparedness had been coined, and people like her and Sam, in carefully controlled settings with doctors present, had been given all sorts of fun intoxicants.

The point wasn’t to build up tolerance. That would have taken months of serious use, and would have gone away after you went cold turkey — assuming you could do that, by then, or that you weren’t dead.

No, the point was practical knowledge. The point was to know what these drugs felt like, for whatever good it could do in a pinch. To learn what the side effects were, and how to cope with them. To learn if the drug had weaknesses that could be exploited.

With this drug, the primary effect — very different from the two side effects — was a kind of mindless euphoria; it waxed and waned in a cyclic pattern as the nervous system rebelled against it. Five minutes of slightly greater lucidity, five minutes of slightly less, over and over. It was the sort of thing you’d never notice if you weren’t trained to spot it.

Claire’s training had involved five or six long sessions with this drug. Its full name escaped her now. Thiozene di — no … Thiozene per —

Good-Cop-in-a-Vial.

That was what the docs had always called it. Which more or less covered what the drug was meant to do: make a subject relax to the point of making friends with his or her captors. Making friends and sharing stories.

For the captors, the trick to using this drug was simply to be nice. The interrogation manuals Claire had read went so far as to recommend adding the smell of fresh-baked bread or chocolate chip cookies to the room.

For the captive — one that was trained, anyway — the trick was to make the most of those periods of relative lucidity. To do your critical thinking when you could, and to consider your options, if you had any. There had even been close-quarters combat training for each particular drug, since things like balance and depth perception were affected differently by each one. If you were going to slam the blade of your hand into the pressure point below someone’s ear, or break his neck, you had to compensate for the distortions in your fine motor control. Claire had rather enjoyed that part of the training.

She was in the middle of one of the lucid spells now. It had rolled in a couple of minutes ago. It would roll back out in a couple more. She used it, as she’d been doing for hours, to take stock of her predicament.

She was tied to a wooden chair. Her hands were behind her, bound to the spindles of the seatback. Her ankles were bound separately, one to each of the chair’s legs. She was in the middle of a room; the walls and floor were made of rough-surfaced planks. There was a doorway leading to another room, and there was a window looking out on a dense woodland of old-growth pines, with no other buildings visible. The window was single-pane, the thin glass old enough to have ripples in it — real ripples, not just the sort her mind was whipping up right now.

Of the next room she could see very little. A bit of floor and wall visible through the doorway, nothing more.

Her captors called this place the cabin. She had seen only this single room — she’d been hooded when they brought her in — but she could tell there was at least a bit more to the place. There was an upstairs, she knew; she heard men talking up there sometimes, and heard the old beams groan when someone walked above her.

She had seen only three people all day. Two were the men who had driven her here from the Mojave. They were both thirty, give or take, and had a hard look to them. They reminded Claire of guys you saw on those prison documentary shows.

That left Cullen. Cullen was fortyish, and very big, and he had much more than just a hard look to him. Whenever she happened to meet his gaze, Claire had the impression she was looking into the eyes of a machine. Something with no concept of empathy or restraint. A crude simulation of a human being.

The three men had watched her all day so far, sometimes all three of them in the room, other times just one or two.

They didn’t quite seem to know the correct use of this drug — they weren’t being especially nice, and they sure as hell weren’t baking cookies — but so far, at least, they weren’t physically hurting her. Not yet.

Her wrists and ankles were sore from the bonds. She could feel abrasions on her skin, and her hands and feet were partly numb from cutoff circulation. She wasn’t sure exactly how many hours she had been bound to the chair — keeping track of time was difficult with the drug in her system. There had been a single bright point in the day, some time ago now, like a star seen through a break in an overcast. One of her two original captors had been in a nearby room, talking on his phone. Claire had discerned a single line of the conversation, spoken louder than the rest, torqued by stress and confusion: They had him zip-tied.

She hadn’t necessarily been at a peak of lucidity just then, but she had understood what it meant all the same. Sam was free.

Which was a silver cloud with a dark lining: If he was free, he was trying to find her. He was taking risks to do so.

Claire blinked and lifted her gaze. At the moment only Cullen was in the room with her. He was seated at a card table against the wall, playing solitaire. The deck of cards looked like it had been handled by a mechanic right after an oil change.

The other two were off in some other part of the place. Claire had heard them upstairs, maybe ten minutes ago.

The shimmers intensified. She watched them rise up off the floorboards like little ghosts. She knew what it meant.

The clearheadedness was leaving her again. Peak to trough. Down she went.

If there was any consolation, it was that this lucid spell had actually yielded an idea.

A very bad idea.

Maybe, but it was better than nothing.

The colors swam and churned against the muted browns of the cabin. Claire gave in and let her thoughts blur all the way out.

Another peak. Another lucid spell. How long had she been under?

Cullen was still alone with her. He still had the greasy cards spread out on the table, though at the moment he was watching her, smiling a little. The smile did nothing to ease the coldness of his features. Quite the opposite.

Claire looked away, but not before catching the satisfaction that rose in his expression.

“Afraid?” Cullen asked.

His voice was deep; his chest probably measured fifty inches.

Claire didn’t answer.

Cullen flipped over three of his cards. His eyes roamed across his piles.

“What you should be is impressed,” he said. “I’m a trusted guy around here. They trust me to do all kinds of things.”

“What things?” Claire asked. It was something to say.

“Killing people.”

Another three cards. Another search for moves.

“Who do you kill?” Claire asked. She could hear the drug in her voice. A matter-of-fact tone that might have been humorous on a different day.

“Anyone they tell me to,” Cullen said.

“Like who?”

“I killed a nineteen-year-old boy in Portland yesterday.”

“Who was he?”

“How should I know?”

“They tell you to murder some random kid, and you do it?”

“Who says it was random? They always have their reasons.”

“What reason could there be for that?”

Cullen shrugged and said nothing more. His attention stayed mostly on his cards.

Then he said, “It gets you a little hot, doesn’t it. Knowing what I do.”

He looked up again, and Claire met his eyes, and she thought, He knows all about how the drug works. He knows about the side effects. The shimmers, and —

And the other one.

The second side effect.

The technical term for it, in the interrogation manual, had been arousal, but that did it no justice at all.

As one of the docs had put it, way back, It makes you horny like a high school boy feeling a pair of tits for the first time.

She stared at Cullen and understood: He knew about that effect, and didn’t realize she knew.

He was playing with her.

“It does, doesn’t it,” he said. He laughed softly to himself. “Makes you a little hot. Just a little bit.”

Claire looked down at her knees and didn’t reply. She felt her cheeks flushing, which she supposed looked like embarrassment, though it wasn’t.

She thought, The technology is a month old, and these are the hands it’s in.

Not really a coincidence, she supposed. Life was just like that. The world was just like that. There was a kind of gravity to the way bad tended to win out. Like the world was an ant-lion’s funnel, everyone sliding down toward some clicking, mandibled nightmare at the bottom.

She thought those things, and hated herself for thinking them, and hated Cullen for making her think them.

“It gets you wet,” Cullen said. “I can tell. I can smell it.”

The fact that the last statement might be true, strictly speaking, sharpened her anger to a straight-razor’s edge.

Cullen laughed quietly to his cards, and Claire clenched her fists behind her, and after a moment she felt the light-headedness taking her down again. Down and down and down.

“What if I am?” she asked.

Some amount of time had passed — a few minutes, she guessed. She was in the clear again, her wits more or less intact.

Cullen, still alone with her, looked up from his cards. For all his cold smugness, he looked surprised.

“What?” he said.

Claire glanced at him for only a second and then looked down at her lap. She let as much fear into her voice as she could.

“Turned on,” she whispered. “What if I am?”

Even at the edge of her vision, she could see Cullen staring at her. She felt the dynamic of the room change. Felt Cullen suddenly transformed into something all too human: a man whose libido had suddenly perked up, like a dog to the sound of the treat drawer sliding open.

While she waited for him to say something, she took in the silence of the cabin. The other two men were still upstairs somewhere. To her right — she compelled herself not to turn her head — was the window. The deep forest outside. The thin pane of glass separating her from it.

“Nobody’s around,” she said softly. “I can be quiet.”

She felt his stare even as she kept her eyes cast down. Another long stretch of time went by. Ten or fifteen seconds. Then Cullen stood and slid back his chair — quietly. He crossed to her and knelt to her eye level. He looked cold again. A taxidermied human face brought to life.

She watched him take stock of the chair and her bonds. Watched him mentally working out the mechanics of trying to have sex with her while she was tied up this way. It wasn’t going to work. It was obvious he could see it for himself.

Claire kept her eyes down and waited for him to give up on it. To shake his head and go back to his card game.

Instead he took a knife from his pocket and clicked it open. “You want to remember something,” he said. “I weigh three of you, and I’m meaner than three of you, too. Understand?”

She bit her lower lip, allowed herself to shudder. “Yeah.”

CHAPTER FORTY

Dryden had expected Eversman to be a hard sell. Harder than Marnie had been. Harder than he himself had been, when Claire had first shown him the machine. He and Marnie had both encountered it only after witnessing things that would have been impossible without it. The trailer in the desert, in his own case; the predicted earthquake, in Marnie’s. Events that demanded an outsized explanation, and laid the foundation for believing the machine was real. It was different with Eversman, just as it had been different with Cal Brennan: There had been no such impossible experience.

They made the most of the earthquake, the coverage of which was now getting much of CNN’s airtime. There was a video clip running every few minutes, in which one of the workers from the construction site spoke of the stranger with the fake bomb threat — the man who had saved them all. The chyron text at the bottom of the screen read: SURVIVOR: “HOW DID HE KNOW?” Between that evidence and the machine itself, open and running on the big granite island in Eversman’s kitchen, they at least seemed to have the man’s full attention. That the news was coming from an FBI agent probably helped.

He listened as they explained the system. He paced, and sometimes sat, while they showed him the e-mails and the newspaper articles: his election, his murders.

When they’d finished, Eversman turned away from the island. He crossed the dining area to a huge set of sliding doors overlooking the rear yard. The grounds rolled away to the brick wall at the back, and the dense evergreens of the Carmel Highlands beyond. In the living room, CNN was now muted.

“Fenway,” Eversman said, almost to himself.

Marnie glanced at Dryden, then returned her gaze to Eversman.

The man turned from the glass doors and came back to the island. He picked up the printed article that detailed his election night victory. His speech to the crowd at Fenway Park in November 2024.

“FDR gave his final campaign speech there,” Eversman said. “Not a lot of people know that, but I read about it somewhere, years ago.” He was quiet for a moment, his eyes drifting over the page in his hands. Then: “I bet almost every president we’ve ever had spent his life dreaming about that job before he got it. Even the ones that seemed humble. I bet they pictured what kind of carpet they’d put down in the Oval Office, years before they ever ran. What color drapes they’d hang.”

He let the printout fall to the granite slab.

“I’ve had the thought of running for president in my head since my early thirties,” he said. “For the record, I’d go with beige carpet with dark blue stars around the edges, and blue and white drapes. And I’ve known for probably ten years that if I ever really did it, I’d make my victory speech at Fenway Park. I’ve pictured it every time I’ve watched a Sox home game on TV.”

Somewhere else in the giant house, Dryden heard a phone ringing. He heard a small dog barking in response to it. Heard a woman answer the call, too far away for her words to be discernible.

“A thing like that,” Eversman said, “I guess you can’t stop yourself from thinking about it, even if you know it makes you an egomaniacal prick. What you can stop yourself from doing is ever talking about it. And I have. I’ve never mentioned the Fenway thing to another soul, and I’ve never written it down anywhere. So either this is real, or else you know someone who can read minds.”

Dryden made no reply to that.

“So you believe it,” Marnie said.

His eyes still on the printout, Eversman nodded slowly. Then he looked up, his gaze going back and forth between the two of them.

“Who else have you shown this to?” he asked.

“No one who’s still alive,” Dryden said. “Right now, you’re it.”

Eversman seemed about to say something more when footsteps came clicking down the hallway that led into the dining area. A woman, maybe his wife, came to the stone arch at the hallway’s end.

“Someone from corporate on the phone,” she said.

“I’ll have to get back to them,” Eversman said.

“It sounds important.”

Eversman exhaled softly, then looked at Dryden and Marnie again. “It’ll just be a minute.”

“It’s fine,” Dryden said.

Eversman followed the woman back down the hall, leaving the two of them alone at the island.

“Did I look that mindfucked when you told me about all this?” Marnie asked.

Dryden nodded. “I’m sure I did too, when Claire told me.”

For a while, neither spoke. Dryden could hear Eversman down the hall, talking, his words dulled out to nothing by the distance.

Dryden looked at his watch. 5:40. Twenty minutes to go before the chopper would arrive to pick him up in a high school parking lot five minutes’ drive from here.

“Do you love her?” Marnie asked.

Dryden looked up. “What?”

“Claire.”

Dryden shook his head. “It was never like that with us.”

He thought of asking why that mattered to her, but she spoke up again before he could say anything.

“I’d really like to know what you’re planning to do in the Mojave.”

“It’s better if you don’t,” Dryden said. “Better if no one does.”

“But these people, the resources they’ve got — for Christ’s sake, they know the future—”

“They know some of the future,” Dryden said. “They can get the answers to questions, if they can think of the questions.”

“That’s a pretty good advantage.”

“There are ways around it.” Dryden thought about it a few seconds longer, then said, “Can you stay with Eversman? After you take me to the chopper, I mean. Keep the machine here; what happens with it after that point is up to the two of you. Whatever you decide, about going after these people.”

“You’re not planning a suicide mission, are you?”

Her gaze was intense. Drilling into him, unblinking.

“If it works like I hope,” Dryden said, “then Claire lives for sure. Possibly me, too.”

Her eyes stayed on him for another moment, and then a door opened in the hallway and Eversman’s footsteps came toward them over the stone tiles.

“Sorry for that,” Eversman said. He crossed back to the island and the arrayed printouts.

“Does any of this stuff hit a nerve with you?” Dryden asked. “It’s one thing if they don’t want you to be president — there could be lots of reasons for that. But why are they not killing you right now? Does that part tell you anything?”

Eversman thought about it a long time. He sighed, half smiling. “Maybe they’re big investors in one of my companies. Maybe they’re worried about the stock price crashing if I die tomorrow.”

“That’s actually not a bad thought,” Marnie said. “How small of a suspect pool would it give us?”

Eversman offered the almost-smile again. “Hundreds of people. And now that I think about it, it’s not much of a theory.” He waved a hand at the printed documents. “People with the kind of system you’re talking about wouldn’t be worried about money at all. They could play Wall Street like a video game.”

“What else, then?” Dryden asked. “Why else would these people be scared to make a move against you in the present, but not later on?”

Eversman’s focus stayed on the printed pages. The articles. The headlines. His death, by gunshot and plane crash and gunshot again, over and over. Finally he just shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t.”

For a passing instant, Dryden found himself wondering if that was true. If the guy really didn’t know, or if he was keeping something to himself. Something in his tone gave Dryden that impression, but it was there and gone so quickly he wasn’t sure he’d really seen it.

“I intend to find out, though,” Eversman said, looking up at both of them. “I’ve sure as hell got a vested interest in it.”

The hissing static from the tablet’s speakers broke. Mama Cass’s voice came through, singing about night breezes and what they seemed to whisper.

Marnie turned to Dryden. “We should go.”

Dryden nodded. “I need a disposable phone. We can get one in town.”

Twenty minutes later he was standing in the deserted parking lot of Pacific Grove High School, Marnie beside him and the FBI chopper coming in low over the city. The air-hammer clatter of its rotors shook the space over the lot, and then the ground beneath it. In the last moment before it touched down, Marnie turned to him. She looked like she wanted to say something, but knew he’d never hear her. Instead she just grabbed his hand. Not exactly a handshake — she simply held on tight for two or three seconds and looked into his eyes.

She mouthed, Don’t die.

He nodded. Then she let go, and Dryden turned and jogged to the chopper as its skids settled on the blacktop.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

The helicopter landed an hour and fifty minutes later in Palmdale, in the southwestern Mojave, half an hour’s drive from the place where Dryden had last seen Claire Dunham. He had seventy minutes to get there, which gave him forty minutes to do what he needed to do in town.

He walked into the lot of a used car dealership and found the cheapest thing that looked capable of surviving the short trip: a 1991 Ford Ranger, its bed full of rust holes big enough that he could see its rear axle through them. It turned over on the first try, though, and ran steadily enough. The dealer wanted three hundred dollars for it. Dryden offered two hundred and didn’t budge, and drove it off the lot at a quarter past eight, forty-five minutes from the deadline. He filled the tank halfway up at a station in town and headed out into the desert, where the shadows of Joshua trees stretched out in the long evening light. He had a Beretta tucked into his waistband, but didn’t expect to use it. If it came to that, he would probably be in very big trouble.

Ten minutes before nine, northbound on 395, he passed the blank ground-level billboard he’d last seen in the predawn darkness, when he’d followed Claire along this road. A quarter mile past it he found the place where she’d led him off the pavement. Where they had parked and she had shown him the machine. Where the patrol officer had been killed.

There was little sign now that any such things had happened here. No yellow police tape. The shot-up cruiser was gone, as was Claire’s wrecked Land Rover. Dryden parked and killed the Ranger’s engine and got out, pausing to wipe his prints from the steering wheel and door handles.

He found the scoured earth where the Land Rover had skidded and flipped. The ground was discolored, and when he scraped it with his foot he smelled gasoline. He saw the drag marks where Claire herself had been pulled out of the vehicle.

He heard the drone of engines and looked up, and saw two black SUVs coming in from the north. Cadillac Escalades. He took the disposable phone from his pocket and walked back to the Ranger. He stood next to the driver’s-side door, hands low at his sides, and simply waited.

The two vehicles rolled in and circled around and stopped directly west of him, twenty yards away. A pretty basic tactical move on their part: putting the glare of the sun at their backs, forcing him to stare into it when he looked at them.

Three men emerged from each vehicle. They looked more or less like the four who’d attacked him and Claire, and the two who’d abducted Curtis. Midpriced hired help, competent enough on a good day.

Five of the six held pistols, low and relaxed. The sixth man, the driver of one of the Escalades, stepped around his open door and walked ten paces toward Dryden, stopping midway between the SUVs and the Ranger. He wore a black V-neck T-shirt and jeans.

Dryden didn’t bother scrutinizing the Escalades for a sign of Claire inside. She wasn’t here. That had never been a possibility.

“You’re supposed to have something for us,” V-neck said.

“It’s not with me,” Dryden said.

“Where is it?”

Dryden ignored the question. “Give me a phone number for your employer.”

“It’s not supposed to work like that.”

“It’s going to,” Dryden said.

He turned away from the guy and leaned against the Ranger, staring off to the south. He studied the chaparral and the cool shadows growing beneath it, the rises and concavities of the desert landscape all picking up contrast. At the edge of his vision he saw V-neck stare at him a moment longer, then turn and walk back to the Escalade.

A minute passed. Then Dryden heard footsteps scrape, and caught movement at the corner of his eye again, and V-neck came back to his spot in the open space between the vehicles. He called out a phone number. Dryden punched it into the throwaway cell phone and waited.

On the third ring, a man answered. The voice was digitally scrambled to sound tinny and mechanical. For all that, a hint of an accent came through. French mostly, but maybe just a trace of something else mixed in. The man didn’t say hello. He came right to the point.

“Tell me where you put it.”

“I want proof of life,” Dryden said. “Put Claire on the phone.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“Then we’ve got a problem.”

“You’ve got a problem. You’re alone, one on six.”

“I think we should talk about your problem,” Dryden said. “It’s a lot more interesting than mine.”

“Us losing track of that machine isn’t such a problem. Wherever it eventually turns up, it’ll make headlines. Or it’ll be detailed in some official record. All of which we can run searches for, with our system. Whether the machine surfaces next month or next year, we’ll know where it’s going to be, and when. We’ll get it back, sooner or later.”

“We’ll see,” Dryden said. “But that’s not the problem I was talking about. You have a bigger problem than that. And I wasn’t kidding when I said it’s interesting.”

“Tell me,” the man said. There was an edge of sarcasm in his tone, though it sounded just a bit forced. Like a front.

“I spent some time in the military,” Dryden said. “I ended up in a pretty unorthodox little unit. A lot of what we did was off the books, not all of it strictly legal. The nature of the work required us to have unusual ways to communicate. We had duress codes, and nonduress codes. We had a whole cobbled-together language only we knew. And we all still know it.”

The man on the phone waited.

“A lot of our codes were just people’s names we made up,” Dryden said. “So if I got a text message from one of my guys saying, ‘Did you hear about Dennis Woods?’ it meant there was new intel expected soon. Or someone might send one saying, ‘I heard Aaron Newhouse was in town,’ which really meant, Drop everything and come talk to me, right now.”

“Okay.”

“One of the guys from my unit ended up with the state police out here in California,” Dryden said. “He oversees those alerts they plaster all over the TV and radio sometimes — flood warnings, emergency broadcast system notices, abducted kids.”

So far, every word of this was true. That was about to change, but the man on the phone would have no way of knowing.

Dryden said, “This friend of mine, if I asked him to — and I have — he could put an alert on the airwaves that wasn’t actually real. An abduction notice about a kid named Aaron Newhouse, for example. He could run it a few minutes from right now.”

From the other end of the phone call, Dryden heard a soft hiss of breath, alien-sounding in the digital distortion.

Dryden said, “You know what I was doing ten hours and twenty-four minutes ago? I was listening to your machine pulling in signals. Which means I was hearing radio traffic from right now. And if my friend sends out that alert in a couple minutes, there’s a very good chance I’d hear it, all those hours ago. Be on the lookout for Aaron Newhouse. You can bet your ass it would get my attention.”

There was a long silence that told Dryden a great deal, and when the man finally spoke there was no more sarcasm in his voice. No front. Just naked fear exposed by the collapse of those defenses. “You can’t do this,” the man said.

“Of course I can,” Dryden said. “And if ten-and-a-half-hours-ago me heard that name on a missing alert, I’d know for a fact it was my friend who sent that message. Then I’d do the math and know he sent it right now, around nine in the evening. I wouldn’t know why he sent it, but that doesn’t really matter, does it? What matters is that it would throw a wrench in the timeline. It would change the past, at least from our point of view right here and now. My past, and yours, too. Sending information back in time would change it, one way or another. And I could swear I heard somewhere that you guys are nervous about changing the past.”

“Listen to me,” the man said. Dryden pictured him gripping his own phone a bit tighter, as if that tension could come through the connection and emphasize his point. His accent had also sharpened, especially the French. “What you’re talking about is something we never do. We designed the system very carefully to avoid it. The computers send information back through time, but they send it from the future. From our future. This distinction is goddamned critical. We change our future, but we never change our past. For Christ’s sake, we don’t even know what that would feel like.”

“We’re about to find out.” Dryden looked at his watch. “It’s a minute past nine o’clock. My friend executes the alert at ten after unless I call and tell him to abort.”

It crossed his mind to wonder what his friend was actually doing at that moment. Maybe having dinner with his family. Maybe walking the dog. Dryden hadn’t spoken to the guy in months.

“Listen to me,” the man with the accent said. “Listen. You are talking about a perfect unknown. Very smart people lose sleep thinking about this. Nobody knows what it would feel like, from our point of view.”

“You and I will, in nine minutes. Actually more like eight and a half.”

The man on the other end went quiet, except for the breathing. Dryden heard it going in and out, sibilant, as if coursing through teeth.

“This is a bluff, yeah?” the man said. “You’re lying to me.”

“Maybe. Why don’t we stand around a while and find out?”

“You wouldn’t risk this for yourself. You’re smart enough to know better.”

“I’m fucked either way,” Dryden said. “Like you said, I’m alone out here, one on six. Eight minutes now, by the way.”

Again the man went silent.

“Proof of life,” Dryden said. “Put Claire on the phone.”

He heard the guy’s breathing accelerate, but otherwise there was no response at all. No answer as the seconds drew out.

Dryden felt his own skin tighten and go cold.

There was no reason for these people to withhold proof of life. No reason unless —

Unless they had killed her.

The tightness in his skin spread down into his muscles. It set them pulsing, a vibration he felt to his core.

“I can’t put her on,” the man said.

“Is she there with you?”

“She is, but—”

“Then put her on the phone.”

“She’s under sedation. She’s blacked out. I can’t put her on.”

Everything in the man’s tone said he was lying. It was obvious, even through the voice scrambler.

Dryden had experienced pure rage before. Feral anger, elemental, independent of thought or language or anything else that might temper it. He felt it blooming inside him now, a burst of red ink in water.

And then a thought got through it anyway. A possibility that shone like a search lamp in the pitch black.

He considered the idea. He thought he saw a way to test it. It would require an assumption, but not much of one: the belief that if Claire’s captors had murdered her, they would still have the body with them. That they would not have dumped it in some random place where authorities might find it. If they did still have the body, it might be wrapped up in plastic by now. It might even be buried. But it seemed plausible that they could get to it, if they had to — if he was wrong about that, then this idea wouldn’t work. There was nothing for it but to try anyway.

“You say she’s there with you,” Dryden said.

“Yes.”

“Is she right there? In the room?”

“She’s close by.”

That sounded vague. Which was good. Maybe.

“Okay,” Dryden said. “She has a birthmark behind her left ear. Just under the hairline. It has a distinct shape. Describe it to me.”

No bluff this time. The birthmark looked like a sideways teardrop, its point aimed almost straight back toward the nape of her neck.

It was a question the man could answer in seconds, if Claire was really unconscious in the same building as him. Or he could answer it within a minute, if she was dead and bundled up in dropcloth. Or five minutes, if digging was required.

But if he couldn’t answer the question by then … if he couldn’t answer it at all … it might be very good news.

“Are you there?” Dryden asked.

No response. Except for the breathing. In and out. Hissing. And speeding up.

Dryden was focused intently on that sound, and so he didn’t immediately notice when V-neck and his five men turned their attention away from him. They turned around and stared west, into the glare of the sunset. Dryden caught the movement just as the last of them pivoted. He saw them shielding their eyes against the hard light, and cocking their heads to listen for something.

Dryden heard it. The rattle of a chopper coming in, its shape still hidden in the sun glare.

An instant later there came another sound: the impact of a bullet against one of the Escalades.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

The five men around the Escalades threw themselves flat, putting the vehicles between themselves and the helicopter. V-neck turned and sprinted back toward them, diving for the ground.

Dryden pressed the button to end the phone call. Keeping his eyes on the six men, he drew back to the Ranger’s tailgate and ducked around it, using the truck as cover against both the chopper and V-neck’s guys — though he found he wasn’t very worried about the chopper.

He heard another bullet strike one of the two SUVs. One of the struts framing its windshield broke in the center and buckled inward. The windshield itself spiderwebbed and caved in around the point of impact.

By then the sound of the rotors had begun to change — the helicopter wasn’t due west anymore. It was angling south as it came in. Dryden leaned past the Ranger’s back end and caught sight of it, a quarter mile out, hugging the desert at an altitude of fifty feet above ground level. It wasn’t the FBI chopper he’d flown in. It wasn’t anything official, judging by its markings. It was a Bell 206 or some close variant, blue and white with a tail number Dryden couldn’t quite read. It was privately owned, whatever it was. A civilian aircraft.

The bay door on its side was open, and someone was sitting there, strapped in, holding a weapon. Dryden saw a muzzle flash from the end of it, and a split second later a tire blew on one of the Escalades. One of V-neck’s guys started screaming, the sound full of pain.

By now the chopper was dead south, tracking around in a tight arc that would put it directly east of the vehicles. V-neck’s guys were yelling and shouting; Dryden heard them scrambling to reposition themselves on the far side of the two SUVs, away from the chopper’s line of sight.

The aircraft reached a position maybe two hundred yards east, then tilted back and checked its forward momentum. It settled into a hover, the pilot rotating the vehicle to give the gunner in the bay a clear angle.

The rifle’s muzzle started flashing again and again, once every second or two. Dryden heard the bullets passing over him. Heard the impacts as the Escalades took hit after hit. Heard the men scream as the rounds passed all the way through the SUVs and struck their bodies, one by one. The rifle had to be .50 caliber.

On the breeze, coming from west to east, Dryden smelled tire rubber and gasoline. And gastric juices. And blood.

The shooting went on for more than a minute, broken only by quick pauses as the gunner reloaded. When the barrage finally stopped, none of V-neck’s guys were screaming. There was no sound at all but the patter of liquid spilling onto the hard ground; both vehicles’ gas tanks had surely been ruptured.

The chopper started moving again. It turned and dipped forward and came in over the two vehicles, climbing as it did. From a height of two hundred feet it made a slow orbit of the Escalades, the man with the rifle staring down through a scope mounted atop it, taking stock of the dead. He was a big guy, bald and bearded, wearing an aviator’s headset and a pair of sunglasses. Dryden had never seen him or the pilot before. After a moment, the gunner said something into his headset microphone, and the chopper wheeled around. It descended and touched down on the hardpan, a hundred feet downwind of Dryden. Its rotorwash kicked up a storm of dust, which trailed away in the wind, across the highway.

Dryden got to his feet. He realized he still had the throwaway phone in his hand. He cracked its cheap plastic case in half, found the battery and detached it, then pocketed the two halves and ran for the chopper. The gunner had already unstrapped himself from his shooting position at the open doorway. He held out a hand and Dryden took it, and the man hauled him into the bay.

“Dryden?” the guy shouted.

Dryden nodded.

The gunner said no more; he just handed Dryden another headset with a built-in microphone. This headset had a cell phone plugged into it. Dryden put it on. The big muffled earpieces drowned out most of the chopper’s turbine scream.

“Hello?” Dryden said.

Marnie’s voice came through the headset’s earphones. “Jesus, you’re alive.”

“What the hell is going on?” Dryden asked.

“Claire got away from her captors,” Marnie said. “At least we think so.”

“I do, too,” Dryden said. “How did you find out?” Then, on the heels of that question, he said, “Do you know where she is?”

“We don’t know. I’ll explain everything when I see you. I don’t want to say much on the phone.”

She said good-bye and clicked off, and in the same moment the chopper’s engine powered up again and the aircraft lifted off the desert floor. It climbed two hundred feet and pivoted to point itself northwest, but for a moment it made no move to accelerate forward. It held its hover, and the big guy in the sunglasses reached into a seatback compartment and came out with a flare gun. He aimed it out through the open bay door, down toward the two Escalades and the pool of gasoline soaking the ground beneath them. The gunner fired the flare, and Dryden looked down and saw a sheet of flame erupt beneath the SUVs.

At last the chopper tipped forward, climbing as it gained speed. Dryden turned in his seat and looked back, and saw both Escalades fully engulfed beneath a thick tower of black smoke.