Signal

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

The chopper flew for just under two hours. It carried Dryden northwest over the Mojave, crossed the Sierra Nevadas, then turned and followed the range north, straddling the boundary between the mountains and the broad, flat expanse of the Central Valley. Dusk was falling by then. In the twilight, Dryden saw cities lighting up: Bakersfield and Visalia, like bright islands ringed by sodium-lit suburbs and the wide-open darkness of farmland beyond. He watched for a while, then settled back in his seat and shut his eyes, and fell asleep within a minute.

He woke to a change in the turbine’s sound, its pitch dropping through octaves. He blinked away the sleep and looked out the chopper’s window, and saw Hayden Eversman’s estate lit up in the dark. Landscape lighting cast a glow under the trees that dotted the grounds and outlined the pool, tucked in close behind the main house.

The chopper went stationary, dropping toward an open stretch of lawn out front. As it did, Dryden saw Marnie step out onto the pavers in front of the porch.

She met him halfway between the house and the chopper, and gave him a quick hug. She looked excited to share what she knew.

“Claire sent a text to your phone,” she said. “Your real phone, I mean. She sent it at seven fifteen tonight. I found out about it a few minutes after eight, when I turned my phone on to check for messages from my field office.”

“How did your phone show a text from Claire to me—” Dryden cut himself off. He knew the answer.

Marnie nodded. “When I was tracking your vehicle this morning, I was monitoring your phone, too. Any call you made or received, any text, I’d get a notification.”

She took out her phone, opened the message, and handed it to him.

The text was from a phone number Dryden didn’t recognize. He read the message:

Dryden lowered the phone. Relief soaked into him like cool water to a parched throat. He looked up and met Marnie’s gaze.

“So it’s real,” Marnie said. Her tone suggested she’d been close to sure of it, but saw proof in Dryden’s expression now. “It’s really from Claire?”

“It’s really from Claire,” Dryden said. “She must have stolen someone’s phone to send this.”

Marnie nodded. “I figured she grabbed it off a table in a café or something. The number really belongs to somebody named Jodi.”

“Claire had to assume the Group might be monitoring my phone. She wanted to tell me she’d gotten away, so I wouldn’t risk my life looking for her, but she didn’t want to tip them off in the process.”

He glanced over the message again. The part about the cat was meaningless; the rest was close to literal.

I’m free.

… will be tending bar at Bond’s starting noon tomorrow.

“Bond’s is a bar we used to hang out at, in Monterey, with a few of the guys from our unit. Only that’s not the name of the place, it’s just what we always called it. There used to be a bartender there who looked like Roger Moore — I guess between being twentysomething and drunk, we thought Bond’s was a hilarious name for the joint, and it stuck. No one but Claire and a couple of our friends would know that.”

“She wants you to meet her there at noon tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there.”

He handed the phone back to her. “How did you know the text was from Claire?”

“I saw a few years’ worth of your financials this morning,” Marnie said. “Sorry. Anyway, no vet bills, no pet stores. Between that and the message itself, I gambled.”

Dryden nodded. He turned toward the house.

“There’s a lot more to tell you,” Marnie said. “Eversman wants to explain it himself.”

Eversman’s wife and daughter were in the living room when Dryden entered. Dryden had seen the wife earlier, though only briefly; Eversman introduced her now. Her name was Ayla. She seemed nice enough, if a bit distant. She spoke to them just for a moment, then took the daughter, Brooke, into a different room.

When they’d gone, Eversman said, “I haven’t explained any of this to Ayla yet. I can’t think of how to begin.” He nodded down the hallway toward an open door with firelight flickering from it. “Let’s talk.”

The room turned out to be a library. The fireplace was huge, flanked by comfortable-looking chairs. There was a bay window with a bench seat built into it, overlooking the grounds: the front drive and the trees and the distant helicopter on the lawn.

Nodding at the aircraft, Eversman said, “I take security seriously, and I don’t farm it out. My security staff are direct employees of mine, and I own the hardware. I keep a chopper in San Jose, and another one in Los Angeles; I have offices in both places. Tonight when Marnie found Claire’s text, she called the FBI chopper that you’d flown in, but you’d already been dropped off by then — and we didn’t have the number for your disposable phone. I sent my chopper from L.A. because it was all we could think of. I’ll be honest; I didn’t expect them to reach you in time.”

Dryden wondered how much longer his bluff would have kept him alive in the Mojave. A few more minutes, maybe.

Then he considered the whole encounter and shook his head. “That shouldn’t have worked at all. Just sending in a chopper and shooting those guys.”

“What do you mean?” Eversman said. “Why wouldn’t it have worked?”

Dryden thought of what Whitcomb had said in the scrapyard, right at the end.

“Because going into a situation like that,” Dryden said, “the Group would use the system to look at future police reports and headlines. From the moment they scheduled that meeting tonight in the desert, they would have checked for any record of how it would turn out. Any kind of aftermath the police would discover out there, once it was over with.”

Marnie nodded. “The Group would have seen articles about two shot-up SUVs being found, and a bunch of dead guys. Which would have told them the meeting was going to go bad for them. They would have seen that, way ahead of time. And they would have changed their plan.”

“They would have sent a bigger team,” Dryden said.

“Maybe they did send a bigger team,” Eversman said. “Maybe that was the bigger team that you ran into. In some other version of the event, the first time around, it could have been just one SUV.”

Dryden considered that. It was a thought, but it didn’t entirely wash. He had no better explanation himself, though — a fact that unsettled him more than he wanted to admit. He paced to the nearest bookshelf, thinking it all through, but got nowhere with it.

“In any case,” Eversman said, “I mentioned my security because of the main point I want to make.” He turned from the window and faced Dryden and Marnie — but mostly Dryden. It was obvious Marnie had already heard all of this. “I want to do exactly what this other man, Dale Whitcomb, meant to do. These people … the Group … I want to eliminate them.” He frowned, unsatisfied with that wording. “I want to kill them. And I’m damn well on board with erasing this technology, if we can do it. I guess my reasons are obvious enough.”

Dryden nodded. Hard to argue against that.

“Earlier this evening,” Eversman said, “you asked if I knew why these people haven’t tried to kill me in the present. Why they’ve arranged it to happen nine years in the future, instead. I didn’t say it then, but I wonder if it comes down to firepower. Maybe they don’t want to go up against my security resources in the here and now. Maybe they’re worried that even if they got to me, my people would hit them back — which they would. Maybe the future feels safer to them.”

Dryden thought about it. “I don’t know. Still seems like it would be easier to pull off now instead of then, when you’ll have Secret Service protection and the whole world watching you.”

“What do we actually know?” Marnie said. “If you step back from it, we have exactly seven pieces of information. We know there’s one future in which you become president of the United States. And we know there are six different futures in which you’re killed, in the months before the election. There has to be a reason.”

“Any ideas?” Eversman asked.

Marnie could only shake her head. She crossed to one of the chairs near the fireplace and sat, resting forward with her elbows on her knees.

“What if they’re planning to have their own candidate in the running that year?” she said. “On the other ticket. What if your rival in 2024 is one of them, one of the Group, and they set up your assassination, hoping their guy would win in the aftermath?”

“Doesn’t explain why they had to find six different ways to kill me.”

“Actually it might,” Marnie said. “What if they tried it the first time, and their candidate still didn’t win? Say the newspapers from the future still showed their guy losing — to your VP nominee or some other last-minute replacement. If the Group saw that future, well, they could always just change their plan. Kill you a few weeks earlier, then check the headlines again and see if that changed the outcome. They could do it again and again. Maybe the sixth time was the charm.”

Eversman considered it. He looked impressed by the logic.

“You’re talking about a sleeper,” Dryden said. “A member of the Group running for the White House.”

Marnie nodded. “Why not? It’s clear they’re thinking on that scale. And why couldn’t they pull it off, with the advantage they’ve got? Their system.”

“I don’t know if they’d get past the screening,” Dryden said. “It’s not so obvious to most people, watching an election play out, but a major party candidate for president gets a damn thorough once-over by the intelligence community. I knew guys who used to do it. They turn your life inside out looking for flaws. It’s one thing if they learn about an affair with a co-worker ten years back, but if a person had something genuinely bad in their past … like a hidden loyalty … some secret motive for becoming president … the alarms would go off. Believe it. A candidate like that would be in real trouble, I think.”

“Intel really worries about that?” Marnie asked. “A mole running for office?”

“It’s their job,” Dryden said. “And they’re good at it.”

Marnie thought it over, then turned back to the flames. “I agree,” she said. “And I don’t have any other guesses.”

For more than a minute, no one spoke.

“It’s a moot point, if we stop them now,” Eversman said. “None of it would happen anyway.” He laughed dryly. “Maybe an hour before we broke down their door, all their searches would show them a future going back to normal.”

At those words, Dryden looked up sharply. A second later, so did Marnie. Her head spun toward Dryden.

She stared.

He stared back.

“Oh God,” she said. It came out as only a whisper.

Dryden said nothing. Just held her gaze. She had to be thinking exactly the same thing he was. The same idea, triggered by Eversman’s joke.

Marnie started to say something, but couldn’t form the words. All that came out was the same soft interjection as before. “Oh God.”

Eversman looked back and forth between them. “What?”

Marnie looked scared in a way Dryden hadn’t seen until now. He wondered if he looked the same. Maybe.

“What?” Eversman said.

“We have a problem,” Dryden said. “Maybe a big problem.”

Eversman waited.

“Our goal is to kill these people and destroy their system,” Dryden said. “It’s the only way we win. Right?”

Eversman nodded. “Right.”

“But if we figure out how to do that, some plan that would actually work … then they’ll know about it in advance.”

Eversman looked thrown. “I wasn’t serious about the headlines going back to normal. But would they? Is that what you mean?”

Dryden shook his head. “The headlines wouldn’t go back to normal. They’d disappear. All the data these people are getting from the future would stop coming through, if we were about to attack them and destroy the system.”

A flicker of understanding crossed Eversman’s face. He said, “When they use the system to grab information from ten years in the future…”

“It only works because their equipment exists for the whole ten years. Curtis called it a daisy chain. Like a video camera filming its own feed on a TV screen. That chain has to be unbroken the whole time. That’s why they buried the equipment in the ground. If they want to see a decade into the future, the machinery has to keep running that whole time.”

Marnie stood and faced Eversman. “They’re going to see us coming. No matter what.”

“You’re certain?”

Marnie nodded. “Think about it. They suddenly find there’s this weird cutoff — the system can grab information right up to some certain time, say seven o’clock tomorrow night, but it can’t seem to get anything from beyond that time. They’ll know what it means. They’ll know the system gets destroyed at seven o’clock tomorrow night. They would know we’re coming. Jesus, they’d even know when.”

Eversman frowned. “Well, what if we…” He trailed off, his expression searching.

“There’s nothing to think of,” Dryden said. “There just isn’t. By definition, any plan that beats them … also warns them.”

Silence fell. A whole minute of it. Hayden Eversman went to his fireplace and sat down in front of it. “What the hell are we supposed to do?” he said.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

The three of them sat up another half hour and hardly spoke.

At last, burned out, they left the room.

Dryden wondered if Eversman would direct them to the guesthouse, but instead he led them to a pair of spare bedrooms in the east wing of the main house. Each bedroom had its own full bathroom. Dryden borrowed a set of clothes from Eversman — khakis and a flannel shirt — then shaved and showered and dressed again. It was the first time he’d felt clean since the night before, walking the rooms of the gutted cottage in El Sedero.

He stood at the window in his room for a long time, staring out on the grounds of the estate. At midnight most of the landscape lighting went out, no doubt on a timer. Just a few lights out at the perimeter wall stayed on, leaving a relaxing darkness under the big trees that dotted the grounds.

Dryden stared at the canopy of the woods beyond the wall. This place wasn’t all that far from where he would meet up with Claire tomorrow — maybe twenty minutes’ drive. He took in the night and thought of her, alone somewhere right now — but free. She was as resourceful as any soldier Dryden had ever served with, and more so than most. She was also careful as hell. Right now she was probably asleep in a wheat field somewhere, as random and secluded a spot as she could find, and tomorrow at noon, hell or high water, she would be at a dive bar in Monterey called Myrtle’s.

There was a soft knock at the door.

He crossed to it and opened it. Marnie stood in the hall, showered and wearing what had to be one of Ayla’s spare outfits: a blue cotton blouse and white slacks.

“Feel like taking a walk?” she asked.

They went out the front door and wandered into the darkened grounds. The air was full of the smell of cedars and cut grass.

“You never finished your story,” Dryden said. “What was simple enough that a ten-year-old would think to write it on a mirror? What did COI mean?”

It took her a long time to answer. They passed beneath a white pine, the night wind rustling its boughs.

“It wasn’t supposed to be COI,” Marnie said. “It was supposed to be COP. The bathroom door got kicked in before she could finish the last letter.”

Dryden thought of what Marnie had said in the car, all those hours before. The girl’s mom dating her boss, the two of them taking the kid out to dinner a week before the abductions. Getting in some kind of altercation at the restaurant.

“The cop who showed up to settle the fight?” Dryden asked.

Marnie nodded. “Once I saw what the letters meant, he was the obvious first guess. I got on the phone and started shouting, and there were black-and-whites at his place about five minutes later. He actually came out the door shooting. The responders took him down and went in, and found the mom and daughter in the basement. The mom was long gone — dead for hours. But the girl was still—”

She cut herself off. By her tone of voice, Dryden knew the next word in the sentence wasn’t alive.

“She was warm,” Marnie said. “The ME said she’d probably died about twenty minutes before those first units rolled up.”

She was quiet again for a while. In the faint light, Dryden saw her stuff her hands into her pockets.

“Six hours,” she said. “Six hours it took me to understand what she meant. What she was counting on me to understand. If it would have taken me five…”

She didn’t finish it. She stopped walking and just stood there looking away into the dark.

If there was anything consoling to say to her, she’d probably heard it fifty times from others, years back. Probably none of it had helped, even then. Dryden said nothing at all. He put a hand on her shoulder instead. She responded by taking her hands back out of her pockets, turning and wrapping her arms around him. He held her against himself, his jaw resting atop her head.

When she spoke again, it was in a whisper that sounded strained, like glass bent almost to breaking. “Why someone would use those machines for anything other than good … What the fuck is wrong with people?”

Dryden held on to her and didn’t try answering.

They went back inside five minutes later. In the hallway that led to their rooms, Marnie stopped and faced him.

She said, “Eversman keeps choppers on standby. I wonder if he’s got a security detail in the guesthouse.”

“I wondered the same thing.”

“I’d only feel a little safer if he did.” She paused. Then: “Want to crash on my floor? Two guns are better than one, right?”

Tired as he’d been all day, sleep eluded him now. He lay on the floor beside Marnie’s bed, with the pillow and blanket from his own room.

They actually had three guns — her Glock and Claire’s two Berettas. Dryden had both of them loaded and ready on the floor beside him.

They talked for a while and then went quiet. In the darkness he listened to her breathing, wondering if she was asleep. He didn’t think so.

Then she moved. She reached to the nightstand above him, and he heard the click of a latch and a plastic lid falling open. He saw the pale glow of a tablet screen, and then Marnie touched it, and the familiar static rolled out into the room.

She looked down and met his eyes. “Is this an addiction?”

“Feels like one,” he said.

She nodded and reached to shut the thing off.

“Don’t,” Dryden said.

“Why not?”

“Because you want it on. And so do I.”

She held her position for a moment, propped up on one elbow, looking down at him. Then she rolled onto her back again, and Dryden pictured her lying there the same way he was, staring at the ceiling in the milky light.

Ten minutes later she really did seem to fall asleep.

Dryden didn’t.

He lay awake for what felt like hours, listening to song fragments breaking through the static. He heard a news report about a traffic accident on I-80 north of Sacramento — no deaths, minor injuries. He heard a test of the emergency broadcast system, covering the townships of Jasper and Willis and the greater San Benito County listening area. He heard two minutes of live coverage of a tractor pull competition.

He thought of something Marnie had said earlier:

What do we actually know? If you step back from it, we have exactly seven pieces of information.

One future in which Hayden Eversman became president.

Six in which he was killed, time and time again.

Thinking it over, Dryden finally drifted away.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Mangouste stepped out the back door again. Into the night. He crossed to the rear of his property and passed through the gate, into the forest with its rhythmic sounds and its cool humidity.

He went to the clearing where the machinery was buried. Where the bass drone of its geothermal power supply hummed up through the ground, into his bones.

He stood there until the chill of the night had saturated him and set his muscles shuddering.

He thought of the problems that had plagued him for the past three days. Little steel burrs impeding the clockwork of his plans.

All those problems would be settled by tomorrow afternoon. Claire Dunham and the people she had turned to — they would be settled.

Mangouste smiled as the shivering became intense, and at last turned and left the clearing. Back through the gate. Back across the rear yard. Past the pool, dimly lit and rippling in the night wind. In through the back door of the giant brick house. His wife stood at the sink, getting a glass of water, her eyes heavy with sleep.

“Hayden, come to bed,” Ayla said.