Signal

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Claire Dunham steadied her binoculars and took in the front of Myrtle’s from a quarter mile away. The place was open for business but was nearly empty. Half an hour before noon on a Sunday, all its regulars were probably still asleep; it wasn’t the sort of establishment that drew tourists.

Myrtle’s was perched on the waterfront of Monterey Bay, half on land and half sticking out over the water, held up by a forest of sea-weathered wooden pilings. Claire had been watching the place and its surroundings for more than an hour already. To its left was a shallow parking lot wedged between Del Monte Avenue and the bay. To its right was a kayak rental place. Beyond both of those were public beaches, but only a few people were on them; the day was sunny but unseasonably cool.

There was no sign of anyone unpleasant staking out the area. It didn’t mean they weren’t there, of course.

No sign of Sam, either, though Claire had already known she wouldn’t catch sight of him. He would be every bit as cautious as her, watching the place from concealment and distance. If he was coming, he was probably at least as far from Myrtle’s as she was, studying the building and all its approaches.

Claire lowered the binoculars and set them beside her on the passenger seat. The vehicle was an old Geo Tracker she’d borrowed from a Walmart parking lot at four in the morning, after catching a night’s restless sleep in the woods at the edge of a cow pasture. She’d borrowed the binoculars, too, from a sporting goods store here in Monterey. She meant to return both as soon as possible.

She leaned back and closed her eyes and exhaled deeply.

“Be here,” she whispered. “Be alive.”

Dryden looked at his watch. 11:32. He raised the binoculars he’d borrowed from Eversman and stared through them for thirty seconds, sweeping them slowly left to right, then back.

“No sign of her,” Dryden said. “There wouldn’t be, though. She’ll keep her distance until the minute she goes in.”

He was sitting in the second-row seat of a black Chevy Suburban, one of three identical vehicles Eversman had brought to Monterey, along with a clutch of his security personnel. Whether they’d come from the guesthouse or not, it wasn’t clear; they’d been parked in the drive and ready to go when Dryden first saw them.

Marnie was sitting next to him on the bench seat. She was wearing the coat she’d worn yesterday, her Glock once more in its shoulder holster beneath it. Dryden had one of Claire’s Berettas in his waistband.

Up front, Eversman was in the passenger seat. One of his security men, a stocky guy named Collins, sat at the wheel. All eyes were focused on the decrepit little bar, five hundred yards away; Dryden had given Eversman its name and location this morning.

The other two Suburbans were much farther back, stationed out of sight on side streets, four men in each vehicle, heavily armed. Eversman had insisted on bringing a significant force, in case things went badly. Dryden’s only demand had been that the other two SUVs keep their distance; from Claire’s point of view, anyone but Dryden himself would look like a hostile. If she got spooked, she would vanish.

Marnie looked at him. “You okay?”

Dryden nodded but said nothing, keeping his gaze on the distant bar.

Marnie kept hers on him. Up front, Eversman and Collins turned and glanced back at him, too.

“We only get one shot at this,” Dryden said. “I don’t want to take any chances.” He nodded toward the bar. “I don’t like the sight lines we’ve got from here. I want better coverage on the left and right.”

“I can move up the other two vehicles,” Eversman said.

“No,” Dryden said. “I’m going to get out and go closer on foot.” He looked at Marnie and indicated the cross street in front of them. “Do me a favor. There’s a café two blocks to the right on that street. You can’t see it from here, but you’ll find it. From there you should have a clear angle on the right side of the bar. Just … watch for anything that looks wrong. If anything sends up a flag, come back here as fast as you can and tell these guys.”

Marnie stared at him, her features suddenly taut. “Are you worried about something?”

Dryden shook his head. He managed a smile. “Abundance of caution.”

He clapped her on the shoulder, nodded to the two men up front, then shoved open the door and stepped out of the vehicle. He headed off in the direction of the bar, and a moment later heard Marnie’s door open and close behind him.

When Dryden was a block away, still visible, Eversman took out his phone and switched it on. He called the driver of one of the other Suburbans. The man picked up on the first ring.

“Slight change, but nothing serious,” Eversman said. “The woman, Calvert, is at a café two blocks downhill from me on Sixth Street. After Dryden connects with Claire Dunham, Collins and I will pick them up. When that happens, you’ll get Calvert and meet us at the third team’s location.”

He ended the call, his eyes still tracking Dryden as he moved closer to the bar. The guy’s movements were casual; he wandered along a street of storefronts, looking in some of the windows, glancing up every so often to study the target location. At last he came to a little ice cream shop with a few metal tables and chairs out front. He bought something — it looked like a sundae, but it was hard to tell — and took a seat, watching the bar from maybe two hundred yards’ range.

Eversman opened the glove box and took out a silenced .45. He turned and mentally rehearsed how things would play out, the moment Dryden got back into the vehicle with Claire Dunham.

It would be fast and brutal, no fucking around. It would also be invisible to anyone outside; the windows in back were heavily tinted. And when the three vehicles rendezvoused, Marnie Calvert would be dealt with in the same manner.

Eversman was more than confident it would work: He knew. He had already used the system to verify it. He had already seen the headlines to come.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

11:53.

Dryden was still sitting at the metal table in front of the ice cream shop. Someone had left a Best Buy flyer on a nearby chair, and he was leafing through it, raising his eyes to the distant bar often enough to keep tabs on everyone approaching it.

Which wasn’t many people. It was clearly not a popular lunch spot, at least on Sunday. Probably not on any day.

In the past ten minutes he’d seen only six people enter the bar. A young couple. A college-aged girl. Three men.

11:54.

He set down the flyer and simply stared at the place.

Claire gave the bar one last scan with the binoculars, then set them aside and started the Tracker. She considered driving right up to the building, parking in the narrow lot along the waterfront, but discarded the idea. If things went bad, there would be no time to get back in the car, start it, and drive off. There might be time to simply run, in which case it would be better to have the car hidden somewhere in the blocks close to the bar. She might be able to lose pursuers in a foot chase, then make her way to the car unseen.

She still had the Tracker in park. She stared at the distant structure, thinking.

The way she went into the place might matter. It would be impossible to go in undetected, but there were ways to make it less obvious who she was. Anything that could make potential observers less certain was worth doing.

She exhaled softly and shut her eyes. The whole logistical calculation felt wishful. Was wishful. If the Group was somehow watching, it would be game over a few minutes from now.

Nothing to do but try.

She put the vehicle in gear and pulled out of her space.

11:56.

Eversman was holding the binoculars Dryden had used earlier. He was leaning forward, bracing his elbows on the dash, training the binocs alternately on Dryden — still sitting at the ice cream shop — and the bar.

Eversman found his thoughts already wanting to move on, past all this. Like the attention of a child nearly finished with his schoolwork, thinking ahead to free time. With the cat-and-mouse game wrapped up, he would use the system for its real purpose again. Even now, his subordinates were back at it, tucked away in their little haven, tapping at the keys. Scouting the world to come. Finding the pivot points on which decades and centuries could be tipped. The future was filled with those, just like the past was. How many times had the track of humanity been shifted by some one-off event, some unheard-of person? Like Gavrilo Princip. Like Vasili Arkhipov. The future was no different. History was a surprisingly workable medium, before it was written down.

He thought of his superiors, too. The higher ranks of the Group, back in the old countries. Their ideas for what the world should be — what it should have been for seventy-plus years now. A world set to strict but beautiful standards. Clean architecture and infrastructure. No muddy backwaters full of shanty towns and hovels. No slums laced with graffiti and broken windows. Clean people, too. Better people. Better stock. He thought of the movie star, decades back, sitting at the fireplace in that Italian villa, rubbing the haunches of a Rottweiler at his feet. We bred filthy wolves into these things. Why in God’s name wouldn’t we refine ourselves?

Eversman agreed with most of those sentiments still — the big picture, if not every brushstroke. None of it would happen overnight, of course, even with all the advantages the system offered. It would be the work of decades. It already had been. His whole life had been a preparation, in the hope that this technology would end up in his hands. Positioning himself in the best possible way to make use of it, if it ever arrived — every decision had been made toward that end.

Renewable energy had been just one part of all that, a long political bet: that by the middle of the 2020s, voters’ hearts and minds would favor the greenest candidates. He hadn’t needed a machine to tell him that; the curving trendlines had been obvious even by the late ’90s, and were only more so now. It was a smart way to place himself, no more or less.

Even the presidency would only be another link in the chain. So much more would need to be done to trigger the changes the Group had in mind. He would need their help soon enough, though for now, he had not even told them about the machines or the system. That could wait a bit. When he’d fortified his position, when he’d set enough in motion that there was no going back, when his control was incontestable, then he would let them in. Everything in its time.

He swung the binoculars from Dryden to the bar. Watched the place for ten seconds. He was just about to swing them back when he saw something:

Three people approaching the bar on foot. Two were a couple, probably in their fifties. Close behind them, jogging a bit to catch up, was a woman in her early thirties. Under other circumstances, Eversman might have guessed it was a party of three, the older couple and the younger woman going in together. Then he swung the binoculars and saw that Dryden had already stood from his chair and set off walking. Fast.

“He’s identified her,” Eversman said.

Collins turned the key in the ignition and reached for the gear selector.

Eversman held up a hand. “Hold here for now. Let him get inside first. Don’t spook her.”

Claire stepped across the threshold and found the interior of Myrtle’s disorientingly dark, after the harsh sunlight outside. Even the windows along the back wall, overlooking the harbor, didn’t help much; they seemed to offer more glare than light, leaving the rest of the place deep in gloom.

She crossed the entryway, the ancient wooden floor creaking beneath her feet. As her eyes adjusted, she swept her gaze down the row of booths along the left wall, and the line of bar stools on the right. The place was dotted with the handful of people she’d watched drifting in over the past half hour.

She crossed to the nearest booth, which was empty, and sat facing the front door.

Eversman watched Dryden cover the last fifty yards. Watched him cross the street and the front lot, reaching the bar’s entrance maybe two minutes after the woman had gone in.

“Let’s go,” Eversman said.

Collins put the Suburban in drive, and Eversman turned his phone on again, tapping the number for the team that would pick up Marnie Calvert.

Dryden pushed the front door inward and stepped through into the dark space of the bar.

A college kid in an apron looked up from a table he was clearing.

“Welcome to Silver’s,” the kid said. “Is it just gonna be you?”

Dryden nodded. “Just me.”

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

12:00.

Claire watched the door for Sam, her pulse already thudding in her eardrums.

Something was wrong.

She’d been here three minutes now. More than enough time for Sam to have reached this place, after seeing her walk in.

If he’d seen her.

If he was anywhere nearby at all.

If he was alive.

Footsteps outside, scraping the blacktop in front of the building. Someone moving fast, almost running.

For an instant her mind drew a picture of men with pistols in hand, swooping in to get her. The end of the line, just like that.

She was unarmed. There wasn’t a thing she could do.

Then the door swung in and a woman came through. Dark hair to her shoulders, dark eyes. She was winded, like she’d just covered serious distance on foot. The woman blinked, taking in the dim space of the room, scanning it quickly. When her eyes found Claire, they stopped.

Marnie saw her. The only woman alone inside Myrtle’s — which was decidedly not the location Dryden had named hours earlier, before the two of them had saddled up along with Eversman’s people.

The place Dryden had directed them to, Silver’s, was twenty blocks away from here.

Marnie let the door fall shut behind her and took three steps toward the woman in the nearest booth.

“Claire Dunham?” she said.

The woman, who’d gone dead still the moment Marnie locked eyes with her, only stared now.

“Who the hell are you?” the woman asked.

“Marnie Calvert. Sam Dryden sent me to find you. He said to tell you Biscuit was still a weak name for a dog, and that you should have used Chet, like he recommended. As in Chet Baker.”

The woman — Claire, beyond a doubt — seemed to register three or four different emotions all at the same time. Relief and confusion were chief among them.

Strictly speaking, Dryden hadn’t told Marnie to say that. He’d written it down on a piece of notebook paper — along with a great deal more — and folded it into a tiny square lump. A lump he’d pressed against her when he’d clapped her shoulder in the Suburban, then allowed to fall out of sight behind her. She’d pocketed it unseen before leaving the vehicle herself.

Then she’d gone to the café and stood outside it, reading the message on the page, each sentence pushing her a little closer to a nervous breakdown.

Claire slid out of the booth and crossed to Marnie. The competing emotions in her expression fell away, leaving only intensity. There was a distinctly military edge to it. It reminded Marnie of Sam.

“Where is he?” Claire asked.

“It’s complicated.”

“Then uncomplicate it.”

“He has a plan,” Marnie said. “He wrote it down.”

“What plan?”

Marnie stared at her and thought, You’re not going to like it. I already don’t like it.

Eversman kept his eyes on the front door of Silver’s as he and Collins pulled into the lot. The Suburban rolled to a stop thirty feet from the entrance. He expected Dryden and Claire to emerge immediately. Expected them to be watching at the door for the vehicle’s arrival and to come running the moment it stopped.

The bar’s entrance stayed shut. No one came out. No one was even looking through the strip of glass in the door.

Collins shoved the selector into park, and the two of them sat staring at the place. Five seconds passed.

“Go take a look,” Eversman said.

Collins got out and crossed to the door at a fast walk. He went through it. Another five seconds went by, and then he shoved it back open, leaned out, and waved his arm for Eversman to come.

“What the hell is this?” Eversman said.

He opened the passenger door, stuffed the silenced .45 into his waistband, and rounded the Suburban’s hood. He broke into a run and grabbed the front door of Silver’s and hauled it open. Collins had already gone back inside — Eversman could hear him yelling at someone.

“Was there a woman?” Collins shouted.

Eversman’s eyes adapted to the low light. He saw Collins ten feet away, leaning in on one of the servers, a guy in his early twenties.

“Dude, what the fuck is your—”

Collins dropped his volume but managed to sound more intense at the same time. “Did you see him with a woman? She’d be about thirty.”

The kid shook his head. In the same moment, Eversman’s eyes took in three people in a booth to the left: the fiftyish couple and the younger woman who’d jogged to catch up with them on the way in. Party of three, after all.

Collins turned from the waiter and crossed toward Eversman. “Kid says Dryden came in, and then he was gone a minute later. He didn’t see where he went.”

Eversman’s mind raced. He and Collins had maintained visual on the bar the entire time they were driving up to it. Dryden had not come out the front door.

“Check the restrooms,” Eversman said. “Both of them.”

Collins nodded and moved off. Eversman crossed to the back of the barroom, where a screen door led onto a dining patio. Beyond the patio’s railing was a three-foot drop to the ground: a shallow lawn that led to the edge of a pine forest. The bar’s property was butted right up against the woods, a forested hillside rising along the edge of town.

Eversman called on his own mental picture of the wooded slope, as it had looked from his stakeout position five hundred yards away.

The hill was a forested circle, maybe half a mile by half a mile, some kind of protected wilderness land. There was city sprawl on this side, the north edge, and probably farmland beyond the hill’s southern boundary.

If Dryden had entered the woods here — however in God’s name he had known to do so — then he could come out anywhere.

At that moment Eversman’s phone rang. He answered and heard the driver of one of the other SUVs. “We’re at the café. The Calvert woman’s not here.”

Eversman heard a door slam somewhere behind him. He turned and saw Collins coming from the ladies’ room, shaking his head.

Eversman’s thoughts felt as scattered as a crowd running from flames. What was happening? And why? He let the panic stir for two seconds, and then he clamped it down and spoke into the phone. “Look at the wooded hill behind the bar. Dryden is somewhere in those trees. Collins and I are going in from the north. I want you and the other team to go in from the southeast and southwest. Fan out, don’t miss him. Call the other team and coordinate it.”

By this time, Collins was standing next to him. He didn’t need to be told anything. Eversman shoved open the screen door, crossed the patio, and dropped over the rail to the grass. As he sprinted for the treeline, Collins beside him, Eversman thought of Dryden’s background. He had researched the man during the night — had tried to, at least. His résumé was impressive, most notably for the fact that six years of it were invisible. But even that work, whatever it had been, was now eight years in Dryden’s past. He had to be a bit rusty. He was also one against ten.

Crossing into the cool space of the forest, Eversman drew the .45 from his waistband; beside him, Collins took a SIG Sauer from his shoulder holster.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Dryden was only a little winded when he reached the top of the hill. He had moved as quickly as possible through the trees, seeking the high ground in the middle of the woods. Now he stopped and held still and let his pulse slow. He turned in a circle, listening. To the north — it was easy to keep track of direction, because the bay was visible through the pines — he heard someone slip and catch himself on loose soil. The sound was hundreds of yards away.

In almost the same moment he heard another sound: a heavy engine running hard, then braking and shutting down. It was somewhere to the south and west. Dryden had no sooner processed that than he heard it all over again — racing engine, skid of tires, shutdown — this time south and east of his position.

Eversman and his men were coming into the circular woods from three equally spaced points along its edges: the corners of a triangle laid over it. Eversman and Collins were entering at the top of the triangle; the guys in the Suburbans — four men per vehicle — were starting from the two bottom corners.

They would all fan out. Like hunters driving prey. What they thought was prey, anyway.

Dryden took the Beretta from his waistband. He had only one of Claire’s two pistols, but he had both magazines. One of them was loaded into the weapon, full with fifteen 9mm Parabellums. The other magazine, in his pocket, held nine. It was missing the two that had gone into Harold Shannon in the Mojave, and the four that’d gone into Dale Whitcomb in the scrapyard.

Ten adversaries. Twenty-four shots.

He heard vehicle doors open and shut at the lower corners of the triangle. Heard footsteps on concrete, and then nothing.

He looked down and considered his clothing: the khakis and flannel shirt he’d borrowed from Eversman last night. Not quite what he’d worn during wilderness training, fifteen years back, though at least the flannel was black and green.

He heard the trickle of a flowing stream, a spring breaching the slope somewhere downhill toward the west.

He moved. Fast and silent. He covered fifty feet and found the stream. It was hardly more than a mudslick, like someone had left a garden hose running in a flowerbed.

Good enough.

He crouched and set down the pistol. He took handful after handful of the mud, smearing it on the cream-colored khakis until a fine layer of it was ground into the fabric, rendering it brown. He smeared more of it on his face and neck. Then he wiped his palms on his shirt and picked up the gun again.

He moved thirty feet from the stream and listened.

Nothing.

It was tempting to find cover right there and wait, but the location was wrong. Too close to the center of the woods. Too likely to be a convergence point where he might encounter all of Eversman’s people at once.

He turned and faced southwest, toward where he’d heard the first Suburban stop. He got moving, staying in the cover of ground vegetation as much as possible. Staying quiet.

He stopped again after a hundred yards. He found a dense spot of brush and got low in it, facing the direction Eversman’s men should be coming from, and settled in for the wait.

He felt his heart rate drop, felt his breathing go silent — all of it happening automatically. The primordial psychology of waiting for game.

A minute passed.

Two.

He heard something.

The faintest rustle of movement — dry pine needles on the sandy ground, yielding to the pressure of a footstep.

Somebody moving — but not in front of him. Off to his left somewhere, outside his field of vision.

Someone close by, and coming toward him. Less than ten feet away.

Dryden held perfectly still. Even turning his head right now might give away his position.

Another footstep. Closer.

Dryden had the Beretta in his right hand, his left braced flat on the ground, his whole body coiled like a spring, tense and ready.

The guy would either spot him or he wouldn’t. If he didn’t, then Dryden would take him easily — either the moment the guy stepped into his view, or after he’d wandered off just far enough that Dryden could turn without being heard.

If the guy did spot him, then things were going to get complicated in a hurry, and hundredths of a second would suddenly matter: the sharp little fragments of time in which he would hear the man’s breath catch, and the sound of the guy’s feet scraping the soil as he flinched and turned. After that it would be a race, decided by fast-twitch muscle fibers, the geometry of firing angles, the momentum of arms swung fast and checked fast. And luck.

Another step. Closer still.

Dryden breathed shallow and waited.

Eversman was halfway up the hill when he heard the first gunshot. A flat crack cutting through the trees, followed half a second later by a rapid salvo of three or four more shots, and before the echoes had faded he heard someone shouting, high and shrill: “I hit him! I hit him! Move in on me, I hit him, I fucking hit him!”

Eversman heard a flurry of motion in the southwest quadrant of the forest, over the hill from where he stood. Men running, breaking through thin branches, kicking up ground cover as they raced in toward the voice.

Eversman cocked his head, listening as the shouting went on.

Which of his men was that? The voice could have belonged to almost anyone, yet he could just about pin down —

He sucked in a breath as understanding hit him.

The voice didn’t belong to any of his guys.

He turned and cupped his mouth to shout something — maybe it would have been Stop or Wait — but before he could make a sound, another series of shots erupted. They came from right where the first volley had been, though these were far less spastic and rapid-fire.

The shooting sounded careful this time. It sounded aimed.

Three seconds later it stopped; everything else stopped with it, the footsteps and the breaking branches. In the silence, Eversman found himself sure of only one thing: He had just lost the entire crew from one of the Suburbans.

Dryden took stock of the dead — all four of them — as quickly as he could; time was not in abundance.

They were down for good: head shots and torso shots, shirts soaked with blood.

He found a Steyr M40 on the first body, with two spare magazines in the guy’s pocket. He stuffed the weapon in his waistband and took the mags, and didn’t bother checking anyone else’s firearm. He was looking for exactly one thing, and he found it in the front pocket of the third body: the keys to the Suburban.

Even as he took them, he heard men shouting to each other, far away. He thought he heard Eversman’s voice among them, barking orders. Dryden didn’t need to hear what the orders were; it was obvious enough. They were coming for him. Fast.

His own best move was obvious, too.

Eversman was running. Sprinting and calling out to Collins and the other four men. Screaming for them to run for the Suburban at the southwest edge of the forest.

What else could Dryden be doing but simply running for that vehicle? There was nobody to stop him from getting in and driving away.

Eversman ran. He crested the hill somewhere west of the peak, and then he was moving downslope through the trees, brush twigs scraping at his face and arms, the .45 in his hand. Running downhill was practically a guided fall; you could maintain something near sprint speed without tiring. Off to his sides he could hear the other men crashing through the woods, keeping pace with him.

Then he heard the big SUV’s engine turn over and rev hard.

“Get on him!” Eversman screamed. “God dammit!”

The vehicle wasn’t far ahead. Another fifty yards, maybe. Eversman could just make out the edge of the forest now, the gaps in the trees filled with the bright surface of a gravel road and a wheat field beyond.

He heard the Suburban’s drive gear engage. Heard its tires spin and bite into the dirt road surface before it lunged forward.

Three seconds later he heard it crash. The sound was unmistakable. Steel on wood. Glass shattering and sprinkling onto metal.

Eversman broke through the treeline and saw the wreck, thirty yards to his left. The Suburban had veered off the road and hit a tree dead center.

Directly in front of him, Eversman saw the place where the vehicle had been parked. There were deep impressions where its tires had dug into the gravel when Dryden gunned the engine.

There was also blood. A thin, spattered trail of it, leading from the wood’s edge to where the driver’s door would have been.

“He’s hurt!” Eversman shouted. “He took one!”

His men were breaking from the forest now: Collins to his right, all four of the guys from the other Suburban to his left. The gravel road formed a perfect boundary between the pine forest to the north and the wheat field stretching away far to the south. There was thick, humid air rolling off the field. There was no other vehicle anywhere to be seen on the road.

The men had their weapons leveled on the crashed SUV. They began moving in on it now, a loose cluster, fanning out just enough to give themselves clear shooting angles. Eversman stood back and left them to it.

At twenty yards they opened fire — Collins and the other four. The storm of bullets blew out the vehicle’s remaining windows. Punched holes through the quarterpanels and the doors, high and low. One by one the men ran dry and reloaded and kept shooting. They were still at it when the top four inches of Collins’s head came off in a burst of blood and gray matter.

Eversman flinched and jerked and looked around; the other men didn’t even notice what had happened. Their eyes were trained dead ahead, their peripheral vision full of muzzle flashes, their ears full of nothing but gunfire.

The next three seconds unfolded like a slow-motion nightmare scene, Eversman screaming in vain, unable to hear even himself over the shooting. The men took their hits one after the next, left to right like empty beer cans on a fence rail. Only the last one sensed anything wrong. A spray of blood hit the side of his head, and he turned just in time to take the last bullet through his eye.

Silence.

Eversman heard himself making a low mewling sound, doglike. He still had the .45, but it hung low at his side. He turned his head and scanned the trees, and then he felt an impact like a nightstick smashing into his right forearm. He felt the bone snap, and a split second later he heard the gunshot from the woods.

He looked down. He had dropped the .45 in the dirt. He was bleeding all over it from the wound in his arm. By the time he looked back up, Dryden was there, rushing in on him, shouting for him to get down flat, arms and legs out.

Dryden didn’t appear to have suffered any gunshot wound. He looked just fine. He had his Beretta in one hand and some kind of bunched-up rag in the other.

Eversman dropped to his knees, then went flat, hands outstretched. Dryden dropped the rag in the dirt, and Eversman saw what it was: somebody’s shirt, saturated with blood, but twisted now like a wrung-out washcloth.

He felt Dryden drop onto him, ramming a knee into his lower back. Felt his arms wrenched painfully behind him. Then Dryden grabbed the bloody shirt again, and Eversman heard him tear off one of its sleeves. A moment later the length of cloth was looping around his wrists in a figure eight, over and over, before Dryden tied it off tight.

“You could have just gotten away,” Eversman said.

“I didn’t want to get away,” Dryden said. “I wanted to talk to you.”

For another moment he left Eversman lying there while he searched the pockets of the dead men nearby. On the third man in the line, he found the keys to the other Suburban, the one that was parked at the southeast edge of the forest.

Dryden came back to Eversman. He took the silenced .45 from where it had fallen, and tucked it into his own rear waistband. Then he reached down, grabbed Eversman by the upper arm, and hauled him to his feet.

“Let’s go,” he said, and stiff-armed Eversman forward, off the road and back into the deep shadows of the forest.

CHAPTER FIFTY

“You would have killed all three of us,” Dryden said. “Me and Claire and Marnie.”

They were just into the woods, moving east, roughly paralleling the curved gravel road fifty yards south of them.

“That’s how it would have gone,” Dryden said, “if I hadn’t known better. You would have driven us out to some place like these farm fields and shot us. Or maybe you would have done it right inside the SUV. Is that what the silencer was for?”

Eversman didn’t answer.

Dryden kept them moving forward, toward the other SUV on the far side of the woods. He had his left hand clenched around a fistful of Eversman’s shirt in back, his elbow locked, propelling the guy step by step.

“I would have lived through it,” Dryden said. “One way or another. I would have survived and even gotten away.”

“Confident thing to say,” Eversman said.

“No. It’s just true. I already know it.”

“How would you know a thing like that?”

For a second Dryden didn’t answer. He forced Eversman forward over a knee-high fallen trunk.

Dryden said, “Marnie asked me yesterday if I would ever change the past. Would I change it if something happened that I wanted to undo? Something I couldn’t live with.”

“We never change the past,” Eversman said. “It’s too much of an unknown. We can’t even imagine what it would feel like from our point of view.”

“That scares you guys,” Dryden said.

“It should scare anyone. It should scare you.”

“It does,” Dryden said. “And when Marnie asked me whether I could do it, I said I didn’t know. But now I do, and it turns out the answer is yes. If something bad enough happened, I would change the past to fix it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve got a buddy who oversees missing child alerts that go out on the airwaves, and emergency broadcast messages.”

Eversman said nothing.

“I got a message from him last night,” Dryden said. “Three or four in the morning. I was lying on the floor in Marnie’s room, and we had the machine on, and I heard an emergency test for the townships of Jasper and Willis. But those aren’t townships. They add up to a person’s name.”

“Jasper Willis? Am I supposed to know who that is?”

Dryden shook his head. “He’s nobody. The name is a shorthand code we used in my unit, way back. We’d send it to someone as a text message, like, ‘I heard Jasper Willis got transferred stateside.’ All that mattered was the name itself, and what it meant. Which was ‘Don’t trust your contact. You’re about to get screwed.’”

Eversman stayed quiet. From Dryden’s position, behind and to the right, he could only see the man’s face in profile, but it was enough to see his expression go slack.

“Three or four in the morning,” Dryden said. “Add ten hours and twenty-four minutes to that, and it’s a couple hours after noon — after the meetup here in Monterey. The timing works out just about right. If things went bad here, but I survived, I’d have time to get in touch with my friend and get that message on the air. And I would have already known Marnie and I had the machine on, ten and a half hours before that. I would have known I had a decent chance of actually hearing the warning.”

Eversman’s face remained blank as Dryden shoved him along, though at least an edge of disbelief seemed to show there.

“I would have been scared shitless to change the past,” Dryden said, “but I guess I was mad enough to balance out the fear. You must have really pissed me off.”

They crossed over a muddy stream like the one Dryden had used to darken his pants and face.

“The warning from my friend last night got me thinking,” Dryden said. “All those different futures. One in which you become president. Six in which you get killed before that. It never made sense. Why would the Group kill you six times? And then I saw it.”

Eversman made a sound like a dry laugh. A nasal breath. Derision, bravado. Dryden ignored it.

“You’re part of the Group,” Dryden said. “And in 2024, you would have been the sleeper running for the White House. The intelligence community would have done its background check on you, and they would have found something, wouldn’t they? I told you, they turn a candidate’s life inside out. And if what they learned about you was bad enough, what would they do about it? My guess? They’d kill you.”

They were midway across the woods now, crossing the swell of the hill, far south of the highest point in the middle of the forest.

“I bet you weren’t lying when you said you’d always wanted to be president,” Dryden said. “I bet the part about Fenway wasn’t even bullshit. And when you and your people got the system up and running, and you could read headlines from the future, I bet I know the first damn thing you searched for. Your name in 2024, to see if you were going to win the election. But you weren’t going to win. You were going to get shot to death, because someone in intel figured out what you really were.”

They crossed another mudslick. Far ahead, to the east, Dryden could make out a hint of light through the trees. The opposite side of the forest.

“When you saw those headlines,” Dryden said, “you knew what to do about it. You scoured the future to find out exactly which intel people were going to figure you out. Maybe some article from far, far ahead in time, twenty years from now, when the names had been declassified and the stories told. You found out who was going to bust you … and you had them killed — right here in the present. Some of them were probably still college kids, weren’t they?”

Eversman didn’t reply.

“Then you checked the 2024 headlines again,” Dryden said. “See if you survived this time around. But you didn’t — because in that altered future, there would just be other intel people filling those job positions. People just as capable of nailing you. So you killed them too, and checked the headlines again, rinse and repeat the whole goddamned thing until you got the future you wanted. Right?”

No response.

“Marnie and I had it backwards from the start,” Dryden said. “We thought the original future was the one where you were elected president. We thought the Group changed that future six different times, killing you in six different ways. But the Group wasn’t killing you. They were saving you. Shuffling the deck by eliminating the people who would find out the truth about you. And finally it worked. Finally there was a future in which you lived all the way to Election Day.”

Eversman looked up into the treetops, as if pretending to be interested in something there. He said, “You sound like you know everything. Why even ask me about it?”

“Because there’s more I need to know, and you’re going to tell me.”

“Why would I say anything to help you?”

“I’ll just go ahead and ask anyway,” Dryden said. “We’ll see how you respond.”

Eversman only shook his head. He glanced upward again, just briefly.

“Some parts are obvious,” Dryden said. “When Marnie and I showed up at your place in Carmel yesterday, you must have thought you won the lotto. The Group was turning over heaven and earth to find us, and we rolled right up to your gate and pushed the buzzer. When we finished telling you our story, one of the first things you did was ask us who else we’d talked to. I should have picked up on that, but I didn’t. I imagine, in that moment, you thought all the loose ends were tied off. Marnie and I probably would have been dead inside the next five minutes, but then you got a phone call. Something so urgent you had to take it. Let me guess: That was the news that Claire had gotten away. Just like that, you still had a loose end out there. But you also had a sure way to get her back. You had me. The one person Claire would try to contact and meet up with.”

Ahead in the direction they were walking, the light through the trees was brighter. They were maybe two hundred yards from the east edge of the woods and the SUV parked there.

“So everything after that was bullshit,” Dryden said. “The meeting in the desert had already been planned, so that still had to take place, but since it was your own people I was meeting out there, you could easily arrange for me to survive it. The fact that Claire sent me that text message offered a perfect reason, but you would have come up with something. I wonder: Were you the guy on the phone, during that meeting? Were you the scrambled voice with the accent?”

Eversman didn’t answer.

“I wondered last night why the chopper attack in the desert worked,” Dryden said. “Why the Group didn’t know about it in advance and prepare for it. Now I understand. The whole damn thing was staged anyway. Sure, the six guys of yours that you killed in the Mojave weren’t in on it, but I don’t imagine you care about them.”

“What exactly do you still need to know, then?” Eversman asked.

“Two things,” Dryden said. “First, the system. The buried unit. It’s at your estate, isn’t it.”

Eversman’s reaction was complex, a sequence of different emotions in the space of a second. Surprise, annoyance, then an attempt to maintain composure and hide both of those responses. Too late.

“You’re never getting near it,” Eversman said. “So why do you care?”

Dryden ignored the comment. “I want to know how it works. The system itself is buried in the ground, but there have to be keyboards and monitors somewhere. There have to be people sitting at them, running the searches and looking at the results. But you know what I think? I think there are as few of those people as you can possibly make do with. Because those people are liabilities. Any one of them could start getting ideas of their own, with that kind of power at their disposal. If I were you, I’d have a skeleton crew at those keyboards, and I’d keep them all in one place where I could watch them like a hawk. I’d make them live there. I’d probably keep them right in that guesthouse on the estate.”

Another little spike of surprise and annoyance. Another score.

“Nobody else knows a damn thing about it,” Dryden said. “Do they. Not your superiors in the Group, wherever they are. Not the guys who just tried to kill me in these woods. Not the people you send out to commit murder. They know the bare minimum they need to. Why would you tell them anything more? I bet your wife doesn’t even know about the system.”

Eversman rolled his neck as if to work out a kink, but the movement looked fake — like his real purpose was to take another good look at the sky through the trees. Dryden looked, too. Nothing there.

“So how many in the skeleton crew?” Dryden asked. “Five? More than that? Is it—”

“Three people. Plus me.” Eversman’s tone was calm. Even proud. “Yes, they live in the guesthouse. Yes, I keep an eye on them. Yes, they’re the only ones in the world, besides me, who know anything about the system. Do you know why I’m not afraid to tell you this?”

Dryden waited, still pushing Eversman forward through the trees.

“Because you and Marnie were exactly right,” Eversman said. “Any plan that could destroy the system would also tip it off. And it hasn’t been tipped off. So none of this is worrying me.”

They were a hundred yards from the east edge of the forest now.

“What’s the second thing you want to know?” Eversman asked.

Dryden said, “Why am I pointing a gun at you? Why do I have your hands bound?”

“You’re asking me?”

“What I mean is, how did I outplay you here? You and your people could have used the system to see how this would turn out. And you must have.”

Eversman nodded. “We must have.”

“So why did I win?”

Eversman laughed; he seemed to catch himself off guard by doing so, as if he found something about the moment genuinely funny.

Then he planted a foot, bringing himself and Dryden to a hard stop, and turned in place so that the two of them were suddenly eye to eye.

Eversman’s wrists were still tied behind him. Dryden was still holding the Beretta. There was nothing Eversman could do to change the dynamic.

Yet the guy’s expression was all confidence.

“Who says you won?” Eversman asked.

Before Dryden could reply, Eversman cocked his head, listening for something.

Five seconds later Dryden heard it.

The rattle of a helicopter coming in.

It was somewhere to the north, beyond the wooded hilltop, the terrain and the trees masking its sound. It was already very close — thirty or forty seconds away at most.

Eversman smiled. “I told you last night, I keep one stationed in San Jose. I called for it to lift off as soon as Collins and I entered the woods.”

Dryden looked around, painfully aware of how little cover the forest would offer against an airborne attack. Someone looking straight down from a hundred feet up would see through any of the ground cover, and even through most of the tree boughs.

“I bet you instructed Marnie and Claire to stay away from here,” Eversman said. “Didn’t you. I also bet they’re going to ignore that. In fact, I know it.”

Dryden looked at him. “What are you talking about?”

“My people and I did use the system to see how this would turn out. We checked this morning. You know what we found? Headlines about you and Marnie Calvert disappearing. You were last seen alive in Los Angeles two days ago. She was last seen Saturday morning in Santa Monica. The two of you end up linked forever, because apparently she was tailing you at the time you both vanished. We found true-crime write-ups about you two, published as much as five years from now. You’re one of those oddball little stories that sticks in the public consciousness. Claire Dunham ends up missing, too — no one connects her disappearance to yours, but either way, she vanishes. So there you go. If no one ever sees you three again, what else could it mean? We’re going to bury you. All of you.”

The clatter of the rotors was much closer now, just over the summit of the tree-covered hill.

Dryden stopped looking around and leveled his gaze on Eversman.

“You didn’t check for headlines about anything strange happening in Monterey today,” Dryden said. “Did you?”

“Why would I? You three weren’t going to disappear from Monterey. There wasn’t going to be any record you’d been here at all. What headlines around here would I have looked for?”

“That’s why you didn’t know I was going to kill your guys,” Dryden said. “Because you never checked. You saw the stories about us missing, and you figured that told you everything.”

“It told me we’ll accomplish the part that matters. It told me enough.”

“What else didn’t you check for?” Dryden said. “Did you search for headlines about your own death?”

Eversman’s confidence remained intact. He held Dryden’s stare.

“You three disappear because we kill you,” Eversman said. “I take that to mean I win. That I live.”

On the last word, the sound of the incoming helicopter suddenly intensified. Dryden looked up and saw it through the pines, just passing over the hilltop, flying no more than twenty feet above the trees. It wasn’t the same chopper that had broken up the meeting last night in the Mojave, but it was similar enough. The setup was the same. Open bay door in back. A gunner strapped in place and leaning out with a big rifle. Probably another .50 caliber.

In the half second Dryden was distracted by the aircraft, Eversman moved — far more quickly than Dryden would have guessed. The guy lunged forward, bending at the waist for a headbutt. Dryden dodged it by spare inches, throwing his own head sideways and taking the impact as a graze against his cheekbone. He pivoted and shoved Eversman hard, meaning to send him sprawling, but the guy caught his balance and came on again, all adrenaline and desperation.

Dryden swung the Beretta toward him and fired. Three shots, a tight group centered in Eversman’s chest. Three little rips in his shirt fabric, instantly soaked with blood.

Eversman stopped as if he’d hit an unseen wall. For another second he stayed on his feet, his eyes wide and staring at Dryden. His mouth worked soundlessly; he looked like he was trying to say How?

Then he fell where he stood, probably dead before he hit, and Dryden forgot all about him. He spun toward the oncoming chopper — it was making straight for him, though he couldn’t possibly have been visible to the pilot yet. Dryden looked down at Eversman’s body and understood: The guy’s phone must have been relaying its GPS coordinates to the chopper, calling it in like a beacon. It would have been the easiest way for Eversman to guide it here from San Jose in the first place. Dryden turned east, toward the nearest edge of the forest, and ran.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

He knew already that escaping in the other Suburban wasn’t an option. Even if he could reach it unseen, it would be suicide to get into it and try driving away.

He ran toward it anyway, east through the forest, simply to move away from both Eversman’s body and the chopper itself. He tried to stick to the densest clusters of trees, the best visual screens available.

Fifty yards from where Eversman had fallen, Dryden stopped. He turned and crouched as low as he could in the brush. He watched the chopper slow and take up a hover directly above the corpse.

The gunner in the bay door leaned farther out and looked straight down. Dryden could see some kind of bulky headgear on him. A helmet with a scope built right into the front of it. Probably a FLIR camera. Thermal vision. Even in daylight, it would make child’s play of searching for a human target in a forest like this. The shaded ground could be no more than sixty degrees. Dryden was thirty-eight point six degrees warmer than that. Not even the sunlit canopy of pine boughs overhead would be that hot. Not on a brisk day like this. Not even close.

The chopper stayed in its hover, the gunman staring down and taking in Eversman’s corpse. The FLIR scope would make it obvious the man was dead. There would be body-temperature blood seeping out in a big puddle, contrasting starkly with the cool dirt.

If the pilot took the chopper a little way to the west, the gunner would see the bodies of the first four men Dryden had taken down. There would be more puddled blood there, and the bodies themselves might have already cooled noticeably. The same would go for the other five out at the southwest edge of the woods, on the gravel road that bordered the wheat field.

The chopper didn’t do any of that, though.

Instead the gunner looked up from Eversman’s corpse and swept his viewpoint over the surrounding woods in a quick, efficient arc.

He saw Dryden almost immediately.

There was no question the guy had spotted him. The low brush Dryden was crouched in was useless. A two-foot-wide tree trunk would have helped, but there was nothing like that within sight.

For three seconds the gunman just stared. Dryden held still and considered his options. He couldn’t play dead; he was already upright in a crouch. He couldn’t stand his ground and fight; he would be outgunned and outmaneuvered to a degree that would be comical to anyone but himself. He couldn’t flee the woods to the nearby south or east side; there was only open farmland in both of those directions.

He could escape to the north. Out of the woods and into the city sprawl.

If he could get that far — the northern edge of the forest was almost half a mile away.

He was still thinking about that when the gunner’s mouth moved beneath the bulk of his FLIR scope. Instructions via headset to the pilot. A second later the chopper tilted forward and left its hover. It banked as it did, coming around in a shallow curve that would put the gunner right above Dryden’s position.

Dryden broke from the brush and took off in a sprint, straight north.

For the first thirty seconds he didn’t look back. He didn’t look anywhere but straight ahead, jumping deadfalls and low stands of brush. He heard the chopper’s rotors and control surfaces making rapid adjustments behind him, the sound chaotic through the trees. Dryden had flown helicopters before; it had been part of his training. He could picture the pilot moving the cyclic control left and right and forward, second by second, using the pedals to whip the tail this way or that, anything to give the gunner a good sightline as the aircraft skimmed the treetops and raced north, gaining on him.

He heard the first zipping whine of a bullet, somewhere just above him in the boughs, half a second before the sound of the gunshot crashed down around him. He didn’t stop.

Another bullet — this one buzzing through the airspace five feet in front of him. It left a ragged line of cut-loose pine needles in its wake, a ghost of the bullet’s path. Dryden ran right through it a split second later.

He heard Eversman’s words in his head:

I bet you instructed Marnie and Claire to stay away from here.

I also bet they’re going to ignore that.

In fact, I know it.

The third shot passed close enough that he felt its heat across his forehead, as if someone had waved a lightbulb two inches from his face.

If no one ever sees you three again, what else could it mean?

The chopper was above and to his left now, somewhere around his eight o’clock, and close by. The last two shots had come down on high, steep angles.

Dryden ran another five paces, until half a second before his internal stopwatch said the next shot was coming.

Then he jammed a foot into the dry soil and pulled up short, and heard the zip and the gunshot almost in unison, the bullet ripping through the base of a sapling three feet in front of him. He pivoted and lunged sideways, passing directly beneath the chopper, coming out on the gunner’s blind side ten seconds later. Then he turned and sprinted north again, the chopper now above and to his right. He heard it once more making adjustments, correcting its position. He imagined the gunner shouting into his headset, scouring the woods as the aircraft came around.

Dryden kept running. There was no other move.

The edge of town was still impossibly far north, given the circumstances. Somewhere between a half and a quarter mile — more than a minute’s run for a world-class athlete on smooth asphalt. Already he could hear the chopper settling into another favorable flight path for the gunman, this time taking into account the maneuver Dryden had used. The chopper would stay farther off to his side now, far enough that it would be useless to try dodging beneath it again.

Running hard, ducking branches, darting past clumps of pines. Cresting the flank of the hill now, the ground dropping away in a shallow grade before him, helping just a bit with his speed.

Another bullet cut through the air, spare feet behind him.

And another, just above his scalp.

At the edge of his vision he saw something; his body reacted to it as much as his brain did. He turned without stopping and sprinted on a diagonal from the line he’d been running on. A bullet splintered a thin branch six inches from his face. Scraps of bark stung his cheeks; his lungs filled with the smell of pine tar.

He reached what he was running toward three seconds later: a knotted old tree with a trunk twice as wide as his body. He slammed to a stop against it, putting it between himself and the chopper.

For ten seconds the gunner held his fire. Dryden drew back from the tree, slowly, ten inches and then twenty. Enough to catch sight of the chopper’s tail, past the trunk’s left edge. Enough to keep tabs on the aircraft as it circled, and to keep himself shielded by the tree no matter where the chopper put itself.

He could circle this tree all day; the chopper couldn’t. It had only so much fuel, and only so much time before some motorist found the bodies near the wheat field. The guys in the chopper wouldn’t want to hang around once police started showing up in the area.

The aircraft’s tail was slipping away to the right. Dryden eased himself clockwise around the tree, keeping just the last two feet of the tail in view.

Easy.

Then the chopper went stationary, and turned sharply to the right, a move that would point the gunner entirely away from him. Why? Dryden risked leaning out past the trunk to see the reason.

He saw.

Forty yards away from him stood Marnie and Claire. Marnie had her Glock in hand, held low. The two of them stared up as the chopper rotated to point the gunman at them. Then they bolted sideways — and away from each other — as a rifle shot ripped through the space where they had been standing.

Dryden lost sight of Claire. He managed to keep his eyes on Marnie as she moved roughly toward him.

The gunner kept his eyes on her, too. Another bullet cut through the pine boughs, missing Marnie by a foot at most.

Dryden drew the Steyr M40 he’d taken from one of the dead men. It was the first time he’d had a clear angle on the chopper without the .50 caliber rifle being pointed at him.

He raised the pistol and aimed it high, compensating for the chopper’s altitude and distance, and opened fire.

There was no way to see what he was hitting inside the cockpit. A direct hit on the pilot would be ideal. A ricochet that winged him with a bullet fragment would be almost as good. All he had to do was make the guy flinch at the controls. Make him lose focus for half a second. That would be enough.

Flying a helicopter was difficult as hell, and holding in a hover was the hardest part by far. You needed both hands and both feet engaged at all times. You had to manage drift and altitude and yaw, each one a separate task, and any correction to one of them threw off the other two. You had to focus.

Dryden saw at least one bullet hole open up in the aircraft’s thin metal skin. Saw one of its side windows blow inward.

The pilot lost his focus.

The chopper’s tail dipped and slewed to the left. Through a window in the back, Dryden saw the gunner reach frantically for a handhold. A second later the aircraft tilted deeply forward, as if to bow at the conclusion of its performance. As it did so, its main rotor clipped the top of a pine tree; the chopper reacted as if an invisible giant had reached up and slapped it sideways, hurling the craft into the highest boughs of a nearby grove. The rest of the rotor assembly tore itself apart against the tree trunks, at which point the helicopter was essentially a falling minivan. Loaded with aviation fuel.

It slammed into the earth beside the grove, its tanks rupturing and detonating in the same instant. Dryden felt the radiant heat flash out and warm his skin.

He turned and saw Marnie staring at him. A second later he saw Claire; she stepped into view past a screen of brush, twenty feet away.

Claire Dunham. Alive and well. She looked healthier than when he’d last seen her. She’d slept, at least.

An ugly thought came to Dryden; he realized he had suppressed it for most of the past twenty-four hours: Deep down he had not expected to see her again.

She stepped past the brush and came toward him. She drew a folded sheet of paper from her pocket; it was the note he’d given Marnie in the Suburban. Claire unfolded it as she crossed to him, stopping two feet away. She held it up, her expression somewhere between amused and pissed.

She said, “Your plan is for all three of us to vanish off the grid for the rest of our lives? You really expect us to do that?”

“We did do that,” Dryden said. “Would have, anyway.”

Marnie came up beside them. “Do we still have to?”

Dryden shook his head. “The girls in the trailer didn’t have to stay dead. We don’t have to stay missing.”

He turned in place, got his bearings, and faced southeast. The intact Suburban was down there somewhere, parked along the road beside the forest.

“We need to go back to Eversman’s estate,” he said. “Right now.”

“Why the hell would we go back there?” Marnie asked.

“Because the system is there. And I know what to do about it now.”

Marnie’s eyes narrowed. “What about what we said last night? There’s no way to beat it without warning it.”

“There is,” Dryden said. “Whitcomb was about to tell us, yesterday. He had it all figured out. Come on.”

He led the way east, sprinting through the trees.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

“Think very carefully,” Dryden said. “When we met Eversman’s wife, did he introduce you as an FBI agent?”

They were in the Suburban, rolling out of Monterey and into the hills, twenty minutes from the estate. Behind them, the city was dotted with police flashers streaming in from all quarters toward the crash site in the woods — amid much else they would find there. During the run to the SUV, Dryden had stopped to relieve Eversman’s corpse of its wallet. With any luck, that would buy a bit of time before authorities identified the man and descended on his home. He had taken the guy’s cell phone, too.

Dryden was at the wheel. Marnie rode in the passenger seat, Claire behind her on the middle bench.

“No,” Marnie said. “He just used my first name. And yours. Maybe he didn’t want her remembering us, if we ended up on the news after we disappeared.”

“Maybe,” Dryden said. “I don’t think she was in the loop on anything. She didn’t know about the system. I doubt he was ever going to tell her.”

“Why does it matter whether she knew I was an agent?” Marnie said.

“Because we still need her to forget us. Or at least not remember us well enough to point the authorities in our direction. And she won’t.”

Claire leaned forward. “Why does any of that matter?”

Dryden explained what he planned to do. By the time he’d finished, Marnie and Claire looked noticeably pale.

“If there’s any other way,” Dryden said, “I’d love to hear it.”

All that followed was silence.

When they reached Eversman’s estate, they drove past it. They followed the switchback residential road as it turned and climbed. They stopped half a mile farther on, where a gap in the trees offered a view down onto the distant brick house. They could see Dryden’s Explorer still parked in front.

Dryden took Eversman’s phone from his pocket, switched it on, and pulled up the contact list. Ayla was near the top. He opened her contact page and tapped SEND MESSAGE. He typed:

He pressed SEND.

They waited. Twenty seconds later, Eversman’s phone rang. Ayla. They watched the mansion as the ring tone trilled on and on. It was still going when one of the house’s garage doors began to rise, and a moment later a sleek red SUV — a Porsche Cayenne, Dryden thought — lurched out and sped down the driveway.

Dryden put the Suburban in drive, made a U-turn and headed back down the road toward the estate. At the last curve before the entry drive, he slowed and stopped, three hundred yards shy of the big iron-and-wood gate. He nosed forward just far enough that he could see it while mostly keeping the Suburban hidden from view. The gate was already swinging inward.

The red Cayenne burst through the opening, fast enough that it nearly clipped the concrete wall on the far side of the road before it could turn. Then it was pointed downhill and accelerating away, and a second later it was out of sight beyond a curve.

Dryden stepped on the gas. He pushed the Suburban to 60; it felt like 90 in the boxed-in canyon between the property walls. He braked hard and turned in at Eversman’s drive, the gate just beginning to swing shut again. He steered around and past it, and twenty seconds later he rolled to a stop in front of the guesthouse.

He turned and looked at Marnie and Claire.

Pale again, both of them. Breathing a little faster than normal.

“We’re not the bad guys,” Dryden said.

He opened the door and got out, Eversman’s silenced .45 in his hand. He crossed to the guesthouse’s front door and simply knocked.

From the moment the door opened, the violence that followed took less than a minute. There were three men in the guesthouse, as Eversman had said. They weren’t armed. They weren’t expecting trouble to show up. They were, in fact, certain that it wouldn’t.

When it was over, Dryden found the door that opened into the garage. There were two stalls, both empty. He pressed the wall-mounted button to raise the big single door, then waved for Marnie to drive the Suburban inside. She climbed over the console to the driver’s seat and put it in gear.

Dryden wiped his prints from the .45 and set it on the concrete floor. Its suppressor was hot to the touch.

Marnie braked, killed the engine, and got out. Claire stepped out behind her. The two of them stood staring through the entry into the house.

“The computer room is downstairs,” Dryden said. He punched the button to lower the garage door again, then led the way back inside.

Before seeing it, Dryden had imagined the computer room would look like a scaled-down, slapped-together mock-up of the war room in every movie version of NORAD. Giant flat screens everywhere, a kind of digital nerve center with data streaming in from all over.

Instead it had a single computer. It was a desktop unit that might have cost five hundred dollars at Best Buy. It had a case and a monitor and a keyboard and a mouse, all sitting on a plain wooden counter against one wall of the room. It had a printer on the carpet nearby.

The monitor currently displayed a black screen with a blinking white cursor at the top. Nothing else.

Someone had stuck a Post-it note on the edge of the keyboard, with a line of text scribbled on it:

Farther down the length of the counter were three chairs, each with a cluttered workspace in front of it: stacks of paper arranged in haphazard order, notecards pinned to the drywall above, photos and computer printouts everywhere. Dryden made his way past them, taking in details.

There was a card with bullet-point notes written in a neat hand:

“Look at this,” Claire said.

Dryden turned to her. She was standing before a long folding table butted up against the end wall of the room. There were short stacks of paper on it, orderly and squared, forming a row that ran the table’s length.

Dryden went to her side, along with Marnie.

For at least a minute none of them said a word. They only stared.

Each stack was topped with a black-and-white photo on regular printer paper. All the photos were of people, ranging in age from the midteens up to fifty. Each had a line of text written in red pen at the top: DOB followed by a date. Date of birth. Judging by the dates and the images, these were all pictures of the subjects as they appeared in the present day. They were the kinds of photos that could have been found on each person’s Facebook page, or in an employee or student directory online.

Every photo also had a red X across the face, with the word DONE written below it.

Claire exhaled slowly. Dryden thought he heard a tremor in the sound.

He moved to his left down the row, looking at each picture in turn. One stopped him: a woman in her late twenties, beautiful but with eyes that looked troubled somehow. Dryden slid the photo off the stack, and found beneath it a printed screenshot from a Facebook timeline.

The woman’s name was — had been — Aubrey Deene. Twenty-eight years old. Postdoc at Arizona State. She had attended high school in South Bend. The person with the red pen had written two words diagonally across the sheet, in big letters: DEFINITELY HER.

Dryden slid the printout aside and saw a text document below it. It was a newspaper article, formatted like the ones in Curtis’s binders. The headline read: DEENE CONFIRMED, HIGH COURT BALANCE SHIFTS TO 7–2.

The article was dated October 9, 2033.

“Oh hell,” Marnie said softly.

Dryden looked up. At the far end of the table, Marnie had raised a hand to her open mouth. Dryden followed Claire to where she stood.

The last four stacks in the line were all topped with photographs of college-aged girls. All four had the same date of birth written at the top, which would have made them all nineteen years old. All four were DONE.

Marnie had slid each picture halfway off the sheet beneath it, revealing three screenshots from Facebook and one from a Twitter account.

All four of the girls had the same name — first, middle, and last.

On each of the four social media printouts, the same scribble appeared in red ink:

The hand Marnie had raised to her mouth began to shake. She made a fist of it and dropped it to her side. For a long moment she remained quiet. Then she turned to Dryden, her eyes hard.

“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me how we got this far without alerting these guys that we were coming. What was Whitcomb going to tell us?”

“He was describing how they buried the system in the ground. How the power supply doesn’t need maintenance. They designed the whole thing to be future-proof. They needed it that way, because to get headlines from ten years in the future, the machine has to keep working that whole time. They had to guarantee it would, no matter what changes came along over the years. So that’s how they built it. Buried and self-sufficient. They said it would keep running, even if, in the future, everyone in charge of it died. It would just sit there in the ground, all by itself, working away. I said that was pretty clever, and Whitcomb said it was very, very stupid. It was their biggest weakness. The way we were going to beat them.”

Marnie’s eyebrows drew toward each other. She was putting it together.

“We thought they’d know when we were coming,” Dryden said. “They’d be able to tell, because all of a sudden their searches wouldn’t work past some certain point in the future. The time when we would show up and destroy the system.”

Marnie nodded. “So the way around that is…”

“Don’t destroy the system.”

She stared, thinking it over.

Dryden nodded to the work counter. “We’ll take the computer they were using to access it. We’ll cut the data line where it comes through the wall. There’s no one left alive who knows about any of this stuff. If someone later on tries plugging into that line, they won’t know what to make of it. They won’t have the software these guys had. But none of that matters anyway, because nobody will try plugging into it.”

Claire looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“You’ll see.”

“But the system itself,” Marnie said, “buried somewhere on this property … we just leave it running? That’s why these guys didn’t know we were on the way?”

“They looked pretty surprised to me.”

They hauled the computer up to the garage and put it in the Suburban. They gathered all the paperwork and took that up, too. They made a fast, thorough sweep of the guesthouse and found three other crude models of the original machine, hooked up to tablet computers, like the one Claire had first shown Dryden. They took all three to the Suburban.

They wiped their prints from the doorknobs and light switches, then raised the garage door again and drove across to the main residence. Inside, in the bedroom Dryden and Marnie had slept in, they found Claire’s machine where they’d left it on the nightstand. They wiped their prints from the obvious places they could think of in the main house, but only as an abundance of caution; neither house on the property was going to yield a hell of a lot of evidence to the authorities.

Dryden entered the big garage the red SUV had come from, and found both things he wanted within thirty seconds. The first was a remote for the front gate, clipped to the visor of a BMW convertible in the second stall. The second was a five-gallon container of gasoline.

Three minutes later Marnie was at the wheel of the Suburban again, Claire riding shotgun. Dryden crossed the motor court to his Explorer. Passing the back end, he saw Dale Whitcomb’s blood still covering the license plate. It was dried brown and flaking at the edges. It looked like dirt. If there were security cameras with coverage of this driveway, no one would ever be able to identify the vehicle’s owner. That was assuming any data from a video system would survive — which was assuming a lot.

He started the Explorer, nosed around in a sharp turn, and followed Marnie down the driveway. He glanced in the rearview mirror as they rolled toward the opening gate. At every main-floor window of both houses, flames capered.

They reached El Sedero just after six in the evening. They skirted the town and drove into the hills a few miles inland. Ten minutes later they parked the Explorer and the Suburban on an overgrown two-track way up in the evergreens, the land pitching steeply up on one side and steeply down on the other, toward a brush-choked pond thirty feet below. They positioned the Suburban nose-first at the edge of the dropoff.

They destroyed the computer they had taken from the guesthouse. They pried open its case with a tire iron and smashed everything inside. They left the pieces scattered on the Suburban’s floor.

They hauled the four machines out and set them in the dirt — the three from the guesthouse, and then Claire’s machine, last in line.

They took turns on the first three machines, using the tire iron. They smashed through the outer cases, shattered and snapped the delicate components inside — circuit boards and strangely shaped arrays of wire and plastic and even glass.

Claire went third, and when she’d finished, she sat crouched there, still holding the tire iron.

With her free hand she shoved the wreckage aside, and dragged the last machine in front of her. Her machine.

Dryden raised his gaze and traded a look with Marnie. Claire looked up at both of them, then unlatched the plastic case and opened it.

She stared down on the machine. The red LED glow shone out from inside it, stark in the shadows of the overhanging pines.

Claire lowered the steel tool until it rested on the machine’s surface. She dragged it lightly across the slats where the light bled through. In the still air, Dryden could just make out the low cyclic hum from inside the thing.

With her other hand, Claire reached down and switched on the tablet computer. She tapped the icon to open the machine’s control program. Four simple buttons: ON, OFF, RECORD, STOP.

She pressed ON.

The cyclic hum sped up. The red glow turned green.

Static. Soft and steady. It might have been the sound of wind pressing through the boughs.

Then it faltered. Receded. A woman’s voice came through.

“—spokesperson for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department said there is no suspect at this time. The victim’s father told reporters—”

Claire swung the tire iron down onto the machine as hard as she could.