Only to Die Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘You and I will, in nine minutes. Actually more like eight and a half.’

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

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

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

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

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

  Again the man went silent.

  ‘Proof of life,’ Dryden said. ‘Put Claire on the phone.’

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

  Dryden felt his own skin tighten and go cold.

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

  Unless they had killed her.

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

  ‘I can’t put her on,’ the man said.

  ‘Is she there with you?’

  ‘She is, but –’

  ‘Then put her on the phone.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is she right there? In the room?’

  ‘She’s close by.’

  That sounded vague. Which was good. Maybe.

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

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

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

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

  ‘Are you there?’ Dryden asked.

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

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

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

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

  Chapter Forty-two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Dryden?’ the guy shouted.

  Dryden nodded.

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

  ‘Hello?’ Dryden said.

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

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ Dryden asked.

  ‘Claire got away from her captors,’ Marnie said. ‘At least we think so.’

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

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

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

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

  Part Four

  * * *

  SATURDAY, 9.10 P.M.–SUNDAY, 4.00 A.M.

  Chapter Forty-three

  The chopper flew for just under two hours. It carried Dryden northwest over the Mojave, crossed the Sierra Nevada, 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:

  Hey Sam its Jodi do you need me to stop over and give the cat her meds this week? I’m free today, but will be tending bar at Bond’s starting noon tomorrow. See you.

  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.’