Only to Die Again

  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:

  Ayla, take Brooke and get out of the house right now. Pick a hotel in town. Don’t talk to anyone. I will call and explain soon.

  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:

 
EXAMPLE QUERY: (YEAR)(MONTH)(DATE)

  search term goes here

  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:

  Mark Squires is 31 as of Apr 10, 2026 (date of Newsweek interview)

  Would have been 20 as of this past Apr 10

  Attended Ohio State (NYT interview)

  2 students with this name enrolled there now

  Lived in Atlanta during grade school age (NYT interview)

  Figure out which Mark Squires at OSU used to live in Atlanta

  ‘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:

  1/4 CHANCE IT’S HER

  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 sma
shed 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.

  Acknowledgments

  As always, there are more people to thank than I could ever list, but here goes. My agent, Janet Reid, for much-appreciated encouragement, patience, and advice during the multiple drafts this book went through. My editor, Keith Kahla, whose guidance sharpened the story and made it better at every pass. Huge thanks to Hannah Braaten and so many others at St Martin’s Press and Minotaur Books: Sally Richardson, Andy Martin, Paul Hochman, Hector DeJean, India Cooper, Jennifer Enderlin, Kelsey Lawrence, Melissa Hastings, Rafal Gibek, Mary Beth Roche, Robert Allen, Brant Janeway, Kerry Nordling, Marta Fleming, Kelley Ragland, Martin Quinn, Jeff Capshew, Brian Heller, Christine Jaeger, and Lisa Tomasello.