Only to Die Again

  Before that, she hadn’t seemed concerned at all that someone might be watching them.

  It made no sense.

  How had the random arrival of a patrol car, one that had damn near driven past without incident, tipped her off to the ambush?

  It wasn’t as if the cruiser’s headlights had given the attackers away. Claire had not turned her attention to any one spot. She had seemed to respond on a more fundamental level: The very fact that the cop car had shown up, that the officer was about to stop and question them, had somehow told her those men were out there.

  Dryden considered it, and got nowhere.

  After a minute he turned his attention to a more basic question: How had those men set up the ambush in the first place?

  How had they found the spot where Claire had left that phone? There was zero chance they had tracked the phone itself. If Claire Dunham wanted to be electronically invisible, she could do it in her sleep. Data security was her world. Big companies – tech companies – paid her large sums to teach them about it.

  She had purchased the disposable phone so she could be untrackable. She would have paid cash for it in some store she’d chosen at random. And before she stashed the phone near that tree in the desert, she would have detached its battery to keep it from pinging nearby towers. She would have done that before she got within thirty miles of the place where she hid the thing.

  The shooters hadn’t found that spot by tracking the phone.

  So how had they done it?

  Dryden thought about it as the minutes passed. Nothing came to him.

  The plastic case still lay in the passenger footwell. The machine was still turned on inside it, hissing.

  Dryden stared at it. Something about it nagged at him. Some loose thread, trailing from the tangle of things Claire had shown him, though he couldn’t seem to place it.

  He picked up the case, set it on the console, and opened it.

  The tablet computer’s display was still lit up, showing the bare-bones program that controlled the strange machine.

  Ten seconds passed. The static faltered. A twangy voice and a steel guitar faded in, then back out.

  Dryden tapped the OFF button on the screen, and the hissing cut out. He closed the program and tapped the only other icon he could see: the file folder of audio clips.

  As soon as the list of files opened, he saw the loose end that had been bugging him.

  Right below the clip Claire had played earlier, about the burned trailer and the dead girls, there was one last audio file.

  Something she must have recorded later on.

  Dryden traced his finger over the time stamps for each file; they were displayed on the right side of the screen.

  Claire had recorded the news clip about the girls at 9.47 last night. That was a little over two hours before she had called Dryden.

  The time stamp on the final clip read 11.56.

  Ten minutes before she’d dialed his number.

  I had no intention to involve you in all this, Claire had said when they were parked in the desert. Not for something random like the guy in the trailer, and not for the rest of this, either. I never meant to drag you into it at all.

  Then why did you?

  I didn’t, actually.

  Dryden tapped the last recording. The audio app opened, and the clip began to play.

  Light static, already receding. A man speaking in the steady cadence of a newscaster:

  ‘… just getting this now, CHP has released the name of the victim in that homicide from earlier this morning. The incident, a shooting, taking place outside a residence just after 7.30 a.m. Neighbors heard gunfire and afterward saw a black sedan and a white SUV leave the scene, though police have said nobody reported a license number. The victim is a resident of El Sedero, a thirty-eight-year-old male named Samuel Dryden.’

  Part Two

  * * *

  SATURDAY, 5.30 A.M.–12.00 P.M.

  Chapter Eleven

  Dryden listened to it three more times. He found himself parsing the details, breaking it down logically, and finally just letting the thing hit him in full.

  His death, rendered in a sound bite that people would skip past on their drives to the mall.

  His whole future, everything he ever wanted to do, and to be – all of it gone, two hours from now.

  His death.

  He let it sink in just that deep and then forced himself back into logic.

  His death was not going to happen. Claire had contacted him to prevent it. She had heard that clip when she was already en route to handle the trailer situation by herself.

  Dryden closed the audio player and the file listing. He switched off the tablet and closed the case and sat staring out the windshield for a full minute.

  He believed what Claire had said: that she hadn’t meant to involve him in any of this, and yet –

  What were the chances that his death two hours from now was unrelated to her problems?

  Questions, rising and falling in his thoughts.

  Possible answers, way out at the edge of his contemplation.

  He looked at the dashboard clock. 5.34. He could be in El Sedero by 7.15 if he risked a speeding ticket.

  Traffic was light on the freeway. He set cruise control to ten over the limit and focused again on the previous hour.

  Certain logistics came to mind: Was it safe to be driving his own vehicle right now? It would only be a matter of time before Claire’s enemies started looking for him. They would realize something had gone wrong – that the men bringing the machine back to them weren’t responding to phone calls, that the prisoner they had been transporting was now unaccounted for, and must have the machine in his possession.

  They would want to find him, just as badly as they had wanted to find Claire.

  One difference: They didn’t know who he was.

  They had not learned his name by way of the events in the Mojave. Of the four attackers, only one had seen Dryden’s identity: the man who had taken his wallet. That man had not spoken the name aloud to the others, nor had he called the information in to anyone. Now that man was dead, and the wallet was safely back in Dryden’s pocket.

  Neither was there any official record for Claire’s enemies to search. The doomed patrol car had never been close enough to see Dryden’s plate number, and no other cruiser had come within a mile of him as he’d left the area. There was no way the cops could tie him to anything.

  Therefore Claire’s enemies couldn’t know his name, if they hadn’t somehow known it before the events in the desert. Which didn’t seem to be the case. The four attackers sure as hell hadn’t known who he was.

  There were other ways, of course, that these people could try to get a fix on him – to guess who Claire might have turned to for help, in a jam. They would look for personal and professional contacts of hers, going back years. Dryden’s name would appear in both categories. There would be old military files showing them serving together, and Claire’s phone records would show calls made to Dryden’s house and cell over the years since.

  Except none of those documents would be easy to get to. Maybe impossible.

  The military unit Dryden and Claire had served in had been about as secret as anything in the United States government, in part because much of what they’d done had been illegal. There might be records on paper somewhere, in a safe room underground in DC – or more likely in Langley, Virginia. There was close to zero chance any information on that unit existed in a computer database with a physical link to the outside world. Someone who golfed with the president might be able to figure it out. Anyone else would be out of luck.

  Claire’s phone records would be even harder to find, if they existed at all. In her work in the private sector these past eight years, she had made enemies of a number of tech-savvy people with the means to do harm. As a result, she’d had every reason to make her digital footprints hard to follow. Dryden had seen for himself, on a few occasions, the lengths she went to: t
he specialized e-mail and phone services she used, the records encrypted or outright purged on a regular basis.

  The people now holding Claire would do everything they could to find the unknown man she had been with in the Mojave. They might even see the news about a man and woman saving four girls in a trailer, an hour earlier, and connect the dots. The coverage would probably dwell on the near-impossible nature of the rescue, which would be a hell of a giveaway to Claire’s enemies.

  But it wouldn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know about him: unidentified male, white, average height and build.

  For the time being, driving his Explorer seemed safe enough. If that changed, he would react accordingly.

  He rolled into El Sedero at twelve past seven. The streets were mostly empty, the diners and coffee shops along the waterfront just waking up. The ocean was slate gray with stark white breakers coming in, its horizon blurred out to nothing by a marine fog that hadn’t yet burned off.

  His house was right up against the beach, a one-story saltbox with cedar siding worn gray over the years. He had been born and raised in Los Angeles, his childhood divided between a high-rise condo in Century City and a boarding school in Oxnard. He’d become good friends with a girl at that school whose family lived out here in El Sedero, and he’d been taken with the town from the first time he saw it. Years and years later, toward the end of his time in the service, he had lost both of his parents in the same miserable summer. When he finally left the military, he sold the condo in the city and bought this house. He ended up reconnecting with the girl he’d known in high school – ended up marrying her soon after that, and settling into the happiest part of his life. It didn’t last very long.

  He coasted along a street two blocks in from the shore now, keeping well clear of the house. He nosed into the terraced parking lot of a used-book store, and into a space at the edge of the overlook, maybe two hundred yards up the incline from his front door. He could see the whole house from here, like a stage set viewed from high in the nosebleeds.

  7.16.

  He pulled the Remington 700 into his lap, took a dime from the console tray, and used it to unscrew the scope mounts. He set the rifle aside and kept the scope, but switched it from thermal vision to its standard optical view.

  He braced his elbows on the wheel and put his eye to the scope, and waited.

  There was a kind of pressure he’d felt only a handful of times, back in his years on the job. Times when he and his people were actually working against the clock. Maybe someone way up high received credible word from an informant – news of some very big, very bad thing in the offing, the fuse burning down on a scale of hours. When that sort of threat came along, things happened quickly. Agencies talked to each other. Phone calls passed through the back channels. Strings got pulled. There was never anything exhilarating about days like that. No good side to it at all. Just tension and dread, and the near-certainty that your phone would go off anytime: Turn on CNN, it just happened.

  He felt it now, thinking about Claire.

  How much time did he have to find her? How short was the fuse?

  He kept thinking of a day probably nine years back, downtime on some airbase, waiting for orders. He and a few of the guys had been playing baseball, and someone had goaded Claire into joining. She looked uncomfortable with it – not the game, just the interaction. Being around that many people, even though she knew them all. Her first time at bat she hit one deep into left, way past the outfielder, and made it to third. The next batter hit a single and Claire made it home, and Dryden, playing catcher, had seen up close the way she reacted to the high fives and cheers of her team.

  The image was pretty sharp in his mind, even now. How she’d tried to smile and only partly succeeded, as if the muscles in her face wouldn’t cooperate. He remembered what she’d looked like a minute later, sitting alone at the end of the bench, trying not to have a panic attack. Hands in her lap, shoulders hunched, her breathing forced and careful.

  She had spent her childhood in foster care; he knew that from her file, and from people she’d worked with before. There were reference tags to old police investigations from back when she was ten years old – abuse of some type, unspecified but long-term. Dryden had thought about all that, watching her that day, this twenty-three-year-old kid who looked like she wanted to crawl under a blanket and hide, all because people had slapped her palm and told her she’d done great. She had spent her life learning to do without those things, and couldn’t handle them now that they’d finally come along.

  Dryden had never had siblings, but he remembered thinking, in that moment, that this must be what it felt like to have a little sister. Someone you were irrationally protective of. Someone you would kill for, just because. He had felt that way about Claire Dunham ever since.

  7.21.

  He could go to the authorities. He had a few personal contacts he could talk to. A buddy from his and Claire’s old unit was a state cop here in California now, pretty high up in the ranks. But the last Dryden had heard, the guy was mostly in charge of coordinating mass media alerts: missing child notifications and emergency broadcast system reports. Technical work, without much authority to investigate anything.

  In any case, the FBI would be the right people to talk to. He could simply bite the bullet and show them the machine. Let them see it in action, and tell them everything Claire had shared with him. They wouldn’t believe him, at first. Not for a while. But they would – after ten hours and twenty-four minutes. Then everything would change. Their attention would focus like the seeker head of a guided missile.

  Maybe that would be enough.

  Maybe sending the federal government after the people who’d killed everyone at Bayliss, and who’d kidnapped Claire, would save her life. There was no question the government would go after those people, whoever they were. This kind of technology, showing up out of nowhere – the government’s first priority would be to clamp down on it, get control, contain the situation. Maybe in the course of doing that they would find Claire Dunham alive and well.

  Maybe.

  Or maybe the official action against these people would be less than perfectly choreographed. Maybe at the first sign of trouble, whoever was holding Claire would get a panicked call. Get rid of her, burn everything, get out.

  The higher you stacked a pile of maybes, the less likely it was to fall the way you wanted.

  7.24.

  Of all these considerations, one eclipsed the rest: the fact that Claire herself had chosen not to go to the authorities. For three days she had been in hiding, in possession of the machine, and she hadn’t taken it to the FBI or anyone else. She must have had her reasons.

  Dryden watched his house, the Zeiss scope ready, and waited for another course of action to present itself.

  At 7.27 a blue compact car slowed in front of his house.

  Dryden steadied the scope and trained it on the driver. A woman, middle-aged, short blond hair. She took something from her passenger seat and flung it out the window onto his driveway.

  A newspaper in an orange plastic sleeve.

  She rolled on to the next house and did the same.

  Dryden exhaled and lowered the scope. Watched the street as the delivery car made its way along, one house after another.

  At 7.29 another vehicle turned onto his street, coming on slow and tentative. A white Chevy Tahoe.

  Neighbors heard gunfire and afterward saw a black sedan and a white SUV leave the scene.

  Dryden put his eye to the scope again.

  The driver was male and young, maybe five years out of college. Short hair, light brown. Glasses. He coasted along, looking at street numbers on mailboxes.

  The kid stopped in front of Dryden’s house, then pulled in and parked and got out. He was tall and lanky, his body language full of hesitation. For five seconds he just stood there beside his SUV, his hands at his sides. He raised one and rubbed his forehead with it.

  He was wearing kha
ki pants and a gray T-shirt, which was tucked in. There was no weapon stowed in his waistband, or anywhere else Dryden could see.

  Dryden lowered the scope and scanned the street.

  Halfway down the block, a black Taurus angled into a space at the curb. Even with unaided eyes, Dryden could see the driver pick up a pair of binoculars and aim them at the white Tahoe.

  Dryden raised the Zeiss and took a better look.

  There were two men in the black Taurus. The passenger he could only see from the jaw down, but the driver’s face was in full view. A stocky guy, fortyish, dark hair cropped close to the scalp.

  Both of them watching the kid.

  Tailing the kid – that much was clear. These men had not been anywhere in the vicinity of Dryden’s house until just now, when the kid arrived. Wherever the young man had come from, the guys in the Taurus had followed him from there. They had not been watching the house itself.

  Dryden swung the scope back to his house. The kid was still standing there beside his vehicle, unsure of himself. Five seconds passed. Then he crossed to the front door and pressed the button for the doorbell. He stood waiting.

  Dryden pictured the way it would have played out if Claire had never called him. He would have been up by 6.45, because he always was. Breakfast, a bowl of cereal, would have been done by 7.00, and he would have been out of the shower and dressed by now, ready to head back up to the cottage and get started for the day. He would have answered the doorbell right away.

  The kid on the porch waited fifteen seconds and pushed the button again. He looked fidgety. He paced. He checked his watch and rang the bell a third time.

  Dryden aimed the scope at the Taurus again.

  The men inside were talking, nodding. The driver cut the wheel to the left, angling the front tires to pull away from the curb. Getting ready to accelerate toward the house, where the kid stood waiting on the porch.

  The man in the passenger seat raised a pistol and worked the slide. His free hand went to the door handle and pulled it. He pushed the passenger door open just slightly.