Signal (14 page)

The system can listen to its own information coming back from ten and a half hours ahead in time … then turn around and send that information to itself ten and a half hours in the past. Like a daisy chain. And there’s no real limit to how far the chain can stretch.

Did you ever plug a video camera into a TV, then point the camera at the screen? You get that tunnel of screens reaching away into infinity. This is like that, but the tunnel reaches through time instead.

It works, Claire. They really did this. The setup for it is there in their programming code, and their e-mails reference it over and over, behind all the careful language.

I know about at least two early trial runs. The first one was simple. They used the system to learn the closing value of the Dow Jones five days in the future. They ended up being dead-on.

The second trial had a longer reach: just shy of ten years. They told the system to give them the high temperature in Des Moines, Iowa, for July 1, 2025. Eighty-nine degrees, it said. I guess we’ll find out someday.

Far away across the parking lot, in the direction of the beach and the boardwalk, kids’ voices shouted and laughed. Something about a Frisbee. Dryden brushed his hair off his forehead. He felt his hand just perceptibly shake.

The trial runs ended almost three weeks ago. Since then, they’ve already begun using this long-term function for real. They have something planned, Claire. I don’t know what it is, but it has to be large-scale. It’s on a timeline of years. You’ll get a sense of it in their e-mails, if you read enough of them. These people, the Group … they have some kind of agenda, some ideology driving them. There are no specifics about it in their messages, but the general tone is hard to miss. They want something, and they’re going to use this technology to get it.

The parts of it that they’ve set in motion so far are small components, I think. Like they’re still testing the waters. But even with these little steps, they’ve demonstrated what an advantage their system gives them.

The way it works is, they can set a chain of events in motion (maybe paying certain people to do things, maybe writing up detailed strategies and committing resources to them), and then they search the future for news stories to see how it will turn out. And if it doesn’t turn out the way they want … they just change their plan in the present. Then they check the future again to see how that version would work. They can change it over and over, until they see a future they’re satisfied with. It’s like correcting artillery fire onto a target, based on watching where the shells are hitting … except their spotters are looking across years, not miles.

I know for a fact they’ve had people killed. (On top of killing everyone at Bayliss, and trying to kill us.) What I mean is they’re seeing future news reports about politicians or journalists who get in their way, even years from now … and they’re killing those people in the present time. We’re talking about people who don’t even necessarily work in those fields yet, or even realize that they someday will. They’re being murdered now over things they would have eventually done. This is really happening, Claire.

Movement at the edge of Dryden’s vision. He glanced up. A couple in their twenties walked to a minivan, five cars over. He stared at them without quite seeing them. His mind was far away, trying to grasp the scale of the situation Curtis had described.

After a few seconds he dropped his eyes to the letter again.

There was more to it. A lot more.

He turned the page and kept reading.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Marnie was on the freeway, passing Thousand Oaks, thirty minutes yet from El Sedero.

She had her phone in its dash mount, switched on. The map application was open, showing not her own location but that of Sam Dryden—the location of his Explorer, anyway: a little red thumbtack symbol currently positioned in what looked like a strip-mall parking lot.

Dryden had been there since Marnie had left the federal building.

She had the radio on. She flipped through the stations, one every second or two. She caught the tail end of a U2 song that gave way to a news report: the latest on the Miracle in the Mojave. The whole mediasphere had begun calling it that about two hours ago. Now as Marnie listened, she heard a sound bite that had become the go-to clip for all the networks. It was Leah Swain’s mother, being interviewed at the hospital where she’d just been reunited with her daughter. Through tears that cracked her voice almost beyond discernibility, she had a message for the man and woman who had rescued her little girl.

Thank you. Whoever you are.

Then someone—maybe a reporter, but more likely a random onlooker—yelled,
Do you think they were angels?

There was no answer to that, because by then—as Marnie had seen in the televised version of this clip—Leah’s mother had turned to go back into the hospital.

“Let’s just go see,” Marnie said.

She pushed the Crown Vic to 90 and changed lanes.

*   *   *

She was five minutes from El Sedero when the little red thumbtack on the map started moving. She watched the phone’s display in glances as she drove: Dryden left the strip-mall parking lot and headed east on a surface street, away from the oceanfront. He crossed under the 101 freeway, then turned onto the northbound on-ramp, accelerating and merging in. The map screen automatically scaled out to a wider zoom as Dryden sped along, moving up the coast toward Santa Barbara.

A data tag popped up next to the thumbtack, showing Dryden’s speed: just above the posted limit. Marnie still had the Crown Vic doing 90. Watching the map, she did the rough math in her head: She would overtake him within five or ten minutes. Well, she’d catch up, anyway. She had no desire to overtake him. Better to hang back half a mile, just in visual range.

*   *   *

Dryden had his windows all the way down, the ocean air rushing through the Explorer’s cab. As he drove, the last portion of Curtis’s letter cycled through his thoughts, key passages standing out from the rest:

Dale Whitcomb is alive, Claire. He and I were in touch for a few hours, that last day, when everything went to hell—the day he left the machine in a safe place for you to find. I know he also left a phone number for you, along with the machine, but I’m guessing you got no answer when you tried to call him. When the Group’s people attacked Bayliss Labs that day, Whitcomb got away, but he had to leave behind everything, including the phone you could have reached him on. He just wasn’t expecting so aggressive a move, so quickly.

He did manage to contact me after that, just for a few minutes. Even that was a risk (to both him and me, I’m sure), but he had to talk to me.

Whitcomb said he knows who these people are, Claire. Who the Group really are. He said there are things he never shared with us, that he didn’t think mattered. He wants to tell us everything now.

He says there may be a way to go after these guys, off the record. A way to shut them all down in one shot, and possibly even erase this technology in the process. Everyone who’s known about it would be dead, at that point, except the handful of us—and we could take it to our graves.

Whitcomb asked me to meet him three days after that last call—meaning today, Saturday. He would spend the time in between trying to contact people on that list he was making—the powerful people he meant to show the machine to in the first place. He says some of them have the means to help us make a move against the Group.

The meeting is at 3:00 this afternoon, in a little town called Avenal, just off I-5 up in Central Valley. There’s an old scrapyard outside town. That’s the place. Whitcomb picked it at random as we spoke.

My job for the three days was to find you, Claire. We need the machine you have, or else the people Whitcomb wants to recruit will never believe any of this. They need to see it for themselves, just like we did.

I hope I’ll be telling you all this in person, but if all I can do is get this information to you indirectly, then I hope it’s enough. Please get to that meeting, and bring the machine. Good luck, Claire.

Curtis

It was 10:30 in the morning now. Four and a half hours until the meeting in the scrapyard. Dryden could reach Avenal by then without any trouble.

He watched the freeway rolling by, the white line segments coming at him like distinct thoughts.

Whitcomb.

The Group.

He says there may be a way to go after these guys, off the record.

A way to shut them all down in one shot.

Dryden saw the delicate thread again. The one connecting himself to Claire. Wire-taut under a world of strain.

But holding.

*   *   *

He felt the edge of weariness creeping in on him as he drove. He did the math: thirty-some hours now without sleep, and probably twelve without food. Five miles farther on, an off-ramp sign advertised a McDonald’s. He took the exit and hit the drive-through, then parked in an Albertson’s lot next door, with a double order of sausage biscuits and hash brown patties and a large coffee.

He reached to turn on the Explorer’s radio out of habit, then stopped himself. He leaned over and grabbed the hard plastic case instead, lifted it onto the passenger seat, and opened it.

He turned on the tablet computer and pulled up the program that controlled the machine. The machine itself was off, silent except for the low cyclic hum from deep inside it.

Dryden tapped the
ON
button on the tablet screen. He heard the machine’s hum speed up and change pitch, as it had done when Claire had switched it on before. A second later the computer’s speakers began playing the familiar static. Dryden heard something trying to break through it right away: some ’80s song he couldn’t quite put a name to. A few seconds later it was gone, lost in the hiss.

Somehow, it felt right to have the thing turned on.

No—that wasn’t quite true. Dryden thought about it a few seconds longer, then understood the feeling better: It wasn’t that it felt right having the thing on, it was that it felt wrong having it off.

His mind kept going back to the four girls in the trailer. If Claire hadn’t been listening to this thing last night—

All at once he pictured her, sitting at the wheel of her Land Rover, dark hollows under her eyes after three days of hardly any sleep.

Maybe this machine was like a drug, once it got in your head. Something you couldn’t let go of. You would never know when you might hear about a car accident that killed a mother and two little kids—three people still alive and well, somewhere out there in the here and now.

Maybe Claire had saved other lives before the trailer last night. There were all kinds of bad things reported on the radio, around the clock.

Three days without sleep.

Had she just been unable to turn away from the damn thing?

Knowing what she might miss by five minutes?

Dryden listened to the steady hissing from the speakers and thought of metal bars and tiny hands gripping them, and lighter fluid and blue flame and smoke and screams.

He pushed the images away—but left the machine on.

*   *   *

Marnie saw the Explorer from two hundred yards away. She pulled into the parking lot of a Pizza Hut that bordered the much larger Albertson’s lot, and parked the Crown Vic. She took a pair of binoculars from her center console compartment and fixed them on Dryden’s vehicle.

He was sitting at the wheel, eating a little breakfast sandwich—probably fast food from the McDonald’s right next door. His gaze stayed trained mostly through the windshield, out past the edge of the parking lot, to the sharp blue water of the Pacific below. The morning haze had nearly gone, leaving a choppy surface that glittered in the early light.

Marnie’s phone rang in its dash mount. She lowered the binoculars and answered the call on speaker.

Don Sumner’s voice came through. “I’ve got something you want to hear. Might be about your guy.”

“Let’s have it.”

*   *   *

Dryden felt the coffee taking the edge off the weariness. If that was a placebo effect, he didn’t care.

Way out on the ocean, maybe five miles offshore, a giant container ship crept by. It was moving south, gradual as the minute hand of a clock at this range, maybe heading for the Port of Long Beach.

*   *   *

“I’m looking at a story about a dead cop in the Mojave,” Sumner said. “About an hour’s drive from the trailer where the little girls were being held.”

“That’s a long way,” Marnie said. “Who says there’s a connection?”

“No one, but the cop’s dash cam says the cruiser was approaching two parked vehicles off the roadside. One of which looks like a Ford Explorer, recent model.”

“Do we have a plate number?”

“The cop didn’t get close enough for that before he was killed.”

Marnie was silent, still watching Dryden.

“What I’m saying,” Sumner said, “is there’s probably enough here to bring Dryden in for questioning, if you want to.”

“I’ve got prints on a junked washing machine at one scene,” Marnie said, “and a vehicle that kind of looks like his at another. That’s pretty thin.”

“We don’t need enough to charge him with a crime. I’ve seen someone detained as a person of interest on less than this.”

Marnie lowered the binoculars. Even without them, she could see Dryden pretty well.

“I can have the assistant U.S. attorney on the phone in thirty seconds,” Sumner said. “He can fax me the signed warrant in another minute or two. You’d be free to arrest Dryden yourself at that point.”

“I’m not ready to drag him in over the trailer thing,” Marnie said. “Not on the record.”

“Then drag him in over the cop in the desert. It’s only for questioning. What’s the downside?”

A dark green Ford Fusion rolled past Marnie and coasted into the lot Dryden was parked in. It pulled into a space thirty yards behind him, two men up front, the back windows tinted.