Signal (24 page)

“Christ…” Dryden said.

Marnie looked at him. “What?”

Dryden only shook his head. Then he took the plastic case and the binder from Whitcomb’s hands. He gave them to Marnie.

“Can you take those and buckle up in the passenger seat? We don’t have much time.”

She stared. “What are you going to do?”

“Please just do it,” Dryden said.

She hesitated another second. Maybe she knew what was about to happen—more or less—and maybe she could have stomached seeing it. Dryden had no doubt she’d seen worse things before. In her line of work, she might have seen even worse things than he had.

But he didn’t want her to see this. He didn’t want anyone to see it.

“Please,” he said.

Marnie stared—then nodded and stood with the case and binder. She took them around the back of the Explorer to the passenger side.

Dryden turned his attention on Whitcomb.

Still breathing, just audibly.

Still unconscious.

Never coming back.

Dryden grabbed a fistful of the man’s shirt, below the collar. He dragged him around to the back end of the Explorer, then lifted him so that his back was positioned against the license plate.

Still breathing. Barely.

Dryden drew the Beretta from his waistband, put it to Whitcomb’s chest and fired. Four times. The hollowpoints made small holes on the way in, and huge ones coming out. They ripped through the back of Whitcomb’s shirt, spraying a thick sheet of blood onto the license plate and the metal around it.

Dryden dropped the body and ran for the driver’s door.

Twenty seconds later, doing 70, they crashed through the roller gate, fishtailed, and then accelerated north on the access road.

A single, wildly aimed shot hit the vehicle a second later. It skipped like a stone off the front corner of the hood, denting the metal. That was it. In another ten seconds they were beyond any possible range.

*   *   *

They got back on I-5, northbound. No goal at the moment but distance. Wind roared through the vehicle, through the blown-out front windows on each side.

For five minutes neither spoke.

The roadbed caught and scattered the hard sunlight, rendering it painful.

“He would have told you to do it,” Marnie said. “Almost
did
tell you. There wasn’t any other choice.”

Dryden kept his eyes on the road.

Marnie turned to him. “Focus on what’s next. What are we going to do?”

Dryden didn’t answer right away. He thought of something Claire had said: that she had arranged security for Whitcomb and his family, a couple years back. In these past few days, when everything had gone bad, he must have hidden his family away somewhere safe. Someplace where, right now, they were waiting for him to come back.

“Hey,” Marnie said.

Dryden blinked. Glanced at her.

She indicated the machine and the binder of e-mails. “He died to get these back. It can’t be for nothing. What’s our next move?”

Dryden nodded. He exhaled hard and pushed away every thought that wasn’t practical.

“Hayden Eversman,” he said. “The guy they want to stop from being president in nine years.”

“But who they’re not killing in the present.”

Dryden nodded. “They plan to kill him eventually, but they’re afraid to try it now. There has to be a reason for that. I’d love to know what it is.”

“So would I.”

“Then let’s find out where he is in 2015.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Where Hayden Eversman was, at that moment, was a hundred and twenty miles north and west of them, watching his four-year-old daughter try to put a pink cape on a shih tzu. The daughter’s name was Brooke; Eversman and his wife had chosen it carefully after two weeks of considering every option they could think of. The shih tzu’s name was Meatball; Brooke herself had picked that one, after five seconds of considering probably zero alternatives.

So far, Meatball didn’t seem to grasp that the cape was supposed to go around his neck. As a result, the spectacle playing out on the living room carpet looked like the least dangerous bullfight in the history of the world.

Above the dog and the girl, the TV on the wall was tuned to C-SPAN. The current broadcast was sedate, even by C-SPAN’s standards: live coverage of oral arguments before the Supreme Court. Because cameras weren’t allowed in the courtroom, the coverage was simply an audio feed spruced up with still photos. Whenever someone was talking, that person’s name and picture filled the screen.

Softly, so that his daughter wouldn’t hear, Eversman said, “These assholes should have bowls of tea leaves on their shelves instead of law books.”

He was leaning back against the kitchen island that bordered the living room, watching the TV.

Nearby, seated on a stool and looking over documents spread on the island’s marble countertop, was Eversman’s business partner, Neil Chatham.

“They do seem to come in with their minds already made up,” Chatham said.

“Made up for them.” Eversman pushed off from the island and crossed to the sliding doors that overlooked the pool and the grounds.

He was forty-one years old and had been in the venture capital business since his late twenties. He’d had more ups than downs in that time; his net worth at the moment hovered around the three-quarters-of-a-billion mark.

It could have been higher by now—a hell of a lot higher—if he hadn’t limited himself to the world of renewable energy, though he didn’t regret that decision in the least.

On TV, Justice Scalia interrupted one of the lawyers and started droning on about a case from thirty years back,
Fenley v. Oregon,
which was about—well, what the hell did it matter what it was about? It was another tea leaf. One of tens of thousands of cases that a justice could pluck out of the stockpile to prop up a premade decision.

Eversman wasn’t directly tied to today’s case—in the sense that he had no stake in any of the parties involved.

Yet the outcome would affect him. No question about that. It would also affect everyone in America who felt like putting solar panels on their roofs, and the effect would not be positive.

It would be plenty positive for other people: enterprises that had tens of billions of dollars tied up in pipelines and tanker ships and refineries. For them, it would be time to pop open bottles of wine that cost more than most people made in a year.

Not that the Court’s decision was going to surprise them. Or anyone. It was going to be five to four. In fact, it already was, in every practical sense.

Why even have the arguments?

From the island, without looking up from his array of documents, Chatham said, “It’s Washington, Hayden. What are working stiffs like us going to do about it?”

Eversman didn’t answer, but he thought about the question. The fact was, he’d been thinking about it for a very long time.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Dryden saw the problem five seconds after they walked into the Coalinga Township Library. It hit him as abruptly as the rush of cold air they encountered when the automatic doors sucked open.

“Dammit,” he whispered.

“What?”

They were still moving, slowing now, crossing the broad entryway that opened up to the central space beyond. Dryden stopped.

The library was essentially one giant room, sixty by sixty feet, with white stucco columns here and there supporting the ceiling. The different sections of the place—reading area, bookshelves, periodical racks, computer terminals—were all visible from anywhere in the room. And the place was packed, 3:10 on a Saturday afternoon.

“What is it?” Marnie asked.

Dryden swept his eyes over the space. There might have been fifty people or more. Two-thirds of them were kids. Of the adults, most seemed to be there with their children, but more than a few of the grown-ups were by themselves. There were men browsing the shelves or the magazine racks, or seated at computers. They wore jeans or shorts, with their shirts untucked and hanging loose. Any one of them might have a gun stuffed into his waistband—Dryden had one of the Berettas in his.

In any case, potential threats weren’t limited to the crowd. Dryden turned in place and took in the glass front wall of the building, facing onto the parking lot. Dozens of vehicles out there. Many with tinted windows. Anyone could be in one of them, watching the interior of the library.

“Hayden Eversman’s not a very common name,” Dryden said.

“No, it’s not. That’s good. If the guy in the articles was named Robert Smith, we’d never figure out who he is in 2015.”

“It’s bad, too, though,” Dryden said. “It makes it easy for someone to monitor Web traffic to watch for text searches of that name.”

Marnie seemed to consider it.

“We should assume the Group has the resources to do that,” Dryden said. “They were smart enough to catch Brennan, whatever kind of snooping he would have done. He was going to trip some kind of alarm, at some point in the future.”

“And the Group found out about it today,” Marnie said.

“Yes.”

Marnie shut her eyes for a second, exhaled slowly. “Okay. So he dug into some account of theirs, and a flag went up, and they found out. Sorry, he
would have
dug into some account. But personal accounts are one thing—you really think these people could have flags for Google searches?”

“For certain keywords, maybe,” Dryden said. “You’re an FBI agent, you must know about monitoring ISPs for suspicious activity. People looking up how to make nerve gas, that kind of thing.”

Marnie nodded. “We have software for it. I guess the Group could, too. But why would they flag that name?”

“Because they know Curtis stole their e-mails. And they should assume anyone he met with has read through them, and seen those articles about Eversman. Googling him would be an obvious move, on our part. And a predictable one.”

Marnie thought it over. Her eyes went past him, tracking slowly along the row of computers nearby.

Dryden said, “We might be easy for their system to spot, if we Google that name. There might be nobody else running searches for it these days. Eversman doesn’t get elected for another nine years. How many people were looking up Barack Obama in 1999?”

“If they really are monitoring it,” Marnie said, “and we sit down and do a search…”

“Then they would have known about it hours ago. Whoever they sent to kill us would already be here right now. They’d probably know the exact time of the search, and which computer would be used, based on its ISP address. Someone in here, or in the parking lot, would be watching that computer and waiting to see who comes along and sits down at it.”

Dryden stood staring at the computers, thinking it all through. Would the Group have sent people to both the scrapyard and this library, two locations within a few miles of each other, in the span of an hour or less? Why not? Multiple leads, multiple responses.

He rubbed his eyes.

“What do you think?” Marnie asked.

“I think Claire’s going to die if I don’t find her, and I think if the tables were turned, she’d take this risk for me.” He looked at Marnie. “But that doesn’t mean you should have to risk it, too. I’ll take a shot at it myself. I’ll try to play it safe—just Eversman’s last name and whatever keywords seem worth a try. Wait near an exit. If it goes bad, just get out. Get the machine and get away, okay?”

He took his keys from his pocket and pressed them into her hand.

For a second she made no move to take them. Then she simply nodded.

*   *   *

Dryden browsed a table of old books on sale for a quarter apiece while Marnie made her way to the shelves off to the left side of the room. There was a fire exit over there. Dryden waited another minute and then turned to the computers, twenty feet away.

It crossed his mind to wonder if choosing one at random would make any difference, in terms of faking out whoever might be watching, but the idea fell apart almost at once. There was no way to pull a feint here: Whichever computer he chose, that would be the one the Group learned about, hours before. Cause and effect, presented by M. C. Escher.

He thought about it another five seconds and then gave it up and walked straight to the nearest computer. He pulled the chair out and—

A girl in the reading area screamed, and someone shoved a table hard, scraping its legs on the floor.

Dryden spun fast, his eyes locking like gun sights on the commotion, even as his hand shot for the Beretta hidden under his shirt—

It was just kids screwing around.

A ten-year-old boy had scared a teenaged girl with a picture in a science book: a full-page blowup of an insect’s face.

Her cheeks flushed, the girl straightened her chair and table back out, then swatted the kid on top of his head.

Dryden turned and spotted Marnie among the shelves. She was staring at him, her face tense, her own hand just dropping back from under her coat, where her Glock was holstered.

She held his stare for another second—and then she walked out from the shelves into the open space of the library. She cleared her throat and spoke loudly enough for the entire room to hear:

“Excuse me, everyone?”

Chair legs scraped. Fifty-plus heads turned toward her.

“Sorry to bother you,” Marnie said, “but can anyone here tell me who Hayden Eversman is? I’ve got it stuck in my head and I can’t remember where I heard it.”

Most of the crowd just looked annoyed. An older woman who looked like she might be the librarian stood up, maybe meaning to give Marnie a scolding, but a male voice spoke up first.

“He’s a green energy guy.”

Dryden and Marnie both turned. The speaker was a college kid with long hair tied back in a ponytail, standing among the shelves Marnie had just come from. He had answered her without looking up from the book he was paging through. He looked supremely calm.

“Are you sure the name is Hayden Eversman?” Marnie asked.

The guy nodded, eyes still on his book. “I read about him in
Wired
.”

“Thanks,” Marnie said.