Signal (28 page)

“We’ll see,” Dryden said. “But that’s not the problem I was talking about. You have a bigger problem than that. And I wasn’t kidding when I said it’s interesting.”

“Tell me,” the man said. There was an edge of sarcasm in his tone, though it sounded just a bit forced. Like a front.

“I spent some time in the military,” Dryden said. “I ended up in a pretty unorthodox little unit. A lot of what we did was off the books, not all of it strictly legal. The nature of the work required us to have unusual ways to communicate. We had duress codes, and nonduress codes. We had a whole cobbled-together language only we knew. And we all still know it.”

The man on the phone waited.

“A lot of our codes were just people’s names we made up,” Dryden said. “So if I got a text message from one of my guys saying, ‘Did you hear about Dennis Woods?’ it meant there was new intel expected soon. Or someone might send one saying, ‘I heard Aaron Newhouse was in town,’ which really meant,
Drop everything and come talk to me, right now
.”

“Okay.”

“One of the guys from my unit ended up with the state police out here in California,” Dryden said. “He oversees those alerts they plaster all over the TV and radio sometimes—flood warnings, emergency broadcast system notices, abducted kids.”

So far, every word of this was true. That was about to change, but the man on the phone would have no way of knowing.

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 guys 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 Nevadas, 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.