Authors: Patrick Lee
The cottage wasn’t his home; he could see his home from here, way down on the waterfront. This cottage was a second place he’d bought to fix up and sell—the third such purchase in the past two years, each one a little bigger as he got more comfortable with the work. It was far from the skill set his background had given him, but that was fine. He never wanted to use any of those skills again.
The wind picked up. Droplets of water shook loose from the trees and pattered the ground. Dryden stood listening for a while, then turned and went back inside.
The cottage’s living room was gutted to the studs. When he’d bought the place, it had still had its original wiring from probably the 1930s: push-button switches, knob-and-tube wires sheathed with fabric, not a ground wire to be found in the house. It was a miracle it hadn’t burned down fifty years ago. Dryden had torn everything out and redone it to code. Same story for the plumbing.
He’d reshaped the cottage’s layout while he was at it. Opened the kitchen up to the living room. Made the doorways and the windows bigger. More light. More airflow.
Tonight he’d finished putting in fiberglass insulation throughout the place. He’d worn a respirator mask and goggles, but his hair and skin had been coated with the stuff by the time he was finished. Half an hour ago he’d showered—the bathroom was gutted, too, but the new clawfoot tub was in place, with a blue tarp hung around it for a makeshift curtain—and now he was clean again, walking the rooms of the cottage, taking in the day’s effort. This morning his footsteps had echoed through the house; now they were dampened and muted, the reverb all soaked up by the fiberglass. Difference. Progress.
He wondered sometimes why more people didn’t do this kind of work. It could be a pain in the ass, no doubt—you might tear the plaster off a wall and find the uprights inside rotted, and just like that you were looking at days and days of added labor—but even so, the job had everything going for it. It had tangibility. You could see your work take shape as you went. And when you got dirty, getting clean was a literal thing. Sawdust and insulation and drywall mud on your skin—all those things came off in shower spray and went down the drain, simple as that. Not every line of work offered that kind of clarity.
He came to the master bedroom. Some of the finish material for the closet had been delivered this week: shelving and a big framed wall mirror. It was all leaning in the corner for now. He caught his reflection from the doorway. He’d been in good shape even before taking up construction, but the physical work had done him some good all the same. He liked the way he looked. Not bad for thirty-eight.
He switched off the bedroom lights and returned to the balcony. He stared away at the town again, and the ocean. He could see the strobing lights of an airliner way out over the water, probably coming in toward LAX, an hour down the coast from El Sedero. He was still watching it when his phone rang in his pocket. He took it out and looked at the display: The number was unfamiliar. Dryden tapped the answer button, forgoing cleverness for a simple hello.
A woman responded. “Are you at your place?”
Dryden recognized the voice instantly—it belonged to a friend: Claire Dunham.
Something in her tone. Urgency and adrenaline.
“I’m close to it,” Dryden said. “Why?”
“You’re in El Sedero?”
“Yeah. Why?”
For the second time, Claire seemed not to hear the question. She said, “How fast can you get to Barstow? Two hours?”
Dryden thought about it. The straightest route came to mind easily enough, and this time of night there would be hardly any traffic.
“Something like that,” Dryden said.
“I need you to meet me near there. You have to go right now. Meet me south of Barstow on the Fifteen. There’s a town called Arrowhead, just an off-ramp with a gas station. Park there and wait.”
Over the call, Dryden heard a sound fade in: the drone of heavy tires on pavement. It swelled and then tailed off to nothing in the space of a few seconds. He got the impression of Claire in her car, passing a semi on a freeway at high speed. If she was coming from her own home, up in the Bay Area, and hoping to be in Barstow by two in the morning, then she must be halfway there already.
“What the hell is this about?” Dryden asked.
When Claire answered, Dryden realized there was more than just stress in her voice. There was fear—deep and real.
“Tell you when I see you,” Claire said. “Don’t bring your phone. Thanks, Sam.”
The call ended. Dryden stood there a moment longer, replaying it in his head. The instruction about the phone implied nothing good. A cell phone had built-in GPS and was constantly updating the network with its current location. Whatever Claire Dunham had going on near Barstow, she didn’t seem to want an official record of their presence there.
Claire was not the sort of person who sought out trouble for no reason. Far from it: She was one of the few people on earth Dryden fully trusted.
You have to go right now.
Dryden stepped in off the balcony, closed the sliding door behind him, and was at the wheel of his Explorer twenty seconds later.
Arrowhead was exactly what Claire had described. An off-ramp to a crumbling two-lane that ran west to east, out of the desert and back into it. Pitch-black emptiness in both directions. Northeast, where the freeway led, the near edge of Barstow was ten miles out.
Close to the off-ramp stood a shabby diner and a Sunoco station. Only the latter was open for business, casting a milky pool of light over the scrubland around it.
Dryden took the exit at 1:58
A.M.
He rolled into the darkened lot of the diner and parked. Except for the attendant inside the station, there was no sign of life anywhere.
Dryden watched the road and the freeway, and waited.
Claire Dunham.
What could she be caught up in?
Dryden had met her ten years before, back in the life he mostly tried to forget these days. Claire had been a technician, an expert with the electronic hardware Dryden and his people had used all over the world, and in many cases she’d been right there in harm’s way with him and the others.
Lots of those who had known her—men, especially—had found her nearly impossible to read. They assumed she was cold, indifferent to others. Dryden had assumed it, too, early on, but he’d understood later that he was wrong about that. The truth was that Claire Dunham’s unreadability was a two-way street. She could make no sense of people, a fact she must have come to terms with long ago, probably way back in childhood, and at some point she’d stopped trying. Probably anyone would have, in her shoes. But she wasn’t cold. Once a stray dog had wandered into the visiting officers’ quarters at Bagram Airfield, and Claire had taken to it. The thing had looked like a burlap sack full of wrenches, its fur matted and its ribs showing. Dryden had expected it to die, despite Claire’s efforts—not just feeding it, but tracking down meds for three or four different afflictions the thing was riddled with—but he’d been wrong about that, too: The dog had lived another eight years, mostly lying around by the pool at Claire’s place up in San Jose, soaking up the sun.
A mile or more west of the freeway interchange, headlights crested a rise, coming in fast.
Dryden killed his engine and got out. He could hear the hiss of tires and the whine of a powerful vehicle running in high gear. A moment later it passed into the halo of light from the Sunoco, and Dryden recognized the outline of Claire Dunham’s Land Rover. It braked hard and came to a stop in the road close by. Claire leaned over and shoved the passenger door open and gestured fast for Dryden to get in.
Dryden had hardly done so when Claire gunned it again; within seconds they were beyond the overpass and into the darkness, following the two-lane out into the empty desert east of I-15. Claire pushed the engine to 95 miles per hour.
She didn’t look good. In the light from the instrument panel, her face gleamed with sweat, though the A/C was blasting. Her eyes—large and green, normally expressing nothing but calm—kept going to the digital clock on the console, which now showed 2:01.
Dryden could think of only a handful of times he’d ever seen her look rattled before, and those had always been awkward social situations. To see her off-balance like this bordered on unthinkable.
“What’s happening?” Dryden asked.
Claire ran a hand over her forehead, wiped it on her shirt, and gripped the wheel again.
“I couldn’t explain it right now. You’ll know pretty soon.” Her eyes went to the clock once more.
“Fuck.”
“Why don’t you give it a try?”
Instead of answering, Claire reached into the backseat and hauled a black duffel bag forward into her lap. It was already open. She reached in and withdrew a Beretta 9mm and held it out to Dryden.
“Loaded, one in the chamber,” she said.
Dryden took the weapon, checked that its safety was on, and rested it on his thigh. He glanced over and saw that Claire had a Beretta of her own already holstered in a shoulder harness.
She reached into the duffel again and took out something larger than a pistol. It was a squat black instrument the size of a lunchbox, with a minitripod folded up beneath it. Dryden recognized the thing at once; he and Claire had used them often, back in their old lives. It was a laser microphone. Its beam could measure sound vibrations on a pane of glass—you pointed it at the outside of a window, and you could hear noises from inside the building.
It was no surprise Claire owned one; she had gone into the private security business after the two of them had left the military, eight years before. She was well sought after these days, working for tech firms in Silicon Valley, securing company sites and even the homes of executives. As Dryden understood it, corporations also sometimes hired her to snoop on employees they didn’t trust, and very often their mistrust turned out to be well placed.
Claire snapped the tripod’s legs into position with one hand, getting the machine ready. At that moment the pavement gave way to gravel, and the Land Rover, doing just under 100 miles per hour, rattled and slewed violently. Stretches of chatterbumps came and went, making the whole vehicle shudder like a washing machine with a brick in it.
“Goddammit,” Claire hissed.
They came over a shallow ripple in the landscape, and Dryden saw a single point of light far ahead in the dark. A bare bulb over somebody’s porch, he guessed, maybe a mile ahead.
“There,” Claire said. Her eyes were locked on the distant light. She eased off the gas, slowing to 70 and then 50. The Land Rover’s engine scream fell away to a low growl, and Dryden understood: Claire didn’t want their approach to be heard.
Taking a hand off the wheel again, she opened a compartment on the side of the laser mic. Inside were half a dozen wireless earpieces; she gave one to Dryden, then took another for herself and fixed it to her ear. Dryden did the same.
The porch light was half a mile away now. Dryden could just make out the shape of the building it was attached to, low-slung and boxy. A mobile home. A red compact car sat in front of it.
Claire kept the Land Rover at 50 until they were three hundred yards out, then killed the headlights. Any closer and the lights’ glow might have been visible from inside the trailer, even if there were curtains over the windows.
With the beams off, the desert became ink black. It was impossible to see even the road. Claire cursed softly, took her foot off the gas, and rolled to a stop. She didn’t bother shutting off the engine; she just dumped it into park and was out the door half a second later, stepping around it and setting the microphone on the hood. Dryden got out on his own side. Already he could see the red laser dot jittering back and forth in the trailer’s distant yard, as Claire steered it.
She leaned over and sighted down the length of the instrument and brought the beam to rest on a window near the trailer’s north end. She steadied it and let go, then drew her sidearm and advanced toward the trailer at just shy of a full run. Dryden followed. Their footfalls were almost silent. They had learned long ago how to move quietly and quickly on desert ground.
Through his earpiece, Dryden began to hear noises from inside the trailer. Strange noises. A kind of softened clicking sound—it made him think of a cat’s claw tearing at upholstery, catching and slipping, again and again.
Then the noise stopped.
For the next few seconds there was no sound at all.
He and Claire were two hundred fifty yards from the trailer now. The bare porch bulb cast a weak yellow light, sixty watts if that. It left the terrain pitch black between the two of them and the trailer’s dooryard.
All at once, over the earpiece, Dryden heard something unmistakable: the digital click of an iPhone being switched on. To his left, he saw Claire react to it, picking up her speed.
Three tones came over the earpiece in rapid succession, the first one high-pitched, the next two lower and identical to each other.
Someone in the trailer had just dialed 9-1-1.
Two hundred yards to go.
The ringing of the outgoing call was just perceptible. It trilled once, and then a tinny voice answered on the other end. Dryden couldn’t make out the words, though he could guess them well enough.
Then came another voice, almost whispering, but much easier to discern. A young girl’s voice, inside the trailer. “Can you trace this?”
The 9-1-1 operator started to respond, but the girl cut her off.
“I’m on a cell phone. Can you trace where I am?”
A quick spill of words from the dispatcher. One of them sounded like
danger.
This time the girl made no reply.
The dispatcher spoke again, but still there was no answer from inside the mobile home. Seconds passed.
Then the girl said, “My name is Leah Swain. I’m here with three other—”
She broke off, exhaling hard, the sound full of fear.
Dryden thought he heard one last syllable from the dispatcher, and then the girl began screaming, high and terrified.