Authors: Patrick Lee
The guy offered a nod and said nothing more.
Marnie crossed to Dryden, smiling a little. “Low-tech approach,” she said. “Let’s see them monitor that.”
“Don’t tempt them,” Dryden said.
* * *
In ten minutes of manual searching in the periodical section, they found four different articles about Hayden Eversman. One was the
Wired
write-up the college guy must have seen. The other three were in
Forbes,
Scientific American,
and
Business Week.
Dryden and Marnie split the articles between them to scan through them more quickly. Dryden started with the
Forbes
article, which was actually a long interview. He found what he was looking for almost immediately: The interviewer described arriving at Eversman’s fifteen-million-dollar home in Carmel, California. There was even a photo of the place, a sprawling ten-acre estate surrounded by wooded highlands above the seaside town. The grounds were fenced in by a brick property wall, and centered in the space was a colonial brick house that looked more suited to New Hampshire than California. One feature in particular seemed to explain why this photo accompanied the article: The house’s roof was covered entirely by solar panels.
“We got it,” Dryden said.
* * *
They spared another three minutes photocopying all four articles, then got back on the road. Carmel was two hours away if they pushed it. Dryden drove while Marnie read the copied articles aloud.
Hayden Eversman was forty-one years old. He had a wife and a young daughter. He had spent most of his adult life funding green energy start-ups, and clearly had made good at it. He was a scratch golfer and a private pilot, though by his own admission it was hard to make time for flying. He was notoriously protective of his privacy, especially with regard to his family.
There was no mention of an interest in politics.
There was nothing that hinted at a conflict with anyone powerful—beyond the obvious understanding that big oil companies were no fans of his.
That was it.
Marnie folded the articles and stuffed them into the center console compartment.
They rode in silence for a minute, and then she opened the plastic case and turned the machine on. Static, soft and inexorable as the flow of a stream. As the flow of time.
“Feels weird not to have it on,” Marnie said. “Like we might … miss something. Doesn’t it?”
Dryden thought of the hollows under Claire’s eyes again. He leaned and glanced at himself in the rearview mirror, and saw the faint beginnings of his own dark circles.
“It does,” he said.
“I keep coming back to the news report about the trailer,” Marnie said.
They were an hour from Carmel, rolling north along a valley that snaked among baked-brown hills.
“The news report that ended up not being true,” Marnie said. “About how the girls were dead. Burned in that cage.”
She was quiet for a while, then said, “In some way, it really must have happened, right? That original version. It happened, and it got reported, and because of that … it
didn’t
happen—you stopped it that time.”
“I guess you could think of it that way.”
“Some version of me really showed up at that scene,” Marnie said.
Dryden imagined she was picturing it, whether she wanted to or not: the nightmare she would have rolled up to if things had gone differently. The trailer, probably burned away to nothing but a few blackened supports. The cage intact within the charred ruin. The bodies. The smell.
Marnie stared forward at the road and the valley, the folds of the terrain revealing themselves one by one, like secrets.
“What Whitcomb said about the Group,” she said, “that they’re afraid to change the past … would you ever try it? I mean, if you had to? If something bad happened … something you couldn’t live with … would you change the past to fix it? Even if you had no idea what would happen to you in the present?”
Dryden thought about it. Whitcomb’s description of the idea—and Whitcomb’s own fear of it—had made perfect sense. What
would
it feel like, to do a thing like that?
“I don’t know if I would,” Dryden said. It was the only honest answer he had.
“I can think of times I would have been tempted to do it,” Marnie said.
The static from the machine ebbed. Some kind of gospel station came through. Dryden caught the words
shepherd
and
praise
before it faded back out.
“I’ve worked kidnapping cases for six years,” Marnie said. “I had one that made me come close to giving it all up, finding some other job. It started with a home invasion at a house in the Central Valley, middle of nowhere, broad daylight. A woman and her daughter, ten years old, lived there. The mom called 9-1-1 and screamed for about a second and then the call cut out. The first black-and-whites got there twelve minutes later and found the house empty. There was a bathroom off the little girl’s bedroom that had been locked from inside, and broken in around the latch. Like the girl tried to hide in there, and the intruder kicked it in. But while she was in there, in those seconds or whatever time she had, she tried to write something on the vanity mirror for the police to find.”
Dryden glanced at Marnie. She had her hands balled tightly in her lap, but he saw them shaking, just noticeably.
“It was the letters
COI,
” Marnie said, “written with her fingertip. She must have been smart enough to not breathe on the mirror first, so her attacker wouldn’t see it.”
“
COI.
Did she get cut off in the middle of writing a name?”
“I might have thought so,” Marnie said, “but she wrote it big, right across the mirror. There wouldn’t have been room for a fourth letter, so …
COI
seemed to be the whole message. We thought it might be someone’s initials, strange as that would be for a ten-year-old to write. We made a list of everyone the girl and her mother might know, and started working through it. I was on-site about an hour after the first responders. I took over the case, and the list. I thought about the girl’s teachers, her friends’ parents and relatives, anyone and everyone. But we didn’t find one person with those initials.”
She unballed her hands and pressed them flat to her pantlegs. The shaking was still visible.
“We tried license plates, even though it didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. The girl couldn’t have seen the driveway from that bathroom, and anyway, not many license plates use the letters
O
or
I
; witnesses mix them up with 1 and 0 too often. That approach came up empty right away. Then, about two hours in, we thought we had a lead. We found out the mom had been dating her boss and keeping it secret from her co-workers. A week earlier, she and the boss had been out at dinner with the little girl, and there had been some kind of fight between the couple—bad enough that the restaurant called the cops. An officer showed up and talked to them, took down their names but didn’t arrest anyone. It made the boss at least a hell of a
maybe
in my book, even though his initials didn’t match the three letters. And then we found out he’d been at a conference two hundred miles away when the break-in happened. He had about a hundred people to vouch for him.”
Out ahead, the hills flanking the road drew aside. Dryden could see broad, flat expanses of farmland planing away to the north.
“COI,”
Marnie said. “I sat in that woman’s living room all that afternoon and evening, while the crime scene techs came and went, and I tried to figure it out. I kept going into that little bathroom and picturing the girl in there, scared out of her mind, listening to her mom being attacked down the hall. I asked myself what could be so damned obvious and simple that even a little kid, under that kind of stress, would think to write it on the mirror. And then, about six hours in, it just hit me.”
She was about to go on, when the static broke again. Dryden heard a man speaking slowly, his tone flat and calm. It reminded him of the baseball game. Almodovar at the bat. Then the last of the static fell away and the man’s words came through. It wasn’t a play-by-play.
“… minutes from now, so that you’ll hear it at present. We look forward to meeting you and reaching a fair agreement. Message begins here: Whoever has the machine, we hope you’re listening to it. We will trade your friend for the machine. At nine this evening, bring it to the place where you last saw her. We are programming our system to compromise multiple broadcast stations and play this message ten hours and twenty-four minutes from now, so that you’ll hear it at present. We look forward to meeting you and reaching a fair agreement. Message begins here: Whoever has the machine, we hope you’re listening to it. We will trade your friend for the machine. At nine this evening…”
Dryden listened as static slid back over the transmission, washing it away.
Neither of them said anything for thirty seconds. There was no sound but the rushing static. An exit came up on the right. Dryden took it and pulled to the shoulder at the end of the off-ramp.
Even as he coasted to a stop, he heard the static falter again. What came through was the same message, no doubt from some other radio station. The same man’s voice, speaking the same words clearly and slowly. The message looped back to the beginning, and then it cut out; an automated recording announced that the station was experiencing technical difficulties. A moment later it all faded into the hiss.
Dryden was already doing the math in his head. It was just past 4:00 in the afternoon. That allowed five hours to reach the place in the Mojave where he and Claire had been attacked. He could get there with time to spare—if he turned around and headed south right now.
“You know you can’t just do it,” Marnie said. “You can’t just show up out there, like they want. And obviously not with the machine.”
“I know that.”
Dryden shut his eyes and rubbed them. He considered the problem, and all the jagged edges of it that he could feel.
“What are you thinking?” Marnie asked.
“That it’s still a lead. That I can’t ignore it.”
For a third time, the hiss from the speakers withdrew; Dryden heard another transmission of the message. He felt a grudging admiration for the Group’s thoroughness.
“Going up against these people blind is suicide,” Marnie said. “We’re an hour from talking to Hayden Eversman. What if that ends up telling us something that changes everything? There’s
some
reason they’re afraid to make a move on the guy.”
“There’s no time to meet with Eversman and still reach the Mojave before the deadline,” Dryden said.
“Not by road there isn’t, but I have some discretion to use FBI assets, including choppers. I’d have a bit of explaining to do later on, but I can make it happen.” Marnie turned in her seat and leaned closer. “If we come up empty with Eversman, you can still reach the meeting site in time to do … something. If you can think of something.”
Dryden stared forward. Way out on the flat farmland ahead of them, a combine harvester made a turn at the end of a field. Its metal edges and panels winked in the sun.
Dryden hardly saw it; all his focus had suddenly gone back to the message from the Group, the audio replaying in his mind. One line stood out from all the rest, revealing maybe a bit more than the Group had intended. Dryden almost smiled, but didn’t.
“What is it?” Marnie said.
Dryden turned to her. “I don’t have to think of anything. I know exactly what I’m going to do in the Mojave, no matter how things go with Eversman.”
He put the Explorer in gear and rolled across the two-lane to the on-ramp, accelerating north, back onto the highway.
“Turn your phone back on and make the call about the chopper,” he said. “Arrange a pickup in Carmel, two hours from now.”
Three times, during the rest of the drive, they switched off the machine and listened to the Explorer’s radio for news reports. Coverage of the quake was everywhere, and already the central story was the stranger who’d shown up yelling about a bomb threat just before Mission Tower came down in the tremor. So far, the word
miracle
hadn’t been appended to the story; most newscasters were treating it with skepticism, though the fact that a bomb threat had also been phoned in to 9-1-1 lent some credibility to it.
They reached Carmel just before five o’clock. Dryden already knew where to go. After arranging the helicopter, Marnie had used her phone’s map application—set to satellite imagery—to find Eversman’s house. There were only so many neighborhoods with fifteen-million-dollar homes, and only so many fifteen-million-dollar homes with solar panels covering their roofs; in fact, there was just one. Marnie had found it in less than five minutes’ worth of dragging the map around, without ever risking a text search.
* * *
They rolled up to the gate, a heavy wood-and-iron structure hung on massive hinges. To its left and right, the brick property wall blocked all view of the estate beyond.
There was an intercom mounted on a post beside the entry drive, with a small camera atop it. Marnie traded places with Dryden at the wheel, then held her badge out for the camera and pushed the talk button. She identified herself by name to the voice that answered.
After that, nothing happened for a long time. Minutes passed. Dryden pictured someone inside calling the FBI field office in Santa Monica and verifying her information. He thought of the digital paper trail generated by those kinds of calls. Database entries. Computer records.
There was no obvious reason to think the Group could connect any of these dots. Up to now, they knew nothing of either him or Marnie.
All the same, Dryden turned and swept his gaze up and down the street. He saw other property walls lining the road, making a narrow canyon of its winding route. He saw rooftops beyond the walls, and other gates with their own intercoms and cameras. He saw nothing moving. No cars creeping along. Nothing at all.