Authors: Patrick Lee
“Feel like taking a walk?” she asked.
* * *
They went out the front door and wandered into the darkened grounds. The air was full of the smell of cedars and cut grass.
“You never finished your story,” Dryden said. “What was simple enough that a ten-year-old would think to write it on a mirror? What did
COI
mean?”
It took her a long time to answer. They passed beneath a white pine, the night wind rustling its boughs.
“It wasn’t supposed to be
COI,
” Marnie said. “It was supposed to be
COP.
The bathroom door got kicked in before she could finish the last letter.”
Dryden thought of what Marnie had said in the car, all those hours before. The girl’s mom dating her boss, the two of them taking the kid out to dinner a week before the abductions. Getting in some kind of altercation at the restaurant.
“The cop who showed up to settle the fight?” Dryden asked.
Marnie nodded. “Once I saw what the letters meant, he was the obvious first guess. I got on the phone and started shouting, and there were black-and-whites at his place about five minutes later. He actually came out the door shooting. The responders took him down and went in, and found the mom and daughter in the basement. The mom was long gone—dead for hours. But the girl was still—”
She cut herself off. By her tone of voice, Dryden knew the next word in the sentence wasn’t
alive.
“She was warm,” Marnie said. “The ME said she’d probably died about twenty minutes before those first units rolled up.”
She was quiet again for a while. In the faint light, Dryden saw her stuff her hands into her pockets.
“Six hours,” she said. “Six hours it took me to understand what she meant. What she was counting on me to understand. If it would have taken me five…”
She didn’t finish it. She stopped walking and just stood there looking away into the dark.
If there was anything consoling to say to her, she’d probably heard it fifty times from others, years back. Probably none of it had helped, even then. Dryden said nothing at all. He put a hand on her shoulder instead. She responded by taking her hands back out of her pockets, turning and wrapping her arms around him. He held her against himself, his jaw resting atop her head.
When she spoke again, it was in a whisper that sounded strained, like glass bent almost to breaking. “Why someone would use those machines for anything other than good … What the fuck is wrong with people?”
Dryden held on to her and didn’t try answering.
* * *
They went back inside five minutes later. In the hallway that led to their rooms, Marnie stopped and faced him.
She said, “Eversman keeps choppers on standby. I wonder if he’s got a security detail in the guesthouse.”
“I wondered the same thing.”
“I’d only feel a little safer if he did.” She paused. Then: “Want to crash on my floor? Two guns are better than one, right?”
* * *
Tired as he’d been all day, sleep eluded him now. He lay on the floor beside Marnie’s bed, with the pillow and blanket from his own room.
They actually had three guns—her Glock and Claire’s two Berettas. Dryden had both of them loaded and ready on the floor beside him.
They talked for a while and then went quiet. In the darkness he listened to her breathing, wondering if she was asleep. He didn’t think so.
Then she moved. She reached to the nightstand above him, and he heard the click of a latch and a plastic lid falling open. He saw the pale glow of a tablet screen, and then Marnie touched it, and the familiar static rolled out into the room.
She looked down and met his eyes. “Is this an addiction?”
“Feels like one,” he said.
She nodded and reached to shut the thing off.
“Don’t,” Dryden said.
“Why not?”
“Because you want it on. And so do I.”
She held her position for a moment, propped up on one elbow, looking down at him. Then she rolled onto her back again, and Dryden pictured her lying there the same way he was, staring at the ceiling in the milky light.
* * *
Ten minutes later she really did seem to fall asleep.
Dryden didn’t.
He lay awake for what felt like hours, listening to song fragments breaking through the static. He heard a news report about a traffic accident on I-80 north of Sacramento—no deaths, minor injuries. He heard a test of the emergency broadcast system, covering the townships of Jasper and Willis and the greater San Benito County listening area. He heard two minutes of live coverage of a tractor pull competition.
He thought of something Marnie had said earlier:
What do we actually know? If you step back from it, we have exactly seven pieces of information.
One future in which Hayden Eversman became president.
Six in which he was killed, time and time again.
Thinking it over, Dryden finally drifted away.
Mangouste stepped out the back door again. Into the night. He crossed to the rear of his property and passed through the gate, into the forest with its rhythmic sounds and its cool humidity.
He went to the clearing where the machinery was buried. Where the bass drone of its geothermal power supply hummed up through the ground, into his bones.
He stood there until the chill of the night had saturated him and set his muscles shuddering.
He thought of the problems that had plagued him for the past three days. Little steel burrs impeding the clockwork of his plans.
All those problems would be settled by tomorrow afternoon. Claire Dunham and the people she had turned to—they would be settled.
Mangouste smiled as the shivering became intense, and at last turned and left the clearing. Back through the gate. Back across the rear yard. Past the pool, dimly lit and rippling in the night wind. In through the back door of the giant brick house. His wife stood at the sink, getting a glass of water, her eyes heavy with sleep.
“Hayden, come to bed,” Ayla said.
Claire Dunham steadied her binoculars and took in the front of Myrtle’s from a quarter mile away. The place was open for business but was nearly empty. Half an hour before noon on a Sunday, all its regulars were probably still asleep; it wasn’t the sort of establishment that drew tourists.
Myrtle’s was perched on the waterfront of Monterey Bay, half on land and half sticking out over the water, held up by a forest of sea-weathered wooden pilings. Claire had been watching the place and its surroundings for more than an hour already. To its left was a shallow parking lot wedged between Del Monte Avenue and the bay. To its right was a kayak rental place. Beyond both of those were public beaches, but only a few people were on them; the day was sunny but unseasonably cool.
There was no sign of anyone unpleasant staking out the area. It didn’t mean they weren’t there, of course.
No sign of Sam, either, though Claire had already known she wouldn’t catch sight of him. He would be every bit as cautious as her, watching the place from concealment and distance. If he was coming, he was probably at least as far from Myrtle’s as she was, studying the building and all its approaches.
Claire lowered the binoculars and set them beside her on the passenger seat. The vehicle was an old Geo Tracker she’d borrowed from a Walmart parking lot at four in the morning, after catching a night’s restless sleep in the woods at the edge of a cow pasture. She’d borrowed the binoculars, too, from a sporting goods store here in Monterey. She meant to return both as soon as possible.
She leaned back and closed her eyes and exhaled deeply.
“Be here,” she whispered. “Be alive.”
* * *
Dryden looked at his watch. 11:32. He raised the binoculars he’d borrowed from Eversman and stared through them for thirty seconds, sweeping them slowly left to right, then back.
“No sign of her,” Dryden said. “There wouldn’t be, though. She’ll keep her distance until the minute she goes in.”
He was sitting in the second-row seat of a black Chevy Suburban, one of three identical vehicles Eversman had brought to Monterey, along with a clutch of his security personnel. Whether they’d come from the guesthouse or not, it wasn’t clear; they’d been parked in the drive and ready to go when Dryden first saw them.
Marnie was sitting next to him on the bench seat. She was wearing the coat she’d worn yesterday, her Glock once more in its shoulder holster beneath it. Dryden had one of Claire’s Berettas in his waistband.
Up front, Eversman was in the passenger seat. One of his security men, a stocky guy named Collins, sat at the wheel. All eyes were focused on the decrepit little bar, five hundred yards away; Dryden had given Eversman its name and location this morning.
The other two Suburbans were much farther back, stationed out of sight on side streets, four men in each vehicle, heavily armed. Eversman had insisted on bringing a significant force, in case things went badly. Dryden’s only demand had been that the other two SUVs keep their distance; from Claire’s point of view, anyone but Dryden himself would look like a hostile. If she got spooked, she would vanish.
Marnie looked at him. “You okay?”
Dryden nodded but said nothing, keeping his gaze on the distant bar.
Marnie kept hers on him. Up front, Eversman and Collins turned and glanced back at him, too.
“We only get one shot at this,” Dryden said. “I don’t want to take any chances.” He nodded toward the bar. “I don’t like the sight lines we’ve got from here. I want better coverage on the left and right.”
“I can move up the other two vehicles,” Eversman said.
“No,” Dryden said. “I’m going to get out and go closer on foot.” He looked at Marnie and indicated the cross street in front of them. “Do me a favor. There’s a caf
é
two blocks to the right on that street. You can’t see it from here, but you’ll find it. From there you should have a clear angle on the right side of the bar. Just … watch for anything that looks wrong. If anything sends up a flag, come back here as fast as you can and tell these guys.”
Marnie stared at him, her features suddenly taut. “
Are
you worried about something?”
Dryden shook his head. He managed a smile. “Abundance of caution.”
He clapped her on the shoulder, nodded to the two men up front, then shoved open the door and stepped out of the vehicle. He headed off in the direction of the bar, and a moment later heard Marnie’s door open and close behind him.
* * *
When Dryden was a block away, still visible, Eversman took out his phone and switched it on. He called the driver of one of the other Suburbans. The man picked up on the first ring.
“Slight change, but nothing serious,” Eversman said. “The woman, Calvert, is at a caf
é
two blocks downhill from me on Sixth Street. After Dryden connects with Claire Dunham, Collins and I will pick them up. When that happens, you’ll get Calvert and meet us at the third team’s location.”
He ended the call, his eyes still tracking Dryden as he moved closer to the bar. The guy’s movements were casual; he wandered along a street of storefronts, looking in some of the windows, glancing up every so often to study the target location. At last he came to a little ice cream shop with a few metal tables and chairs out front. He bought something—it looked like a sundae, but it was hard to tell—and took a seat, watching the bar from maybe two hundred yards’ range.
Eversman opened the glove box and took out a silenced .45. He turned and mentally rehearsed how things would play out, the moment Dryden got back into the vehicle with Claire Dunham.
It would be fast and brutal, no fucking around. It would also be invisible to anyone outside; the windows in back were heavily tinted. And when the three vehicles rendezvoused, Marnie Calvert would be dealt with in the same manner.
Eversman was more than confident it would work: He knew. He had already used the system to verify it. He had already seen the headlines to come.
11:53.
Dryden was still sitting at the metal table in front of the ice cream shop. Someone had left a Best Buy flyer on a nearby chair, and he was leafing through it, raising his eyes to the distant bar often enough to keep tabs on everyone approaching it.
Which wasn’t many people. It was clearly not a popular lunch spot, at least on Sunday. Probably not on any day.
In the past ten minutes he’d seen only six people enter the bar. A young couple. A college-aged girl. Three men.
11:54.
He set down the flyer and simply stared at the place.
* * *
Claire gave the bar one last scan with the binoculars, then set them aside and started the Tracker. She considered driving right up to the building, parking in the narrow lot along the waterfront, but discarded the idea. If things went bad, there would be no time to get back in the car, start it, and drive off. There might be time to simply run, in which case it would be better to have the car hidden somewhere in the blocks close to the bar. She might be able to lose pursuers in a foot chase, then make her way to the car unseen.
She still had the Tracker in park. She stared at the distant structure, thinking.
The way she went into the place might matter. It would be impossible to go in undetected, but there were ways to make it less obvious who she was. Anything that could make potential observers less certain was worth doing.
She exhaled softly and shut her eyes. The whole logistical calculation felt wishful.
Was
wishful. If the Group was somehow watching, it would be game over a few minutes from now.
Nothing to do but try.
She put the vehicle in gear and pulled out of her space.
* * *
11:56.
Eversman was holding the binoculars Dryden had used earlier. He was leaning forward, bracing his elbows on the dash, training the binocs alternately on Dryden—still sitting at the ice cream shop—and the bar.