Authors: Patrick Lee
There was no question the guy had spotted him. The low brush Dryden was crouched in was useless. A two-foot-wide tree trunk would have helped, but there was nothing like that within sight.
For three seconds the gunman just stared. Dryden held still and considered his options. He couldn’t play dead; he was already upright in a crouch. He couldn’t stand his ground and fight; he would be outgunned and outmaneuvered to a degree that would be comical to anyone but himself. He couldn’t flee the woods to the nearby south or east side; there was only open farmland in both of those directions.
He could escape to the north. Out of the woods and into the city sprawl.
If he could get that far—the northern edge of the forest was almost half a mile away.
He was still thinking about that when the gunner’s mouth moved beneath the bulk of his FLIR scope. Instructions via headset to the pilot. A second later the chopper tilted forward and left its hover. It banked as it did, coming around in a shallow curve that would put the gunner right above Dryden’s position.
Dryden broke from the brush and took off in a sprint, straight north.
* * *
For the first thirty seconds he didn’t look back. He didn’t look anywhere but straight ahead, jumping deadfalls and low stands of brush. He heard the chopper’s rotors and control surfaces making rapid adjustments behind him, the sound chaotic through the trees. Dryden had flown helicopters before; it had been part of his training. He could picture the pilot moving the cyclic control left and right and forward, second by second, using the pedals to whip the tail this way or that, anything to give the gunner a good sightline as the aircraft skimmed the treetops and raced north, gaining on him.
He heard the first zipping whine of a bullet, somewhere just above him in the boughs, half a second before the sound of the gunshot crashed down around him. He didn’t stop.
Another bullet—this one buzzing through the airspace five feet in front of him. It left a ragged line of cut-loose pine needles in its wake, a ghost of the bullet’s path. Dryden ran right through it a split second later.
He heard Eversman’s words in his head:
I bet you instructed Marnie and Claire to stay away from here.
I also bet they’re going to ignore that.
In fact, I know it
.
The third shot passed close enough that he felt its heat across his forehead, as if someone had waved a lightbulb two inches from his face.
If no one ever sees you three again, what else could it mean?
The chopper was above and to his left now, somewhere around his eight o’clock, and close by. The last two shots had come down on high, steep angles.
Dryden ran another five paces, until half a second before his internal stopwatch said the next shot was coming.
Then he jammed a foot into the dry soil and pulled up short, and heard the zip and the gunshot almost in unison, the bullet ripping through the base of a sapling three feet in front of him. He pivoted and lunged sideways, passing directly beneath the chopper, coming out on the gunner’s blind side ten seconds later. Then he turned and sprinted north again, the chopper now above and to his right. He heard it once more making adjustments, correcting its position. He imagined the gunner shouting into his headset, scouring the woods as the aircraft came around.
Dryden kept running. There was no other move.
The edge of town was still impossibly far north, given the circumstances. Somewhere between a half and a quarter mile—more than a minute’s run for a world-class athlete on smooth asphalt. Already he could hear the chopper settling into another favorable flight path for the gunman, this time taking into account the maneuver Dryden had used. The chopper would stay farther off to his side now, far enough that it would be useless to try dodging beneath it again.
Running hard, ducking branches, darting past clumps of pines. Cresting the flank of the hill now, the ground dropping away in a shallow grade before him, helping just a bit with his speed.
Another bullet cut through the air, spare feet behind him.
And another, just above his scalp.
At the edge of his vision he saw something; his body reacted to it as much as his brain did. He turned without stopping and sprinted on a diagonal from the line he’d been running on. A bullet splintered a thin branch six inches from his face. Scraps of bark stung his cheeks; his lungs filled with the smell of pine tar.
He reached what he was running toward three seconds later: a knotted old tree with a trunk twice as wide as his body. He slammed to a stop against it, putting it between himself and the chopper.
For ten seconds the gunner held his fire. Dryden drew back from the tree, slowly, ten inches and then twenty. Enough to catch sight of the chopper’s tail, past the trunk’s left edge. Enough to keep tabs on the aircraft as it circled, and to keep himself shielded by the tree no matter where the chopper put itself.
He could circle this tree all day; the chopper couldn’t. It had only so much fuel, and only so much time before some motorist found the bodies near the wheat field. The guys in the chopper wouldn’t want to hang around once police started showing up in the area.
The aircraft’s tail was slipping away to the right. Dryden eased himself clockwise around the tree, keeping just the last two feet of the tail in view.
Easy.
Then the chopper went stationary, and turned sharply to the right, a move that would point the gunner entirely away from him. Why? Dryden risked leaning out past the trunk to see the reason.
He saw.
Forty yards away from him stood Marnie and Claire. Marnie had her Glock in hand, held low. The two of them stared up as the chopper rotated to point the gunman at them. Then they bolted sideways—and away from each other—as a rifle shot ripped through the space where they had been standing.
Dryden lost sight of Claire. He managed to keep his eyes on Marnie as she moved roughly toward him.
The gunner kept his eyes on her, too. Another bullet cut through the pine boughs, missing Marnie by a foot at most.
Dryden drew the Steyr M40 he’d taken from one of the dead men. It was the first time he’d had a clear angle on the chopper without the .50 caliber rifle being pointed at him.
He raised the pistol and aimed it high, compensating for the chopper’s altitude and distance, and opened fire.
There was no way to see what he was hitting inside the cockpit. A direct hit on the pilot would be ideal. A ricochet that winged him with a bullet fragment would be almost as good. All he had to do was make the guy flinch at the controls. Make him lose focus for half a second. That would be enough.
Flying a helicopter was difficult as hell, and holding in a hover was the hardest part by far. You needed both hands and both feet engaged at all times. You had to manage drift and altitude and yaw, each one a separate task, and any correction to one of them threw off the other two. You had to focus.
Dryden saw at least one bullet hole open up in the aircraft’s thin metal skin. Saw one of its side windows blow inward.
The pilot lost his focus.
The chopper’s tail dipped and slewed to the left. Through a window in the back, Dryden saw the gunner reach frantically for a handhold. A second later the aircraft tilted deeply forward, as if to bow at the conclusion of its performance. As it did so, its main rotor clipped the top of a pine tree; the chopper reacted as if an invisible giant had reached up and slapped it sideways, hurling the craft into the highest boughs of a nearby grove. The rest of the rotor assembly tore itself apart against the tree trunks, at which point the helicopter was essentially a falling minivan. Loaded with aviation fuel.
It slammed into the earth beside the grove, its tanks rupturing and detonating in the same instant. Dryden felt the radiant heat flash out and warm his skin.
He turned and saw Marnie staring at him. A second later he saw Claire; she stepped into view past a screen of brush, twenty feet away.
Claire Dunham. Alive and well. She looked healthier than when he’d last seen her. She’d slept, at least.
An ugly thought came to Dryden; he realized he had suppressed it for most of the past twenty-four hours: Deep down he had not expected to see her again.
She stepped past the brush and came toward him. She drew a folded sheet of paper from her pocket; it was the note he’d given Marnie in the Suburban. Claire unfolded it as she crossed to him, stopping two feet away. She held it up, her expression somewhere between amused and pissed.
She said, “Your plan is for all three of us to vanish off the grid for the rest of our lives? You really expect us to do that?”
“We did do that,” Dryden said. “Would have, anyway.”
Marnie came up beside them. “Do we still have to?”
Dryden shook his head. “The girls in the trailer didn’t have to stay dead. We don’t have to stay missing.”
He turned in place, got his bearings, and faced southeast. The intact Suburban was down there somewhere, parked along the road beside the forest.
“We need to go back to Eversman’s estate,” he said. “Right now.”
“Why the hell would we go back there?” Marnie asked.
“Because the system is there. And I know what to do about it now.”
Marnie’s eyes narrowed. “What about what we said last night? There’s no way to beat it without warning it.”
“There is,” Dryden said. “Whitcomb was about to tell us, yesterday. He had it all figured out. Come on.”
He led the way east, sprinting through the trees.
“Think very carefully,” Dryden said. “When we met Eversman’s wife, did he introduce you as an FBI agent?”
They were in the Suburban, rolling out of Monterey and into the hills, twenty minutes from the estate. Behind them, the city was dotted with police flashers streaming in from all quarters toward the crash site in the woods—amid much else they would find there. During the run to the SUV, Dryden had stopped to relieve Eversman’s corpse of its wallet. With any luck, that would buy a bit of time before authorities identified the man and descended on his home. He had taken the guy’s cell phone, too.
Dryden was at the wheel. Marnie rode in the passenger seat, Claire behind her on the middle bench.
“No,” Marnie said. “He just used my first name. And yours. Maybe he didn’t want her remembering us, if we ended up on the news after we disappeared.”
“Maybe,” Dryden said. “I don’t think she was in the loop on anything. She didn’t know about the system. I doubt he was ever going to tell her.”
“Why does it matter whether she knew I was an agent?” Marnie said.
“Because we still need her to forget us. Or at least not remember us well enough to point the authorities in our direction. And she won’t.”
Claire leaned forward. “Why does any of that matter?”
Dryden explained what he planned to do. By the time he’d finished, Marnie and Claire looked noticeably pale.
“If there’s any other way,” Dryden said, “I’d love to hear it.”
All that followed was silence.
* * *
When they reached Eversman’s estate, they drove past it. They followed the switchback residential road as it turned and climbed. They stopped half a mile farther on, where a gap in the trees offered a view down onto the distant brick house. They could see Dryden’s Explorer still parked in front.
Dryden took Eversman’s phone from his pocket, switched it on, and pulled up the contact list. Ayla was near the top. He opened her contact page and tapped
SEND MESSAGE.
He typed:
Ayla, take Brooke and get out of the house right now. Pick a hotel in town. Don’t talk to anyone. I will call and explain soon.
He pressed
SEND.
They waited. Twenty seconds later, Eversman’s phone rang. Ayla. They watched the mansion as the ring tone trilled on and on. It was still going when one of the house’s garage doors began to rise, and a moment later a sleek red SUV—a Porsche Cayenne, Dryden thought—lurched out and sped down the driveway.
Dryden put the Suburban in drive, made a U-turn and headed back down the road toward the estate. At the last curve before the entry drive, he slowed and stopped, three hundred yards shy of the big iron-and-wood gate. He nosed forward just far enough that he could see it while mostly keeping the Suburban hidden from view. The gate was already swinging inward.
The red Cayenne burst through the opening, fast enough that it nearly clipped the concrete wall on the far side of the road before it could turn. Then it was pointed downhill and accelerating away, and a second later it was out of sight beyond a curve.
Dryden stepped on the gas. He pushed the Suburban to 60; it felt like 90 in the boxed-in canyon between the property walls. He braked hard and turned in at Eversman’s drive, the gate just beginning to swing shut again. He steered around and past it, and twenty seconds later he rolled to a stop in front of the guesthouse.
He turned and looked at Marnie and Claire.
Pale again, both of them. Breathing a little faster than normal.
“We’re not the bad guys,” Dryden said.
He opened the door and got out, Eversman’s silenced .45 in his hand. He crossed to the guesthouse’s front door and simply knocked.
* * *
From the moment the door opened, the violence that followed took less than a minute. There were three men in the guesthouse, as Eversman had said. They weren’t armed. They weren’t expecting trouble to show up. They were, in fact, certain that it wouldn’t.
When it was over, Dryden found the door that opened into the garage. There were two stalls, both empty. He pressed the wall-mounted button to raise the big single door, then waved for Marnie to drive the Suburban inside. She climbed over the console to the driver’s seat and put it in gear.
Dryden wiped his prints from the .45 and set it on the concrete floor. Its suppressor was hot to the touch.
Marnie braked, killed the engine, and got out. Claire stepped out behind her. The two of them stood staring through the entry into the house.