Signal (6 page)

“Dale said he was terrified from the moment they realized what this thing did. That very first afternoon, he and a few of the techs in the lab, listening to the first signals coming through, putting it all together. He said you could see the goosebumps on their arms. He said the moment that finally broke the spell for him was just a weather report. That night’s weather—ten and a half hours in the future, but not a prediction of it. Just a present-tense rundown. He said just like that, it finally hit him in full. The power of the thing, and what it meant, and everyone who would come out of the woodwork to claim it, if he and the others weren’t careful. He said he felt like he was in that Steinbeck book,
The Pearl.
”

After a moment, Claire went on.

Dale Whitcomb had seen the machine’s potential for good right away, she said. It was so obvious: ten hours’ notice about airline crashes, say, or any kind of disaster that came without warning. It would change the world.

Its potential for bad was every bit as clear. The wrong people could create all kinds of misery with a machine like this. What they could do with financial markets was easy to imagine, but that was probably just scratching the surface.

The first unnerving question showed up immediately: Whom to tell about this thing?

On paper there was an easy answer to that. There were proper channels to go through—certain people at the Defense Department that Bayliss Labs was supposed to report to, when they came upon any kind of breakthrough.

“And that would’ve been fine if all they’d created was a better radar system for drones,” Claire said. “But
this
stuff … For God’s sake, Bayliss’s official contact at Defense was a man who’d been investigated for fraud less than a year before. What was the right move? Tell that guy everything and hope for the best? Or go over his head to someone else, and basically still just cross their fingers?”

Whitcomb had settled on a different route, she said. He had personal connections in D.C., people he’d had lunches and dinners with, time and time again during his long career in the gray space between business and government. At least some of them were decent people, he believed, beneath all the politics. Whitcomb decided the safest move was to set up a meeting with several of them all at once and demonstrate the technology for them. Show it to those hand-picked safe bets and enlist their help and guidance on how to proceed.

He would need prep time to line it all up. Time to be sure he had the right people in mind, then more time to get them all together without telling them anything in advance. Given the schedules of people like that, it would take some number of weeks to arrange. Maybe as much as a month.

Which scared him just a bit.

A month was a long time for a whole company to keep a secret.

Bayliss Labs wasn’t large by any count: fewer than twenty people, the whole enterprise housed at a single site in Palo Alto. The lab space, the offices—everything under one roof. But even with so few in the loop, Whitcomb was terrified of leaks. He had good reasons for that. Some of his employees were on close terms with powerful outsiders. One of the financial guys had gotten his job because he was a nephew of a major shareholder. It was hard not to picture the guy telling his uncle at least some of the big news. There were half a dozen other weak spots like that, mostly connections back to the original company, the big defense contractor.

“Dale asked me to come on board within the first three days after the breakthrough,” Claire said. “I guess he just wanted an ally there with him. At least one person he could absolutely trust.”

“What happened when you hired on?” Dryden asked.

“For a while, nothing. Everyone was saying all the right things. They agreed with Dale’s ideas on how to approach the government, and in the meantime the research continued. They built other prototypes of the machine. They tried tweaks in the design, but always got the same results. The time difference is always ten hours and twenty-four minutes. And there’s no way to tune it—you can’t go up and down the dial or anything. You just hear what you hear. But anyway, yes, everything seemed fine at the beginning.”

“Seemed,” Dryden said.

Claire nodded. “And then it didn’t.”

Dryden waited.

Claire leaned forward and folded her arms atop the steering wheel. She rested her forehead on them. Enough time went by that Dryden thought she might have passed out. Then she began speaking again.

She and Dale had done their best to be vigilant for leaks, she said. To the point of being paranoid. They’d enlisted one of the computer techs, a guy named Curtis whom Dale had known longer than anyone else in the company, to help snoop on all the rest. The snooping included personal communications in employees’ homes, illegal as it was. There was just so much at stake.

But for nearly four weeks, nothing struck the three of them as suspicious. Nothing seemed wrong. Until three days ago.

Claire’s phone had rung at five minutes before six, Wednesday morning. Dale calling, sounding panicked.

Get out of your house right now. Get in your car and go somewhere.

What is it? Dale, what’s happening?

Curtis found something. Evidence of something going on.

What do you mean?

We think there are people at Bayliss who’ve been working with someone on the outside, sharing the designs for these machines, maybe since the first days after the breakthrough. Someone out there with high-level resources, we don’t know who it is yet.

Dale—

Jesus, Claire, just get in your car—

I’m going right now.

Do you remember the safe location you picked out, when you protected my family? The place we’d all meet up if something happened?

Yes.

I’m going to hide one of the machines there. I want you to pick it up later today.

Dale, what are you going to do?

Nothing too risky if I can help it.

Where’s Curtis?

He’s going to meet me later. He says he copied a huge amount of data from these people—some kind of secure server they were using for all their communication. He already told me some of what he found. It’s scary stuff, Claire.

Like what?

They’ve built their own copies of the machine, but there’s more to it than that. They’ve got some kind of system they created, to exploit this technology in ways we never thought of.

Exploit it how?

Claire raised her head from her forearms and met Dryden’s eyes. Hers looked haunted.

“Dale told me some of what Curtis had told him,” she said. “Details about this system these people built, whoever the hell they were. It scared the shit out of me, just hearing about it. It’s … brilliant. And horrible. Dale told me that much, and then he said he had to go. He told me to ditch my phone and get a throwaway. He said he’d get one, too, and he’d leave the number with the machine I was supposed to pick up.”

Her gaze dropped to the open case. The tablet computer and the strange black box.

“This machine was there when I got to the place,” she said. “And the phone number. But when I called it, thirty seconds later, there was no answer. I gave it a minute and tried again, and then I ditched that phone, too, and got out of there. Six hours later, on the news, I found out what had happened. Maybe you heard about it, too, in a way.”

Dryden thought about it. Three days ago, the Bay Area—some memory flickered but didn’t quite light up. Some big story he’d just caught the end of, flipping past the news.

“Chemical fire and explosion,” Claire said. “A company called Empire Services. All employees dead or simply unidentifiable. Empire Services was the public name of Bayliss Labs. The building that was destroyed was Bayliss’s entire facility. I have no idea if Dale or Curtis is still alive somewhere. I don’t have any safe way of looking for either of them, and I guess they could say the same for me.”

For a long time she just sat there, holding the wheel again. Like it was the gunwale of a lifeboat. Like her own weariness would drag her into the deep if she let go.

“Whatever you need help with,” Dryden said, “I’m in. You know that. You had to know that before you even called me.”

She looked at him. An edge of sadness twisted her features.

“What?” Dryden said.

“I had no intention to involve you in all this,” Claire said softly. “Not for something random like the guy in the trailer, and not for the rest of this, either. I never meant to drag you into it at all.”

“Then why did you?”

Claire’s eyes went back to the machine.

“I didn’t, actually,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

Claire started to respond, but stopped. A pair of headlights broke into view to the south, coming up 395 in the same direction Dryden and Claire had driven a few minutes before. The vehicle’s outline was just visible against the dim sky—a low shape with a light-bar on its roof. A police cruiser.

None of its flashers were on. The car was going the speed limit, maybe a little faster. Nothing about it suggested urgency or purpose. Just a random patrol.

“Shit,” Claire whispered.

She closed the plastic case, blacking out the glow of the tablet screen and plunging the Land Rover’s cab into darkness. Already its headlights and instrument panel were off. Along with Dryden’s Explorer, the Land Rover sat two hundred feet off the road where the cop would pass. The two vehicles were unlikely to be visible to the officer, though they would have to arouse suspicion if they were spotted.

Closing in now, the cruiser passed through a long, gentle curve where the road skirted some shallow rise in the desert. Dryden had hardly noticed the curve when he’d driven it himself. He noticed it now because it sent the police cruiser’s high beams swinging ten degrees west of the highway, out into the darkness where he and Claire were parked. An unwitting searchlight.

The brightest portion of the beams came nowhere near the two parked vehicles, but the beams’ periphery cast a faint glow through the nearby scrub, setting shadows beneath each chaparral bush. Dryden instinctively looked down to keep his eyes from shining. Claire did the same. Nothing could be done about the reflective metal and glass of the two SUVs.

Claire’s fingertips drummed on the wheel, the uncharacteristic tension running through her again.

“It’s not a problem if he sees us,” Dryden said.

“It’s a big problem.”

“We’re seventy miles from the trailer. There’s nothing to connect us to it.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about.”

“What, then?” Dryden asked.

Claire didn’t answer. She raised her eyes just enough to watch the cruiser coming on. It was a few hundred yards south now, its headlights finally swinging back onto the road as it moved beyond the curve. A few seconds later, without slowing, it blasted by and continued north into the darkness.

Then its brake lights came on.

Claire’s breath hissed out like air from a ruptured pneumatic line.

The cruiser came to a stop. For five seconds it just sat there in the road, maybe three hundred yards to the north, its taillights glowing. Like the officer was weighing the decision. Wondering if he’d really seen something.

In the same moment, Claire did something Dryden couldn’t understand. She ignored the cruiser entirely and turned her gaze on the surrounding desert. She scanned the darkness, her eyes going everywhere, as if she suddenly believed something dangerous was out there. It made no sense—she had shown no such fear until now, after all the minutes they’d been parked here.

The cruiser’s brake lights stayed on. Like a tossed coin, tumbling in the air. Stay or go.

The brake lights went out.

The officer goosed the vehicle forward.

And brought it around in a tight U-turn.

Its headlights lit up the world, filling the Land Rover’s cab with harsh glare that made Dryden squint.

The effect on Claire was immediate. She turned the key in the ignition and shoved the selector into drive.

“What are you doing?” Dryden shouted.

Claire had not taken her foot off the brake yet. She turned to Dryden, and when she spoke, her voice was saturated with fear. “Get back in your vehicle and go. Now.”

“Claire, this is—”

“I can’t explain it! Go! Please!”

The way she screamed the words, it sounded like she was begging. Like she was kneeling beside a ditch with a pistol to her head. The sound of it pierced Dryden—a needle into the deepest part of his brain, the reptile complex where fight-or-flight decisions were made in thousandths of a second.

He decided.

He reached for the door handle.

But before he could pull it, everything changed.

A hundred yards away off the vehicle’s left side, far from both the Land Rover and the police cruiser, a pinprick of light flared. A millisecond pop, like a flashbulb—but it wasn’t a flashbulb.

The windows on both sides of the Land Rover’s middle bench seat shattered, and Dryden heard the buzzing whine of a bullet cutting the air, passing through the vehicle maybe a foot behind him.

On instinct, Claire took her foot off the brake and shoved the accelerator to the floor. The Land Rover lurched forward into the dark, its headlights still doused.

Way out in the night, the muzzle flash came again, followed by others in unison, like spastic fireflies. Three shooters, maybe four, clustered tightly together, all firing at once.

Claire had the SUV doing 40 now, jostling over the scrubland. She was driving by the indirect glow from the police cruiser, still a couple hundred yards behind them. All at once the cruiser’s beams swung sharply away. Dryden turned in the passenger seat and looked back. The patrol car had jerked sideways and stopped. In the faint interior glow of its dashboard equipment, Dryden could see that its windows had all been blown out. As he watched, one of its headlights burst. The cruiser was taking the brunt of the rifle fire; the cop was almost certainly dead.