Authors: Patrick Lee
The work had begun right away, sometimes solo jobs, other times team efforts like tonight. It was steady work, which was nice, and the pay was excellent, which was even nicer.
Richard Conklin was thinking that very thing when something collided with the side of his foot—not painfully, more like a solid thump from a mallet. It smacked his foot sideways, right off the accelerator; he jerked his head down to see what was happening. He never got the chance.
In the next instant the vehicle’s brakes locked up as if he’d jammed his heel on them. The tires bit the road and shrieked, the whole chassis dipping at the nose as if its back end had lifted half a foot off the pavement. He and the passenger were slammed forward against their seat belts. He felt the air compress out of his lungs, and then the awful rubber screech finally halted and the world went still.
He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t get the air back into his chest. Couldn’t—
Movement, a blur of it, right between the front seats. The guy they’d tied up. Richard turned in time to see the stranger throw a hard punch into the passenger’s temple, about as savage a hit as he’d ever seen. The passenger’s head snapped sideways and cracked against the side window—unconscious, just like that. Richard forgot about getting his breath back; his focus jumped to the two Berettas he’d taken from the wrecked Land Rover. One of the handguns was tucked into his partner’s waistband, the other in his own. Richard’s hand darted for it even as the stranger turned to him.
* * *
Dryden saw the hand moving. Saw what it was moving toward. In the fraction of a second he had to work with, he considered what he had seen in the previous instant: The now-unconscious passenger had Claire’s other Beretta, and the man’s rifle was leaning upright in the footwell, against the door. Neither gun was a useful option—not in the time it would take the driver to draw his own gun, at which point everything was going to get messy. Grappling for a firearm, especially in a confined space, was clumsy as hell at the best of times. Too many variables. Too much luck involved.
The driver’s hand reached the Beretta. Closed around it. Dryden gave up on grabbing for it himself.
He reached for the driver’s head instead. He looped his left arm around it and got a grip on the guy’s chin. He braced his other hand on the back of the skull. He twisted the head counterclockwise, facing it toward the driver’s-side window, as far as it would turn before the neck stopped it. He tightened his grip, locked his elbows to his own sides, and pivoted explosively at the waist, wrenching the head through another forty-five degrees of turn. He heard a vertebra crack like a walnut shell, and the man’s hand went slack around the Beretta. Dead, or within seconds of it. Good enough.
Dryden thought of the Jeep Wrangler, probably five miles south now, doing 70. He could feel the seconds draining away. There were no more to spare.
He swept the Beretta forward off the seat, into the footwell, then unclipped the driver’s seat belt. He grabbed the guy by the waistband of his pants and hauled the body over the console into the middle bench seat. A second later he’d clambered behind the wheel himself. The engine was still running; the Explorer was, in fact, rolling gently forward at idle.
Ten seconds since he’d stopped the vehicle.
Dryden glanced at the passenger. The man was still breathing but showed no sign of waking anytime soon. Dryden took the second Beretta from the man’s waistband, then cranked the wheel and made a tight U-turn. When the Explorer was pointing south, he floored it, pushing the speed up through 50, 70, 90. The needle edged past 110 and hovered there, the engine screaming like it might blow something if he pushed it any harder.
The man in the passenger seat shuddered. Dryden glanced at him again, considering the layout of the situation.
He had a decent chance of catching the Jeep. The desert was big and mostly flat, and still mostly dark—he would see the Jeep’s taillights if he got within even a couple of miles.
But if he didn’t …
Dryden kept one hand on the wheel and kept the other poised to backhand the passenger if he woke. If he didn’t catch the Jeep, he would need the man alive for questioning.
He kept the speedometer near 110 and divided his attention between the passenger and the road blurring by.
* * *
He passed the shot-up police cruiser ninety seconds later. The eastern sky was just bright enough now to cast a bit of light over the desert. The cruiser was still steaming, hunkered in the dark like a smashed insect.
He watched the road to the south, though he didn’t expect to see the Jeep’s taillights for another couple of minutes at best.
The needle wavered up and down near 110. The yellow lines on the highway looked unnatural, sliding by at this speed. Like a bad special effect in a movie.
Thirty seconds past the cruiser.
Sixty.
Nothing ahead but darkness.
Ninety seconds.
Then he topped a rise and saw a light. Not red. Pale yellow, a single pinpoint in the black landscape.
Half a mile later he knew what it was. He felt his chest tighten. He let off the accelerator.
The keening whine of the Explorer’s engine cycled down—80 miles per hour, 60, 40.
He rolled to a stop twenty feet shy of the white light. It hung high above the roadbed on a rusty arm sticking out from a wooden post. In its glow, a second paved road bisected 395, running east and west into the desert.
The men in the Jeep Wrangler would have had every reason to get off 395 as soon as possible. There were sure to be police coming up the highway any time now, closing in on the stricken cruiser with the unresponsive driver.
The Jeep could have gone east or west from here.
West seemed more likely. It would lead toward the coast, and eventually Silicon Valley, several hours north, if that was where they were going.
But the men in the Jeep weren’t necessarily going straight back to wherever they’d been sent out from. They were taking Claire to the interrogation site, wherever that was.
Dryden put the Explorer in park and shoved open his door. He reached across the unconscious passenger and took hold of the man’s rifle, a Remington 700 with a scope the size of a small coffee can.
A night-vision scope.
Dryden got out and clambered onto the Explorer’s hood, then onto its roof. He stood upright and first scanned the three directions with his own eyes. East. South. West. Nothing out there. Just black country under a brightening sky.
He found the power switch for the scope and turned it on. It was a Zeiss, a little newer than the hardware he’d used back in the day, but familiar enough in its operation.
He found the selector switch for its thermal-vision setting, and the optical magnification ring. He twisted the ring to its most powerful zoom, 12x, then shouldered the rifle and put his eye to the lens.
He glassed the southern route first—395 running down toward Barstow.
The landscape looked ghostly in the blue-white false-color image. Even now, after hours of night air, the road held a different temperature than the surrounding land. Maybe an effect of humidity or soil acidity. Whatever the case, Dryden could see the road easily, snaking away for miles.
There was no vehicle to be seen on it.
He turned in place and studied the western stretch of the crossroad.
Nothing there.
And nothing to the east.
He’d just lowered the rifle when he felt the Explorer rock lightly on its shocks—movement in the cab, beneath his feet.
“Goddammit,” he hissed.
He slung the weapon on his shoulder, vaulted down to the hood and then the asphalt, and drew the Beretta from his waistband.
But he saw at once there would be no need for it.
The man in the passenger seat wasn’t coming around. He was seizing. His shoulders jerked forward and back; his head hung to one side, a pencil-thick line of blood coming from his nose and one ear.
Dryden thought of the punch he had hit the man with, seconds after freeing himself and locking up the brakes.
He had thrown the punch too hard. Had centered the impact too much on the temple. In that moment, he had been in no frame of mind for restraint. His only thought had been to immobilize both men as quickly as possible.
Careless. Too many years past his training—even a couple of years back, he would’ve reined in his emotions better than that.
All at once the seizure stopped. Dryden was pretty sure he knew why. He tracked around to the open driver’s-side door, leaned in, and pressed a finger to the man’s carotid artery pulse point. For a second or two he thought he felt something, weak and fluttering. Then nothing.
He withdrew his hand. Stared at the dead man in front, and the dead man in back, and then at the darkness and the three roads leading into it.
Three choices. A shell game.
He slid behind the wheel again, slammed the door, and shoved the selector into drive. He turned hard right and floored it, skidding and then accelerating west on the crossroad—the best bet of the three, though not by much.
For the next four minutes he kept the vehicle’s speed above 100 miles per hour. He passed another crossroad but didn’t stop. A mile farther on, he passed another. He crested a rise and at last saw a pair of taillights far ahead, like cat’s eyes in the near-dark. He overtook the vehicle within sixty seconds: an old pickup with a gray-haired man at the wheel. Nothing ahead of it but wide open miles of nothing.
He kept the needle over 100 for another five miles. Until long after the math had become undeniable. He denied it anyway and kept going, mile upon mile.
Nothing. Just empty road and empty land. Nothing else to see.
Dryden let off the gas. He coasted to a stop on the shoulder. He rolled the window down and sat gripping the wheel, his palms slick and his breath coming in fast surges. He could hear the low, rhythmic chorus of insect noises in the desert scrub.
And beneath that, another sound: the hiss of static from the passenger footwell.
It was twenty minutes later. Dryden was parked at an overlook in the foothills; he had come to it by way of a two-track that probably hadn’t seen traffic in weeks.
The overlook faced east across the desert, into the sunrise. Ten miles out on the plain, Highway 395 gleamed dully in the light. There had been a steady procession of emergency vehicles moving north on it, the whole time Dryden had been watching. Farther up in that direction, he could see them clustered at the place where he and Claire had been attacked.
He opened his door and got out. He went around to the passenger side, opened both doors there, and dragged the dead men into the weeds. He went through their clothes and found three wallets—one of them his own. In the other two he found a combined two hundred thirty-one dollars in cash, and no IDs. He pocketed the money, wiped his prints from the wallets, and tossed them after their owners.
Each dead man had a phone on him, the models identical and cheap. Throwaways, for sure, though they’d been modified with some add-on software. When Dryden pulled up the recent call logs, all the phone numbers were simply lines of asterisks. Only the time stamps remained visible. Neither man had made or received a call in more than an hour—long before the attack on Claire and himself.
Dryden pulled the phones’ batteries, wiped his prints as he’d done with the wallets, and left the phones with the dead men. He got back behind the wheel but left the engine off. He sat staring at the distant crime scene, thinking.
What kept coming back to him was Claire’s behavior right before the shooting started. The way she had suddenly scrutinized the darkness around them, seconds before the first shots were fired. She had somehow known those men were out there—had known
someone
was out there, anyway—but she had only known it once the cop arrived.
Before that, she hadn’t seemed concerned at all that someone might be watching them.
It made no sense.
How had the random arrival of a patrol car, one that had damn near driven past without incident, tipped her off to the ambush?
It wasn’t as if the cruiser’s headlights had given the attackers away. Claire had not turned her attention to any one spot. She had seemed to respond on a more fundamental level: The very fact that the cop car had shown up, that the officer was about to stop and question them, had somehow
told her
those men were out there.
Dryden considered it, and got nowhere.
After a minute he turned his attention to a more basic question: How had those men set up the ambush in the first place?
How had they found the spot where Claire had left that phone? There was zero chance they had tracked the phone itself. If Claire Dunham wanted to be electronically invisible, she could do it in her sleep. Data security was her world. Big companies—
tech
companies—paid her large sums to teach them about it.
She had purchased the disposable phone so she could be untrackable. She would have paid cash for it in some store she’d chosen at random. And before she stashed the phone near that tree in the desert, she would have detached its battery to keep it from pinging nearby towers. She would have done that before she got within thirty miles of the place where she hid the thing.
The shooters hadn’t found that spot by tracking the phone.
So how had they done it?
Dryden thought about it as the minutes passed. Nothing came to him.
The plastic case still lay in the passenger footwell. The machine was still turned on inside it, hissing.
Dryden stared at it. Something about it nagged at him. Some loose thread, trailing from the tangle of things Claire had shown him, though he couldn’t seem to place it.
He picked up the case, set it on the console, and opened it.
The tablet computer’s display was still lit up, showing the bare-bones program that controlled the strange machine.
Ten seconds passed. The static faltered. A twangy voice and a steel guitar faded in, then back out.
Dryden tapped the
OFF
button on the screen, and the hissing cut out. He closed the program and tapped the only other icon he could see: the file folder of audio clips.