Signal: A Sam Dryden Novel (Sam Dryden series Book 2)

by Patrick Lee

  Dryden heard a woman’s voice speaking, indiscernible beneath a wash of static. It stayed like that for five seconds or more, and then it cleared just enough that he could make out most of the words.

  “… have said they will not release any names until the families have been notified. A spokesperson for the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department told us they know the identity of only one of the victims, based on the 9-1-1 call that came in just after two in the morning. Medical examiners will attempt to identify the other three by dental records. I’m going to go back to Richard Amis, who’s still out at the scene. Richard.”

  A second of hissing silence followed, and then a man began to speak.

  “Tamryn, it’s still a very active scene out here. Any normal day, you could drive past this place and not see another car for miles, but this morning there are upward of a dozen vehicles on-site, local and federal officials, including arson investigators. Based on what I’m hearing, the evidence supports what the first responders assumed. The trailer’s owner, Harold Heeley Shannon, was keeping the four victims in a cage, and when he discovered they’d called the police, he set fire to the trailer and fled, leaving them locked inside. Tamryn, I have to tell you, I’ve seen a number of investigators at this site become outwardly emotional. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen in more than ten years of reporting.”

  Another pause, and the woman’s voice came back.

  “I want to give our listeners the description of the perpetrator again, Harold Heeley Shannon, he’s a white male, age sixty-two, long gray hair, gray beard, there’s a red Ford Fiesta registered in his—”

  A burst of static drowned out her words for a few seconds.

  “—come back to you with any developments on that story as we get them. For ABC7-FM, I’m Tamryn Bell. It’s eleven minutes past eight o’clock.”

  The first notes of a commercial came through the static; Claire tapped the stop button and closed the audio player.

  Dryden stared at the tablet screen, unblinking. All that he’d heard—and all that he’d seen at the trailer—felt both real and intangible at the same time. Like thumbtacks stuck to empty space where a wall should have been.

  His thoughts went to the specifics: The woman on the radio had said it was eleven minutes past eight, and the reporter at the scene had described it as morning—8:11 in the morning. It wasn’t even 4:30 in the morning yet. The stars were still out over the Mojave.

  Dryden stared at the time stamp on the file: 09:47 PM—08/07/2015.

  That was last night, around a quarter to ten, a couple of hours before Claire had called him.

  Dryden looked up from the screen and found Claire watching him, gauging his response. Dryden met her gaze for a moment, then simply shook his head.

  I’m lost. Explain it.

  Claire seemed about to speak but stopped. She shut her eyes, leaned back into her headrest. Then she opened them again and closed the list of audio recordings.

  On the tablet’s screen, she tapped a program icon labeled simply MACHINE. It seemed to be the only other application the computer had. When it opened, Dryden saw a bare-bones program window featuring four labeled buttons: ON, OFF, RECORD, and STOP.

  At the moment, OFF was highlighted in bold. Claire tapped ON.

  For a second or two, nothing happened. Then the red glow inside the black plastic box disappeared, and a green glow replaced it. The deep, cyclic hum sped up, rising and falling through its frequency range at two or three times its earlier speed.

  Like something waking up, Dryden thought.

  Then, from the computer’s speakers, came static. Steady, hissing, like an aerated faucet.

  “Give it a minute,” Claire said.

  But it took only ten or fifteen seconds for the static to recede. A song faded in: ZZ Top’s “La Grange.” Almost at once it sank back into the hiss. Gone.

  For more than a minute after that, there was nothing to hear. Claire kept tilting her head, as if picking up subtle changes in the static.

  Then the distortion faded again, and a man’s voice came through, deep and measured, speaking calmly about something. Within seconds his words became discernible.

  “… two and two on Almodovar, who has a four-game hitting streak coming into this one. Curve ball outside, that’ll make it three balls, two strikes. We’ve got one out and one runner on, top of the second, score is one-nothing San Diego.”

  “Think the Padres are playing at four thirty in the morning?” Claire asked.

  Dryden stared at her, waiting for more. Between them, the play-by-play continued.

  “Fastball, Almodovar gets a piece of it, pop-up foul left, still three and two.”

  Claire touched the clock display on the Land Rover’s instrument panel. Ran her fingertip across the glowing numbers: 4:27.

  “Give or take a minute,” she said, “I’m gonna say Almodovar hits that pop-up around two fifty-one this afternoon.”

  Dryden understood and didn’t. The thumbtacks were still stuck to nothing. He shook his head again.

  Claire countered by nodding.

  “You’re listening to something that hasn’t happened yet,” she said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Dryden had stopped shaking his head. He was only staring now. At Claire, then at the black box, then at the tablet computer. From its speakers the announcer was still talking. Almodovar got a fourth ball and walked.

  “Ten hours, twenty-four minutes,” Claire said. She rested her hand on the black box, the green light through the slats silhouetting her fingers. “It picks up radio signals ten hours and twenty-four minutes before they’re transmitted.”

  Dryden stared and tried to see how it could be a joke. The trailer had been real. The man he’d killed there had been real. This part, though—no. It had to be some kind of joke, hard as it was to imagine Claire Dunham doing that. It was a hundred eighty degrees from her character.

  “You’re reacting the same way I did,” Claire said, “when I first saw it. Anyone would.”

  “What you’re talking about isn’t possible,” Dryden said.

  “You said it yourself in the trailer: How could I have known? No one in the world, outside that metal cage, could have expected that 9-1-1 call.”

  Dryden’s mind went back to the recorded news broadcast. He said, “That audio clip, the reporters talking about the girls being dead—”

  “I recorded it last night at nine forty-seven,” Claire said, “when this machine received it.”

  “And you’re saying that report will actually be on the radio at eight eleven this morning?”

  Dark amusement crossed Claire’s face. “Not now it won’t be.”

  Dryden looked away into the night. The red edge of the horizon was brighter than before, but the faint light smudge of Barstow was still visible to the south of it.

  Static crept back in over the baseball game, washing it out to nothing. Dryden’s thoughts seemed to go with it. Out into the ether.

  “I don’t know how it works,” Claire said. “No one does, exactly—not even the people who built it. The way I understand it, they stumbled onto this effect.”

  “What people?”

  “A company I started working for, just over a month ago. It’s called Bayliss Labs. They’re a spin-off from a big defense contractor, up in the Valley. They were separated off for security reasons—Bayliss works on really sensitive technology. Bleeding-edge stuff.”

  Dryden realized most of her words were going right past him. He was stuck on what she’d already said. He was stuck on the machine.

  Claire opened her mouth to go on, but Dryden shook his head. “It’s just not possible,” he said. “What you’re saying this thing can do … it’s not possible. This isn’t something you stumble onto.”

  “It is. They did.”

  Dryden could only shake his head again.

  Claire started to say something, then stopped. She seemed to be marshaling what she wanted to tell him. Finally she looked up. “Do you
remember a story in the news, a few years ago, about a kind of particle called a neutrino?”

  “I’ve heard that word. I don’t remember any news about it.”

  “There was a big dustup in the scientific community, all over the world. There was an experiment that seemed to suggest neutrinos can travel faster than light. Remember now?”

  Dryden thought about it. He nodded. “Vaguely.”

  “It wasn’t exactly front-page stuff, but it was kind of everywhere. It would have been a very big deal if later experiments proved it was true, but there was no slam dunk in either direction. A lot of people wrote it off. A lot of other people kept working on it. Bayliss had a few minor projects devoted to the concept, using novel materials to try interacting with neutrinos—that in itself was tricky; neutrinos are strange, even to physicists who are used to strange things, like quantum mechanics. Neutrinos barely interact with most other matter; they’re emitted by the sun, and the ones that hit the earth usually pass through it without striking so much as an atom. Think about that—they slip right through the planet without touching it. The projects at Bayliss were aimed at finding materials that would capture neutrinos like an antenna. They were using sheets of graphene layered with other materials I couldn’t name now if I tried. They started seeing results after about a year of working at it.”

  “What would be the point of that?” Dryden asked. “What would they gain by capturing these things?”

  “Who knows? Usually discoveries come first, and applications follow. People always think of some use for a new toy. I know they weren’t expecting this outcome, though.” She indicated the machine.

  Dryden stared at the thing again. “But how could it do what you’re talking about? How could it pick up radio signals that don’t even exist yet?”

  “I can only explain it the way I heard it, and all I heard were educated guesses.”

  “Like what?”

  “Did you ever read Stephen Hawking? A Brief History of Time?”

  “I gave it a shot. That was probably twenty years ago. I don’t remember any of it now.”

  “I’m probably going to mangle some of this,” Claire said, “but the main parts are about time itself. What time actually is. It’s a physical thing; it’s not just some human construct to measure hours and years. Time is something tangible, like gravity and light. And it’s not just like those things—it’s tied to those things. People like Einstein and Lorentz worked out the basics a hundred years ago. Things like time dilation—how the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time slows down for you. That’s a nailed-down fact. No one disputes it.”

  “Okay,” Dryden said.

  “The guys at Bayliss came to believe neutrinos—some of them, at least—really do travel faster than light, and when they do, they actually move against the direction of time.”

  Dryden stared at her. “You mean back in time.”

  Claire nodded. “And it’s possible they can carry information with them. It’s possible they’re absorbing the energy of radio waves in the future, and releasing that same energy when this machine picks them up in the present. If they absorbed enough of it—a pattern of it, the kind of pattern that makes up a radio signal—then that pattern could show up when this machine absorbs the neutrinos. Those particles would just be acting like a relay. Like a booster.”

  Dryden let the idea sink into him. His eyes dropped to the black box, the ghostly light from inside it seeming to ripple with the deep hum.

  “I told you,” Claire said, “those are guesses. It’s the best they could come up with. Maybe it doesn’t work like that at all, but it does work. And once the people at Bayliss realized what they had, it scared the shit out of them.”

  She was looking his way. Dryden raised his eyes and met her gaze, and when she spoke again, her exhaustion was palpable. “I need you to believe me.”

  Dryden was quiet for a moment. Then he spoke, almost surprising himself.

  “Alright. Jesus … alright.”

  He saw relief rise in Claire’s expression.

  “They hired your firm to handle their security?” Dryden asked. “When they got scared?”

  Claire shook her head. “Not my firm. Me personally. They hired me to be their internal security chief. The executive in charge at Bayliss was a friend of mine, Dale Whitcomb. He and I met a few years ago, when I did home security for him—I saved his life, probably his family’s lives, too. He asked me to come on board at Bayliss last month because he trusted me, and because I was an outsider to the company. He wanted someone like that. Someone he could be sure didn’t have hidden loyalties to anyone else there.”

  Dryden thought he saw where she was going. He waited for her to continue.

  For a moment it looked like she wouldn’t be able to. Another wave of fatigue seemed to pass through her—not so much tiredness as simply emptiness. Then she blinked and took a breath and made herself continue the story.

  “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.