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

by Patrick Lee

  Dryden had been staring down into the flames. His gaze snapped up now, meeting Whitcomb’s. Beside him, Marnie did the same.

  Whitcomb nodded. “He heard that in the desert in North Africa, in 1942. At the time, he had no reason to think it was anything strange. Just some song he wasn’t familiar with. How it was being broadcast in Algeria, he couldn’t imagine. Maybe someone was transmitting English music out of occupied France. Maybe the machine could pull in signals from that far out, all the way across the Mediterranean. Or farther. Maybe Britain.”

  Whitcomb took hold of a two-by-four sticking out of the tire rim on his side. He used it like a poker, prodding at the bed of coals below.

  “I saw for myself the moment it hit him,” he said. “I remember the date. February 9, 1964. I was ten years old. I guess just about anyone my age remembers the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, but it’s not the show itself I remember now. What I remember is my dad getting up off the couch, his expression like I’d never seen it before. I remember him going into the kitchen and splashing water on his face, and my mom asking him what was wrong, and I remember that he couldn’t answer her. He went up in the attic and got out some old boxes of his stuff from the war. Journals he’d kept at the time. In 1964, he was still in the military. Still working in intelligence. I remember him putting his coat on, after he came back downstairs, and saying he had to go to work. And then he left, and I didn’t see him again for weeks.”

  Whitcomb set aside the two-by-four and went on. “I learned the whole story years later, when I was in military intel myself, and working with him. In the days after that television broadcast, my father tracked down some of the former OSS men who’d been with him in North Africa. Men who’d gone to that site. Together they got clearance to dig into the old paperwork that had been found there, and even to lead an expedition out to that spot in the Sahara where the site had been. They didn’t find much there. They had better luck with the boxes of papers, which were lab notes by the Germans who’d built that machine, in 1942. But the notes were incomplete. Most of them had been burned before the American commandos secured the site. What was left was … frustrating. Like a treasure map missing half the route, including the X to mark the spot.”

  “The U.S. military wanted to build their own version of that machine?” Dryden asked. “If they could figure it out?”

  Whitcomb nodded. “But there was more to it than that. Think of all the questions they had to consider. Had those few Germans out in the desert really been the only ones who knew about this technology, or did others know? If there were others, what happened to them? When the U.S. and Russia divided up Nazi scientists after the war, like battle spoils, could the Russians have gotten someone who knew how to build one of those machines? In 1964, when my father and his colleagues started digging into this, the Cold War was pretty close to its worst days. It was like the whole government ran on paranoia. There were serious incentives to look into this matter. But … there was also no proof any of it was true. Just my father’s say-so, versus all common sense. The one bit of evidence he had was his journal from the North Africa campaign; he’d actually written that Beatles line in it. In ’64, the military went as far as running chemical analysis on the ink he’d used to write it, and they determined it was a hell of a lot older than the song ‘She Loves You.’ I think that test bought my father and his friends more credibility than anything else, but only to a point. Try looking at it from the military’s perspective, back then. What’s the more likely explanation? That an intel officer really heard a message from the future, back in 1942, or that he found a way to make ink that could fuck with the chemical tests? What would you believe?”

  Marnie said, “So what happened?”

  “A half measure,” Whitcomb said. “The military analyzed the paperwork from that site and pulled from it everything they could make sense of. Everything that offered a hint of how the machine might have worked. They weren’t willing to spend money on trying to build another one; there had to be a million ways to interpret those technical notes. A million different machines you could build, on the off chance one would be the right one. If there was a right one. If the whole thing wasn’t a fantasy.”

  “So what was the half measure?” Dryden said.

  “Sitting back and watching. Watching the world, and watching new communication technologies emerge naturally, over the decades. Scrutinizing the details, seeing if some new field of work started to look oddly familiar—along the lines of those old German tech notes. I’ve always thought it was a smart approach. Whether the Germans back then just made a shot in the dark, or even if they had some equivalent of a Nikola Tesla, way ahead of his time, it stood to reason someone else would eventually discover the same technology again. We figured by watching closely enough, we might actually see it coming. Some project at a place like MIT or Caltech might be stumbling in the right direction and not even realize it … but we would. For that matter, we could give them a little push now and then, this way or that way, based on the notes from 1942. Like that kids’ game, warmer or colder, only they wouldn’t know they were playing it. That’s how I ended up at Bayliss Labs. Their work with neutrinos, starting a few years back … the devices they were building … it was uncanny how well they matched those old notes. They were on the right track without knowing it. Once I became head of the company, I was able to give them a few nudges. Educated guesses that were more educated than I let on. Like I said, the end result wasn’t a fluke. Not just a fluke, anyway.”

  “So the military knows what Bayliss created,” Marnie said. “If they sent you to oversee it—”

  Whitcomb shook his head. “They sent me to try. I never told them I succeeded. When the damn thing finally worked, my reaction was genuine. It scared the hell out of me. I could see then how dangerous it could be, and what people would do to get control of it. The approach Claire told you about—my putting together a list of powerful people I trusted—that was all I could think of. At the time, I wasn’t seeing it in terms of destroying the thing, disinventing it. I just wanted to get it into safe hands. I thought that was possible, then. I don’t anymore. This technology needs to disappear. If we’re lucky, it’ll be another half a century before someone else invents it. Maybe the world will be readier for it by then.”

  He said the last part like he didn’t put much stock in it. He started to say more, but Dryden cut him off.

  “Wait a second. The machine your father found, in 1942 … how did it hear something more than twenty years in the future? Are you saying the Germans had a system like the Group has today? How could they? It takes computers, search engines—”

  Whitcomb shook his head again. “If you want to control what you hear in the future, then you need search engines. But to just hear the distant future, a pretty crude feedback loop between two of these machines could be rigged up. That’s what the Germans had. It would have been primitive, compared to what we’re up against now.”

  “Let’s get to that part,” Marnie said. “The Group. Curtis said in his letter that you know something about them.”

  Whitcomb’s eyes went past the fire pit to the machine in its plastic case.

  “I’ve known about them for years,” he said. “In a way, they’re the original owners of this technology.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “There was another side to the work my father did,” Whitcomb said, “and that I later did. It wasn’t just about trying to re-create these machines. There was all that paranoia I mentioned. The fear that some other government would build one of these things, if it were possible. We wondered if anyone in Germany remembered this research. If they’d shared it with others. We did a lot of snooping to find out—human intel, eavesdropping, anything we could manage. Over the years we picked up a few crumbs. We ended up pretty certain nobody else in the world knew how to build one of these. But we also learned there were people just like us out there: people who knew there had been a working model once and wanted to reinvent it.�
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  “Were they from the original project?” Dryden said.

  “Not really. I don’t believe any of the initial researchers survived the war—but some of their knowledge did. As far as we could piece it together, we think there were detailed project files kept somewhere in Berlin, and in the last days before the city fell, somebody who understood the value of those files got them out of there. Out of harm’s way and into a hiding place. We think it was a German soldier, probably someone who’d done security for the project along the way. Then at some point in the postwar, he took that information to people who could make use of it. His own idea of safe hands to put it in, I suppose.”

  “What kind of hands?” Marnie said.

  “Rich ones. Old money, aristocratic types. That’s what all our sources pointed to. We never had absolute certainty on every last name, but we had very solid hunches. I got the impression they were people who weren’t all that happy with how the war turned out.”

  Dryden fixed his gaze on Whitcomb. “You’re saying the Group are—”

  “I don’t think they fit any simple category. I think they’re a mix of a lot of things that most of the world has tried to leave behind. My father used to say power has a good memory for bad ideas. The people this German soldier took the project files to … it makes sense he would have chosen people whose views he agreed with. These days, the Group is made up of their children and grandchildren; who knows what exactly their goals are. We’ve seen for ourselves what they’ll do to achieve them. That’s enough for me.”

  To the west, above the hills, the crow screamed again. Dryden could see it circling, catching some kind of updraft coming off the terrain.

  “In any case,” Whitcomb said, “those old files weren’t enough to let them actually rebuild one of these machines. Same problem we had. So they settled on the same strategy: watch and wait. I didn’t appreciate how good they might be at it. Not until it was too late.”

  Marnie put her hands to her face and rubbed her eyes. “Maybe they just want money. Maybe it’s not anything ideological, or political. Just money. Isn’t that all that matters to people like that, in the end?”

  There was a wishfulness in the way she said it.

  In response, Whitcomb pointed at the black bag with Curtis’s binders sticking out of the top. “Did either of you look at that material? I know you read Curtis’s letter, but did you get to the printouts?”

  Dryden shook his head. “I glanced at the binders, but that was it. We haven’t had time to do more than that.”

  “It’s interesting reading,” Whitcomb said. “Curtis e-mailed me copies of those files before we broke contact. I didn’t bother with the computer code stuff—I’m not a programmer—but the last batch there, all the Group’s internal e-mails … there’s a hell of a lot to learn from it.”

  “The few e-mails I read didn’t make much sense,” Dryden said.

  Whitcomb nodded. “Most of them don’t. Some do.” He held his hand out toward the open bag. “Let me show you something.”

  Dryden slid the fifth binder out of the bag and handed it to Whitcomb. The man opened it and paged quickly through the bound stack of printed e-mails, zeroing in on some particular passage. Finally he stopped.

  “There’s a chain of messages here that contain file attachments,” Whitcomb said. “Text files. Curtis was able to open those attachments and print them. The e-mails themselves are vague and pretty meaningless, but the attachments are clips from newspaper articles. Future articles. Take a look.”

  He passed the open binder to Dryden and Marnie.

  The first article began at the top of the printed page. The headline read: EVERSMAN WINS 54–46

  The first sentences of the article removed any doubt over what the headline was referring to:

  At the stroke of 11:00 P.M. Eastern Time, as polls closed in California and Oregon and Washington, Hayden Eversman officially became the next president of the United States. Thirty minutes later, before a jubilant crowd at Boston’s Fenway Park, Eversman took to the podium to declare victory.

  The snippet of the article ended there. Dryden looked up at Whitcomb, along with Marnie.

  “This is the outcome of the next election?” Marnie asked.

  “I’ve never heard of Hayden Eversman,” Dryden said. “How is he the next president, when the election is a year from this fall? Everyone who’s running is already in the race.”

  “He’s not the next president,” Whitcomb said. “Look at the dateline.”

  Dryden looked down and focused on what he’d skipped over before: the slug of text just below the article’s headline.

  AP—Wednesday, November 6, 2024.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “Keep reading,” Whitcomb said. “There’s more to it.”

  Dryden turned the page to the next printed article. This one came from the same year as the first, 2024, but from an earlier point in time: four weeks before the election—October 8. In the simple text format of the attachment, the headline was the same size and font as the rest of the article, though in an actual newspaper, this headline would have screamed from the page in letters three inches tall:

  HAYDEN EVERSMAN SHOT TO DEATH IN DES MOINES

  “What the hell?” Marnie said.

  As with the previous article, only the first several sentences were included, but that was enough to cover the basics. According to the story, Eversman had been speaking at an outdoor venue in Des Moines when he was killed. The bullet had come from some distance away, probably a rifle shot, and as of print time, no suspect had been named. Hayden Eversman, the Democratic candidate, had held a comfortable lead over his Republican opponent, whose name didn’t appear in this part of the story.

  Marnie looked up at Whitcomb. “How can both of these articles exist?” she asked. “How does this man win the election and also get killed a month earlier?”

  “The articles are from different versions of the future,” Whitcomb said. “Just like there would have been different articles about the death toll from that building collapse in Santa Maria. Different outcomes, different news reports.”

  Marnie nodded slowly, getting the idea squared in front of her. “In one future,” she said, “Hayden Eversman gets elected president, and in a different version, he gets killed a few weeks before that.”

  Whitcomb nodded. “In the construction site, you two changed something that was a few minutes from happening. These articles show how the Group changed something that was nine years away.” He nodded at the binder. “In fact, they changed it more than once. Keep going.”

  Dryden turned to the next attachment: a third article about Eversman. Another headline that would have been shouted across the printed page in real life:

  HAYDEN EVERSMAN’S PLANE CRASHES—NO SURVIVORS

  This article was dated September 15, 2024, another few weeks before the previous one. The text told of Eversman’s campaign jet going down just minutes after takeoff from Richmond International Airport in Virginia. The crash investigation had not yet begun, but even this article, written within hours of the incident, reported that the wreckage was a debris field more than a mile long—indicating the plane had exploded in midair.

  The next article, the fourth one, was dated June 26. The headline and story had Eversman once again being shot and killed, this time while speaking to a crowd in Tampa.

  The fifth article was similar: another shooting death, though it took place on June 5 in Chicago.

  The sixth article described another midair explosion of Eversman’s campaign jet, after takeoff from LAX on May 23—just two weeks after he’d officially claimed the Democratic nomination.

  The seventh and final article was dated Wednesday, May 1, 2024. Both the headline and the text drew allusions to Robert F. Kennedy, for obvious reasons. Hayden Eversman, minutes after making a victory speech upon winning the California primary, was shot and killed. It didn’t happen in a hotel kitchen. It happened on the sidewalk five feet from the limousine he was walk
ing toward. No suspect had been detained in the few hours before the article was published.

  “What the hell is all this?” Marnie asked. “They’re trying out different ways to kill someone who would have become president nine years from now? And how are they doing that? How are they arranging an assassination almost a decade in the future?”

  “It could be done,” Dryden said. “You could use sealed orders, blind go-betweens. Tell someone, ‘Hold this envelope for nine years and then deliver it to so-and-so.’ If you pay people enough, you can get them to do anything. Obviously it works. It looks like they did it six times.”

  “Which in itself doesn’t make sense,” Marnie said. She looked around at the others. “Why find six different ways to kill him? After it worked once, wouldn’t that be enough?”

  Whitcomb managed a smile. “You’d think so.”

  “Why do this at all?” Dryden asked. “I don’t mean why kill him, I mean why kill him then? In 2024. If the Group wants this guy dead before he becomes president, it would be easier to kill him right now, when he’s nobody.”

  “Much easier,” Whitcomb said. “And they’ve already done that with other people. You read as much in Curtis’s letter, and I’ve seen the e-mails that reference some of those murders.”

  “So why is Hayden Eversman different?” Marnie asked.

  Whitcomb shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve racked my brains over it, and all I’ve got are half-assed maybes. Like maybe it’s not Eversman they care about. Maybe they want his running mate to be president, and killing Eversman right at the end is a way to pull that off. But—”

  “But that doesn’t work,” Marnie said.

  Dryden nodded, flipping back through the preceding articles. “If they wanted his running mate in office, they’d sit back and let Eversman win like he was supposed to, and then kill him.”