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

by Patrick Lee

  “That’s right,” Whitcomb said. “So I have no idea. I only showed you this to make the point that these people are thinking in terms of politics. They have big plans, and they’re going to achieve them if we don’t shut it all down.”

  On those words, Whitcomb turned to Cal Brennan. Dryden looked at him, too. Sized him up again. The hard skin, the result of sunburn after sunburn. The sandblasted Oakleys. Dryden pictured the guy on a plane, maybe yesterday or the day before, flying in from Iraq or Syria or one of half a dozen other places.

  “What sort of resources do you deal in, Brennan?” Dryden asked.

  Brennan’s eyes turned toward him. The eyes without laugh lines. “Human resources.”

  “Guys with guns,” Dryden said.

  Brennan nodded. “Among other hardware.”

  Whitcomb spoke up. “There’s no clean way to go about this. It comes down to killing these people. All of them, if we can. Do either of you have a problem with that?”

  He aimed the question at Dryden and Marnie.

  “No,” Dryden said.

  Marnie hesitated. Whitcomb and Brennan watched her.

  “I’d want to know about collateral damage,” she said. “Some of these people will have children around—”

  “We’d be careful within reason,” Brennan said. He rattled it off like he was used to saying it. Spoken boilerplate.

  “You need to find them all first,” Dryden said. “Every location where they’re set up. Wherever they’ve got their own versions of the machine, wherever their system is.”

  Whitcomb was nodding. “There’s an intelligence aspect to it. We can manage it—between the printed e-mails and what I already knew of these people, there’s a base of facts to start from. Besides … they’ve made it easy for us, in at least one way.”

  Dryden waited for him to go on.

  “Though the e-mails don’t mention any names, they make it clear there’s one person in charge of the Group’s activities in California, maybe the whole western U.S. A kind of regional head, you could call him. Like a caporegime in the Mafia. All the e-mails come across as if … well … as if the only people writing them are this man and a few others below him. Not a word from anyone above him.”

  “You don’t think they told the rest of the Group about the machines,” Dryden said, not asking. “About the system, or any of it.”

  “I’d almost guarantee it,” Whitcomb said. “Why the hell would this guy hand that kind of power up to his superiors, anyway? He’s the superior if he’s got all this to himself.”

  Dryden thought about that. It fit everything he’d ever learned about human nature. It was almost reassuring, in its own ugly way: a scrap of normalcy in the four-dimensional chess game.

  “I still plan to take out as much of the Group as I can,” Whitcomb said, “but as far as shutting down the system, erasing this technology right out of the world … I believe we can do all that here in California.” He pointed to the binder full of e-mails. “I’ve read that material at least ten times now. I’ve made notes. I’m convinced they’ve got their entire system, including every machine they’ve built, in a single secure location. We find that site and hit it, it’s game over. Then we destroy our own machine for good measure.”

  “Wherever their machines are,” Dryden said, “that’s not where they took Claire. They were taking me to the machine site, before I got free. Claire was going someplace else. We need to know where. We need to hit that site at exactly the same time we hit the other place, if we’re going to save her.”

  Whitcomb nodded. “We will. We’ll do this right.”

  Dryden looked back and forth between Whitcomb and Brennan. “So what’s the first move? Whatever it is, we start right now.”

  Brennan shook his head. “No. We start ten and a half hours from now, at the soonest.”

  The man was looking at the machine in its case as he finished saying it.

  Dryden stared at him. Saw what he meant. Felt his pulse accelerate as his adrenaline spiked.

  “You’re not serious,” Dryden said.

  “I am,” Brennan said. He turned his gaze on Whitcomb. “I’ve listened without rejecting this, because I do know the kinds of projects you work on, and because in thirty years I’ve never heard you lie about anything. But you can’t expect me to commit my people until I’ve seen for myself that this is real.”

  Dryden took a step toward him, past the edge of the fire pit. “My friend is locked in a room somewhere, being interrogated. I’m not burning ten and a half hours for nothing.”

  Brennan shrugged. “Have at it. I’ll help as soon as I’ve seen proof.”

  Dryden turned to Whitcomb. “We start now. If your friend wants to wait—”

  Whitcomb was already shaking his head. “We can’t do this piecemeal. We get one shot at it—”

  “If Claire dies because we wasted half a fucking day—”

  “If you were him,” Whitcomb said, nodding at Brennan, “would you believe the rest of us? Think about it.”

  Dryden started to answer, but stopped. He saw himself in Claire’s Land Rover, in the darkness of the Mojave, right after she’d shown him the machine. He’d already seen the proof by then—the trailer and all that had happened there—but the fact was, he still hadn’t believed her. Not right away.

  Dryden ran a hand through his hair. “Goddammit…”

  He turned in place, saw Marnie looking at him, her own frustration palpable.

  Then Dryden’s eyes narrowed. A thought had come to him. Another memory from those few minutes in Claire’s SUV.

  “What is it?” Marnie asked.

  Dryden shook his head. “I need to think for a second.”

  He stepped away from the fire, pacing, his gaze going everywhere and nowhere. He shut his eyes and let the memory come all the way through.

  Then he opened them again and looked at his watch.

  2:37 P.M.

  “It was going to be two fifty-one,” he said. “Two fifty-one this afternoon.”

  “What’s at two fifty-one?” Whitcomb asked.

  Dryden ignored him. He turned and looked at Brennan again. “You need proof? Fine. But we’re not waiting for it. Fifteen minutes is all it’ll take.”

  “What do you mean?” the man asked.

  Dryden said, “You follow baseball?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Dryden leaned into his Explorer, put the key in the ignition, and turned on the radio. He stood there at the driver’s-side door, using the seek button to cycle through the stations.

  Marnie came up beside him, Whitcomb and Brennan close behind.

  “What are you looking for?” Marnie asked.

  “The Padres are playing right now,” Dryden said. “Or they’re about to be. At two fifty-one they’ll be in the top of the second inning. I heard part of it on the machine ten and a half hours ago.”

  He gave up on the seek button and used the knob, clicking one step at a time through the frequencies. Here and there, barely audible songs filtered through the distortion. He’d almost made it back around the dial when he heard a man’s voice coming through the static, deep and measured, unmistakably familiar.

  The game itself hadn’t started yet. The announcer was talking about a sponsor, some insurance company in San Diego.

  Dryden sat behind the wheel and opened the glove box; he found a pencil, then tore out the last page of his road atlas for something to write on. He pressed the page to the flat top of the center console, then stopped. He shut his eyes and put himself back in Claire’s vehicle again, listening to the game.

  “Almodovar,” he said. “It was two balls, two strikes when I first heard it.”

  He opened his eyes and began writing in the margin as the details came back.

  “There was a curve ball—outside. That made it three-two. After that he hit the pop-up—two fifty-one, Claire said. It was foul, to the left. Count was still three-two, and then…”

  He went quiet again, thinking.
What had happened after the pop-up?

  At the edge of his vision he saw the others watching him, waiting.

  “Ball four,” Dryden said. “The pitch right after the pop-up was ball four. Almodovar walked.”

  He jotted it down, dropped the pencil in the cup holder, and got out of the vehicle. He held the page out to Brennan.

  “That’s more than a person could guess at,” Dryden said. “Keep listening to the game. In a few minutes you’ll be up to speed with the rest of us.”

  Brennan took the page. From the Explorer’s speakers the announcer kept talking, static-laden but easily discernible. Dryden’s watch showed 2:40.

  * * *

  They waited. They stood near the vehicle as the game began and the minutes passed.

  At 2:45, Marnie looked up and met Dryden’s eyes, then Whitcomb’s. Something had occurred to her—whatever it was, it made her breath catch.

  “What?” Dryden said.

  “These people,” Marnie said, “the Group … their system lets them get information from the future—even years away. Police records, articles, anything. They learn about the future so they can change it, right?”

  “Right,” Dryden said.

  “So why don’t they use it to change the past? Why don’t they send a message to themselves one week ago, before things went wrong for them? Before Whitcomb and Claire and Curtis got away? Any kind of warning to themselves would fix everything, and that would be easy to do, the way the system works.”

  Dryden thought about it. The idea hadn’t occurred to him, in all the clamor of the day’s thoughts, but Marnie was right. There was no reason the Group couldn’t do that, given the system Curtis had described in his letter.

  For a second he wondered if the Group could send a message even further back in time—months or years—but then he caught himself. That wasn’t possible. The earliest point they could send a message back to would be the day they first had the system working. Before that, there would be no machinery to receive such a message. They could send something back a few weeks, no further.

  But Marnie had nailed it: Even one week would change everything.

  So why hadn’t the Group done that already?

  Whitcomb was shaking his head. “I worried about it, too, until I read their e-mails. There’s a long exchange where they go over this very point. They could do what you’re describing … but they never will.”

  Dryden and Marnie both stared at him, waiting for more.

  “There’s something you have to appreciate here that’s not so obvious. It wasn’t obvious to me. The people we’re dealing with … they’ve been obsessed with the idea of this technology for their entire lives. They grew up with the secret of it, and the talk of it, like it was a religion: this impossible thing that existed once, and might return someday—like a savior. It was different for my father, and later myself. For us it was a technical goal, like stealth planes or cruise missiles. Something we wanted for the military—for the country. It was never going to be just ours. But the Group did want it for themselves. It was a personal obsession, and they’ve had seventy years to dwell on it. To dream up the things they would do with it—and the things they wouldn’t.”

  “Why wouldn’t they send information back in time to themselves?” Marnie asked. “That would be the most powerful way to use this stuff. By far.”

  “Because they’re terrified of trying it,” Whitcomb said. “I’ll show you the e-mails later. You’ll see what I mean. It’s the one thing they absolutely will not do.”

  “But why?” Dryden asked. “Why does that scare them?”

  “Picture yourself doing it,” Whitcomb said. “Imagine you type a text message to send to yourself one week in the past—a warning about something. Maybe you’re in Florida on vacation, and the weather’s sucked all week, so you’re going to tell your past self to go to Colorado instead.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ve got the message ready to go. All you have to do is tap SEND. Now think about it. What exactly is going to happen when you hit that button? From your point of view, standing there in Florida … what’s going to happen? Are you going to disappear from there, and reappear in Colorado? Something is going to happen. But what?”

  Dryden stared. He thought about it. He traded a look with Marnie and saw her wrestling with it, too.

  At last he said, “I don’t know what would happen to me.”

  “Neither do they,” Whitcomb said. “Seventy years trying to get their heads around it, and they don’t have a clue. The only way to find out would be to try it, and nobody wants to do that. It scares them like nothing else in the world.”

  “But you wouldn’t always be a thousand miles from where you would have been,” Marnie said. “It wouldn’t have to be that extreme.”

  Whitcomb shrugged. “What if it’s a foot? The problem is the same. There would always be some difference in the present, if you changed your past. The instant switchover to that difference … what it would feel like to you … that’s the unknown. I wouldn’t try it myself for a million dollars.”

  A few feet away, the name Almodovar came over the Explorer’s speakers. Next up to bat.

  Brennan, leaning beside the open driver’s door, glanced down at the page in his hand.

  It was 2:49 by Dryden’s watch.

  “I think it’s important to know their weaknesses,” Whitcomb said. “Again, like a chess game. Their fear of screwing with the past is a big one.”

  “Do they have any other weaknesses?” Marnie said.

  Whitcomb smiled. “Oh, yes.”

  “Like what?”

  Before Whitcomb could answer, Dryden said, “Radio waves.”

  He had voiced the thought even as it crossed his mind. The others turned to him.

  “What do you mean?” Marnie asked. “Radio is how it all works in the first place. How would it be a weakness—”

  She cut herself off, catching at least part of what he meant.

  “Exactly,” Dryden said. “It is how it all works. So it’s a weakness. The Group uses radio station broadcasts to grab information from the future. Could we use that against them somehow? Jam the signals, set up some kind of interference?”

  “It might have worked in the beginning,” Whitcomb said. “Not anymore.”

  “Why not?” Dryden asked.

  Over the speakers, Almodovar came to the plate.

  “Because they knew that was a vulnerability,” Whitcomb said. “Using radio stations. It was a weak link. Sooner or later, some stations would have noticed the software hacks. Or routine upgrades would erase them. Or a hundred other problems. Too much room for error, especially in the long run—like using the system to get news articles from ten years in the future.”

  Almodovar swung and missed. Strike one.

  “But how could they avoid using radio stations?” Marnie asked.

  “They built one for themselves,” Whitcomb said. “Sort of. This system of theirs … it’s a boxed-in setup: their own little antenna sending out FM signals, with their machines right there to receive them. All of it together in a package about the size of a refrigerator, buried underground. According to the e-mails, it has a geothermal generator to power it, zero maintenance. They wanted it to be … future-proof. That way, in any version of the future, their system will still be there, underground, doing its job. That’s why they can look ten years ahead in time.”

  Fastball, low inside. Ball one.

  “They said this thing would keep working,” Whitcomb said, “even if the rest of the secure site burned down and took everyone there with it. Even the system’s Internet connection, which it obviously needs, would survive. It’s a pirated access, separate from the service for the rest of the buildings, and basically untraceable. They thought of everything.”

  Another swing and a miss. One ball, two strikes.

  “Pretty clever,” Dryden said.

  Whitcomb nodded. Then: “It’s also very, very stupid. It creates their biggest we
akness of all. It’s how we’re going to beat them.”

  “What are you talking about?” Marnie asked.

  Breaking ball, high over the plate. Ball two.

  “This is it,” Brennan said.

  Dryden looked at his watch. 2:51.

  For a moment he returned his gaze to Whitcomb and thought of continuing the conversation.

  Then Whitcomb waved it off. “Tell you in a minute,” he said, and turned his attention to the game broadcast.

  “Two and two on Almodovar, who has a four-game hitting streak coming into this one,” the announcer said. “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.”

  Every word, every stressed syllable, matched what Dryden had heard in the Mojave ten hours and twenty-four minutes earlier. It was as though he’d been looking down a tunnel then, and was seeing down it from the other end now. The feeling was surreal in a way he had not expected.

  Marnie turned to him. “You okay?”

  Dryden nodded. He blinked and took a hard breath to clear his head.

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

  Brennan was staring at the page of jotted notes in his hand. The paper shook, just visibly, picking up a tremor in his arm.

  “What do you say, Cal?” Whitcomb asked.

  Brennan didn’t answer. Didn’t seem to have even heard him. He stared at the page as the crackling audio washed over him.

  “Low and inside, and that’ll do it. Ball four. Runners on first and second, Watkins comes to the plate.”

  Brennan kept his eyes on the sheet of paper for another five seconds, though there was nothing more on it.

  “Is that enough?” Whitcomb asked.

  No reply.

  A second later Brennan dropped the page on the Explorer’s driver’s seat, then turned and crossed to the fire pit twenty feet away. The binder full of e-mails was lying on the ground beside the closed plastic case with the machine inside it. Brennan stooped, picked up both the binder and the case, and tucked them under his left arm.

  Then with his right hand he drew a pistol from his rear waistband and leveled it at the three of them.