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

by Patrick Lee

  “Made up for them.” Eversman pushed off from the island and crossed to the sliding doors that overlooked the pool and the grounds.

  He was forty-one years old and had been in the venture capital business since his late twenties. He’d had more ups than downs in that time; his net worth at the moment hovered around the three-quarters-of-a-billion mark.

  It could have been higher by now—a hell of a lot higher—if he hadn’t limited himself to the world of renewable energy, though he didn’t regret that decision in the least.

  On TV, Justice Scalia interrupted one of the lawyers and started droning on about a case from thirty years back, Fenley v. Oregon, which was about—well, what the hell did it matter what it was about? It was another tea leaf. One of tens of thousands of cases that a justice could pluck out of the stockpile to prop up a premade decision.

  Eversman wasn’t directly tied to today’s case—in the sense that he had no stake in any of the parties involved.

  Yet the outcome would affect him. No question about that. It would also affect everyone in America who felt like putting solar panels on their roofs, and the effect would not be positive.

  It would be plenty positive for other people: enterprises that had tens of billions of dollars tied up in pipelines and tanker ships and refineries. For them, it would be time to pop open bottles of wine that cost more than most people made in a year.

  Not that the Court’s decision was going to surprise them. Or anyone. It was going to be five to four. In fact, it already was, in every practical sense.

  Why even have the arguments?

  From the island, without looking up from his array of documents, Chatham said, “It’s Washington, Hayden. What are working stiffs like us going to do about it?”

  Eversman didn’t answer, but he thought about the question. The fact was, he’d been thinking about it for a very long time.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Dryden saw the problem five seconds after they walked into the Coalinga Township Library. It hit him as abruptly as the rush of cold air they encountered when the automatic doors sucked open.

  “Dammit,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  They were still moving, slowing now, crossing the broad entryway that opened up to the central space beyond. Dryden stopped.

  The library was essentially one giant room, sixty by sixty feet, with white stucco columns here and there supporting the ceiling. The different sections of the place—reading area, bookshelves, periodical racks, computer terminals—were all visible from anywhere in the room. And the place was packed, 3:10 on a Saturday afternoon.

  “What is it?” Marnie asked.

  Dryden swept his eyes over the space. There might have been fifty people or more. Two-thirds of them were kids. Of the adults, most seemed to be there with their children, but more than a few of the grown-ups were by themselves. There were men browsing the shelves or the magazine racks, or seated at computers. They wore jeans or shorts, with their shirts untucked and hanging loose. Any one of them might have a gun stuffed into his waistband—Dryden had one of the Berettas in his.

  In any case, potential threats weren’t limited to the crowd. Dryden turned in place and took in the glass front wall of the building, facing onto the parking lot. Dozens of vehicles out there. Many with tinted windows. Anyone could be in one of them, watching the interior of the library.

  “Hayden Eversman’s not a very common name,” Dryden said.

  “No, it’s not. That’s good. If the guy in the articles was named Robert Smith, we’d never figure out who he is in 2015.”

  “It’s bad, too, though,” Dryden said. “It makes it easy for someone to monitor Web traffic to watch for text searches of that name.”

  Marnie seemed to consider it.

  “We should assume the Group has the resources to do that,” Dryden said. “They were smart enough to catch Brennan, whatever kind of snooping he would have done. He was going to trip some kind of alarm, at some point in the future.”

  “And the Group found out about it today,” Marnie said.

  “Yes.”

  Marnie shut her eyes for a second, exhaled slowly. “Okay. So he dug into some account of theirs, and a flag went up, and they found out. Sorry, he would have dug into some account. But personal accounts are one thing—you really think these people could have flags for Google searches?”

  “For certain keywords, maybe,” Dryden said. “You’re an FBI agent, you must know about monitoring ISPs for suspicious activity. People looking up how to make nerve gas, that kind of thing.”

  Marnie nodded. “We have software for it. I guess the Group could, too. But why would they flag that name?”

  “Because they know Curtis stole their e-mails. And they should assume anyone he met with has read through them, and seen those articles about Eversman. Googling him would be an obvious move, on our part. And a predictable one.”

  Marnie thought it over. Her eyes went past him, tracking slowly along the row of computers nearby.

  Dryden said, “We might be easy for their system to spot, if we Google that name. There might be nobody else running searches for it these days. Eversman doesn’t get elected for another nine years. How many people were looking up Barack Obama in 1999?”

  “If they really are monitoring it,” Marnie said, “and we sit down and do a search…”

  “Then they would have known about it hours ago. Whoever they sent to kill us would already be here right now. They’d probably know the exact time of the search, and which computer would be used, based on its ISP address. Someone in here, or in the parking lot, would be watching that computer and waiting to see who comes along and sits down at it.”

  Dryden stood staring at the computers, thinking it all through. Would the Group have sent people to both the scrapyard and this library, two locations within a few miles of each other, in the span of an hour or less? Why not? Multiple leads, multiple responses.

  He rubbed his eyes.

  “What do you think?” Marnie asked.

  “I think Claire’s going to die if I don’t find her, and I think if the tables were turned, she’d take this risk for me.” He looked at Marnie. “But that doesn’t mean you should have to risk it, too. I’ll take a shot at it myself. I’ll try to play it safe—just Eversman’s last name and whatever keywords seem worth a try. Wait near an exit. If it goes bad, just get out. Get the machine and get away, okay?”

  He took his keys from his pocket and pressed them into her hand.

  For a second she made no move to take them. Then she simply nodded.

  * * *

  Dryden browsed a table of old books on sale for a quarter apiece while Marnie made her way to the shelves off to the left side of the room. There was a fire exit over there. Dryden waited another minute and then turned to the computers, twenty feet away.

  It crossed his mind to wonder if choosing one at random would make any difference, in terms of faking out whoever might be watching, but the idea fell apart almost at once. There was no way to pull a feint here: Whichever computer he chose, that would be the one the Group learned about, hours before. Cause and effect, presented by M. C. Escher.

  He thought about it another five seconds and then gave it up and walked straight to the nearest computer. He pulled the chair out and—

  A girl in the reading area screamed, and someone shoved a table hard, scraping its legs on the floor.

  Dryden spun fast, his eyes locking like gun sights on the commotion, even as his hand shot for the Beretta hidden under his shirt—

  It was just kids screwing around.

  A ten-year-old boy had scared a teenaged girl with a picture in a science book: a full-page blowup of an insect’s face.

  Her cheeks flushed, the girl straightened her chair and table back out, then swatted the kid on top of his head.

  Dryden turned and spotted Marnie among the shelves. She was staring at him, her face tense, her own hand just dropping back from under her coat, whe
re her Glock was holstered.

  She held his stare for another second—and then she walked out from the shelves into the open space of the library. She cleared her throat and spoke loudly enough for the entire room to hear:

  “Excuse me, everyone?”

  Chair legs scraped. Fifty-plus heads turned toward her.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Marnie said, “but can anyone here tell me who Hayden Eversman is? I’ve got it stuck in my head and I can’t remember where I heard it.”

  Most of the crowd just looked annoyed. An older woman who looked like she might be the librarian stood up, maybe meaning to give Marnie a scolding, but a male voice spoke up first.

  “He’s a green energy guy.”

  Dryden and Marnie both turned. The speaker was a college kid with long hair tied back in a ponytail, standing among the shelves Marnie had just come from. He had answered her without looking up from the book he was paging through. He looked supremely calm.

  “Are you sure the name is Hayden Eversman?” Marnie asked.

  The guy nodded, eyes still on his book. “I read about him in Wired.”

  “Thanks,” Marnie said.

  The guy offered a nod and said nothing more.

  Marnie crossed to Dryden, smiling a little. “Low-tech approach,” she said. “Let’s see them monitor that.”

  “Don’t tempt them,” Dryden said.

  * * *

  In ten minutes of manual searching in the periodical section, they found four different articles about Hayden Eversman. One was the Wired write-up the college guy must have seen. The other three were in Forbes, Scientific American, and Business Week.

  Dryden and Marnie split the articles between them to scan through them more quickly. Dryden started with the Forbes article, which was actually a long interview. He found what he was looking for almost immediately: The interviewer described arriving at Eversman’s fifteen-million-dollar home in Carmel, California. There was even a photo of the place, a sprawling ten-acre estate surrounded by wooded highlands above the seaside town. The grounds were fenced in by a brick property wall, and centered in the space was a colonial brick house that looked more suited to New Hampshire than California. One feature in particular seemed to explain why this photo accompanied the article: The house’s roof was covered entirely by solar panels.

  “We got it,” Dryden said.

  * * *

  They spared another three minutes photocopying all four articles, then got back on the road. Carmel was two hours away if they pushed it. Dryden drove while Marnie read the copied articles aloud.

  Hayden Eversman was forty-one years old. He had a wife and a young daughter. He had spent most of his adult life funding green energy start-ups, and clearly had made good at it. He was a scratch golfer and a private pilot, though by his own admission it was hard to make time for flying. He was notoriously protective of his privacy, especially with regard to his family.

  There was no mention of an interest in politics.

  There was nothing that hinted at a conflict with anyone powerful—beyond the obvious understanding that big oil companies were no fans of his.

  That was it.

  Marnie folded the articles and stuffed them into the center console compartment.

  They rode in silence for a minute, and then she opened the plastic case and turned the machine on. Static, soft and inexorable as the flow of a stream. As the flow of time.

  “Feels weird not to have it on,” Marnie said. “Like we might … miss something. Doesn’t it?”

  Dryden thought of the hollows under Claire’s eyes again. He leaned and glanced at himself in the rearview mirror, and saw the faint beginnings of his own dark circles.

  “It does,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “I keep coming back to the news report about the trailer,” Marnie said.

  They were an hour from Carmel, rolling north along a valley that snaked among baked-brown hills.

  “The news report that ended up not being true,” Marnie said. “About how the girls were dead. Burned in that cage.”

  She was quiet for a while, then said, “In some way, it really must have happened, right? That original version. It happened, and it got reported, and because of that … it didn’t happen—you stopped it that time.”

  “I guess you could think of it that way.”

  “Some version of me really showed up at that scene,” Marnie said.

  Dryden imagined she was picturing it, whether she wanted to or not: the nightmare she would have rolled up to if things had gone differently. The trailer, probably burned away to nothing but a few blackened supports. The cage intact within the charred ruin. The bodies. The smell.

  Marnie stared forward at the road and the valley, the folds of the terrain revealing themselves one by one, like secrets.

  “What Whitcomb said about the Group,” she said, “that they’re afraid to change the past … would you ever try it? I mean, if you had to? If something bad happened … something you couldn’t live with … would you change the past to fix it? Even if you had no idea what would happen to you in the present?”

  Dryden thought about it. Whitcomb’s description of the idea—and Whitcomb’s own fear of it—had made perfect sense. What would it feel like, to do a thing like that?

  “I don’t know if I would,” Dryden said. It was the only honest answer he had.

  “I can think of times I would have been tempted to do it,” Marnie said.

  The static from the machine ebbed. Some kind of gospel station came through. Dryden caught the words shepherd and praise before it faded back out.

  “I’ve worked kidnapping cases for six years,” Marnie said. “I had one that made me come close to giving it all up, finding some other job. It started with a home invasion at a house in the Central Valley, middle of nowhere, broad daylight. A woman and her daughter, ten years old, lived there. The mom called 9-1-1 and screamed for about a second and then the call cut out. The first black-and-whites got there twelve minutes later and found the house empty. There was a bathroom off the little girl’s bedroom that had been locked from inside, and broken in around the latch. Like the girl tried to hide in there, and the intruder kicked it in. But while she was in there, in those seconds or whatever time she had, she tried to write something on the vanity mirror for the police to find.”

  Dryden glanced at Marnie. She had her hands balled tightly in her lap, but he saw them shaking, just noticeably.

  “It was the letters COI,” Marnie said, “written with her fingertip. She must have been smart enough to not breathe on the mirror first, so her attacker wouldn’t see it.”

  “COI. Did she get cut off in the middle of writing a name?”

  “I might have thought so,” Marnie said, “but she wrote it big, right across the mirror. There wouldn’t have been room for a fourth letter, so … COI seemed to be the whole message. We thought it might be someone’s initials, strange as that would be for a ten-year-old to write. We made a list of everyone the girl and her mother might know, and started working through it. I was on-site about an hour after the first responders. I took over the case, and the list. I thought about the girl’s teachers, her friends’ parents and relatives, anyone and everyone. But we didn’t find one person with those initials.”

  She unballed her hands and pressed them flat to her pantlegs. The shaking was still visible.

  “We tried license plates, even though it didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. The girl couldn’t have seen the driveway from that bathroom, and anyway, not many license plates use the letters O or I; witnesses mix them up with 1 and 0 too often. That approach came up empty right away. Then, about two hours in, we thought we had a lead. We found out the mom had been dating her boss and keeping it secret from her co-workers. A week earlier, she and the boss had been out at dinner with the little girl, and there had been some kind of fight between the couple—bad enough that the restaurant called the cops. An officer showed up and talked to them, took
down their names but didn’t arrest anyone. It made the boss at least a hell of a maybe in my book, even though his initials didn’t match the three letters. And then we found out he’d been at a conference two hundred miles away when the break-in happened. He had about a hundred people to vouch for him.”

  Out ahead, the hills flanking the road drew aside. Dryden could see broad, flat expanses of farmland planing away to the north.

  “COI,” Marnie said. “I sat in that woman’s living room all that afternoon and evening, while the crime scene techs came and went, and I tried to figure it out. I kept going into that little bathroom and picturing the girl in there, scared out of her mind, listening to her mom being attacked down the hall. I asked myself what could be so damned obvious and simple that even a little kid, under that kind of stress, would think to write it on the mirror. And then, about six hours in, it just hit me.”

  She was about to go on, when the static broke again. Dryden heard a man speaking slowly, his tone flat and calm. It reminded him of the baseball game. Almodovar at the bat. Then the last of the static fell away and the man’s words came through. It wasn’t a play-by-play.

  “… minutes from now, so that you’ll hear it at present. We look forward to meeting you and reaching a fair agreement. Message begins here: Whoever has the machine, we hope you’re listening to it. We will trade your friend for the machine. At nine this evening, bring it to the place where you last saw her. We are programming our system to compromise multiple broadcast stations and play this message ten hours and twenty-four minutes from now, so that you’ll hear it at present. We look forward to meeting you and reaching a fair agreement. Message begins here: Whoever has the machine, we hope you’re listening to it. We will trade your friend for the machine. At nine this evening…”

  Dryden listened as static slid back over the transmission, washing it away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Neither of them said anything for thirty seconds. There was no sound but the rushing static. An exit came up on the right. Dryden took it and pulled to the shoulder at the end of the off-ramp.