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

by Patrick Lee

  Even as he coasted to a stop, he heard the static falter again. What came through was the same message, no doubt from some other radio station. The same man’s voice, speaking the same words clearly and slowly. The message looped back to the beginning, and then it cut out; an automated recording announced that the station was experiencing technical difficulties. A moment later it all faded into the hiss.

  Dryden was already doing the math in his head. It was just past 4:00 in the afternoon. That allowed five hours to reach the place in the Mojave where he and Claire had been attacked. He could get there with time to spare—if he turned around and headed south right now.

  “You know you can’t just do it,” Marnie said. “You can’t just show up out there, like they want. And obviously not with the machine.”

  “I know that.”

  Dryden shut his eyes and rubbed them. He considered the problem, and all the jagged edges of it that he could feel.

  “What are you thinking?” Marnie asked.

  “That it’s still a lead. That I can’t ignore it.”

  For a third time, the hiss from the speakers withdrew; Dryden heard another transmission of the message. He felt a grudging admiration for the Group’s thoroughness.

  “Going up against these people blind is suicide,” Marnie said. “We’re an hour from talking to Hayden Eversman. What if that ends up telling us something that changes everything? There’s some reason they’re afraid to make a move on the guy.”

  “There’s no time to meet with Eversman and still reach the Mojave before the deadline,” Dryden said.

  “Not by road there isn’t, but I have some discretion to use FBI assets, including choppers. I’d have a bit of explaining to do later on, but I can make it happen.” Marnie turned in her seat and leaned closer. “If we come up empty with Eversman, you can still reach the meeting site in time to do … something. If you can think of something.”

  Dryden stared forward. Way out on the flat farmland ahead of them, a combine harvester made a turn at the end of a field. Its metal edges and panels winked in the sun.

  Dryden hardly saw it; all his focus had suddenly gone back to the message from the Group, the audio replaying in his mind. One line stood out from all the rest, revealing maybe a bit more than the Group had intended. Dryden almost smiled, but didn’t.

  “What is it?” Marnie said.

  Dryden turned to her. “I don’t have to think of anything. I know exactly what I’m going to do in the Mojave, no matter how things go with Eversman.”

  He put the Explorer in gear and rolled across the two-lane to the on-ramp, accelerating north, back onto the highway.

  “Turn your phone back on and make the call about the chopper,” he said. “Arrange a pickup in Carmel, two hours from now.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Three times, during the rest of the drive, they switched off the machine and listened to the Explorer’s radio for news reports. Coverage of the quake was everywhere, and already the central story was the stranger who’d shown up yelling about a bomb threat just before Mission Tower came down in the tremor. So far, the word miracle hadn’t been appended to the story; most newscasters were treating it with skepticism, though the fact that a bomb threat had also been phoned in to 9-1-1 lent some credibility to it.

  They reached Carmel just before five o’clock. Dryden already knew where to go. After arranging the helicopter, Marnie had used her phone’s map application—set to satellite imagery—to find Eversman’s house. There were only so many neighborhoods with fifteen-million-dollar homes, and only so many fifteen-million-dollar homes with solar panels covering their roofs; in fact, there was just one. Marnie had found it in less than five minutes’ worth of dragging the map around, without ever risking a text search.

  * * *

  They rolled up to the gate, a heavy wood-and-iron structure hung on massive hinges. To its left and right, the brick property wall blocked all view of the estate beyond.

  There was an intercom mounted on a post beside the entry drive, with a small camera atop it. Marnie traded places with Dryden at the wheel, then held her badge out for the camera and pushed the talk button. She identified herself by name to the voice that answered.

  After that, nothing happened for a long time. Minutes passed. Dryden pictured someone inside calling the FBI field office in Santa Monica and verifying her information. He thought of the digital paper trail generated by those kinds of calls. Database entries. Computer records.

  There was no obvious reason to think the Group could connect any of these dots. Up to now, they knew nothing of either him or Marnie.

  All the same, Dryden turned and swept his gaze up and down the street. He saw other property walls lining the road, making a narrow canyon of its winding route. He saw rooftops beyond the walls, and other gates with their own intercoms and cameras. He saw nothing moving. No cars creeping along. Nothing at all.

  In front of them, Eversman’s gate suddenly hummed and came to life. It swung inward, drawn by an unseen mechanism, revealing a driveway of paver bricks leading up to the house Dryden had seen in Forbes. Red brick with black shutters, a huge central mass flanked by symmetrical wings leading away to the left and right. The place had to be ten thousand square feet. It had a guesthouse off to the left, thirty yards from the end of that wing, its exterior matching the look of the larger structure. Maybe it served as living quarters for a waitstaff, or security guards.

  Marnie put the Explorer in drive and rolled through the gateway toward the main house.

  * * *

  Dryden expected an attendant of some kind to meet them in front of the place. Instead, the man who stepped out the front door as they parked the Explorer was the same one they had seen in all four magazine articles.

  Hayden Eversman was six foot one, athletically built. He wore jeans and an oxford shirt, untucked. Even at a glance, Dryden saw in him the natural confidence that came from a lifetime of being the smartest person in the room. Eversman crossed to the edge of the porch and stood watching them, waiting.

  Dryden and Marnie got out of the vehicle.

  “What’s this about?” Eversman asked. He directed the question to both of them, his eyes going back and forth. Dryden noted that the voice was the same one that had answered over the gate intercom a moment earlier.

  “Have you caught much of the news today?” Dryden asked.

  “Some.”

  “You heard about the earthquake?”

  “Yes. What about it?”

  Dryden reached into the vehicle and pulled out the hard plastic case. Marnie had wiped most of Whitcomb’s blood off of it during the drive, using a work glove she’d found in the back of the Explorer. The machine was silent, switched off for the moment.

  “We need to sit down and talk to you,” Dryden said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  To Claire Dunham, everything in the room where she was tied up seemed to have heat shimmers above it. Like sun-scorched blacktop, though it wasn’t especially hot inside this place. No hotter than the forest she could see outside, she guessed.

  The shimmers were an illusion. That much was obvious. They were in her head—a side effect of the drug she’d been given.

  As it happened, Claire knew all about this drug. She knew about most of the drugs people employed when it came to making other people give up their secrets. For a while, back in the day, she’d been in the interrogation business herself. She’d been tech support for people who did it, anyway.

  The shimmers were beautiful. They rose up even from objects that weren’t quite objects: a knothole on the wall to her left, the rough-hewn trimwork above the doorway leading out of the room. Sometimes vivid colors swam up into the ripples: reds and purples and greens, like little rainbow patterns on a soap bubble.

  The shimmers were one of two classic side effects of this drug; the other was a different story altogether, though still pleasant in its own way.

  Claire had encountered this drug and its effects
before, years back, during training with Sam Dryden and his guys. Someone way up in the political ranks at Homeland had decided field operatives like herself should be familiar with interrogation drugs—intimately familiar—just in case they themselves were grabbed off a street corner in Yemen and found the tables turned.

  A whole school of thought had grown up around the idea, and terms like counternarcotics training and chemical agent preparedness had been coined, and people like her and Sam, in carefully controlled settings with doctors present, had been given all sorts of fun intoxicants.

  The point wasn’t to build up tolerance. That would have taken months of serious use, and would have gone away after you went cold turkey—assuming you could do that, by then, or that you weren’t dead.

  No, the point was practical knowledge. The point was to know what these drugs felt like, for whatever good it could do in a pinch. To learn what the side effects were, and how to cope with them. To learn if the drug had weaknesses that could be exploited.

  With this drug, the primary effect—very different from the two side effects—was a kind of mindless euphoria; it waxed and waned in a cyclic pattern as the nervous system rebelled against it. Five minutes of slightly greater lucidity, five minutes of slightly less, over and over. It was the sort of thing you’d never notice if you weren’t trained to spot it.

  Claire’s training had involved five or six long sessions with this drug. Its full name escaped her now. Thiozene di—no … Thiozene per—

  Good-Cop-in-a-Vial.

  That was what the docs had always called it. Which more or less covered what the drug was meant to do: make a subject relax to the point of making friends with his or her captors. Making friends and sharing stories.

  For the captors, the trick to using this drug was simply to be nice. The interrogation manuals Claire had read went so far as to recommend adding the smell of fresh-baked bread or chocolate chip cookies to the room.

  For the captive—one that was trained, anyway—the trick was to make the most of those periods of relative lucidity. To do your critical thinking when you could, and to consider your options, if you had any. There had even been close-quarters combat training for each particular drug, since things like balance and depth perception were affected differently by each one. If you were going to slam the blade of your hand into the pressure point below someone’s ear, or break his neck, you had to compensate for the distortions in your fine motor control. Claire had rather enjoyed that part of the training.

  She was in the middle of one of the lucid spells now. It had rolled in a couple of minutes ago. It would roll back out in a couple more. She used it, as she’d been doing for hours, to take stock of her predicament.

  She was tied to a wooden chair. Her hands were behind her, bound to the spindles of the seatback. Her ankles were bound separately, one to each of the chair’s legs. She was in the middle of a room; the walls and floor were made of rough-surfaced planks. There was a doorway leading to another room, and there was a window looking out on a dense woodland of old-growth pines, with no other buildings visible. The window was single-pane, the thin glass old enough to have ripples in it—real ripples, not just the sort her mind was whipping up right now.

  Of the next room she could see very little. A bit of floor and wall visible through the doorway, nothing more.

  Her captors called this place the cabin. She had seen only this single room—she’d been hooded when they brought her in—but she could tell there was at least a bit more to the place. There was an upstairs, she knew; she heard men talking up there sometimes, and heard the old beams groan when someone walked above her.

  She had seen only three people all day. Two were the men who had driven her here from the Mojave. They were both thirty, give or take, and had a hard look to them. They reminded Claire of guys you saw on those prison documentary shows.

  That left Cullen. Cullen was fortyish, and very big, and he had much more than just a hard look to him. Whenever she happened to meet his gaze, Claire had the impression she was looking into the eyes of a machine. Something with no concept of empathy or restraint. A crude simulation of a human being.

  The three men had watched her all day so far, sometimes all three of them in the room, other times just one or two.

  They didn’t quite seem to know the correct use of this drug—they weren’t being especially nice, and they sure as hell weren’t baking cookies—but so far, at least, they weren’t physically hurting her. Not yet.

  Her wrists and ankles were sore from the bonds. She could feel abrasions on her skin, and her hands and feet were partly numb from cutoff circulation. She wasn’t sure exactly how many hours she had been bound to the chair—keeping track of time was difficult with the drug in her system. There had been a single bright point in the day, some time ago now, like a star seen through a break in an overcast. One of her two original captors had been in a nearby room, talking on his phone. Claire had discerned a single line of the conversation, spoken louder than the rest, torqued by stress and confusion: They had him zip-tied.

  She hadn’t necessarily been at a peak of lucidity just then, but she had understood what it meant all the same. Sam was free.

  Which was a silver cloud with a dark lining: If he was free, he was trying to find her. He was taking risks to do so.

  Claire blinked and lifted her gaze. At the moment only Cullen was in the room with her. He was seated at a card table against the wall, playing solitaire. The deck of cards looked like it had been handled by a mechanic right after an oil change.

  The other two were off in some other part of the place. Claire had heard them upstairs, maybe ten minutes ago.

  The shimmers intensified. She watched them rise up off the floorboards like little ghosts. She knew what it meant.

  The clearheadedness was leaving her again. Peak to trough. Down she went.

  If there was any consolation, it was that this lucid spell had actually yielded an idea.

  A very bad idea.

  Maybe, but it was better than nothing.

  The colors swam and churned against the muted browns of the cabin. Claire gave in and let her thoughts blur all the way out.

  * * *

  Another peak. Another lucid spell. How long had she been under?

  Cullen was still alone with her. He still had the greasy cards spread out on the table, though at the moment he was watching her, smiling a little. The smile did nothing to ease the coldness of his features. Quite the opposite.

  Claire looked away, but not before catching the satisfaction that rose in his expression.

  “Afraid?” Cullen asked.

  His voice was deep; his chest probably measured fifty inches.

  Claire didn’t answer.

  Cullen flipped over three of his cards. His eyes roamed across his piles.

  “What you should be is impressed,” he said. “I’m a trusted guy around here. They trust me to do all kinds of things.”

  “What things?” Claire asked. It was something to say.

  “Killing people.”

  Another three cards. Another search for moves.

  “Who do you kill?” Claire asked. She could hear the drug in her voice. A matter-of-fact tone that might have been humorous on a different day.

  “Anyone they tell me to,” Cullen said.

  “Like who?”

  “I killed a nineteen-year-old boy in Portland yesterday.”

  “Who was he?”

  “How should I know?”

  “They tell you to murder some random kid, and you do it?”

  “Who says it was random? They always have their reasons.”

  “What reason could there be for that?”

  Cullen shrugged and said nothing more. His attention stayed mostly on his cards.

  Then he said, “It gets you a little hot, doesn’t it. Knowing what I do.”

  He looked up again, and Claire met his eyes, and she thought, He knows all about how the drug works. He knows about the side effect
s. The shimmers, and—

  And the other one.

  The second side effect.

  The technical term for it, in the interrogation manual, had been arousal, but that did it no justice at all.

  As one of the docs had put it, way back, It makes you horny like a high school boy feeling a pair of tits for the first time.

  She stared at Cullen and understood: He knew about that effect, and didn’t realize she knew.

  He was playing with her.

  “It does, doesn’t it,” he said. He laughed softly to himself. “Makes you a little hot. Just a little bit.”

  Claire looked down at her knees and didn’t reply. She felt her cheeks flushing, which she supposed looked like embarrassment, though it wasn’t.

  She thought, The technology is a month old, and these are the hands it’s in.

  Not really a coincidence, she supposed. Life was just like that. The world was just like that. There was a kind of gravity to the way bad tended to win out. Like the world was an ant-lion’s funnel, everyone sliding down toward some clicking, mandibled nightmare at the bottom.

  She thought those things, and hated herself for thinking them, and hated Cullen for making her think them.

  “It gets you wet,” Cullen said. “I can tell. I can smell it.”

  The fact that the last statement might be true, strictly speaking, sharpened her anger to a straight-razor’s edge.

  Cullen laughed quietly to his cards, and Claire clenched her fists behind her, and after a moment she felt the light-headedness taking her down again. Down and down and down.

  * * *

  “What if I am?” she asked.

  Some amount of time had passed—a few minutes, she guessed. She was in the clear again, her wits more or less intact.

  Cullen, still alone with her, looked up from his cards. For all his cold smugness, he looked surprised.

  “What?” he said.

  Claire glanced at him for only a second and then looked down at her lap. She let as much fear into her voice as she could.

  “Turned on,” she whispered. “What if I am?”