by Patrick Lee
He turned and faced southwest, toward where he’d heard the first Suburban stop. He got moving, staying in the cover of ground vegetation as much as possible. Staying quiet.
He stopped again after a hundred yards. He found a dense spot of brush and got low in it, facing the direction Eversman’s men should be coming from, and settled in for the wait.
He felt his heart rate drop, felt his breathing go silent—all of it happening automatically. The primordial psychology of waiting for game.
A minute passed.
Two.
He heard something.
The faintest rustle of movement—dry pine needles on the sandy ground, yielding to the pressure of a footstep.
Somebody moving—but not in front of him. Off to his left somewhere, outside his field of vision.
Someone close by, and coming toward him. Less than ten feet away.
Dryden held perfectly still. Even turning his head right now might give away his position.
Another footstep. Closer.
Dryden had the Beretta in his right hand, his left braced flat on the ground, his whole body coiled like a spring, tense and ready.
The guy would either spot him or he wouldn’t. If he didn’t, then Dryden would take him easily—either the moment the guy stepped into his view, or after he’d wandered off just far enough that Dryden could turn without being heard.
If the guy did spot him, then things were going to get complicated in a hurry, and hundredths of a second would suddenly matter: the sharp little fragments of time in which he would hear the man’s breath catch, and the sound of the guy’s feet scraping the soil as he flinched and turned. After that it would be a race, decided by fast-twitch muscle fibers, the geometry of firing angles, the momentum of arms swung fast and checked fast. And luck.
Another step. Closer still.
Dryden breathed shallow and waited.
* * *
Eversman was halfway up the hill when he heard the first gunshot. A flat crack cutting through the trees, followed half a second later by a rapid salvo of three or four more shots, and before the echoes had faded he heard someone shouting, high and shrill: “I hit him! I hit him! Move in on me, I hit him, I fucking hit him!”
Eversman heard a flurry of motion in the southwest quadrant of the forest, over the hill from where he stood. Men running, breaking through thin branches, kicking up ground cover as they raced in toward the voice.
Eversman cocked his head, listening as the shouting went on.
Which of his men was that? The voice could have belonged to almost anyone, yet he could just about pin down—
He sucked in a breath as understanding hit him.
The voice didn’t belong to any of his guys.
He turned and cupped his mouth to shout something—maybe it would have been Stop or Wait—but before he could make a sound, another series of shots erupted. They came from right where the first volley had been, though these were far less spastic and rapid-fire.
The shooting sounded careful this time. It sounded aimed.
Three seconds later it stopped; everything else stopped with it, the footsteps and the breaking branches. In the silence, Eversman found himself sure of only one thing: He had just lost the entire crew from one of the Suburbans.
* * *
Dryden took stock of the dead—all four of them—as quickly as he could; time was not in abundance.
They were down for good: head shots and torso shots, shirts soaked with blood.
He found a Steyr M40 on the first body, with two spare magazines in the guy’s pocket. He stuffed the weapon in his waistband and took the mags, and didn’t bother checking anyone else’s firearm. He was looking for exactly one thing, and he found it in the front pocket of the third body: the keys to the Suburban.
Even as he took them, he heard men shouting to each other, far away. He thought he heard Eversman’s voice among them, barking orders. Dryden didn’t need to hear what the orders were; it was obvious enough. They were coming for him. Fast.
His own best move was obvious, too.
* * *
Eversman was running. Sprinting and calling out to Collins and the other four men. Screaming for them to run for the Suburban at the southwest edge of the forest.
What else could Dryden be doing but simply running for that vehicle? There was nobody to stop him from getting in and driving away.
Eversman ran. He crested the hill somewhere west of the peak, and then he was moving downslope through the trees, brush twigs scraping at his face and arms, the .45 in his hand. Running downhill was practically a guided fall; you could maintain something near sprint speed without tiring. Off to his sides he could hear the other men crashing through the woods, keeping pace with him.
Then he heard the big SUV’s engine turn over and rev hard.
“Get on him!” Eversman screamed. “God dammit!”
The vehicle wasn’t far ahead. Another fifty yards, maybe. Eversman could just make out the edge of the forest now, the gaps in the trees filled with the bright surface of a gravel road and a wheat field beyond.
He heard the Suburban’s drive gear engage. Heard its tires spin and bite into the dirt road surface before it lunged forward.
Three seconds later he heard it crash. The sound was unmistakable. Steel on wood. Glass shattering and sprinkling onto metal.
Eversman broke through the treeline and saw the wreck, thirty yards to his left. The Suburban had veered off the road and hit a tree dead center.
Directly in front of him, Eversman saw the place where the vehicle had been parked. There were deep impressions where its tires had dug into the gravel when Dryden gunned the engine.
There was also blood. A thin, spattered trail of it, leading from the wood’s edge to where the driver’s door would have been.
“He’s hurt!” Eversman shouted. “He took one!”
His men were breaking from the forest now: Collins to his right, all four of the guys from the other Suburban to his left. The gravel road formed a perfect boundary between the pine forest to the north and the wheat field stretching away far to the south. There was thick, humid air rolling off the field. There was no other vehicle anywhere to be seen on the road.
The men had their weapons leveled on the crashed SUV. They began moving in on it now, a loose cluster, fanning out just enough to give themselves clear shooting angles. Eversman stood back and left them to it.
At twenty yards they opened fire—Collins and the other four. The storm of bullets blew out the vehicle’s remaining windows. Punched holes through the quarterpanels and the doors, high and low. One by one the men ran dry and reloaded and kept shooting. They were still at it when the top four inches of Collins’s head came off in a burst of blood and gray matter.
Eversman flinched and jerked and looked around; the other men didn’t even notice what had happened. Their eyes were trained dead ahead, their peripheral vision full of muzzle flashes, their ears full of nothing but gunfire.
The next three seconds unfolded like a slow-motion nightmare scene, Eversman screaming in vain, unable to hear even himself over the shooting. The men took their hits one after the next, left to right like empty beer cans on a fence rail. Only the last one sensed anything wrong. A spray of blood hit the side of his head, and he turned just in time to take the last bullet through his eye.
Silence.
Eversman heard himself making a low mewling sound, doglike. He still had the .45, but it hung low at his side. He turned his head and scanned the trees, and then he felt an impact like a nightstick smashing into his right forearm. He felt the bone snap, and a split second later he heard the gunshot from the woods.
He looked down. He had dropped the .45 in the dirt. He was bleeding all over it from the wound in his arm. By the time he looked back up, Dryden was there, rushing in on him, shouting for him to get down flat, arms and legs out.
Dryden didn’t appear to have suffered any gunshot wound. He looked just fine. He had his Beretta in o
ne hand and some kind of bunched-up rag in the other.
Eversman dropped to his knees, then went flat, hands outstretched. Dryden dropped the rag in the dirt, and Eversman saw what it was: somebody’s shirt, saturated with blood, but twisted now like a wrung-out washcloth.
He felt Dryden drop onto him, ramming a knee into his lower back. Felt his arms wrenched painfully behind him. Then Dryden grabbed the bloody shirt again, and Eversman heard him tear off one of its sleeves. A moment later the length of cloth was looping around his wrists in a figure eight, over and over, before Dryden tied it off tight.
“You could have just gotten away,” Eversman said.
“I didn’t want to get away,” Dryden said. “I wanted to talk to you.”
For another moment he left Eversman lying there while he searched the pockets of the dead men nearby. On the third man in the line, he found the keys to the other Suburban, the one that was parked at the southeast edge of the forest.
Dryden came back to Eversman. He took the silenced .45 from where it had fallen, and tucked it into his own rear waistband. Then he reached down, grabbed Eversman by the upper arm, and hauled him to his feet.
“Let’s go,” he said, and stiff-armed Eversman forward, off the road and back into the deep shadows of the forest.
CHAPTER FIFTY
“You would have killed all three of us,” Dryden said. “Me and Claire and Marnie.”
They were just into the woods, moving east, roughly paralleling the curved gravel road fifty yards south of them.
“That’s how it would have gone,” Dryden said, “if I hadn’t known better. You would have driven us out to some place like these farm fields and shot us. Or maybe you would have done it right inside the SUV. Is that what the silencer was for?”
Eversman didn’t answer.
Dryden kept them moving forward, toward the other SUV on the far side of the woods. He had his left hand clenched around a fistful of Eversman’s shirt in back, his elbow locked, propelling the guy step by step.
“I would have lived through it,” Dryden said. “One way or another. I would have survived and even gotten away.”
“Confident thing to say,” Eversman said.
“No. It’s just true. I already know it.”
“How would you know a thing like that?”
For a second Dryden didn’t answer. He forced Eversman forward over a knee-high fallen trunk.
Dryden said, “Marnie asked me yesterday if I would ever change the past. Would I change it if something happened that I wanted to undo? Something I couldn’t live with.”
“We never change the past,” Eversman said. “It’s too much of an unknown. We can’t even imagine what it would feel like from our point of view.”
“That scares you guys,” Dryden said.
“It should scare anyone. It should scare you.”
“It does,” Dryden said. “And when Marnie asked me whether I could do it, I said I didn’t know. But now I do, and it turns out the answer is yes. If something bad enough happened, I would change the past to fix it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve got a buddy who oversees missing child alerts that go out on the airwaves, and emergency broadcast messages.”
Eversman said nothing.
“I got a message from him last night,” Dryden said. “Three or four in the morning. I was lying on the floor in Marnie’s room, and we had the machine on, and I heard an emergency test for the townships of Jasper and Willis. But those aren’t townships. They add up to a person’s name.”
“Jasper Willis? Am I supposed to know who that is?”
Dryden shook his head. “He’s nobody. The name is a shorthand code we used in my unit, way back. We’d send it to someone as a text message, like, ‘I heard Jasper Willis got transferred stateside.’ All that mattered was the name itself, and what it meant. Which was ‘Don’t trust your contact. You’re about to get screwed.’”
Eversman stayed quiet. From Dryden’s position, behind and to the right, he could only see the man’s face in profile, but it was enough to see his expression go slack.
“Three or four in the morning,” Dryden said. “Add ten hours and twenty-four minutes to that, and it’s a couple hours after noon—after the meetup here in Monterey. The timing works out just about right. If things went bad here, but I survived, I’d have time to get in touch with my friend and get that message on the air. And I would have already known Marnie and I had the machine on, ten and a half hours before that. I would have known I had a decent chance of actually hearing the warning.”
Eversman’s face remained blank as Dryden shoved him along, though at least an edge of disbelief seemed to show there.
“I would have been scared shitless to change the past,” Dryden said, “but I guess I was mad enough to balance out the fear. You must have really pissed me off.”
They crossed over a muddy stream like the one Dryden had used to darken his pants and face.
“The warning from my friend last night got me thinking,” Dryden said. “All those different futures. One in which you become president. Six in which you get killed before that. It never made sense. Why would the Group kill you six times? And then I saw it.”
Eversman made a sound like a dry laugh. A nasal breath. Derision, bravado. Dryden ignored it.
“You’re part of the Group,” Dryden said. “And in 2024, you would have been the sleeper running for the White House. The intelligence community would have done its background check on you, and they would have found something, wouldn’t they? I told you, they turn a candidate’s life inside out. And if what they learned about you was bad enough, what would they do about it? My guess? They’d kill you.”
They were midway across the woods now, crossing the swell of the hill, far south of the highest point in the middle of the forest.
“I bet you weren’t lying when you said you’d always wanted to be president,” Dryden said. “I bet the part about Fenway wasn’t even bullshit. And when you and your people got the system up and running, and you could read headlines from the future, I bet I know the first damn thing you searched for. Your name in 2024, to see if you were going to win the election. But you weren’t going to win. You were going to get shot to death, because someone in intel figured out what you really were.”
They crossed another mudslick. Far ahead, to the east, Dryden could make out a hint of light through the trees. The opposite side of the forest.
“When you saw those headlines,” Dryden said, “you knew what to do about it. You scoured the future to find out exactly which intel people were going to figure you out. Maybe some article from far, far ahead in time, twenty years from now, when the names had been declassified and the stories told. You found out who was going to bust you … and you had them killed—right here in the present. Some of them were probably still college kids, weren’t they?”
Eversman didn’t reply.
“Then you checked the 2024 headlines again,” Dryden said. “See if you survived this time around. But you didn’t—because in that altered future, there would just be other intel people filling those job positions. People just as capable of nailing you. So you killed them too, and checked the headlines again, rinse and repeat the whole goddamned thing until you got the future you wanted. Right?”
No response.
“Marnie and I had it backwards from the start,” Dryden said. “We thought the original future was the one where you were elected president. We thought the Group changed that future six different times, killing you in six different ways. But the Group wasn’t killing you. They were saving you. Shuffling the deck by eliminating the people who would find out the truth about you. And finally it worked. Finally there was a future in which you lived all the way to Election Day.”
Eversman looked up into the treetops, as if pretending to be interested in something there. He said, “You sound like you know everything. Why even ask me about it?”
“Because there’s more I
need to know, and you’re going to tell me.”
“Why would I say anything to help you?”
“I’ll just go ahead and ask anyway,” Dryden said. “We’ll see how you respond.”
Eversman only shook his head. He glanced upward again, just briefly.
“Some parts are obvious,” Dryden said. “When Marnie and I showed up at your place in Carmel yesterday, you must have thought you won the lotto. The Group was turning over heaven and earth to find us, and we rolled right up to your gate and pushed the buzzer. When we finished telling you our story, one of the first things you did was ask us who else we’d talked to. I should have picked up on that, but I didn’t. I imagine, in that moment, you thought all the loose ends were tied off. Marnie and I probably would have been dead inside the next five minutes, but then you got a phone call. Something so urgent you had to take it. Let me guess: That was the news that Claire had gotten away. Just like that, you still had a loose end out there. But you also had a sure way to get her back. You had me. The one person Claire would try to contact and meet up with.”
Ahead in the direction they were walking, the light through the trees was brighter. They were maybe two hundred yards from the east edge of the woods and the SUV parked there.
“So everything after that was bullshit,” Dryden said. “The meeting in the desert had already been planned, so that still had to take place, but since it was your own people I was meeting out there, you could easily arrange for me to survive it. The fact that Claire sent me that text message offered a perfect reason, but you would have come up with something. I wonder: Were you the guy on the phone, during that meeting? Were you the scrambled voice with the accent?”
Eversman didn’t answer.
“I wondered last night why the chopper attack in the desert worked,” Dryden said. “Why the Group didn’t know about it in advance and prepare for it. Now I understand. The whole damn thing was staged anyway. Sure, the six guys of yours that you killed in the Mojave weren’t in on it, but I don’t imagine you care about them.”
