by Patrick Lee
“What exactly do you still need to know, then?” Eversman asked.
“Two things,” Dryden said. “First, the system. The buried unit. It’s at your estate, isn’t it.”
Eversman’s reaction was complex, a sequence of different emotions in the space of a second. Surprise, annoyance, then an attempt to maintain composure and hide both of those responses. Too late.
“You’re never getting near it,” Eversman said. “So why do you care?”
Dryden ignored the comment. “I want to know how it works. The system itself is buried in the ground, but there have to be keyboards and monitors somewhere. There have to be people sitting at them, running the searches and looking at the results. But you know what I think? I think there are as few of those people as you can possibly make do with. Because those people are liabilities. Any one of them could start getting ideas of their own, with that kind of power at their disposal. If I were you, I’d have a skeleton crew at those keyboards, and I’d keep them all in one place where I could watch them like a hawk. I’d make them live there. I’d probably keep them right in that guesthouse on the estate.”
Another little spike of surprise and annoyance. Another score.
“Nobody else knows a damn thing about it,” Dryden said. “Do they. Not your superiors in the Group, wherever they are. Not the guys who just tried to kill me in these woods. Not the people you send out to commit murder. They know the bare minimum they need to. Why would you tell them anything more? I bet your wife doesn’t even know about the system.”
Eversman rolled his neck as if to work out a kink, but the movement looked fake—like his real purpose was to take another good look at the sky through the trees. Dryden looked, too. Nothing there.
“So how many in the skeleton crew?” Dryden asked. “Five? More than that? Is it—”
“Three people. Plus me.” Eversman’s tone was calm. Even proud. “Yes, they live in the guesthouse. Yes, I keep an eye on them. Yes, they’re the only ones in the world, besides me, who know anything about the system. Do you know why I’m not afraid to tell you this?”
Dryden waited, still pushing Eversman forward through the trees.
“Because you and Marnie were exactly right,” Eversman said. “Any plan that could destroy the system would also tip it off. And it hasn’t been tipped off. So none of this is worrying me.”
They were a hundred yards from the east edge of the forest now.
“What’s the second thing you want to know?” Eversman asked.
Dryden said, “Why am I pointing a gun at you? Why do I have your hands bound?”
“You’re asking me?”
“What I mean is, how did I outplay you here? You and your people could have used the system to see how this would turn out. And you must have.”
Eversman nodded. “We must have.”
“So why did I win?”
Eversman laughed; he seemed to catch himself off guard by doing so, as if he found something about the moment genuinely funny.
Then he planted a foot, bringing himself and Dryden to a hard stop, and turned in place so that the two of them were suddenly eye to eye.
Eversman’s wrists were still tied behind him. Dryden was still holding the Beretta. There was nothing Eversman could do to change the dynamic.
Yet the guy’s expression was all confidence.
“Who says you won?” Eversman asked.
Before Dryden could reply, Eversman cocked his head, listening for something.
Five seconds later Dryden heard it.
The rattle of a helicopter coming in.
It was somewhere to the north, beyond the wooded hilltop, the terrain and the trees masking its sound. It was already very close—thirty or forty seconds away at most.
Eversman smiled. “I told you last night, I keep one stationed in San Jose. I called for it to lift off as soon as Collins and I entered the woods.”
Dryden looked around, painfully aware of how little cover the forest would offer against an airborne attack. Someone looking straight down from a hundred feet up would see through any of the ground cover, and even through most of the tree boughs.
“I bet you instructed Marnie and Claire to stay away from here,” Eversman said. “Didn’t you. I also bet they’re going to ignore that. In fact, I know it.”
Dryden looked at him. “What are you talking about?”
“My people and I did use the system to see how this would turn out. We checked this morning. You know what we found? Headlines about you and Marnie Calvert disappearing. You were last seen alive in Los Angeles two days ago. She was last seen Saturday morning in Santa Monica. The two of you end up linked forever, because apparently she was tailing you at the time you both vanished. We found true-crime write-ups about you two, published as much as five years from now. You’re one of those oddball little stories that sticks in the public consciousness. Claire Dunham ends up missing, too—no one connects her disappearance to yours, but either way, she vanishes. So there you go. If no one ever sees you three again, what else could it mean? We’re going to bury you. All of you.”
The clatter of the rotors was much closer now, just over the summit of the tree-covered hill.
Dryden stopped looking around and leveled his gaze on Eversman.
“You didn’t check for headlines about anything strange happening in Monterey today,” Dryden said. “Did you?”
“Why would I? You three weren’t going to disappear from Monterey. There wasn’t going to be any record you’d been here at all. What headlines around here would I have looked for?”
“That’s why you didn’t know I was going to kill your guys,” Dryden said. “Because you never checked. You saw the stories about us missing, and you figured that told you everything.”
“It told me we’ll accomplish the part that matters. It told me enough.”
“What else didn’t you check for?” Dryden said. “Did you search for headlines about your own death?”
Eversman’s confidence remained intact. He held Dryden’s stare.
“You three disappear because we kill you,” Eversman said. “I take that to mean I win. That I live.”
On the last word, the sound of the incoming helicopter suddenly intensified. Dryden looked up and saw it through the pines, just passing over the hilltop, flying no more than twenty feet above the trees. It wasn’t the same chopper that had broken up the meeting last night in the Mojave, but it was similar enough. The setup was the same. Open bay door in back. A gunner strapped in place and leaning out with a big rifle. Probably another .50 caliber.
In the half second Dryden was distracted by the aircraft, Eversman moved—far more quickly than Dryden would have guessed. The guy lunged forward, bending at the waist for a headbutt. Dryden dodged it by spare inches, throwing his own head sideways and taking the impact as a graze against his cheekbone. He pivoted and shoved Eversman hard, meaning to send him sprawling, but the guy caught his balance and came on again, all adrenaline and desperation.
Dryden swung the Beretta toward him and fired. Three shots, a tight group centered in Eversman’s chest. Three little rips in his shirt fabric, instantly soaked with blood.
Eversman stopped as if he’d hit an unseen wall. For another second he stayed on his feet, his eyes wide and staring at Dryden. His mouth worked soundlessly; he looked like he was trying to say How?
Then he fell where he stood, probably dead before he hit, and Dryden forgot all about him. He spun toward the oncoming chopper—it was making straight for him, though he couldn’t possibly have been visible to the pilot yet. Dryden looked down at Eversman’s body and understood: The guy’s phone must have been relaying its GPS coordinates to the chopper, calling it in like a beacon. It would have been the easiest way for Eversman to guide it here from San Jose in the first place. Dryden turned east, toward the nearest edge of the forest, and ran.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
He knew already that escaping in the other Suburban wasn’t an option. Even i
f he could reach it unseen, it would be suicide to get into it and try driving away.
He ran toward it anyway, east through the forest, simply to move away from both Eversman’s body and the chopper itself. He tried to stick to the densest clusters of trees, the best visual screens available.
Fifty yards from where Eversman had fallen, Dryden stopped. He turned and crouched as low as he could in the brush. He watched the chopper slow and take up a hover directly above the corpse.
The gunner in the bay door leaned farther out and looked straight down. Dryden could see some kind of bulky headgear on him. A helmet with a scope built right into the front of it. Probably a FLIR camera. Thermal vision. Even in daylight, it would make child’s play of searching for a human target in a forest like this. The shaded ground could be no more than sixty degrees. Dryden was thirty-eight point six degrees warmer than that. Not even the sunlit canopy of pine boughs overhead would be that hot. Not on a brisk day like this. Not even close.
The chopper stayed in its hover, the gunman staring down and taking in Eversman’s corpse. The FLIR scope would make it obvious the man was dead. There would be body-temperature blood seeping out in a big puddle, contrasting starkly with the cool dirt.
If the pilot took the chopper a little way to the west, the gunner would see the bodies of the first four men Dryden had taken down. There would be more puddled blood there, and the bodies themselves might have already cooled noticeably. The same would go for the other five out at the southwest edge of the woods, on the gravel road that bordered the wheat field.
The chopper didn’t do any of that, though.
Instead the gunner looked up from Eversman’s corpse and swept his viewpoint over the surrounding woods in a quick, efficient arc.
He saw Dryden almost immediately.
There was no question the guy had spotted him. The low brush Dryden was crouched in was useless. A two-foot-wide tree trunk would have helped, but there was nothing like that within sight.
For three seconds the gunman just stared. Dryden held still and considered his options. He couldn’t play dead; he was already upright in a crouch. He couldn’t stand his ground and fight; he would be outgunned and outmaneuvered to a degree that would be comical to anyone but himself. He couldn’t flee the woods to the nearby south or east side; there was only open farmland in both of those directions.
He could escape to the north. Out of the woods and into the city sprawl.
If he could get that far—the northern edge of the forest was almost half a mile away.
He was still thinking about that when the gunner’s mouth moved beneath the bulk of his FLIR scope. Instructions via headset to the pilot. A second later the chopper tilted forward and left its hover. It banked as it did, coming around in a shallow curve that would put the gunner right above Dryden’s position.
Dryden broke from the brush and took off in a sprint, straight north.
* * *
For the first thirty seconds he didn’t look back. He didn’t look anywhere but straight ahead, jumping deadfalls and low stands of brush. He heard the chopper’s rotors and control surfaces making rapid adjustments behind him, the sound chaotic through the trees. Dryden had flown helicopters before; it had been part of his training. He could picture the pilot moving the cyclic control left and right and forward, second by second, using the pedals to whip the tail this way or that, anything to give the gunner a good sightline as the aircraft skimmed the treetops and raced north, gaining on him.
He heard the first zipping whine of a bullet, somewhere just above him in the boughs, half a second before the sound of the gunshot crashed down around him. He didn’t stop.
Another bullet—this one buzzing through the airspace five feet in front of him. It left a ragged line of cut-loose pine needles in its wake, a ghost of the bullet’s path. Dryden ran right through it a split second later.
He heard Eversman’s words in his head:
I bet you instructed Marnie and Claire to stay away from here.
I also bet they’re going to ignore that.
In fact, I know it.
The third shot passed close enough that he felt its heat across his forehead, as if someone had waved a lightbulb two inches from his face.
If no one ever sees you three again, what else could it mean?
The chopper was above and to his left now, somewhere around his eight o’clock, and close by. The last two shots had come down on high, steep angles.
Dryden ran another five paces, until half a second before his internal stopwatch said the next shot was coming.
Then he jammed a foot into the dry soil and pulled up short, and heard the zip and the gunshot almost in unison, the bullet ripping through the base of a sapling three feet in front of him. He pivoted and lunged sideways, passing directly beneath the chopper, coming out on the gunner’s blind side ten seconds later. Then he turned and sprinted north again, the chopper now above and to his right. He heard it once more making adjustments, correcting its position. He imagined the gunner shouting into his headset, scouring the woods as the aircraft came around.
Dryden kept running. There was no other move.
The edge of town was still impossibly far north, given the circumstances. Somewhere between a half and a quarter mile—more than a minute’s run for a world-class athlete on smooth asphalt. Already he could hear the chopper settling into another favorable flight path for the gunman, this time taking into account the maneuver Dryden had used. The chopper would stay farther off to his side now, far enough that it would be useless to try dodging beneath it again.
Running hard, ducking branches, darting past clumps of pines. Cresting the flank of the hill now, the ground dropping away in a shallow grade before him, helping just a bit with his speed.
Another bullet cut through the air, spare feet behind him.
And another, just above his scalp.
At the edge of his vision he saw something; his body reacted to it as much as his brain did. He turned without stopping and sprinted on a diagonal from the line he’d been running on. A bullet splintered a thin branch six inches from his face. Scraps of bark stung his cheeks; his lungs filled with the smell of pine tar.
He reached what he was running toward three seconds later: a knotted old tree with a trunk twice as wide as his body. He slammed to a stop against it, putting it between himself and the chopper.
For ten seconds the gunner held his fire. Dryden drew back from the tree, slowly, ten inches and then twenty. Enough to catch sight of the chopper’s tail, past the trunk’s left edge. Enough to keep tabs on the aircraft as it circled, and to keep himself shielded by the tree no matter where the chopper put itself.
He could circle this tree all day; the chopper couldn’t. It had only so much fuel, and only so much time before some motorist found the bodies near the wheat field. The guys in the chopper wouldn’t want to hang around once police started showing up in the area.
The aircraft’s tail was slipping away to the right. Dryden eased himself clockwise around the tree, keeping just the last two feet of the tail in view.
Easy.
Then the chopper went stationary, and turned sharply to the right, a move that would point the gunner entirely away from him. Why? Dryden risked leaning out past the trunk to see the reason.
He saw.
Forty yards away from him stood Marnie and Claire. Marnie had her Glock in hand, held low. The two of them stared up as the chopper rotated to point the gunman at them. Then they bolted sideways—and away from each other—as a rifle shot ripped through the space where they had been standing.
Dryden lost sight of Claire. He managed to keep his eyes on Marnie as she moved roughly toward him.
The gunner kept his eyes on her, too. Another bullet cut through the pine boughs, missing Marnie by a foot at most.
Dryden drew the Steyr M40 he’d taken from one of the dead men. It was the first time he’d had a clear angle on the chopper without the .50 caliber rifle being pointed at
him.
He raised the pistol and aimed it high, compensating for the chopper’s altitude and distance, and opened fire.
There was no way to see what he was hitting inside the cockpit. A direct hit on the pilot would be ideal. A ricochet that winged him with a bullet fragment would be almost as good. All he had to do was make the guy flinch at the controls. Make him lose focus for half a second. That would be enough.
Flying a helicopter was difficult as hell, and holding in a hover was the hardest part by far. You needed both hands and both feet engaged at all times. You had to manage drift and altitude and yaw, each one a separate task, and any correction to one of them threw off the other two. You had to focus.
Dryden saw at least one bullet hole open up in the aircraft’s thin metal skin. Saw one of its side windows blow inward.
The pilot lost his focus.
The chopper’s tail dipped and slewed to the left. Through a window in the back, Dryden saw the gunner reach frantically for a handhold. A second later the aircraft tilted deeply forward, as if to bow at the conclusion of its performance. As it did so, its main rotor clipped the top of a pine tree; the chopper reacted as if an invisible giant had reached up and slapped it sideways, hurling the craft into the highest boughs of a nearby grove. The rest of the rotor assembly tore itself apart against the tree trunks, at which point the helicopter was essentially a falling minivan. Loaded with aviation fuel.
It slammed into the earth beside the grove, its tanks rupturing and detonating in the same instant. Dryden felt the radiant heat flash out and warm his skin.
He turned and saw Marnie staring at him. A second later he saw Claire; she stepped into view past a screen of brush, twenty feet away.
Claire Dunham. Alive and well. She looked healthier than when he’d last seen her. She’d slept, at least.
An ugly thought came to Dryden; he realized he had suppressed it for most of the past twenty-four hours: Deep down he had not expected to see her again.
She stepped past the brush and came toward him. She drew a folded sheet of paper from her pocket; it was the note he’d given Marnie in the Suburban. Claire unfolded it as she crossed to him, stopping two feet away. She held it up, her expression somewhere between amused and pissed.
