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

by Patrick Lee

  By then Dryden had set the atlas aside. A second later he started the Explorer. He pulled out of his space and accelerated across the lot to the nearest exit.

  Marnie put the Crown Vic back in drive and followed.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The atlas had confirmed what Dryden had already guessed: The 101 was the fastest route. Along the coast through Santa Barbara, then inland through the mountains. Total drive time would be just over an hour, at the speed limit. A bit less, if he pushed it.

  The lack of a timeline was maddening. For all the details he’d heard in the broadcast, there had been nothing to say when the accident would happen.

  Well, there had been a hint.

  Has there been any statement from the construction firm managing the site?

  There’s been no statement all day …

  All day.

  Dryden had heard the broadcast around 10:40 in the morning. That put the actual time of the broadcast around 9:04 tonight.

  No statement all day, as of 9:04 tonight.

  Whatever was going to happen at Mission Tower, whatever was going to kill twelve people and injure nine more, it would happen early in the day. Anytime now.

  Could he just call somebody? Walk into a gas station right now and ask to use their phone for an emergency? It would take only a few phone calls, starting with 4-1-1, to track down whoever was building Mission Tower in Santa Maria, but when he got through to someone, what exactly could he tell them?

  Something to make them clear the construction site?

  Would that fix the problem?

  Maybe. If the accident was going to be caused by some one-off human error, like someone dropping an air-nailer and rupturing a fuel line, or pulling the wrong lever of an earth mover, then simply shuffling the deck might change everything. If it were that simple, then the solution might be as easy as calling in a bomb threat. Shake up the whole day, shut down the site for hours while cops scoured the place. By the time the crew got back to work, the fluke accident would probably never happen.

  If it was a fluke.

  And if it wasn’t? If the danger was some loose bolt in a machine—say, the pulley of a construction elevator? Something sure to go wrong, given a few more hours of use?

  Then a bomb threat would only delay the tragedy—and make it that much harder to address the real problem. How would Dryden call in later and urge someone to inspect all the site hardware, if they’d just gotten a crank bomb threat the same day?

  How would he even know whether to make that call? How would he know if the bomb scare had solved the problem or not?

  He had the Explorer doing 90, the Saturday morning traffic sparse enough to permit it.

  Fifty minutes, give or take, and he could be there to look around for himself.

  On the passenger seat, the machine was still on. Maybe he would get lucky and catch another update. Twelve people dead was a big story. Lots of coverage.

  He passed a semi and veered back into the right lane.

  * * *

  Marnie stayed half a mile behind him. No need to get close enough to risk him spotting her. On her phone’s display, the little red thumbtack traveled neatly along the 101.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Mangouste had five cell phones on the desk in his den. One was a smartphone he’d had for a year. The other four were burners—throwaway units he replaced daily, whether he ended up using them or not. Every morning at 6:00 he dumped the previous day’s collection into an industrial blender in the basement, grinding them to plastic crumbs, and at 6:15 his courier would arrive with four new ones. Each phone had a white sticker on the back, with a list of names—well, alphanumeric codes that stood for names—of the people who could reach him via that unit.

  Caution was like money: More was more.

  The third of the four burners rang at 10:55 in the morning. Mangouste got to it on the second ring.

  The caller said, “We’re getting some headway on the trailer in the desert. Not sure if any of it’s going to pan out, but we’re trying.”

  In the background, over the line, Mangouste could hear a keyboard clicking—his people hard at work, using the system. His jaw tightened at the notion of it: all that numinous power, sidetracked for three days now to play cat-and-mouse. The hunt for Claire Dunham and Dale Whitcomb and Curtis Wynn. Like using an aircraft carrier to dredge for clams.

  Until today there had been no leads at all, and then in a span of hours, in the middle of the night, there had been two: A stakeout team had pegged Curtis at a coffee shop, and the system had found Claire in the Mojave—had picked up a police report describing a run-in between her and a patrol unit out there, several hours before the event took place.

  That police report, describing the original version of the incident—with no intervention by Mangouste’s people—made it obvious that Claire knew about the system. She knew the danger of having her name and location officially logged by the police.

  She had very nearly avoided that outcome.

  According to the report, a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy, doing a routine patrol, had spotted two vehicles parked in the darkness, far off of a remote highway in the Mojave. The deputy had stopped to investigate, at which point one of the two vehicles left the scene before the cruiser’s dash cam could resolve its plate number. The other vehicle, a Land Rover, U-turned and rammed head-on into the deputy’s patrol car to disable it.

  This crash also crippled the Land Rover, whose female occupant then fired several shots from a handgun toward the deputy’s car, forcing him to take cover behind it. The woman fled the scene on foot and was picked up by the unidentified second vehicle several hundred yards away.

  The crashed Land Rover turned out to have stolen license plates on it, and its VIN had been physically removed. Only a fluke had allowed authorities to identify its owner at all: The oil filter had a unit-specific identifier stamped into it, traceable to a point-of-sale record at a service garage in San Jose, where the Land Rover’s owner, Claire Dunham, had gotten an oil change six months before.

  All of which had been enough for Mangouste’s purposes. The police report included a time stamp and GPS data for the incident, from the patrol car’s dash computer. It gave Mangouste enough information to send a team to that spot, in advance. Which he had done, immediately.

  The report also tantalized him, though. It offered no further information about the person who had been with Claire in the desert—the driver of that second vehicle. The police had not yet identified that suspect at the time the report was filed.

  Might it be Dale Whitcomb? Was that too much to hope for?

  It couldn’t have been Curtis. He was already accounted for at that moment, being tailed by the stakeout team that had spotted him, hundreds of miles away.

  It made good sense, of course, that Claire would be with Whitcomb, and for a while there, when that possibility seemed solid, Mangouste had let himself believe he had all the loose ends in reach. All three strands, right there in front of him, ready to be tied off forever. Curtis, Claire, Whitcomb. Easy as that.

  It would have been nice to know for sure, in the moments after first seeing that police report. It would have been helpful to run further searches with the system, and find later reports detailing the police manhunt for Claire Dunham and her unknown friend, in that original version of the future. Maybe some document would eventually name Whitcomb as the second suspect.

  Except there was no chance of finding any later reports like that.

  No chance at all.

  Here was one bona fide weakness the system had, and would always have: Once it showed you a useful piece of the future—some bit of knowledge you were sure to act on—then the future itself changed accordingly. How could it not? From the moment you saw that information—in this case, the time and place at which to attack Claire—then the old future no longer existed. You could run all the searches you wanted, but all you’d find would be information from the new future.

&nbs
p; Mangouste had searched anyway. And had seen what he expected: a police report about a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy stopping in the desert to investigate two vehicles, only to be killed seconds later by rifle fire from unseen assailants. By the time police reinforcements descended on the remote site, more than twenty minutes later, there were no other people in the vicinity. Just a wrecked Land Rover, eventually traceable to Claire Dunham by way of the same trick with the oil filter. No identity for any second person at the scene. No other info at all.

  Mangouste hadn’t minded seeing that report. It told him enough. It told him the attack would work: that his men would capture Claire and her friend and escape the scene. Good news, all around.

  And the attack had worked. His men followed protocol and kept their phones switched off while they were in the desert, so that authorities couldn’t later check the cell network and see that multiple unknown parties had been out there. Burner phones were untraceable, in theory, but why give the cops anything more than you had to?

  Mangouste had watched the clock, starting from the point when his men would carry out the attack. He guessed it would be another half hour after that before they would reach the crowded safety of a freeway, switch on their phones, and report in.

  Two of them had. They had Claire and were en route to the interrogation site. They said the other team was bringing the stray machine home, along with Claire’s companion—a man in his thirties, by their description, which told Mangouste it was most certainly not Dale Whitcomb. Who the hell was he, then?

  Mangouste waited for the second team to report in and tell him the rest of the story. They never did. Neither did they respond to calls made to their cells, even long after they should have reached the interstate.

  There was no pleasant way to interpret that set of facts. No way to fill in the blanks without assuming the two men were dead and the stranger was loose out there somewhere. With the machine.

  Mangouste had set his people to work using the system, scouring the future for news reports of unidentified bodies. Assuming the worst—that the stranger had left the dead men someplace remote—it might be weeks before they were found. By that point their fingertips would be too decomposed to identify them, and they had no official ID on their bodies.

  The system had found a result right away—and then about three dozen more. As it turned out, Southern California produced a fair number of unidentified corpses in a given month or two. Even when you narrowed by age range and race, it was information overload. It occurred to Mangouste that it wouldn’t help much anyway to find where the mystery man had left the bodies. That moment must have already come and gone.

  Even as that search had begun to prove pointless, other news reports started filtering in—ordinary news on TV, in the present time. Reports about the miraculous rescue of four little girls at a trailer in the Mojave, by a man and woman who had shown up just in time to prevent a tragedy. Authorities seemed baffled as to how the two, who had quickly fled the scene, had known to show up there at all.

  Into the phone, Mangouste said, “Tell me what you’ve got on the trailer. Tell me the cops eventually have a name for this guy.”

  “In a way, they do,” the caller said. “Two days from now, a man named Clay Reynolds comes forward claiming he and his girlfriend were the ones who saved those kids.”

  Mangouste’s eyes narrowed. “He identifies himself?”

  “Proudly, according to the articles we’ve seen. But later the same day, a second couple speaks to reporters and says Reynolds is lying—claiming they saved the kids, not him. By the next afternoon there are two other couples taking credit.”

  Mangouste pressed a hand to his forehead, shutting his eyes hard. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “It ends up being a real sideshow for the next month or more. Something like fifty different people swear they were the ones—anyone who even loosely matches police sketches the girls provide. It’s like that time all the Z-list celebrities ran for governor of California. We found a Newsweek rundown of Jimmy Fallon and Conan O’Brien’s best jokes about it, dated six weeks from now.”

  “There have to be real leads the police end up following. There must be something.”

  “We’re still working on it. It’s just … kind of a busy haystack to sift through.”

  Mangouste didn’t reply. He stood there, gripping the phone, thinking it all over.

  Hours earlier, everything had seemed to be in the bag. Three targets, three apparent leads. Now two of those had come up empty. There was no sign of Dale Whitcomb, and even Curtis Wynn had slipped away, somehow taking the stakeout team with him. There had been a final check-in from those men, tailing the kid down the Pacific Coast Highway around 6:00 in the morning, but that was the last contact. They had vanished as completely as the guys who’d been transporting the stranger from the Mojave. Even a search using the system had proved fruitless: There was no record of their vehicle being found anywhere, at any point in the foreseeable future.

  “What is this?” Mangouste asked softly.

  “Sir?” the caller said.

  Mangouste opened his eyes. “Keep working on the trailer,” he said. “Call me when you have something.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Dryden took the first exit for Santa Maria at 11:35. He could already see the building.

  Mission Tower has gotten a lot of pushback from Santa Maria residents just for its size. It’s really not the type of building you expect in a town like that.

  From the elevated exit ramp, the whole city appeared spread out like a carpet; Mission Tower could not have looked more out of place in the sprawl if it were a pyramid with a sphinx guarding it. Standing at least twenty stories tall, it was probably the only structure in the city that topped out above forty feet.

  Structure seemed like the right word for it—not so much a building as the skeleton of one, a framework of steel uprights and concrete slab floors, like a parking structure without perimeter walls.

  Dryden put its distance at just over a mile. He could see a tower crane braced to the north side. The crane’s mast, standing three hundred feet tall, looked as delicate as a vertical truss of glued-together toothpicks. The long horizontal jib and counterjib, balanced atop the mast, swung slowly around as the operator lowered some kind of load onto the building’s rooftop. Dryden couldn’t see the workmen from this distance, but they had to be there.

  He turned off the exit ramp onto the surface street.

  * * *

  Marnie managed to stay one light behind him, all the way across town. She watched Dryden turn onto the main drag that ran east-west through the city, at the far end of which stood a huge building under construction. Two minutes and three stoplights later, she saw the Explorer pull to the curb twenty yards from the build site, its boundary protected by orange mesh fencing and NO TRESPASSING signs.

  Marnie pulled over half a block behind him. She killed her engine and sank down a little in her seat.

  Dryden was out of his vehicle within seconds of stopping. He had something in his hand—a hard plastic case of some kind.

  Without so much as looking around, Dryden crossed the distance to the construction zone, shoved down the mesh fence, and stepped over it into the site.

  Marnie stared after him, as confused as she had been at any point since arriving in the Mojave at four in the morning.

  She got out of her Crown Vic and followed.

  * * *

  Twelve dead. Nine injured.

  None of that was going to happen on the ground floor of the tower, Dryden saw. There was nobody at all on the first level. Not inside, anyway. He could hear men shouting to each other outside the structure, way on the other side. Crewmen positioning the heavy loads that remained for the tower crane to pick up.

  Dryden could see the crane’s reinforced base, midway along the north side of the building. A massive footing of steel and concrete, probably bolted to foundation piles that punched fifty feet down into the ea
rth.

  Whatever was going to go wrong, the crane’s base was not going to be a part of it. It looked solid enough. It looked like it would stay right there for five hundred years, even if everyone went away and left it to the elements.

  Certainly the equipment failed, but of course there were extenuating circumstances …

  What sort of equipment—and what extenuating circumstances?

  And why of course?

  Something in that phrasing had troubled Dryden since he’d first heard it.

  He came to an exposed stairwell—there were no walls yet boxing it in; it was wide open to the surrounding space of each floor. The stair treads were bare steel that would someday hold ceramic tile or padded carpet. He stopped at the bottom and cocked his head. From high above came the sound of voices echoing down through the vertical space. All of them seemed to come from way up in the building, closer to the top than the bottom.

  Distracting him from the sound was the static coming from the plastic hardcase in his hand. He had cranked the tablet computer’s volume to its highest setting, loud enough that he could hear it even with the case shut.

  He started up the stairwell.

  * * *

  Marnie waited for him to disappear up the stairs before crossing the orange fencing outside the site. She walked softly on the concrete, her footfalls all but silent.

  She started toward the stairwell Dryden had gone into, then saw another, twenty yards to the left. She made her way across to it and climbed to the first landing. She stopped and listened, and found she could hear Dryden easily. He was making no attempt to be quiet as he climbed through the structure.

  She kept thinking about the hard plastic case.

  What the hell was in it?

  Obvious possibilities came to mind. Drugs. Money.

  Other scenarios were less likely, but uglier. Like a bomb.

  None of those things made any sense at all, but neither did anything else about Sam Dryden.