by Patrick Lee
“You’re not destroying this thing,” Brennan said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
For a long moment no one said a thing. The static-choked baseball game continued to wash from the Explorer’s speakers.
Then Whitcomb spoke. “What are you doing, Cal? What is this?”
“You’re not destroying it,” Brennan said again.
His voice had none of its previous reserve. He was breathing quickly, and his cheeks had reddened even behind the rough surface of his tan.
Whitcomb spoke as if talking to a jumper on a ledge. “Why don’t you put the gun away? We’re all rational here.”
“I’m rational,” Brennan said. “You three are out of your minds.” He nodded to the case under his arm. “It works. Christ, it works. Everything you said was true. Why would you want to throw this thing away?”
“Because it’s dangerous,” Whitcomb said, “and we’ll never get another chance to put the genie back in the bottle. We can do that right now, if we destroy all of these things. The world will never know it existed.”
Whitcomb took a step forward. Brennan took a step back. He pressed his left arm tightly toward himself, holding the machine and the binder of e-mails securely.
“There’s too much that can go wrong with this stuff,” Whitcomb said. “You know that.”
Brennan shook his head. “Too much goes wrong without it.” His eyes went from Whitcomb to Dryden and Marnie, back and forth. “Listen to your own stories, for God’s sake. Those four little girls out in the desert. The guys on the roof of that build site. All those people would be dead if it wasn’t for this thing. And that’s just one day’s worth of using it.”
“The downside is still bigger,” Whitcomb said. “What happens when governments get ahold of this technology? What about corporations? Political groups. We’ve already got people being murdered for things they haven’t even done yet. You want a hundred different special interests using this stuff?”
“It doesn’t have to come to that,” Brennan said. “I can keep this one working copy, and never tell anyone. Why shouldn’t I?”
“And leave the Group out there running around?”
Brennan shook his head. “I’ll do what we already planned. That was going to come down to me anyway. My firm, my manpower. I don’t need your help for that.”
“You do,” Whitcomb said. “You need my intel to do it the right way. If you get it wrong, you have no idea what’s going to come down on you.”
Brennan tapped the binder of e-mails with his free hand. “Everything you know came from this.”
Whitcomb shook his head. “I know a lot more than what’s in that binder. Don’t do this, Cal. You’re going to make a mistake, and then—”
“My firm has its own intelligence assets. Our Vegas office alone does counterintel work for three of the top twenty companies in the U.S. We know what we’re doing.”
He took another step backward, moving away from the three of them while keeping the gun leveled. It was clear he meant to back up some farther distance and then turn and run down the long channel between the scrap piles, to where it angled blindly to the right, a hundred feet away. His car was probably parked somewhere deep in the maze. If he made that corner, there would probably be no catching him. Getting in the Explorer and racing to block the exit road would be useless; Brennan could crash through the chain-link fence anywhere and drive away down the broad slope of the hillside. The freeway was right there at its base, a few hundred yards down.
Brennan took another step back. And another.
Dryden had one of Claire’s Berettas in his own rear waistband, but going for it was pointless while Brennan had them all covered. When he turned to run, shooting at him would be easy. Accidentally hitting the machine would also be easy.
The man took another step back. He was ten feet beyond the fire pit now, thirty feet from where the three of them stood.
Whitcomb said, “If you slip up at some point, next month or next week or tomorrow, these people will learn about it today. You don’t understand what you’re up against.”
“I’m a quick study,” Brennan said.
On the last word, Dryden saw a pinprick of light flash behind the man, high in the wooded hills west of the scrapyard. Half a second later, Brennan’s head blew apart above his eyes.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Dryden was moving even before the shot hit Brennan. He got a hand on Marnie’s shoulder and shoved her sideways. The two of them, and Whitcomb, were standing at the mouth of the long channel between the scrap rows. To their left and right, the ends of the rows would provide cover from the shooter on the hillside.
Marnie staggered, caught her balance, and threw herself the rest of the way past the end of the row. Dryden caught a glimpse of Whitcomb going in the other direction, dropping flat, scrabbling fast for cover on the other side of the channel.
Adrenaline-rush math flashed through Dryden’s thoughts in a tiny fragment of a second. How many shooters up there in the woods? Logic said it was just one, because two shooters would have synchronized their first shots—an easy opportunity to drop two targets before all the rest scattered.
There had only been one first shot, though.
Therefore, one shooter.
How much time would there be between shots?
Two seconds, maybe, if the shooter was skilled. Which seemed to be the case. Brennan could vouch for it.
Dryden threw himself after Marnie, behind the cover of the scrap metal stack. In the same quarter second that he cleared it, he heard the insectile whine of a rifle bullet passing close by, cutting through the space his head had just occupied.
He turned and looked back. He saw Whitcomb standing behind cover on the far side of the open lane, looking across at him and Marnie.
Between their two positions, in the wide space of the channel’s mouth, the Explorer sat parked like an offered sacrifice. Its driver’s-side door still hung open. The baseball game was still playing over the sound system.
Dryden stared at the vehicle. He expected a shot to punch through its front quarterpanel into the engine block. Or the fuel tank. Or the tires. Or all of the above.
Five seconds passed. Nothing happened.
Dryden understood. From the shooter’s point of view, it was temporarily better to leave the vehicle drivable. To leave it as bait.
Across the lane, Whitcomb edged up to the corner of the stack he was hiding behind. He lowered his eye to a narrow horizontal gap between a pair of crushed car bodies, and looked through into the empty space of the channel. Toward the fire pit. Toward where Brennan had fallen.
“Brennan drove here in a rental,” Whitcomb called out. “Parked it somewhere in these stacks. Probably has GPS on board. Whatever slipup he was going to make, looking for these people—next week, whenever—they probably saw it hours ago now. They would have narrowed down his name after that, and then where his car would be. Chess in four dimensions.”
Twenty seconds had passed since the last shot.
“If we get away,” Marnie said, “would they have learned that a few hours ago? Would that make them send extra people to compensate?”
“They’ll have seen police records and news articles showing someone died out here,” Whitcomb said. “If those documents don’t say anything about us … then no, the Group won’t have known about us until right now.”
Whitcomb dropped his eye to the narrow gap again. Stared once more into the open channel.
“We can’t leave without the machine,” he said. “If they get it, the whole game’s lost.”
He took a deep breath, then another. His body language made it clear what he intended to do.
“Don’t be stupid,” Dryden said.
Whitcomb’s eyes stayed locked on the plastic case. “It’s only thirty feet. Sixty there and back.”
“You won’t make it fifteen.”
“I might. He’s sighting on the vehicle right now, waiting for someone to run for it.”
“Takes about a second for a sniper to retarget,” Dryden said. “Maybe less.”
“I’ll be moving the whole time.”
“Yeah, straight toward him and then straight away. That’s an easy lead.”
“We need the machine. There’s no choice.”
“Whitcomb—”
“After the first shot, you should go for the vehicle. Move it to cover while he’s distracted with me.” Whitcomb managed a smile. “Or maybe he’ll shoot you, and I’ll survive. It’s all good.”
The man turned and met Dryden’s gaze across the space between them. He took another deep breath.
“Now or never,” Whitcomb said.
And ran.
Dryden watched the moment unfold in awful clarity. Saw it in a kind of precision that wasn’t quite slow motion but might as well have been. Whitcomb was ten feet from cover when the zip of another bullet passed through the channel. Dryden saw the man flinch and draw to his right—which meant the sound must have passed just to his left—without breaking stride as he sprinted.
Then Dryden forgot about him and turned his focus on the Explorer, and broke from cover himself.
Behind him, Marnie was suddenly screaming.
He couldn’t process the sound.
The world had scaled down to the strip of space between himself and the open door of the vehicle, fifteen feet away. His thinking had scaled down to the sequence of moves he needed to make. Simple actions in linear order. Planting each foot, pistoning with his legs, tilting his upper body forward, hurling himself at the Explorer.
The window in the open door burst right in front of him, close enough to shower his face with crumbs of tempered glass.
He rounded the door, didn’t bother shutting it, crammed his body behind the wheel, ducked and turned the ignition the rest of the way forward. Heard the baseball game momentarily cut out. Heard the engine rev and catch and roar. Heard the passenger-side window explode. Felt another shower of glass bits. He reached up and worked the selector, already jamming his foot on the gas. Beneath him, the vehicle lurched forward like a living thing. Its momentum slammed the door shut beside him, and a second later the shadow of the tall scrap pile slid over everything.
Dryden braked.
Sat upright.
The Explorer was behind cover and running smoothly. No damage to anything except the two windows.
He looked down at himself. No injury. Nothing.
He sat there for five seconds, letting his pulse stabilize, letting his thoughts become words again. He took a breath and released it. It came out sounding like a laugh. Maybe it was. He had drawn the fire off Whitcomb after all. He’d have to give the guy some shit for that.
He opened the door and stood, and saw Marnie sitting ten feet away.
She was holding on to Whitcomb, who’d been shot through the neck.
* * *
Dryden ran to them and dropped to a knee.
Whitcomb had the plastic case in his hands—he even had the binder full of e-mails.
His blood was all over both things. It was coming out of the bullet wound in pulses. The carotid artery on the right side of his neck had been ripped open.
“They don’t know you,” Whitcomb said. His voice was high and reedy; his windpipe had taken part of the hit.
Marnie had an arm around his shoulder, and one of his hands in her own.
“Don’t try to talk,” she said, though she had to know it was pointless; Whitcomb would be gone in another minute. Two at best.
The man shook his head, his eyes hardening. Whatever he was saying, it mattered to him.
“They don’t know you,” he said again. “The Group. Don’t know your names. Don’t let them find out.”
Dryden nodded, if only to make the guy feel better in these last moments. Whitcomb’s words made sense, but they were also obvious. Maybe it was some simple thought Whitcomb’s brain had fixed on, as he faded.
The guy looked at Dryden. Seemed to read the patronizing thought in his expression. Whitcomb’s eyes narrowed further. He looked angry.
“License plate,” he whispered. Then with great effort he jerked his head in the direction of the distant shooter. “He’ll see it when you go. Cover it. Put…”
His breath hissed out. He sucked in another, and then his body was racked with a coughing fit. By the time it passed, he’d lost consciousness. He wasn’t going to regain it. His breathing rattled in and out, weakening.
“We need to go,” Dryden said.
Marnie nodded, but her eyes stayed on Whitcomb.
“Do we bring him?” she asked.
Dryden thought about it. Then he thought of the man’s last words. Whitcomb was right: The license plate had to be covered before they made their break. But with what? The dirt all around them was dry and sandy. Not so much as a handful of mud or clay to smear on the plate. Dryden scanned the nearest parts of the scrap pile. Nothing useful there.
Cover it.
Dryden looked at Whitcomb’s unconscious body, each breath a little shallower.
“Christ…” Dryden said.
Marnie looked at him. “What?”
Dryden only shook his head. Then he took the plastic case and the binder from Whitcomb’s hands. He gave them to Marnie.
“Can you take those and buckle up in the passenger seat? We don’t have much time.”
She stared. “What are you going to do?”
“Please just do it,” Dryden said.
She hesitated another second. Maybe she knew what was about to happen—more or less—and maybe she could have stomached seeing it. Dryden had no doubt she’d seen worse things before. In her line of work, she might have seen even worse things than he had.
But he didn’t want her to see this. He didn’t want anyone to see it.
“Please,” he said.
Marnie stared—then nodded and stood with the case and binder. She took them around the back of the Explorer to the passenger side.
Dryden turned his attention on Whitcomb.
Still breathing, just audibly.
Still unconscious.
Never coming back.
Dryden grabbed a fistful of the man’s shirt, below the collar. He dragged him around to the back end of the Explorer, then lifted him so that his back was positioned against the license plate.
Still breathing. Barely.
Dryden drew the Beretta from his waistband, put it to Whitcomb’s chest and fired. Four times. The hollowpoints made small holes on the way in, and huge ones coming out. They ripped through the back of Whitcomb’s shirt, spraying a thick sheet of blood onto the license plate and the metal around it.
Dryden dropped the body and ran for the driver’s door.
Twenty seconds later, doing 70, they crashed through the roller gate, fishtailed, and then accelerated north on the access road.
A single, wildly aimed shot hit the vehicle a second later. It skipped like a stone off the front corner of the hood, denting the metal. That was it. In another ten seconds they were beyond any possible range.
* * *
They got back on I-5, northbound. No goal at the moment but distance. Wind roared through the vehicle, through the blown-out front windows on each side.
For five minutes neither spoke.
The roadbed caught and scattered the hard sunlight, rendering it painful.
“He would have told you to do it,” Marnie said. “Almost did tell you. There wasn’t any other choice.”
Dryden kept his eyes on the road.
Marnie turned to him. “Focus on what’s next. What are we going to do?”
Dryden didn’t answer right away. He thought of something Claire had said: that she had arranged security for Whitcomb and his family, a couple years back. In these past few days, when everything had gone bad, he must have hidden his family away somewhere safe. Someplace where, right now, they were waiting for him to come back.
“Hey,” Marnie said.
Dryden blinked. Glanced at her.
<
br /> She indicated the machine and the binder of e-mails. “He died to get these back. It can’t be for nothing. What’s our next move?”
Dryden nodded. He exhaled hard and pushed away every thought that wasn’t practical.
“Hayden Eversman,” he said. “The guy they want to stop from being president in nine years.”
“But who they’re not killing in the present.”
Dryden nodded. “They plan to kill him eventually, but they’re afraid to try it now. There has to be a reason for that. I’d love to know what it is.”
“So would I.”
“Then let’s find out where he is in 2015.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Where Hayden Eversman was, at that moment, was a hundred and twenty miles north and west of them, watching his four-year-old daughter try to put a pink cape on a shih tzu. The daughter’s name was Brooke; Eversman and his wife had chosen it carefully after two weeks of considering every option they could think of. The shih tzu’s name was Meatball; Brooke herself had picked that one, after five seconds of considering probably zero alternatives.
So far, Meatball didn’t seem to grasp that the cape was supposed to go around his neck. As a result, the spectacle playing out on the living room carpet looked like the least dangerous bullfight in the history of the world.
Above the dog and the girl, the TV on the wall was tuned to C-SPAN. The current broadcast was sedate, even by C-SPAN’s standards: live coverage of oral arguments before the Supreme Court. Because cameras weren’t allowed in the courtroom, the coverage was simply an audio feed spruced up with still photos. Whenever someone was talking, that person’s name and picture filled the screen.
Softly, so that his daughter wouldn’t hear, Eversman said, “These assholes should have bowls of tea leaves on their shelves instead of law books.”
He was leaning back against the kitchen island that bordered the living room, watching the TV.
Nearby, seated on a stool and looking over documents spread on the island’s marble countertop, was Eversman’s business partner, Neil Chatham.
“They do seem to come in with their minds already made up,” Chatham said.