Only to Die Again

by Patrick Lee

  Did you ever plug a video camera into a TV, then point the camera at the screen? You get that tunnel of screens reaching away into infinity. This is like that, but the tunnel reaches through time instead.

  It works, Claire. They really did this. The setup for it is there in their programming code, and their e-mails reference it over and over, behind all the careful language.

  I know about at least two early trial runs. The first one was simple. They used the system to learn the closing value of the Dow Jones five days in the future. They ended up being dead-on.

  The second trial had a longer reach: just shy of ten years. They told the system to give them the high temperature in Des Moines, Iowa, for July 1, 2025. Eighty-nine degrees, it said. I guess we’ll find out someday.

  Far away across the parking lot, in the direction of the beach and the boardwalk, kids’ voices shouted and laughed. Something about a Frisbee. Dryden brushed his hair off his forehead. He felt his hand just perceptibly shake.

  The trial runs ended almost three weeks ago. Since then, they’ve already begun using this long-term function for real. They have something planned, Claire. I don’t know what it is, but it has to be large-scale. It’s on a timeline of years. You’ll get a sense of it in their e-mails, if you read enough of them. These people, the Group … they have some kind of agenda, some ideology driving them. There are no specifics about it in their messages, but the general tone is hard to miss. They want something, and they’re going to use this technology to get it.

  The parts of it that they’ve set in motion so far are small components, I think. Like they’re still testing the waters. But even with these little steps, they’ve demonstrated what an advantage their system gives them.

  The way it works is, they can set a chain of events in motion (maybe paying certain people to do things, maybe writing up detailed strategies and committing resources to them), and then they search the future for news stories to see how it will turn out. And if it doesn’t turn out the way they want … they just change their plan in the present. Then they check the future again to see how that version would work. They can change it over and over, until they see a future they’re satisfied with. It’s like correcting artillery fire onto a target, based on watching where the shells are hitting … except their spotters are looking across years, not miles.

  I know for a fact they’ve had people killed. (On top of killing everyone at Bayliss, and trying to kill us.) What I mean is they’re seeing future news reports about politicians or journalists who get in their way, even years from now … and they’re killing those people in the present time. We’re talking about people who don’t even necessarily work in those fields yet, or even realize that they someday will. They’re being murdered now over things they would have eventually done. This is really happening, Claire.

  Movement at the edge of Dryden’s vision. He glanced up. A couple in their twenties walked to a minivan, five cars over. He stared at them without quite seeing them. His mind was far away, trying to grasp the scale of the situation Curtis had described.

  After a few seconds he dropped his eyes to the letter again.

  There was more to it. A lot more.

  He turned the page and kept reading.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Marnie was on the freeway, passing Thousand Oaks, thirty minutes yet from El Sedero.

  She had her phone in its dash mount, switched on. The map application was open, showing not her own location but that of Sam Dryden – the location of his Explorer, anyway: a little red thumbtack symbol currently positioned in what looked like a strip-mall parking lot.

  Dryden had been there since Marnie had left the federal building.

  She had the radio on. She flipped through the stations, one every second or two. She caught the tail end of a U2 song that gave way to a news report: the latest on the Miracle in the Mojave. The whole mediasphere had begun calling it that about two hours ago. Now as Marnie listened, she heard a sound bite that had become the go-to clip for all the networks. It was Leah Swain’s mother, being interviewed at the hospital where she’d just been reunited with her daughter. Through tears that cracked her voice almost beyond discernibility, she had a message for the man and woman who had rescued her little girl.

  Thank you. Whoever you are.

  Then someone – maybe a reporter, but more likely a random onlooker – yelled, Do you think they were angels?

  There was no answer to that, because by then – as Marnie had seen in the televised version of this clip – Leah’s mother had turned to go back into the hospital.

  ‘Let’s just go see,’ Marnie said.

  She pushed the Crown Vic to 90 and changed lanes.

  She was five minutes from El Sedero when the little red thumbtack on the map started moving. She watched the phone’s display in glances as she drove: Dryden left the strip-mall parking lot and headed east on a surface street, away from the oceanfront. He crossed under the 101 freeway, then turned onto the northbound on-ramp, accelerating and merging in. The map screen automatically scaled out to a wider zoom as Dryden sped along, moving up the coast toward Santa Barbara.

  A data tag popped up next to the thumbtack, showing Dryden’s speed: just above the posted limit. Marnie still had the Crown Vic doing 90. Watching the map, she did the rough math in her head: She would overtake him within five or ten minutes. Well, she’d catch up, anyway. She had no desire to overtake him. Better to hang back half a mile, just in visual range.

  Dryden had his windows all the way down, the ocean air rushing through the Explorer’s cab. As he drove, the last portion of Curtis’s letter cycled through his thoughts, key passages standing out from the rest:

  Dale Whitcomb is alive, Claire. He and I were in touch for a few hours, that last day, when everything went to hell – the day he left the machine in a safe place for you to find. I know he also left a phone number for you, along with the machine, but I’m guessing you got no answer when you tried to call him. When the Group’s people attacked Bayliss Labs that day, Whitcomb got away, but he had to leave behind everything, including the phone you could have reached him on. He just wasn’t expecting so aggressive a move, so quickly.

  He did manage to contact me after that, just for a few minutes. Even that was a risk (to both him and me, I’m sure), but he had to talk to me.

  Whitcomb said he knows who these people are, Claire. Who the Group really are. He said there are things he never shared with us, that he didn’t think mattered. He wants to tell us everything now.

  He says there may be a way to go after these guys, off the record. A way to shut them all down in one shot, and possibly even erase this technology in the process. Everyone who’s known about it would be dead, at that point, except the handful of us – and we could take it to our graves.

  Whitcomb asked me to meet him three days after that last call – meaning today, Saturday. He would spend the time in between trying to contact people on that list he was making – the powerful people he meant to show the machine to in the first place. He says some of them have the means to help us make a move against the Group.

  The meeting is at 3.00 this afternoon, in a little town called Avenal, just off I-5 up in Central Valley. There’s an old scrapyard outside town. That’s the place. Whitcomb picked it at random as we spoke.

  My job for the three days was to find you, Claire. We need the machine you have, or else the people Whitcomb wants to recruit will never believe any of this. They need to see it for themselves, just like we did.

  I hope I’ll be telling you all this in person, but if all I can do is get this information to you indirectly, then I hope it’s enough. Please get to that meeting, and bring the machine. Good luck, Claire.

  Curtis

  It was 10.30 in the morning now. Four and a half hours until the meeting in the scrapyard. Dryden could reach Avenal by then without any trouble.

  He watched the freeway rolling by, the white line segments coming at him like distinct thoughts.
/>   Whitcomb.

  The Group.

  He says there may be a way to go after these guys, off the record.

  A way to shut them all down in one shot.

  Dryden saw the delicate thread again. The one connecting himself to Claire. Wire-taut under a world of strain.

  But holding.

  He felt the edge of weariness creeping in on him as he drove. He did the math: thirty-some hours now without sleep, and probably twelve without food. Five miles farther on, an off-ramp sign advertised a McDonald’s. He took the exit and hit the drive-through, then parked in an Albertson’s lot next door, with a double order of sausage biscuits and hash brown patties and a large coffee.

  He reached to turn on the Explorer’s radio out of habit, then stopped himself. He leaned over and grabbed the hard plastic case instead, lifted it onto the passenger seat, and opened it.

  He turned on the tablet computer and pulled up the program that controlled the machine. The machine itself was off, silent except for the low cyclic hum from deep inside it.

  Dryden tapped the ON button on the tablet screen. He heard the machine’s hum speed up and change pitch, as it had done when Claire had switched it on before. A second later the computer’s speakers began playing the familiar static. Dryden heard something trying to break through it right away: some ’80s song he couldn’t quite put a name to. A few seconds later it was gone, lost in the hiss.

  Somehow, it felt right to have the thing turned on.

  No – that wasn’t quite true. Dryden thought about it a few seconds longer, then understood the feeling better: It wasn’t that it felt right having the thing on, it was that it felt wrong having it off.

  His mind kept going back to the four girls in the trailer. If Claire hadn’t been listening to this thing last night –

  All at once he pictured her, sitting at the wheel of her Land Rover, dark hollows under her eyes after three days of hardly any sleep.

  Maybe this machine was like a drug, once it got in your head. Something you couldn’t let go of. You would never know when you might hear about a car accident that killed a mother and two little kids – three people still alive and well, somewhere out there in the here and now.

  Maybe Claire had saved other lives before the trailer last night. There were all kinds of bad things reported on the radio, around the clock.

  Three days without sleep.

  Had she just been unable to turn away from the damn thing?

  Knowing what she might miss by five minutes?

  Dryden listened to the steady hissing from the speakers and thought of metal bars and tiny hands gripping them, and lighter fluid and blue flame and smoke and screams.

  He pushed the images away – but left the machine on.

  Marnie saw the Explorer from two hundred yards away. She pulled into the parking lot of a Pizza Hut that bordered the much larger Albertson’s lot, and parked the Crown Vic. She took a pair of binoculars from her center console compartment and fixed them on Dryden’s vehicle.

  He was sitting at the wheel, eating a little breakfast sandwich – probably fast food from the McDonald’s right next door. His gaze stayed trained mostly through the windshield, out past the edge of the parking lot, to the sharp blue water of the Pacific below. The morning haze had nearly gone, leaving a choppy surface that glittered in the early light.

  Marnie’s phone rang in its dash mount. She lowered the binoculars and answered the call on speaker.

  Don Sumner’s voice came through. ‘I’ve got something you want to hear. Might be about your guy.’

  ‘Let’s have it.’

  Dryden felt the coffee taking the edge off the weariness. If that was a placebo effect, he didn’t care.

  Way out on the ocean, maybe five miles offshore, a giant container ship crept by. It was moving south, gradual as the minute hand of a clock at this range, maybe heading for the Port of Long Beach.

  ‘I’m looking at a story about a dead cop in the Mojave,’ Sumner said. ‘About an hour’s drive from the trailer where the little girls were being held.’

  ‘That’s a long way,’ Marnie said. ‘Who says there’s a connection?’

  ‘No one, but the cop’s dash cam says the cruiser was approaching two parked vehicles off the roadside. One of which looks like a Ford Explorer, recent model.’

  ‘Do we have a plate number?’

  ‘The cop didn’t get close enough for that before he was killed.’

  Marnie was silent, still watching Dryden.

  ‘What I’m saying,’ Sumner said, ‘is there’s probably enough here to bring Dryden in for questioning, if you want to.’

  ‘I’ve got prints on a junked washing machine at one scene,’ Marnie said, ‘and a vehicle that kind of looks like his at another. That’s pretty thin.’

  ‘We don’t need enough to charge him with a crime. I’ve seen someone detained as a person of interest on less than this.’

  Marnie lowered the binoculars. Even without them, she could see Dryden pretty well.

  ‘I can have the assistant US attorney on the phone in thirty seconds,’ Sumner said. ‘He can fax me the signed warrant in another minute or two. You’d be free to arrest Dryden yourself at that point.’

  ‘I’m not ready to drag him in over the trailer thing,’ Marnie said. ‘Not on the record.’

  ‘Then drag him in over the cop in the desert. It’s only for questioning. What’s the downside?’

  A dark green Ford Fusion rolled past Marnie and coasted into the lot Dryden was parked in. It pulled into a space thirty yards behind him, two men up front, the back windows tinted.

  Marnie took note of the car absently, her mind working through the decision in front of her.

  ‘Why don’t I go ahead and set up the warrant,’ Sumner said. ‘And instead of you making the arrest, I’ll give Dryden’s current location to police dispatch and let them take him down. That’s a better approach, given his background – he’s potentially dangerous. He’d still be yours to question, either way.’

  Marnie thought about it, still idly staring at the Fusion. The men inside were just sitting there, talking about something.

  Marnie returned her gaze to Dryden, who was still staring off at the ocean.

  ‘It’s your call, Marnie,’ Sumner said.

  Dryden heard a commercial flit through the static. Something about a pizza place where kids’ meals were half off on Fridays. The signal cleared for five or six seconds, then washed out.

  He finished the last hash brown patty and stuffed the wrapper into the bag everything had come in. He rolled the bag down into a compact shape and set it on the floor in front of the passenger seat. He was reaching for his coffee again when another signal began to fade in. For a second he thought it was a weather report, or maybe a station identification – it was a man’s voice, still too choppy to make out.

  Then the static cleared entirely.

  ‘… death toll is confirmed at twelve, but with nine critically injured, it’s likely to go higher, Katelyn.’

  Dryden turned toward the machine.

  ‘Yes or no,’ Sumner said. ‘It’s not a hard question.’

  Marnie barely heard him. Her attention had suddenly locked on to Dryden.

  There was something going on.

  Dryden had turned his head and was now focused intently on something on his passenger seat.

  Dryden studied the tablet computer’s screen, filled by the application that ran the machine. He hadn’t tried recording with it yet, but there was no question about how to do it. The four buttons could not have been simpler: ON, OFF, RECORD, and STOP.

  He pressed RECORD as the news report continued.

  ‘With an incident like this,’ the male reporter said, ‘we know we’re going to hear lots of questions in hindsight. Was the construction site as safe as it could have been? Any time you’ve got heavy equipment, with people milling around, folks are going to be asking whether all the guidelines were followed –’

  ‘Are
there guidelines that could have prevented this type of accident?’ a woman, presumably Katelyn, asked. ‘Has there been any statement from the construction firm managing the site?’

  ‘There’s been no statement all day, and nothing from the developer except the press release earlier, offering thoughts and prayers.’

  Watching Dryden, Marnie was only dimly aware of the men in the dark green car getting out. The driver opened the back door on his side and leaned in, reaching for something out of view in the rear seats.

  ‘Let’s give his information to the cops, Marnie,’ Sumner said. ‘You want to question him, so let’s just do it.’

  She chewed her lip, thinking. Felt herself leaning in Sumner’s direction.

  ‘It’s possible the developer is worried about the legal risks of saying anything public right now,’ the male reporter said. ‘Certainly the equipment failed, but of course there were extenuating circumstances, so –’

  ‘Right,’ Katelyn said, ‘and the project itself was considered controversial even before today. 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 –’

  ‘That’s absolutely right –’

  Static began to edge back in, distorting the man’s words.

  ‘– but obviously on a day like this, all we’re hearing from the community is consolation for those killed and their –’

  The signal dropped away into the hiss.

  Dryden stared at the tablet’s screen a second longer.

  Santa Maria. An hour’s drive north of here, he thought – he had been there before but couldn’t remember the exact directions to reach it. It was definitely not along the route he’d planned to take to Avenal, but it couldn’t be far off of it, either.

  There was some amount of time to spare – not a hell of a lot, but probably enough, depending on what had happened in Santa Maria. What would happen.

  Death toll is confirmed at twelve.