Only to Die Again

by Patrick Lee

  The Explorer rocked side to side on its suspension. Dryden could see every other car on the street doing the same. He saw people on sidewalks throw themselves down on the grass. Saw the stoplights over every intersection jerk and twist and swing.

  And Mission Tower.

  Twenty-two stories. Concrete and steel. Swaying and pitching and reeling – but handling it.

  It actually looked like it was doing fine. There were ripples racing up and down its height, the whole structure just visibly moving in a kind of belly-dance sway; Dryden had the distinct impression that it was designed to do this. Engineered to move in precisely this way, to dissipate the shock waves. To bend so it wouldn’t break.

  The tower crane was a different story.

  There were ripples racing up and down its height, too. It did not look like it was handling it.

  As Dryden watched, he could see a kind of cumulative effect building up, each oscillation of the crane’s mast just a little more pronounced than the one before it. Like a child on a swing going a bit higher with each pass.

  And then it failed.

  Midway up the mast’s freestanding portion – the part above the building, anchored to nothing – something gave way. Some bolt or weld, marginally weaker than the rest, let go, and in an instant the failure cascaded up and down through the mast, turning rigid steel into something that looked more like cable.

  The giant horizontal arm that formed the top of the crane – the jib and counterjib – simply dropped. Like a two-by-four held out flat and then released.

  The counterweight punched through the tower’s roof without stopping. A massive block of dumb, dead weight, probably twenty mixer trucks’ worth of concrete, it obeyed the primeval physics of gravity and acceleration and momentum. It didn’t even slow down; it crashed through floor after floor, as if the building weren’t there at all. It tore a ragged tunnel straight downward, and left a dust-choked wake above itself, and even as Dryden watched it smash into the ground beneath the tower, his eyes were drawn back up to the building’s top.

  Where the floors were failing. The highest one first. It sagged at its center like a collapsing pie crust, settling its weight onto the floor beneath it. After only a few seconds, both floors gave way; they crumbled and pancaked downward and took the whole building with them, compressing it into its own footprint with brutal speed and efficiency. The collapse kicked out a cloud of concrete dust. It surged outward, channeled through the spaces between buildings, as ugly a déjà vu as Dryden had ever experienced. In a matter of seconds the dust cloud had reached the Explorer and engulfed it, plunging the inside into a murky twilight.

  In the light that remained, Dryden turned to the woman in the passenger seat.

  She was staring at him.

  Her mouth hung slack.

  Her lower eyelids ticked upward once, and then again, as if she were thinking of something to say. But she said nothing. She just stared.

  Part Three

  * * *

  SATURDAY, 12.00 P.M.–9.10 P.M.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Ghosts emerged out of the dust from the collapsed building. The shapes of people, dark gray against the light gray. They materialized from the gloom three feet from the Explorer’s hood, drifted past, vanished behind its back bumper.

  Wind scoured the vehicle. It moaned in the wheel wells and the complex spaces of the underside. It scurried little snakes of soot across the windshield.

  Dryden felt the adrenaline leaving him. Felt the live-wire thrum in his limbs settling out, calming. He forced his breathing back to normal – and felt his attention go back to where it had been earlier, in the moment after he’d disarmed the woman.

  Who was she?

  A cop of some kind.

  The implications of that came at him from every angle. Made him want to look around outside for some sign of a threat, in spite of the dust choking off the visibility.

  If the authorities knew enough to be looking for him, what else did they know? If they had his name tied to Claire’s in any official way, then surely the Group would have already learned about him.

  Dryden turned to the woman. ‘Tell me who you are. Tell me how you found me.’

  For a second it didn’t seem like she’d heard him. She was staring forward into the haze, as if still trying to take it all in. The quake and the collapse. The fact that she’d been inside the building twenty seconds before that. She kept looking up at where the tower had stood.

  She was thirty, give or take. Brown eyes, and brown hair to her shoulders.

  Dryden grabbed her arm. ‘Hey.’

  She turned to face him. Her eyes widened a little.

  ‘Are the police looking for me?’ Dryden asked. ‘Is there an investigation with my name on record?’

  The question seemed to go right past her. She blinked, and when she spoke, she still sounded half-dazed. ‘How are you doing this? How are you showing up in these places before things … happen?’

  Places. Plural.

  How much did she know?

  Dryden gripped her arm tighter, and found his voice getting louder of its own accord. ‘Are the police looking for me? How did you find me?’

  She drew back from him, scared again.

  ‘Tell me,’ Dryden said.

  She blinked. ‘The trailer in the desert. You left fingerprints. In the arroyo.’

  Dryden opened his mouth to tell her that wasn’t possible. There had been nothing in the arroyo except strewn trash and –

  The washing machine.

  Christ.

  ‘I was there,’ the woman said. ‘I’m an FBI agent.’

  Dryden felt his mind working rapid-fire, like he was mapping a minefield while driving through it at freeway speed.

  He let go of the woman’s arm and willed himself to speak evenly, but he locked his eyes onto hers and didn’t blink.

  ‘I need to know how much you know about me,’ he said. ‘You need to tell me everything, right now. This is life and death, maybe for both of us.’

  She stared. ‘I don’t understand –’

  ‘Everything,’ Dryden said.

  She looked into the eddying dust again, toward the unseen rubble of Mission Tower. ‘But how are you –’

  ‘Look at me.’

  She turned back to him. Met his eyes.

  ‘If someone could access police computers,’ Dryden said, ‘and FBI computers, what would they see about me right now? What is my name attached to, in the past twelve hours?’

  The woman shook her head, thrown by the question.

  ‘What would they see?’ Dryden asked.

  ‘Nothing. Well … no, nothing.’

  ‘What were you going to say?’

  The woman hesitated.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘There was almost a warrant.’

  ‘Almost?’

  ‘We wanted to question you. We were going to name you a person of interest –’

  ‘For the trailer?’

  The woman started to answer, but checked herself.

  ‘For the trailer?’ Dryden asked again.

  The woman shook her head. ‘A cop that got killed, out in the Mojave.’

  Icy little needles seemed to pierce Dryden’s skin. Down to his bones, where the chill spread deep and wide.

  The Group knew all about the dead cop in the desert. Obviously. If Dryden’s name was linked to that on any police computer –

  ‘We held back on it,’ the woman said. ‘There’s no warrant. There’s nothing official at all.’

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘Me and one other person. There’s no official –’

  ‘What other person?’

  The woman shook her head. ‘I don’t understand what’s going on –’

  ‘Someone you work with?’

  ‘Yes.’ The woman looked baffled as to why he was asking.

  Dryden stared at her. His mind was still flooring it across the minefield, jostling and bouncing.

  ‘Call
them,’ he said. ‘Whoever this person is. Call and make sure they don’t still go through with creating the warrant. You don’t understand how much this matters.’

  For a long moment she just stared at him. She was calming a bit, but still entirely lost. ‘What is this? What the hell is any of this?’

  He held her gaze for a beat. Then he turned and stared away over the hood, thinking.

  There was only so much he could push her to do. Or not do. He couldn’t hold her against her will.

  He exhaled deeply. Rested his arms across the wheel. Lowered his forehead to them. He was tired. Maybe not as tired as Claire had been, but getting there.

  ‘You want to understand all this?’ he asked.

  From the corner of his eye he saw the woman nod. ‘It’s why I followed you.’

  From the passenger footwell, Dryden could hear the machine hissing in its case. He drew upright again, reached into his rear waistband, and took out the woman’s Glock 17. He held it out to her, grip first.

  ‘Make the phone call,’ he said, ‘and I’ll show you.’

  Chapter Twenty-five

  She called. She put her phone on speaker and talked to a guy named Sumner. She told him she was looking into something, and told him to hold off on doing anything with the name Sam Dryden until he heard from her again. She made him promise.

  When she hung up, Dryden said, ‘I need you to put your phone in airplane mode, so no one can ping it to track your location. Call it paranoia if you want, you’ll see the point in a few minutes.’

  She didn’t argue. She switched the phone’s setting, then pointed to the Explorer’s dashboard, and the satellite navigation screen built into it.

  ‘If you’re paranoid,’ she said, ‘you should disable the GPS for that.’

  For a second or two, Dryden only stared at it. The idea that the vehicle’s navigation system might be a liability had never crossed his mind. He rarely used the thing, and today it hadn’t once struck him as a means for tracking him. Staying unidentified in the first place had taken up all his attention.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said.

  He knew how to cut the GPS unit’s power. There was a dedicated fuse for it in the panel below the glove box. He leaned over and looked up under the dash, found the fuse, and pulled it out. Then he pressed the nav system’s power button to be sure. The screen stayed dormant, dead.

  When he turned to the woman again, she was staring at him. Waiting.

  ‘My name’s Marnie Calvert,’ she said.

  ‘Sam Dryden.’

  ‘I know.’

  She continued to hold his gaze. Still waiting.

  Dryden pointed to her feet. ‘Hand me the case.’

  It took half an hour to show her, and to tell her everything he knew. By ten minutes in – around the time she seemed to get past her denial over the machine itself – the dust was clear enough that Dryden could see to drive. He retraced his route back to the 101 and took it north again. The freeway would lead to US 46 at Paso Robles, which would take them east toward I-5 and then to the town of Avenal. They would be there comfortably ahead of the meeting at 3.00 p.m.

  When Dryden finished speaking, Marnie sat for over a minute saying nothing at all. She had Curtis’s letter in her lap, and her eyes kept going from its pages to the machine, back and forth. Outside, the landscape slid by: low hills dotted with scrub vegetation.

  At last she said, ‘All the men on top of that building would have been dead.’ She wasn’t asking. Just firming up her grip on it.

  Dryden nodded anyway.

  For another long beat Marnie was quiet. Then: ‘I would have died, too.’

  ‘Yes and no,’ Dryden said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The way it would have originally happened, you wouldn’t have been there at all. You were only there because I was trying to stop it.’

  She shut her eyes. ‘Right. Christ …’

  ‘You don’t have to be part of this,’ Dryden said. ‘I understand why you wanted answers, but now you have them. If you want to walk away, you can.’

  It took her a long time to respond. Most of her attention was still on the machine, her mind trying to come to terms with it. Dryden imagined he had looked the same way when Claire had first shown him the thing.

  ‘I can stop in the next town and let you out,’ Dryden said. ‘You can forget you ever heard of all this.’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Marnie nodded. She turned to him. ‘I know what you mean. I don’t want out.’

  Dryden glanced at her. ‘You understand what’s going to happen, right? What this guy Whitcomb is talking about doing? There’s not going to be any due process. We’re going to track these people down and kill them. There’s no other way it would work.’

  Marnie nodded again. Her eyes dropped to Curtis’s letter, in her lap. Her fingertips brushed over a paragraph in the middle of the page. Dryden saw what it was: the passage about the murders. Victims who had been killed for things they hadn’t done yet.

  ‘I know,’ Marnie said. ‘And I don’t want out.’

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The third burner phone on Mangouste’s desk rang again. He grabbed it.

  ‘Tell me you have something.’

  ‘It’s not about the trailer,’ the caller said.

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘One of the trip wires caught something.’

  Mangouste was silent a moment, taking in the news. The so-called trip wires were a series of routine searches to be carried out using the system, once an hour by default. Mangouste had come up with the idea not long after getting the system up and running, weeks before. These routine searches were defensive in nature – a quick digital survey of his own bank accounts, and certain accounts belonging to the Group at large, to see if any outside party had tried to gain access.

  To see if someone was snooping around – and getting close.

  Banks and other companies had used such technology for years: flagged files and the like. What made the system’s trip wires special was obvious, of course: If somebody tripped one of them, you could learn about it in advance.

  ‘Tell me,’ Mangouste said.

  ‘Tomorrow morning, just before ten o’clock, someone at a private security firm in Las Vegas tries to access one of our offshore holdings.’

  Mangouste sat down. He took a notepad and pen from the tray drawer and set them in front of himself. He said, ‘Do we have a name? An IP address?’

  ‘Not yet, but we’re narrowing it. We’re hoping to get something actionable on a tighter timeline – something we can move on today instead of tomorrow.’

  ‘Tell me everything,’ Mangouste said.

  He picked up the pen and began writing notes as the caller spoke.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Dryden exited I-5 at Avenal ten minutes before two o’clock. The small town hugged the transition between the mountains to the west and the vast plain of Central Valley to the east, a flat checkerboard of farmland, green and gold, extending to the horizon.

  They could already see the scrapyard; it had been visible even before Avenal itself. It lay south of town, overlooking the freeway, a series of ascending shelves cut into the side of a foothill ridge. It looked like an Incan terrace farm that somehow grew rusted-out vehicles and piles of sheet metal.

  There was a single road leading south from Avenal toward the yard, winding with the curve of the foothill slope. A quarter mile short of the yard’s front gate, Dryden stopped the Explorer on a rise. He pulled to the shoulder, reached down, and took the Zeiss scope from the floor near Marnie’s feet. He rested his elbows on the steering wheel and studied what he could of the site.

  It didn’t appear to be in operation. Not today, at least, and probably not any day in recent years. Just inside the gate – a metal fence section on rollers, closed at the moment – Dryden could see a double-wide trailer that must have once served as a kind of management office.
Its windows were broken out, and waist-high weeds had grown up all around it, blocking the one visible entry door.

  Beyond the trailer lay the expanse of the scrapyard itself, row upon row of stacked wreckage: crushed cars, appliances, torn and twisted structural metals that might have come from demolished buildings. Dryden pictured dump trucks loaded with scrap, rolling in from torn-down shopping malls and office mid-rises all over central California. Material just valuable enough to escape the landfill, but not urgently needed by anyone right now. There was probably a few decades’ worth of it here.

  The yard formed three terraces, like broad, shallow stair treads cut into the hillside, the whole thing stretching maybe half a mile down the face of the slope. Wide empty lanes ran between the stacked piles of junk, big enough to admit the heavy machinery that must have piled it all up, long ago.

  There was no sign of Dale Whitcomb, but that was what Dryden had expected – and not just because they were early. If Whitcomb was here, he had probably been here for hours. He would almost certainly be watching the approach road right now, from some concealed place in the ruins.

  ‘This is going to be tricky,’ Marnie said. ‘He’s not expecting us. How do we convince him we’re on his side?’

  ‘If he’s smart, it won’t be a problem.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We have the machine with us. That should demonstrate well enough that we’re the good guys.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because if the bad guys had the machine, they wouldn’t bring it here and risk losing track of it again. And they wouldn’t need to, anyway. If they were to recover this thing, I don’t think they’d worry about loose ends like Whitcomb anymore. What damage could he do, if he didn’t have the machine himself? Who could he convince to help him, if all he had were stories? He’d sound like a nutcase in a tinfoil hat.’