“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me how we got this far without alerting these guys that we were coming. What was Whitcomb going to tell us?”
“He was describing how they buried the system in the ground. How the power supply doesn’t need maintenance. They designed the whole thing to be future-proof. They needed it that way, because to get headlines from ten years in the future, the machine has to keep working that whole time. They had to guarantee it would, no matter what changes came along over the years. So that’s how they built it. Buried and self-sufficient. They said it would keep running, even if, in the future, everyone in charge of it died. It would just sit there in the ground, all by itself, working away. I said that was pretty clever, and Whitcomb said it was very, very stupid. It was their biggest weakness. The way we were going to beat them.”
Marnie’s eyebrows drew toward each other. She was putting it together.
“We thought they’d know when we were coming,” Dryden said. “They’d be able to tell, because all of a sudden their searches wouldn’t work past some certain point in the future. The time when we would show up and destroy the system.”
Marnie nodded. “So the way around that is…”
“Don’t destroy the system.”
She stared, thinking it over.
Dryden nodded to the work counter. “We’ll take the computer they were using to access it. We’ll cut the data line where it comes through the wall. There’s no one left alive who knows about any of this stuff. If someone later on tries plugging into that line, they won’t know what to make of it. They won’t have the software these guys had. But none of that matters anyway, because nobody will try plugging into it.”
Claire looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
“But the system itself,” Marnie said, “buried somewhere on this property … we just leave it running? That’s why these guys didn’t know we were on the way?”
“They looked pretty surprised to me.”
*
They hauled the computer up to the garage and put it in the Suburban. They gathered all the paperwork and took that up, too. They made a fast, thorough sweep of the guesthouse and found three other crude models of the original machine, hooked up to tablet computers, like the one Claire had first shown Dryden. They took all three to the Suburban.
They wiped their prints from the doorknobs and light switches, then raised the garage door again and drove across to the main residence. Inside, in the bedroom Dryden and Marnie had slept in, they found Claire’s machine where they’d left it on the nightstand. They wiped their prints from the obvious places they could think of in the main house, but only as an abundance of caution; neither house on the property was going to yield a hell of a lot of evidence to the authorities.
Dryden entered the big garage the red SUV had come from, and found both things he wanted within thirty seconds. The first was a remote for the front gate, clipped to the visor of a BMW convertible in the second stall. The second was a five-gallon container of gasoline.
*
Three minutes later Marnie was at the wheel of the Suburban again, Claire riding shotgun. Dryden crossed the motor court to his Explorer. Passing the back end, he saw Dale Whitcomb’s blood still covering the license plate. It was dried brown and flaking at the edges. It looked like dirt. If there were security cameras with coverage of this driveway, no one would ever be able to identify the vehicle’s owner. That was assuming any data from a video system would survive—which was assuming a lot.
He started the Explorer, nosed around in a sharp turn, and followed Marnie down the driveway. He glanced in the rearview mirror as they rolled toward the opening gate. At every main-floor window of both houses, flames capered.
*
They reached El Sedero just after six in the evening. They skirted the town and drove into the hills a few miles inland. Ten minutes later they parked the Explorer and the Suburban on an overgrown two-track way up in the evergreens, the land pitching steeply up on one side and steeply down on the other, toward a brush-choked pond thirty feet below. They positioned the Suburban nose-first at the edge of the dropoff.
They destroyed the computer they had taken from the guesthouse. They pried open its case with a tire iron and smashed everything inside. They left the pieces scattered on the Suburban’s floor.
They hauled the four machines out and set them in the dirt—the three from the guesthouse, and then Claire’s machine, last in line.
They took turns on the first three machines, using the tire iron. They smashed through the outer cases, shattered and snapped the delicate components inside—circuit boards and strangely shaped arrays of wire and plastic and even glass.
Claire went third, and when she’d finished, she sat crouched there, still holding the tire iron.