He let it sink in just that deep and then forced himself back into logic.
His death was not going to happen. Claire had contacted him to prevent it. She had heard that clip when she was already en route to handle the trailer situation by herself.
Dryden closed the audio player and the file listing. He switched off the tablet and closed the case and sat staring out the windshield for a full minute.
He believed what Claire had said: that she hadn’t meant to involve him in any of this, and yet—
What were the chances that his death two hours from now was unrelated to her problems?
Questions, rising and falling in his thoughts.
Possible answers, way out at the edge of his contemplation.
He looked at the dashboard clock. 5:34. He could be in El Sedero by 7:15 if he risked a speeding ticket.
*
Traffic was light on the freeway. He set cruise control to ten over the limit and focused again on the previous hour.
Certain logistics came to mind: Was it safe to be driving his own vehicle right now? It would only be a matter of time before Claire’s enemies started looking for him. They would realize something had gone wrong—that the men bringing the machine back to them weren’t responding to phone calls, that the prisoner they had been transporting was now unaccounted for, and must have the machine in his possession.
They would want to find him, just as badly as they had wanted to find Claire.
One difference: They didn’t know who he was.
They had not learned his name by way of the events in the Mojave. Of the four attackers, only one had seen Dryden’s identity: the man who had taken his wallet. That man had not spoken the name aloud to the others, nor had he called the information in to anyone. Now that man was dead, and the wallet was safely back in Dryden’s pocket.
Neither was there any official record for Claire’s enemies to search. The doomed patrol car had never been close enough to see Dryden’s plate number, and no other cruiser had come within a mile of him as he’d left the area. There was no way the cops could tie him to anything.
Therefore Claire’s enemies couldn’t know his name, if they hadn’t somehow known it before the events in the desert. Which didn’t seem to be the case. The four attackers sure as hell hadn’t known who he was.
There were other ways, of course, that these people could try to get a fix on him—to guess who Claire might have turned to for help, in a jam. They would look for personal and professional contacts of hers, going back years. Dryden’s name would appear in both categories. There would be old military files showing them serving together, and Claire’s phone records would show calls made to Dryden’s house and cell over the years since.
Except none of those documents would be easy to get to. Maybe impossible.
The military unit Dryden and Claire had served in had been about as secret as anything in the United States government, in part because much of what they’d done had been illegal. There might be records on paper somewhere, in a safe room underground in D.C.—or more likely in Langley, Virginia. There was close to zero chance any information on that unit existed in a computer database with a physical link to the outside world. Someone who golfed with the president might be able to figure it out. Anyone else would be out of luck.
Claire’s phone records would be even harder to find, if they existed at all. In her work in the private sector these past eight years, she had made enemies of a number of tech-savvy people with the means to do harm. As a result, she’d had every reason to make her digital footprints hard to follow. Dryden had seen for himself, on a few occasions, the lengths she went to: the specialized e-mail and phone services she used, the records encrypted or outright purged on a regular basis.
The people now holding Claire would do everything they could to find the unknown man she had been with in the Mojave. They might even see the news about a man and woman saving four girls in a trailer, an hour earlier, and connect the dots. The coverage would probably dwell on the near-impossible nature of the rescue, which would be a hell of a giveaway to Claire’s enemies.
But it wouldn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know about him: unidentified male, white, average height and build.
For the time being, driving his Explorer seemed safe enough. If that changed, he would react accordingly.
*