He rolled into El Sedero at twelve past seven. The streets were mostly empty, the diners and coffee shops along the waterfront just waking up. The ocean was slate gray with stark white breakers coming in, its horizon blurred out to nothing by a marine fog that hadn’t yet burned off.
His house was right up against the beach, a one-story saltbox with cedar siding worn gray over the years. He had been born and raised in Los Angeles, his childhood divided between a high-rise condo in Century City and a boarding school in Oxnard. He’d become good friends with a girl at that school whose family lived out here in El Sedero, and he’d been taken with the town from the first time he saw it. Years and years later, toward the end of his time in the service, he had lost both of his parents in the same miserable summer. When he finally left the military, he sold the condo in the city and bought this house. He ended up reconnecting with the girl he’d known in high school—ended up marrying her soon after that, and settling into the happiest part of his life. It didn’t last very long.
He coasted along a street two blocks in from the shore now, keeping well clear of the house. He nosed into the terraced parking lot of a used-book store, and into a space at the edge of the overlook, maybe two hundred yards up the incline from his front door. He could see the whole house from here, like a stage set viewed from high in the nosebleeds.
7:16.
He pulled the Remington 700 into his lap, took a dime from the console tray, and used it to unscrew the scope mounts. He set the rifle aside and kept the scope, but switched it from thermal vision to its standard optical view.
He braced his elbows on the wheel and put his eye to the scope, and waited.
*
There was a kind of pressure he’d felt only a handful of times, back in his years on the job. Times when he and his people were actually working against the clock. Maybe someone way up high received credible word from an informant—news of some very big, very bad thing in the offing, the fuse burning down on a scale of hours. When that sort of threat came along, things happened quickly. Agencies talked to each other. Phone calls passed through the back channels. Strings got pulled. There was never anything exhilarating about days like that. No good side to it at all. Just tension and dread, and the near-certainty that your phone would go off anytime: Turn on CNN, it just happened.
He felt it now, thinking about Claire.
How much time did he have to find her? How short was the fuse?
He kept thinking of a day probably nine years back, downtime on some airbase, waiting for orders. He and a few of the guys had been playing baseball, and someone had goaded Claire into joining. She looked uncomfortable with it—not the game, just the interaction. Being around that many people, even though she knew them all. Her first time at bat she hit one deep into left, way past the outfielder, and made it to third. The next batter hit a single and Claire made it home, and Dryden, playing catcher, had seen up close the way she reacted to the high fives and cheers of her team.
The image was pretty sharp in his mind, even now. How she’d tried to smile and only partly succeeded, as if the muscles in her face wouldn’t cooperate. He remembered what she’d looked like a minute later, sitting alone at the end of the bench, trying not to have a panic attack. Hands in her lap, shoulders hunched, her breathing forced and careful.
She had spent her childhood in foster care; he knew that from her file, and from people she’d worked with before. There were reference tags to old police investigations from back when she was ten years old—abuse of some type, unspecified but long-term. Dryden had thought about all that, watching her that day, this twenty-three-year-old kid who looked like she wanted to crawl under a blanket and hide, all because people had slapped her palm and told her she’d done great. She had spent her life learning to do without those things, and couldn’t handle them now that they’d finally come along.
Dryden had never had siblings, but he remembered thinking, in that moment, that this must be what it felt like to have a little sister. Someone you were irrationally protective of. Someone you would kill for, just because. He had felt that way about Claire Dunham ever since.
7:21.
He could go to the authorities. He had a few personal contacts he could talk to. A buddy from his and Claire’s old unit was a state cop here in California now, pretty high up in the ranks. But the last Dryden had heard, the guy was mostly in charge of coordinating mass media alerts: missing child notifications and emergency broadcast system reports. Technical work, without much authority to investigate anything.
In any case, the FBI would be the right people to talk to. He could simply bite the bullet and show them the machine. Let them see it in action, and tell them everything Claire had shared with him. They wouldn’t believe him, at first. Not for a while. But they would—after ten hours and twenty-four minutes. Then everything would change. Their attention would focus like the seeker head of a guided missile.