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 U.S. 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.”