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.”
“So if Whitcomb is smart,” Marnie said, “we don’t have to worry about him shooting us.”
“Something like that.”
“What if he’s not smart?”
“If he’s made it this far, I’m not worried.”
Dryden set the scope aside, put the Explorer back in gear, and accelerated forward.
*
Where the rolling gate met the scrapyard’s perimeter fence—an eight-foot-high chain-link affair, no barbed wire at the top—the latch mechanism was secured with what looked like a bicycle lock. Which wasn’t locked. Dryden slipped the thing out of the way and rolled the gate aside. It creaked and whined on bearings that hadn’t been oiled in a very long time.
There was no way to tell whether anyone had driven through the entrance recently. The dry, hardpan ground might as well have been concrete. Dryden walked back to the Explorer and rolled through the opening.