“Then how did you know?” Whitcomb said.
“Because of the wallet,” Dryden said. “It was missing everything that could identify you in any official way, but it had a movie ticket stub from Cupertino in it. That was strategic, on your part. You knew the Group might get to Curtis, and learn about this meeting. And if they showed up here, you wanted them to find something that made it look like you were dead. Something they’d have to wonder about, at least. Blood on the ground, a wallet with a ticket stub from where you live—the Group would have picked up on that. They know where you live. But if the Group didn’t find this place … if some random person came along instead, and saw the blood and the wallet, and called the cops … you’d never want them to tie your name to this location, on some official record. That really would bring the Group straight here. They might have shown up at this place days ago, if the cops found your wallet here today. Right? So that’s why there was a ticket stub and nothing else. Something the Group would associate with you … but the police wouldn’t. Best of both worlds.”
Whitcomb nodded, studying Dryden.
“You’re already looking at this game the way I do,” Whitcomb said. “Chess in four dimensions.”
Something in the way the man said it chilled Dryden, though he tried not to show it. He only nodded, and waited for him to start talking.
*
“The way Claire understood it,” Whitcomb said, “and the way she explained it to you, this technology was discovered by a fluke. Bayliss Labs stumbled onto it without any idea what they were looking for. Right?”
Dryden nodded.
Whitcomb leaned over the improvised fire pit, holding his hands out to the heat. “It wasn’t a fluke,” he said. “It wasn’t just a fluke. My people at Bayliss may have stumbled onto the design, but they were being pushed toward it. They were looking for it without knowing it.”
Dryden traded a glance with Marnie, then looked at Whitcomb again and waited for him to go on.
“I need to start a little further back,” the man said. “Actually a lot further back, but it won’t take long. Please bear with me.”
Far away to the west, in the wooded foothills rising above the scrapyard, a crow screamed and took to the air. Dryden turned and saw it, a tiny speck of black against the early afternoon sky.
“My father served in World War II,” Whitcomb said, “in North Africa and Europe. He landed in Morocco under Patton, November 1942. My dad was infantry, but a few weeks into the invasion he was transferred to a group under the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, which was military intelligence. He had a background they liked: radio engineering, pretty advanced work at Stanford before the war. OSS had a job for him right away. Scout planes had seen something out in the desert in northern Algeria, some small German installation, all by itself in the middle of nowhere. Someone up the chain wanted to know what the hell it was, so my dad and his guys went in with a commando unit. The Germans defending that site must have thought it was pretty important, because they fought to the last man. When my father and his team finally got in to look at the place, they found most of it demolished. But not all of it. From what they could see, it had been some type of research station. There was one machine in particular that seemed to be the main event. A great big thing, the size of a pool table, with cables running out to speakers beside it. A radio of some kind, they thought. Its power supply had been cut, and someone had put a few bullets through its casing, but nothing vital had been hit. They got it powered up and switched it on, but at first all they heard was static. Then, every so often, they’d hear radio traffic coming through. Mostly it was music, sung in local languages, like what they’d heard on the streets in Moroccan towns. It was strange as hell to hear that stuff being broadcast on the radio, though, in German-occupied North Africa.”
A knot in one of the two-by-fours popped in the firepit, sending an ember arcing out onto the dirt beside Whitcomb. He hardly seemed to notice.
“My father and his people only had control of that site for a day before word came that heavier German forces were en route. Other teams from OSS had arrived by then. They boxed up all the paperwork they could salvage and carted it off, but the equipment itself was too heavy to move on short notice. The commando unit rigged everything with high explosives, including the big machine with the speakers. They blew it all to scraps, and then everyone got out of there. In those hours that my father had been able to listen to the machine, and the static, he only heard one thing he could actually make sense of. One thing in English: the chorus of a song apparently titled ‘She Loves You.’ He heard those three words and then the word yeah repeating a few times before he lost the signal.”