“Rich ones. Old money, aristocratic types. That’s what all our sources pointed to. We never had absolute certainty on every last name, but we had very solid hunches. I got the impression they were people who weren’t all that happy with how the war turned out.”
Dryden fixed his gaze on Whitcomb. “You’re saying the Group are—”
“I don’t think they fit any simple category. I think they’re a mix of a lot of things that most of the world has tried to leave behind. My father used to say power has a good memory for bad ideas. The people this German soldier took the project files to … it makes sense he would have chosen people whose views he agreed with. These days, the Group is made up of their children and grandchildren; who knows what exactly their goals are. We’ve seen for ourselves what they’ll do to achieve them. That’s enough for me.”
To the west, above the hills, the crow screamed again. Dryden could see it circling, catching some kind of updraft coming off the terrain.
“In any case,” Whitcomb said, “those old files weren’t enough to let them actually rebuild one of these machines. Same problem we had. So they settled on the same strategy: watch and wait. I didn’t appreciate how good they might be at it. Not until it was too late.”
Marnie put her hands to her face and rubbed her eyes. “Maybe they just want money. Maybe it’s not anything ideological, or political. Just money. Isn’t that all that matters to people like that, in the end?”
There was a wishfulness in the way she said it.
In response, Whitcomb pointed at the black bag with Curtis’s binders sticking out of the top. “Did either of you look at that material? I know you read Curtis’s letter, but did you get to the printouts?”
Dryden shook his head. “I glanced at the binders, but that was it. We haven’t had time to do more than that.”
“It’s interesting reading,” Whitcomb said. “Curtis e-mailed me copies of those files before we broke contact. I didn’t bother with the computer code stuff—I’m not a programmer—but the last batch there, all the Group’s internal e-mails … there’s a hell of a lot to learn from it.”
“The few e-mails I read didn’t make much sense,” Dryden said.
Whitcomb nodded. “Most of them don’t. Some do.” He held his hand out toward the open bag. “Let me show you something.”
Dryden slid the fifth binder out of the bag and handed it to Whitcomb. The man opened it and paged quickly through the bound stack of printed e-mails, zeroing in on some particular passage. Finally he stopped.
“There’s a chain of messages here that contain file attachments,” Whitcomb said. “Text files. Curtis was able to open those attachments and print them. The e-mails themselves are vague and pretty meaningless, but the attachments are clips from newspaper articles. Future articles. Take a look.”
He passed the open binder to Dryden and Marnie.
The first article began at the top of the printed page. The headline read: EVERSMAN WINS 54–46
The first sentences of the article removed any doubt over what the headline was referring to:
At the stroke of 11:00 P.M. Eastern Time, as polls closed in California and Oregon and Washington, Hayden Eversman officially became the next president of the United States. Thirty minutes later, before a jubilant crowd at Boston’s Fenway Park, Eversman took to the podium to declare victory.
The snippet of the article ended there. Dryden looked up at Whitcomb, along with Marnie.
“This is the outcome of the next election?” Marnie asked.
“I’ve never heard of Hayden Eversman,” Dryden said. “How is he the next president, when the election is a year from this fall? Everyone who’s running is already in the race.”
“He’s not the next president,” Whitcomb said. “Look at the dateline.”
Dryden looked down and focused on what he’d skipped over before: the slug of text just below the article’s headline.
AP—Wednesday, November 6, 2024.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“Keep reading,” Whitcomb said. “There’s more to it.”
Dryden turned the page to the next printed article. This one came from the same year as the first, 2024, but from an earlier point in time: four weeks before the election—October 8. In the simple text format of the attachment, the headline was the same size and font as the rest of the article, though in an actual newspaper, this headline would have screamed from the page in letters three inches tall:
HAYDEN EVERSMAN SHOT TO DEATH IN DES MOINES
“What the hell?” Marnie said.
As with the previous article, only the first several sentences were included, but that was enough to cover the basics. According to the story, Eversman had been speaking at an outdoor venue in Des Moines when he was killed. The bullet had come from some distance away, probably a rifle shot, and as of print time, no suspect had been named. Hayden Eversman, the Democratic candidate, had held a comfortable lead over his Republican opponent, whose name didn’t appear in this part of the story.