Marnie looked up at Whitcomb. “How can both of these articles exist?” she asked. “How does this man win the election and also get killed a month earlier?”
“The articles are from different versions of the future,” Whitcomb said. “Just like there would have been different articles about the death toll from that building collapse in Santa Maria. Different outcomes, different news reports.”
Marnie nodded slowly, getting the idea squared in front of her. “In one future,” she said, “Hayden Eversman gets elected president, and in a different version, he gets killed a few weeks before that.”
Whitcomb nodded. “In the construction site, you two changed something that was a few minutes from happening. These articles show how the Group changed something that was nine years away.” He nodded at the binder. “In fact, they changed it more than once. Keep going.”
Dryden turned to the next attachment: a third article about Eversman. Another headline that would have been shouted across the printed page in real life:
HAYDEN EVERSMAN’S PLANE CRASHES—NO SURVIVORS
This article was dated September 15, 2024, another few weeks before the previous one. The text told of Eversman’s campaign jet going down just minutes after takeoff from Richmond International Airport in Virginia. The crash investigation had not yet begun, but even this article, written within hours of the incident, reported that the wreckage was a debris field more than a mile long—indicating the plane had exploded in midair.
The next article, the fourth one, was dated June 26. The headline and story had Eversman once again being shot and killed, this time while speaking to a crowd in Tampa.
The fifth article was similar: another shooting death, though it took place on June 5 in Chicago.
The sixth article described another midair explosion of Eversman’s campaign jet, after takeoff from LAX on May 23—just two weeks after he’d officially claimed the Democratic nomination.
The seventh and final article was dated Wednesday, May 1, 2024. Both the headline and the text drew allusions to Robert F. Kennedy, for obvious reasons. Hayden Eversman, minutes after making a victory speech upon winning the California primary, was shot and killed. It didn’t happen in a hotel kitchen. It happened on the sidewalk five feet from the limousine he was walking toward. No suspect had been detained in the few hours before the article was published.
“What the hell is all this?” Marnie asked. “They’re trying out different ways to kill someone who would have become president nine years from now? And how are they doing that? How are they arranging an assassination almost a decade in the future?”
“It could be done,” Dryden said. “You could use sealed orders, blind go-betweens. Tell someone, ‘Hold this envelope for nine years and then deliver it to so-and-so.’ If you pay people enough, you can get them to do anything. Obviously it works. It looks like they did it six times.”
“Which in itself doesn’t make sense,” Marnie said. She looked around at the others. “Why find six different ways to kill him? After it worked once, wouldn’t that be enough?”
Whitcomb managed a smile. “You’d think so.”
“Why do this at all?” Dryden asked. “I don’t mean why kill him, I mean why kill him then? In 2024. If the Group wants this guy dead before he becomes president, it would be easier to kill him right now, when he’s nobody.”
“Much easier,” Whitcomb said. “And they’ve already done that with other people. You read as much in Curtis’s letter, and I’ve seen the e-mails that reference some of those murders.”
“So why is Hayden Eversman different?” Marnie asked.
Whitcomb shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve racked my brains over it, and all I’ve got are half-assed maybes. Like maybe it’s not Eversman they care about. Maybe they want his running mate to be president, and killing Eversman right at the end is a way to pull that off. But—”
“But that doesn’t work,” Marnie said.
Dryden nodded, flipping back through the preceding articles. “If they wanted his running mate in office, they’d sit back and let Eversman win like he was supposed to, and then kill him.”
“That’s right,” Whitcomb said. “So I have no idea. I only showed you this to make the point that these people are thinking in terms of politics. They have big plans, and they’re going to achieve them if we don’t shut it all down.”
On those words, Whitcomb turned to Cal Brennan. Dryden looked at him, too. Sized him up again. The hard skin, the result of sunburn after sunburn. The sandblasted Oakleys. Dryden pictured the guy on a plane, maybe yesterday or the day before, flying in from Iraq or Syria or one of half a dozen other places.
“What sort of resources do you deal in, Brennan?” Dryden asked.
Brennan’s eyes turned toward him. The eyes without laugh lines. “Human resources.”
“Guys with guns,” Dryden said.