Brennan nodded. “Among other hardware.”
Whitcomb spoke up. “There’s no clean way to go about this. It comes down to killing these people. All of them, if we can. Do either of you have a problem with that?”
He aimed the question at Dryden and Marnie.
“No,” Dryden said.
Marnie hesitated. Whitcomb and Brennan watched her.
“I’d want to know about collateral damage,” she said. “Some of these people will have children around—”
“We’d be careful within reason,” Brennan said. He rattled it off like he was used to saying it. Spoken boilerplate.
“You need to find them all first,” Dryden said. “Every location where they’re set up. Wherever they’ve got their own versions of the machine, wherever their system is.”
Whitcomb was nodding. “There’s an intelligence aspect to it. We can manage it—between the printed e-mails and what I already knew of these people, there’s a base of facts to start from. Besides … they’ve made it easy for us, in at least one way.”
Dryden waited for him to go on.
“Though the e-mails don’t mention any names, they make it clear there’s one person in charge of the Group’s activities in California, maybe the whole western U.S. A kind of regional head, you could call him. Like a caporegime in the Mafia. All the e-mails come across as if … well … as if the only people writing them are this man and a few others below him. Not a word from anyone above him.”
“You don’t think they told the rest of the Group about the machines,” Dryden said, not asking. “About the system, or any of it.”
“I’d almost guarantee it,” Whitcomb said. “Why the hell would this guy hand that kind of power up to his superiors, anyway? He’s the superior if he’s got all this to himself.”
Dryden thought about that. It fit everything he’d ever learned about human nature. It was almost reassuring, in its own ugly way: a scrap of normalcy in the four-dimensional chess game.
“I still plan to take out as much of the Group as I can,” Whitcomb said, “but as far as shutting down the system, erasing this technology right out of the world … I believe we can do all that here in California.” He pointed to the binder full of e-mails. “I’ve read that material at least ten times now. I’ve made notes. I’m convinced they’ve got their entire system, including every machine they’ve built, in a single secure location. We find that site and hit it, it’s game over. Then we destroy our own machine for good measure.”
“Wherever their machines are,” Dryden said, “that’s not where they took Claire. They were taking me to the machine site, before I got free. Claire was going someplace else. We need to know where. We need to hit that site at exactly the same time we hit the other place, if we’re going to save her.”
Whitcomb nodded. “We will. We’ll do this right.”
Dryden looked back and forth between Whitcomb and Brennan. “So what’s the first move? Whatever it is, we start right now.”
Brennan shook his head. “No. We start ten and a half hours from now, at the soonest.”
The man was looking at the machine in its case as he finished saying it.
Dryden stared at him. Saw what he meant. Felt his pulse accelerate as his adrenaline spiked.
“You’re not serious,” Dryden said.
“I am,” Brennan said. He turned his gaze on Whitcomb. “I’ve listened without rejecting this, because I do know the kinds of projects you work on, and because in thirty years I’ve never heard you lie about anything. But you can’t expect me to commit my people until I’ve seen for myself that this is real.”
Dryden took a step toward him, past the edge of the fire pit. “My friend is locked in a room somewhere, being interrogated. I’m not burning ten and a half hours for nothing.”
Brennan shrugged. “Have at it. I’ll help as soon as I’ve seen proof.”
Dryden turned to Whitcomb. “We start now. If your friend wants to wait—”
Whitcomb was already shaking his head. “We can’t do this piecemeal. We get one shot at it—”
“If Claire dies because we wasted half a fucking day—”
“If you were him,” Whitcomb said, nodding at Brennan, “would you believe the rest of us? Think about it.”
Dryden started to answer, but stopped. He saw himself in Claire’s Land Rover, in the darkness of the Mojave, right after she’d shown him the machine. He’d already seen the proof by then—the trailer and all that had happened there—but the fact was, he still hadn’t believed her. Not right away.
Dryden ran a hand through his hair. “Goddammit…”
He turned in place, saw Marnie looking at him, her own frustration palpable.
Then Dryden’s eyes narrowed. A thought had come to him. Another memory from those few minutes in Claire’s SUV.
“What is it?” Marnie asked.
Dryden shook his head. “I need to think for a second.”