He stepped away from the fire, pacing, his gaze going everywhere and nowhere. He shut his eyes and let the memory come all the way through.
Then he opened them again and looked at his watch.
2:37 P.M.
“It was going to be two fifty-one,” he said. “Two fifty-one this afternoon.”
“What’s at two fifty-one?” Whitcomb asked.
Dryden ignored him. He turned and looked at Brennan again. “You need proof? Fine. But we’re not waiting for it. Fifteen minutes is all it’ll take.”
“What do you mean?” the man asked.
Dryden said, “You follow baseball?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Dryden leaned into his Explorer, put the key in the ignition, and turned on the radio. He stood there at the driver’s-side door, using the seek button to cycle through the stations.
Marnie came up beside him, Whitcomb and Brennan close behind.
“What are you looking for?” Marnie asked.
“The Padres are playing right now,” Dryden said. “Or they’re about to be. At two fifty-one they’ll be in the top of the second inning. I heard part of it on the machine ten and a half hours ago.”
He gave up on the seek button and used the knob, clicking one step at a time through the frequencies. Here and there, barely audible songs filtered through the distortion. He’d almost made it back around the dial when he heard a man’s voice coming through the static, deep and measured, unmistakably familiar.
The game itself hadn’t started yet. The announcer was talking about a sponsor, some insurance company in San Diego.
Dryden sat behind the wheel and opened the glove box; he found a pencil, then tore out the last page of his road atlas for something to write on. He pressed the page to the flat top of the center console, then stopped. He shut his eyes and put himself back in Claire’s vehicle again, listening to the game.
“Almodovar,” he said. “It was two balls, two strikes when I first heard it.”
He opened his eyes and began writing in the margin as the details came back.
“There was a curve ball—outside. That made it three-two. After that he hit the pop-up—two fifty-one, Claire said. It was foul, to the left. Count was still three-two, and then…”
He went quiet again, thinking. What had happened after the pop-up?
At the edge of his vision he saw the others watching him, waiting.
“Ball four,” Dryden said. “The pitch right after the pop-up was ball four. Almodovar walked.”
He jotted it down, dropped the pencil in the cup holder, and got out of the vehicle. He held the page out to Brennan.
“That’s more than a person could guess at,” Dryden said. “Keep listening to the game. In a few minutes you’ll be up to speed with the rest of us.”
Brennan took the page. From the Explorer’s speakers the announcer kept talking, static-laden but easily discernible. Dryden’s watch showed 2:40.
*
They waited. They stood near the vehicle as the game began and the minutes passed.
At 2:45, Marnie looked up and met Dryden’s eyes, then Whitcomb’s. Something had occurred to her—whatever it was, it made her breath catch.
“What?” Dryden said.
“These people,” Marnie said, “the Group … their system lets them get information from the future—even years away. Police records, articles, anything. They learn about the future so they can change it, right?”
“Right,” Dryden said.
“So why don’t they use it to change the past? Why don’t they send a message to themselves one week ago, before things went wrong for them? Before Whitcomb and Claire and Curtis got away? Any kind of warning to themselves would fix everything, and that would be easy to do, the way the system works.”
Dryden thought about it. The idea hadn’t occurred to him, in all the clamor of the day’s thoughts, but Marnie was right. There was no reason the Group couldn’t do that, given the system Curtis had described in his letter.
For a second he wondered if the Group could send a message even further back in time—months or years—but then he caught himself. That wasn’t possible. The earliest point they could send a message back to would be the day they first had the system working. Before that, there would be no machinery to receive such a message. They could send something back a few weeks, no further.
But Marnie had nailed it: Even one week would change everything.
So why hadn’t the Group done that already?
Whitcomb was shaking his head. “I worried about it, too, until I read their e-mails. There’s a long exchange where they go over this very point. They could do what you’re describing … but they never will.”