All the same, Dryden turned and swept his gaze up and down the street. He saw other property walls lining the road, making a narrow canyon of its winding route. He saw rooftops beyond the walls, and other gates with their own intercoms and cameras. He saw nothing moving. No cars creeping along. Nothing at all.
In front of them, Eversman’s gate suddenly hummed and came to life. It swung inward, drawn by an unseen mechanism, revealing a driveway of paver bricks leading up to the house Dryden had seen in Forbes. Red brick with black shutters, a huge central mass flanked by symmetrical wings leading away to the left and right. The place had to be ten thousand square feet. It had a guesthouse off to the left, thirty yards from the end of that wing, its exterior matching the look of the larger structure. Maybe it served as living quarters for a waitstaff, or security guards.
Marnie put the Explorer in drive and rolled through the gateway toward the main house.
*
Dryden expected an attendant of some kind to meet them in front of the place. Instead, the man who stepped out the front door as they parked the Explorer was the same one they had seen in all four magazine articles.
Hayden Eversman was six foot one, athletically built. He wore jeans and an oxford shirt, untucked. Even at a glance, Dryden saw in him the natural confidence that came from a lifetime of being the smartest person in the room. Eversman crossed to the edge of the porch and stood watching them, waiting.
Dryden and Marnie got out of the vehicle.
“What’s this about?” Eversman asked. He directed the question to both of them, his eyes going back and forth. Dryden noted that the voice was the same one that had answered over the gate intercom a moment earlier.
“Have you caught much of the news today?” Dryden asked.
“Some.”
“You heard about the earthquake?”
“Yes. What about it?”
Dryden reached into the vehicle and pulled out the hard plastic case. Marnie had wiped most of Whitcomb’s blood off of it during the drive, using a work glove she’d found in the back of the Explorer. The machine was silent, switched off for the moment.
“We need to sit down and talk to you,” Dryden said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
To Claire Dunham, everything in the room where she was tied up seemed to have heat shimmers above it. Like sun-scorched blacktop, though it wasn’t especially hot inside this place. No hotter than the forest she could see outside, she guessed.
The shimmers were an illusion. That much was obvious. They were in her head—a side effect of the drug she’d been given.
As it happened, Claire knew all about this drug. She knew about most of the drugs people employed when it came to making other people give up their secrets. For a while, back in the day, she’d been in the interrogation business herself. She’d been tech support for people who did it, anyway.
The shimmers were beautiful. They rose up even from objects that weren’t quite objects: a knothole on the wall to her left, the rough-hewn trimwork above the doorway leading out of the room. Sometimes vivid colors swam up into the ripples: reds and purples and greens, like little rainbow patterns on a soap bubble.
The shimmers were one of two classic side effects of this drug; the other was a different story altogether, though still pleasant in its own way.
Claire had encountered this drug and its effects before, years back, during training with Sam Dryden and his guys. Someone way up in the political ranks at Homeland had decided field operatives like herself should be familiar with interrogation drugs—intimately familiar—just in case they themselves were grabbed off a street corner in Yemen and found the tables turned.
A whole school of thought had grown up around the idea, and terms like counternarcotics training and chemical agent preparedness had been coined, and people like her and Sam, in carefully controlled settings with doctors present, had been given all sorts of fun intoxicants.
The point wasn’t to build up tolerance. That would have taken months of serious use, and would have gone away after you went cold turkey—assuming you could do that, by then, or that you weren’t dead.
No, the point was practical knowledge. The point was to know what these drugs felt like, for whatever good it could do in a pinch. To learn what the side effects were, and how to cope with them. To learn if the drug had weaknesses that could be exploited.
With this drug, the primary effect—very different from the two side effects—was a kind of mindless euphoria; it waxed and waned in a cyclic pattern as the nervous system rebelled against it. Five minutes of slightly greater lucidity, five minutes of slightly less, over and over. It was the sort of thing you’d never notice if you weren’t trained to spot it.
Claire’s training had involved five or six long sessions with this drug. Its full name escaped her now. Thiozene di—no … Thiozene per—
Good-Cop-in-a-Vial.