Dryden shook his head. “It was never like that with us.”
He thought of asking why that mattered to her, but she spoke up again before he could say anything.
“I’d really like to know what you’re planning to do in the Mojave.”
“It’s better if you don’t,” Dryden said. “Better if no one does.”
“But these people, the resources they’ve got—for Christ’s sake, they know the future—”
“They know some of the future,” Dryden said. “They can get the answers to questions, if they can think of the questions.”
“That’s a pretty good advantage.”
“There are ways around it.” Dryden thought about it a few seconds longer, then said, “Can you stay with Eversman? After you take me to the chopper, I mean. Keep the machine here; what happens with it after that point is up to the two of you. Whatever you decide, about going after these people.”
“You’re not planning a suicide mission, are you?”
Her gaze was intense. Drilling into him, unblinking.
“If it works like I hope,” Dryden said, “then Claire lives for sure. Possibly me, too.”
Her eyes stayed on him for another moment, and then a door opened in the hallway and Eversman’s footsteps came toward them over the stone tiles.
“Sorry for that,” Eversman said. He crossed back to the island and the arrayed printouts.
“Does any of this stuff hit a nerve with you?” Dryden asked. “It’s one thing if they don’t want you to be president—there could be lots of reasons for that. But why are they not killing you right now? Does that part tell you anything?”
Eversman thought about it a long time. He sighed, half smiling. “Maybe they’re big investors in one of my companies. Maybe they’re worried about the stock price crashing if I die tomorrow.”
“That’s actually not a bad thought,” Marnie said. “How small of a suspect pool would it give us?”
Eversman offered the almost-smile again. “Hundreds of people. And now that I think about it, it’s not much of a theory.” He waved a hand at the printed documents. “People with the kind of system you’re talking about wouldn’t be worried about money at all. They could play Wall Street like a video game.”
“What else, then?” Dryden asked. “Why else would these people be scared to make a move against you in the present, but not later on?”
Eversman’s focus stayed on the printed pages. The articles. The headlines. His death, by gunshot and plane crash and gunshot again, over and over. Finally he just shook his head.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t.”
For a passing instant, Dryden found himself wondering if that was true. If the guy really didn’t know, or if he was keeping something to himself. Something in his tone gave Dryden that impression, but it was there and gone so quickly he wasn’t sure he’d really seen it.
“I intend to find out, though,” Eversman said, looking up at both of them. “I’ve sure as hell got a vested interest in it.”
The hissing static from the tablet’s speakers broke. Mama Cass’s voice came through, singing about night breezes and what they seemed to whisper.
Marnie turned to Dryden. “We should go.”
Dryden nodded. “I need a disposable phone. We can get one in town.”
*
Twenty minutes later he was standing in the deserted parking lot of Pacific Grove High School, Marnie beside him and the FBI chopper coming in low over the city. The air-hammer clatter of its rotors shook the space over the lot, and then the ground beneath it. In the last moment before it touched down, Marnie turned to him. She looked like she wanted to say something, but knew he’d never hear her. Instead she just grabbed his hand. Not exactly a handshake—she simply held on tight for two or three seconds and looked into his eyes.
She mouthed, Don’t die.
He nodded. Then she let go, and Dryden turned and jogged to the chopper as its skids settled on the blacktop.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The helicopter landed an hour and fifty minutes later in Palmdale, in the southwestern Mojave, half an hour’s drive from the place where Dryden had last seen Claire Dunham. He had seventy minutes to get there, which gave him forty minutes to do what he needed to do in town.
He walked into the lot of a used car dealership and found the cheapest thing that looked capable of surviving the short trip: a 1991 Ford Ranger, its bed full of rust holes big enough that he could see its rear axle through them. It turned over on the first try, though, and ran steadily enough. The dealer wanted three hundred dollars for it. Dryden offered two hundred and didn’t budge, and drove it off the lot at a quarter past eight, forty-five minutes from the deadline. He filled the tank halfway up at a station in town and headed out into the desert, where the shadows of Joshua trees stretched out in the long evening light. He had a Beretta tucked into his waistband, but didn’t expect to use it. If it came to that, he would probably be in very big trouble.