*
Ten minutes before nine, northbound on 395, he passed the blank ground-level billboard he’d last seen in the predawn darkness, when he’d followed Claire along this road. A quarter mile past it he found the place where she’d led him off the pavement. Where they had parked and she had shown him the machine. Where the patrol officer had been killed.
There was little sign now that any such things had happened here. No yellow police tape. The shot-up cruiser was gone, as was Claire’s wrecked Land Rover. Dryden parked and killed the Ranger’s engine and got out, pausing to wipe his prints from the steering wheel and door handles.
He found the scoured earth where the Land Rover had skidded and flipped. The ground was discolored, and when he scraped it with his foot he smelled gasoline. He saw the drag marks where Claire herself had been pulled out of the vehicle.
He heard the drone of engines and looked up, and saw two black SUVs coming in from the north. Cadillac Escalades. He took the disposable phone from his pocket and walked back to the Ranger. He stood next to the driver’s-side door, hands low at his sides, and simply waited.
The two vehicles rolled in and circled around and stopped directly west of him, twenty yards away. A pretty basic tactical move on their part: putting the glare of the sun at their backs, forcing him to stare into it when he looked at them.
Three men emerged from each vehicle. They looked more or less like the four who’d attacked him and Claire, and the two who’d abducted Curtis. Midpriced hired help, competent enough on a good day.
Five of the six held pistols, low and relaxed. The sixth man, the driver of one of the Escalades, stepped around his open door and walked ten paces toward Dryden, stopping midway between the SUVs and the Ranger. He wore a black V-neck T-shirt and jeans.
Dryden didn’t bother scrutinizing the Escalades for a sign of Claire inside. She wasn’t here. That had never been a possibility.
“You’re supposed to have something for us,” V-neck said.
“It’s not with me,” Dryden said.
“Where is it?”
Dryden ignored the question. “Give me a phone number for your employer.”
“It’s not supposed to work like that.”
“It’s going to,” Dryden said.
He turned away from the guy and leaned against the Ranger, staring off to the south. He studied the chaparral and the cool shadows growing beneath it, the rises and concavities of the desert landscape all picking up contrast. At the edge of his vision he saw V-neck stare at him a moment longer, then turn and walk back to the Escalade.
A minute passed. Then Dryden heard footsteps scrape, and caught movement at the corner of his eye again, and V-neck came back to his spot in the open space between the vehicles. He called out a phone number. Dryden punched it into the throwaway cell phone and waited.
On the third ring, a man answered. The voice was digitally scrambled to sound tinny and mechanical. For all that, a hint of an accent came through. French mostly, but maybe just a trace of something else mixed in. The man didn’t say hello. He came right to the point.
“Tell me where you put it.”
“I want proof of life,” Dryden said. “Put Claire on the phone.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Then we’ve got a problem.”
“You’ve got a problem. You’re alone, one on six.”
“I think we should talk about your problem,” Dryden said. “It’s a lot more interesting than mine.”
“Us losing track of that machine isn’t such a problem. Wherever it eventually turns up, it’ll make headlines. Or it’ll be detailed in some official record. All of which we can run searches for, with our system. Whether the machine surfaces next month or next year, we’ll know where it’s going to be, and when. We’ll get it back, sooner or later.”
“We’ll see,” Dryden said. “But that’s not the problem I was talking about. You have a bigger problem than that. And I wasn’t kidding when I said it’s interesting.”
“Tell me,” the man said. There was an edge of sarcasm in his tone, though it sounded just a bit forced. Like a front.
“I spent some time in the military,” Dryden said. “I ended up in a pretty unorthodox little unit. A lot of what we did was off the books, not all of it strictly legal. The nature of the work required us to have unusual ways to communicate. We had duress codes, and nonduress codes. We had a whole cobbled-together language only we knew. And we all still know it.”
The man on the phone waited.
“A lot of our codes were just people’s names we made up,” Dryden said. “So if I got a text message from one of my guys saying, ‘Did you hear about Dennis Woods?’ it meant there was new intel expected soon. Or someone might send one saying, ‘I heard Aaron Newhouse was in town,’ which really meant, Drop everything and come talk to me, right now.”