“So it’s real,” Marnie said. Her tone suggested she’d been close to sure of it, but saw proof in Dryden’s expression now. “It’s really from Claire?”
“It’s really from Claire,” Dryden said. “She must have stolen someone’s phone to send this.”
Marnie nodded. “I figured she grabbed it off a table in a café or something. The number really belongs to somebody named Jodi.”
“Claire had to assume the Group might be monitoring my phone. She wanted to tell me she’d gotten away, so I wouldn’t risk my life looking for her, but she didn’t want to tip them off in the process.”
He glanced over the message again. The part about the cat was meaningless; the rest was close to literal.
I’m free.
… will be tending bar at Bond’s starting noon tomorrow.
“Bond’s is a bar we used to hang out at, in Monterey, with a few of the guys from our unit. Only that’s not the name of the place, it’s just what we always called it. There used to be a bartender there who looked like Roger Moore—I guess between being twentysomething and drunk, we thought Bond’s was a hilarious name for the joint, and it stuck. No one but Claire and a couple of our friends would know that.”
“She wants you to meet her there at noon tomorrow.”
“I’ll be there.”
He handed the phone back to her. “How did you know the text was from Claire?”
“I saw a few years’ worth of your financials this morning,” Marnie said. “Sorry. Anyway, no vet bills, no pet stores. Between that and the message itself, I gambled.”
Dryden nodded. He turned toward the house.
“There’s a lot more to tell you,” Marnie said. “Eversman wants to explain it himself.”
*
Eversman’s wife and daughter were in the living room when Dryden entered. Dryden had seen the wife earlier, though only briefly; Eversman introduced her now. Her name was Ayla. She seemed nice enough, if a bit distant. She spoke to them just for a moment, then took the daughter, Brooke, into a different room.
When they’d gone, Eversman said, “I haven’t explained any of this to Ayla yet. I can’t think of how to begin.” He nodded down the hallway toward an open door with firelight flickering from it. “Let’s talk.”
The room turned out to be a library. The fireplace was huge, flanked by comfortable-looking chairs. There was a bay window with a bench seat built into it, overlooking the grounds: the front drive and the trees and the distant helicopter on the lawn.
Nodding at the aircraft, Eversman said, “I take security seriously, and I don’t farm it out. My security staff are direct employees of mine, and I own the hardware. I keep a chopper in San Jose, and another one in Los Angeles; I have offices in both places. Tonight when Marnie found Claire’s text, she called the FBI chopper that you’d flown in, but you’d already been dropped off by then—and we didn’t have the number for your disposable phone. I sent my chopper from L.A. because it was all we could think of. I’ll be honest; I didn’t expect them to reach you in time.”
Dryden wondered how much longer his bluff would have kept him alive in the Mojave. A few more minutes, maybe.
Then he considered the whole encounter and shook his head. “That shouldn’t have worked at all. Just sending in a chopper and shooting those guys.”
“What do you mean?” Eversman said. “Why wouldn’t it have worked?”
Dryden thought of what Whitcomb had said in the scrapyard, right at the end.
“Because going into a situation like that,” Dryden said, “the Group would use the system to look at future police reports and headlines. From the moment they scheduled that meeting tonight in the desert, they would have checked for any record of how it would turn out. Any kind of aftermath the police would discover out there, once it was over with.”
Marnie nodded. “The Group would have seen articles about two shot-up SUVs being found, and a bunch of dead guys. Which would have told them the meeting was going to go bad for them. They would have seen that, way ahead of time. And they would have changed their plan.”
“They would have sent a bigger team,” Dryden said.
“Maybe they did send a bigger team,” Eversman said. “Maybe that was the bigger team that you ran into. In some other version of the event, the first time around, it could have been just one SUV.”
Dryden considered that. It was a thought, but it didn’t entirely wash. He had no better explanation himself, though—a fact that unsettled him more than he wanted to admit. He paced to the nearest bookshelf, thinking it all through, but got nowhere with it.