Dryden shook his head. “The headlines wouldn’t go back to normal. They’d disappear. All the data these people are getting from the future would stop coming through, if we were about to attack them and destroy the system.”
A flicker of understanding crossed Eversman’s face. He said, “When they use the system to grab information from ten years in the future…”
“It only works because their equipment exists for the whole ten years. Curtis called it a daisy chain. Like a video camera filming its own feed on a TV screen. That chain has to be unbroken the whole time. That’s why they buried the equipment in the ground. If they want to see a decade into the future, the machinery has to keep running that whole time.”
Marnie stood and faced Eversman. “They’re going to see us coming. No matter what.”
“You’re certain?”
Marnie nodded. “Think about it. They suddenly find there’s this weird cutoff—the system can grab information right up to some certain time, say seven o’clock tomorrow night, but it can’t seem to get anything from beyond that time. They’ll know what it means. They’ll know the system gets destroyed at seven o’clock tomorrow night. They would know we’re coming. Jesus, they’d even know when.”
Eversman frowned. “Well, what if we…” He trailed off, his expression searching.
“There’s nothing to think of,” Dryden said. “There just isn’t. By definition, any plan that beats them … also warns them.”
Silence fell. A whole minute of it. Hayden Eversman went to his fireplace and sat down in front of it. “What the hell are we supposed to do?” he said.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The three of them sat up another half hour and hardly spoke.
At last, burned out, they left the room.
Dryden wondered if Eversman would direct them to the guesthouse, but instead he led them to a pair of spare bedrooms in the east wing of the main house. Each bedroom had its own full bathroom. Dryden borrowed a set of clothes from Eversman—khakis and a flannel shirt—then shaved and showered and dressed again. It was the first time he’d felt clean since the night before, walking the rooms of the gutted cottage in El Sedero.
He stood at the window in his room for a long time, staring out on the grounds of the estate. At midnight most of the landscape lighting went out, no doubt on a timer. Just a few lights out at the perimeter wall stayed on, leaving a relaxing darkness under the big trees that dotted the grounds.
Dryden stared at the canopy of the woods beyond the wall. This place wasn’t all that far from where he would meet up with Claire tomorrow—maybe twenty minutes’ drive. He took in the night and thought of her, alone somewhere right now—but free. She was as resourceful as any soldier Dryden had ever served with, and more so than most. She was also careful as hell. Right now she was probably asleep in a wheat field somewhere, as random and secluded a spot as she could find, and tomorrow at noon, hell or high water, she would be at a dive bar in Monterey called Myrtle’s.
There was a soft knock at the door.
He crossed to it and opened it. Marnie stood in the hall, showered and wearing what had to be one of Ayla’s spare outfits: a blue cotton blouse and white slacks.
“Feel like taking a walk?” she asked.
*
They went out the front door and wandered into the darkened grounds. The air was full of the smell of cedars and cut grass.
“You never finished your story,” Dryden said. “What was simple enough that a ten-year-old would think to write it on a mirror? What did COI mean?”
It took her a long time to answer. They passed beneath a white pine, the night wind rustling its boughs.
“It wasn’t supposed to be COI,” Marnie said. “It was supposed to be COP. The bathroom door got kicked in before she could finish the last letter.”
Dryden thought of what Marnie had said in the car, all those hours before. The girl’s mom dating her boss, the two of them taking the kid out to dinner a week before the abductions. Getting in some kind of altercation at the restaurant.
“The cop who showed up to settle the fight?” Dryden asked.
Marnie nodded. “Once I saw what the letters meant, he was the obvious first guess. I got on the phone and started shouting, and there were black-and-whites at his place about five minutes later. He actually came out the door shooting. The responders took him down and went in, and found the mom and daughter in the basement. The mom was long gone—dead for hours. But the girl was still—”
She cut herself off. By her tone of voice, Dryden knew the next word in the sentence wasn’t alive.
“She was warm,” Marnie said. “The ME said she’d probably died about twenty minutes before those first units rolled up.”
She was quiet again for a while. In the faint light, Dryden saw her stuff her hands into her pockets.
“Six hours,” she said. “Six hours it took me to understand what she meant. What she was counting on me to understand. If it would have taken me five…”