Eversman opened the glove box and took out a silenced .45. He turned and mentally rehearsed how things would play out, the moment Dryden got back into the vehicle with Claire Dunham.
It would be fast and brutal, no fucking around. It would also be invisible to anyone outside; the windows in back were heavily tinted. And when the three vehicles rendezvoused, Marnie Calvert would be dealt with in the same manner.
Eversman was more than confident it would work: He knew. He had already used the system to verify it. He had already seen the headlines to come.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
11:53.
Dryden was still sitting at the metal table in front of the ice cream shop. Someone had left a Best Buy flyer on a nearby chair, and he was leafing through it, raising his eyes to the distant bar often enough to keep tabs on everyone approaching it.
Which wasn’t many people. It was clearly not a popular lunch spot, at least on Sunday. Probably not on any day.
In the past ten minutes he’d seen only six people enter the bar. A young couple. A college-aged girl. Three men.
11:54.
He set down the flyer and simply stared at the place.
*
Claire gave the bar one last scan with the binoculars, then set them aside and started the Tracker. She considered driving right up to the building, parking in the narrow lot along the waterfront, but discarded the idea. If things went bad, there would be no time to get back in the car, start it, and drive off. There might be time to simply run, in which case it would be better to have the car hidden somewhere in the blocks close to the bar. She might be able to lose pursuers in a foot chase, then make her way to the car unseen.
She still had the Tracker in park. She stared at the distant structure, thinking.
The way she went into the place might matter. It would be impossible to go in undetected, but there were ways to make it less obvious who she was. Anything that could make potential observers less certain was worth doing.
She exhaled softly and shut her eyes. The whole logistical calculation felt wishful. Was wishful. If the Group was somehow watching, it would be game over a few minutes from now.
Nothing to do but try.
She put the vehicle in gear and pulled out of her space.
*
11:56.
Eversman was holding the binoculars Dryden had used earlier. He was leaning forward, bracing his elbows on the dash, training the binocs alternately on Dryden—still sitting at the ice cream shop—and the bar.
Eversman found his thoughts already wanting to move on, past all this. Like the attention of a child nearly finished with his schoolwork, thinking ahead to free time. With the cat-and-mouse game wrapped up, he would use the system for its real purpose again. Even now, his subordinates were back at it, tucked away in their little haven, tapping at the keys. Scouting the world to come. Finding the pivot points on which decades and centuries could be tipped. The future was filled with those, just like the past was. How many times had the track of humanity been shifted by some one-off event, some unheard-of person? Like Gavrilo Princip. Like Vasili Arkhipov. The future was no different. History was a surprisingly workable medium, before it was written down.
He thought of his superiors, too. The higher ranks of the Group, back in the old countries. Their ideas for what the world should be—what it should have been for seventy-plus years now. A world set to strict but beautiful standards. Clean architecture and infrastructure. No muddy backwaters full of shanty towns and hovels. No slums laced with graffiti and broken windows. Clean people, too. Better people. Better stock. He thought of the movie star, decades back, sitting at the fireplace in that Italian villa, rubbing the haunches of a Rottweiler at his feet. We bred filthy wolves into these things. Why in God’s name wouldn’t we refine ourselves?
Eversman agreed with most of those sentiments still—the big picture, if not every brushstroke. None of it would happen overnight, of course, even with all the advantages the system offered. It would be the work of decades. It already had been. His whole life had been a preparation, in the hope that this technology would end up in his hands. Positioning himself in the best possible way to make use of it, if it ever arrived—every decision had been made toward that end.
Renewable energy had been just one part of all that, a long political bet: that by the middle of the 2020s, voters’ hearts and minds would favor the greenest candidates. He hadn’t needed a machine to tell him that; the curving trendlines had been obvious even by the late ’90s, and were only more so now. It was a smart way to place himself, no more or less.