Ahead in the direction they were walking, the light through the trees was brighter. They were maybe two hundred yards from the east edge of the woods and the SUV parked there.
“So everything after that was bullshit,” Dryden said. “The meeting in the desert had already been planned, so that still had to take place, but since it was your own people I was meeting out there, you could easily arrange for me to survive it. The fact that Claire sent me that text message offered a perfect reason, but you would have come up with something. I wonder: Were you the guy on the phone, during that meeting? Were you the scrambled voice with the accent?”
Eversman didn’t answer.
“I wondered last night why the chopper attack in the desert worked,” Dryden said. “Why the Group didn’t know about it in advance and prepare for it. Now I understand. The whole damn thing was staged anyway. Sure, the six guys of yours that you killed in the Mojave weren’t in on it, but I don’t imagine you care about them.”
“What exactly do you still need to know, then?” Eversman asked.
“Two things,” Dryden said. “First, the system. The buried unit. It’s at your estate, isn’t it.”
Eversman’s reaction was complex, a sequence of different emotions in the space of a second. Surprise, annoyance, then an attempt to maintain composure and hide both of those responses. Too late.
“You’re never getting near it,” Eversman said. “So why do you care?”
Dryden ignored the comment. “I want to know how it works. The system itself is buried in the ground, but there have to be keyboards and monitors somewhere. There have to be people sitting at them, running the searches and looking at the results. But you know what I think? I think there are as few of those people as you can possibly make do with. Because those people are liabilities. Any one of them could start getting ideas of their own, with that kind of power at their disposal. If I were you, I’d have a skeleton crew at those keyboards, and I’d keep them all in one place where I could watch them like a hawk. I’d make them live there. I’d probably keep them right in that guesthouse on the estate.”
Another little spike of surprise and annoyance. Another score.
“Nobody else knows a damn thing about it,” Dryden said. “Do they. Not your superiors in the Group, wherever they are. Not the guys who just tried to kill me in these woods. Not the people you send out to commit murder. They know the bare minimum they need to. Why would you tell them anything more? I bet your wife doesn’t even know about the system.”
Eversman rolled his neck as if to work out a kink, but the movement looked fake—like his real purpose was to take another good look at the sky through the trees. Dryden looked, too. Nothing there.
“So how many in the skeleton crew?” Dryden asked. “Five? More than that? Is it—”
“Three people. Plus me.” Eversman’s tone was calm. Even proud. “Yes, they live in the guesthouse. Yes, I keep an eye on them. Yes, they’re the only ones in the world, besides me, who know anything about the system. Do you know why I’m not afraid to tell you this?”
Dryden waited, still pushing Eversman forward through the trees.
“Because you and Marnie were exactly right,” Eversman said. “Any plan that could destroy the system would also tip it off. And it hasn’t been tipped off. So none of this is worrying me.”
They were a hundred yards from the east edge of the forest now.
“What’s the second thing you want to know?” Eversman asked.
Dryden said, “Why am I pointing a gun at you? Why do I have your hands bound?”
“You’re asking me?”
“What I mean is, how did I outplay you here? You and your people could have used the system to see how this would turn out. And you must have.”
Eversman nodded. “We must have.”
“So why did I win?”
Eversman laughed; he seemed to catch himself off guard by doing so, as if he found something about the moment genuinely funny.
Then he planted a foot, bringing himself and Dryden to a hard stop, and turned in place so that the two of them were suddenly eye to eye.
Eversman’s wrists were still tied behind him. Dryden was still holding the Beretta. There was nothing Eversman could do to change the dynamic.
Yet the guy’s expression was all confidence.
“Who says you won?” Eversman asked.
Before Dryden could reply, Eversman cocked his head, listening for something.
Five seconds later Dryden heard it.
The rattle of a helicopter coming in.
It was somewhere to the north, beyond the wooded hilltop, the terrain and the trees masking its sound. It was already very close—thirty or forty seconds away at most.
Eversman smiled. “I told you last night, I keep one stationed in San Jose. I called for it to lift off as soon as Collins and I entered the woods.”