Only to Die Again Read online

  Then something had changed – not quite two years ago, toward the end of 2013. There was no indication of what had triggered it, but all at once Sam Dryden seemed to begin living his life again. There were airline tickets – flights to places like Honolulu and Vail and Grand Cayman. There were weeklong hotel stays at those places, and boat rentals, and payments for all the things people did on vacations just for the hell of it. The plane tickets were always for two, and the other ticket was always for a woman: someone named Riley Walker for the first seven or eight months, then a few others in succession. Dating. Living. Taking in the world. Something or someone had come along and jolted Sam Dryden out of his exile.

  He was working again, too. Buying and fixing and then selling houses, from the look of his financials. Pretty damn nice houses, if the prices and locations were any sign.

  And apparently, maybe just for kicks, he had now taken up the hobby of preventing horrifying tragedies no human could have predicted.

  ‘How the hell did you know to be there?’ Marnie whispered.

  She watched a light business jet take off out of Santa Monica Municipal Airport, a few miles to the south and west. Watched it climb and bank out over the Pacific, a white speck and then nothing.

  ‘You wanted to see me?’

  Marnie turned. Don Sumner stood in the doorway of his office, where he’d been on the phone for the past three minutes.

  Marnie nodded and crossed to the door. Sumner stepped back and let her through.

  Sumner was fifty and going gray at the temples. One wall of his office was lined with deep shelves, on which were arrayed detailed models of mid-twentieth-century automobiles. There was a ’64 Mustang, a ’51 Bel Air, a ’42 Packard Super Eight. Even some kind of Studebaker from the ’30s. Sumner had built the models from kits, then airbrushed them and done all kinds of intricate detail work; some of the cars were actually made to look weathered and worn. Marnie had studied the collection up close before, and had concluded that Sumner could have been a special effects guy for one of the movie studios, back before CGI had become the norm.

  ‘Have a seat,’ he said, dropping into his own chair. ‘What do you need?’

  ‘Help on this Mojave thing.’

  There was no need to specify which Mojave thing she was talking about. The story was already in heavy circulation locally, and was beginning to get traction on CNN and Fox. It had all the right ingredients: a miracle rescue, a very nasty, very dead bad guy, and two mysterious saviors who had appeared out of thin air and vanished back into it. The networks would feed on it for days – maybe longer if the two rescuers remained unknown.

  ‘What do you have?’ Sumner asked. He nodded at the printout in Marnie’s hand: Dryden’s info.

  She unfolded the thin stack of pages and slid them across the desk. ‘This is a match from a set of prints I found at the scene. When I ran the search, I didn’t tell anyone where the prints came from. As of now, this guy has no official connection to the case. Outside of you and me, there’s nobody who can leak his name. I’d like to keep it that way until I know more.’

  Marnie ran through the details of how she’d found the prints while Sumner’s eyes tracked down over the material, his eyebrows edging up once or twice.

  ‘Prints on a washing machine,’ he said. ‘Maybe he owned the thing. Maybe it broke down and he decided to dump it out in the desert.’

  ‘Two hours’ drive from his address?’

  ‘Maybe he was that pissed off at it. Wanted to make sure it didn’t find its way home like in that movie The Incredible Journey.’

  ‘I think it was two dogs and a cat in the movie. Anyway, the scuff marks I found with the prints were new. Dryden was there last night.’

  Sumner exhaled and slid the printout back across his desk. ‘So what is he? A vigilante?’

  ‘Even if he is,’ Marnie said, ‘how did he know enough to show up at that exact moment? Those girls snagged a cell phone off the coffee table and called 9-1-1. That was the trigger for the whole thing. How could Dryden or anyone else have known that would happen?’

  ‘Got a theory?’

  Marnie pinched the bridge of her nose. Rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. ‘Not even a stab at one. After hours of banging my head against it.’

  ‘Want to tell me why you’re keeping his name off the books?’

  Marnie opened her eyes. ‘Because there’s an easy leap people will make. And I think it’s bullshit. I think it doesn’t fit the facts of his background, but people will consider it anyway.’

  ‘The idea that Dryden might have known the guy?’ Sumner asked.

  Marnie nodded.

  ‘Might have been old pals with the guy who kept four little girls in a cage,’ Sumner said. ‘Knew all about it, and finally got around to doing something.’

  ‘You know how things get covered. What passes for journalism now. Send us your tweets, America, tell us what you think happened.’

  ‘He did manage to show up there,’ Sumner said. ‘There’s something behind that.’

  ‘Something, yeah. But none of the girls had ever seen this guy before – or the woman. Who I’ve still got nothing on. I want to know more about this before I open the doors and let the circus in.’

  ‘What are you asking me?’

  ‘I want to set up surveillance on Dryden. Without anyone knowing.’

  ‘By anyone, you mean the judge that would have to sign the warrant.’

  ‘Yes,’ Marnie said. ‘Judges have staffers and assistants. Staffers and assistants have cell phones. Things get out.’

  Sumner leaned back in his chair. Swiveled it ten degrees clockwise and then back. He looked very tired.

  ‘All I need from you are a few pieces of information,’ Marnie said. ‘A couple of access strings you can look up from right here. I’ll do the surveillance myself, no assets, no support. If I get busted, there’s no proof you set it up.’

  Sumner rocked his chair forward again and put his elbows on his desk.

  He said, ‘This kind of intrusion into someone’s life –’

  ‘I’m doing it to prevent an intrusion into his life. Unless it turns out he deserves one.’

  Sumner stared into the woodgrain of his desk. In the silence, Marnie heard the wall clock ticking. Five seconds. Ten.

  ‘Christ,’ Sumner whispered. Then: ‘What kind of surveillance?’

  ‘Phone and vehicle, for now. He drives a 2013 Explorer, base model judging by the price, except it has satellite navigation. Which means we can ping it and track him.’

  Sumner thought about it for another long moment. Then he nodded and swiveled to face his computer.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Still parked in the strip-mall lot, Dryden turned his ignition key partway and cracked open the Explorer’s windows. The smells of sea salt and fast food and hot blacktop tar streamed through.

  Curtis’s five binders were mostly indecipherable. Much of the content inside them was simply computer code, hundreds of pages of it, printed out and arranged in some kind of logical order. Dryden had a passing knowledge of programming, enough to recognize which language this code was written in, but could make no real sense of it. Even the programmers’ comments – plain English lines peppered throughout the code as useful labels and reminders – were little help.

  This part waits for the sort algorithm to return any value of 5 or higher.

  This boolean returns true if both CroA1 and CroA2 are true.

  Hundreds of those, scattered like confetti throughout the pages. They must have made sense to the people who’d written this stuff. Maybe they’d made sense to Curtis, too, after hours of paging through the material, jotting down the names of variables and strings and classes, drawing connections Dryden couldn’t see on any given page.

  He flipped through the first four binders in a couple of minutes and set them aside.

  The fifth didn’t contain computer code. It was full of printed e-mails instead, but they weren’t much easier to make se
nse of.

  All their language is careful, Curtis had said.

  Every e-mail address in the message headings was a meaningless string of numbers and letters. Maybe the accounts had been created and discarded on a daily basis, out of paranoid caution. The digital equivalent of throwaway cell phones.

  The messages themselves were a little better; they were at least made of words and sentences. But the language was carefully couched and allusive, an extra layer of security by the people who’d written and sent these e-mails.

  Still, thumbing through the first of maybe two hundred pages in that binder, Dryden got the impression that there was real information to be gleaned from it. It would require reading the entire thing repeatedly, and scrutinizing key parts more carefully still, but there were probably loose ends to pick at, somewhere in the tangle.

  He closed it for the moment, set it with the other four, and picked up the thin, stapled stack of pages. Curtis’s letter to Claire.

  It was neatly typed, composed on whatever computer Curtis had used when he’d printed the stuff in the binders. Dryden pictured the kid sitting with a laptop in a cheap motel room, bags from an office store all over the bed. The binders, a few reams of paper, maybe an eighty-dollar inkjet plugged in on the nightstand.

  The letter began:

  Claire,

  I hope I’m right about how to get this letter to you. I hope you’re alive to receive it.

  I know Dale called you, right before everything went to hell. I know he told you some of this, but I don’t know how much of it he got through. So I’ll start at zero. Sorry in advance if the tone is a little bit Romper Room. Clarity is key. Here goes.

  First, I know almost nothing about the people who took out Bayliss Labs. They might be a rival company. They might just be a circle of people with money and connections. Even on their secure server, they were very careful to not make themselves identifiable. In the messages, they refer to themselves as the Group – capitalized like that.

  Maybe they were monitoring Bayliss before we even developed the machine, or maybe someone on the inside talked to them. Whatever happened, it’s clear the Group was involved from damn near day one, after we got the first machine working. They had their own version of it up and running within probably days, and they got very busy figuring out how to do big things with this technology, things we never even brainstormed at Bayliss.

  You already know these machines hear radio signals from 10 hours and 24 minutes in the future. You also know there’s no way to tune the things, and they’re limited to frequency-modulated (FM) signals between 89.1 MHz and 106.5 MHz, not quite the full range used for FM radio broadcasting in the United States.

  A person might wonder whether these things are really all that dangerous in the wrong hands. How much damage could someone really do? They could cheat at the Lotto, I guess. I suppose they could even mess with Wall Street … but only if they happened to hear something on the radio about a certain stock going up or down.

  That’s the trick – there’s a limit to what you could ever learn using these things. You’re stuck with whatever happens to be on the radio ten and a half hours from now, and even worse, you’re limited to what little scraps of those broadcasts the machine picks up.

  Pretty serious hindrances, right? But the Group found a way around them.

  How to explain this? Let’s say you want to make money betting on a football game. Let’s make it easy: It’s the Super Bowl. I think a person could use one of these machines as normal for that. All you’d have to do is listen to the machine for three or four hours before the game. You’d be hearing radio traffic from a few hours after the game was over – you’re definitely going to catch a few seconds of some DJ talking about how it turned out.

  Now let’s make it harder. What if you want to bet on a college lacrosse game? Duke against Baylor. Not even a championship game or anything – just some regular matchup in the season. Think you’re going to catch that score on the radio?

  So what can you do?

  Well, what if you’ve got a buddy who’s a DJ at a local radio station? You say to him, do me a favor – 10 hours and 24 minutes from now, go online and look up the score for the Duke-Baylor lacrosse game, and just as a joke, keep saying the score on the air, over and over again. Do it after every song and commercial break.

  Better yet, you bribe every DJ, at every nearby radio station, to do the same thing.

  Now you’re going to hear that score. Or the closing price of IBM stock, if that’s what you asked them to look up and keep repeating on the radio. Or literally any piece of information a person could look up, 10 hours and 24 minutes in the future. Anything.

  That would really work, but it’s not exactly subtle.

  There’s a subtle way to do the same thing, though. That’s the system the Group has created. It’s a combination of powerful hardware and software that basically does what those DJs would do, but it does it without anybody noticing.

  First, it’s a pretty simple search program. It can use Google or any number of Web sites where you can look things up (stock exchange sites, news sites, anything). The way the program works, you tell it to run a search, and it simply waits 10 hours and 24 minutes before it executes it.

  Then what does it do? It turns the search result into a simple string of text, then translates it into a kind of Morse code the Group invented. The system then hacks into the computers that oversee radio broadcasts, at multiple stations, and hides this coded information within the audio that they’re putting out on the airwaves. The code plays at a pitch range human ears can’t pick up. (In fact, most people’s speakers probably don’t even render the sound.) Even if some technician did hear it, it would sound like harmless interference, if anything at all.

  The Group’s system can hear it, though, and decode it.

  In this way, they have removed all the randomness and limitation from using these machines. They don’t just hear whatever happens to be on the radio ten and a half hours from now. They hear specific answers to nearly any question they can think of … even if all they’re picking up is a rock song or a used car commercial. The coded information is hidden in the broadcast no matter what.

  Dryden raised his eyes from the letter and stared away over the parking lot, through the heat ripples coming up off the rows of cars.

  Curtis’s description of the system seemed to break open in front of him, like an egg sac full of a thousand little spiders. Implications scurrying away to all corners, too many to follow.

  He kept reading:

  In the right hands, this system would be an amazing and good thing. Well-meaning authorities would set it up to tell them about a whole range of potential bad events. There could be a special database in which mass shootings, plane crashes, and a hundred other types of tragedies were always reported, and those in charge would then see those things coming far ahead of time. The authorities would become perfect goalies when it came to the really bad stuff.

  It goes without saying that the Group doesn’t seem to be interested in that.

  What they’re using the technology for at this moment (among other things) is to hunt down the loose ends that got away from them when they made their move against Bayliss Labs. That would be you and me, Claire. (And Dale Whitcomb, but I’ll come to that in a minute.)

  I hope to hell you already know most of the above. I hope Dale was able to explain that much to you, when he called you and told you to run. I hope he made it clear how dangerous your situation is. This system the Group is using, it can do a lot more than run Google searches or look up stock quotes. For example, it’s fucking child’s play to access the servers on which police departments record their activity. Any routine traffic stop automatically logs the target vehicle’s plate number, the driver’s ID, the time of the stop, and even the GPS coordinates of the cruiser.

  The Group will hunt us using that information. You need to appreciate how dangerous that is. If you were pulled over, even just for speeding, and e
ven if you got off with a warning … there would be a police database record of that traffic stop, containing your name and the exact time and place where it happened.

  This system the Group created … it could be programmed to constantly search police servers for a record like that. If it found one, it would embed that info in the airwaves, and the Group would learn about it 10 hours and 24 minutes earlier.

  Do you understand? If you get pulled over, the Group will know about it hours and hours before it even happens.

  Which gives them all the time in the world to position men to attack you at that exact location and time.

  The dots Dryden had felt trying to connect earlier now fused together as if arc-welded.

  Claire in the Mojave, terrified at the sight of the approaching cop.

  Staring in all directions, searching inexplicably for some threat in the darkness around them.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Dryden whispered.

  He tried to get his mind around it: what it meant to be up against an enemy who knew your mistakes before you even made them.

  Then he kept reading the letter, and saw that the problem was a lot bigger than that.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I don’t believe you know the rest of this, Claire. I’m not sure Dale understood it well himself at the time he called you. It was more important to warn you quickly and tell you the immediate stuff.

  The rest is scarier, though. Maybe a lot scarier, and on the scale of big things. I think we have real trouble here.

  The system I’ve described is powerful, obviously. When you think about it, it’s basically sending information to itself, back in time. Ten and a half hours back.

  But the information it sends back doesn’t have to just come from the Internet or police records. The information the system sends back can come from any source. Including the system itself.

  The system can listen to its own information coming back from ten and a half hours ahead in time … then turn around and send that information to itself ten and a half hours in the past. Like a daisy chain. And there’s no real limit to how far the chain can stretch.