Signal (19 page)

It didn’t appear to be in operation. Not today, at least, and probably not any day in recent years. Just inside the gate—a metal fence section on rollers, closed at the moment—Dryden could see a double-wide trailer that must have once served as a kind of management office. Its windows were broken out, and waist-high weeds had grown up all around it, blocking the one visible entry door.

Beyond the trailer lay the expanse of the scrapyard itself, row upon row of stacked wreckage: crushed cars, appliances, torn and twisted structural metals that might have come from demolished buildings. Dryden pictured dump trucks loaded with scrap, rolling in from torn-down shopping malls and office mid-rises all over central California. Material just valuable enough to escape the landfill, but not urgently needed by anyone right now. There was probably a few decades’ worth of it here.

The yard formed three terraces, like broad, shallow stair treads cut into the hillside, the whole thing stretching maybe half a mile down the face of the slope. Wide empty lanes ran between the stacked piles of junk, big enough to admit the heavy machinery that must have piled it all up, long ago.

There was no sign of Dale Whitcomb, but that was what Dryden had expected—and not just because they were early. If Whitcomb was here, he had probably been here for hours. He would almost certainly be watching the approach road right now, from some concealed place in the ruins.

“This is going to be tricky,” Marnie said. “He’s not expecting us. How do we convince him we’re on his side?”

“If he’s smart, it won’t be a problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“We have the machine with us. That should demonstrate well enough that we’re the good guys.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because if the bad guys had the machine, they wouldn’t bring it here and risk losing track of it again. And they wouldn’t need to, anyway. If they were to recover this thing, I don’t think they’d worry about loose ends like Whitcomb anymore. What damage could he do, if he didn’t have the machine himself? Who could he convince to help him, if all he had were stories? He’d sound like a nutcase in a tinfoil hat.”

“So if Whitcomb is smart,” Marnie said, “we don’t have to worry about him shooting us.”

“Something like that.”

“What if he’s not smart?”

“If he’s made it this far, I’m not worried.”

Dryden set the scope aside, put the Explorer back in gear, and accelerated forward.

*   *   *

Where the rolling gate met the scrapyard’s perimeter fence—an eight-foot-high chain-link affair, no barbed wire at the top—the latch mechanism was secured with what looked like a bicycle lock. Which wasn’t locked. Dryden slipped the thing out of the way and rolled the gate aside. It creaked and whined on bearings that hadn’t been oiled in a very long time.

There was no way to tell whether anyone had driven through the entrance recently. The dry, hardpan ground might as well have been concrete. Dryden walked back to the Explorer and rolled through the opening.

*   *   *

They drove a single loop of the scrapyard, just inside the fence. At each place where one terrace met another, there were shallow gravel ramps to allow passage. The rows of piled scrap were enormous, standing three stories high in places. It was like a scaled-up version of a supermarket, with the stock shelves rearing high above twenty-foot-wide aisles.

Passing the end of each open lane, they slowed and stared down its length as far as they could see. Most lanes ended in blind turns, suggesting a random maze of unseen passages beyond.

There was no sign of Whitcomb, or anyone else—until they came to the lot’s southeast corner.

Dryden stopped. He was looking to his left, out the driver’s-side window. He heard Marnie lean forward to look past him. He buzzed the window down and stared.

Twenty feet in past the mouth of an open lane was a makeshift fire pit: an old steel tractor rim that had been rolled into the middle of the channel and laid flat.

Thin tendrils of smoke snaked up from inside it.

“Let’s take a look,” Dryden said.

He killed the engine and got out, taking one of the Berettas in one hand and the plastic hardcase in the other. Leaving the machine unguarded for even a minute felt like a very bad idea.

He shut the driver’s door behind him as Marnie came around the hood. She had her Glock held ready.

There was no sign of anybody near the fire pit. Beyond it, the open lane between the stacks of scrap metal stretched away for nearly a hundred feet, to where it bent ninety degrees to the right, out of view. Between the fire pit and the distant corner, there were no openings leading away on either side.

Dryden crossed to the tire rim and crouched next to it. There was a bed of mostly cooled embers at the bottom, the carbonized remnants of what might have been plywood scraps—whatever firewood had been available amid the heaps of junk in this place.

There was an improvised grill suspended across the rim, some kind of grate that might have covered an air return duct in a building, years or decades ago. On the stony ground beside the rim, two metal cans stood open and empty. Their labels were gone, either torn off or burned off. It was clear the cans themselves had been used as makeshift pans to cook whatever had been inside them.

“Looks like he spent some time here,” Dryden said.

“We don’t know this was Whitcomb. Maybe high school kids come out here to party. Seems like the kind of place for that.”

“I don’t see any beer cans or cigarette butts,” Dryden said.

Marnie shrugged. “Litter-conscious high school kids.”

“Funny.”

Dryden turned in a slow circle, studying the rows of scrap metal on both sides. They seemed to form unbroken walls running from one end of the lane to the other. Except—

“Look at this,” Dryden said.

He went to the north-side wall, twenty feet farther in from the fire pit. There was a sheet of corrugated metal, the kind people used for pole barn roofs, leaning against the wall of scrap. The sheet stood upright, easily four feet by eight. Dryden took hold of one edge and pulled it sideways.

Behind it was a framed doorway leading into the scrap pile itself.

“What the hell?” Marnie said.

She came up beside Dryden. They stood and stared.

It was clear within seconds what they were seeing. Embedded in the base of the huge scrap pile was a standard-sized shipping container—the kind of modular unit that could serve as a train car, a semitrailer, or a massive cargo crate aboard a ship.

This one had been set down at a rough angle at the bottom of the stack of wreckage, and then mostly covered by it over time; only one corner of the container was visible, exposed like a portion of a fossil jutting from a shale outcropping.

The framed metal doorway was wide open; its door appeared to have been torched off and discarded ages ago. Where the hinges had been cut through, the exposed metal was long since rusted and pitted.

The space beyond the threshold loomed black like the depth of a cave. Dryden could smell the air inside—lots of smells, and none of them good.

“Got a flashlight?” he asked.

He glanced at Marnie and saw that she was already holding a pocket Maglite. She clicked it on and aimed its beam into the darkness. Dryden ducked and stepped through the opening, and Marnie followed.

The inside of the container was more claustrophobia-inducing than Dryden had guessed. In a normal one of these units, an adult could stand upright with headroom to spare. Not this one. It had been compressed by the tons of weight piled atop it. The metal roof sagged in bulges, reducing the ceiling height to maybe five feet. The walls bowed outward to compensate. Here and there, where the sides met the top, the welded seams had torn like foil under the stress; scrap metal crowded inward through the ripped openings.

The floor of the unit was pooled with rainwater in places, all of it rusty brown. Half submerged in the farthest of these, just visible in the light beam, lay the remains of some animal, probably a raccoon. Dryden could see a rib cage and a few tufts of fur.

Much closer, only a few feet from the doorway, someone had made a crude bed out of a bench seat from a pickup truck. There were ratty old movers’ blankets hanging off one end, as if kicked there after a night’s sleep.

Dryden put a hand on Marnie’s arm and guided the light to a point beside the bed.

Where the floor was spotted with blood.

“Shit,” Marnie whispered.

“Hand me the light.”

Marnie pressed it into Dryden’s hand; he crossed to the bench seat and knelt beside it. The blood was mostly dried on the metal floor, in little dime-sized spatters. But a small amount had filled an indentation in the surface, some kind of stamped rivet hole about as deep as a tablespoon. The blood that filled it wasn’t exactly liquid, but it wasn’t dry either. In the harsh glare of the Maglite beam, it looked tacky.

Marnie crouched next to him, her eyes fixed on the same indentation.

“I’ve seen plenty of blood,” Dryden said, “but I never had to guess how long it’d been there. This is more like your line of work.”

Marnie leaned closer, narrowing her eyes. “Maybe twelve hours. Maybe longer.” She pointed to the sides of the indentation, discolored by a kind of high-water mark of dried blood. The tacky portion was lower down in the dimple. “It’s had time to settle. Time for some of the water content to evaporate off. I never know for sure until I hear from forensics, but after a while you get pretty good at guessing what they’re going to say.”

At the edge of the light beam, beneath the makeshift bed, something caught Dryden’s eye. He reached under and drew the object out into the light: a leather wallet. He flipped it open.

Most of its contents appeared to have been taken. There were only empty slots where credit cards would have been. Only a bare plastic sleeve in place of a driver’s license. No cash, of course.

All that remained was a ticket stub from a movie theater:
AMC CUPERTINO SQUARE 16
.

“Cupertino is a few miles from San Jose,” Marnie said.

Dryden nodded. “Where Dale Whitcomb lived. Where he worked, anyway.”

He stared at the stub, then at the dried and congealing blood.

“If the Group figured out that Whitcomb was coming here,” Marnie said, “then they could have known about the meeting, too. Including the time it was supposed to take place. They could be hidden somewhere outside right now.”

“If it’s the Group that got him. If it wasn’t just some transient that lived in this container, and attacked him out in the scrapyard and dragged him back here. Granted, that doesn’t sound all that damned plausible, when you look at the odds. I mean, if someone killed him, I guess the smart money should be on the people hell-bent on killing him. Except…”

He trailed off, his attention suddenly fixing on the wallet. The empty sleeve where the driver’s license would have been. And the ticket stub.

“Interesting,” Dryden said.

“What is?”

Before Dryden could answer, the space around them darkened. On impulse, they both looked at the flashlight, but its beam still shone as bright as before.

Then, from behind them, came a man’s voice. “Weapons down. Slowly.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Dryden felt his hand tense around the Beretta. Felt Marnie’s entire body go rigid beside him, the sensation transmitting through the point of contact between their shoulders.

“Do it,” the man in the doorway said.

Marnie turned her head halfway toward Dryden, her breath coming in fast, shallow bursts.

Dryden pictured the sequence of moves it would take to open fire on the newcomer. Four things to do: spin in place from his kneeling position, raise the Beretta, center it on the target, pull the trigger.

The man in the doorway only had to do one thing—assuming he had his weapon leveled already. Or two things. Two shots in rapid succession. Dryden and Marnie, right there in the guy’s field of fire, at can’t-miss distance. Damn near punching distance.

No contest.

“We’re putting them down,” Dryden said. “Stay calm.”

Marnie’s head turned the rest of the way, her eyes locking onto his.
Are you sure?

“It’s okay,” Dryden said. He lowered his shoulder and eased the Beretta onto the metal floor, and let it go. Marnie hesitated, her breathing still fast, then did the same.

“Stand up and turn toward me,” the newcomer said.

Dryden got his feet beneath him and stood. He turned and saw a man maybe sixty years old, dark hair going gray, hard features, sharp eyes. The guy was just outside the doorframe, lit by the indirect sunlight in the channel between the scrap piles.

A second man stood behind the first, ten years younger, blond hair going thin on top.

Both men held pistols. The man in the doorway had his leveled on Dryden, but the guy’s gaze was pointed elsewhere. It was focused on the plastic case Dryden still held in his other hand.

“You know what this is, don’t you,” Dryden said.

The man nodded just visibly. “Open it.”

Dryden unlatched the case. He eased the lid open with his free hand, so neither the machine nor the tablet computer would come loose.

The man stared into the red glow shining through the machine’s slats. For a moment he seemed almost entranced by it. Then he raised his eyes and looked back and forth between Dryden and Marnie. “Who are you people?”

Dryden said, “We’re on your side—Dale. But you’re a smart guy, right? So you must already know that.”

The man seemed to consider these words, holding Dryden’s gaze. Then he exhaled softly and nodded, and lowered his gun.

“Where are Curtis and Claire?” Dale Whitcomb asked.

“Curtis is dead,” Dryden said. He watched the news hit Whitcomb like an elbow to the chest. Watched him brace for whatever was next.

“Claire’s been abducted,” Dryden said. “I believe she’s alive. I believe we can get her back.”

Whitcomb stood there in the metal doorway, trying to process it all. At last he stepped back to let the two of them exit.

“Let’s talk,” Whitcomb said.