“Tell you when I see you,” Claire said. “Don’t bring your phone. Thanks, Sam.”
The call ended. Dryden stood there a moment longer, replaying it in his head. The instruction about the phone implied nothing good. A cell phone had built-in GPS and was constantly updating the network with its current location. Whatever Claire Dunham had going on near Barstow, she didn’t seem to want an official record of their presence there.
Claire was not the sort of person who sought out trouble for no reason. Far from it: She was one of the few people on earth Dryden fully trusted.
You have to go right now.
Dryden stepped in off the balcony, closed the sliding door behind him, and was at the wheel of his Explorer twenty seconds later.
CHAPTER THREE
Arrowhead was exactly what Claire had described. An off-ramp to a crumbling two-lane that ran west to east, out of the desert and back into it. Pitch-black emptiness in both directions. Northeast, where the freeway led, the near edge of Barstow was ten miles out.
Close to the off-ramp stood a shabby diner and a Sunoco station. Only the latter was open for business, casting a milky pool of light over the scrubland around it.
Dryden took the exit at 1:58 A.M. He rolled into the darkened lot of the diner and parked. Except for the attendant inside the station, there was no sign of life anywhere.
Dryden watched the road and the freeway, and waited.
Claire Dunham.
What could she be caught up in?
Dryden had met her ten years before, back in the life he mostly tried to forget these days. Claire had been a technician, an expert with the electronic hardware Dryden and his people had used all over the world, and in many cases she’d been right there in harm’s way with him and the others.
Lots of those who had known her—men, especially—had found her nearly impossible to read. They assumed she was cold, indifferent to others. Dryden had assumed it, too, early on, but he’d understood later that he was wrong about that. The truth was that Claire Dunham’s unreadability was a two-way street. She could make no sense of people, a fact she must have come to terms with long ago, probably way back in childhood, and at some point she’d stopped trying. Probably anyone would have, in her shoes. But she wasn’t cold. Once a stray dog had wandered into the visiting officers’ quarters at Bagram Airfield, and Claire had taken to it. The thing had looked like a burlap sack full of wrenches, its fur matted and its ribs showing. Dryden had expected it to die, despite Claire’s efforts—not just feeding it, but tracking down meds for three or four different afflictions the thing was riddled with—but he’d been wrong about that, too: The dog had lived another eight years, mostly lying around by the pool at Claire’s place up in San Jose, soaking up the sun.
A mile or more west of the freeway interchange, headlights crested a rise, coming in fast.
Dryden killed his engine and got out. He could hear the hiss of tires and the whine of a powerful vehicle running in high gear. A moment later it passed into the halo of light from the Sunoco, and Dryden recognized the outline of Claire Dunham’s Land Rover. It braked hard and came to a stop in the road close by. Claire leaned over and shoved the passenger door open and gestured fast for Dryden to get in.
Dryden had hardly done so when Claire gunned it again; within seconds they were beyond the overpass and into the darkness, following the two-lane out into the empty desert east of I-15. Claire pushed the engine to 95 miles per hour.
She didn’t look good. In the light from the instrument panel, her face gleamed with sweat, though the A/C was blasting. Her eyes—large and green, normally expressing nothing but calm—kept going to the digital clock on the console, which now showed 2:01.
Dryden could think of only a handful of times he’d ever seen her look rattled before, and those had always been awkward social situations. To see her off-balance like this bordered on unthinkable.
“What’s happening?” Dryden asked.
Claire ran a hand over her forehead, wiped it on her shirt, and gripped the wheel again.
“I couldn’t explain it right now. You’ll know pretty soon.” Her eyes went to the clock once more. “Fuck.”
“Why don’t you give it a try?”
Instead of answering, Claire reached into the backseat and hauled a black duffel bag forward into her lap. It was already open. She reached in and withdrew a Beretta 9mm and held it out to Dryden.
“Loaded, one in the chamber,” she said.