Dryden took the weapon, checked that its safety was on, and rested it on his thigh. He glanced over and saw that Claire had a Beretta of her own already holstered in a shoulder harness.
She reached into the duffel again and took out something larger than a pistol. It was a squat black instrument the size of a lunchbox, with a minitripod folded up beneath it. Dryden recognized the thing at once; he and Claire had used them often, back in their old lives. It was a laser microphone. Its beam could measure sound vibrations on a pane of glass—you pointed it at the outside of a window, and you could hear noises from inside the building.
It was no surprise Claire owned one; she had gone into the private security business after the two of them had left the military, eight years before. She was well sought after these days, working for tech firms in Silicon Valley, securing company sites and even the homes of executives. As Dryden understood it, corporations also sometimes hired her to snoop on employees they didn’t trust, and very often their mistrust turned out to be well placed.
Claire snapped the tripod’s legs into position with one hand, getting the machine ready. At that moment the pavement gave way to gravel, and the Land Rover, doing just under 100 miles per hour, rattled and slewed violently. Stretches of chatterbumps came and went, making the whole vehicle shudder like a washing machine with a brick in it.
“Goddammit,” Claire hissed.
They came over a shallow ripple in the landscape, and Dryden saw a single point of light far ahead in the dark. A bare bulb over somebody’s porch, he guessed, maybe a mile ahead.
“There,” Claire said. Her eyes were locked on the distant light. She eased off the gas, slowing to 70 and then 50. The Land Rover’s engine scream fell away to a low growl, and Dryden understood: Claire didn’t want their approach to be heard.
Taking a hand off the wheel again, she opened a compartment on the side of the laser mic. Inside were half a dozen wireless earpieces; she gave one to Dryden, then took another for herself and fixed it to her ear. Dryden did the same.
The porch light was half a mile away now. Dryden could just make out the shape of the building it was attached to, low-slung and boxy. A mobile home. A red compact car sat in front of it.
Claire kept the Land Rover at 50 until they were three hundred yards out, then killed the headlights. Any closer and the lights’ glow might have been visible from inside the trailer, even if there were curtains over the windows.
With the beams off, the desert became ink black. It was impossible to see even the road. Claire cursed softly, took her foot off the gas, and rolled to a stop. She didn’t bother shutting off the engine; she just dumped it into park and was out the door half a second later, stepping around it and setting the microphone on the hood. Dryden got out on his own side. Already he could see the red laser dot jittering back and forth in the trailer’s distant yard, as Claire steered it.
She leaned over and sighted down the length of the instrument and brought the beam to rest on a window near the trailer’s north end. She steadied it and let go, then drew her sidearm and advanced toward the trailer at just shy of a full run. Dryden followed. Their footfalls were almost silent. They had learned long ago how to move quietly and quickly on desert ground.
Through his earpiece, Dryden began to hear noises from inside the trailer. Strange noises. A kind of softened clicking sound—it made him think of a cat’s claw tearing at upholstery, catching and slipping, again and again.
Then the noise stopped.
For the next few seconds there was no sound at all.
He and Claire were two hundred fifty yards from the trailer now. The bare porch bulb cast a weak yellow light, sixty watts if that. It left the terrain pitch black between the two of them and the trailer’s dooryard.
All at once, over the earpiece, Dryden heard something unmistakable: the digital click of an iPhone being switched on. To his left, he saw Claire react to it, picking up her speed.
Three tones came over the earpiece in rapid succession, the first one high-pitched, the next two lower and identical to each other.
Someone in the trailer had just dialed 9-1-1.
Two hundred yards to go.
The ringing of the outgoing call was just perceptible. It trilled once, and then a tinny voice answered on the other end. Dryden couldn’t make out the words, though he could guess them well enough.
Then came another voice, almost whispering, but much easier to discern. A young girl’s voice, inside the trailer. “Can you trace this?”
The 9-1-1 operator started to respond, but the girl cut her off.
“I’m on a cell phone. Can you trace where I am?”
A quick spill of words from the dispatcher. One of them sounded like danger.
This time the girl made no reply.
The dispatcher spoke again, but still there was no answer from inside the mobile home. Seconds passed.
Then the girl said, “My name is Leah Swain. I’m here with three other—”