“Three or four in the morning,” Dryden said. “Add ten hours and twenty-four minutes to that, and it’s a couple hours after noon—after the meetup here in Monterey. The timing works out just about right. If things went bad here, but I survived, I’d have time to get in touch with my friend and get that message on the air. And I would have already known Marnie and I had the machine on, ten and a half hours before that. I would have known I had a decent chance of actually hearing the warning.”
Eversman’s face remained blank as Dryden shoved him along, though at least an edge of disbelief seemed to show there.
“I would have been scared shitless to change the past,” Dryden said, “but I guess I was mad enough to balance out the fear. You must have really pissed me off.”
They crossed over a muddy stream like the one Dryden had used to darken his pants and face.
“The warning from my friend last night got me thinking,” Dryden said. “All those different futures. One in which you become president. Six in which you get killed before that. It never made sense. Why would the Group kill you six times? And then I saw it.”
Eversman made a sound like a dry laugh. A nasal breath. Derision, bravado. Dryden ignored it.
“You’re part of the Group,” Dryden said. “And in 2024, you would have been the sleeper running for the White House. The intelligence community would have done its background check on you, and they would have found something, wouldn’t they? I told you, they turn a candidate’s life inside out. And if what they learned about you was bad enough, what would they do about it? My guess? They’d kill you.”
They were midway across the woods now, crossing the swell of the hill, far south of the highest point in the middle of the forest.
“I bet you weren’t lying when you said you’d always wanted to be president,” Dryden said. “I bet the part about Fenway wasn’t even bullshit. And when you and your people got the system up and running, and you could read headlines from the future, I bet I know the first damn thing you searched for. Your name in 2024, to see if you were going to win the election. But you weren’t going to win. You were going to get shot to death, because someone in intel figured out what you really were.”
They crossed another mudslick. Far ahead, to the east, Dryden could make out a hint of light through the trees. The opposite side of the forest.
“When you saw those headlines,” Dryden said, “you knew what to do about it. You scoured the future to find out exactly which intel people were going to figure you out. Maybe some article from far, far ahead in time, twenty years from now, when the names had been declassified and the stories told. You found out who was going to bust you … and you had them killed—right here in the present. Some of them were probably still college kids, weren’t they?”
Eversman didn’t reply.
“Then you checked the 2024 headlines again,” Dryden said. “See if you survived this time around. But you didn’t—because in that altered future, there would just be other intel people filling those job positions. People just as capable of nailing you. So you killed them too, and checked the headlines again, rinse and repeat the whole goddamned thing until you got the future you wanted. Right?”
No response.
“Marnie and I had it backwards from the start,” Dryden said. “We thought the original future was the one where you were elected president. We thought the Group changed that future six different times, killing you in six different ways. But the Group wasn’t killing you. They were saving you. Shuffling the deck by eliminating the people who would find out the truth about you. And finally it worked. Finally there was a future in which you lived all the way to Election Day.”
Eversman looked up into the treetops, as if pretending to be interested in something there. He said, “You sound like you know everything. Why even ask me about it?”
“Because there’s more I need to know, and you’re going to tell me.”
“Why would I say anything to help you?”
“I’ll just go ahead and ask anyway,” Dryden said. “We’ll see how you respond.”
Eversman only shook his head. He glanced upward again, just briefly.
“Some parts are obvious,” Dryden said. “When Marnie and I showed up at your place in Carmel yesterday, you must have thought you won the lotto. The Group was turning over heaven and earth to find us, and we rolled right up to your gate and pushed the buzzer. When we finished telling you our story, one of the first things you did was ask us who else we’d talked to. I should have picked up on that, but I didn’t. I imagine, in that moment, you thought all the loose ends were tied off. Marnie and I probably would have been dead inside the next five minutes, but then you got a phone call. Something so urgent you had to take it. Let me guess: That was the news that Claire had gotten away. Just like that, you still had a loose end out there. But you also had a sure way to get her back. You had me. The one person Claire would try to contact and meet up with.”