The burned trees fell behind. A broad stretch of sandy, barren ground opened up on both sides of the road.

“What did your father do in the Army?” Dryden asked.

Danica shrugged. “He always called it logistics. He was stationed at Los Alamitos here in L.A. I remember him coming home every night like it was just another office job. We didn’t live on base or anything. It all seemed pretty normal.”

A silence played out. Dryden could feel them both thinking the same obvious thing.

“No, I don’t remember him recovering from brain trauma,” Danica said. “Or forgetting some big chunk of time that’d just happened. I think I would have noticed a thing like that, if it happened anytime after I was four or five. Before then, who knows?”

“What was your father’s name?”

“Richard Ellis.” She said it with a little rise at the end—a statement and a question at the same time. Does that ring a bell?

“Never heard of him,” Dryden said.

Danica looked up and watched the road coming at them, flanked by the arid land. After a moment she dropped her eyes to the page again.

“Persons 2855 and 2856,” she said. “So this is, what, a scrub file for two people? If one of them was my father, I don’t even have a guess who the other was.”

“Guessing is all we’re doing so far,” Dryden said. “Let’s just read it.” He pointed to the lower right corner of the visible page. “They’re numbered. It shouldn’t take you long to put it back in order. If you don’t mind reading it out loud, I’ll just keep driving, keep us moving until we have some idea what the hell we’re dealing with.”

She nodded and began working her way through the pages.

“It has to tell us something,” she said.

Dryden glanced at the sheets as she thumbed through them, every page half covered by redaction lines. He thought of other sensitive documents he’d seen, years back, their content blocked out in the same way.

Redaction tended to be thorough, for obvious reasons. He’d seen hundred-page reports cut down to text that included not a single name or location or date.

“It has to,” Danica said.

No it doesn’t, Dryden thought.

PART TWO

ECHO HOUSE

JULY 1989

CHAPTER NINE

For Sam Dryden, it started on a calm summer night.

He was standing at the screen of his bedroom window, staring out into the dark. It was two in the morning, the first hours of Tuesday, July 18th. He couldn’t sleep. There were lots of things on his mind.