Free Signal by Patrick Lee

The needle edged past 110 and hovered there, the engine screaming like it might blow something if he pushed it any harder.
    The man in the passenger seat shuddered. Dryden glanced at him again, considering the layout of the situation.
    He had a decent chance of catching the Jeep. The desert was big and mostly flat, and still mostly dark—he would see the Jeep’s taillights if he got within even a couple of miles.
    But if he didn’t …
    Dryden kept one hand on the wheel and kept the other poised to backhand the passenger if he woke. If he didn’t catch the Jeep, he would need the man alive for questioning.
    He kept the speedometer near 110 and divided his attention between the passenger and the road blurring by.
    *   *   *
    He passed the shot-up police cruiser ninety seconds later. The eastern sky was just bright enough now to cast a bit of light over the desert. The cruiser was still steaming, hunkered in the dark like a smashed insect.
    He watched the road to the south, though he didn’t expect to see the Jeep’s taillights for another couple of minutes at best.
    The needle wavered up and down near 110. The yellow lines on the highway looked unnatural, sliding by at this speed. Like a bad special effect in a movie.
    Thirty seconds past the cruiser.
    Sixty.
    Nothing ahead but darkness.
    Ninety seconds.
    Then he topped a rise and saw a light. Not red. Pale yellow, a single pinpoint in the black landscape.
    Half a mile later he knew what it was. He felt his chest tighten. He let off the accelerator.
    The keening whine of the Explorer’s engine cycled down—80 miles per hour, 60, 40.
    He rolled to a stop twenty feet shy of the white light. It hung high above the roadbed on a rusty arm sticking out from a wooden post. In its glow, a second paved road bisected 395, running east and west into the desert.
    The men in the Jeep Wrangler would have had every reason to get off 395 as soon as possible. There were sure to be police coming up the highway any time now, closing in on the stricken cruiser with the unresponsive driver.
    The Jeep could have gone east or west from here.
    West seemed more likely. It would lead toward the coast, and eventually Silicon Valley, several hours north, if that was where they were going.
    But the men in the Jeep weren’t necessarily going straight back to wherever they’d been sent out from. They were taking Claire to the interrogation site, wherever that was.
    Dryden put the Explorer in park and shoved open his door. He reached across the unconscious passenger and took hold of the man’s rifle, a Remington 700 with a scope the size of a small coffee can.
    A night-vision scope.
    Dryden got out and clambered onto the Explorer’s hood, then onto its roof. He stood upright and first scanned the three directions with his own eyes. East. South. West. Nothing out there. Just black country under a brightening sky.
    He found the power switch for the scope and turned it on. It was a Zeiss, a little newer than the hardware he’d used back in the day, but familiar enough in its operation.
    He found the selector switch for its thermal-vision setting, and the optical magnification ring. He twisted the ring to its most powerful zoom, 12x, then shouldered the rifle and put his eye to the lens.
    He glassed the southern route first—395 running down toward Barstow.
    The landscape looked ghostly in the blue-white false-color image. Even now, after hours of night air, the road held a different temperature than the surrounding land. Maybe an effect of humidity or soil acidity. Whatever the case, Dryden could see the road easily, snaking away for miles.
    There was no vehicle to be seen on it.
    He turned in place and studied the western stretch of the crossroad.
    Nothing there.
    And nothing to the east.
    He’d just lowered the rifle when he felt the Explorer rock lightly on its shocks—movement in the cab, beneath his feet.
    “Goddammit,” he hissed.
    He slung the weapon on his shoulder, vaulted down