Deep Sky

Chapter Eighteen

Paige and Bethany stared at the two lines Travis had typed on the laptop. For a long time they neither spoke nor blinked.

The Tap sat nearby on the table, cooling. Travis stepped to the kitchen counter, grabbed a napkin and wiped a thin trail of blood from his temple.

Already he could feel the strange effect of the burned memory: while the past two days in Baltimore were as fresh in his mind as if he’d just experienced them—as he had—they were also stitched into his distant past, foggy as a recollection of a school field trip he might have taken way back then, that spring when he was in fifth grade. The Baltimore memory had simply replaced whatever real memory he might’ve had of those two days, like an exotic film clip recorded over a section of home video. He let the sensation fade and tossed the bloody napkin into the trash. As he did, his eyes went to the microwave clock.

8:50 A.M.

Ten hours and fifty-five minutes to the end of the road.

He heard a group of people go by in the corridor outside the residence, talking. They sounded animated about something.

“This second line,” Paige said. “You’re certain the first letter was capitalized?”

Travis nodded, seeing where she was going. He’d gone there himself while still holding the notepad under the light post, exhausting every possible way the sentence could mean less than it appeared to. If the first letter were lowercase, then the unseen earlier portion of the sentence might change the meaning. Might contain a negative that reversed it entirely.

But all such possibilities could be discarded.

“The S filled the line, top to bottom,” Travis said. “Every other letter without an ascender was exactly half that height. Nora’s handwriting was perfect.”

Travis saw Bethany’s shoulders twitch as a shudder climbed her neck. She read the line again and exhaled softly. “Already among us. That makes it sound like they blended in.”

Paige seemed to react to that idea. She looked up at Travis. “Remember what you asked in Ouray? Who has the motive to undo what my father did?”

Travis’s mind called up images of full-floor penthouses eighty stories above Manhattan or Hong Kong, from which a few encrypted phone calls could launch private armies or sway governments—could direct arterial flows of cash to influential interests that didn’t care where the money came from, or why. The notion that such places existed was unnerving enough, even if their occupants were human.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Paige said. “If some of them were already here before the Breach opened, why bother sending instructions through it to make a pawn of one of us? Why would they need a pawn at all? They’re millions of years more advanced than we are. Maybe billions. Anything they wanted to do here, they could’ve done it themselves like you or I would get a glass of water. They wouldn’t need to sneak around and pull strings from behind the scenes.” A silence. “So why did they?”

Travis found only about half his attention going to the question. The other half kept going back to what Ruben Ward had said in the alley—the disconnected talk about the filter, whatever it was. Something that wasn’t supposed to become an issue for years and years—from the vantage point of 1978. Travis had said nothing of the filter since waking from the memory. Though it obviously tied into what was happening now—might simply be what was happening now—it just as obviously had a connection to Travis’s own future, and whatever was waiting for him there. It.

Which he’d never spoken about in front of Bethany, as much as he trusted her. He’d never told anyone but Paige.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Paige said again.

Travis could only shake his head. He stared at the laptop screen, the two short lines surrounded by vacant space. He thought of the blade-thin margin by which he’d lost the notebook—lost all the answers and come back with only these impossible questions.

“Does the first line give us anything actionable?” Paige said. “Is there more to it than we’re seeing?”

She leaned close and studied it.

“ ‘A passageway beneath the third notch,’ ” she said. “ ‘Look for . . .’ ”

For a long time no one spoke. Then Bethany shrugged. “It tells us Ruben Ward went somewhere that had notches and a passageway. I’m sure we’d hit some kind of jackpot if we could find the passageway now. But we can’t. Not with only this to go on.”

Paige straightened and paced away from the table, hands on her head.

More footsteps sounded in the hallway. More lively—if not quite happy—speech. Like something was going on. The moment triggered a memory for Travis—one that was minutes old for Paige and Bethany but more than two days old for him.

“Who was on the phone?” he said. “You got a call right before I went under.”

Paige looked at him. “One of President Holt’s aides. Air Force One is landing here within the next fifteen minutes.”

Chapter Nineteen

“Ostensibly, he’s only coming to tour the place,” Paige said. “Every new president does that, early on.”

“You believe him?” Travis said.

“Not for a second. You?”

Travis shook his head. He looked at the microwave clock again. 8:52.

“What are you thinking?” Paige said.

“It’s three hours since the trap in Ouray failed,” Travis said. “Which is about how long it takes a 747 to fly here from D.C. The timing just about works out—Holt learns it all went to hell down there, and he hops in his plane to pay us a visit. Like some kind of Plan B.”

Paige considered it. “It’s plausible. But whatever the case, he’s not coming in here with any kind of armed presence. Not even Secret Service; that’s been policy here forever. If he doesn’t accept that, we won’t even open the elevator.”

“Then Plan B is something more subtle than Plan A was,” Travis said. “Some spoken threat, thinly veiled, or maybe not veiled at all. Or else just a lie to throw us off track entirely. Remember, Holt doesn’t know we suspect his involvement.”

“And we want to keep it that way,” Paige said. “So we’ll give him the tour and not share anything we’ve learned, and assume every word he says is bullshit.”

Travis indicated the Tap, still sitting on the table.

“There’s one more place where I can intercept Ruben Ward,” he said. “That motel on Sunset Boulevard, August 12.”

“Probably fifteen minutes before he blows his brains out,” Paige said. “I doubt he’ll be in a talkative mood. And by then the notebook’s already gone.”

Travis recalled Ward’s fear in the alley behind the townhouses. He tried to imagine getting information out of him, in the last hour of his life. As a ten-year-old. He considered it for five seconds and dropped it.

“All right, we concentrate on the cheat sheet,” he said. “It’s everything we need to know, on a single piece of paper. We work the information we have, starting with your father’s meeting in 1987, right before he closed down Scalar. We find out who he met with—who he gave copies of that report to—and where they lived, and then I’ll use the Tap to drop into their lives again and again, in the months right after that. That part won’t be hard; I was nineteen years old by then. I’ll do whatever it takes to get that document. Break into houses—anything.”

“If we get Holt in and out of here fast enough,” Paige said, “say forty-five minutes, then we’ll have ten hours left to work with. In the first hour alone you could use the Tap a dozen times, if need be.” She winced at the thought of his actually making that many trips with it, but the power of the idea shone clearly in her eyes. “If we find out what’s actually going on, what’s happening right now, today, we’ll still have hours left to go on offense against it.”

“No kid gloves,” Travis said. “If it’s a matter of just finding certain people and killing them, we do it. We use any Breach technology necessary. We do it. Simple as that.”

Paige was nodding. So was Bethany. Both looked a little unnerved, but neither looked uncertain.

“So who did my father meet with?” Paige said. “Carrie called them a mixed bag of powerful people. Politics, intel, finance. How do we find them?”

“We need a starting point,” Bethany said. “Any little piece of information about your father’s meeting with them—location, date, someone’s flight number, anything at all. Just something I can get my nails into.”

“What about flights?” Travis said. “We know the meeting happened at the end of the Scalar investigation, which should be sometime near the final entry in the index downstairs—November 28, 1987. Assuming Peter flew there from here, could we find a record of his departure and destination? Does the airbase in Browning have traffic logs?”

Paige shook her head. “Not for us. We’ve never allowed any of our comings or goings to be documented. Anonymity’s a good line of defense.”

Bethany looked thoughtful. “There might be other records from that time, though.” She turned to Paige. “Do you have your father’s social security number somewhere?”

“It should be in the system,” Paige said. She minimized Word on the laptop and opened the personnel records. Ten seconds later she read the number to Bethany, who entered it into her tablet computer and got to work.

Paige’s cell rang. It was someone from Defense Control on level B4, which served as Border Town’s air traffic control center. Air Force One was five minutes out.

A minute later Bethany said, “Might have something.” She continued navigating on her computer as she spoke. “Do either of you remember the rough dates of the two index entries before the last one, on November 28? I can run down to the archives and check, if you don’t.”

Paige closed her eyes and concentrated. She opened them a few seconds later and said, “The second-to-last one was about a month earlier, at the end of October, and the one before that was six weeks earlier still—mid-September.”

“Definitely have something then,” Bethany said. “Take a look.”

Travis and Paige pressed in behind her and stared at her screen. Travis realized he was looking at a financial record of some kind, with credits and debits listed in columns, along with transaction labels.

“These are Peter Campbell’s credit-card statements beginning in September of 1987,” Bethany said.

If the invasion of privacy bothered Paige, she didn’t show it.

“He didn’t use the card a lot,” Bethany said. “Understandably. Living here, why would he? But in mid-September we’ve got four charges clustered over three days. A gas station and three restaurants, all located in a place called Rum Lake, California.” She looked at Paige. “Ever hear him mention it?”

“Never heard of it at all until just now.”

“Well he went there a few more times,” Bethany said. “Late October and late November, a couple days each trip, corresponding with the final two entries downstairs in the archives, and then one last trip that doesn’t match an entry. That was in mid-December. I’ve looked back through these statements to the beginning of 1984—that’s as far back as it goes—and there are no other Rum Lake charges. No more of them after these four trips either. So it wasn’t just some getaway he went to all the time, with the dates of his trips just happening to match the Scalar entries. This place was directly tied to Scalar, right at the end.”

“Carrie said he flew somewhere for the meeting,” Paige said. “But it was just one meeting—not four of them separated by weeks.”

“I’m thinking the meeting is just the final trip,” Bethany said, “in mid-December. It makes sense that there’s no index entry for that one downstairs, if he purged the files right when he got back from it. Why create a new file just before you get rid of them all?”

Paige nodded, following the logic.

Bethany minimized the window and opened another. “So for starters I’ll focus on the last trip, and see if I can identify anyone else who showed up in Rum Lake at the same time. I’ll get into the merchant accounts of these places where Peter ran his card, and pull up the rest of the transactions over those days. Maybe some other customer’s info will send up a flag—like if it’s someone who lives in D.C. or works in the intelligence business. Power players, right?”

“That sounds like a lot of digging,” Travis said. He thought of all the card charges that would’ve happened at those businesses during the days in question. Once she had that information, Bethany would need to access personal information on every one of those customers to see who stood out.

“It’ll take time,” Bethany said. “There’s not exactly an app for that. Not until I script one, at least. Give me a few minutes.”

Sixty seconds later the three of them were in the elevator, rising toward B4. Bethany held the tablet computer in one hand while the fingertips of the other flew over its touch-screen. She kept her focus on it even as the doors parted and the three of them stepped out. The open doorway to Defense Control was twenty feet ahead and to the left. Light from its numerous LCD screens bled into the corridor, along with the voices of half a dozen people inside. Paige led the way in.

Defense Control was about the same size as the conference room, though more spacious because its ceiling was twice as high. The flat wall that paralleled the corridor was lined with small equipment cabinets and much larger, semi-portable mainframe computers the size of industrial refrigerators. The far wall was a sweeping half circle, covered floor to ceiling with giant high-definition monitors. Each one carried a live video feed from one of nearly a hundred cameras embedded in the desert above.

Evelyn Rossi, Defense’s ranking officer, paced near the room’s central workstation and spoke into a wireless headset. “Air Force One, I have you at one-seven-zero knots, heading zero-eight-five. Maintain course and descent.”

Evelyn caught Paige’s eye and nodded hello.

“Pilot provided the verification code?” Paige said.

“Yeah.”

Travis let his eyes track over the room’s other workstations, set up to handle less-friendly situations. Technicians sat at or stood near these desks, idle but ready to engage in a hurry. Along with the network of cameras, the desert around Border Town hid one of the world’s most formidable defensive systems, designed to counter both ground and air-based attacks. The most critical ingredient, though, was simply the policy of not allowing unauthorized aircraft anywhere near the place. Even Air Force One had to forgo its usual complement of escort fighters when it visited.

Several of the screens on the curved wall had a visual of the giant aircraft, less than a mile out now, though its details were still vague. Every camera up top was either snug with the ground or raised above it by no more than a foot, which meant that when focused on a distant, nearly ground-level subject, they all looked through curtains of heat-ripples rising off the baked landscape. The effect was present now on every screen in the room, reducing the distant 747 to no more than a shimmering blob with wings.

Evelyn turned to Paige again as if to say something, but stopped herself. She’d noticed something on her desk display. She keyed her headset.

“Air Force One, I have you changing to heading zero-eight-seven. You are outside the glide path. Please acknowledge.”

Her eyes narrowed as she waited for a reply. She didn’t appear to get one.

“Air Force One, acknowledge change of heading. You are not on course for the runway.”

“He’s climbing,” one of the techs said. “And increasing airspeed. One-eight-zero knots. One-eight-five.”

“Air Force One,” Evelyn said, “if you are aborting approach please acknowledge. Say again, please acknowledge this transmission.” She looked around at the others. “Why the hell can’t he hear me?”

“One-nine-five knots,” the tech said. “Still climbing. If he’s aborting for a retry he should’ve turned by now. Still tracking dead straight on heading zero-eight-seven.”

Travis picked out the wall screen with the best image of the aircraft, and stepped closer to it. As it climbed and drew nearer, its shape began to resolve. So did its color.

Which was uniform gray, not blue and white.

Someone behind him said, “What the hell?”

At that moment the ripples diminished by a fraction, and the plane’s outline, even head-on, became clear. Not the massive bulk of a 747’s body with its wings tying in at the bottom. This was a narrower, sleeker form, and its wings met near the top of the fuselage.

Travis understood that he’d been wrong about Holt’s intentions: they weren’t subtle. They were as far from subtle as they could get.

“That’s not Air Force One,” Travis said. “That’s a B–52.”

Chapter Twenty

Colonel Dennis Pike hadn’t slept much during the night. Along with his wife and older daughter, he’d been up past midnight watching CNN’s coverage from D.C. Then he’d gotten a phone call—one he’d expected—and five minutes later he’d logged in at the front gate of his post: Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. In response to the attack on the White House, all branches of the armed forces were stepping up their levels of readiness. Pike had to oversee the status change for his own command, the 83rd Bomb Wing. It took about six hours, after which he’d gone home and caught ninety minutes’ sleep before another call came in. This one he hadn’t expected.

The man on the other end was the Air Force chief of staff, with orders coming directly from the new president. Strange orders. A wargame of some kind, to be conducted immediately by Pike himself. It would take place at a target range in eastern Wyoming—a location Pike had seen on maps throughout his career, though it had never been labeled as a practice area. It hadn’t been labeled as military property at all, but simply as Restricted Airspace—Undesignated. The president wanted Pike, without a copilot or navigator aboard, to fly a B–52 to the center of that place and test his ability to deploy a very unorthodox weapon, only two of which were even stored at Minot. Stranger still, Pike would relinquish control of his comm system for the entirety of the flight, setting it to a remote-access channel which would allow the Air Force chief and the president—or anyone they selected—to use his radio and do his talking for him.

“Don’t ask,” the chief of staff had said. “All that matters is that we’ll be evaluating your performance. Do this right and we’ve got something very special in mind for you.”

The target was in sight now, less than half a mile ahead: a seemingly arbitrary GPS point ten yards south of what looked like a pole barn, the only structure for miles around. The weapon was to impact that spot of empty ground precisely. Which it would, of course. Given the perfect visibility, low altitude and near-stalling speed, a trained chimp could’ve hit this target. It occurred to Pike, though only briefly, to wonder what the hell his superiors were evaluating. He’d performed the strange set of approach maneuvers exactly as ordered, but he could’ve done it drunk. So could every pilot in his command. There was no logic to it. Now, climbing and accelerating in the final seconds of the run, he realized this wouldn’t even make for a good story at the Officers Club. Whatever it was, no doubt it would be classified forever.

Well, strange was better than boring.

He reached for the weapons system panel.

Paige was already running, even as Travis got the last word out. Others in the room were scrambling for their desks, pulling up the defensive controls in seconds, as their training had taught them to do. But Paige’s solution would be faster. And simpler.

She all but crashed into the rack-mounted instrument cabinet she’d been aiming for, bolted to the wall near the entry. She pressed her palm to the scanner above the cabinet’s door, and with every tense muscle in her body she willed it to respond quickly.

A quarter-second later the cabinet clicked open.

Paige yanked the door aside to reveal a single, coaster-sized red button. It looked exactly like the kind Travis remembered from electrical shop in high school. There’d been one every six feet along the classroom wall, rigged to kill the power in case some freshman touched the wrong wire and started cooking.

The red button in Border Town had a different purpose.

Paige slammed it as hard as she could.

Pike felt a thud reverberate through the airframe as the bomb-bay doors locked open. Felt the sudden increase in drag as the slipstream passing under the plane churned and whirled through the complex interior geometry of the bay. He knew that in another second he’d feel the most dramatic change of all: the instant loss of nearly five thousand pounds of weight. The GBU–28 was a heavy son of a bitch, though only a small fraction of its mass was explosive. Well over four thousand of its pounds were just dumb, solid steel. For good reason.

Pike’s hand was already on the bomb release when everything changed. One instant the desert floor was bare and lifeless. The next, it burst open at half a dozen places, long, rectangular sections of ground being heaved aside from below. Pike had the crazed impression of casket lids coming up through the topsoil of a cemetery.

Half a second later he understood what he was seeing—a reality many times worse than a graveyard come to life.

Kill everything.

That was what the red button did. It deployed every weapon concealed in the desert and gave the system a universal, exceptionless command: target and engage any moving object within range.

Travis had already turned his eyes from Paige back to the wall screens. The bomber had come so much closer in the past five seconds it seemed surreal. Its apparent distance before must’ve been a trick of camera perspectives and shimmer.

Now, as the aircraft continued to swell on screen, Travis saw that its bomb doors were wide open. Even as he noticed, he felt the building shudder, and on every television in the room, multiple rocket-exhaust trails raced up out of the ground toward the plane.

Pike spent the last second of his life numb. He didn’t feel what his hand was doing on the bomb release, if anything. Didn’t bother to reach for the electronic countermeasures switch either—it probably wouldn’t have saved him even if there’d been time to use it.

He found his brain doing exactly two things at once—each half acting on its own, he imagined. The left half recognized the flight profile and outlines of the Patriot missiles that had come up out of the desert to meet him. His eyes went to the one that would reach him first, its RF seeker head having apparently locked onto the B–52’s nose. He tried to remember the trigger distance for a Patriot’s proximity fuze. Five meters? Ten? Did it matter? The thing was closing toward him at more than twice the speed of sound, and its warhead was a two-hundred-pound frag bomb. Like a hand grenade the size of a keg.

The right half of his brain was looking elsewhere, and more frantically. It was struggling to grab the last image he’d had of his daughter, as he’d left the house the night before. She’d been sitting in the leather recliner beside the couch, in a big purple T-shirt. Bangs in her eyes. She’d looked at him and said what she always said when he left for the base.

Careful.

It meant good-bye, but it meant a lot more the way she said it—high and soft, her eyebrows arched. It meant I love you. It also meant If anything happens to you, I’m always going to love you. He knew it meant all those things. He wasn’t imagining any of it.

Careful.

That word, in his daughter’s voice, was Dennis Pike’s last thought.

Travis saw the first distinct explosion maybe a fourth of a second before the next. The leading Patriot detonated almost nose-to-nose with the bomber, reducing everything forward of the wings to a particle cloud—which the plane instantly outran. The second Patriot, coming from the aircraft’s left, exploded just beneath the port-side wing, which at once became a sheet of flame. An instant later the starboard wing, the only intact lifting surface, pitched upward, hauling the entire plane high and left in a roll.

And revealing, like a curtain drawn aside with a flourish, a bomb that’d been freed from the bay less than a second earlier.

Travis heard sharp breaths sucked in around him.

The loosed weapon, so close now that it was visible from multiple camera angles, was long and sleek like a missile, but it didn’t fly like one. It had no propulsion of its own. It simply arced forward in a smooth line, gently falling away from the climbing trajectory the plane had held. The bomb’s tip dropped to level and then gradually angled downward. Travis could see that by the time it hit the surface, its nose would be pointing straight down, and though he’d never seen one before, he knew exactly what kind of bomb it was.

A bunker buster.

The majority of the thing’s weight, mostly up front, would just be dead metal, shaped to penetrate soil and concrete. The explosive portion would be rigged to blow only after the weapon had traveled some distance beneath the impact point. What that distance might be, Travis couldn’t guess, but without question the bomb would explode inside the complex, not above it. Whether anyone in the place survived was a dice roll now.

He turned and found Paige beside him, Bethany just beyond her, both of them thinking the same things he was. Their eyes were wide—they weren’t even trying to hide the fear. None of them said anything. They just waited. Whatever was coming was only seconds away.

In his peripheral vision Travis saw orange light flare across the wall of screens; the last Patriots had converged on the crippled bomber and brought it tumbling downward in a cartwheel of fire. Now the floor of the room began to vibrate with a high-frequency hum—the 30mm chain guns in the desert had opened up, though in all likelihood they were just shooting at the falling aircraft. Travis didn’t look to see if any of them were firing on the bunker buster. Even if they were, they probably couldn’t stop it.

An absurd thought struck Travis in the moment before impact: an image of the little vault built into their closet wall down on B16.

Where they’d left the Tap for safekeeping.

Chapter Twenty-One

The sound the bomb made when it punched through into the building was nothing like what Travis had expected, whatever he’d expected. It sounded like a machine gun. He realized immediately what he was hearing: the successive impacts as the thing slammed down through one concrete floor after another. It seemed to pass very close to Defense Control, maybe just a few feet beyond one of the walls, before thudding onward, deeper into the complex. Travis could no more count the floors it passed through than he could count autofire shots, but he guessed it’d gone at least as far down as B20.

Then it blew.

Every sensation came at once. The air pressure wave, like someone had clapped a pair of hands violently over Travis’s ears, nearly rupturing the drums. The ungodly jolt to the building’s structure, killing the power and dumping the room into pitch blackness. And then the kinetic shock of the explosion itself, heaving upward, certainly powdering the dozen floors above and below it, and pressing hard against those farther away. Travis felt the concrete beneath his feet arch up impossibly. Heard the reinforcing steel within it groan and crack, and knew without any doubt that when it sagged back a second later it would simply break. He and Paige and Bethany and everyone in the room would plunge with it, pressed to nothing as the interior of Border Town pancaked to a few stories of rubble down at B51.

The floor reached the top of its upward heave. It seemed to linger there for longer than should’ve been possible—time itself was hard to gauge just now—and then it fell back toward level, and right past it. The rebar crackled and strained again at the lowest extent.

But held.

The floor was rising once more—not quite to even, but close—when Travis heard the screams. They came from directly below: Security Control on level B5. With the screams came the sound Travis had expected to hear all around him—the avalanche roar of concrete falling apart. The floor on B5 had given.

A second later the screams were gone, washed out by the maelstrom noise of one story after another collapsing in sequence. A steel-and-concrete waterfall rushing down and away. It sucked the air out of Defense Control and Travis heard a high, surging whine somewhere close by. He realized it was an airstream being drawn down through the line of holes the bunker buster had made.

And then it was over. No more sound. No more air movement. Just the building’s remaining framework shuddering with latent energy from the blast and the collapse.

Emergency lighting kicked on within fifteen seconds. Wall-mounted bulbs that normally ran off the grid switched to batteries.

The air was choked with concrete dust. Everyone stood in a daze, looking for one another or for the exits, or doing nothing at all. Travis saw a tech stoop and straighten a keyboard that’d slid partway off a desk.

Bethany was crying. Paige’s eyes were red but nothing was spilling from them. Travis had no idea what his own eyes were doing.

He took a step and realized the floor was tilted to a greater degree than he’d first believed. He imagined the entire level, or at least a portion of it, sagging toward some lowest, weakest point.

He indicated the door they’d come in through earlier. “Come on.”

As soon as they stepped into the corridor they saw where the bomb had passed. Dead centered in the hall, halfway to the elevator, was a ragged hole two feet wide. There was another in the ceiling straight above it.

Travis turned the other way and studied the stretch of corridor leading out to this level’s perimeter. On a normal day he could’ve seen the hallway’s far end, some ninety feet away, where a T-junction led left and right at the outer rim of Border Town. He couldn’t see it now; the corridor dipped in a long, severe bow that cut off the sightline. The lowest point seemed to be perfectly centered between the elevator and the building’s south exterior wall.

Travis stared for another second, then turned away and moved toward the two-foot hole in the floor. He stopped just shy, knelt, and studied the edge. It looked strong enough. He eased forward on all fours and then lay flat on his chest, his head extended down into the opening.

What he saw, he would remember forever. Beneath him yawned nearly fifty stories of empty space, churning with concrete fog. Border Town, if it’d stood above ground like a regular building, would’ve been a cylindrical skyscraper with the rough proportions of a soda can. Through the dust, Travis saw that only the southern half of the structure had collapsed—as if the soda can had been cleaved vertically down the middle, and one of its sides had then been crushed flat while the other remained standing.

For all that, the collapse zone looked as big as the world. Stubs of broken floors lined its curved southern sweep like massive, fractured ribs. On the opposite side, the guillotined edges of the north half’s intact levels met the open space in a rough, upright plane. It looked strangely like a stack of balconies facing inward onto the atrium of a high-rise hotel, seen from the top floor looking down. Only there were no balconies—just vivisected rooms and corridors and airducts and gushing pipes and sparking electrical conduits, all of it lit up from deep within by more backup lighting. Clothing from torn-open closets spiraled down into the heavy dust, out of sight. Travis saw a bed lying right along the cutoff, ten stories below, its topsheet held on by one corner and the rest fluttering like a streamer in the eddying air.

Two things came to him, so obvious they barely registered as isolated thoughts. First, his and Paige’s residence lay right along the cutoff. Through the dust he thought he could resolve which one was theirs, though it was hard to tell. Second, the Breach and its protective dome were probably unharmed. Level B51 was not a full floor, but simply a tunnel that extended straight north from the central elevator hub, before opening to the vast cavern housing the Breach and its fortifications.

Travis thought of the falling bomb—clear of the plane before the first Patriot hit. Not just clear. Dropped. The bomb had arced and landed precisely as the pilot wanted it to. Not straight into the elevator shaft—the logical bull’s-eye if the goal was to level the entire building—because dropping it there would’ve damaged the Breach’s chamber, or at least buried it.

Holt had deliberately avoided doing that. He’d settled for taking out half the complex and hoping the shockwave would kill everyone inside.

But he wouldn’t rest on that hope. Not for a minute. Which meant there was more trouble coming, and probably soon.

Travis considered that as he strained for the sound he knew he’d hear—would probably already hear if his ears weren’t ringing. He turned his head and held his breath, and finally picked it up: the crying and calling of survivors among the intact north-side floors. The sounds all came from the top five or six residence levels. It made sense: much deeper and the shockwave would’ve been unsurvivable. Even the backup lighting was sparser below that point—the air compression of the blast had destroyed most of the bulbs. Travis tried to gauge the number of voices he was hearing. Maybe a dozen. That too made sense, given that most of Border Town’s population would’ve been down in the labs at this hour. Only a few would’ve been up in the living quarters.

He twisted and looked at Paige, crouched just behind him. She could see past his head well enough to understand the situation. She could hear the cries too. So could Bethany and the half dozen others in the hall behind her—the whole crowd from Defense Control.

“Is the stairwell still there?” Paige said.

Travis nodded. He kept his eyes on hers and saw them narrow.

“There’ll be kill squads on their way here,” she said. “Won’t there?”

“Staged and ready to chopper in as soon as the bomb hit,” Travis said. “From just outside our radar field. Which is what—forty-five miles?”

“About that.”

“Figure Black Hawks. What’s their top speed?”

“About a hundred eighty miles per hour,” Paige said. “Three miles a minute. So fifteen minutes’ flight time. And the defenses up top are all dead—they run on building power.”

Travis withdrew from the hole and stood. He faced the small crowd.

Evelyn pawed tear-soaked concrete dust from beneath her eyes, her gaze sliding back and forth between Travis and Paige, the question too obvious to need voicing: Why the fuck is this happening?

Travis didn’t answer. His mind was running the crucial math. There were six electric Jeeps up in the pole barn, fully charged. Straight-line over the desert, they could reach Casper, and they could do sixty with no trouble. The Jeeps were sandy brown, the same color as the ground, and Travis had never seen them kick up dust on the hardpan around this place. They didn’t even leave tire tracks. All of which meant they could avoid being spotted by the arriving choppers—but only with a serious head start. Travis’s gut said ten miles was the minimum safe distance; his head could do no better.

Evelyn was still waiting for an answer. So were all the others.

Travis looked at Bethany and indicated the tablet computer she was still holding. He could see its connection icon in the lower corner, red with a diagonal slash through it—Border Town’s wireless system had died with the power grid.

“From up on the surface,” Travis said, “you can get a signal from cell towers on I–25, right?”

Bethany nodded.

“Can you find out if there are spy satellites in visual range of this place?”

She nodded. “It’s not likely. One in four chance, any given hour or so.”

“Can you go up right now and find out?” Travis said. “And while you’re there, move the Jeeps outside, then scatter random clutter over where they were parked.”

She nodded again and didn’t say another word. She stepped past the hole and ran for the stairwell.

Travis turned to the others. “Look at your watches or your phones. Fix on a point in time exactly five minutes from right now.” He continued speaking as they did it. “You’re going to save who you can downstairs, but at the five-minute mark, you’re going to be sitting in the Jeeps up top, ready to go. All six Jeeps are leaving at that moment, together. Even one straggler a few minutes behind would get everyone else killed. Be there or you’re staying here.”

He didn’t wait to see what they thought of that plan. It didn’t matter what they thought. It was simply the only plan that didn’t end with everyone in the building dead. He turned and ran for the stairwell, and heard their footsteps following right behind him.

When they were two levels down Travis slowed and pulled Paige aside on a landing. He let the crowd pass.

“I have to go back up to B4 and do something,” he said. “We can’t leave that level intact for Holt’s people to find. They’ll see Defense Control and realize that’s where we would’ve watched the plane coming in. With that room still in place—and empty—they’ll know there were survivors who made it out.”

Paige’s eyes narrowed as she took his point. “If Defense Control were destroyed . . . they’d think they got us all.”

“They’d be sure of it. It wouldn’t occur to them that we left in Jeeps—that we even had Jeeps, forty miles from the nearest road. The charging station in the pole barn, all by itself, won’t tip them off; it could be used for a hundred different kinds of equipment.”

Paige nodded. Then fear crept into her expression. She looked upward, as if through the wall of the stairwell, toward B4.

“What are you planning to do?” she said.

“Nothing just yet. I’ll need a few minutes to get it ready. Come up with the last of the crowd, and call out into B4 when everyone’s above that level.”

“Travis, what are you—”

“No time. I’ll be fine. I’ll be up top right behind you.” Before she could say more, he continued. “I need you to do something too.”

“I’m already on it,” she said. “I’ll do it and then help with the survivors.”

“I know what you’re planning,” he said. “What I need is for you to not do it, if it looks too risky.”

“I have to try—”

“No you don’t. Not if it jeopardizes your life. If it’s too dangerous, just skip it and go right to the wounded.”

She started to protest, but he spoke over her again. “Promise.”

A second passed. She looked frustrated—but understanding.

“I promise.”

Then she was gone, down the stairs after the others.

Travis turned and sprinted up the flight they’d just come down.

He passed the hole the bunker buster had punched in the floor, and entered Defense Control, its workstations and its wall of screens dark and dead. He turned to the flat wall, with its row of giant, semi-portable mainframe computers—eight in all.

They were on wheels. Big industrial swivel casters the diameter of salad plates, with brake levers that could be locked or unlocked by stepping on them. Travis saw to his relief that only the front casters of each mainframe had been locked. He ran along the row, slamming his heel down on each lever and freeing each wheel. When he’d finished he ran back to the first mainframe in the line, the one nearest the door. He got a hand on its back corner, braced the other against the wall, and pulled.

For a second the thing didn’t budge. It had to weigh five hundred pounds. Then one of its casters pivoted and the whole unit lurched outward, exposing its power cord and data cable. Travis ripped both from their sockets, got hold of the mainframe once more and heaved it farther out. It protested again, clinging to its inertia even on the room’s slanted floor, but once it’d traveled even a few inches, all four casters fell in line with its direction of travel. It rolled smoothly, gaining momentum as Travis pushed it toward the wide-open door.

He eased it into the hallway and slipped past it, positioning himself on its downhill side. For the moment the huge machine, its wheels still cocked sideways, held still where it’d come to rest. Travis, facing it, turned and looked over his shoulder at the hallway dipping sickeningly behind him. Forty feet away, the low point. The weak point.

How weak, exactly?

Travis doubted the sudden addition of five hundred pounds would make a difference.

Maybe four thousand would.

If it didn’t, he and all the others would probably be dead within a few hours, hunted down and captured after Holt’s people connected the dots here.

Travis stepped backward—down the slope—and pulled the mainframe gently toward him. The moment its wheels realigned, the thing came at him like a brawler. He dropped his shoulder against it and dug his shoes into the carpet and stopped it, then carefully walked it down the slope, one foot at a time. When he’d gone what he judged to be fifteen feet he stopped again, and keeping one heel braced on the floor, used the other to step on both caster brakes on the unit’s lower end.

He let go of it.

It stayed put.

He looked at his phone. Three and a half minutes left before the deadline he’d imposed.

He stepped around the mainframe and sprinted back to the door into Defense Control.

Paige’s first glance at the residence twisted her stomach. It’d been her home for over a decade. She’d shared it with Travis for more than a year now. The best year of her life, by an absurd margin, and almost everything that’d made it good had happened here on B16 in this little sanctuary.

Which had now been sliced in two.

She stood in the doorway for a moment, rocked by what lay beyond it. To her left was half of the living room. To her right was nothing at all. Just darkness and churning dust. The wall that’d held the LCD screen was gone, along with ten feet of floor space that’d extended from it. The couch was right on the brink, facing out into the void like some image out of a surreal magazine ad. Behind and to the couch’s left was the short hall that led to the bedroom, just out of sight from where she stood.

She stepped out of the doorway, crossed the room to the hall, and stopped at the bedroom’s threshold. The same ten feet had been lopped off here as in the living room. The bed was gone. The doorway to the closet was half gone—it’d perfectly straddled the cutoff. The closet itself lay mostly to one side, beyond the door, and had largely remained intact. Even from where she stood, Paige could see its back wall, and the built-in safe that now held the Tap.

She looked at the closet’s doorway again, and focused on the floor that passed through it—what little was left. While half the doorway itself remained, there was hardly anything to stand on beneath it. A two-inch ledge at one side. To get beyond, to the intact closet floor, would require holding onto the trim at the doorway’s remaining edge and swinging her body past it. Her center of gravity would be out over the emptiness during the bulk of that maneuver.

She moved forward across the room, slowing as she neared the closet’s doorway and the edge. There was no telling how strong the floor might be along the drop-off—or here where she was standing, for that matter. The carpet hid any cracks that might’ve been visible in the concrete beneath her, but she assumed they were there; the wall was spiderwebbed with them, surrounding the closet doorway and leading away from it in all directions.

The doorway’s trim was three feet from her outstretched hand now. She took another step. Leaned forward. Put her fingertips to the fluted wood and tested its strength by pushing outward on it, toward the chasm.

The cracked wall around the doorway disintegrated almost at a touch. The trim and three inches of concrete around it simply broke free and pitched out into the darkness and fell away.

Paige flinched and stumbled back, sprawling on her ass on the carpet. She stared at the ragged opening where the doorway had been.

She might still make it through into the closet. Where she’d planned to hold onto the trim, she could press the fractured wall between both hands and swing her body over the drop as planned.

Promise, Travis had said.

She stared at the opening and the wall safe ten feet beyond. Stared at the dust-filled abyss below.

From the levels above she heard the voices of the others, calling out and locating the injured.

She got to her feet, turned, crossed out of the bedroom, and sprinted for the corridor.

Travis pushed the last of the eight mainframes into the hallway and eased it into position with the others: they formed a single line extending down the slope, each butted up against the next, the whole mass held back by the first unit Travis had put in place. That one alone had its brakes on.

He watched the formation shudder and slip downward an inch as number eight settled into line.

Footsteps pounded past up the stairwell. Not the first he’d heard in the last minute. He looked at his phone again: thirty seconds left.

More footsteps, some running, some struggling. He turned toward the door and saw it draw open. Paige leaned through.

“Eleven survivors,” she said. “All but two can walk.” She frowned, her forehead creasing. “I couldn’t get it.”

“We’ll be okay,” Travis said.

Paige took in the mainframes for the first time. She saw the idea. Her eyes widened a little.

“Everyone’s above us?” Travis said.

Paige nodded slowly, most of her attention on the computers.

Travis ran to the low end of the line. He studied the two brakes, then stepped forward and jammed his foot hard onto the pedal nearest the wall. As it released the wheel, the entire formation groaned and moved six inches, then halted again.

Travis looked up at Paige in the doorway.

“Do I need to say it?” she said.

“Run your ass off?” He managed a smile. “No.”

Paige’s own smile was very weak, no match for the fear beneath it.

Travis stomped on the last brake lever and yanked his foot away, coming within a tenth of a second of having it crushed by the caster. He turned and sprinted up the slope, while the array of mainframes bumped and skittered and picked up momentum going the other way. He’d expected them to gather speed quickly, but he saw within the first second that he’d underestimated how quickly. Before he’d covered half the distance to the Defense Control doorway, and maybe a quarter of the distance to Paige at the stairwell door, all of the huge units had lumbered past him, thundering down toward the low point faster than a person could run. The whole corridor vibrated with their passage. It seemed to shudder and, though Travis hoped he was imagining it, to tilt even more steeply toward the low point far behind him.

He passed the Defense Control doorway, covered the short distance to the hole in the floor and vaulted right over it. Ten feet from Paige now. Maybe three steps to go. He’d taken only one of them when her body went rigid and her eyes widened all the way, looking past him now instead of at him.

Two steps remained, but in that instant Travis knew there was no time for them. His leading foot touched down. He let the leg bend more than usual, let his weight drop squarely onto it. Then he launched upward and forward, his momentum carrying him airborne toward the doorway.

He was five feet from it when the floor dropped out from beneath him. It ruptured along a line six inches shy of the stairwell, the concrete giving way like it was piecrust. Travis felt air rushing backward around him, pulled down through the stair shaft by the collapsing mass of B4. Paige threw herself aside, out of his way, and he passed across the threshold and crashed down on the landing. He stopped just short of toppling down the flight directly in front of him.

They missed the deadline by twenty seconds, but the Jeeps hadn’t left without them. There were still a few survivors making their way up the last ten feet to the pole barn: the hardest ten feet, since the stairwell didn’t go all the way to the surface. The final transit required a climb up the elevator shaft’s inset ladder. Travis and another man helped the two who couldn’t stand—they were at least able to grip the rungs.

“No satellites,” Bethany said. She was standing in the barn when Travis emerged with the last survivor. “We’re free and clear for the next hour and then some.”

Travis nodded and passed the victim off to a man standing near Bethany, then stepped back onto the ladder and descended again to B2. He closed the shaft doors there, returned to the surface, swung out and closed those doors as well. The barn was empty now; the others had all gone to the Jeeps. Travis looked at the random equipment Bethany had piled and leaned around the charging station. The stuff looked like it’d been there for years. Perfect. He turned and ran out after the others.

They were twelve miles out when they saw the choppers: tiny black dots coming in low over the desert far to the east. They made straight for Border Town, which Travis could still see by the black smoke from the wrecked bomber. A minute later the choppers reached it, formed a stationary cluster, and descended.

Paige, Travis, and Bethany had a Jeep to themselves. The other Jeeps held three or four occupants each, the groupings based on country of origin. Bethany was already contacting the proper authorities within each government, sending them cell phone numbers for the survivors. Their respective intelligence agencies would need to get involved, and help them stay hidden until they could be extracted. Certainly no authorities here—local, state or federal—would be of help. Holt ultimately held sway over all of those.

The Jeeps would split up once they reached Casper. None would have the power to continue on to a different town, but within Casper itself the survivors would be safe enough, even on their own. No one would be looking for them, after all.

Travis already knew where he and Paige and Bethany would go, within the city. What they would do at that point was still undetermined, though he had a solid guess about it.

He looked at his phone.

9:20 A.M.

Ten hours and twenty-five minutes to the end of the road. Without the Tap in their arsenal, that span of time seemed agonizingly shortened, like the moment required for a guillotine to drop.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Five minutes after breaking formation with the other vehicles, Travis and Paige and Bethany were parked outside a bowling alley three hundred yards from Casper/Natrona County International Airport. While all Tangent personnel carried backup identities, Bethany’s alter egos tended to be unusually wealthy. In the past, that’d come in handy for booking charter flights on short notice. It would work here too, once they knew where they were flying.

“I have three hits,” Bethany said.

She leaned forward from the backseat. “Three people from outside California who made card charges in the town of Rum Lake while Peter was there—those few days in mid-December 1987.”

“Only three out-of-state visitors in the whole town, those days?” Paige said.

“There were others. Most didn’t fit Carrie’s definition—powerful people. These three did: each at the time had a net worth of over twenty million.”

Paige’s eyebrows went up a little.

“That’s nothing compared to what they ended up with,” Bethany said. “In time all three of them made it into the nine figures. Well into them. They were appropriately paranoid about their data security, too—those card charges they made in Rum Lake were on dummy accounts detached from their real names. I only saw through them because the encryption is so old; at the time no one would’ve pegged them. Very careful guys.”

She ran through their bios quickly. The three men were Simon Parks, Keith Greene, and Allen Raines. All Americans, and all in their late thirties in 1987, when they’d presumably met with Peter in Rum Lake. Parks and Greene had both started their careers as corporate lawyers, one in New York and one in Houston. Then, in the late 1970s, each had begun to dabble in finance, making investments in tech firms and quickly working up to fronting serious venture capital. Each man had possessed an especially keen instinct for spotting winners, and spotting them early. By 1987 both were serious players who had ties not only to the tech sector but politics as well. The third man, Raines, had started out as a physicist with a promising academic career, but sometime around 1980 he’d changed course toward D.C. and become a respected scientific advisor to the powerful. Raines, like the other two, had made very smart investments in the eighties, compounding his sizable political income. But unlike the other two, he’d done more than just visit Rum Lake in December 1987.

He’d moved there.

Immediately.

The cash transfer with which he’d purchased his home there was dated December 23 of that year, not even two weeks after the meeting that effectively ended the Scalar investigation. As far as Bethany could tell, that home had been his only residence from that point forward, even as his investments continued to snowball over the following years.

“Where in California is Rum Lake?” Paige said. “Is it a resort? The kind of place you might fall for at first sight and decide to move to?”

By her tone she didn’t seem to have much faith in that theory; she was just exhausting a hypothetical.

“It’s in the mountains off the Coast Highway,” Bethany said, “about an hour north of San Francisco. I don’t think it’s any kind of resort. Definitely no skiing. Just a little town, about four thousand people, up in the redwoods.”

“And Allen Raines still lives there?” Travis said.

“Until recently,” Bethany said.

Travis turned in his seat and looked at her.

“All three of these names generated hits from news sites when I ran them,” she said. “Parks in D.C., Greene in Boston, and Raines in Rum Lake—each in the past twelve hours. All three men died last night, at more or less the same time as President Garner.”

The silence that followed felt like a physical thing. Like the oven wind that scoured the desert and the parking lot.

“There aren’t a lot of details yet,” Bethany said. “Just little capsule articles online. Parks was stabbed in the restroom of an upscale restaurant in Chicago, sometime just before nine, central time. With Greene it was some kind of carjacking near his home in Boston; his wife was killed too. Article says it happened shortly before ten, eastern time. Raines was a hit and run, right on Main Street in Rum Lake, at a quarter to seven in the evening, Pacific time. No one got a license-plate number off the vehicle.” She glanced up from the computer. “All three of those times are within minutes of one another, and of the attack on the White House.”

Another silence. Travis felt them all trying to line up the threads.

“These are just the three people we know about,” Paige said. “There were probably more who met with my father in that town, but didn’t use their credit cards while they were there. It’s likely those people died last night too.”

Travis shut his eyes and interlaced his fingers on top of his head. “From what Carrie told us,” he said, “it sounds like when Peter met with these guys in 1987, he handed them the responsibility for Scalar. He must’ve known by then that it would take people that powerful to oversee the problem. Maybe he even knew what we know: that whoever’s on the other side of the Breach has a presence established on this side already. A powerful presence, if they can control people like Holt. It makes sense that Peter recruited power players of his own. The meeting in Rum Lake was a changing of the guard.” He was quiet a few seconds. “But I don’t think that’s all it was. I think there’s a reason they met there, of all places. Maybe there was something there Peter needed to show them. I think Rum Lake is at the heart of everything. I think whatever Ruben Ward did in those three months before he killed himself, he did it there.”

“It fits with the rest of it,” Paige said. “The investigation sure as hell dialed in on that place at the end. My father was there three times before the meeting.”

“We also know that whatever the solution was, it wasn’t permanent,” Bethany said. “Peter was afraid it could be undone in a single day, even years later. That would explain why Allen Raines stayed in town for good. Because someone had to—to keep an eye on whatever’s there. To babysit it.”

Paige gazed away toward the airport. The runways and the white sides of the terminal gleamed in the hard light.

“Without the Tap we’re not going to get the cheat sheet,” she said. “Not in Rum Lake or any of these places. If we could’ve gone back a year, or a week, or even a full day, sure. But in the present, forget about it. Holt’s people will have raided the homes of everyone who died last night, looking for that document. They wouldn’t even need to sneak around; they could go in with authority. He’s the president.”

Her expression darkened and she shook her head. Travis knew her anger was aimed inward. Knew she was replaying her failure to recover the Tap.

“There was nothing you could do,” he said.

If it helped her to hear that, she didn’t show it.

“Look at the bright side,” Bethany said. “They tried to kill us.”

Both Travis and Paige turned to her.

“Think about it,” Bethany said. “They took out all these guys last night because they needed them out of the way—because if they’d lived, they might’ve stopped whatever’s unrolling right now. Holt’s decision to bomb Border Town is no different: he or whoever’s calling the shots had some reason to fear us. They set the trap at Carrie’s place to verify that Tangent didn’t know anything, but when you got away and took her with you, it was their worst-case scenario. They knew Tangent would know something after that. At least as much as Carrie knew. Which wasn’t everything, but apparently it was enough to spook them.” She paused. “They knew we didn’t have the cheat sheet, but they came after us anyway. That implies we’re a genuine threat to them. That there’s some Achilles’ heel we could find, even without the help of that report.” She looked back and forth from Travis to Paige. “We should be encouraged by that. If they consider us a threat, then we are one.”

“If there’s an Achilles’ heel, it’s at Rum Lake,” Travis said.

“And they’ll be protecting it with everything they’ve got,” Paige said, “even if they’ve eliminated all the threats they’re aware of. Today of all days, they’d err on the side of caution.” She looked at Bethany. “Can you try to get satellite coverage of that town?”

Bethany nodded and got working on it, but didn’t look hopeful. Travis recalled something she’d told him once about the likelihood of a place being visually covered. Spy satellites orbited pretty low, and their paths were set up to maximize the time they spent over places of interest. War zones, terrorist-friendly areas, sites of possible weapons programs. Other places in the world might end up having consistent coverage, but only if they happened to line up with one of those chosen regions. In most places and at most times, like Border Town in the past hour, it was more miss than hit. The globe was very big, and satellite tracks were very narrow.

A minute and a half later Bethany frowned. “One pass over Rum Lake, just under ninety minutes from now. I should be able to tap into it. We’ll get about sixty seconds of visual. That’s the only one to go over between now and the deadline tonight.”

“Ninety minutes isn’t bad,” Paige said. “Flight time to Northern California’s two hours anyway.” She nodded at the airport. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Travis and Paige sat at a wall of windows overlooking the desert while Bethany spoke to a lone ticket clerk thirty feet away. Except for the four of them, the private terminal was empty.

Travis spoke quietly: “There’s something about the Baltimore memory I didn’t tell you.”

He relayed what Ruben Ward had said in the alley, word for word. When he’d finished, he watched Paige process it. Her eyes tracked over the desert, or maybe just the glass three feet in front of her.

“Filter,” she said. “What could it be? Something the Breach itself does? Something that triggers a change in a person, like the Breach Voices?”

“I wondered the same thing,” Travis said. “It’s all I can come up with, based on what little he said.”

Paige repeated Ward’s last line in a whisper: “Whoever it affects, it’s not their fault. Not really. Under the wrong conditions, anyone could end up the worst person on Earth.” She looked at Travis. “You think it’s going to be you. You think the filter is . . . it.”

Travis stared at a dry weed growing against the base of the window. The breeze batted it endlessly into the glass.

“I can’t imagine it’s not,” Travis said.

Paige was quiet a long time. Then she said, “Maybe it won’t happen at all now. The timeline we’re in is so different from the other one—the one you and I sent our messages back from. Everything’s changed. Tangent doesn’t even exist anymore, in this version of events. Maybe whatever was coming has already been cancelled out.”

“The Whisper gave me the impression it was inevitable—and the Whisper tended to be right about things.”

For a moment neither said anything more. They stared at the empty horizon. Behind them, Bethany was reciting a string of numbers: some kind of financial information related to her alternate identity.

“The instruction that came back from your future self,” Travis said. He looked at Paige before continuing. “Do you ever wonder if you should’ve followed it?”

She turned to face him, and when she replied her tone left no ambiguity. “Never.”

Travis saw hurt in her expression. She hated that he’d asked the question—probably hated that he’d even had it rattling around in his head.

“That part we do know something about,” she said. “We know the disagreement between us—in that future—comes from a misunderstanding. Whatever it is that you do, I interpret it the wrong way. I react on limited information—withheld information, from the sound of it. Something you’re not able to tell me, at the time.”

“That’s the part I understand least,” Travis said. “Something that important, you’re the first person I’d talk to. You might be the only person I’d talk to.”

He’d kept only one thing from her before: the note from her future self. Its arrival had caught him like a sucker punch, and he’d had only seconds to decide whether to show it to her or not. In that moment he’d simply panicked, but in time he’d told her everything; there wasn’t a single secret between them now.

“I really can’t get there,” he said. “Keeping you in the dark about anything at all—I can’t imagine it.”

He left his next thought unspoken: that unimaginable wasn’t the same thing as impossible.

They chartered a flight to Petaluma, California. Half an hour after wheels-up Travis felt himself begin to nod off. He realized he hadn’t slept all night—the sleep he’d gotten in 1978 didn’t count, as far as his body was concerned. He reclined his seat and shut his eyes and slipped almost at once into a dream. A strange one: Richard Garner was there with him, tied upright to a dolly—like Hannibal Lecter but without the face mask. President Holt was there, too, standing near an old man who looked like Wilford Brimley. Maybe it was Wilford Brimley. The room was small and had no windows. It spun and undulated, calling to mind acid trips Travis had taken in high school. George Washington, in a portrait on the wall, kept pursing his lips and narrowing his eyes, as if he were right on the fence between sharing and keeping some critical secret. The Wilford stand-in was repeating a line from a golden oldie, asking Travis what was behind the green door. But there was no green door in the dream. Just that drug-warped little room, beneath which Travis could hear the drone of jet engines. “We already know the combo,” the lookalike said. “Four-eight-eight-five-four. Save a world of trouble and tell us now. What’s behind it?” There was pain then. Serious pain. Throbbing in Travis’s left forearm. He noticed an empty syringe on a little tray along the wall. He also noticed, now that he was looking around, that he himself was tied upright to a dolly. The pain in his arm surged upward toward his heart, and when it reached it, it bloomed to every part of his body. It felt the worst in his head. He shut his eyes tight. “Now listen to me carefully,” the old man said in his ear, and his voice at that range made the headache step up tenfold.

Travis startled awake. Paige and Bethany glanced at him. He shook off the remnants of the dream, though he could still hear the steady droning—the business jet’s turbines, running smooth in the high desert air.

Bethany had the tablet computer on her lap. “It’s almost time,” she said. She held the computer out so that all three of them could see it. At the moment it showed only a dark blue field of view. Travis realized after a few seconds that it was the ocean, slowly drifting through the frame.

“The satellite’s camera covers an area much wider than Rum Lake, obviously,” Bethany said, “but this program lets you designate a specific patch of land, and it automatically enlarges that part of the image and tracks it for the whole time it’s in range. Should happen pretty soon.”

For another five seconds there was only blue water on the screen. Then, at the right edge, the coastline of Northern California appeared. It crept in at a few pixels per second. Travis guessed he was seeing ten or fifteen miles of shoreline from the top of the screen to the bottom. It was hard to make out much detail. Roads were impossible to resolve. Mostly what he could see were forests and mountains and lakes. And clouds—lots of clouds. He wondered if they’d block the view of the town.

“Don’t worry about the weather,” Bethany said. “The satellite can see in both visual and thermal—it’ll look right through the cloud cover. I also set up a roadmap overlay to help us make sense of the imagery.”

For a while longer the picture on her screen remained in its wide-angle perspective. The land continued pressing in from the right, the coast now a couple miles into the frame.

Then a little white box drew itself at the edge, defining a square maybe two miles by two, and an instant later it expanded, the land within it filling the entire program window. The view was almost entirely obscured by cloud. For a second that was it: just gray haze and a few inches of forest visible at the top of the screen. Then the thermal and roadmap layers appeared, and the image took on meaning at once.

At the westernmost edge was a major road, probably the Coast Highway. A narrower lane extended from it and wandered along what Travis guessed was a mountain valley: it skipped back and forth through switchbacks and then straightened in the last quarter mile before the town. It was the only road in and out of Rum Lake.

The town itself was more or less an elongated grid. It had a half-mile main drag running west to east, with six or seven cross streets branching off. At their southern ends the cross streets bent and arced around what must’ve been hills or depressions. At their northern ends they tied into a long, curved lane that hugged the lake—Rum Lake, cool blue in the thermal image and about twice the size of the town that shared its name.

Running vehicles stood out clearly: bright white rectangles against the gray background. A few moved along the streets here and there, but Travis ignored them—his attention went immediately to two places where multiple vehicles were clumped together, stationary. The first was along the valley road, just shy of town. Four were parked there, glowing not from engine heat but from bodies seated inside them. Two vehicles on each side of the road, angled at forty-five degrees. Big, boxy shapes, unusually wide.

“Humvees,” Travis said.

Paige nodded.

The second cluster was on the opposite side of town, near a house all by itself on the outskirts. Six more Humvees, these ones neither running nor occupied. They stood out only because of the greenhouse heating of their closed cabs, the effect minimized by the haze that filtered the sunlight.

The vehicles’ former occupants were moving like busy ants in and out of the residence.

“Probably private security contractors,” Paige said, “not soldiers. Maybe the same kind they used against us in Ouray.”

Bethany double-tapped the formation near the house, and the view centered and tightened on it dramatically.

“That’s gotta be Allen Raines’s place,” she said.

She minimized the satellite frame, opened a browser and clicked on Google Maps. Within seconds she’d isolated and zoomed on Rum Lake, and then she typed an address into the search field. The hourglass flickered. A red thumbtack appeared. Same house the Humvees were parked at. Bethany was reaching to open the satellite window again when Travis grabbed her wrist, the move startling her.

“Look,” he said.

He pointed with his other hand to the center of town. In the past half second, little icons and labels had popped up along Main Street, identifying certain businesses. Both Paige and Bethany inhaled audibly when they saw the one Travis had indicated:

Its symbol was made up of a tiny fork and a knife, and its label read, THIRD NOTCH BAR & GRILLE.

Chapter Twenty-Four

They rented a Chevy Tahoe in Petaluma and were on the Coast Highway by eleven on Travis’s phone—adjusted now to Pacific time. Seven hours and forty-five minutes left to work with.

Travis drove. The ocean lay to the left, at times obscured by trees but mostly wide open and endless and blue.

“The name of a restaurant in Northern California,” Paige said, “contained in a message transmitted through the Breach.” Her eyes registered the same vague bafflement all three of them had shared since seeing the labeled icon.

In one sense Travis found it plausible: if the instructions could send Ruben Ward to a specific town, then why not a specific location within that town? But for the most part it threw him. It was, in its way, the strangest detail they’d encountered so far. The exactness of it felt absurd. Ward had been directed to travel across the continent and find a passageway beneath a place that served burgers and chicken wings and beer.

Bethany had already verified that the restaurant had been there in 1978. It dated to the late fifties and had never changed its name. As far as she’d been able to tell, the place hadn’t shown up in any headlines during the summer in question. It’d been business as usual then, and ever since.

Far north along the coast, low clouds crept inland from the sea, pressing and writhing through gaps in the mountains. The same clouds they’d seen from orbit.

“There’s something that’s bothered me since that first phone call last night,” Travis said. “The first thing we knew about the Scalar investigation: its cost. Hundreds of millions of dollars. No matter how I look at it, I can’t get it to make sense.”

“I’ve been wondering about that too,” Bethany said. “The amount is ludicrous. Even if they were accessing the hardest-to-use databases at that time—the kind where paid workers did the searching instead of computers—or running satellite surveillance every day of the week, it wouldn’t come to that cost. Not even close. Throw in the use of FBI agents to check out certain leads, compensate the Bureau for their time, you still don’t even get into the ballpark.”

“The funny thing is,” Travis said, “neither we nor Carrie ever actually knew they used any of that stuff. Satellites, federal agents, any of it. We just made those assumptions based on the huge price tag—something had to cost that much. But none of those resources make sense, when you think about it. Satellites to investigate a guy who’d been dead for three years? Database searches? Ward wasn’t leaving a paper trail—he walked out of that hospital without a single piece of ID. No credit card, no checkbook; he wasn’t even wearing his own clothes. I don’t see how you’d track him three days later, much less three years. It’d be like reconstructing the itinerary of a bum.”

“Strange,” Paige said. “With all the other questions rattling around, we never asked the most obvious one: How did the Scalar investigation work at all? How could they have pieced together any of Ward’s moves?”

“We know they really spent hundreds of millions,” Bethany said. “Whatever they spent it on, it apparently worked.”

They said no more about it, but the question stayed with Travis as he drove.

They’d figured out their approach even before landing. The single road up to Rum Lake was obviously no good, but there were others that passed within half a mile of the town, through neighboring valleys separated from it by low, forested ridges. The nearest was called Veil Road, and in the satellite frame they’d seen that it was clear of checkpoints.

They slid under the low clouds just before the turnoff, and saw at once where the road had gotten its name. A two-way blacktop, it rose in steep pitches and bends along the valley’s ascending length, climbing right into the cloudbank within the first mile. Travis saw the clouds now for what they were: a marine fog layer that nourished the flora of this place—most notably the redwoods, which flanked the road like thirty-story high-rises.

They pulled off where the map showed the ridgeline to be at its narrowest, and headed up the slope on foot.

They dropped out of the clouds twenty minutes later on the other side, and through the trees they saw the town, crisp and clear beneath its overcast lid. Well-kept storefronts with brick facades lined Main Street, probably dating back a century or more. Cottages and log cabins comprised the rest of the place, its southern half pitched upward on an incline against the foothills where the three of them now stood, its northern half ranged down to the lakefront. The town was a natural amphitheater with the lake for its stage; there couldn’t be a single building in it that lacked a million-dollar view.

The outline of streets perfectly matched Travis’s memory of the roadmap overlay. He picked out Allen Raines’s house, high on the northeast fringe of the basin, maybe a third of the way around the lake. It stood just below the fog, eye-level with their own position. The six Humvees were still there, their occupants still moving in and out of the place. No doubt they were gutting the home’s interior right to the studs, tearing out insulation batts, ripping up the carpeting and the subflooring. A single sheet of paper could hide in a lot of places. Now that he thought about it, Travis supposed it’d been stored in the most inaccessible place of all: its owner’s head. Raines had probably memorized the thing twenty-five years ago and destroyed it.

Travis lowered his eyes to the center of town and picked out the Third Notch. It had a two-story facade, green-painted wood with white trim, all of it getting on in years but well maintained. There were no Humvees parked around it. No contractors on foot, either. Through the big front windows Travis could see a few tables and booths, but all appeared to be empty. There was someone in an apron moving about, not doing a whole lot.

“Place looks a little dead,” Paige said.

“The restaurant?” Travis said.

She shook her head. “The whole town.”

Now that he looked for it, Travis saw what she meant. Rum Lake wasn’t deserted by any means, but it seemed to be at a near standstill. No kids out on bikes. No one walking dogs or just taking a stroll. A Jeep Cherokee with luggage tied to its racks pulled out of a driveway, rolled two blocks to Main and swung west. A moment later it’d crossed the outskirts and headed down the valley road toward the coast. Paige pointed out another house: its owners were hauling suitcases and bags out and stuffing them into a sedan’s trunk.

“They know something’s going on,” Travis said.

“Let’s find out what it is,” Bethany said.

They walked into the Third Notch ten minutes later. The person with the apron turned out to be a woman in her forties. Her name tag read JEANNIE. She was visibly stressed, which might’ve made sense if the place had been bustling and understaffed. But it wasn’t. It was empty except for Jeannie and two kids—a boy and a girl, maybe six and ten respectively, clearly hers. The two of them were playing handheld video games at one of the tables and looked thoroughly bored.

Jeannie was on a cell phone when they walked in. She gave them a small wave and made a face: right with you. Into the phone she said, “Well we’re waiting. Get everything locked up and come and get us.” She hung up without saying good-bye, and turned to the three of them. “Kitchen staff’s gone home. I have pizza slices I can warm up, and drinks.”

Travis considered his reply. The approach he had in mind wouldn’t work well if he jumped right into it.

“Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi,” he said. “Either one’s fine.”

Paige and Bethany both asked for the same. Jeannie stepped into the back room, and the three of them sat at the bar. Travis saw a stack of menus to his left. The cover showed a Paul Bunyan type character wearing a huge belt with three notches carved into it. Travis couldn’t imagine being any less interested in hearing a backstory.

Jeannie returned with the drinks and the check, set them down and got to work squaring things away around the register. Her movements were hurried, anxious.

“I heard of this place a while back,” Travis said.

Jeannie didn’t look up from her work. “Yeah?”

“Guy I used to know told me I should stop by, if I was ever in the area.”

Jeannie said nothing.

Outside, the sedan with the stuffed trunk went past.

“He said he left something of mine in the basement,” Travis continued. “Said someone here would know what I was talking about.”

At last Jeannie glanced up at him.

Travis studied her face for any sign of suspicion. Any hint that she understood the significance of this place’s basement, and that a stranger requesting access to it was probably tied to that significance in some way.

But all she did was knit her eyebrows together. “I think it’s pretty empty down there,” she said. “How long ago was this?”

“Few years,” Travis said.

Jeannie shrugged, thought about it another second and then went back to her straightening, as if that concluded the discussion.

“Can I take a look anyway?” Travis said.

She seemed amused at the request, for some reason. She shrugged again and said, “Knock yourself out,” then reached under the bar out of sight. Travis heard a coffee can slide on wood, and objects clinking against one another. After a moment Jeannie brought out two keys, each on its own ring. The rings had plastic tabs attached to them, labeled simply #1 and #2. She pushed them across to Travis. “Entrance is outside, around the back.”

With that she returned to the register and ignored them.

Travis traded looks with Paige and Bethany, and then the three of them stood, leaving their drinks. They were almost to the door when Travis stopped and turned back toward Jeannie.

“You ever heard of a man named Ruben Ward?” he said.

She met his gaze.

Travis had seen lots of people play dumb before. They almost always overdid it. Their faces scrunched up. They registered too much confusion. Really, any confusion was too much; it wasn’t confusing to simply hear an unfamiliar name.

Jeannie didn’t look confused. She looked puzzled, which was stranger yet. Travis got the impression that she knew nothing about Ward, but that she’d heard the name. Maybe recently.

After a moment she shook her head. “Can’t help you.”

Travis considered pressing her on the subject, but held back. He turned and led the others out.

They were halfway along the building’s left side, moving down an alley floored with cracked pavement and a few lonely tufts of grass, when it happened.

It started as a sound—or what seemed like a sound. Maybe the frenetic hum of an electrical transformer about to fail, or the snapping, static-like buzz you sometimes heard over a field of grasshoppers on a dry summer day. It rose over the span of a second, seemingly from a source very close to Travis—behind him, he thought at first. He spun to look for it but saw nothing there, and noticed as he moved that the sound’s direction didn’t change at all. It had no direction. It was just everywhere, as if he were hearing it through a set of headphones. He saw Paige and Bethany reacting the same way. They were hearing it too. They looked at him and each other, their eyes narrowing in concern—and then widening.

Because they’d just realized the same thing Travis had.

That it wasn’t a sound, exactly. It wasn’t anything they were picking up with their ears. It was closer than that, somehow—already inside their heads.

It was a thought.

They were hearing it the way they heard their own internal monologue.

All three of them came to a stop, facing one another. None of them spoke. Second by second the sensation intensified, its apparent volume and clarity mounting. Travis felt it becoming almost a physical presence, its insectile quality growing sharper. It felt like bugs swarming inside his skull. The effect began to push him toward nausea. He saw it doing the same to Paige and Bethany. Saw them taking careful breaths to keep their stomachs under control.

And then it was over. The sound was gone as if someone had thrown a switch, and there was only the hush of the town again.

The three of them stood there for a long moment, still not speaking. Just breathing, getting their bearings.

“What the hell’s happening in this place?” Bethany said. It came out as hardly more than a whisper.

Travis thought of the sea withdrawing before the arrival of a tsunami. Of people’s hair standing on end before a lightning strike. Of the supposed panicked behavior of animals in the hours before a major earthquake.

“No idea,” he said, his own voice quieter than he’d intended. He nodded to the back of the building. “Come on.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

A passageway beneath the Third Notch.

They didn’t even have to enter the basement to see it. It was there in plain view to any stray dog that wandered through the rear lot. Centered on the back wall, one story below the main level, was the arched entry to a corridor beneath the building. A set of concrete stairs descended to it, hugging the cinderblock foundation. A stamped metal sign was bolted to the bricks just shy of the opening:

720 Main St.

Apt. 1

Apt. 2

An orange security light glowed softly, somewhere in the gloom beyond the arch. The floor down there was more concrete, probably from the same pour that’d laid the stairs.

Travis understood Jeannie’s amusement now. He also knew what they would find beneath the restaurant.

Nothing.

Both apartments were long deserted. They’d probably been declared illegal for residential use: each had only a tiny window, tucked up near the ceiling, all but impossible to crawl out through during an emergency.

Each unit’s layout was a mirror image of the other: kitchen and bathroom on one end, balanced by undefined space that served as living, dining, and sleeping quarters. Like a slightly oversized hotel room minus carpeting and a view. Both apartments were empty. Not even boxes of random junk had accumulated—just a few cracked laundry baskets in unit two, nested together and forgotten in a corner.

There was nothing else that could’ve been called a passageway. No hidden tunnel behind either derelict refrigerator—they checked. No mirror on any wall that could swing out on concealed hinges. The corridor itself was the only thing the notebook could’ve been referring to.

“A passageway beneath the third notch,” Bethany said. “And the next sentence started with Look for.” She thought about it. “Look for one of these apartments? It wouldn’t make sense to word it like that. You don’t have to look very hard to find these doors, once you’re in the hallway.”

“Look for John Doe in Apartment One,” Travis said. That sounded better. He couldn’t think of anything else that sounded right at all. “Maybe Ward met someone here. Was instructed to meet someone here—someone who lived in one of these units back then.”

Before he could say more they heard Jeannie’s voice through the ceiling straight above them, yelling at someone. They were standing in the second apartment, roughly beneath the seats they’d taken at the bar. Travis couldn’t quite make out Jeannie’s words, but her angry tone was clear enough. It went quiet for three seconds, then started again. There’d been no one else speaking in between. She was on the phone—probably with whoever she’d talked to earlier, reiterating her demand: get your ass over here and get us out of this town. Her second spiel ended on a note of finality. Silence followed.

Paige turned to Travis. “Who could they have told Ward to meet here?” Her lower eyelids edged upward. “One of their own?”

Travis weighed the idea. He turned and studied the dark recesses of the apartment. It didn’t exactly fit the image that’d come to him earlier: the sprawling penthouses above the nerve centers of the world. But that’d been a snap impression at best. A guess based on nothing at all, because they knew nothing at all about who they were up against. Power took other forms, he knew. Like anonymity.

He turned to Bethany. “Can you check records for who lived here in 1978?”

She winced. “I can try. Tax records might turn up something—assuming whoever lived here even filed.”

“Maybe there’s paperwork on old tenants upstairs,” Paige said. “I think our approach needs to lose its subtlety.”

They pushed back in through the front door and Travis asked about the paperwork.

Jeannie stared at him. The anger she’d put into the phone call was still on her face.

Then she said, “I didn’t think you’d stick with the ‘good cop’ thing much longer.”

“Excuse me?” Travis said.

The two kids were watching now, their video games forgotten.

“In back, both of you,” Jeannie said.

The kids complied, disappearing into the kitchen.

“Ma’am,” Travis said, “whatever you think—”

“That’s the idea, right?” Jeannie said. “All morning we get the bad cops—all these hard-asses in their Humvees scaring the shit out of everyone who catches a look at them. Coming into all the shops and grilling us about Ruben Ward, Allen Raines—What do we remember? What have we seen?”

“Raines,” Travis said. He’d always intended to ask her about the man, but only after checking the basement. It would’ve been one thing too many to stuff into the first conversation.

“Yeah, I knew him,” Jeannie said. “Everyone knows everyone here. You people, we don’t know, which is why we’re not talking to you about him. And putting on street clothes and acting casual isn’t going to change that.”

“We’re not with the others,” Travis said. “We came over the ridge on foot to avoid them.”

She didn’t buy it.

“Get out,” she said. “And if your friends are supposed to be fixing whatever’s wrong inside that mine, tell them to stop screwing around and do it.”

“Mine?” Paige said. She looked at Travis, then Bethany. Each shared her bafflement.

For the first time since they’d come back in, Jeannie’s anger slipped. She glanced from one of them to the next, reading their reactions.

Travis advanced and rested his hands on the back of the stool he’d sat on earlier. He met Jeannie’s eyes and didn’t blink.

“We’re not playing good cop,” he said. “Please listen to me. What’s happening around here is only the ramp-up to what’s really coming. Do you remember what time Allen Raines was killed last night?”

She thought for a second. “About a quarter to seven.”

“And what time was President Garner killed?”

She started to answer, then cut herself off, thinking about the correlation.

“This is not just something that’s happening in Rum Lake,” Travis said. “The problem is a lot bigger than that, and as far as we know, everyone who’s supposed to be stopping it is dead. Please—anything you can tell us will help. Start with the mine.”

For a while Jeannie didn’t reply. Maybe she was considering where to begin. Maybe she was debating whether to begin at all.

Travis saw movement at the edge of his vision. The two kids had come to the kitchen doorway, watching with wide eyes. The girl kept her little brother behind her, as if to protect him.

Jeannie exhaled deeply. “It’s probably been shut down for most of a century. I don’t know anyone who remembers it being open. I moved here in the nineties, a few years after everything happened up there. I only know about it through the stories I’ve heard, but I’ve always believed them. They’ve never changed over time, the way stories do when they’re made up.”

“Tell them about the ghost,” the little girl said.

Jeannie waved her off.

“You told us it was real,” the girl said. “You said you and Dad heard it talk.”

Jeannie looked annoyed at the girl’s insistence, maybe a little embarrassed. But there was something else in her expression, Travis saw. Some inability to refute what the kid had said, because no doubt Jeannie really had told her children those things.

“I don’t know what’s up there,” she said at last, keeping her focus on Travis and Paige and Bethany. “There’s . . . something.” She was silent a bit longer, then just shook her head. “The stories all go like this: the mine was nothing special until 1987—kids might go up there to drink or make out, but nothing strange ever happened. Then, that year, the government came in and fenced it all off. The nearest shaft entrance is actually on Forest Service land, outside the town limits.” She nodded out the front windows. “You probably saw the house up at the treeline with all the Humvees in front.”

“Raines’s house,” Travis said.

She nodded. “His property butts up against federal land. The mine access is two hundred yards straight uphill from that house, deep in the woods. They say the government took over the site and . . . did something up there. Built something, maybe. Down inside the shaft.”

Travis looked at Paige. He saw her processing the information and drawing the same conclusion as he was: Jeannie had it wrong. The stories had it wrong. The government—working with Tangent—had only found something in the mine shaft. The Scalar investigation’s long search for answers had led to this town in the end, and in turn had led to the mine. Whatever was in there, Ruben Ward had created it. Maybe with help.

“They say most of the government’s comings and goings were at a different entrance,” Jeannie said, “over the ridge to the north. That opening is a lot lower down, accessible by old logging roads. I guess some teenagers from here in town got pretty close to it a few times, when everything was going on. Close enough to overhear workers talking about what was in the mine.” A shiver seemed to pass through her. She shook it off. “The workers called it the Stargazer. They were scared of it. They hated being down inside with it, whatever it was—whatever it is. They said it had to be kept under control, but they were still working out how to do that. And then Mr. Raines bought that house up on the slope—he paid twice what it was worth to speed up the deal. He moved in, and around that time all the government activity just went away. It was pretty clear Raines was involved somehow. I don’t think anyone trusted him, at first. But after a while something became obvious: the man never left this town. And I mean never. I’ve seen that for myself, living here almost twenty years now. In all that time, Raines never took so much as a drive down to the ocean, three miles away. He’d come down to Main Street for groceries, or to have a sandwich in here. Then right back up to that house. The way people eventually saw it, he was the one keeping the Stargazer under control, whatever the hell that entailed. He got stuck with that job, and he did it. He kept us safe from it, all those years. And if we weren’t sure of it before, we are now. It was about six hours after he died that we got the first . . . hum.”

Travis had been staring down into the bar. Now he looked up. “Like the one five minutes ago. Feels like bugs in your head.”

Jeannie nodded. “Second one was about four hours after the first, then less than two hours, and they’ve been coming faster and faster ever since.”

No wonder the town was emptying out. Twenty-five years of these stories, and now physical evidence that they weren’t bullshit. That there really was something bad up in the mine.

Travis considered the word: Stargazer. A uniquely strange name for something that was deep underground.

Much of what they’d learned was strange—both here and before they’d arrived in Rum Lake. There were giant gaps in the puzzle, and Travis couldn’t picture what would fill them. The Stargazer itself was one: it had to have been in that mine since the summer of 1978, some nine years before the Scalar investigators found it, but in all that time it must’ve been effectively dormant. If it’d been generating these hums back then, this place would’ve become a ghost town. Yet when Allen Raines had taken watch over the thing, he’d had to stay on top of it day and night, right from the beginning. Those two facts were hard to reconcile. As was a third: even if he and Paige and Bethany could reach the Stargazer, it was unlikely they could do much more than Raines had. Which was to keep the thing in check, assuming they’d see how that was done. But what sort of Achilles’ heel was that? If all they could do was babysit the thing, how long could they stay on it before someone interfered with them? Like these guys in the Humvees. A few hours, at best?

He knew he was thinking in circles, and that doing so wouldn’t help until they’d seen the Stargazer for themselves. For better or worse, they’d have the whole picture then. He drew hope only from what Bethany had said back in Casper: If they consider us a threat, then we are.

The little girl stepped out of the doorway and tugged on Jeannie’s arm.

“The ghost,” the girl said. “Tell them.”

Jeannie’s forehead furrowed. She seemed stretched between frustration and sober gravity, as if she believed the story herself but would never expect others to.

“Try us,” Travis said.

Jeannie frowned and let out a long breath, giving in. “They say it always happens around the two entrances to the mine. They say anyone who goes near starts to hear voices, whispering right behind them in the trees. Pine boughs around you start to move like the wind’s blowing, even when it isn’t. My husband and I . . . we like to think now we might’ve imagined what we heard. The wind really was blowing that day. Maybe that’s all it was. I don’t know.”

Travis tried to picture the mine entrance relative to Raines’s place, on the satellite image they’d seen. The moment he did, something occurred to him. He turned to Bethany.

“That satellite was looking almost straight down, right?”

She nodded. “Perfectly straight down. Default angle unless you command it to do otherwise.”

“From that perspective,” Travis said, “even redwoods would have lots of gaps between them. Plenty of open ground visible in the image.”

Bethany shrugged. “I guess. Probably quite a bit.”

“We didn’t see any heat signature uphill from Raines’s house,” Travis said. “No bodies moving through those woods. Not even one.” He thought about it a second longer. “I don’t think these guys are going near the mine shaft.”

“I’m certain they’re not,” Jeannie said. “I’ve been watching all morning, waiting for them to head up into the trees and get in there—get working on the problem. I’ve assumed that’s what they were sent here to do. But all they’re focused on so far is that house. In and out, hours on end now.”

The more Travis considered it, the more that made sense, and not because of any strange phenomenon that could be mistaken for a ghost. Simple priorities were enough: these men had been sent to find and destroy the cheat sheet, and failing that, they would at least prevent anyone else from getting into that house and obtaining it—if it still existed at all. And while those who’d sent them probably wanted some muscle close at hand to protect the mine if the need arose, Travis wasn’t surprised these guys were staying back. Being kept back, more likely, by strict orders. They were almost certainly nothing more than hired guns; why let them sniff around the mine at all? Whatever the Stargazer was doing in there, it was doing without anybody’s help. All it needed was for Allen Raines to stay dead, and none of his powerful friends to show up in his place.

“Two hundred yards isn’t much,” Travis said, “even with tree cover. But maybe it’s enough. Maybe we can get in there from the uphill side without them seeing us.”

The sound of a loud engine faded in. A second later an old pickup went by, heading out of town, its bed loaded with boxes and bags.

Travis put aside the mine for the moment, his thoughts going back to earlier questions. He turned to Jeannie. “What about the man I mentioned before? Ruben Ward.”

“I never heard that name until today,” Jeannie said, “when the others came in and asked about it.”

“And none of these old stories talk about the summer of 1978?” Paige said.

Jeannie shook her head.

“Do you have paperwork for who lived here back then?” Travis said. “I know it’s a long shot—”

“It’s possible,” Jeannie said. “There are old file boxes in the office—”

She stopped and cocked her head.

Travis listened too, and heard another engine rumbling. Another loud one, though it sounded different from the truck. Jeannie appeared to recognize its tone.

“Shit,” she whispered. “I only meant to complain.”

“What are you talking about?” Travis said.

“When you went downstairs I called the number they gave me earlier. I yelled at them for sending in the good cops.”

The engine grew louder, drawing very near now. Its growl spoke more of power than age. A second later it cut out and brakes whined, somewhere just out of view past the edge of the glass front wall.

“That’s one of the Humvees,” Jeannie said. “They know you’re here.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Storage room, back right,” Jeannie said. Her hand shot out toward the corner of the building opposite where the Humvee had stopped. “No screen in the window.”

Paige and Bethany were already moving. Travis took a step after them, then pulled up short. He looked at Jeannie and the two kids.

Jeannie shook her head. “We’re fine if you’re gone. You left three minutes ago.”

Travis nodded, spun and ran after the others. He’d almost cleared the room when Jeannie called after him. He stopped again and faced her.

“Cell phone number,” she said. “I’ll find the old paperwork.”

From outside came footsteps and men’s voices.

Travis said the number aloud once. Didn’t wait to see if she’d caught it all. He sprinted for the back room, and in the same second that he slipped into it, he heard the front door open.

Paige already had the window up: an old single-pane affair with about ten layers of paint on its frame. It was on the side wall, leading out to the back stretch of the alley they’d walked down earlier. Bethany slipped through; the alley’s pavement was only a couple feet lower than the floor. Travis motioned for Paige to go ahead of him, and took hold of the raised sash as she let go of it. He went through after her, got his feet on the concrete and stood upright, his hand still holding the sash in place.

He considered just leaving it up—an open window in a back room shouldn’t stand out as unusual, if any of the men from the Humvee came to check this part of the building. Travis relaxed his hand on the bottom of the sash.

It immediately slipped downward a quarter inch, its sides lightly shuddering against the frame. If he let go entirely it might stay where it was, or it might hold for five seconds and then drop, making all the sound in the world as it went.

He heard Jeannie’s voice, through the doorway and down the hall. “Is ‘Go to hell’ too subtle for you people to grasp?”

A man replied, his tone coming from a deep, broad chest cavity. “Where are they?”

“Probably bullshitting the shop owner next door. They’re your people, why don’t you call them?”

No reply. Just boots thudding around on the ancient wood floor.

Travis leaned back inside and looked around for something with which to brace the window.

There was nothing.

He’d have to shut it, and not quickly—he couldn’t trust it to stay quiet at any real speed. There were long vertical abrasions where it’d rubbed against its frame over the decades, probably on humid days when the wood had expanded. Days like this one.

He began to ease it downward, making about an inch per second.

“You saw which way they went?” the deep voice said, still somewhere up front by the bar.

There was no audible reply. Travis pictured Jeannie just pointing, too pissed to speak. She would send them along Main Street back in the direction of their Humvee, to keep them from walking past this alley.

He had the window half shut now. Twelve inches left.

Paige and Bethany were right beside him, watching the progress with gritted teeth.

Nine inches. Eight.

“Sorry to bother you when you’re this busy,” the deep voice said. The boots clumped away toward the front door.

Six inches.

Then a bird started screaming, somewhere above Travis. He looked up sharply at the sound.

A blue jay. Right on the cornice ten feet overhead. It scolded in loud, double squawks. It probably had a nest up there. The cries went on for four seconds and then the bird flitted out of sight onto the roof.

Silence followed, outside and inside. The boot steps toward the front door had halted.

Then they began again—thumping quickly over the hardwood toward the back room.

“Shit,” Travis whispered.

He lowered the window the last six inches in the next second, risking the sound. It made none.

Paige and Bethany had already covered the distance to the back corner of the building across the alley—ten or twelve diagonal feet. Travis followed, got past the edge and stopped alongside them, his back against the old cedar siding. They listened.

At first there was only silence.

Then came the scrape and whine of the window going up. The sill creaked as heavy weight leaned onto it. Travis waited for the clamber of a body coming through, and the scuff of soles on pavement, but all he heard was a fingertip drumming idly on wood. After a moment it stopped. There was a click and a wash of static, and then silence again.

“Anyone copy at the Raines house?”

Static as the man waited.

Then a tinny voice: “Go ahead.”

“Leave three men up there, send the rest down here for a coordinated search. Bring every Humvee.”

“Got it.”

“Put the three that stay behind on lookout. Eyes on the slopes below the treeline. These people didn’t come in a vehicle.”

“You want to take Holt up on his offer? Grab law enforcement from nearby jurisdictions? We could have an army in here pretty soon, taking orders from us.”

The fingertip drummed again. Less than a second.

“Make the call.”

A click ended the static and then the window came down hard, and muffled steps faded away behind it.

The three of them ran along the row of back lots until they’d passed four more alleys. They stopped behind a building that nestled against a side street, and listened.

Far away, across and above town, the Humvees at Raines’s house fired up one by one and began to move. Then their sound was lost to the roar of the one near the Third Notch.

Travis nodded quickly and they sprinted across the street to the next block. They continued into it past the first building, then turned down an alley and moved farther away from Main Street, at last coming out between a little art gallery and the town’s post office. The street they now faced ran parallel to Main. Across it were small homes tucked close to one another, and beyond lay three more blocks of the same, the whole spread rising toward the exposed hills. Those hills could be easily climbed—the three of them had come down them fifteen minutes ago—but it would take a good sixty seconds to reach the redwoods from the concealment of the highest backyards. That hadn’t been a problem when nobody was watching. Now that at least three sets of eyes would be, an undetected crossing was pointless to even think about.

Travis thought about it anyway. If they could get up into the trees and hide, they could circle around to the mine, probably a mile away through unbroken forest.

Paige gazed up at the woods too, and the open ground beneath, clearly running all the same calculations.

“We’ve probably got three minutes before the first highway patrol units roll in here,” Paige said. “It’ll be a steady stream after that; anything we try to do will just get harder and harder.” She paused. “Three minutes. That’s not enough time to think of even a bad plan.”

Travis stared at the empty hillsides a moment longer, then dropped his gaze to the residential blocks nearer by. Dozens of homes, most of them probably empty by now. A natural gas explosion might make a nice diversion; five or six at once might even generate a smokescreen behind which they could climb. Or maybe he could hotwire a car, douse its interior with gasoline, and send it rolling down to the lake in flames. It would probably crash into something before it got there, but that in itself would be a fine distraction. It might buy them a fifty-fifty chance of gaining the trees unseen, provided they were way up at the edge of town and ready to run at the moment of impact.

But none of those things could be done in three minutes. Not even close.

“You’re right,” he said. “We don’t have time to plan anything.”

“So what do we do?” Paige said.

All Travis could think of was a panic option. It was the furthest thing from a plan. He couldn’t even properly envision how it would play out—he had yet to actually see the nearby Humvee and the number of men inside it. Probably more than one. Probably fewer than five.

He could hear it now, grumbling along in low gear, hunting the alleys that branched off of Main Street. It would pass this alley in another twenty seconds or so.

It hardly mattered that these guys had no description of their prey. The fact that the three of them were on foot would be enough. None of Rum Lake’s few remaining occupants were out for a stroll just now.

“Stay close to me,” Travis said, “but stay in the alley. And be ready to run if this doesn’t work.”

He said no more. He turned back toward Main, two hundred feet away along the alley’s length. Stared at the gap where the Humvee would soon appear. He was pretty sure he could get there first.

He ran. As fast as he could. Heard Paige and Bethany following behind, and the heavy diesel engine somewhere ahead and to the side.

One hundred feet from the alley’s mouth now. Fifty. Ten.

He burst right through it without slowing, and saw the huge vehicle in his peripheral vision. Twenty-five feet away. Matte black. Soaking up the overcast glare and reflecting away almost none of it.

Travis kicked the sidewalk with the front of his foot, and sprawled. He hit the concrete with his hands and tumbled once, scraping every part of his body that struck. He heard the Humvee’s engine throttle down hard. Heard the faint whine of shocks as the driver hit the brakes and the thing’s five thousand pounds rocked forward onto its front suspension.

Travis got up without coming to a stop. He snapped his gaze toward the Humvee and reacted to it. He went for a mix of surprise and relief, but didn’t let it linger more than half a second. Instead he advanced on the vehicle, his legs shaky, his hands waving frantically overhead as if to flag it down—as if he were too brain-addled to see it’d already stopped for him. He was fifteen feet away when the driver opened his door and got out. The guy with the deep voice. Had to be. Six-three and easily two hundred fifty pounds. MP5 submachine gun slung over his shoulder, right hand on its grip, finger outside the trigger well. Travis could see the weapon’s left side, and its three-setting fire selector switch, just like the ones he’d seen on the force two decades earlier. The settings were labeled S, E, and F, for German words that meant “safe,” “single-shot,” and “autofire.” This one was set to “safe”—for the moment. Travis glanced through the Humvee’s windshield and took in the other occupants. One more up front. Two in the back.

He took another visibly awkward step. Ten feet from the driver now. The guy was just drawing a breath to speak.

Travis recalled something else from his time as a cop—a training exercise called cone versus gun. The setup was simple. One man would play the cop and stand with an unloaded pistol holstered on his hip—safety on, holster strap in place. Another man would be the assailant, facing the cop from twenty feet away, an ice-cream cone in his hand to represent a knife.

From a standing start, the assailant would charge the cop. How close would he get before dying?

Most of the trainees had guessed ten feet: the guy would cover half the distance by the time the gun was leveled at him and clicking. Travis had felt generous and said he’d get within five.

Then the assailant had burst forward, and an instant later the room was full of low, surprised whistles.

The ice cream was mashed against the cop’s neck before he could pull the trigger even once.

Same result on the second run. And the third, and the tenth. Didn’t matter who played which part. Didn’t matter if one was a trainee and the other a hardened veteran. After a few iterations, certain truths became evident. First, twenty feet wasn’t that damn far, and the last third could be covered in a single, diving lunge, the body tipping forward and the arm shooting out in a movement that erased several feet at blink-speed. Second, there was a concentration issue. It took focus to snap loose a holster strap, draw a pistol, thumb off its safety, raise it, aim it, and fire. It took lots of focus, in fact, and focus was in short supply when someone was charging toward you like a runaway log truck. Your body was preconditioned to tense under those circumstances. Your hands wanted to go up in front of your face, not to your hip. You had to work against those instincts every time, even after you’d trained yourself to expect them. Even when the attacker was a friend with an ice-cream cone.

“No closer,” the driver said. His thumb went unconsciously to the selector switch.

Travis didn’t have a knife. Didn’t even have an ice-cream cone. He also didn’t have twenty feet to cross.

He charged.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

It happened in less than three seconds, and it felt like less than three seconds. At no point did it seem to slow down. At times in Travis’s life, eruptions of violence had sometimes taken on special clarity. A simplicity made of goals and obstacles and means, playing out in a few beats of his pulse. He’d heard Paige put it in similar terms.

None of that happened here.

It was all motion and panic; flinching bodies and jerking limbs and the startled beginnings of shouts. Travis crossed the distance in a burst of momentum, got his left hand on the MP5’s barrel guard, balled up his right and slammed it into the big guy’s Adam’s apple with all his forward speed. The man’s free hand went to his throat, and his gun hand loosened, and Travis took his attention off the guy completely. Arms were moving inside the vehicle. Reaching for door handles. Reaching for weapons Travis couldn’t see. He knocked the driver’s hand away from the MP5, gripped the gun with both of his own, thumbed its selector to full-auto, and yanked it down away from the huge torso. The strap pulled tight, but there was enough play for what Travis had to do. He put the weapon’s barrel into the gap between the open driver’s door and its frame. Right at the front, above the hinge, head-level with all three men inside. Like an archer pointing a drawn arrow through a loophole in a fortress wall.

He aimed for the front passenger and pulled the trigger. Felt the cyclic, full-auto recoil as the thing roared. Saw the guy’s head come apart, and shoved the stock hard clockwise to spray the backseat, hitting both heads there probably five times each. He let go of the trigger and hauled the gun back out of the gap, its strap still tight around the big man—who’d recovered enough to reach for the weapon again. Travis pointed it straight at him and fired, and its last four rounds entered right below his jaw. The guy went limp and dropped where he stood, his weight on the strap tugging the gun out of Travis’s hands.

Silence, except the vehicle’s idling engine.

Travis looked up the length of Main Street. No sign of the other Humvees just yet.

He raised his eyes to the distant Raines house, just visible over the nearest shopfronts, and saw the three spotters up there going apeshit. Grabbing one another’s arms and pointing down toward the action. Drawing two-way radios and shouting into them.

Time to get going.

Travis turned and saw Paige and Bethany at the mouth of the alley. Paige looked only a little shaken. Bethany more so.

“Seconds are going to count,” Travis said.

Paige nodded, shoved Bethany forward and ran after her.

Travis opened the back door on the driver’s side and Bethany got in first, heedless of the bodies—all the blood was farther back, covering the rear windows and the storage area behind the seats. Paige climbed in after her, and by then Travis was at the wheel, slamming his own door and shoving the vehicle into drive. For half a second he considered reversing instead, backing up and taking the nearby cross street. Then he thought of the spotters up high again, on their radios, and knew it was pointless. There would be no hiding from the other Humvees. He floored the accelerator and the vehicle shot forward along Main, toward the street at the far end that led to Raines’s house.

“Get the guns off those guys in back,” Travis said.

“Already on it,” Paige said.

Travis reached with his right and unslung the front passenger’s MP5 from his shoulder. He set the weapon in his own lap and patted the guy’s pockets for extra magazines. He found two in a big pouch on his pant leg.

Three blocks from the end of Main now, doing sixty. A second later the first of the other Humvees appeared ahead. It rounded the corner Travis meant to take, at the end. Another followed half a vehicle length behind it. Then came four more. The whole procession advanced, roughly single-file, accelerating to meet him.

If these guys had had time to form a plan, they might’ve spread out like horsemen riding abreast. No way could Travis have rammed through that barrier; his vehicle weighed exactly as much as any one of theirs. But in the few seconds available, as the closing distance shrank toward zero, the column simply stayed in a straight line, bearing toward Travis in an impromptu game of chicken.

At least maybe it looked like that from their point of view.

Travis jerked the wheel to the right at the last possible instant, veering past the leader. As he did, he saw the rest of the line begin to destabilize, the Humvees braking or jogging to one side or another—little movements that betrayed their drivers’ confusion. But Travis was passing the formation almost too quickly to notice those things—or to care. Sixty miles per hour, he’d read somewhere, was just under ninety feet per second. With these vehicles moving the other way at the same speed, he was passing them at closer to one hundred eighty feet per second. In hardly more than a second they were all behind him, just shapes in his side mirror, stopping and turning and trying not to slam into each other like cops in an old movie.

Travis braked hard and took the turn at the end of Main doing thirty, then gunned it again along the secondary street. He could already see the curve ahead that would take them uphill toward Raines’s. No doubt the three men still up there had their guns in hand by now. Travis guessed this vehicle’s shell could withstand 9mm fire, but he wasn’t certain of it.

He took the curve and saw the incline rising above him, steep as any street in San Francisco. There were houses to his left and right, but just ahead the way opened up on both sides to a broad, empty grassland. Raines’s house was three hundred feet above that point, the redwoods almost at its back wall.

Travis saw the three spotters. They had their guns. They were positioned way up next to the house itself, maybe ready to duck inside it if they needed cover.

They wouldn’t. Travis didn’t give them a second glance. He pulled hard right on the wheel and left the road altogether, angling up across the slope to miss the house by two hundred feet. As the redwoods drew nearer, he sized up the gaps among them. At a distance, the trees had been just a visual screen, but at this range he could see several openings that would admit the Humvee. They probably wouldn’t get far into the woods, but any distance was better than none.

They were still a hundred feet from the trees when the spotters at the house opened up. A burst of a dozen shots hit the window right next to Travis; the pane bulged inward as the glass sandwiched between the lexan layers shattered. Other salvos pattered against the vehicle’s metal sides. Travis aimed for the biggest opening in the trees, and a second later they were through it, deep in the shadows and the green-filtered light beneath the boughs. He angled back to the left; Jeannie had said the mine access was straight uphill from the house. He dodged a trunk that loomed out of the dimness, and saw a gap between two others, just ahead, that for half a second looked wide enough to pass through. Then it didn’t. He stood on the brake and felt the huge tires slide in the sandy soil. He cranked the wheel right, felt the vehicle rotate without actually changing course, and a moment later, sliding almost sideways along its path, it rocked to a halt.

Travis shoved open his door, heard Paige and Bethany scrambling out of theirs. Far away down the slope, men were shouting and heavy engines were racing; the Humvee column was less than thirty seconds behind.

The three of them ran. Clambered up the needle-carpeted slope. Scanned the way ahead for any sign of the shaft’s opening. It occurred to Travis for the first time that the thing might be difficult to spot. It might be choked with ferns and low scrub; it might look like nothing but a patch of undergrowth at any distance beyond ten feet—it might be impossible to see that it was an opening at all. He worried about that for five seconds and then Bethany screamed “There!” and shot her arm out ahead, and Travis saw that his concerns had been groundless. The shaft access was an upright opening, like a garage door but a third smaller. It formed the end of a rough, squared concrete tube that jutted straight out from the hillside, its end cracked and worn and showing rebar.

They sprinted for it as the engines roared behind them. Tires skidded and metal thumped hard against wood, and then doors were opening and voices were shouting again, no more than a few dozen yards back. Beneath all those sounds Travis suddenly heard his cell phone ringing. Jeannie, calling with the information from the old files. He ignored it, pointed his MP5 behind him and fired a quick burst. He heard feet slip and men curse as they went for cover. The access was right ahead now, fifteen feet away, pitch black beyond the tunnel’s mouth.

“Watch out for a drop-off,” Travis said, and then they were inside, blind for a second as their eyes tried to adjust.

An instant later Paige sucked in a hard breath and stopped—she threw both arms out to block the others.

There was a drop-off.

Ten feet in, the concrete floor ended as neatly as a high-dive platform, empty space beyond the left half, black metal stairs descending beyond the right half. Paige led the way down. Ten steps, then a landing made of the same metal gridwork, and another flight. And another. At the bottom of the fourth they touched down on concrete again—another horizontal tunnel. It stretched twenty feet and terminated against a slab of solid metal, eight feet square, visible in the pale glow of an overhead mercury lamp.

There were giant hinges on the slab’s left side, and there was a keypad on its right.

Travis stared.

He felt his thoughts begin to go blank.

High above, sounds reverberated through the stair shaft. The sliding of feet and hands on loose soil outside. Then the scrape of boots skidding to a halt on concrete.

Paige and Bethany ran forward, getting clear of the shaft. Travis followed, but at a walk; he’d barely noticed the sounds. All his attention was on the giant door.

Which was green.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“What the hell do we do?” Bethany whispered.

Paige could only shake her head.

There was a handhold inset in the steel just below the keypad. Her sense of futility manifesting in her body language, Paige took hold of it and pulled. The door didn’t so much as rattle in its frame.

Behind and above, in the shaft, more footsteps thudded into the concrete tunnel. Voices spoke in low, soft tones, some of which carried unusually well in the strange acoustics.

“We called it in,” someone said. “They want them alive, whoever they are.”

Someone else cursed softly, then said, “Okay.”

Paige turned from the door and faced Travis, and seemed thrown by the look in his eyes. He imagined he appeared numb. He sure as hell felt that way.

“What is it?” Paige said.

Travis took a deep breath. He steeled himself for the likelihood—it should’ve been a certainty—that the dream had been only a dream. That this was the mother of all coincidences, and a cruel one at that.

Up in the shaft, something like a backpack dropped to the concrete. Tough fabric with metal objects clattering inside. A zipper came open.

“Travis?” Paige said.

He stepped past her to the keypad. Above the buttons was a simple readout, like a VCR’s clock. There were glowing blue dashes where digits could be entered. Five of them.

“There’s a dozen masks in one of the back storage holds,” someone up above said. “Go get them all.”

Then came a faint but sharp sound from atop the stairwell. Some tiny metallic thing being pulled free of something else. Like a key drawn from a lock, but not quite.

Travis blocked it all out and thought of the dream. The old man—the Wilford Brimley lookalike—staring at him from a few inches away. Asking over and over what was behind the green door. We already know the combo, the old man had said.

And then what?

What exactly had come after that?

High up in the vertical shaft, something bounced hard against the wall—by its sound Travis pictured a can of shaving cream, though he was pretty damn certain it wasn’t. The thing ricocheted again and again, hitting the stairs, the walls, the landings, making its way down. Travis turned with Paige and Bethany and watched it hit the bottom, less than twenty feet from where they stood. They could barely see it in the vague light there, but there was no real mystery as to what it was. It came to rest and did nothing for two seconds. Then it jumped and skittered and started blasting thick gas into the air. Tear gas or pepper gas or some variant. Another canister came rattling down after it. Then another.

“Shit . . .” Bethany whispered. Her voice gave away a tremor.

The gas churned and curled toward them in delicate wisps.

We already know the combo.

Travis closed his eyes.

A second passed.

He opened them again and turned back to the keypad.

At the corners of his vision he saw Paige and Bethany watching him, confused.

He entered the numbers carefully but quickly: 4–8–8–5–4.

The instant he punched the last one the keypad flared with green backlight. Something very heavy thudded inside the door, and with a hiss of air pressure the huge slab kicked open an inch.

Both Paige and Bethany flinched. They looked back and forth between Travis and the keypad. Then Paige stowed her bafflement and grabbed the door’s handhold again. Travis gripped it too, and they pulled it outward more easily than he’d imagined was possible. There had to be an unseen counterweight somewhere beyond the hinges, balancing the whole thing so that it pivoted smoothly.

In a few seconds they had it open a foot and a half. Travis saw darkness beyond, tempered by another mercury light somewhere above. He also saw the thickness of the door itself: at least five inches of steel. He stood aside and ushered Paige and Bethany through first, then glanced back along the short corridor behind them.

The ragged front of the gas cloud was three feet away.

Someone up in the higher chamber said, “Did you hear something?”

“I don’t know,” came the reply.

Travis followed the others through the opening, turned and took hold of an identical grip on the door’s far side.

“How about this?” he shouted, and leaned back and dragged the door shut with a booming clang.

A second later the heavy mechanism inside the door thudded again, and when Travis tested the slab by shoving his shoulder against it, it felt as though he were pushing on the base of a cliff.

It crossed his mind that the guys upstairs probably knew the combination too—if not, their superiors could sure as hell give it to them—but almost before the thought had formed, he saw that it didn’t matter.

Waist high on this side of the door was a sliding bolt latch, similar in shape to the little ones you could get in a hardware store for three or four bucks. This one had probably cost more—its bolt was thicker than a baseball bat. Travis grabbed its handle, rotated it upward out of the notch it rested in, and rammed the bolt sideways into its seat in the frame.

For a few seconds none of them spoke or moved. Travis stood there with his hand still resting on the bolt, Paige and Bethany close by and staring at him, waiting for him to explain.

By the echoes of their breathing, Travis sensed they were in a much wider space than the corridor they’d just come from. The tiny light above this side of the door shone mostly straight down, casting a glow over the three of them, but leaving deep darkness everywhere else.

Travis turned from the latch and met their stares.

He described the dream in every detail he could recall. The strange little room swimming and warping, as if he’d been drugged even before the dream began. Richard Garner tied upright to a dolly. He himself bound in the same way. The old man asking what was behind the green door, and saying the combination aloud. The empty syringe on the tray. And right at the end, the drug’s harsher effects kicking in, spreading pain up to his heart and then everywhere else.

That was it. He couldn’t remember any more. He was pretty sure there hadn’t been any more.

As he finished telling the story, a series of indistinct thumps began to transmit through the steel door. Travis pictured men in gas masks on the other side, pounding and kicking the slab. After a moment he heard what might’ve been shouts, but they were so faint he could’ve been imagining them. He put it all out of his mind.

Paige turned and paced at the edge of the light pool, hands in her hair.

“Eliminate what it wasn’t,” she said. “It wasn’t an ordinary dream that happened to contain the code for this door. Not a chance.” She shut her eyes. “So what the hell was it?”

“I don’t think it was a dream at all,” Travis said. “I think what I saw and heard was really happening—to someone else. I think Richard Garner is still alive, tied up in that little room, wherever it is. And there’s somebody tied up there with him, being drugged and interrogated. I think I was seeing through that person’s eyes.”

He knew how that sounded to both Paige and Bethany. It sounded the same to him.

“The part about Garner being alive is plausible, anyway,” Bethany said. “I’ve heard from more than one person that there’s a mock-up of the Oval Office somewhere else in the White House—a mock-up of the part you see on TV, anyway. They say there’s even a defocused projection to simulate the background behind the windows. If Garner anticipated any threat last night, he could’ve broadcast from there; the missile would’ve probably still knocked out the TV signal.”

“I can accept that he survived,” Paige said. “I can even accept that there was some kind of internal action against him right after that, with Holt in charge of it. But the dream—”

“I don’t understand it either,” Travis said. “Is there a Breach entity that could account for it? Something that ties you into someone else’s senses for a little while?”

“I’ve never heard of one that could do that,” Paige said. “What are you thinking—that if something like that existed, someone could’ve used it on you? That someone wanted you to hear the combination?”

“I don’t know,” Travis said. “I don’t see how that would work, it’s just . . . it did work. Whatever it was, it worked. The door combination was right.”

“There are entities that interact with the brain across distances,” Bethany said. “Blue flares, for example.”

Paige nodded absently, but didn’t look swayed. Blue flares were a fairly common entity type; a couple hundred had emerged from the Breach since the beginning. As with nearly all entities, no one knew what their creators had used them for, but their defining characteristic was that you could make them heat up just by thinking about them—if you focused hard enough and consistently enough. In tests people had gotten them up to over eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit in less than a minute, from distances as great as one hundred feet, and with walls in the way. But heating up was all they did. They didn’t connect one person’s eyes and ears to someone else’s mind.

“If there were an entity like that,” Paige said, “how would someone outside Tangent have control of it? Why wouldn’t I have heard of it?”

Even as she asked the question, her expression changed. Travis saw her feeling the edges of the same possibility he’d begun to consider.

“Your father recruited a group of powerful people in 1987,” Travis said, “to act against what Ruben Ward set in motion. Would it be surprising to learn Peter supplied them with Breach technology, if he thought it would help them? Maybe even things he kept off the books in Border Town?”

Paige bit her lip. The idea didn’t sit well with her, but she couldn’t dismiss it either.

“I know I’m reaching,” Travis said. “I don’t know what else to do. I saw a five-digit number in a dream, and it opened a door in the real world. Something made that possible.”

Paige nodded, still looking uneasy. “I’m sure we’ll find out what it is. One way or another.”

For a while no one else spoke.

The vague thumps against the steel door had ceased.

Bethany frowned. “The dream itself—or whatever it was—doesn’t make sense to me. The old guy was asking what was behind the green door, but he already had the combination. Couldn’t he just come and see for himself? More to the point, wouldn’t he already know what was here? Wouldn’t these people know about the Stargazer? Holt sure as hell should know; he’s working with them—the ones who sent Ruben Ward here to create the damn thing.”

On that point Travis couldn’t even reach. She was exactly right: Holt should know. It made no sense at all for him and his associates to be out of the loop.

“So why didn’t they use the combo?” Paige said. “They had it, and it definitely works—we just proved that. Why not send these contractors in here hours ago to take a look around? They were two hundred yards away at the house. Or if Holt didn’t trust them enough, he could’ve come here himself. None of it adds up.”

Travis nodded slowly. More gaps in the puzzle. The whole middle of the image was nothing but a void.

Every instinct told him that was about to change.

He wasn’t half as sure they’d like what it changed to.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

They found a long switchplate on the wall, just visible in the gloom three feet from the door. Five switches, all down. Travis flipped them up one by one, and the chamber lit up in discrete zones until the whole thing was blazing.

It was bigger than he’d expected—a nearly perfect cube of space, forty feet in each dimension—but its size lost hold of his attention almost at once.

What grabbed it was the layout.

The place looked like a loft apartment cut out of solid stone. There was a kitchen area in the far right corner, complete with cabinets, a range, a deep sink, and a huge refrigerator. A few recent issues of Newsweek lay on the counter. Ten feet away was a couch facing a flat-panel television on the wall, and beyond that, filling the nearer corner, was a bedroom suite. It included a bathroom of sorts—not really a separate room but just a vanity butted up against a glass-block shower enclosure, and a walled-off area containing a toilet. A stacked washer and dryer stood nearby. The wiring for all of it—switches and outlets and overhead lights hanging out of the dimness high above—ran in black conduits fixed to the stone walls. The conduits converged on a breaker box near the kitchen, from which a much thicker conduit plunged through the chamber’s floor.

That was the right side of the room. The left side had a computer desk at the far end, its data cable climbing the wall and disappearing through the ceiling. Travis hardly noticed it. His eyes had been drawn to the rest of that wall—and the array of additional flat-panel monitors that covered it, three screens high and ten wide. They were each the same size as the television in the living room, but while that one remained dormant, all thirty of these had come on when Travis flipped the light switches.

They carried video feeds from the forested slope surrounding the mine access, a strange equivalent to Defense Control in Border Town, with its dozens of angles on the empty desert. In some of these shots of the redwoods, the access itself was visible, with contractors milling around looking pissed. On closer inspection Travis saw that the rough opening appeared vacant in some of the images. After a second he realized what he was really seeing: the other access Jeannie had told them about, across the ridge and lower down.

Travis looked at the screens a few seconds longer, then turned his focus to the room’s most commanding feature.

The pit.

It was exactly centered, measuring maybe fifteen by fifteen feet—a square donut hole, in proportion to the chamber’s floorspace. A steel-tube handrail boxed in its entire perimeter except for a three-foot gap where a flight of stairs descended. The same kind of stairs they’d come down a few minutes before. From where he stood, Travis could see only a few feet of the hole’s depth, but he knew it went a long way down. This was the actual mine shaft. The concrete floor around it bore the scars of its long-abandoned function: corrosion-stained outlines, dotted with masonry bolt holes, where the footings of heavy equipment had rested. Twin grooves worn faintly into the surface, three feet apart and parallel to each other, extended from the pit back to the green door and right under it. There’d been a rail track here at one time, for heavy-duty carts and maybe a gantry crane.

The last thing Travis took in was a red metal locker fixed to the wall at the near end of the bank of monitors. It was shaped more or less like the one he’d had in high school, but was half the height and positioned at chest level. It had a standard drop-latch with a hole for a padlock, but no lock had been put into it. On impulse Travis went to it, lifted the latch and opened the door. Nothing inside. He closed it and turned back to Paige and Bethany.

“He lived here,” Paige said. “Allen Raines. He had the house down at the edge of the woods, but this was his home.”

Travis nodded. The illusion would’ve been perfect. From town, people would’ve only seen Raines park his vehicle at the house and walk in the front door. They wouldn’t have seen him continue right through the place, out the back and up into the trees; from a flat viewing angle the undergrowth and low boughs would’ve hidden him completely.

“It must’ve mattered,” Bethany said. “Being right inside here almost all the time, instead of down at the house. It must’ve made a difference, in terms of his handling of the Stargazer.”

On the last word her eyes went unconsciously to the pit.

Travis nodded again, and started toward the railing.

He was halfway there when the snapping buzz started back up, the same as it’d been in the alley. The field-of-grasshoppers sound, deep inside his head. The only difference was that it was stronger now—a lot stronger—this close to its source. It brought Travis to a halt, and after a few seconds he found his balance deserting him. He saw Paige and Bethany swaying on their feet too. He put his hands forward and let himself lean in the same direction, ready to control the fall if it came. As before, the sound—the thought—intensified until it felt almost physical. Like there were things moving inside his head. Skittering little legs and wings and mandibles, descending the brainstem now, boring toward his throat. Bethany shut her eyes and gritted her teeth and sucked in a deep breath, and Travis was sure she was about to scream at the top of her lungs—

And then it was gone again. A perfect cutoff, like before. Paige put a hand to her stomach, eyes widening for a second. Bethany released the pent-up breath. She looked rattled all to hell. Looked like she might scream anyway, but didn’t.

Travis dropped his arms to his sides and steadied his breathing—he realized only now that it’d gone shallow.

He went to the rail.

Paige and Bethany stepped up to it beside him.

They stared down and said nothing for probably half a minute.

The pit had to be six hundred feet deep. Maybe deeper. Mercury lights every thirty feet or so lit up the descent. The stairs wound down in a squared spiral, following the shaft walls and leaving a wide-open drop in the middle. Seen from up here, that open space shrank to a tiny square by the time it reached the bottom. There was no way to discern the structure of what was down there—to know whether the shaft accessed a horizontal run, or did something else altogether.

The only visible detail was a soft red glow that shone onto the lowest flights of stairs, its source apparently somewhere off to the side. Its brightness waxed and waned in random patterns, and even its color seemed to vary within a narrow range: deep red for the most part, but for fleeting instants it seemed closer to neon pink.

Travis looked at the stair treads just beneath him. He followed them down and around through half a dozen flights. Each step had a layer of dust covering its ends, left and right, but was clear in the middle. They’d seen regular use.

“These stairs weren’t part of the mine’s original architecture,” Travis said. “Workers weren’t lugging tons of ore up sixty flights back in the day. The stairs were built later on, for Raines’s use. Power consumption and maintenance probably ruled out a lift, but a person could go up and down these all the time, with the right pacing. Take it slow, don’t kill yourself.” He paused. “Whatever Raines was doing to keep the Stargazer in check, it required him to go down there and deal with it directly.”

He didn’t need to finish the point aloud: the three of them would have to deal with it directly too.

“When we see it,” Paige said, “do you think it’ll be obvious what we’re supposed to do? Do you think we’ll just know?”

“Only one way to find out,” Bethany said.

But they didn’t go that minute. They did three things first, none of them difficult.

They searched the chamber for any kind of paperwork that might help. Maybe, by a long shot, the cheat sheet would turn up.

It didn’t. They checked the kitchen cabinets, the desk drawers, the space beneath the mattress, the vanity, even the couch cushions. Nothing.

Next they switched on the computer and Bethany scoured Raines’s files. There were hundreds of songs and audiobooks and movies and television shows that’d been downloaded from iTunes. The web browser’s history showed lots of visits to mainstream news sites, YouTube, and a scattering of blogs. There were very few document files on the computer—just instructions for various programs that’d probably come with the system. There was nothing about Tangent or Scalar or the Stargazer. Nothing useful at all.

The third thing they tried came to Travis as Bethany was reaching to shut off the computer.

“Hold up,” he said.

He followed the data cable with his eyes, up to where it punched through the ceiling.

“How does the system get online?” he said. “Cell transceiver, right?”

Bethany nodded. “It must be hidden up in the trees, like the surveillance cameras.”

Travis took his phone from his pocket and switched it on. As expected, there was no signal at all.

“Jeannie called me right before we came in off the slope,” he said. “She must’ve found out who lived downstairs in 1978.” He indicated the data line. “Is there any way to plug that into my phone? She might’ve left a voicemail.”

Bethany thought about it. She slid the computer’s case out from under the desk, pulled two thumb tabs and removed its side panel. She leaned close and scrutinized a card attached to the motherboard.

“No problem,” she said.

While she rigged the connection, Travis gazed at the wall of monitors. The contractors were still gathered near the squared tunnel that led into the hillside. Still pissed. One of them was on a phone, yelling at someone.

Travis noticed a few angles he’d overlooked before. They were interior shots of the tunnel right outside the green door, just resolvable through the gas cloud from the canisters. Other images showed an identical door that must be built into the second access—it was clear of gas, and no one stood outside it yet. Now as he watched, two men in ventilator masks made their way to the first door. Each had something in his hand, but through the haze the objects were impossible to identify at first. Then the men used them. The first held a tape measure. He pressed its tab into the gap on the hinged side, and walked the tape sideways until it stretched across the width of the door. The second man turned out to have a hammer, a standard-sized claw type. He rested an ear against the door and used the hammer to tap very lightly on the steel. Travis heard the tapping on this side, but only faintly. A few seconds later both men retreated back toward the stairs.

“We’re in business,” Bethany said.

She held his phone out to him, the computer’s cable attached to an exposed board within it.

Jeannie had left a voice mail. In 1978 only one person had lived in either of the apartments beneath the Third Notch. A woman named Loraine Cotton. She’d moved in during the fall of the previous year and stayed through all of 1978.

Bethany patched the data line into her tablet computer and quickly pulled up Loraine Cotton’s history. She seemed, by every measure, to be an actual person. She’d been born in 1955, which made her 23 when she lived beneath the restaurant. At that time she’d just gotten a biology degree from Oregon State, specializing in forest ecosystems, and had apparently come to Rum Lake on a grant to study the redwoods. Her choice of such a dismal apartment made more sense in that light; she’d probably only gone inside the place to sleep, if even then—maybe she’d tented in the woods part of the time.

Loraine’s career path had changed pretty dramatically in March of the following year, 1979. She’d moved up to Bellevue, Washington, and taken an entry-level job at a small company that’d just moved its operations there: Microsoft. By the turn of the millennium she’d been worth over half a billion dollars.

“She’s on Twitter,” Bethany said. She pulled up the site and navigated to Loraine’s profile. “Doesn’t tweet much. Once every few days. Last one’s the day before yesterday: says she’s on vacation—Kings Canyon in the Australian Outback.”

Travis paced, rubbing his forehead.

“A passageway beneath the Third Notch,” he said. “Look for Loraine Cotton in apartment whichever. The message from the Breach sent Ruben Ward to meet her. It’s like she was intended to be another pawn. One that was going to last a lot longer than three months.”

“And have massive financial resources at her disposal after a while,” Paige said. “If whoever’s on the other side of the Breach had a presence on our side by that time, maybe they recognized the potential of a company like Microsoft—even back then.”

“Plenty of regular humans recognized it,” Travis said. “They all own islands now.”

He stopped pacing. He stared at the floor for a second, thinking hard. Something in what they’d just learned about Loraine Cotton had set off a ping, but he couldn’t get his mind around it. He gave it another ten seconds’ thought but got nowhere. He let it fade. Maybe it would come to him on its own.

He looked at a clock above Raines’s refrigerator. Twelve thirty. Six hours and fifteen minutes left before Peter Campbell’s estimated deadline. All at once it seemed like all the time in the world, but Travis took no relief from that fact. If things went well down in the shaft—if they saw what they had to do, and were able to do it—then he imagined it would all unfold pretty quickly. And if things didn’t go well—if they went bad in ways he couldn’t guess at the moment—then that would probably unfold pretty damn quickly, too.

They went.

The going was easy on the stairs. They were well constructed and solid and the mercury lamps put out plenty of light. Travis led the way. Every few flights he leaned over the handrail as he descended, and got a slightly closer look at the deep floor of the pit. Still no details. Just the slowly pulsing red-and-pink light.

They were some two hundred feet down when Travis noticed a break in the pattern of stairs far below—maybe two hundred feet lower still. It was as if the squared spiral had been compressed by ten feet at a single point. Like an accordion held open vertically, with just one pleat of its bellows pinched shut in the middle. He stopped for a moment and stared at it, and realized what it was: a horizontal walkway where a flight of stairs would’ve otherwise been. A single stretch that went sideways instead of down. From this high angle he couldn’t see the shaft wall at that spot—the flights above it blocked it from view—but he knew what was there.

The three of them stopped again when they were only fifty feet above the level walkway, facing it from the opposite wall. From this vantage they could easily see the opening there, where a side tunnel branched off the shaft into pitch darkness.

They stared at it a few seconds and then continued downward, but Travis kept his eyes fixed on it as they made their way around. He couldn’t admit it out loud, but something about the opening unnerved him. Some ancient fear coded right into his DNA was setting off an internal klaxon, telling him it was a bad idea to walk past a dark cavity in a rock face. He had his MP5 slung on its shoulder strap, the same as Paige and Bethany, and was on the verge of taking hold of its grip as they came down the last flight before the tunnel. Only logic kept him from doing so. This was an abandoned mine in the present, not Olduvai Gorge a million years ago. Nothing with claws was going to erupt from the darkness and try to have them for lunch. That’s what he was thinking when he was two treads above the walkway, and then a man’s voice out of the blackness said, “Stop right there.”

Chapter Thirty

There was no sound of a gun being cocked. Just a tone confident enough to imply one.

Travis stopped.

Paige and Bethany stopped behind him—he heard their breathing cut out at the same time.

“Keep your hands away from the weapons,” the man said.

“We’re not going to drop them,” Travis said. There was caution and then there was stupidity.

“I’m not going to ask you to,” the man said.

A moment later there came the soft crunch of a careful step, followed by another. Travis saw a hint of movement in the darkness, clothing catching the indirect spill of mercury light ten feet back in the tunnel.

Then the man said, “You’re Travis Chase.”

The unreal quality of the moment passed quickly. The analytical part of Travis’s mind kicked in, firing off questions. Who was still alive who could both recognize him and be inside this place? Had the voice sounded familiar? He had no immediate answer for either one.

“Who are you?” Travis said.

“I think you’ll remember me. I’m coming out now. My weapon’s holstered.”

More footsteps. Then a shape materialized out of the gloom, and a second later the man was standing right at the tunnel’s opening, hands out at his sides in a nonthreatening stance. He glanced up the flight at each of them in turn, then looked at Travis and waited for him to speak.

Travis knew him. He’d met him just over a year ago under very tense circumstances, and spent a few hours in his general vicinity. He couldn’t remember if they’d spoken directly—if so, it would’ve been just a few words. Paige and Bethany wouldn’t recognize him at all; they’d been in the same room with him for ten seconds back then, but their faces had been pressed to the floor, and there’d been a lot of shooting going on.

“Rudy Dyer,” Travis said. “Secret Service for Richard Garner.”

Travis introduced Paige and Bethany. The three of them filed down onto the walkway and into the open space at the tunnel’s mouth. Between themselves and Dyer they formed a rough square a few feet apart from one another, in which everyone could see everyone else. Travis had his back diagonal to the walkway’s railing. He turned and looked over the edge at the bottom of the shaft, now just two hundred feet below. From here he could resolve the lowest flight in the spiral. It didn’t terminate against a solid floor, but instead tied into a flat walkway like this one, which led out of sight to one side. Though he couldn’t be sure, Travis had the impression there was no floor at the bottom of the shaft. That instead the vertical channel punched down into some broader chamber beneath it, whose bottom might be dozens of feet further below, and whose width and length he couldn’t determine.

He stared a moment longer, the red glow almost hypnotizing at this range. It saturated the bottom walkway and the steps there, and every visible inch of whatever lay beneath it all.

Travis looked up and saw Dyer gazing down at it too. Then the man trailed his eyes upward until he was craning his neck to stare at the top two thirds of the shaft, rearing above them like a chimney seen from deep inside. Travis got the impression that Dyer was looking at it all for the first time.

“You came in through the other access,” Travis said.

Dyer nodded, at last leveling his gaze and turning to face the group. “I only got here half an hour ago. I was in Barbados with my wife and daughter when I got the news last night.”

“How did you know the door combination?” Paige said.

“Garner gave it to me, just after he took office again last year. He told me—” He cut himself off, looking puzzled about something. Travis realized the same puzzlement had been there, under the surface, from the moment Dyer had stepped out of the dark. The man looked from one of them to the other. At last he said, “Are you guys it? None of the others made it?”

“Others?” Travis said.

Dyer nodded. “This mine is the rally point. Everyone still alive is supposed to show up here.”

Travis thought of the people who’d been killed in unison with Garner, all over the country. The power players Peter had met with, all those years ago.

Still looking confused, Dyer said, “No offense, but I didn’t think you guys were part of the group. You’d be just about the last people I’d expect to meet in this place. How did you get the combination?”

Travis met Paige’s and Bethany’s eyes. Their bafflement matched his own. Clearly Dyer knew a lot more than the three of them did—he’d learned it directly from Garner.

Travis looked at Dyer again. The man stared and waited for the answer.

“We’re honestly not sure how we got the combo,” Travis said. “We think Breach technology was involved, but if so, it was a kind we’ve never heard of.” He shook his head. “Look, you seem to have the whole picture of this thing. We’ve been piecing it together slapshot since last night, and we’re missing big chunks of it. If you know it all, please tell us.”

Dyer frowned. He seemed to struggle with some deep indecision. “This is all happening wrong,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”

“Tell us what it is supposed to be like,” Paige said.

For a moment Dyer just stood there. He looked troubled by the idea he needed to express. Then he said, “The whole point is not to tell you. That’s what it’s supposed to be like. No current member of Tangent is supposed to know anything. Not for a few years yet.”

Travis found himself getting tired of the confusion. “You’re right,” he said. “It is all happening wrong—the people you expected aren’t here. But we are. I assume your purpose is the same as ours.” He nodded over the rail behind him. “To do whatever can be done about the Stargazer.”

Dyer looked more thrown by that than anything so far. “That must be an old nickname for it. Whatever you want to call it, I don’t think much can be done. Just management, like Allen Raines was doing.”

“You’re not here to stop it?” Paige said.

Dyer shook his head.

“What about the deadline?” Bethany said. “A little over six hours from now.”

“That’s the deadline,” Dyer said, “but it has nothing to do with what’s in this mine.”

Paige looked frustrated. “Just tell us everything. We already know the basics. We know Ruben Ward got instructions from the Breach in 1978. We know he spent that summer carrying them out. We know my father picked up on it later, and the Scalar investigation spent six years following Ward’s trail. Which led here, to whatever Ward created in this mine. So tell us the rest. Tell us what needs to be done, and we’ll help you do it.”

Dyer stared at her. His expression went almost blank, as if his thoughts had turned inward to process what he’d just heard.

“You’ve got the first few points right,” he said. “The rest is way off. Ward didn’t create anything in this place, and the Scalar investigation never picked up his trail. For all practical purposes, he didn’t leave one.”

Travis remembered their conversation on the Coast Highway. Their uncertainty as to how the investigation could’ve accomplished anything at all.

“But they spent hundreds of millions doing something,” Bethany said.

“Probably more like billions,” Dyer said. “Most of the cost was likely hidden one way or another.”

“The cost of what?” Bethany said. “What the hell did they do?”

Suddenly Travis knew. He realized he might’ve known hours ago, if he’d given it more thought. Might’ve guessed, anyway; he couldn’t have known for sure until they reached this place.

“Holy shit,” he whispered.

Dyer nodded, seeing his understanding.

“They did the only thing they could do,” Dyer said. “They knew from the beginning that Ward’s trail was long gone, and so was the notebook with the instructions written in it. Trashed or burned before he killed himself. They were never going to see it again.”

“They needed a do-over,” Travis said.

Dyer nodded again. “They needed another Ruben Ward. And this is the place where they tried to get one. At the bottom of this mineshaft they created the second Breach.”