The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

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 standin 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.