Deep Sky Read online

  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, i
f 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 t
he 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.