Deep Sky Page 8

  “You said there was something about a war,” Travis said. “Did she remember anything else about it?”

  Carrie shook her head. “No details. Ward had spoken in detail about it, and Nora had written it all down, but none of it was still in her head in 1981.” She went quiet a moment. Then: “There was something else. Probably the most compelling part of the message. A step process of some kind—a set of instructions. But again, Nora had lost the specifics.”

  The chill returned to Travis. It arced like electricity down his neck and along the skin of his arms.

  “The Breach gave Ruben Ward instructions?” he said.

  Carrie nodded. “He walked out of Johns Hopkins in May of 1978 with a set of orders literally in hand. Presumably he spent the next three months following them, and when he was done he put a bullet in his brain.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Nobody spoke for a long time. Travis watched the highway roll out of the darkness ahead. Snow and tire ruts and wind-scoured pavement.

  “What could the instructions have been?” Paige said.

  “That’s what Scalar was about,” Carrie said. “That question. Where did Ward go that summer? What did he do? What had he been told to do?”

  “Did they make any headway on it?” Travis said.

  “I really don’t know. I learned about the run-up like everyone else in Border Town, but once the investigation started Peter kept it tightly contained. Even the files in the archives were stored in secure cases. He and five or six others handled it all. Worked with the government to use their resources when necessary—probably things like law-enforcement databases, or even command of federal agents to follow up on leads. Once in a while we’d get a sense that there’d been some progress, but we never got the specifics. The only concrete thing I ever heard about the investigation was how it ended. Peter and the others flew somewhere—maybe D.C., but it could’ve been anywhere—to meet with a small group of very powerful people. From what little I heard they seemed to be a mixed bag: people way up in politics, intel, maybe even finance. The one detail I know is that Peter and the rest of his team prepared a report for these people before leaving Border Town. Some kind of summary of what Scalar had turned up, as well as a response plan. Like, Here’s what Ruben Ward did in 1978, and here’s what needs to be done about it. The rest of us called it the cheat sheet, because even though we never read it, we saw that it comprised just a single page.”

  “Pretty concise plan, whatever it was,” Travis said.

  “Important ones often are,” Carrie said. “And I had the feeling that whoever they met with agreed to it. Peter seemed relieved when he got back. He called us all together and said the investigation was over—Tangent’s role in it was, anyway. He said what mattered most now was simply forgetting about it. Said the subject was taboo.” She shrugged. “That was it. As far as we knew, the whole thing was settled for good.”

  Travis thought of Paige’s encounter with Peter in her memory. The man’s fear that she’d mentioned Scalar to someone outside Border Town. That she might have triggered some unthinkable chain of events simply by doing so. Peter had harbored those fears just five years ago—two decades after shutting down the investigation. Whatever Scalar had uncovered, Travis was pretty certain it wasn’t settled for good.

  “What exactly are we saying?” Paige said. “The moment the Breach opened it gave Ruben Ward instructions to do something, right? Something on behalf of whoever’s on the other side. They wanted him to do it. And he did. Then years later, my father learned about it—learned enough anyway, by the end of Scalar, to know Ward’s actions had to be countered.” She paused, thinking. “It’s like Ward set something in motion, and my father stopped it. Halted it, at least, got a lid on it—and spent the rest of his life terrified that the lid would come off. That means whatever this thing was, whatever Ward did, there’s no question it was something bad. Something very bad, with long-term consequences.”

  “That’s about the only way to read it,” Carrie said. The fear had risen in her voice again.

  Paige looked at her, then at Travis. “So whoever they are on the other side of the Breach,” she said, “they’re . . . malignant. They’re flat-out bad. That’s what we’re saying.”

  Travis glanced at her. Saw her expression drawn tight, her own fear unmistakable. And something else—almost a sense of betrayal. He understood why. For as long as he’d known her, Paige had been the closest thing Tangent had to an optimist. She harbored no illusions that those on the other side of the Breach were especially good—there was no basis for believing that—but she’d long held onto the idea that they were at least ambivalent. That they’d never meant for their dangerous technology to come spilling into human hands. That they probably didn’t even know about the accident that’d tapped into one of their transit tunnels. The Breach was dangerous, but only in the way that earthquakes and hurricanes were dangerous. There was no intent behind any of it. Whoever they were over there, they weren’t trying to do us harm. That belief had shored up Paige’s world for a long time. Probably since the first day she’d set foot in Border Town.

  The betrayed look flickered through her eyes for maybe a second, and then it was gone, vastly eclipsed by the fear that came with it. Her breathing accelerated and shallowed. For a moment she seemed overwhelmed, unsure how to respond.

  Travis felt it too. No doubt Peter had felt the same, by the time he’d finished speaking to Nora. By the time he’d grasped even the basics:

  Ward had done something for them.

  Something he’d needed to keep secret.

  Something he’d killed himself over, after the fact.

  Maybe Ward had followed the instructions against his will, his mind as fried by the Breach Voices as David Bryce’s had been.

  Travis tried to imagine Peter’s mind-set on that first day, in the summer of 1981—knowing that Ruben Ward’s work from three years before must still be playing out. That somewhere out there, at that moment, the dominoes were falling. Scalar had been a mad scramble to understand. To find the dominoes and stop them before the last one tipped.

  Peter had stopped them.

  So why was someone trying to set them falling again? One way or another, the people who’d killed Garner and laid the trap in Ouray were working against the end result of Scalar. Someone behind it all, pulling the strings, wanted to overturn the outcome. In all likelihood they’d already begun to do so.

  “Whatever Peter did was in all of our best interests,” Travis said. “Who could possibly have the motive to undo it?”

  The words hung in the air. No one had an answer. Snowflakes swirled in the headlights like stars broken free of the sky.

  “We need details,” Paige said. “We need to know who my father met with in 1987. We need to find one of them, preferably one who still has a copy of the cheat sheet locked away somewhere.”

  “It’d be a tall order getting your eyes on that document,” Carrie said. “It’s right up there with finding the original Scalar notebook, which Ward probably burned in a vacant lot before he killed himself.”

  At the edge of his vision Travis saw Paige turn to him. He looked at her and didn’t have to ask what she was thinking.

  “The Tap,” she said.

  “Nora,” Travis said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Even as hope flared in Paige’s eyes it guttered. On the one hand it’d be trivially easy for Nora to revisit the notebook in her memory—she’d written the damn thing; she could drop in and reread it at some point just before Ward disappeared. On the other hand, the Tap could kill her before it was even fully into her head. Forget whatever had happened to Gina Murphy; the pain and stress and increased pulse rate would be bad enough.

  “If it worked, we’d know everything,” Paige said. “I just don’t have any confidence that it would.”

  “Are you talking about an entity?” Carrie said.

  Paige nodded, and explained the basics of the Tap in less than a minute—
including the part about Gina. By the time Paige had finished, Carrie looked skeptical. Just like everyone who’d ever heard of the thing, before using it themselves.

  “You can forget about Nora, in any case,” Carrie said at last. “She died of breast cancer in 1989.” A silence. Then: “What if I gave it a try? I was thirty years old in 1978, and living in New York. If this thing works the way you describe it, I could go back, take a drive to Baltimore, and get my hands on the notebook without much trouble.”

  “The guards outside the room might be a problem,” Travis said. “Not to mention Nora herself.”

  “I’m not talking about sneaking in. I could walk up and introduce myself as a colleague of Ruben’s. I wasn’t, but I was close enough. I’d certainly followed his work. I only ended up with Tangent because I swam in the same academic circles as people like him and Peter Campbell. I could wing it with Nora, easily. Go in and sit at the bedside, wait for some distraction and grab the book.”

  Travis glanced at Carrie in the mirror.

  “How’s your heart?” he said.

  She shrugged with her eyebrows. “It’s not great. I’ve had a systolic murmur all my life. It’s louder in recent years, but that’s expected.”

  “Sorry to be blunt,” Travis said, “but your age alone is an issue. I’m forty-four and I thought it was going to kill me when I used it.”

  He didn’t add the rest of his thought—the part that was even more blunt: Carrie would have to think the Tap back out of her head once it was inside, a task she might not have the focus for in the middle of a fatal heart attack. What would happen if she died with it still inserted? Would the thing extract itself and revert to its cube shape, or would it just be stuck in there, useless forever? Carrie’s life was a lot to risk, but so was the Tap. As much as Travis hated the thing, there was no denying its usefulness.

  “It’s an unnecessary risk anyway,” Travis said. “I have an idea. Let me think about it for a few minutes.”

  For a while no one said anything more. The bullet hole whistled and the wind moaned at the open back window.

  Paige looked at Carrie. “You can still come back to Border Town with us. Probably the safest place for you.”

  Carrie thought about it, then shook her head. “If you don’t need me, I’d rather stay as far from Tangent as possible. I can take care of myself. In my less trusting days I hid stashes of money, and made a few useful contacts. Leave me the Jeep and I’ll be fine.” She was quiet a long moment, staring out the side window into the darkness. “I need to tell you one last thing, for what it’s worth. Something I overheard about a year after Scalar ended. I was heading toward the conference room, and I heard Peter inside, speaking to one of the others. They were alone. Something in their tone made me stop before going in, and before I could leave to give them privacy, I heard the end of the conversation. Peter said something like, ‘It’s clumsy as hell, the way we wrapped it up. If it goes bad now, it’ll happen fast. We won’t have much time to stop it.’ ‘How much time?’ the other man asked, and Peter said, ‘The first sign of trouble would be something big, and from that moment we’d have just about exactly twenty-four hours.’ I remember he paused for about ten seconds then, and when he spoke again he sounded more scared than I’d ever heard him. He said, ‘Yeah, twenty-four hours to the end of the road.’ ”

  Travis glanced at Paige and then, in unison with her, looked at the Jeep’s console clock.

  6:05 A.M.

  Garner had been killed at a quarter to ten the night before, in the eastern time zone—7:45 here in mountain time. Therefore the end of the road—whatever that implied—would be 7:45 tonight. Thirteen hours and forty minutes from right now.

  Paige called Border Town and arranged for a jet to meet them at a regional airstrip near Cimarron. No flight plan; the pilots radioed for clearance five minutes before arrival, on the likelihood that unfriendly elements were monitoring air traffic.

  Carrie was gone with the Jeep by the time the plane landed. The aircraft was on the ground less than three minutes, and as it climbed above the clouds and the first hard beams of sunlight shone through the cabin, Paige said, “Tell me.”

  Travis squinted in the glare. “In May of 1978 I was ten years old. Pretty big for my age. Stocky, probably four-nine.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “We know Ruben Ward leaves the hospital the night of May 7 by a north exit, carrying the notebook. We know the time to within a few hours. And we know he’s so weakened right then he can barely walk. Physically, between me and him it’s no contest. Snatch and run.”

  “You lived in Minneapolis. How are you going to get halfway across the country by yourself at that age?”

  “Steal my dad’s car and put the seat all the way forward. Minneapolis to Baltimore’s probably fifteen or sixteen hours if I obey the speed limit. Which I’d better, I guess.”

  He watched her warm to the idea in spite of herself. But only to a point.

  “You’ll have to make stops for gas,” she said, “and any station attendant is going to dial nine-one-one the minute you step out of the driver’s seat. That’s not to mention interference from other customers at the pumps. All of whom will be a lot older than ten, and not just emerging from a coma unit.”

  “I won’t need gas stations at all. Five feet of plastic hose will do the trick.”

  The biggest problem, Travis knew, would simply be other drivers on the road. Even at night he’d be visible at the wheel, at least in brightly lit areas like cities and busy stretches of the freeway. Though no one in 1978 would have a cell phone with which to call the cops, there was no question that people would take action at the sight of a kid driving a car. But after only a few seconds, Travis thought he had the answer to that problem too. He considered it a moment longer, felt certain of it, then pushed it away and turned to Paige.

  “I’ve been trying to think of someone better suited to taking a shot at it,” Travis said, “but no one comes to mind. Outside Tangent, we might’ve trusted Carrie if we weren’t likely to kill her in the process. Or Garner, if he were alive—though I’d have worried about his age too. And inside Tangent there are—what—four people older than me?”

  Paige nodded, her eyes suddenly far away as she consulted a mental roster of Border Town. Travis had already covered that ground in his own head. Tangent’s population was skewed pretty young these days, given the near total replacement of personnel three years earlier. The new recruits hadn’t come straight out of grad school, but nearly all of them were under forty. Academics with solid track records and sufficiently few ties to politics or industry, drawn from all the nations that’d jointly founded Tangent. Of the four people older than Travis, none were American. Two were just a year older and had grown up in France. Another was maybe three years older and Russian. The oldest, at fifty-one, would’ve been seventeen the night Ruben Ward made his escape from Johns Hopkins. Seventeen and living in a remote village in northern China.

  Whatever resistance Paige had harbored for the idea was slipping fast. She looked at the time on her phone; she’d been doing that every few minutes since Carrie had spoken of the deadline. Travis had done the same. Even this flight back to Border Town, dead straight at five hundred fifty miles per hour, felt like a colossal hemorrhage of time.

  “I can get to Baltimore,” Travis said. “I can get the book. It only costs us three minutes and sixteen seconds to try.”

  “I guess your odds are better than mine,” Paige said. “I was negative two in 1978.”

  They called Bethany and brought her up to speed, and by the time they’d landed, taken the Tap from the Primary Lab and returned to their residence on B16—at 8:25 in the morning—Bethany was waiting for them with all the useful information she’d unearthed. Which wasn’t a lot.

  “Couldn’t nail down the exact timing of Ward’s exit,” she said. She adjusted her glasses, the same oversized pair she’d been wearing when Travis first met her last year in Atlanta. She looked youn
g even for her age—could’ve passed for twenty without a hitch. When she really was twenty, she’d already been out of college and working for information-security firms, engineering the software that guarded the world’s secrets. In that field, the set of people on Earth with her skill level could’ve squeezed together into a good-sized elevator.

  “I assume the Baltimore PD got involved,” Bethany said, “once the hospital realized Ward was missing, but any dispatch info from that time is long gone. The computerized records only go back to the late eighties. If there was more detailed paperwork filed, like a missing-persons report with witness statements, and maybe a description of the hospital’s camera feeds, I couldn’t find it. There might be a hard copy on a shelf somewhere, but there’s nothing I can read over broadband.”

  “How about dated schematics of the hospital?” Paige said.

  Bethany frowned. “I scored a hit on that one, but you’re not going to like it.”

  She took a tablet computer from a big pocket on the side of her pants, switched it on and opened an image file. It was a huge high-resolution scan of a blueprint: an overhead view of part of the Johns Hopkins campus. She dragged it down so that only the top edge was visible: Monument Street running from Broadway to Wolfe—a distance of more than eight hundred feet.

  “You’re going to stand outside the place on the north side and watch the exits there, right?” Bethany said. “Wait for Ruben Ward to come out?”

  Travis nodded.

  “The good news,” Bethany said, “is that you should be able to see them all at once. The north stretch was pretty much the same in 1978 as it is now: four separate exits onto Monument, all of them roughly visible from any point on the other side of the street. Given the coma unit’s location within the building, Ward could’ve used any one of the four just as easily as another.”

  “Especially if he wandered at random for a while before he found one,” Travis said. “I won’t make any assumptions about where he might come out.”