by Patrick Lee
“Nellis said he and a few guys at the top asked around,” Paige said. “Discreetly, among people they trust, mostly in the intel community. They even talked to some retired guys, on the possibility that Scalar is an older reference. Which it seems to be. So far the only people to recognize the word were both from around President Reagan’s time. One was a senator who chaired the Intelligence Committee back in the day, and the other was the deputy CIA director for a good chunk of the eighties. Both of them recalled Scalar as the name of an investigation from that time, but here’s the interesting part: neither one of them was ever cleared to know anything about it, beyond the name. Although there were some things they ended up learning anyway—things that couldn’t be hidden from them.”
“Like what?”
“Like the investigation’s budget. Whatever Scalar was—whoever was running it and whatever they were looking for—it had no spending limit. Any requested resource—I imagine things like satellite access, classified records access—was granted by the White House without delay, no questions asked. Scalar cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and spanned most of the 1980s, yet nobody in Congress, and nobody at the CIA, knew anything about it.”
They reached the elevator. Paige pressed the call button. She turned to Travis as they waited. He saw something in her eyes. Some kind of understanding.
“Nellis said he wouldn’t have believed that,” she said, “except that he heard it independently from each of these guys tonight. Even then, it’s pretty hard to swallow. He said he couldn’t imagine there was anybody out there with that kind of authority. Anyone powerful enough and secret enough to get that sort of cooperation from the United States government, with apparently zero oversight.”
Travis suddenly understood what her expression was about.
“It was us,” he said. “Scalar was a Tangent investigation.”
“I think it had to be,” Paige said. “Nellis made a few more calls, this time to higher-level people who are in power right now. He ended up getting a couple minutes on the phone with, well, I guess it’s President Holt now. Holt’s known about Tangent for some time—vice presidents are usually in the loop. When Nellis described Scalar for him, I’m sure Holt made the same assumption you and I just made.”
The elevator dinged softly and the doors parted. Travis followed Paige into the car. She pressed the button for level B48. The archives. It made sense. Though the files down there were mostly related to Breach entities and the experiments done on them over the past three decades, there were other kinds of records kept there too. If Tangent had been behind the Scalar investigation, whatever it was, the archives should contain a massive amount of data about it.
“Did the president give the FBI your number?” Travis said. That was hard to believe.
Paige shook her head. “The White House must have set up the call through a blind socket. Nellis didn’t even know my name when he introduced himself on the phone. Didn’t know anything about Tangent, either.”
Travis thought it over, watching the button display as the elevator dropped through the complex. He understood now why Paige had told Nellis it was a dead lead. If she’d told him the truth—that crucial evidence for an FBI investigation might exist here in Border Town—it would’ve created all kinds of jurisdictional problems. The FBI would’ve wanted access to this place, and they would’ve wanted to do a lot more than just look through the archives.
That wouldn’t have happened, of course. Not in a million years. The FBI would have been denied without even getting confirmation that Tangent existed. But it would’ve still been a political mess. And an unnecessary one. The simplest move was for Tangent to review the evidence itself. Then any information worth sending to the FBI could be routed through the White House, credited to a classified source. Nice and neat.
The elevator chimed again and the doors slid open on the archives. Travis followed Paige out.
The place had the look and feel of a library basement, some kind of periodical dungeon not set up for public use. Simple, black metal shelves. Narrow channels between them—just enough room for a person to pass through. The shelves reached the ceiling, ten feet up, and were lined with gray plastic binders. Each binder had a handwritten label fixed to its spine, filled out in a standard format with a given Breach entity’s name and number, followed by a string of letters and numbers Travis couldn’t make sense of. Some improvised Dewey decimal system created by Tangent’s founders back in the early years, before computerized storage had become standard.
As Travis understood it, the most recent fifteen years of data had been created on PDAs and filmed on digital camcorders. All of that information now fit easily onto a few rack-mounted servers, tucked away somewhere on this floor. But all the data older than that—roughly the same amount in terms of information content—had been written out by hand and filmed on analog tape. That data filled essentially the entire floor, ten thousand square feet of densely packed physical storage.
Paige led the way toward a clearing among the shelves, fifty feet out from the elevator. A desk stood centered in the open space.
“I take it you’ve never heard of Scalar yourself,” Travis said.
“Not even as a passing reference. Unless I’ve forgotten. And I can’t imagine I would have—whatever Scalar was, it sounds like it was a very big deal.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as odd? That nobody ever mentioned it to you? All these years?”
“It strikes me as close to impossible,” Paige said. “If Scalar happened in the eighties, my father would’ve known all about it. So why would he have kept it from me, later on when I came to work here?”
They passed into the open space and crossed to the desk. It was a big, practical thing: four feet by eight, black metal legs and surface, the same as the shelves. Five wooden chairs shoved under it at random. The desktop was bare except for a giant binder lying on its side, gray like those on the shelves, but much thicker. Ten or twelve inches wide at the spine, the thing was essentially a cubic foot of paper encased in hinged plastic. The word INDEX adorned the cover in adhesive block letters.
Paige heaved it open to about the midpoint of the post-bound stack. There were little tabs sticking out of the pages’ sides at intervals, marking the alphabetical arrangement. The pages were tightly packed with text under headings that were mostly entity names, though some were simply the names of people, or various labs or stations within Border Town.
The entries themselves, beneath the headings, each consisted of just a date and a string of letters and numbers—the same kind that appeared on each of the shelved binders. A locator code, pointing to a specific place in the archives. Each heading had dozens of such entries below it, indicating random places all over level B48. Travis understood the basic logic: for any given entity, each time a new experiment was carried out, the results were filed away in the archives wherever space was available, and the location was recorded in the index. It was much easier to do it that way than to continually rearrange all the shelves to keep related material bunched together.
The index had clearly been updated often over the years—each page bore a mix of typed and handwritten text.
Paige flipped to the S section and navigated to where Scalar should’ve been.
It was there.
And it wasn’t.
The heading was certainly there, right at the top of its own page.
SCALAR.
Beneath it, Travis counted seventeen separate entries, with dates ranging from 1981–06–04 to 1987–11–28. The locator codes were there too. The entries looked like all the others in the index, with one exception.
They were all crossed out.
Each had a simple line drawn through it, horizontally, in pen. The same pen, for all of them. It’d been done in one sitting—a single decision to cancel it all out. Yet there’d been no real attempt to conceal what the entries said. Travis was sure he knew why—was sure Paige knew too.
Five minutes later they’d co
nfirmed it. At every one of the shelf locations listed in the seventeen entries, the Scalar files were gone. In their place the shelves were either empty or else filled with newer, unrelated material—binders labeled with entity names. Paige opened each of them anyway and flipped through their contents, on the chance that the relevant data had simply been disguised within them. It hadn’t.
“But it was here,” Paige said. “This was a real investigation, and Tangent was behind it. It lasted at least six and a half years, and during that time they filed the paperwork here in the archives. And then they got rid of every trace of it, and as far as I know, they never even talked about it again.”
She looked at Travis. Shook her head.
“What the hell was it about?” she said.
Chapter Four
They were back in their residence on B16, in the living room. Travis was sitting in a chair by the couch. Paige was pacing a few feet away. The LCD screen was on, tuned to CNN. The coverage was the same as when they’d left the conference room upstairs; all that’d changed was that the damage to the Oval Office was now concealed by a giant white tarp, pulled tight and square over a framework of scaffolding. It looked sharp and clean and dignified. Like a flag on a coffin.
For the past few minutes the commentary had focused on Garner’s legacy, including measures he’d supported and signed into law. An extension of the tax credit for electric vehicles. An aggressive education reform bill. Additional funding for a much-derided research program at Harvard and MIT called the Methuselah Project, aimed at learning how to counter—and even reverse—human aging by the middle of the century. It’d never sounded all that crazy to Travis; no crazier, at least, than sending a person to the moon or plugging most of the world’s computers into one another.
There was no mention of the message the assassin had left behind.
“The top people at the FBI have already called the best sources they can think of,” Travis said, “including the new president, and they’ve turned up almost nothing. Our safest assumption is that they’re done making progress—that no one in power knows anything about Scalar. No one who wants to help, anyway.”
“Which means Nellis is probably right: whoever did this left the message just for us, no doubt assuming we’d know what the hell it meant.”
Travis considered the strangeness of their situation. “Not only don’t we know who we’re playing against, we don’t even know what the game is. We better find out on our terms before we find out on theirs.”
Paige sank into the couch. “I don’t understand why my father never told me about Scalar.”
That would be a tricky question to answer. Paige’s father was dead, along with nearly every member of Tangent who’d known him. Paige herself, though only thirty-two years old, was by far the most senior member of the organization, with just over a decade’s involvement. There was a reason for that. Three years ago, the chain of events that’d originally brought Travis to Border Town had also, in the end, brought about the deaths of all but a handful of its inhabitants. The cataclysmic violence responsible still visited Travis’s dreams. Paige’s, too. He woke her from them a few times a month.
In time new members had been recruited, as quickly as caution afforded. Within a couple years the ranks had been essentially refilled. Then, while Paige and most of the senior personnel were on business in Washington, D.C., they’d come under attack by heavily armed assailants—the opening salvo of a new conflict. Paige alone had survived. From that moment on she’d been the only person in the world capable of leading Tangent. The strongest of the few threads tying its present form to its past.
“I worked here alongside my father for the bulk of the last decade,” she said. “Him and a hundred others. And most of them had been here since the beginning, which means Scalar happened on their watch. Why wouldn’t a single person have ever spoken of it?”
“Can’t have been a trust issue,” Travis said.
“Not a chance. We all trusted each other with everything. With our lives.”
“What other reason, then?” Travis said. “Embarrassment?”
Paige glanced at him, visibly uncomfortable at the thought. She shook her head, but Travis thought he saw more uncertainty than refutation in the gesture.
For thirty seconds neither of them spoke. The just-audible television took the edge off the silence.
Then Paige’s eyes widened a little and she said, “Blue.”
The word seemed to surprise her even as it came out. She stood from the couch and crossed to the short hallway leading to the bedroom. Travis stood and followed.
She had the computer’s monitor switched on by the time he entered the room. The computer itself had already been running.
“Blue status,” Paige said. She clicked open the file manager and navigated through a series of folders. Travis didn’t even try to keep track of them. “It’s a set of security measures we use for people who retire from Tangent.”
“I didn’t know anyone ever had retired from Tangent,” Travis said. “Except me, for the time I was gone.”
“It almost never happens,” Paige said. Her attention stayed with the computer as she spoke. “Three times, total, in thirty-four years. Not counting you.”
She reached the end of a directory tree, and Travis saw a folder icon that looked identical to all the rest, except that it was tinted blue. Paige clicked it. An input field opened, calling for two distinct passwords. Paige typed them quickly; only the second required any thought.
A personnel file opened on the screen. The format was familiar enough to Travis. He’d seen his own file and several others during his time here.
But he’d never seen any of the three names that now appeared on the monitor.
Rika Sengupta.
Carrie Holden.
Bartolo Conti.
“All three were here from the early days,” Paige said. “My father probably recruited them himself.”
Within seconds Paige clicked open each of their files and arranged them in three separate windows, visible at the same time.
All three had joined Tangent between the summer of 1978—the year the organization was formed—and the end of 1979. Original cast members, so to speak. Travis scanned the retirement dates for each file. Sengupta, Holden, and Conti had resigned in 1989, 1994, and 1997, respectively. All three had been with Tangent for the entire time Scalar was under way.
“Sengupta and Conti left for health reasons,” Paige said. “Both were very old when they retired—they wanted to spend time with their families while they could. Neither made it to the new millennium.”
“And Carrie Holden?”
“I only know a little about her. She was young when Tangent formed—early thirties. So, mid to late forties when she retired in ninety-four. She’d be into her sixties now.”
“Why did she retire?”
“I don’t know. I remember my father talking about her, sometimes. She was pretty important around here, in her day. But he never said why she left.”
She clicked to expand Holden’s file, filling the screen with it. There was a thumbnail photo that probably dated to the late seventies: a young woman with blond hair and green or hazel eyes. The file’s text dealt mostly with her pre-Tangent background—she had degrees in chemical and physical engineering from Caltech. There was nothing about her retirement, neither the reason for it nor the identity she’d assumed upon leaving.
“She’d have to know something about Scalar,” Paige said. “Certainly more than anyone else we’re going to find.”
“Can we find her? If she’s hidden as well as I was, her new name won’t be in the computer. Only the person who created the identity would know it—someone with Tangent in 1994—and that person has to be dead by now.”
Paige nodded. “That person was my father.”
“I don’t suppose he randomly let the information slip.”
“No. Not directly.”
Paige swiveled her chair to the side. She traced a pa
th on the carpet with her foot, back and forth.
“I think they had a history,” she said. “She and my father. Some connection during the time they both lived here. He never said so, but that was the impression I got. The way he spoke when her name came up. Things other people said, and stopped short of saying.” Her foot slowed and came to rest. She looked at the computer but made no move to use it. “There was this strange little moment, one time. One of those things you end up filing away and never really thinking about, because it’s awkward. It was probably five years ago. I walked into my father’s office in the Primary Lab, and he had two things on his computer screen: a picture of Carrie Holden, and a Google satellite map. When he heard me come in, he flinched and closed them both, the map first and then the picture. It was very out of character for him—hiding something, being jumpy. But a second later when he turned to me, it was like nothing had happened. Totally casual—he ignored the moment entirely. So did I. I pretty much had to. And later on, when I had time to think about it, I was glad I’d done that, because I was pretty sure of what I’d walked in on. I think the map must’ve been the place Carrie relocated to, and my father was just … thinking about her. No special reason. You know what I mean?”
Travis nodded. He thought of the two years he’d worked in a shipping warehouse in Atlanta before coming back to Tangent. On occasion he’d found himself slapping a label onto a box of brake pads bound for Casper, Wyoming, less than eighty miles from Border Town. He’d stare at the box for a few seconds, dwelling on the fact that in a day or two it would be much closer to Paige Campbell than he himself would probably ever be again. Irrational as hell, but he’d done it all the time. It wasn’t hard to imagine Peter Campbell, in a private moment, gazing at a map of the place where Carrie Holden had ended up.
“You didn’t see the map clearly enough to get the location,” Travis said.