by Patrick Lee
When he reached Paige, she put her hand on his arm and left it there for a second.
“It’s bad,” she said, and led him through the doorway.
It was everyone. Standing room only. All eyes on the three large LCD panels on the right-side wall. Live news feeds: CNN, MSNBC, Fox. All three had aerial coverage of some structure on fire, surrounded by emergency crews. Travis looked from one screen to the next, seeking the clearest angle on the event, and after a few seconds the middle image pulled back and there it was.
The White House.
Burning.
More specifically, one of its wings was burning; the central portion of the house looked fine. Travis couldn’t tell whether it was the east or west wing that was on fire without knowing which way the aerial shots were pointing. He finally let his eyes drop to the captions at the bottom of each screen, and understood. An explosion, very near the Oval Office, possibly inside it. He studied the image again. Only a gutted cavity remained of the president’s office, all of it aflame despite two streams of water going into it from fire trucks on the scene.
“He was in there,” Paige said. “He was on TV, live, and then it just went to black. About a minute later they started reporting on it.”
The story resolved over the next two hours. Details came in, sketchy and then solid. The three networks must’ve had nearly identical sources—with each new piece of information, their chyrons updated almost in unison.
Twenty minutes into the coverage the secretary of state confirmed that President Garner had been killed. Vice President Stuart Holt, in Los Angeles for an environmental summit, was already in the air on his way back to Washington. He would be sworn in aboard the plane.
Travis found it hard to see Garner’s death in its proper light—its global and historical significance. Garner had been a friend, and now he was gone. That was the only way Travis could feel it, for the moment.
He tried to stay focused on the coverage. The details of the blast had already begun to crystallize. There were dozens of witnesses who’d seen a contrail in the air at the time of the explosion, though it was unclear, at first, whether it’d belonged to an aircraft or a missile.
Then, five minutes after the official announcement about President Garner, all three networks cut away from the White House to a new feed—still an aerial shot, but at a different location. A residential street somewhere. A cul-de-sac full of more emergency vehicles, mostly police cruisers but also an ambulance and a single fire truck. The house at the end of the cul-de-sac was heavily damaged in some way that was hard to make sense of. Most of its roof had been blown off, and the debris lay scattered around it, but the walls and even most of the windows appeared intact. Nothing was burning.
Around him in the conference room, Travis saw sudden looks exchanged. He glanced at Paige and saw her focusing hard on the televised images. The house. The missing roof.
A man to Travis’s left said, “Archer.”
A few others nodded, Paige among them. After a moment she seemed to feel Travis’s stare, and turned to him.
“Archer is an old Air Force program,” she said. “Goes back to the fifties. Defensive missiles concealed in civilian areas. Supposed to be a last line against a nuclear strike.”
Travis watched the implication spread across the room. President Garner had just been killed by someone in his own military.
It took less than an hour for rumors of the Archer program to filter into the broadcast coverage. Travis wasn’t surprised. Secret as the program was, it had to require hundreds of people to operate it. Maybe thousands. Impossible to keep them all quiet in the aftermath of something like this.
By two in the morning there was official confirmation that Archer existed, and that it had been used against the White House. CNN got an Air Force general on the phone who addressed those two points and then spent the next five minutes saying nothing at all in a dozen different ways. No word of a suspect. No word of a motive.
The helicopter footage remained the backdrop throughout, mostly covering the White House but occasionally returning to the cratered home on the cul-de-sac.
Travis had an idea that no further news was coming tonight, though the investigation had probably made serious headway already. No doubt there was an official suspect, dead or in custody. Those working the case probably knew most of what they would ever know. But they would be very careful parceling out that information to the public. The process would take weeks, not hours.
By 3 A.M. the crowd in the conference room on level B12 had begun to thin. Paige looked at Travis and communicated her thoughts without a spoken word.
Five minutes later they were in their residence on B16, under the covers, holding each other close in the dark. Travis could think of nothing to say. He thought about Garner. Knew Paige was thinking about him too. Only platitudes came to Travis’s mind. Garner had lived a long and dignified life. He would be remembered forever. His death had almost certainly come without pain. Maybe without awareness, even—the blast had probably killed him before he could see or hear it.
All of it true.
None of it helpful.
He kissed Paige’s forehead. Pulled her closer. Felt her body relax as sleep came on. Felt himself begin fading too.
Paige’s phone rang on the nightstand. She rolled, picked it up, squinted at the display. Travis saw by her reaction that the number was unfamiliar.
She pressed the button. “Hello?”
The caller spoke for a few seconds. Travis could discern only enough to tell that it was a man’s voice. He couldn’t make out the words.
“Yes, I’m in charge here,” Paige said. “Who is this?”
The conversation lasted five minutes. Paige hardly spoke. Just quick affirmatives to let the man know she was still listening.
When the caller finally stopped speaking, Travis glanced at Paige. In the diffuse glow from her phone, he saw her staring at empty space, her forehead knitted.
Two more syllables from the caller. It sounded like, Still there?
“Yeah,” Paige said. She shook off whatever she was trying to think of. “What you’re describing doesn’t sound familiar to me. I’ll look into it here, but you should probably assume this is a dead lead.” The man spoke briefly again, and then Paige said, “Thanks, I’ll let you know.”
She ended the call. Her eyes narrowed as if she was reviewing what she’d heard, committing relevant details to memory.
“That was the FBI,” she said.
“About Garner?”
Paige nodded.
“Do they have a suspect?”
“Yeah. Commanding officer of the crew on duty at the Archer site—a man and woman, both murdered. Cameras inside the house caught it all; the officer didn’t even try to hide his face. They’re into his financials now, and it looks like he got a giant payoff weeks ago, and spent all the time since making it liquid. Getting ready to disappear. Which he’s now done.”
“They don’t know where the money came from?”
“No, and they probably never will. They called here because the assassin left a note behind. The FBI seems to think it was addressed to us.”
“But you think they’re wrong?”
“No, I’m almost certain they’re right.”
Chapter Three
Paige pulled the covers aside, arched her body across Travis’s, and stood from the bed.
“Come with me,” she said.
She crossed the room, naked, to the desk chair where she’d left her clothes. Travis stared at her body in the soft light. Some sights were just never going to get old. Then he stood and went to his own clothes, clumped against the wall, and began pulling them on.
“The guy on the phone was Dale Nellis,” Paige said, “chief of staff to the FBI director. He read me the note—it didn’t take very long.”
She opened a drawer in the desk and tore a blank page from a notepad. Then she took out a pencil and wrote a single line:
See Scalar.
“That’s all,” she said.
Travis stared at it. He knew the word scalar as a mathematical term, but couldn’t see what meaning it might hold in the context of the attack.
“The FBI ran the word through their computers to see if anything interesting turned up,” Paige said. “A last name, an organization title, something like that. But they came up empty. A few small businesses have used that title over the years. A computer repair company, some kind of school supply maker, nothing much bigger than that.”
“Not exactly the usual suspects,” Travis said.
Paige shook her head, then nodded toward the door to the hallway. A moment later they were outside the residence, moving along the corridor toward the elevator.
Nearly every level of Border Town had the same basic layout, its hallways in the shape of a big wagon wheel. One giant ring corridor at the outside, a dozen spokes reaching inward to the central hub that housed the elevator and the stairwell.
“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 mater
ial 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 confirmed 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