The Fog of Dreams
Page 48
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William Strickland had wanted to dig into the permit documents the minute he got to his hotel, but he knew sleep was more important. He'd located a tiny little off the beaten path hotel in a town about twenty miles north of his home where he hoped he could effectively disappear, at least for the moment. Pulling the beat-up sedan into the parking lot, he leafed through one of the lockboxes he'd retrieved from his house and pulled out the requisite paperwork for one of his many aliases. There was a driver's license and a handful of credit cards, all looking completely legitimate. He also pulled out a wad of cash and decided he would probably start with that first to make this visit untraceable. A nice old lady behind the checkout counter took his cash with no questions and signed him off on Room 225. There were not many amenities, but a place to stay and collect his thoughts. Best of all, he couldn't think of any reasons why representatives from the NSA would end up this far north.
After a rousing six hours of sleep, Strickland was awake, the sun already high in the sky and his mind free of disturbing dreams. Before he even showered, he dressed and pulled out the folder that he had liberated from the town hall the previous night. Sitting at the table, he spread out the documents from the folder and sorted them, checking out architectural drawings, water and sewer map, and an outline of his property. That was the first diagram that really caught his eye. His property line wove throughout a large chunk of woodlands and his house only appeared to occupy the small front right corner. Looking at the map, he saw a path sketched out through the woods, and what looked like another out-building about two hundred yards behind his house. He had no memory of what this building might be, but he was sure it deserved some investigation, and probably sooner rather than later.
The next documents he lifted out were the blueprints and architectural drawings themselves, which, as he imagined they might, revealed the small room off to the north side of the basement. Flipping through other documentation, he located another permit that gave him the information he was looking for. In a small blue box in the lower right hand corner was printed Pollard Construction, Inc. The name stared out at him like a beacon from a coast side lighthouse yet meant little to him in a direct sense. He knew this information was important, but he was not yet sure why it would be so. That little nugget of instinct buried deep within his skull throbbed at him, telling him to pay attention to this. Slowly, an idea formed in his mind.