Deep Sky

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