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 young even for her age—could’ve passed for twenty without a hitch. When she really
“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.”
“Well, see, that’s the bad news,” Bethany said. “You’re going to have to.”
She zoomed in until the middle third of the north stretch filled the screen. At that resolution, something became visible that hadn’t been before: a broad zone of Monument Street crossed out with diagonal lines. They extended right up onto the sidewalk to the building’s edge. All told, about fifty feet of the street’s length were marked out.
“What the hell is that?” Paige said.
“Construction. A service tunnel for the Baltimore Metro. The system didn’t go live until 1983, but they spent years building it before then. In the spring of seventy-eight they hadn’t yet started on the rail tunnel itself, the one that terminates at Broadway and Monument. Instead they were putting in a conduit for power and maintenance access four hundred feet east of that intersection, dead-centered on the hospital’s north side.” She dragged the image left and right and pointed out the exits Ward might use. “Two doors are west of the dig site, two are east. Whichever side you choose to wait on, you’re stuck with. I don’t think you’re going to get across the construction zone.”
“I might,” Travis said. “If it’s late at night, the work crew may have already gone home.”
“Can’t count on that,” Bethany said, “but even if they have, the dig itself is a major obstacle. This isn’t just some torn-up blacktop with plastic fencing stretched around it. I found an old
“So if you guess wrong about which side he comes out on,” Paige said, “you’ll have to run around the block. How big is the one north of Monument? Is it square like the main hospital’s block, or is it shallower?”
“Normally, shallower,” Bethany said. “Madison Street is just a couple hundred feet north. But that’s dug up, too, so you’d have to go up to the next street, Ashland Avenue. I already did the math. No matter where you stand to watch for Ward, if you’re on the wrong side, you’ll have to run at least half a mile around. During which time he could wander off down a dozen possible alleys or even flag a cab—so what if he’d have to stiff the driver? He was desperate to get away from that place.”
Paige looked up from the computer at Travis. “I hope you were a fast ten-year-old.”
“Me too, because there’s no second shot at this. The memory’s burned whether I get the notebook or not.”
Chapter Fourteen
They planned what they could, as quickly as they could, devoting just under twenty minutes to it. They mapped the route—eleven hundred miles, about sixteen hours’ drive time with present speed limits.
“But not 1978 limits,” Travis said. “Fifty-five everywhere back then.”
“Even on the freeways?” Bethany said. She looked doubtful.
Travis nodded. “Sammy Hagar wasn’t kidding.”
He did the math in his head: at fifty-five the trip would take twenty hours.
Which was a problem.
Realistically, he’d have to steal the car late at night when both his parents were asleep. That would be well past midnight, probably closer to one or two. Twenty hours after two in the morning was ten the next night—in the central time zone. In Baltimore it would be an hour later. Factoring in stops for gas—which might take a while the way Travis was going to do it—could easily add another full hour. He’d be lucky to reach Johns Hopkins by midnight.
“Ward could already be gone by then,” Paige said. “All we know about the timing is that he leaves at some point after Nora does, and we don’t know when
“And I could be a lot later than that,” Travis said. “My dad might stay up until four instead of two. I might hit traffic jams.” He stared at Bethany’s computer, the highlighted route winding through seven states. “I’ll go a day earlier. Steal the car Friday night, get into town Saturday night.”
