Deep Sky

sounds like when Peter met with these guys in 1987, he handed them the responsibility for Scalar. He must’ve known by then that it would take people that powerful to oversee the problem. Maybe he even knew what we know: that whoever’s on the other side of the Breach has a presence established on this side already. A powerful presence, if they can control people like Holt. It makes sense that Peter recruited power players of his own. The meeting in Rum Lake was a changing of the guard.” He was quiet a few seconds. “But I don’t think that’s all it was. I think there’s a reason they met there, of all places. Maybe there was something there Peter needed to show them. I think Rum Lake is at the heart of everything. I think whatever Ruben Ward did in those three months before he killed himself, he did it there.”

“It fits with the rest of it,” Paige said. “The investigation sure as hell dialed in on that place at the end. My father was there three times before the meeting.”

“We also know that whatever the solution was, it wasn’t permanent,” Bethany said. “Peter was afraid it could be undone in a single day, even years later. That would explain why Allen Raines stayed in town for good. Because someone had to—to keep an eye on whatever’s there. To babysit it.”

Paige gazed away toward the airport. The runways and the white sides of the terminal gleamed in the hard light.

“Without the Tap we’re not going to get the cheat sheet,” she said. “Not in Rum Lake or any of these places. If we could’ve gone back a year, or a week, or even a full day, sure. But in the present, forget about it. Holt’s people will have raided the homes of everyone who died last night, looking for that document. They wouldn’t even need to sneak around; they could go in with authority. He’s the president.”

Her expression darkened and she shook her head. Travis knew her anger was aimed inward. Knew she was replaying her failure to recover the Tap.

“There was nothing you could do,” he said.

If it helped her to hear that, she didn’t show it.

“Look at the bright side,” Bethany said. “They tried to kill us.”

Both Travis and Paige turned to her.

“Think about it,” Bethany said. “They took out all these guys last night because they needed them out of the way—because if they’d lived, they might’ve stopped whatever’s unrolling right now. Holt’s decision to bomb Border Town is no different: he or whoever’s calling the shots had some reason to fear us. They set the trap at Carrie’s place to verify that Tangent didn’t know anything, but when you got away and took her with you, it was their worst-case scenario. They knew Tangent would know something after that. At least as much as Carrie knew. Which wasn’t everything, but apparently it was enough to spook them.” She paused. “They knew we didn’t have the cheat sheet, but they came after us anyway. That implies we’re a genuine threat to them. That there’s some Achilles’ heel we could find, even without the help of that report.” She looked back and forth from Travis to Paige. “We should be encouraged by that. If they consider us a threat, then we are one.”

“If there’s an Achilles’ heel, it’s at Rum Lake,” Travis said.

“And they’ll be protecting it with everything they’ve got,” Paige said, “even if they’ve eliminated all the threats they’re aware of. Today of all days, they’d err on the side of caution.” She looked at Bethany. “Can you try to get satellite coverage of that town?”

Bethany nodded and got working on it, but didn’t look hopeful. Travis recalled something she’d told him once about the likelihood of a place being visually covered. Spy satellites orbited pretty low, and their paths were set up to maximize the time they spent over places of interest. War zones, terrorist-friendly areas, sites of possible weapons programs. Other places in the world might end up having consistent coverage, but only if they happened to line up with one of those chosen regions. In most places and at most times, like Border Town in the past hour, it was more miss than hit. The globe was very big, and satellite tracks were very narrow.

A minute and a half later Bethany frowned. “One pass over Rum Lake, just under ninety minutes from now. I should be able to tap into it. We’ll get about sixty seconds of visual. That’s the only one to go over between now and the deadline tonight.”

“Ninety minutes isn’t bad,” Paige said. “Flight time to Northern California’s two hours anyway.” She nodded at the airport. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Travis and Paige sat at a wall of windows overlooking the desert while Bethany spoke to a lone ticket clerk thirty feet away. Except for the four of them, the private terminal was empty.

Travis spoke quietly: “There’s something about the Baltimore memory I didn’t tell you.”

He relayed what Ruben Ward had said in the alley, word for word. When he’d finished, he watched Paige process it. Her eyes tracked over the desert, or maybe just the glass three feet in front of her.

“Filter,” she said. “What could it be? Something the Breach itself does? Something that triggers a change in a person, like the Breach Voices?”

“I wondered the same thing,” Travis said. “It’s all I can come up with, based on what little he said.”

Paige repeated Ward’s last line in a whisper: “Whoever it affects, it’s not their fault. Not really. Under the wrong conditions, anyone could end up the worst person on Earth.” She looked at Travis. “You think it’s going to be you. You think the filter is . . . it.”

Travis stared at a dry weed growing against the base of the window. The breeze batted it endlessly into the glass.

“I can’t imagine it’s not,” Travis said.

Paige was quiet a long time. Then she said, “Maybe it won’t happen at all now. The timeline we’re in is so different from the other one—the one you and I sent our messages back from. Everything’s changed. Tangent doesn’t even exist anymore, in this version of events. Maybe whatever was coming has already been cancelled out.”

“The Whisper gave me the impression it was inevitable—and the Whisper tended to be right about things.”

For a moment neither said anything more. They stared at the empty horizon. Behind them, Bethany was reciting a string of numbers: some kind of financial information related to her alternate identity.

“The instruction that came back from your future self,” Travis said. He looked at Paige before continuing. “Do you ever wonder if you should’ve followed it?”

She turned to face him, and when she replied her tone left no ambiguity. “Never.”

Travis saw hurt in her expression. She hated that he’d asked the question—probably hated that he’d even had it rattling around in his head.

“That part we do know something about,” she said. “We know the disagreement between us—in that future—comes from a misunderstanding. Whatever it is that you do, I interpret it the wrong way. I react on limited information—withheld information, from the sound of it. Something you’re not able to tell me, at the time.”

“That’s the part I understand least,” Travis said. “Something that important, you’re the first person I’d talk to. You might be the only person I’d talk to.”

He’d kept only one thing from her before: the note from her future self. Its arrival had caught him like a sucker punch, and he’d had only seconds to decide whether to show it to her or not. In that moment he’d simply panicked, but in time he’d told her everything; there wasn’t a single secret between them now.

“I really can’t get there,” he said. “Keeping you in the dark about anything at all—I can’t imagine it.”

He left his next thought unspoken: that unimaginable wasn’t the same thing as impossible.

They chartered a flight to Petaluma, California. Half an hour after wheels-up Travis felt himself begin to nod off. He realized he hadn’t slept all night—the sleep he’d gotten in 1978 didn’t count, as far as his body was concerned. He reclined his seat and shut his eyes and slipped almost at once into a dream. A strange one: Richard Garner was there with him, tied upright to a dolly—like Hannibal Lecter but without the face mask. President Holt was there, too, standing near an old man who looked like Wilford Brimley. Maybe it was Wilford Brimley. The room was small and had no windows. It spun and undulated,