“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:
“That’s all,” she said.
Travis stared at it. He knew the word
“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
“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
The elevator
“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