Patrick Lee - Deep Sky

“If we get Holt in and out of here fast enough,” Paige said, “say forty-five minutes, then we’ll have ten hours left to work with. In the first hour alone you could use the Tap a dozen times, if need be.” She winced at the thought of his actually making that many trips with it, but the power of the idea shone clearly in her eyes. “If we find out what’s actually going on, what’s happening right now, today, we’ll still have hours left to go on offense against it.”

“No kid gloves,” Travis said. “If it’s a matter of just finding certain people and killing them, we do it. We use any Breach technology necessary. We do it. Simple as that.”

Paige was nodding. So was Bethany. Both looked a little unnerved, but neither looked uncertain.

“So who did my father meet with?” Paige said. “Carrie called them a mixed bag of powerful people. Politics, intel, finance. How do we find them?”

“We need a starting point,” Bethany said. “Any little piece of information about your father’s meeting with them—location, date, someone’s flight number, anything at all. Just something I can get my nails into.”

“What about flights?” Travis said. “We know the meeting happened at the end of the Scalar investigation, which should be sometime near the final entry in the index downstairs—November 28, 1987. Assuming Peter flew there from here, could we find a record of his departure and destination? Does the airbase in Browning have traffic logs?”

Paige shook her head. “Not for us. We’ve never allowed any of our comings or goings to be documented. Anonymity’s a good line of defense.”

Bethany looked thoughtful. “There might be other records from that time, though.” She turned to Paige. “Do you have your father’s social security number somewhere?”

“It should be in the system,” Paige said. She minimized Word on the laptop and opened the personnel records. Ten seconds later she read the number to Bethany, who entered it into her tablet computer and got to work.

Paige’s cell rang. It was someone from Defense Control on level B4, which served as Border Town’s air traffic control center. Air Force One was five minutes out.

A minute later Bethany said, “Might have something.” She continued navigating on her computer as she spoke. “Do either of you remember the rough dates of the two index entries before the last one, on November 28? I can run down to the archives and check, if you don’t.”

Paige closed her eyes and concentrated. She opened them a few seconds later and said, “The second-to-last one was about a month earlier, at the end of October, and the one before that was six weeks earlier still—mid-September.”

“Definitely have something then,” Bethany said. “Take a look.”

Travis and Paige pressed in behind her and stared at her screen. Travis realized he was looking at a financial record of some kind, with credits and debits listed in columns, along with transaction labels.

“These are Peter Campbell’s credit-card statements beginning in September of 1987,” Bethany said.

If the invasion of privacy bothered Paige, she didn’t show it.

“He didn’t use the card a lot,” Bethany said. “Understandably. Living here, why would he? But in mid-September we’ve got four charges clustered over three days. A gas station and three restaurants, all located in a place called Rum Lake, California.” She looked at Paige. “Ever hear him mention it?”

“Never heard of it at all until just now.”

“Well he went there a few more times,” Bethany said. “Late October and late November, a couple days each trip, corresponding with the final two entries downstairs in the archives, and then one last trip that doesn’t match an entry. That was in mid-December. I’ve looked back through these statements to the beginning of 1984—that’s as far back as it goes—and there are no other Rum Lake charges. No more of them after these four trips either. So it wasn’t just some getaway he went to all the time, with the dates of his trips just happening to match the Scalar entries. This place was directly tied to Scalar, right at the end.”

“Carrie said he flew somewhere for the meeting,” Paige said. “But it was just one meeting—not four of them separated by weeks.”

“I’m thinking the meeting is just the final trip,” Bethany said, “in mid-December. It makes sense that there’s no index entry for that one downstairs, if he purged the files right when he got back from it. Why create a new file just before you get rid of them all?”

Paige nodded, following the logic.

Bethany minimized the window and opened another. “So for starters I’ll focus on the last trip, and see if I can identify anyone else who showed up in Rum Lake at the same time. I’ll get into the merchant accounts of these places where Peter ran his card, and pull up the rest of the transactions over those days. Maybe some other customer’s info will send up a flag—like if it’s someone who lives in D.C. or works in the intelligence business. Power players, right?”

“That sounds like a lot of digging,” Travis said. He thought of all the card charges that would’ve happened at those businesses during the days in question. Once she had that information, Bethany would need to access personal information on every one of those customers to see who stood out.

“It’ll take time,” Bethany said. “There’s not exactly an app for that. Not until I script one, at least. Give me a few minutes.”

Sixty seconds later the three of them were in the elevator, rising toward B4. Bethany held the tablet computer in one hand while the fingertips of the other flew over its touch-screen. She kept her focus on it even as the doors parted and the three of them stepped out. The open doorway to Defense Control was twenty feet ahead and to the left. Light from its numerous LCD screens bled into the corridor, along with the voices of half a dozen people inside. Paige led the way in.

Defense Control was about the same size as the conference room, though more spacious because its ceiling was twice as high. The flat wall that paralleled the corridor was lined with small equipment cabinets and much larger, semi-portable mainframe computers the size of industrial refrigerators. The far wall was a sweeping half circle, covered floor to ceiling with giant high-definition monitors. Each one carried a live video feed from one of nearly a hundred cameras embedded in the desert above.

Evelyn Rossi, Defense’s ranking officer, paced near the room’s central workstation and spoke into a wireless headset. “ Air Force One , I have you at one-seven-zero knots, heading zero-eight-five. Maintain course and descent.”

Evelyn caught Paige’s eye and nodded hello.

“Pilot provided the verification code?” Paige said.

“Yeah.”

Travis let his eyes track over the room’s other workstations, set up to handle less-friendly situations. Technicians sat at or stood near these desks, idle but ready to engage in a hurry. Along with the network of cameras, the desert around Border Town hid one of the world’s most formidable defensive systems, designed to counter both ground and air-based attacks. The most critical ingredient, though, was simply the policy of not allowing unauthorized aircraft anywhere near the place. Even Air Force One had to forgo its usual complement of escort fighters when it visited.

Several of the screens on the curved wall had a visual of the giant aircraft, less than a mile out now, though its details were still vague. Every camera up top was either snug with the ground or raised above it by no more than a foot, which meant that when focused on a distant, nearly ground-level subject, they all looked through curtains of heat-ripples rising off the baked landscape. The effect was present now on every screen in the room, reducing the distant 747 to no more than a shimmering blob with wings.