“All right.”
“Only the top four people in Tangent know that. Paige being one of them. They’re the same four people who went to D.C. They were the only ones involved in experimenting with these entities, figuring out their function. That work began this past Monday, not quite three days ago now. Paige and the others restricted the research to closed labs, and kept all their notes and video on secure servers. They must have figured out right away that these things did something big.”
“Is that normal?” Travis said. “Secrecy within Tangent itself?” It didn’t sound like any policy he remembered, but then he hadn’t been in Border Town for very long. His entire involvement with Tangent—and with Paige—had lasted less than a week, two years ago. He hadn’t wanted to leave, but in the end he’d learned something that made it unthinkable to stay. And what he’d learned, he’d kept to himself.
“The secrecy is a temporary policy,” Bethany said. “Paige feels bad about it, but she and the others at the top think it’s necessary for now. So much of the population there is new these days. They’ve had to refill the ranks almost completely in the past two years.” She glanced at him. “I guess you know about that.”
Travis nodded. “I know about that.”
“Well, it’s put a strain on the recruiting process. Tangent used to spend months vetting a single candidate, but lately they just haven’t had that luxury. They needed so many people, so fast, that the process had to be truncated for most of them. It’s just going to be a while before they can all be trusted like the former staff. Paige apologizes for it all the time. People understand, though. They’re well aware of the risk of another Aaron Pilgrim coming along. So, yeah, when an entity shows up that’s serious business, generally just the top few people are allowed to work with it. That’s how it went with these two.”
She set the cylinder back in her lap, half in and half out of the open backpack.
“So, Monday,” she said. “The closed labs. I know Paige and the others did a safety assessment first, because they took test organisms in with them. Fruit flies. Nematode worms. Half a dozen mice. I guess the entities checked out fine, because they returned all the animals to containment by that night, and nothing was wrong with them. Then on Tuesday morning they took both entities up into the desert and did more work there. A lot of it. They stayed up there all that day and right through the night. I doubt they even slept, unless it was on the ground. They kept coming back down, one or two of them at a time, and taking communications gear up to the surface. Long-range radio equipment, every kind of frequency. Satellite stuff too. Big transmitting and receiving dishes, and the tools to take them apart and put them back together. I have no idea why. Then early Wednesday, a little less than twenty-four hours ago, they brought it all back down, and the entities too, and told us they were leaving for a while. Maybe for weeks. Maybe longer than that. Some kind of exploratory trip involving the two entities, putting them to use somehow. They wouldn’t say more than that, except that their first stop was Washington, D.C.”
“What were they going to do there?”
“Meet with the president.”
“Did they say why?”
“Not really. I got the impression they wanted his help with what they were doing. Like going to him was the logical first step in the process.”
“On the phone Paige told you not to trust the president,” Travis said.
Bethany nodded. “Something changed her mind about him.” She went quiet for a few seconds. She stared ahead at the pressing darkness over the freeway. “I think the president was behind the attack on the motorcade. I think he had to be.”
Travis thought about the damage to the vehicles again. The kind of weapon that could do that wasn’t handheld. It needed a heavy tripod. It needed setup time too. A couple minutes, at least. You could ready one inside a van, but then your firing positions would be limited to where you could park, and you’d be a lot less agile once the shooting started. You’d need to put yourself in just the right spot, well ahead of time, and to do that you’d need to know the target’s exact route and schedule.
Only the president and a few aides would’ve had that information.