Travis thought about President Garner, a man he’d spoken to on the phone once, briefly. Like the five presidents before him, Garner had enjoyed close ties with Tangent while never making a move against its autonomy.
But Garner wasn’t the president anymore. He’d resigned from office two years ago, after losing his wife to what the world believed was a heart attack. His replacement, Walter Currey, had carried on the former administration’s policies to the letter, and already made it clear he had no ambition to run for another term in 2012. Currey had been a friend of Garner’s for over twenty years. He’d made a speech at the First Lady’s funeral and had to stop twice to keep his composure. By almost anyone’s measure he was a good man.
Maybe he was just good at looking like a good man.
“Anyway, that was it,” Bethany said. “They left for D.C. yesterday afternoon. And late last night I got the call you heard. I tried calling Paige back after it cut out. Nothing. Right to voice mail. So then I just did what she told me to do. I got the entity from her residence and I got the hell out of Border Town. I guess I understand the point of not telling anyone there. If she wants me to go underground and use this thing—whatever it does—then the fewer who know about it the better. And it was faster that way, without notifying anyone. No group decisions, no proper channels. I just called in one of the Gulfstreams we keep at Browning Air National Guard Base in Casper. Did it on Paige’s authority. This was less than five minutes after the call. No one had learned of the motorcade attack yet. It took the plane ten minutes to reach Border Town, and another ten to fly me to Rapid City in South Dakota. And then Renee Turner chartered a private jet, and Bethany Stewart vanished off the grid. As far as anyone knows, I’m hitchhiking on Interstate 90. And now I’m here, and you know as much as I know.”
Travis said nothing for a long moment. He considered all that she’d told him. He let the pieces fall together where they seemed ready to.
“Learn from it,” Travis said. “That’s how Paige phrased it in the call. Whatever you learn from the entity, make it public.”
Bethany nodded.
Travis looked at the cylinder sticking half out of the backpack.
“Paige and the others learned something from it,” he said. “Something big and important that the world would want to know about—something that should be made public. But there must have been even more they wanted to learn. That’s what the exploratory trip was about. Like they’d found one piece of some puzzle, and they were going off to find the rest of it, using the entity. But before that, they went to see the president, to show him the one puzzle piece they already had. Maybe they thought he could help them make sense of it. But that plan backfired. Whatever they’d uncovered, the president didn’t want it made public. Didn’t want them digging up the rest of the pieces. Maybe Paige and the others didn’t realize what they’d stumbled onto. And obviously the president did.”
“They touched a nerve of some kind,” Bethany said.
Travis nodded. He thought of the burning vehicles in the street.
“A big damn nerve,” he said.
“Hence the instruction to go underground. Figure it out for ourselves and trust no authorities.”
Travis looked at her. “But you’re not going underground. You’re going right to where she was attacked. Something she’d probably tell you not to do.”
Bethany returned his gaze. “You don’t sound like you disapprove.”
“I don’t.”
He saw the hint of a smile in her eyes, buried under a ton of stress.
“Do you have some way of finding her?” he said. “If she’s still alive?”
“I have a way of trying. It’s hard to explain how it works. Easier if I just show you once we’re on the plane. But I can only locate her. After that, I don’t know what to do. She’ll be somewhere secure.” She looked down at the black cylinder. “I guess I’m hoping that whatever else this thing does, it can help us with that part, somehow. No reason to expect that, I know. It’s just all I’ve got. After we get Paige’s position, we can find someplace safe and switch this thing on, and then I guess we’ll find out.”
She went silent again. She watched a sign with directions to the airport slide by. Then she looked at him. “You don’t have to help me, you know. You don’t have to get involved in this at all, if you don’t want to.”
Travis watched the road. He thought of Paige, bound somewhere, her life in the hands of whoever had hit the motorcade. Just ahead, I–285 swung broadly to the east, toward the blood-red promise of dawn at the horizon.
“Yes I do,” he said.
Chapter Four
Travis parked in the long-term lot, a quarter mile from the private hangars.
“Do they search your bags before you board a private flight?” he said.