“I’ll tell you the parts I know,” Carrie said, “in the order they happened.” She went quiet again, thinking. “They took Ward to Johns Hopkins right after they got him out of the VLIC. He was unconscious for something like two weeks after that, and then he was in and out, never fully awake, but maybe halfway at times. He started talking a little, almost all of it incoherent. His wife was there with him—Nora, his only living relative. In one of his more lucid moments Ward asked her to write down everything he said, no matter how strange it sounded. So she did. She bought a notebook and jotted every word she heard him say. Later—a lot later—she would tell Peter that it seemed like science fiction. She thought Ward was drawing it from the books he’d read all his life. Crazy ramblings about a wormhole, alien technology, and something about a war. It was all absurd—but also consistent. Like a story.”
She paused for a few seconds and then went on. “At the same time, in those weeks at the hospital, there were guards outside Ward’s room at all hours. Federal officers of one kind or another. The accident at the VLIC was so sensitive, everything connected to it was under protective watch, including Ward. But whoever made that decision must’ve relaxed after enough time went by; the guards left on May 7, and late that night, after Nora went back to her hotel room, Ward extracted his own feeding tube and made his exit. Took the notebook with him, stole some orderly’s street clothes from a locker down the hall, and eventually found his way out.”
“Nobody tried to stop him?” Paige said. “After two months on his back he’d have been staggering like a drunk.”
“Once he was out of the coma unit, all he encountered were strangers,” Carrie said. “To them he probably looked like a physical-therapy patient. I know there were camera feeds the cops studied the next morning; they pieced it all together. From what I recall, it took Ward something like twenty minutes to get out of the building. He went out a north exit onto Monument Street and that was it. No one who knew him saw him alive again.”
They were two miles up 550 now. The last outposts of the town—a few motels and a campground strung out along the canyon—slid by, and then the terrain opened to flat emptiness bound by pasture fencing.
“Three months later, the suicide. I think the LAPD identified him by his prints; he’d been arrested at a couple war protests in college. Everything about the scene was straightforward. He checked in alone, killed himself, no sign of foul play. No sign of the notebook, either—not that anyone was even thinking about it by then. And my understanding of the story goes blank at that point, until June of 1981, when Nora remarried. Some of the wedding guests were old friends who’d known both her and Ruben, including former VLIC people who now belonged to Tangent. Peter Campbell was there too. He and Nora talked about Ruben—about how it wasn’t his fault what’d happened to him. He just wasn’t himself at the end. Nora reinforced that point by mentioning the notebook—all the sci-fi things he’d said in his stupor. Peter asked her to elaborate. What kind of sci-fi things, specifically? Nora rattled off what little she remembered, and as I’m told, Peter had to set down his drink to keep from spilling it. I suppose, technically, the investigation began at that moment, right there in that reception hall. Peter asked Nora if she could set aside a few hours the next morning, before leaving for her honeymoon, and speak to him at length about the notebook. I doubt she was thrilled at that idea, but she did it, and in those hours she managed to recall a little more, including a visual description of the notebook, for what it was worth: black cover, with the word Scalar in the bottom corner. The company that made it, I’m sure. Nora remembered that easily enough. It was the stuff inside the book she had trouble with. All she could summon by then were bits and pieces, which I’m sure were maddening for Peter to try to make sense of. In the end, though, those scraps were enough to give him a rough sketch of what had happened. Enough to scare the hell out of him.”
Far out across the open ground on either side of the highway, the yard lights of ranch houses glided past. Steep foothills rose beyond them, just discernible against the near-black sky.
“It all reduces to something like this,” Carrie said. “In the days after the accident at VLIC, when Ward was still in the bunker, he wasn’t entirely unconscious. He was aware of conversations around him—the fear and the tension down there. But there was something else he was aware of. Something he referred to as ‘tunnel voices.’ ”
“Breach Voices?” Paige said.
Carrie nodded. “Ward could hear them from inside the bunker, just like everyone else. But unlike everyone else, he could understand them.”
Paige had been staring forward at the snowfall in the headlights. Now she turned in her seat. Her eyes went back and forth between Carrie and Travis.
“Understand them?” Paige said.
Carrie nodded again. “They really are voices. And they’re saying something. A message that repeats every few minutes, endlessly.”
Paige shook her head. “We’ve analyzed the Breach Voices to death. Not with human ears, obviously, but microphones and every kind of pattern-recognition software. From the very beginning there were people who hoped those sounds contained a message, but the computers never turned up a thing.”