“Then Plan B is something more subtle than Plan A was,” Travis said. “Some spoken threat, thinly veiled, or maybe not veiled at all. Or else just a lie to throw us off track entirely. Remember, Holt doesn’t know we suspect his involvement.”
“And we want to keep it that way,” Paige said. “So we’ll give him the tour and not share anything we’ve learned, and assume every word he says is bullshit.”
Travis indicated the Tap, still sitting on the table.
“There’s one more place where I can intercept Ruben Ward,” he said. “That motel on Sunset Boulevard, August 12.”
“Probably fifteen minutes before he blows his brains out,” Paige said. “I doubt he’ll be in a talkative mood. And by then the notebook’s already gone.”
Travis recalled Ward’s fear in the alley behind the townhouses. He tried to imagine getting information out of him, in the last hour of his life. As a ten-year-old. He considered it for five seconds and dropped it.
“All right, we concentrate on the cheat sheet,” he said. “It’s everything we need to know, on a single piece of paper. We work the information we have, starting with your father’s meeting in 1987, right before he closed down Scalar. We find out who he met with—who he gave copies of that report to—and where they lived, and then I’ll use the Tap to drop into their lives again and again, in the months right after that. That part won’t be hard; I was nineteen years old by then. I’ll do whatever it takes to get that document. Break into houses—anything.”
“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?”