The town itself was more or less an elongated grid. It had a half-mile main drag running west to east, with six or seven cross streets branching off. At their southern ends the cross streets bent and arced around what must’ve been hills or depressions. At their northern ends they tied into a long, curved lane that hugged the lake—Rum Lake, cool blue in the thermal image and about twice the size of the town that shared its name.
Running vehicles stood out clearly: bright white rectangles against the gray background. A few moved along the streets here and there, but Travis ignored them—his attention went immediately to two places where multiple vehicles were clumped together, stationary. The first was along the valley road, just shy of town. Four were parked there, glowing not from engine heat but from bodies seated inside them. Two vehicles on each side of the road, angled at forty-five degrees. Big, boxy shapes, unusually wide.
“Humvees,” Travis said.
Paige nodded.
The second cluster was on the opposite side of town, near a house all by itself on the outskirts. Six more Humvees, these ones neither running nor occupied. They stood out only because of the greenhouse heating of their closed cabs, the effect minimized by the haze that filtered the sunlight.
The vehicles’ former occupants were moving like busy ants in and out of the residence.
“Probably private security contractors,” Paige said, “not soldiers. Maybe the same kind they used against us in Ouray.”
Bethany double-tapped the formation near the house, and the view centered and tightened on it dramatically.
“That’s gotta be Allen Raines’s place,” she said.
She minimized the satellite frame, opened a browser and clicked on Google Maps. Within seconds she’d isolated and zoomed on Rum Lake, and then she typed an address into the search field. The hourglass flickered. A red thumbtack appeared. Same house the Humvees were parked at. Bethany was reaching to open the satellite window again when Travis grabbed her wrist, the move startling her.
“Look,” he said.
He pointed with his other hand to the center of town. In the past half second, little icons and labels had popped up along Main Street, identifying certain businesses. Both Paige and Bethany inhaled audibly when they saw the one Travis had indicated:
Its symbol was made up of a tiny fork and a knife, and its label read, THIRD NOTCH BAR & GRILLE.
Chapter Twenty-Four
They rented a Chevy Tahoe in Petaluma and were on the Coast Highway by eleven on Travis’s phone—adjusted now to Pacific time. Seven hours and forty-five minutes left to work with.
Travis drove. The ocean lay to the left, at times obscured by trees but mostly wide open and endless and blue.
“The name of a restaurant in Northern California,” Paige said, “contained in a message transmitted through the Breach.” Her eyes registered the same vague bafflement all three of them had shared since seeing the labeled icon.
In one sense Travis found it plausible: if the instructions could send Ruben Ward to a specific town, then why not a specific location within that town? But for the most part it threw him. It was, in its way, the strangest detail they’d encountered so far. The exactness of it felt absurd. Ward had been directed to travel across the continent and find a passageway beneath a place that served burgers and chicken wings and beer.
Bethany had already verified that the restaurant had been there in 1978. It dated to the late fifties and had never changed its name. As far as she’d been able to tell, the place hadn’t shown up in any headlines during the summer in question. It’d been business as usual then, and ever since.
Far north along the coast, low clouds crept inland from the sea, pressing and writhing through gaps in the mountains. The same clouds they’d seen from orbit.
“There’s something that’s bothered me since that first phone call last night,” Travis said. “The first thing we knew about the Scalar investigation: its cost. Hundreds of millions of dollars. No matter how I look at it, I can’t get it to make sense.”
“I’ve been wondering about that too,” Bethany said. “The amount is ludicrous. Even if they were accessing the hardest-to-use databases at that time—the kind where paid workers did the searching instead of computers—or running satellite surveillance every day of the week, it wouldn’t come to that cost. Not even close. Throw in the use of FBI agents to check out certain leads, compensate the Bureau for their time, you still don’t even get into the ballpark.”