“Do they have a suspect?”
“Yeah. Commanding officer of the crew on duty at the Archer site—a man and woman, both murdered. Cameras inside the house caught it all; the officer didn’t even try to hide his face. They’re into his financials now, and it looks like he got a giant payoff weeks ago, and spent all the time since making it liquid. Getting ready to disappear. Which he’s now done.”
“They don’t know where the money came from?”
“No, and they probably never will. They called here because the assassin left a note behind. The FBI seems to think it was addressed to us.”
“But you think they’re wrong?”
“No, I’m almost certain they’re right.”
Chapter Three
Paige pulled the covers aside, arched her body across Travis’s, and stood from the bed.
“Come with me,” she said.
She crossed the room, naked, to the desk chair where she’d left her clothes. Travis stared at her body in the soft light. Some sights were just never going to get old. Then he stood and went to his own clothes, clumped against the wall, and began pulling them on.
“The guy on the phone was Dale Nellis,” Paige said, “chief of staff to the FBI director. He read me the note—it didn’t take very long.”
She opened a drawer in the desk and tore a blank page from a notepad. Then she took out a pencil and wrote a single line:
See Scalar.
“That’s all,” she said.
Travis stared at it. He knew the word scalar as a mathematical term, but couldn’t see what meaning it might hold in the context of the attack.
“The FBI ran the word through their computers to see if anything interesting turned up,” Paige said. “A last name, an organization title, something like that. But they came up empty. A few small businesses have used that title over the years. A computer repair company, some kind of school supply maker, nothing much bigger than that.”
“Not exactly the usual suspects,” Travis said.
Paige shook her head, then nodded toward the door to the hallway. A moment later they were outside the residence, moving along the corridor toward the elevator.
Nearly every level of Border Town had the same basic layout, its hallways in the shape of a big wagon wheel. One giant ring corridor at the outside, a dozen spokes reaching inward to the central hub that housed the elevator and the stairwell.
“Nellis said he and a few guys at the top asked around,” Paige said. “Discreetly, among people they trust, mostly in the intel community. They even talked to some retired guys, on the possibility that Scalar is an older reference. Which it seems to be. So far the only people to recognize the word were both from around President Reagan’s time. One was a senator who chaired the Intelligence Committee back in the day, and the other was the deputy CIA director for a good chunk of the eighties. Both of them recalled Scalar as the name of an investigation from that time, but here’s the interesting part: neither one of them was ever cleared to know anything about it, beyond the name. Although there were some things they ended up learning anyway—things that couldn’t be hidden from them.”
“Like what?”
“Like the investigation’s budget. Whatever Scalar was—whoever was running it and whatever they were looking for—it had no spending limit. Any requested resource—I imagine things like satellite access, classified records access—was granted by the White House without delay, no questions asked. Scalar cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and spanned most of the 1980s, yet nobody in Congress, and nobody at the CIA, knew anything about it.”
They reached the elevator. Paige pressed the call button. She turned to Travis as they waited. He saw something in her eyes. Some kind of understanding.
“Nellis said he wouldn’t have believed that,” she said, “except that he heard it independently from each of these guys tonight. Even then, it’s pretty hard to swallow. He said he couldn’t imagine there was anybody out there with that kind of authority. Anyone powerful enough and secret enough to get that sort of cooperation from the United States government, with apparently zero oversight.”
Travis suddenly understood what her expression was about.
“It was us,” he said. “Scalar was a Tangent investigation.”