“I think it had to be,” Paige said. “Nellis made a few more calls, this time to higher-level people who are in power right now. He ended up getting a couple minutes on the phone with, well, I guess it’s President Holt now. Holt’s known about Tangent for some time—vice presidents are usually in the loop. When Nellis described Scalar for him, I’m sure Holt made the same assumption you and I just made.”
The elevator dinged softly and the doors parted. Travis followed Paige into the car. She pressed the button for level B48. The archives. It made sense. Though the files down there were mostly related to Breach entities and the experiments done on them over the past three decades, there were other kinds of records kept there too. If Tangent had been behind the Scalar investigation, whatever it was, the archives should contain a massive amount of data about it.
“Did the president give the FBI your number?” Travis said. That was hard to believe.
Paige shook her head. “The White House must have set up the call through a blind socket. Nellis didn’t even know my name when he introduced himself on the phone. Didn’t know anything about Tangent, either.”
Travis thought it over, watching the button display as the elevator dropped through the complex. He understood now why Paige had told Nellis it was a dead lead. If she’d told him the truth—that crucial evidence for an FBI investigation might exist here in Border Town—it would’ve created all kinds of jurisdictional problems. The FBI would’ve wanted access to this place, and they would’ve wanted to do a lot more than just look through the archives.
That wouldn’t have happened, of course. Not in a million years. The FBI would have been denied without even getting confirmation that Tangent existed. But it would’ve still been a political mess. And an unnecessary one. The simplest move was for Tangent to review the evidence itself. Then any information worth sending to the FBI could be routed through the White House, credited to a classified source. Nice and neat.
The elevator chimed again and the doors slid open on the archives. Travis followed Paige out.
The place had the look and feel of a library basement, some kind of periodical dungeon not set up for public use. Simple, black metal shelves. Narrow channels between them—just enough room for a person to pass through. The shelves reached the ceiling, ten feet up, and were lined with gray plastic binders. Each binder had a handwritten label fixed to its spine, filled out in a standard format with a given Breach entity’s name and number, followed by a string of letters and numbers Travis couldn’t make sense of. Some improvised Dewey decimal system created by Tangent’s founders back in the early years, before computerized storage had become standard.
As Travis understood it, the most recent fifteen years of data had been created on PDAs and filmed on digital camcorders. All of that information now fit easily onto a few rack-mounted servers, tucked away somewhere on this floor. But all the data older than that—roughly the same amount in terms of information content—had been written out by hand and filmed on analog tape. That data filled essentially the entire floor, ten thousand square feet of densely packed physical storage.
Paige led the way toward a clearing among the shelves, fifty feet out from the elevator. A desk stood centered in the open space.
“I take it you’ve never heard of Scalar yourself,” Travis said.
“Not even as a passing reference. Unless I’ve forgotten. And I can’t imagine I would have—whatever Scalar was, it sounds like it was a very big deal.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as odd? That nobody ever mentioned it to you? All these years?”
“It strikes me as close to impossible,” Paige said. “If Scalar happened in the eighties, my father would’ve known all about it. So why would he have kept it from me, later on when I came to work here?”
They passed into the open space and crossed to the desk. It was a big, practical thing: four feet by eight, black metal legs and surface, the same as the shelves. Five wooden chairs shoved under it at random. The desktop was bare except for a giant binder lying on its side, gray like those on the shelves, but much thicker. Ten or twelve inches wide at the spine, the thing was essentially a cubic foot of paper encased in hinged plastic. The word INDEX adorned the cover in adhesive block letters.