“Oh shit,” Travis said. He could see the rough shape of the problem.
Dyer nodded. “Peter did that stuff long before Garner and the others came to see him. Before he knew any better. By the time they did meet with him, there were a handful of people in the United States government who knew all nine of their names, and knew they’d taken an unusual interest in Scalar—which a select few also knew about. You see the danger, right? And you see how even stopping the investigation in its tracks, ceasing work on new Breaches, wouldn’t make that danger go away. There would always be those few people out there, along with whoever they’d talked to, who might put the pieces together. Rumors of an alien message, its instructions carried out on Earth in 1978. Nine powerful people deeply involved with it somehow, all of whom had radically improved their standing right after the message arrived. There would always be the risk of someone connecting the dots and reacting out of fear. Of huge-scale action being taken against Garner and the others, and maybe against Tangent itself. All of that could happen years before 2016. Years before the culmination of their work.”
Dyer waved a hand to indicate the unseen chamber six hundred feet above. “So they all met to talk about it. Peter and the other Scalar investigators, and Garner and the rest of those who’d received the message. They came here in mid-December 1987 to figure it all out. The location worked because it was still secret to anyone in D.C. Only the engineers knew where this place was, and they’d all signed nondisclosure forms that threatened capital punishment. Between that and how damned scared of the place they were, by that point, they weren’t likely to ever talk. So, good place for the meeting. Peter and the others brought a report with them. A plan for how to proceed.”
“The cheat sheet,” Paige said.
Dyer looked puzzled.
“That’s what others in Tangent called it,” she said.
“A one-page plan,” Travis said. “Jesus, now I know why. It could’ve probably been a one-line plan: Stop everything and cross our fingers.”
“More or less,” Dyer said. “In the end it was all they could do. Like submarine combat. Rig for quiet and go dead in the water. Hope like hell they just lose you after a while.”
He went silent, and for a moment the four of them listened to the drilling up top. Droning, patient, relentless.
“I guess they didn’t,” Travis said.
A second later the drilling stopped.
Chapter Thirty-Five
They listened. A minute passed. No sound anywhere, except the scrape and rattle of insect bodies against the viewing booth. The drilling at both accesses had finished.
“Not much longer now,” Paige said.
They waited. Time slipped by. Sometimes they heard a metallic tapping from one access or the other. Mostly they heard nothing at all.
“This dream you had,” Dyer said. “You actually think it was real?”
“The door combo was real,” Travis said. “That’s all I have to go on.”
Dyer looked thoughtful.
“What?” Travis said.
“The drug you described,” Dyer said. “That’s real too. It’s called phenyline dicyclomide. They use it for interrogations. It’s been around for about twenty years, but they perfected it in the last ten, in places like Gitmo. Intel guys call it hypnosis in a vial.”
“It makes you talk?” Travis said.
“It can. But its selling point is that it makes you act. It hits you in two stages. The first one lasts a couple minutes. Mild hallucinations, with an amnesia effect; you don’t remember much of anything from before the drug kicked in. Then comes the second stage, maybe five minutes long, during which your short-term memory is fractured down to a second or less. Someone can speak to you, and you can forget each word as it passes. Very disturbing effect—with two kickers. One, you can still follow commands. Even complex ones that are too long to remember. If I’ve got your laptop sitting there, I can tell you, ‘Log into your e-mail account and your banking site,’ and you’ll probably do it. Passwords and all. You’ll be forgetting the command even while I’m saying it, but you’ll follow it anyway. It’s a conditioning thing—it functions like a habit. They say you hear the command well enough to obey it, but don’t remember it well enough to resist.”