Deep Sky by Patrick Lee

Author:Patrick Lee [Lee, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2011-12-26T13:00:00+00:00

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.”

“The funny thing is,” Travis said, “neither we nor Carrie ever actually knew they used any of that stuff. Satellites, federal agents, any of it. We just made those assumptions based on the huge price tag—something had to cost that much. But none of those resources make sense, when you think about it. Satellites to investigate a guy who’d been dead for three years? Database searches? Ward wasn’t leaving a paper trail—he walked out of that hospital without a single piece of ID. No credit card, no checkbook; he wasn’t even wearing his own clothes. I don’t see how you’d track him three days later, much less three years. It’d be like reconstructing the itinerary of a bum.”

“Strange,” Paige said. “With all the other questions rattling around, we never asked the most obvious one: How did the Scalar investigation work at

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