The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

himself.”
    Within seconds Paige clicked open each of their files and arranged them in three separate windows, visible at the same time.
    All three had joined Tangent between the summer of 1978—the year the organization was formed—and the end of 1979. Original cast members, so to speak. Travis scanned the retirement dates for each file. Sengupta, Holden, and Conti had resigned in 1989, 1994, and 1997, respectively. All three had been with Tangent for the entire time Scalar was under way.
    “Sengupta and Conti left for health reasons,” Paige said. “Both were very old when they retired—they wanted to spend time with their families while they could. Neither made it to the new millennium.”
    “And Carrie Holden?”
    “I only know a little about her. She was young when Tangent formed—early thirties. So, mid to late forties when she retired in ninety-four. She’d be into her sixties now.”
    “Why did she retire?”
    “I don’t know. I remember my father talking about her, sometimes. She was pretty important around here, in her day. But he never said why she left.”
    She clicked to expand Holden’s file, filling the screen with it. There was a thumbnail photo that probably dated to the late seventies: a young woman with blond hair and green or hazel eyes. The file’s text dealt mostly with her pre-Tangent background—she had degrees in chemical and physical engineering from Caltech. There was nothing about her retirement, neither the reason for it nor the identity she’d assumed upon leaving.
    “She’d have to know something about Scalar,” Paige said. “Certainly more than anyone else we’re going to find.”
    “Can we find her? If she’s hidden as well as I was, her new name won’t be in the computer. Only the person who created the identity would know it—someone with Tangent in 1994—and that person has to be dead by now.”
    Paige nodded. “That person was my father.”
    “I don’t suppose he randomly let the information slip.”
    “No. Not directly.”
    Paige swiveled her chair to the side. She traced a path on the carpet with her foot, back and forth.
    “I think they had a history,” she said. “She and my father. Some connection during the time they both lived here. He never said so, but that was the impression I got. The way he spoke when her name came up. Things other people said, and stopped short of saying.” Her foot slowed and came to rest. She looked at the computer but made no move to use it. “There was this strange little moment, one time. One of those things you end up filing away and never really thinking about, because it’s awkward. It was probably five years ago. I walked into my father’s office in the Primary Lab, and he had two things on his computer screen: a picture of Carrie Holden, and a Google satellite map. When he heard me come in, he flinched and closed them both, the map first and then the picture. It was very out of character for him—hiding something, being jumpy. But a second later when he turned to me, it was like nothing had happened. Totally casual—he ignored the moment entirely. So did I. I pretty much had to. And later on, when I had time to think about it, I was glad I’d done that, because I was pretty sure of what I’d walked in on. I think the map must’ve been the place Carrie relocated to, and my father was just … thinking about her. No special reason. You know what I mean?”
    Travis nodded. He thought of the two years he’d worked in a shipping warehouse in Atlanta before coming back to Tangent. On occasion he’d found himself slapping a label onto a box of brake pads bound for Casper, Wyoming, less than eighty miles from Border Town. He’d stare at the box for a few seconds, dwelling on the fact that in a day or two it would be much closer to Paige Campbell than he himself would probably ever be again. Irrational as hell, but he’d done it all the time. It wasn’t hard to imagine Peter Campbell, in a private moment, gazing at a map of the place where Carrie Holden had ended up.
    “You didn’t see the map clearly enough to get the location,” Travis said.
    Paige shook her head. “There wasn’t time to see it, even if I’d wanted to. I was way across the room, and it was gone by the time I’d taken a few steps.”
    She went quiet again. The only sound was the soft drone of the computer’s cooling fan.
    Travis met her stare.
    He knew what she was about to say.
    She said it.
    “We’ve both been thinking the