Chapter 55
June had the Tahoe’s extra key. Peter’s luggage was still in the back, but there was nothing else.
She and Lewis climbed in and led the way down surface streets toward the freeway and the old Boy Scout camp.
Each of them had already downloaded a map of that section of the national forest, knowing cell signal could be spotty in the wilderness.
On the way to the mall, Faraday had talked them through the layout of the compound.
The main entrance and parking area, the cabins, the lodge and armory and greenhouses.
She checked Google Maps and saw a couple of accidents perfectly placed to bring everything to a halt. She found an overland route and directed Lewis off the freeway. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea, and the surface street maze was almost as bad.
In Covington, Lewis pulled into a mini-mall lot, ran into an auto parts store, and came back with two sets of tire chains, leaving one with the Lexus. “All this rain down here, gonna be plenty of snow up in the mountains.”
Still, whatever the Messenger was up to, June couldn’t count on Peter having figured it out.
When they got him back, she wanted to be able to tell him their next step.
So she stared down at the clustered hieroglyphics and the lines connecting them, then at the long column of numbers running down one side.
Finally, she picked a large circle of symbols outside of Kennewick, pulled out her notebook, and started copying down the pictograms.
One looked like a fat little rolling pin, kind of.
Another was a jagged arrow curving up. Another was a jagged arrow that curved down.
There was a tiny picket fence, and a tiny stick figure, and a dozen other little images that didn’t look like anything, really.
A box with an X in it. A box with a dot in it.
Some boxes rendered in red, others in green or blue or black.
Then circles with vertical lines, circles with horizontal lines, also in multiple colors.
All linked to other groups of symbols by the ruler-straight lines.
Again, the whole thing reminded her of a corporate org chart for an extremely complex interconnected organization, or maybe a group of organizations.
She stared at it hard, willing the answer to come, but it didn’t.
There was something to that idea, she could feel it. But she couldn’t quite latch on to it.
So she opened her laptop and pulled up a map and zoomed in on that area, comparing the pictograms on paper to the online version.
Because the scale was so large on the hard copies, she had to assume the locations were approximations.
She scrolled and scanned, both in regular map view and in satellite view, looking for any object that might correspond to a symbol.
Nothing clicked. Fuck. She felt the Tahoe accelerate. She looked up and saw the traffic clearing ahead of them. They were heading into the mountains. On the windshield, the coastal rain had changed to sleet.
She turned to Lewis. “You got a look at these maps, right? Did anything make sense to you?”
He kept his eyes on the road. “Not a lick. And no pressure, but you got about twenty minutes before we ditch the truck.”
“Understood.” She picked another spot on the map and repeated the process, scrolling and scanning at the new location. Nothing. Lewis mostly kept his eyes on the road, but every few minutes he’d glance over.
“Our turn coming up,” he said. “You figure out those numbers on the side yet?”
“Shit, I haven’t even tried.” She’d looked at them back at Stella’s house, thinking maybe they were email addresses or account numbers or numerical passwords. Then Robert had called to say he’d cracked the burner phone, and she hadn’t gotten back to it.
“They all the same number of digits?” Lewis asked.
She counted. “Yeah. Fourteen.” Then the light bulb went on and she gave herself a dope slap. “Fuck a duck. They’re GPS coordinates, but in digital format. How could I miss that?”
Latitude and longitude were usually depicted in degrees, minutes, and seconds.
But they could also be depicted as a single number, which June knew from her reporting was a format often used in programming.
The first seven digits were latitude, the second seven were longitude.
Seven digits meant four decimal places, which would give an accuracy to about eleven meters.
She opened a new browser window and typed the first number into the search bar, leaving a space between the seventh and eighth digit. A map came up. She frowned. “China? Fucking Inner Mongolia?”
Lewis glanced over. “Right idea, wrong hemisphere. Second set of numbers, make it negative.”
She went back to the search bar, added a minus symbol after the space, and hit return. A new map came up. The pin was in the middle of what appeared to be empty land, east of the mountains, just off Highway 17. She zoomed in and gained no new details. She zoomed out and that’s when she saw it.
“Holy fuck. It’s two miles from the Chief Joseph Dam.”
She switched to satellite view and went back to the pin. It was the dead center of an enormous electrical substation. Zoomed in all the way, she could even see the power lines running from the dam to the substation, then out to the southwest, toward Seattle.
“The Messenger’s going to hit the power grid,” she said. But how? By blowing up the dam? It would be a catastrophe, but not exactly a civilization-ender. They’d have to destroy hundreds of power plants to make a dent.
Lewis slowed and took a right onto a low, narrow bridge and crossed the river.
Below, the churning water was black in the headlight wash.
After the bridge, the road turned to gravel.
He accelerated again, the Tahoe bucking wildly over the ruts.
Her fingers kept bouncing off the keys. “Pull over for a sec,” she said. “Let me plug in the next number.”
Braking, he turned his head and looked at her. There was no anger in that stare, but no kindness, either. Instead it was the stare of a seasoned apex predator, hard and flat and utterly without mercy. It didn’t scare her. She’d seen the same look in Peter’s eyes as he readied himself for a fight.
“You got one minute,” he said. “Then we go get our people.”
She typed the next number and hit return. She got the blue circle that meant some server somewhere was thinking. But the circle kept circling. She wasn’t getting a result. She pulled her cell modem from her bag. The indicator light was off. They were too deep in the mountains.
“No signal,” she said. “Fuck it.” She knew enough. She opened her notepad to a fresh page and wrote a few lines, then added her master password and showed the whole thing to Lewis. “If something happens to me, use my computer and find those fucknuts.”
“Roger that.” Lewis glanced at his phone. “We ’bout three miles out.”
He took his foot off the brake and the Tahoe rocketed uphill toward the camp.
—
After another mile of bad logging road, the forest rising steeply on one side and falling away on the other, they came to a derelict turnoff where scrub brush grew up between the tire tracks.
Lewis hit the brakes and killed his lights.
June had already put her laptop, her notebook, and the paper maps in her work bag.
She got out and ran down to the Lexus and handed her bag to Manny through the window, quickly explaining what she’d found and how to keep looking, just in case.
Then she returned to the Tahoe while Manny threw the Lexus in reverse and backed up the turnoff until the big white SUV was out of sight behind a curve.
Two minutes later, he and Faraday materialized out of the falling snow with their gear and hopped into the Tahoe. Nobody said a word. June’s heart was pounding hard.
Headlights still off, Lewis put the vehicle in low gear and began to climb again, slower now, into the darkness.