“What do we do now?” Parkowski asked.
“I guess we can go check the spot on the ridge where they were firing at the house from,” DePresti suggested, “but I think we both know what we will find.”
“Nothing.”
“Precisely. These people are professionals, Grace, they’re not going to leave a trace.”
“So what do we do now?” she repeated.
Her boyfriend had no answer.
They weren’t in a good position.
Chang had taken them in, sheltered them when they had nowhere else to go, and helped guide their investigation into the Bronze Knot mystery. And now he was gone, taken by the mysterious adversary that had dogged them since the Manhattan Beach pier.
They were rudderless.
She recalled the other two suggested investigative branches: the NASA complex at White Sands and Panspermia Game Studios, the developers of the virtual environment. But, Parkowski quickly ruled both of them out.
White Sands was just a ground station, a pass-through for the data coming from Venus through MICS to Earth. She had already seen the logs, seen the Bronze Knot references. It was unlikely that they would find anything new if they were to travel in person to the NASA site.
Panspermia was the same. Parkowski already had all of their data, including the entire virtual environment, in her cloud storage drive. The environment took in inputs from external sources and displayed them in virtual reality. It was totally dependent on those inputs, which is what Bronze Knot seemed to be protecting. Unless Parkowski could pin down exactly who coded and documented the interface to the Bronze Knot data, a trip there would be for naught.
All of their leads in Los Angeles had been played out or were otherwise unavailable to them.
That left one place to go.
“We need to go out to the Cape,” Parkowski told DePresti.
He snorted. “That’s a long trip.”
“It is,” she agreed, “but it’s the only way out of this.”
“How so?”
“We need to stick to the plan,” Parkowski explained. “Get as much information on Bronze Knot as we can, threaten to go public with it, trade the information with these people to get them off our backs. I think the only chance we have to get that information and figure out what’s behind Bronze Knot is to go east. To Hangar AZ.”
“To where it all started,” DePresti said with a smile.
“Yes.”
He thought for a moment. “It’s not the worst idea,” the Space Force captain said. “I was the government manager for the launch, sure, but there’s plenty of spooky stuff that happens at the Cape that I wasn’t aware of. There could have been some kind of addition, some kind of dual-use technology that would be protected by a SAP that was done either above or below my level. And that Hangar AZ reference that you found, that could be the place where we break the whole thing open.”
“So what are we waiting for?”
“Nothing. Let’s go east.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
They made it to Florida in one piece, driving Chang’s old Chevy truck cross-country without stopping, and checked into a small, locally-owned motel in the beach town of Cocoa Beach.
With no alarm, Parkowski slept until eleven. She sat up in the small twin bed in the old-fashioned motel room with a start. DePresti still snored away on the other bed. The sun shone through the two windows at the front of the room.
Parkowski wondered why she had slept for so long, but then remembered that in the last three days, she and her boyfriend had driven almost twenty-five hundred miles. It was mentally and physically exhausting. Plus, the three-hour difference in time zones probably played a big role too.
She let DePresti sleep and ran out to get a box of donuts and a pair of coffees. It was warm in Florida, but not overwhelmingly so. She understood why people wanted to spend winters here.
By the time she got back, DePresti was awake. They quickly ate and then set up all of their equipment and paperwork in order to plan their next move.
DePresti had a pretty good plan, Parkowski thought. They would go on base with all of their gear in the truck. From there, they would find a secluded spot on the base and wait. Security was mostly concerned with keeping people without access to the Cape off of it, not preventing the movement of accessed people once they got on. They could literally just sit in the truck, or even better, in the back with the windows blocked, and wait for the day shift to leave the facility. Then, they could find Hangar AZ, break in, and finally solve the Bronze Knot mystery.
She breathed a sigh of relief. It was almost all over.
They showered and DePresti shaved. After packing everything they’d need, including the two pistols Chang had given them, Parkowski and DePresti grabbed lunch at a Wawa and headed back up Florida A1A towards the Space Force Station.
Parkowski ate on the way while DePresti drove. It was relatively peaceful, the early rush to the beaches was over, and just a few tourists were walking back to their rental houses and hotels. It was warm, roughly the same temperature she had experienced in LA, and the salty smell of the Atlantic was again refreshing to her senses.
They got off of A1A towards the cruise ships. One of the two that Parkowski had seen the night before was gone, the other still in port but in the process of loading up with passengers. She smiled at the juxtaposition of family-friendly cruise ships with the military launch facility just up the road.
After going through some rumble strips, they got to the gate. DePresti put out his hand and Parkowski gave him his CAC as well as her Aering badge. At least a dozen cars were coming out of the facility while theirs was the only one entering. DePresti pulled up to the leftmost guard shack and handed the gate guard, an Air Force airman first class, the two ID cards.
The other man promptly saluted and went into the small shack with the IDs.
“What’s going on?” Parkowski asked as soon as the A1C was out of earshot. “Is that normal?”
DePresti shook his head. “No, they normally just give it a cursory scan and hand it back to you. Something’s up.”
The security forces E-3 came back to the Chevy truck. “I’m sorry, sir, but y’all ain’t on the list.”
“What list?” DePresti asked.
“The list of people supporting the NROL-204 launch,” the other man said.
DePresti’s mouth fell open in shock — there was something they had missed despite all of their planning — but Parkowski was quick on her feet. “That’s why we’re here,” she told the gate guard. “We just got into town. We might not be on the list yet.”
“Sorry,” the E-3 said with a shrug. “If you’re not on the list, you can’t get in. This is a highly classified launch, and security is a lot tighter than normal.”
“How long is it going to be like this?” DePresti asked.
“Until they launch the thing,” the enlisted man said. “And that’s not for another week or two.”
“Oh, ok, thanks,” DePresti said, probably realizing that they were momentarily defeated. “I’ll call our boss and get it all sorted out.”
“Works for me, sir,” the E-3 said. “Good luck! If you could turn around up here,” he continued as he pointed at a turnaround fifty feet in front of them, “and head back towards the cruise ships that’d be great. Hopefully, it all gets worked out.”
The Space Force captain nodded. “Thanks, sorry about that,” he said to the guard as he pulled forward and turned around, heading back the way they had come in.
They just missed hitting a giant turtle that was crossing the road. DePresti swerved to avoid it and the reptile continued its path to the other side. Parkowski made a note of the turtle’s size — it was massive.