Solstice

'That I do understand,' Clarke said.

'Right. So the way we try to shortcut things is we produce a digital profile of what we're looking for. You choose the item, then the computer goes off to see if it can find a match. Nothing's that precise, of course. So we have to have some control of the tolerance. I'll show you.'

He worked at the keyboard. The map changed in contrast, a little hourglass came up on the screen, and four newly painted circles appeared. 'This is what we get if we just run a straight match against the system. That' — he pointed at a circle outside the town of Wendover — 'is an electricity substation. As luck would not have it, Nevada Power and Light favours a substation design that kicks off our dome algorithm pretty neatly. The same goes of this hit beneath it. The other two we can rule out too. One is a rodeo ring at a dude ranch — we can see that just by drilling down into the image from a standard daylight view. The other is a water tower — been there for years. We can cross-reference this into the local planning database pretty easily and see if there's a listing for the object. So when we rule those out, we need to degrade the match. Then see what happens.'

Wolfit pressed a single key. A rash of new circles appeared on the screen. 'That's just a one per cent degradation. Gives us no fewer than nineteen new objects to investigate. And bear in mind we're looking at a mere hundred square miles or so of the target area here. We've been told to look at a square running five hundred miles on each side. That's a quarter of a million square miles, all told. So imagine replicating just this one per cent degradation there. Then look what happens when we go to two…'

He hit the keyboard again. The screen was covered in circles. 'Then three.' It was now virtually impossible to see the underlying geographical features of the image. Overlapping circles ran everywhere.

'If I move a couple of percents beyond that, we're going to lock up the system. We don't have the byte power to crunch those numbers. And even if we did, we don't possess the manpower to analyse the number of hits. I've got every last person I can find working on this back at Langley, plus we've co-opted the imaging departments of the Air Force and the Army too. But it's still a long process. Where we are now is that we've eliminated just about every one of the initial hits in around three-quarters of the target area — and most of them are those damn power substations or some pre-existing water installation that comes through on the planning records. If we hit lucky, we just haven't got there yet and she's sitting somewhere in the unsifted area. If we don't, then in thirty minutes or so I push that one per cent button and we start to pray.'

Clarke looked at Ben Levine. 'This is clever stuff, but it's not going to get us there.'

'No, Mr President. That was one reason why we put those papers in front of you, sir.'

'Forget the damn papers, Levine. You heard what I said on that subject and that's that. If you don't find these people using this nice billion-dollar toy of yours, how do you propose to do it?'

Fogerty stepped in. 'That's a Bureau issue, sir. I thought I'd make that point before Ben here did. We're running checks on everything we can think of. Existing databases, local police records, credit card companies, hotel bookings, anything where someone might have kept details of an address.'

'And?'

'This isn't rocket science,' Larry Wolfit said. 'I can show you just as easily as any of the other guys. See…'

A new image came up on his screen. 'This is a central database of all property records listed in the state of Nevada. We put in a keyword search for "Yasgur's Farm" — and we do have fuzzy logic built in here so it would come up if they'd changed the spelling slightly — and what do we get? Nothing. Same goes for Arizona and Utah. We got the power companies, the phone companies, the water companies, Internet service providers, rental car firms… there's scarcely anyone who doesn't sell or monitor something that we can't tap into. Nothing. Not a single close match. Maybe they do use this Yasgur's Farm term themselves, but my guess is it's some kind of code word, not a real name. Geeks love that sort of stuff. And it doesn't help us a bit.'

'What about the people?' Fogerty asked. 'Are we still getting a blank there?'

'Afraid so. These must be decent, clean-living folk. No parking tickets, no speeding fines. Nothing that's put their record into any database we can find since they left San Diego with not a forwarding address in sight.'

'Shit,' Clarke said quietly.

Levine's voice broke the silence. 'Sir?'

'Yes?'

'We can still go back on those orders. I don't like the idea any more than you, but if all we have is the Shuttle, we're cutting this fine.'

Clarke's eyes gleamed in the half-light of the room. 'If you push me once more on that subject, mister, I'll relieve you of your post here and now. Understood?'

Levine nodded and said nothing. Helen stared at Barnside, wondering if this was crazy, wondering if she really was the only one who could see this. Clarke turned to go.

'There is one other possibility,' she said.

The President looked at her, some sourness in his eyes. 'Well?'

'We know this has to be a remote location, right?'

'For sure,' Larry Wolfit said, watching the screen, playing with the imaging application again.

'Well, in that case it wouldn't have an official name, not in the sense that it was one that went down on credit cards or in the property records. More than likely it's a post office box number that's the official address.'

Barnside was watching her, smiling as if he enjoyed seeing her try to guess through something so out of her field. 'Even if you're right,' he asked, 'where does that get us? We still have nothing to go on.'

'Really?'

When she thought about it she could still feel the harsh, clean cut of the Atlantic air against her skin. And some pain behind it all as well. Childhood and pain went together.

'For a while, when I was a kid, we lived in Maine, somewhere really remote. That was a box number too — had to be, the mail people said. But no one lives in a number. We had a name for the place. Haven Cottage. And that's what we called it.'

'Nice memory,' Barnside said, unsmiling, 'but I still don't see where it gets us.'

'The point is that after a very short while we started getting mail, from people we knew. They would put the name we used for the place alongside the PO box number. Pretty soon, we'd get mail that dropped the number altogether, just read Haven Cottage, the area, and a zip code. And that still got through. Every time. When you're remote, that happens. You could just put someone's name on it if you felt like it, because — '

'- the mailman knew,' Clarke said, staring at her. 'Jesus, here are you guys punching away at computers and the answer we need is probably sitting inside the head of some mail depot manager right now, ready for the taking.'

Barnside was shaking his head, grinning all over his face. 'Can't be that many of them. These are remote, low-population-density areas. And these people must get mail. Just print out the contact names for the depot managers, Larry. The Agency guys can take it from there.'

In the corner of the room, a printer started to whir. Pretty soon names were spewing from it and Fogerty had his men dispatching them as they came, carving out the different territories. Helen watched them pawing through the sheets of paper, Barnside silent at her side, and waited until everyone had moved away from them, to stand behind Wolfit and watch the progress on the screen.

'Say it, Dave.'

'Say what?'

'That I am muscling in on something I don't understand.'

'Oh that.'

She wished he'd cut the stupid grin. 'Hey. You're right, of course. You're right a lot, Helen. It must be hard being you.'