The Other Sites
Nine down. The rest still waiting.
Scale || Ongoing || Justice
Seven of the seventeen suspected sites were confirmed, by federal investigators working in coordination with the Frequency Hunters’ logs, over the course of eight months. Each confirmation followed the same general pattern: aerial survey, ground investigation, subsurface electromagnetic scan using equipment Walt Kowalski had helped standardize for the task force’s use, followed by a federal warrant and physical access. Each site was a variation on the Millhaven template — the same basic architecture scaled to local conditions, the same data collection infrastructure, the same maintenance records coded in the same corporate structure. In six of the seven, there were signal transmitters still running. In two of those, the transmissions contained what the analysts classified as archival recordings: voices, dates, evidence — stored in the most durable medium someone had found available to them, broadcast on a dead frequency, waiting.
Elena listened to each recovered recording with the same quality of attention she had brought to the first one. Some were technical data — survey notes, equipment logs. Some were personal — a man named Ray Fuentes in Nevada who had disappeared in 2001 and whose wife had been told he’d run off with another woman, who had believed it for nineteen years, and whose recorded voice now said, simply and clearly, that he had found something he was not supposed to find and he was going to do the right thing and he hoped she would understand when she heard this. That one took Elena a long time to write. She wrote it anyway. Ray Fuentes’s wife was sixty-two. She read the piece and called the paper’s tip line and asked to speak to Elena, and they spoke for two hours, and Elena cried during that conversation, which she noted in her private accounting without particular judgment. Some things were worth crying over. The trick was not to stop there.