“We’re forced to consider a less practical solution, but one that might work just the same. Your mother’s plan, the Wilson gambit, as I like to call it, only needed to produce a single name to work. A sleeper at one of the companies that had recently imploded. She could run the background checks on the families and put together a dossier for the FBI, complete with her executive summary. They’d have no choice but to do their due diligence and check out the name.

“And when they did, they’d find that Mr. and Mrs. Sleeper—the parents of the software engineer investigated by their very own organization for their role in the failed Tamir missiles or by the National Transportation Safety Board for their quality-control work on the supposedly fixed 737 MAX flight-control system—had materialized out of thin air in the early 1970s. Just like the seventy-three other couples she’d passed along to them in her file.

“Now she’s getting somewhere. If Helen could get more names out of Donald Wilson, even better. They wouldn’t even have to be employees from one of the companies we discussed a little earlier. The Bureau would investigate the parents’ background and discover that they arrived on the same spaceship that dropped the rest of the couples in various places around the country in the seventies. Case closed for Helen, but not for the FBI. Not by a long shot.”

Devin couldn’t help feeling skeptical of Berg’s rosy scenario. “They probably would have shipped her off to Guantanamo Bay and thrown her in isolation for the rest of her life, after reaching some kind of agreement with the Russians to pretend the whole thing never happened. Everyone avoids the embarrassment.”

“I wish I could say that would never happen, but I’ve seen both governments pretend something potentially more catastrophic didn’t happen,” said Berg. “Which is why we need to approach this differently. I’d like to locate the camp. My guess is that it has remained completely off the grid from inception to closing, which would serve to bolster the overall credibility of the conspiracy theory. You don’t open a summer camp for a few hundred families and keep it hidden for no reason. Physical evidence of this secret camp—combined with the overall pattern that Helen discovered and the thirty-seven deaths occurring on the nearby lakes—might be enough to pique the FBI’s interest. Should be enough. I know someone at the FBI who will hear me out, but I have to bring her something tangible.”

“The camp or a name connected to one of these high-profile technology failures,” said Devin.