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Frazier had pulled a graveyard shift, he’d made sure that Kenney was there too and the two of them would drink coffee and trade dirty jokes all night long.
    And Kenney had loved the attention he’d gotten from the big boss. Frazier had been a stickler for regs and a general hard-ass, but he was a man’s man who had the reputation of supporting his subordinates to the max and being a mentor to a chosen few. When Frazier died Kenney had cried like a baby, and he was still crying days later when he was one of the pallbearers at the funeral.
    In the aftermath of his death, Kenney fell into a black hole. The medical officer at the base ordered him to see the Groom Lake psychiatrist. Kenney, being a man who’d rather puke than practice introspection, had been a reluctant participant in the exercise. The day he abruptly ended his therapy sessions was the day the shrink was wondering out loud whether Malcolm Frazier hadn’t perhaps become something of a father figure to the young man.
    “Tell me about
your
father, Roger,” the shrink had asked.
    “Never knew the man, Doc. The guy was nothing more than a sperm donor if you know what I mean. My mother raised me solo.”
    “I see. Do you think there might be a link between your grief over Colonel Frazier’s death and your fatherless childhood?”
    Kenney had shifted uncomfortably as if ants had invaded his shorts, and he suddenly rose. “This is voluntary, right? These sessions of ours,” he asked.
    “Beyond the initial consult, yes. Completely voluntary. I’ve already certified your fitness for duty.”
    “Then I am so out of here.”
    In time, Kenney returned to his sunny ways, the hysteria waned at the base and life at Area 51 returned to a semblance of normality. While politicians and the courts decided on the fate of Will Piper’s leaked database, analysts got back to their routine. There were still sixteen years to the Horizon, still work to be done, and the watchers were as vital to the effort as they ever were.
    The buzzwords at Area 51 and the Pentagon had always been research, planning, and resource allocation. The CIA and the military had used the Library as a tool since the early fifties, when, after its discovery beneath the ruins of medieval Vectis Abbey, a deal was struck between Winston Churchill and Harry Truman for the Americans to take control of the asset.
    The Library, all seven hundred thousand volumes, was flown by the US Air Force from England to Washington. A nuclear-proof vault was built under the Nevada desert. It took twenty years to digitize all the forward-looking material. Before digitization, the books were precious. Afterward, the Library became largely ceremonial, a symbol of the awesome power of Area 51.
    One of the early tasks for the staff at Area 51, a motley group of eggheads, braniacs, and military overlords, was figuring out how to exploit the data. After all, the ancient hide-bound books only contained names, written in their native alphabets, and dates of birth and death. Without correlates, the data was useless. Thus began a multidecade quest for virtually every digital and analog database in the world,birth records, phone records, bank, marital, utilities, employment records, land deeds, taxes, insurance data. North America was filled in first. Within twenty years Area 51 analysts had some form of address identifier for nearly 100 percent of the population. Europe followed suit. Asia, Africa, and South America took longer but the blank spaces on the globe got filled in eventually. Now, with 8 billion people in a world where virtually all personal data was digital, the picture was complete.
    In the fifties and sixties, as soon as Area 51 analysts worked out the methodology for correlating names with addresses and geographic coordinates, attention turned to exploiting the data. Clearly, there were singular dates of national importance. A stunned Vice President Lyndon Johnson was notified on November 19 that John Fitzgerald