Lee a Las Personas Como Un Libro: Cómo Analizar, Entender Y Predecir Las Emociones, Los Pensamientos, Las Intenciones Y Los Comportamientos De Las Personas
Author: Patrick King
Date: 2021-05-19 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Mystery Thriller; Suspense; Mystery; Fiction; Time Travel; Adventure; Action; Thriller; Science Fiction
Description: Lee a las personas con rapidez, descifra el lenguaje corporal, detecta mentiras y comprende la naturaleza humana. ¿Es posible analizar a las personas sin que digan una palabra? Sí, lo es. Aprende cómo convertirte en un lector de mentes y forjar conexiones profundas. Cómo meterse en la cabeza de la gente sin que se den cuenta. Lee a las personas como un libro no es un libro normal sobre el lenguaje corporal de las expresiones faciales. Sí, incluye todas esas cosas, así como nuevas técnicas sobre cómo detectar realmente mentiras en tu vida diaria, pero este libro trata más sobre la comprensión d
Publisher: Pkcs Media, Inc.

THE BREACH

Patrick Lee

Part I - BLACKBIRD

CHAPTER ONE

On the first anniversary of his release from prison, Travis Chase woke at four in the morning to bright sunlight framing his window blinds. He put his backpack in his Explorer, left Fairbanks on State Route 2, and an hour later was on the hard-packed gravel of the Dalton Highway, running north toward the Arctic Circle and the Brooks Range beyond. From the crests of the highest hills, he could see the road and the pipeline snaking ahead for miles, over lesser ridges and through valleys blazing with pink fireweed.

The trip was not a celebration. Far from it. It was a deliberation on everything that mattered: where he stood, and where he would go from here.

The console showed an outside temperature of fifty-nine degrees. Travis lowered the windows and let the moist air rush through the vehicle. The height of summer here smelled like springtime back in Minneapolis, the scent of damp grass just freed from snow cover.

He reached Coldfoot at ten o’clock and stopped for lunch. The town, with a few buildings and a population of less than twenty, survived entirely on commerce from travelers on the Dalton. Mostly truckers bound for the oil field at Prudhoe Bay, 250 miles north. Coldfoot was the last glimpse of humanity along the highway, before the elevation divide and the long, downslope run to the sea.

Travis wouldn’t be going that far. The mountains he’d come for were right here. To the west of town, Gates of the Arctic National Park followed the range in a two-hundred-mile arc to the southwest. There were no roads leading in—no foot trails, even. All hiking in the Brooks Range was back-country, though various websites and published guides detailed the most trusted and trafficked routes. Travis had studied them all, then plotted his own course to avoid them.

He left the Explorer at the depot, filled his water pouches, strapped on his pack and was on his way before eleven. By the time he stopped for dinner—a freeze-dried packet of brown rice he cooked over his tiny propane burner—he’d reached the top of the first ridge, two thousand feet above town. To the south, the last seventy miles of the morning’s journey receded toward infinity—back toward the world, and the places between which he had to choose.

Alaska or Minnesota?

There was pressure to go back home, of course. Pressure from everyone he knew there. He’d only been out of prison a month when he’d bought his one-way ticket to Fairbanks; some of his relatives hadn’t even gotten the chance to see him. What future did he see for himself up north, two thousand miles from his family?

What future did he see among them? Even to the few who could understand and forgive what he’d done, he would always be the brother who’d spent half of his twenties and all of his thirties in prison. Twenty years from now, in the eyes of the next generation, he would still be that guy. That uncle. You could only get so free.

He pushed on to the next ridge before making camp for the night. What passed for night, anyway: a few hours of cooling twilight as the sun dipped through the haze toward, but not quite to, the northern horizon. He staked his tent into the soft earth beside a snowfield that planed away for miles across the upper face of the ridge, and sat outside for an hour waiting for sleep to settle over him.

Maybe five miles to the west—distance was tricky up here—a stony ridge rose higher than the foothills he’d crossed so far. In the long light he thought he saw shadows flitting on the face of the rock. He took out his binoculars, steadied them on his knees, and scanned the ridge for over a minute before he saw them: Dall sheep, twenty or more, moving with spooky ease across a nearly vertical granite face. Lambs no more than two months old followed their mothers with sure-footed skill. Travis watched until they vanished behind a fold of the cliff wall.

At last feeling a calming heaviness in his limbs, he climbed into his tent and sleeping bag, and faded away to the rustle of wind over the short grass.

He woke with a quickened pulse, aware that something had startled him, but unable to tell what, exactly.

The sunlight through the tent fabric was stronger. His watch showed that it was just past three in the morning. He blinked, trying to fully wake up, and then the treble range of a thunderclap crashed across the ridgeline. Seconds later the bass wave shook the ground, seeming to radiate directly from the mountain beneath him.

Relaxing, he sank into his bag again, and rubbed his eyes. Silent lightning flashed, brighter on the west face of the tent than elsewhere. He measured the seconds on his watch and counted thirty-five before the accompanying thunder reached him; the storm was seven miles away.

Sleep began to draw him down again, even as the storm intensified. He found a strange comfort in the sound of it, a lullaby suited to this hard and unforgiving place. Within minutes the lightning and thunder were much closer, and almost continuous.

Just before he slipped over the edge of consciousness, he heard something in the storm that made him open his eyes again. He turned an ear to the west. What had it been? It really hadn’t sounded like thunder at all. It’d been more like a scream, though not human or even animal. More than anything, it’d reminded him of the rending of sheet metal in the prison drill shop. Well, that was it, then. Just his own ghosts troubling him at the brink of sleep. They were persistent, but he’d learned to ignore them.

He closed his eyes again and drifted off.

Three nights later, Travis set up camp thirty-six miles from Coldfoot, though the wandering route he’d taken, displayed on his GPS unit, added up to just over forty-nine. He ate his heated pouch of enchilada soup—all these freeze-dried meals tasted more like the pouches they came in than what was written on them—on the rim of a steep-walled valley some six hundred feet deep. Its floor, broad and flat, extended relatively straight toward the northwest for what had to be three miles.

A cloud bank churned through the valley like a smoky river, swirling around outcroppings of rock and pooling in the deepest places. Directly beneath Travis, the valley floor was completely obscured, though for a few moments when the sun’s lateral rays shone straight along its length, he saw the sparkle of something underneath the fog. Water, or maybe ice.

He slept easily, waking only twice, not to thunder but to the howling of wolves. He had no idea how far away they might be, though at times they seemed no more distant than a quarter of a mile. He’d read that wolf packs randomized the volume of their howling in order to confuse prey—and other wolves—as to their distance. It worked on humans, too.

At six in the morning he woke, opened the tent flap and sat up into crisp air, colder than it’d been the night before. The visible horizon extended farther than it had at any time during the trip.

Alaska or Minnesota?

He’d come here to answer that question. He’d failed, so far.

The pros and cons of each place cycled through his mind of their own accord. Home was family, friends. For all the judgment they could never hide, they would always be more accepting of his past than strangers would. Home was his brother, Jeff, offering to let him in on the software business he was starting out of his house, and show him the ropes from the beginning.

Home was also a place full of ghosts, every street in the old neighborhood sagging under the weight of troubled memories.

Alaska was this. This perfect emptiness that made no claim to understand his character one way or the other, and no effort to push him back into old grooves. In his move to Fairbanks he’d brought along nothing. Not even himself, it sometimes seemed. He wouldn’t have believed it even a year before, in his first days of freedom, but up here he sometimes went a whole day without thinking about prison, or what he’d done to put himself there. Up here, sometimes, he just wasn’t that guy anymore. And damned if that sensation wasn’t getting stronger by the month.

All of that would end, the hour he set foot in his old world again.

For that reason, if for no other, he thought he knew which way he was leaning.

He unzipped his bag, pulled on his pants and boots, and swung his feet out onto the ground. The grass, soft the night before, now crunched beneath his treads. He stood and stretched, then knelt and took from his backpack his propane burner and metal cup. A moment later the blue flame was hissing beneath the water for his coffee. Waiting for it, he wandered to the drop-off overlooking the valley, its depths now revealed in the crystal air.

He stopped.

For a moment he could only stare, too disoriented even to blink.

On the valley floor lay the wreck of a Boeing 747.

CHAPTER TWO

Travis packed everything within ninety seconds, including the tent. He set off along the valley’s rim at a sprint.

How could it be here?

How could it be here without choppers hovering over it, and a hundred rescue specialists armed with acetylene torches and schematics cutting carefully into the fuselage in a dozen places?

How could it be here alone?

The valley wall below his campsite had been too steep to descend, but half a mile northwest he could see a concavity where it shallowed to something like a forty-degree incline. Still steep as hell. He’d have to be careful to avoid going ass over pack all the way down, breaking every limb in the process. A lot of help he’d be to survivors then, if there were any.

As for help, he was it, at least for now. He had no means to call anyone. The cell phone in his pack had become useless forty miles out of Fairbanks, and his CB—the preferred mode of communication on the Dalton Highway—was thirty-six miles away, in the parking lot of the Brooks Lodge and Fuel Depot.

As he made his way along the precipice, his eyes hardly strayed from the impossible vision below.

The pilots had tried to land—that much was clear. The wreck lay pointing down the length of the valley as if it were a runway. Behind where it had come to rest, deep furrows were gouged into the earth for more than three hundred yards. Halfway along this scarred path lay the starboard wing, sheared from the plane by a stony pillar that had weathered the impact just fine. At the torn wing stub jutting from the fuselage, where fuel and scraping metal must have converged, only blind luck had prevented an inferno: the remainder of the plane’s long skid had taken place across a snowfield that covered the valley floor.

The rest of the craft was intact, more or less. The tail fin had snapped and lay draped on the port-side stabilizer like a broken limb held on by skin alone. The fuselage had buckled in three places, wiring and insulation curling from foot-wide vertical ruptures. Through these openings Travis could see only darkness inside the plane, though at this distance even a brightly lit interior would have shown him nothing.

He saw no movement in or around the wreck, and no sign that there’d been any. Nobody had dragged supplies out of the plane and set up shelter in the open. Had they simply sheltered in the fuselage? Were they too injured to move at all?

Distance and perspective made it pointless to look for footprints. The snowfield, glazed by the temperature drop, was almost blinding to look at, and from six hundred feet above it offered no contrast. There was no way to tell if anyone had left the wreck to hike out in search of help.

Help. That notion brought him back to the situation’s most confusing aspect. How did a 747 crash without anyone coming to its aid for—how long? Jesus, how long had this thing been here?

Three days. The metal shriek in the thunderstorm came back to him with clarity. He’d heard the damn thing crash.

Three days, and nobody had found the wreckage. Nobody had even come looking—at no point during his hike had he heard the drone of a search plane or the rattle of helicopter rotors. He couldn’t square it. This wasn’t a single-prop Cessna that had taken off without a flight plan and disappeared. Airliners had redundant communication systems: high-powered radio, two-way satellite, and probably a couple other kinds he didn’t even know about. Even if all of those instruments had failed, the tower at Fairbanks International would have logged the plane’s last known position. There should have been an army looking for it within the hour.

Travis reached the inlet in the valley wall, a grassy funnel that extended to the flat bottom below. The slope was more severe than he’d supposed, but there was nothing kinder for miles in either direction. Tackling it in a straight line to the bottom would be suicide, even here, but a sidelong transit looked feasible. He stepped onto the grade and found its surface to be as obliging as he could have hoped for: soft enough to allow traction without yielding in a muddy slide. He found that if he leaned into the hillside and braced a hand on the grass, he could make good progress without risking his balance.

Fifteen minutes later, sprinting hell-bent alongside one of the gouges in the valley floor—up close, the torn furrow was deep and wide enough for a Humvee to drive in—he passed the starboard wing, flung like a broken piece of a toy against the formation that had severed it.

He crossed onto the snowfield and was immediately enveloped by the smell of jet fuel. The snow was saturated with it. Every depression his boots made in the surface instantly pooled with the pink liquid.

The airliner was less than a football field ahead now, pointed away down the valley and rotated a few degrees counterclockwise, so that its left side—with the wing intact—was more visible than the right.

So far, no tracks in the snow.

Ahead, the tail loomed over the valley floor, four stories above Travis’s head, even with its fin broken. The aircraft lay canted to the left by the weight of the port-side wing, both engines of which were submerged in the deep snow. He passed the tail and stopped ten yards shy of the wing, between the twin ruts carved by the engines’ passing.

All three of the fuselage ruptures he’d seen from his campsite were on this side of the plane. The nearest, just steps away, was wide enough to admit him. Even from here, the darkness beyond the tear was featureless. The windows were even less help: tilted downward, they offered only a reflection of the snow.

Travis inhaled deeply and shouted, “Is anyone there?”

His echo came back in distinct bounces. There was no other reply.

He went to the opening, tested the strength of the metal on both sides of it, and pulled himself into the plane.

It wasn’t an airliner.

CHAPTER THREE

Row upon row of instrument stations filled the space Travis had entered, a claustrophobic version of NASA’s mission control that extended from the tail of the plane to a bulkhead thirty feet forward of his position. Swivel chairs were bolted to the floor at each terminal; everything else in the room lay in ruins, heaped against the left wall, the low end of the tilt.

The smell of fuel, still intense, gave way to something fresher. Familiar, too. In the close darkness, speared by shafts of window glare that only made seeing harder, he identified the scent just a breath before he saw its source.

Blood. Pooled beneath the tumble of debris. Pooled beneath his feet.

His stomach constricted; he turned to the rupture in the wall, thrust his head outside for fresh air and got a lungful of fuel vapor. It helped. Forcing control, his breathing shallow, he pulled back inside.

He held up a hand against the glare and scrutinized the disarray for what he knew must be there.

He saw them immediately.

A dozen bodies lay among the debris.

Atop the debris, actually. Which was strange.

He moved closer, saw the reason for it, and felt ice in his stomach where the nausea had just been. They hadn’t died in the crash. Each victim had taken two bullets to the temple, tightly clustered.

Travis went still and listened for movement aboard the wreck. Logic told him the killer, or killers, couldn’t possibly still be aboard. The plane had been down for three days. The killings had probably happened soon after. There would be no reason for the shooters to stay with the aircraft, and every reason to get away from it.

He listened for another ten seconds anyway, and heard nothing but wind scouring the valley and moaning in the cracks along the fuselage. A hymn for the dead.

He returned his eyes to them. They wore uniforms: black pants and crisp blue shirts, not necessarily military, but a long way from casual. The clothing was devoid of insignia or indication of rank. Even their nationality could only be narrowed by degrees: nine of the dead were white, three black. Seven male, five female. Their ages were hard to tell because of the bloating, but Travis guessed they ranged from thirty to fifty.

Now an obvious aspect of the plane’s exterior occurred to him, one he’d overlooked amid the clamor of more pressing observations: the outside of the aircraft was completely blank. He hadn’t seen even a tail number.

What was this thing?

He’d watched enough middle-of-the-night programming on the Discovery Channel to know the government maintained special aircraft for dire situations—flying backups, in case command hubs like the Pentagon were taken out in a first strike. “Doomsday planes,” they were called. Billions of tax dollars, which, God willing, would remain wasted forever.

But if this was a doomsday plane, wasn’t it that much more improbable that no one had found it?

Well, someone had found it, hadn’t they?

Travis rose and swept another gaze across the executed bodies and the machines they’d manned.

A thousand questions. No answers.

No need for any, either.

This was none of his business, and there was no helping these people. That was it, then. Time to go. Time to head back to Coldfoot and tell the good folks at the burger shop he’d had a nice, uneventful hike.

He returned to the tear in the outer wall, glancing forward as he went, his now adjusted eyes taking in the space beyond the door in the forward bulkhead. A corridor lay there, stretching a hundred feet toward the nose of the plane, windows on one side and doors on the other.

He’d already slipped his head and one shoulder out of the plane by the time his mind processed what he’d just seen in the hallway.

He shut his eyes hard, though not because of the glare from the snowfield. For maybe ten seconds he hesitated, willing his body to keep moving, to put the corpses and the plane and the whole fucking valley behind him. One quick drop to the snow would seal the decision. His legs would take over from there.

Instead he withdrew his head into the plane again, and turned to face the corridor.

A punctuated blood trail, nearly invisible on the black floor of the equipment room, led onto the beige hallway carpet and stretched fifty feet farther to a doorway on the right, where it turned in. Bloody handprints flanked a heavier trail in the middle. Not drag marks. Crawl marks.

Travis went to the threshold of the corridor. Four doors opened off the right wall, facing the Plexiglas-covered windows on the other side. The blood trail went in at the third. A fifth door capped the far end of the hall, probably leading to the stairwell, then the upper deck and the cockpit.

The bloodstains in the carpet were brown, long since dried; the pooled blood in the room behind him had only remained viscous because there were gallons of it. If the attack had followed on the heels of the crash, then the wounded survivor had been dying in that room up the hall for three long days. No chance of survival.

But it would take only a minute to be sure. Travis stepped into the corridor.

The first doorway was haloed by a constellation of bullet holes, which seemed to have been made from both inside and outside the room, at chest and head level.

Travis came abreast of the open doorway. Two dead men lay against the far wall, downed behind an executive desk they’d upended for cover. Wearing crew cuts, black suits and ties, they looked like Secret Service agents—or, Travis thought, just about any high-level security personnel. They’d been dropped with shots to the chest and neck, then executed for good measure like the victims in the aft section.

Unlike the aft victims, however, these two had been armed. And still were.

It’d been a very long time since Travis had held a gun, and he’d been well out of the loop on modern firearms during his extended stay with the Minnesota Corrections Department, but he easily recognized the M16 variants that lay beside the dead men.

He crossed to the nearest of the weapons and lifted it. The translucent magazine still held about half of what Travis guessed was a thirty-round capacity. Leaning the rifle against the desk, he inspected the second weapon’s clip, found it nearly full, and ejected it. In the coat pockets of the two dead men he found another full magazine each. They had nothing else on them, including identification. Pocketing the ammunition, he took the rifle in hand and proceeded to the next room along the hall.

What he found there gave him a longer pause than the bodies had.

Centered in the space was a three-foot-wide cube of solid steel, cut in half across its waist and hinged. At the moment it lay open; two heavy-duty chainfalls hanging from I-beam rails on the ceiling had been needed to get it that way. Carved into the exposed inner face of each half of the cube, right in the middle, was a square depression perhaps four by four inches across and two deep. If the cube were closed, those twin spaces would form a single cavity at its core, large enough to hold a softball, and surrounded in every direction by more than a foot of steel.

Whatever had required this much protection was gone.

On the side of the cube was a metal plate with simple black lettering:

BREACH ENTITY 0247—“WHISPER”

CLASS-A PROTOCOLS APPLY

SPECIAL INSTRUCTION FOR THIS ENTITY—NO PERSON SHALL

REMAIN WITHIN FIVE (5) FEET

OF EXPOSED ENTITY FOR LONGER THAN

TWO (2) CONSECUTIVE MINUTES.

Something about the steel around the core space of the cube caught Travis’s eye. He stepped in for a closer look, but almost immediately wished he hadn’t. In both halves of the cube, the metal directly around the central cavity was discolored to a dirty blue. The grain of the steel itself had been warped there, pushed outward as if by some unimaginably powerful and patient force.

His mind suddenly full of the frantic rattle of a Geiger counter in the red, Travis retreated from the room. He realized only once he reached the hall that he’d been holding his breath.

He turned in the corridor—not toward the third room but back the way he’d come from. The bright crack in the fuselage wall was just twenty paces away. If he stared at it much longer, he’d find himself slipping through it.

Then, angry at himself, he pivoted and made for the third doorway. This was going to be simple:

He’d find the victim dead and cold.

He’d wipe his prints from the M16.

He’d leave the plane and put three mountains between it and himself, and then he’d brew his goddamned coffee like he’d set out to do.

He was certain of all that until he walked through the third doorway, and then he was certain of nothing.

The victim was dead and cold. But this was not going to be simple.

CHAPTER FOUR

Travis had experienced the surreal before: moments as impossible to accept as they were to deny. What he found inside the third room took him back to one of those, the feeling channeling the past like an obscure scent not encountered in years. Sterile courtroom. Strobing fluorescent lights reflected on the narrow windows, all closed except one. Through the open window, the sound of a girl laughing, somewhere down the block in another reality far from this room and this judge and this sentence. He’d expected it, of course, and deserved much worse, but the gut punch of the moment had swayed him anyway: twenty-five years old, and he would be in his forties the next time he saw a night sky.

Here was a moment as difficult to grasp.

Here was the First Lady of the United States, dead with her eyes open, looking right through him, seated against the wall with a bloody notebook page in her hand.

Ellen Garner. Beautiful even now. Her features, always pale and delicate, had hardly been altered by the loss of her blood, which had soaked into the carpet around her. A single bullet had punctured her abdomen.

Beside her lay something that looked like an early-model car phone, a bulky handset connected by a black spiral cord to a suitcase. It could only be a satellite unit. Dried bloody fingerprints told the story: Mrs. Garner had crawled here from the tail just to get this thing, had taken it from its wall cabinet, found it damaged, and exposed its wires and boards in a wasted attempt to fix it.

Travis set the M16 aside and went to her. He knelt and gently took the paper from her fingertips, which death had long since stiffened, and read:

I hope that someone from Tangent finds this. If you are anyone else, do not contact local authorities. Go to a phone as quickly as you can, dial 112–289–0713. Ignore the consulting firm recording and enter 42551 at any time. A human will answer. Tell him/her that Box Kite is down at 67.4065 north, 151.5031 west. All dead except for two captives, taken by seven hostiles. Hostiles have almost certainly encamped within a few miles of this location—Tangent will know why, and will know what to do.

Two blank lines followed, and then the text continued. Here the writing was faint, wandering up and down over the light blue lines, written by a much weaker hand.

I know we are down somewhere remote. Have to assume now it is so remote, will not be found for days, and whoever finds this will be days from phone. Crash happened at 3:05 a.m. local time 26 June. If you find me more than two days after, if telephone is very far away, then ignore above message. Not enough time to call Tangent.

Hostiles are torturing our two people for info within close range of this crash, they will not leave area until they have broken them. (Not a guess, there is a reason they can’t leave before then.) Do not know how long our people will withstand them before breaking. Days I think, but I don’t know.

I am failing quickly—no way I can detail what is at stake. It affects you, whoever is reading this. It affects everyone. It’s bad. I understand that you won’t think you can do this, but I am asking you to kill these people.

Arms locker at aft wall of upper cabin, combo 021602. M16 rifles inside, can do full auto. Kill everyone. Most important to kill our people, captives, even if you fail to kill all hostiles. Kill captives first. I am sorry to ask this.

Another gap, and then a last passage, this portion so faint that Travis had to tilt the page toward the light.

PS—If you kill them all don’t go near the thing they have taken, three-inch sphere, dark blue, just get away and call Tangent.

Travis read the full page over again. By the time he’d finished, he felt a chill his heavy coat couldn’t keep out. He noticed a second slip of paper just visible in the pocket of Mrs. Garner’s shirt. He withdrew it and unfolded it. There were only a few lines.

Richard,

I’m fading in and out a lot, and when I’m out, I’m back in the dorms, back in Room 712 under that quilt with you, watching the snow over the law quad. Lucky life, spent with the only one I ever loved.

Ellen

Feeling like a trespasser, Travis carefully refolded the note and returned it to her pocket, exactly as it had been.

He stood, and saw for the first time the ground outside the starboard windows, above where Ellen sat. Here at last were the footprints. And ATV tracks. Though they terminated at the edge of the snowfield, forty yards away, there was little doubt which way they led.

CHAPTER FIVE

Paige Campbell stared up at the pines and tried to slip into dream lucidity. She’d managed it twice so far, for maybe a minute each time—not much, all things considered, a few crumbs of peace, but oh Christ, they were worth it. Even as something to look forward to, they helped.

She wouldn’t need them to look forward to, of course, if she could just move her head a few inches. Raise it up from the tabletop, then bring it down again as hard as she could, crack open the back of her skull and rupture something, anything. Three or four solid whacks, before the rat-faced man could stop her, and then she’d be gone.

Why was that asking too much? Why was it a pipe dream just to want the chance to die?

Because the rat-faced man was good at his job; that was why. Because her head was strapped fast to the wood, like every other part of her. Even her tongue had been clamped to her teeth, to keep her from biting through it and choking on her own blood.

So instead she tried for dream lucidity. It was magic when it worked. All at once no pain, no straps, no clearing in the freezing daylight that never ended. The dream places were familiar, safe. The first one had been the reading nook in her living room. She hadn’t read anything there in the dream; she’d just walked through the space, barefoot on the stone tiles, and run her hand over the soft fabric of the chair.

The second place had been the beach at Carmel, pushing her fingers down into the sand, past the baked surface to where it was cool. She hadn’t been there in years, but the memory of it came back in high definition now.

The opportunities to slip away were rare. It was only possible when the drug started to wear off, in the last five or ten minutes before they injected her again. If she wasn’t careful they’d catch on, and start injecting her sooner. That meant closing her eyes was a no-no, as much as it would have eased the way into dreamland. She’d just have to get there with them open, but that was fine. She’d done it both times.

One trick was to stare at the pines instead of the sky. The light was less intense that way, maybe half the effect of letting her eyelids fall shut.

This time around, though, none of it was working. Too many distractions. The rat-faced man and one of the others were arguing just a few feet away, jabbering machine-gun fast in their language. Once upon a time Paige had loved the sound of that language, had considered minoring in it, going abroad for two semesters to immerse herself in it, and had moped for months when her academic path had swung her away from that option. Now, she thought, if she had a big red button in front of her that would magically tear the tongue out of every man, woman, and child on the planet who spoke it, she’d break her hand on that button.

If her hand wasn’t strapped to a fucking table.

The argument ended, and here came the rat-faced man’s footsteps again. Here came the needle again. No dreamland this time.

Here came the tears, too, even before the injection and the resumption of the pain. She hated that she couldn’t stop herself, hated having ceded that much control to these people.

Her body jerked when the needle touched the skin beside her navel. Then it was inside her, and though the effect would take several minutes to set in, she could feel the drug itself blooming cold and sharp across her stomach.

The pines blurred and swam, her body shaking hard now and jarring the tears. The baffle across her mouth—there to rein in her screams, which might carry unusually far in these mountains—did not prevent her from hearing her own voice, pleading no, over and over like a mantra. She couldn’t stop that, either.

Now came the rattle of the crank under the table, the surface pitching over sideways until it was almost vertical, her body no longer resting on it but held by the straps.

Looking sideways now instead of up.

Looking right into her father’s eyes.

His own straps held him immobile against the base of the nearest pine, his head trapped between the blocks of the casing that kept him from looking anywhere but straight at her.

Her tears spilled out sideways. His remained pooled in his eyes.

Then the rat-faced man moved out of view behind her, and got ready to work on her, the same way he’d done it each time. She could never see for herself what he was doing, but her father’s expression reflected what it must look like better than any mirror could have.

She could picture it, of course. It couldn’t have been more obvious what was happening to her. The very first time—something like three days ago now, just after the rat-faced man had strapped her down—he’d opened her upper arm with a scalpel and parted her triceps wide with a wedge clamp. He’d avoided damaging the artery, of course; it wouldn’t do to let death rescue her that easily. His prize had been the radial nerve, thick as a pencil once he’d freed it from its lubricated sheath beside the bone. After that, he’d been able to access it immediately each time.

He was about to do that now, making a big show of his preparations. She was sure it was part of the torture, the psychological aspect of it, all the cues to whet her anticipation of the pain: the zipper of his tool bag opening slowly, the clucking sound of his tongue, like he was sad to have to be doing this, and then the sigh.

Now her father’s eyes moved, because the rat-faced man was looking at him before beginning.

“What kind of daddy you being, then?” the rat-faced man said, his English broken, lyrical. “How you expect you look yourself in the mirror after this? How you let your little girl get hurt this long?”

Then the high-pitched laugh, rapid-fire, like a squirrel chittering.

Her father’s eyes hardened and looked away from the man, meeting hers again, his tears overrunning now.

This was supposed to be part of the torture too, obviously: making them lock eyes while he hurt her. Maybe it worked on some people, but they’d miscalculated sorely in this case. Her father’s eyes were all that made this bearable for her.

Of course, the point of the eye contact wasn’t its effect on her. The eye contact was for him. He was the one they were trying to break.

Was it working? Was it breaking him?

No, not a chance of that. Why had she gone through all of this, if he was only going to submit in the end?

More to the point, he was just stronger than that. Of that much Paige was certain. Her father knew the stakes, which were bigger than this clearing and anything that might be done to them in it. Telling these people how to switch on the Whisper was simply not on the list of options. End of debate.

Blinking through her tears, she tried to look strong, tried to send him assurance. It was all okay. Really, it was okay, even now when she was shaking like this, and so fucking scared, even as she could hear the rat-faced man rummaging in his bag and bringing out the tool, her tears intensifying because any second it was coming, even now, she had to send him the will to bear watching this, because giving them what they wanted was so much worse—

The tool snapped to life with its grating hum, and a second later its teeth closed around the exposed nerve, and the image of her father shattered like a reflection on broken water as she screamed.

Travis lay very still on the rock shelf and tried to recall the mindset of a killer. It was far back along the corridor of years, where he’d meant to leave it forever.

Until now.

Through his binoculars he watched the little guy with the string mustache move the instrument back and forth inside the young woman’s arm. Even through the muffling attachment she had across her mouth, Travis could hear her screams. His perch was perhaps a hundred fifty yards from the encampment, and seventy feet above.

Seven hostiles. Two captives.

The surreal fabric of the situation still enveloped Travis, as it had since the moment he’d found Mrs. Garner. Who the hell were these people? What was all of this about?

Even when he focused past the disconnect, and forced himself to take stock of the circumstances he was up against, questions remained. Why had the hostiles chosen to remain here? How could they consider themselves safe less than three miles from the wreck of a 747 that had carried the First Lady of the United States? Not to mention whatever had been in the steel container. Why stay near the crash for even a single hour, much less three days? Mrs. Garner had said in her note that there was a reason for that, but hadn’t expanded upon it.

Well, the plane hadn’t been found by any of the authorities who must be looking for it, including, presumably, the president. Somehow these guys had pulled that off—their confidence in their safety must stem from that. They hadn’t even posted a lookout. For now, it was enough to know that Mrs. Garner had been right: these guys were not expecting trouble.

He could get them all from here. Easily. Skill was simply not a variable from this range and elevation, and with these weapons—he’d brought five M16s, their selectors set to full-auto. Anyone who could douse a flower bed with a garden hose could kill all nine people in that encampment from this spot, probably before firing the first two rifles dry. Certainly by the fifth.

Yes, he could do that. He could do that right now and have it done with.

But he wasn’t going to.

In truth, he hadn’t squared with that part of Ellen Garner’s message, whatever the unmentioned stakes might be, but if even a scrap of the idea had lingered in his mind, it had vanished the moment he’d trained his binoculars upon the young woman on the torture table.

He wasn’t going to kill her. He’d accrued enough of that brand of guilt for one lifetime.

But he was going to kill.

He continued watching String Mustache enjoy his work, while the young woman’s body spasmed in the binds, and he found the killer’s mindset coming back to him easily.

He could do this.

He just needed to get closer.

VERSE IAN OCTOBER NIGHT IN 1992

His footsteps are the only sound in the night, and they don’t carry far.

For this time of year in Minneapolis, the day has been warm and wet, but in the past hour—the hour before midnight—a chill has moved in on the city, stirring wraiths of fog into the graveyard quiet of Cedar Street.

This deep in the neighborhood, there are no streetlights. Some of those who carve out their lives here prefer it that way. Tonight, so does Travis Chase. It is dark enough that he presents neither shadow nor silhouette, and his shoes make only faint ticks on the broken pavement. The only things in the night sharp enough to sense his presence are those things wilder than himself—even as he thinks this, a dog chain rattles softly on a porch, somewhere in the fog to his left—but his business on Cedar Street at this hour doesn’t concern such things. His approach will not be detected by anyone that matters.

The .32 is in his pocket, loaded with hollowpoints.

Ahead of him the fog thins, and he sees the house. Emily Price’s house. The only light comes from the big living-room window, casting its shape out into the mist. He can picture the two of them inside, maybe sitting on the couch, holding each other close and saying little or nothing. When he thinks of that, Travis’s shame burns.

He has no idea what will happen when he knocks on the door.

CHAPTER SIX

Travis saw within minutes what it would take. A lot could go wrong, but he thought the advantage was his, even against these numbers.

On the far side of the encampment, fifty feet beyond, the pines were dense. More than heavy enough to conceal him. He could reach that spot undetected if he traveled far enough along the valley on this side, low among the rocks, before crossing over and coming back.

Fifty feet was close, and with surprise on his side he might do well to just start shooting. The first shot would be a free kill, maybe even the second. Then it’d be him against five, and confusion on their part might give him the edge for another kill or two, if he was fast enough.

But the ifs would stack up quickly then. Those left standing would reach cover. If even two of them found safe positions from which to return fire, he’d be in trouble. Most likely he’d be dead.

Surprise wouldn’t be enough. He needed misdirection. He needed them looking exactly away from where he’d be firing from. He needed them looking at the place where he lay right now.

The idea came to him quickly, probably because he had so little material to work with.

He leaned one of the M16s against a waist-high fallen rock, and took from his backpack one of the nylon bags that held a single change of his clothes. He dumped the clothes back into the pack, and hung the empty bag—nearly weightless now—by its drawstrings from the M16’s trigger.

Then he set a full water pouch atop the rock, and made a pinprick hole in it with his knife. What came out wasn’t even a fine stream, but just a ceaseless drip, which he positioned to fall directly into the nylon bag. Designed to keep water out, the bag would keep it in just as well. When it held enough, and weighed enough, this gun would fire its entire clip into the sky.

Peter Campbell was going to break.

He kept his eyes locked on Paige’s as she cried, while the stringy little shit with the whiskers continued probing inside her arm with the nerve actuator. From time to time she would narrow her eyes and manage the slightest shake of her head within the strap, her message unmistakable: don’t.

But he would. Had to. He’d been in denial about it for hours, though he’d only just now begun to recognize it.

These people had simply won. Help was not coming—would not be coming for days and days, if even then. Drummond had seen to that.

Drummond. He’d broken, hadn’t he? And under what pressure? Nothing like what these past three days had been. As Peter understood it, the man had gotten a call from his wife, crying somewhere with a gun to her head. Almost anyone in the world would have caved to that, but Tangent operators were supposed to be stronger. That was one of the key attributes they were selected for, and Peter would have bet his life on Stuart Drummond’s integrity. In fact, he had. And he’d lost.

It was little solace that everyone else had trusted Drummond too—trusted him supremely. Who else would have been tapped to fly a plane carrying some of Tangent’s highest-ranking people, along with the most dangerous object ever to come out of the Breach? But the flight—coming from Tokyo and bound for Wind Creek, in Wyoming, where the object would have been secured forever—had made an unscheduled course change somewhere over the Aleutians. Drummond had murdered the rest of the flight crew, then depressurized the plane without releasing the oxygen masks. Finally he’d taken the jumbo jet down to pelican height—somewhere in there, overriding the damn safeties to keep the interior pressure equivalent to high altitude—and gone north into Alaska below radar.

Peter and the others had revived to the metal screams of the aircraft coming to rest God knew where, rejuvenating air at last flooding the plane through the broken fuselage.

Even as they’d heard the ATV engines closing in from outside, Drummond’s voice had come over the comm, so hysterical he could barely speak. Peter had made out fragments of the apology and the story of Drummond’s abducted wife, and then he’d caught one final phrase before the man killed himself.

The final phrase—Ink Burst—had unnerved him more than the gunshot that ended the transmission.

Just like that, he’d understood that hope was lost. Ink Burst—a technology derived from another Breach object, albeit a relatively benign and manageable one—was a defensive measure designed to hide a crashed aircraft from satellites. Even visual satellites. It pulled a variety of clever tricks to fool them; one involved broadcasting an omnidirectional signal that caused spy birds to ignore the live crash site and substitute their own archived shots. The effective radius was something like five miles from the crash site, to cover any possible debris field. Currently every satellite platform in the world was vulnerable to it, though DARPA had a system ready to launch in November that was immune—after all, you never knew when your own toys would be used against you.

That precaution would come a few months late, as it turned out.

The whiskered man made a sudden adjustment to the nerve actuator’s power, and Paige’s body convulsed, a new flood of tears brimming in her eyes. He did that every few minutes to break up the pattern, keep her from getting used to any one strain of agony. This round would go on for another hour and a half, and then they’d crank the table flat again and let her rest an hour, as the drug lost its edge. The resting hour had nothing to do with kindness; it was simply the whiskered man’s understanding of how far he could push her and still keep her alive. The drug must be one of a dozen shock-inhibiting agents Peter knew of.

It was time to break.

He no longer cared what consequences would befall the world as a result. His world had shrunk until it no longer contained even himself. There was only Paige.

He could end her pain right now; in twenty words he could tell them where the Whisper’s key was hidden on the plane. An inch-long strip of something like clear cellophane, the key was the easiest thing in the world to hide, and among all the components of a 747, even a team of Boeing engineers could spend months searching for it, if they didn’t know where to look. Peter could give these people its location, and once they’d found it and verified that it was valid, they’d put a bullet in Paige’s temple, and his own.

Chirping laughter broke from the group encircling the campfire. That the arrogant fuckers had built a fire at all had made it abundantly clear to him, three days earlier, that this place would not be found in time. For the first twelve hours he’d clung to the hope that Ellen had survived. He and the others in the equipment room had forced her to hide in a mainframe cabinet; she’d protested, unwilling to be spared the others’ fate, and had given in only as the ATVs had stopped outside the plane. If she’d lived, she could have waited until the attackers left and then called for help.

But the hostiles, after executing everyone but Paige and him, had fired magazine after magazine into the equipment room, shredding every piece of machinery. He’d watched four shots pierce the compartment where Ellen lay hidden. There was close to zero chance she’d survived.

By the end of the first day, when Paige had already endured eight cycles of the torture, Peter’s resolve had withered to a thread, and all that had kept it from breaking had been the angry insistence in his daughter’s eyes, promising to hate him if he gave in.

All these impossible hours later, her strength was still intact.

But his was dead and gone.

It was time.

In the pines at the edge of the campsite, Travis set two of the spare M16s on the ground. Another he kept slung on his shoulder, and the last he held in his hands.

Fifty feet away, String Mustache was still about his business. From this angle Travis could see the face of the other captive, an older man tied to a tree near the young woman. Travis wondered if a look of greater anguish had ever existed in the world.

Ten feet from String Mustache, four of the other men were gathered around a fire, carefully tended to burn clean without visible smoke. It was more or less a bed of embers that they continually fed sticks to. One of the men was cooking a lump of meat over it. These four seemed intent on keeping their attention off of the torture, their conversation—Travis couldn’t pin down the language—serving as their own white noise to mask the woman’s muffled screams.

The remaining two hostiles were seated facing the torture table as if it were a matinee screen.

Travis crouched, tensed to move. It would happen any time now. He’d made the trip from the overlook in twenty minutes, hoping like hell with every step that he hadn’t misjudged the speed of the water drip, or the resistance force of the rifle’s trigger.

Now it didn’t matter. He was ready.

He thought he’d take the four at the campfire first. He might get them in one burst, depending on how much they separated when they turned away. After that he’d switch from full-auto to single shot—his thumb already rested on the selector—and be more precise with the other three, who were closer to the captives. By that time his rush would put him inside the camp, firing almost point-blank.

Breathing steady. Hands dry. Any second now.

And then the older man tied to the tree said, “Stop.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

String Mustache switched off the thing in his hand, though he kept it inside the woman’s arm. With the buzzing stopped, the only sound in the clearing was her soft crying, and the occasional pop of something in the fire.

Travis couldn’t see her eyes, but the man facing her—it had to be her father—looked more wretched than ever. He whispered what looked like, “I’m sorry,” and then, “I love you,” repeating the latter at least three times as his eyes ran over.

Finally he turned to her tormentor.

“Tell,” String Mustache said.

The bound man spoke, his voice wasted and all but dead. “The forward-most lavatory—bathroom—right behind the cockpit. Remove the fan cover in the ceiling, reach above and to the right. It’s there.”

String Mustache had his back to Travis, but Travis could picture the man’s eyes narrowing, calculating. Then he turned and spoke in his own language to two of the men at the fire. They got to their feet and went quickly to the ATVs that were parked at the edge of the encampment. Their own rifles slung on their shoulders, they mounted two of the four machines and raced away along the valley floor, in the direction of the crash site.

String Mustache watched them go, then turned to the father, who was still whispering something to the young woman on the table.

“Hope what you told me is true,” String Mustache said in his rough English. “I keep going until I know.”

Then he switched the handheld device back on, and the woman and her father screamed at the same time.

The two remaining at the fire averted their eyes. The two that comprised the peanut gallery smiled. Travis was just processing his own reaction—rage, beyond what he’d already felt—when automatic rifle fire shredded the air above the camp.

String Mustache dropped his device and threw himself flat—no rifle anywhere near his reach. The other four did as Travis had hoped: they took cover, and they got it exactly backward. He broke from the pines as the masking roar of the staged M16 continued. Fifty feet from the encampment, now forty, thirty. The four armed hostiles crouched behind their trees, looking the other way, backs exposed to him like hay bale targets.

String Mustache was still on the ground, with neither cover nor weapon in hand—his hands, in fact, were covering his ears.

Twenty feet. Travis arrested his forward speed, his feet sliding on the loose soil, and shouldered his rifle. He thumbed the selector switch to single shot—the targets were too widely spaced for a sweep—and brought it up to sight on the leftmost of the armed men.

In that moment the staged gun on the ledge ran dry, the instant silence far more jarring than the gunfire itself had been.

Travis pulled the trigger. His shot took the first hostile dead center in the back, and though he couldn’t see the exit wound in the man’s chest, the eruption of blood onto the tree was almost absurd. Like the guy had swallowed a grenade.

The others were already turning. Fast. Travis swung the barrel toward the second man and squeezed, the shot catching him through the side of the rib cage and propelling most of its contents out the far side. Following through on the gun’s sideways momentum, Travis fired again a quarter second later, the shot going wide of the third man and only slicing open his shoulder.

By now the last two armed hostiles were fully facing him, their weapons coming up smoothly.

What came next, Travis could only think of as autopilot. He’d felt it before, at times when his survival had balanced on a pivot-point made of seconds, or half seconds. His body just seemed to make its own call.

His knees bent. He dropped fast, just as both of the weapons facing him roared. In the same instant that he felt the baked-air trails of bullets passing his face, his thumb flicked the selector switch back to full auto, and then he was firing.

The autofire didn’t exactly knock the two men backward—that only seemed to happen in movies—but instead knocked the life from their bodies. Punctured across their upper torsos, they simply dropped, the left of the two crumpling so tidily in place that he cracked his head on his own knee before flopping sideways.

Travis felt the weapon fire empty even as he remembered String Mustache. Turning now, already letting go of the rifle and shrugging the second one from his shoulder, he saw him.

The man was no longer cowering. He was standing. Still not holding a rifle, but drawing a 9mm from inside his coat. He wasn’t even looking at Travis. His eyes were on the man tied to the tree, and his pistol was coming up.

The young woman screamed, so much louder than before that the sound baffle strapped to her face seemed not to affect it.

Travis got his left hand on the spare M16’s barrel guard. Twisting his body, swinging up the stock, his right hand finding the grip and the trigger well—

String Mustache put his pistol to the bound man’s head and fired. The woman’s scream doubled.

A half second later, as the man pivoted to execute the young woman as well, Travis’s M16 barked, already set to full auto. Three shots caught String Mustache across the face before the recoil pushed the weapon off target. Travis stopped firing, watched the torturer fall, his 9mm tumbling away over the dirt and pine needles.

Travis swept his gaze across the bodies of the first four hostiles to be sure they were dead. They were dead.

He slung the rifle and went to the woman on the table, taking his knife from his pocket as he went. She startled when she saw him, and he realized she had witnessed almost none of what had just happened—just her father’s death and then String Mustache’s.

The mechanics of the crank table were obvious enough. Travis took hold of the metal handle and turned it until the surface lay flat. He carefully lifted the strap of the sound baffle, cut it, and pulled the thing away.

She wasn’t screaming anymore. She lay there hyperventilating instead.

The straps holding her body were sturdy, but his knife got through them without any trouble. Her hands went to her face; her legs folded up to her chest as she rolled on her side. She felt for something inside her mouth and pulled it out. A rubber clamp of some kind.

Her upper right arm looked as bad as anything Travis had ever seen, but she paid no attention to it now.

Thinking to give her some privacy, Travis turned and walked to the edge of the camp, cocking an ear to listen for the ATVs. He could hear the engines, very distant now and still receding; no way could the riders have heard the gunfire over the roar of those machines up close. They’d left maybe ninety seconds ago. They were probably halfway to the crash now.

“Who are you?” The young woman’s voice was broken and faint.

Travis turned, and was surprised to find her sitting up on the table. Her body still shuddered with sobs, but she showed remarkable control, all things considered. She looked to be in her late twenties. Dark hair. Large, dark eyes. He found himself thinking she must be beautiful on anything but the worst day of her life.

“Travis,” he said, suddenly lacking a better answer. She seemed to be waiting for more. “I’m just a guy. I found the plane, found Mrs. Garner.”

“She lived?”

“Long enough to leave instructions.”

Before she could ask about that, movement between them drew their attention sharply.

String Mustache was alive, trying to turn himself over in the dirt. Though a good chunk of the man’s face had been cleaved away by one of the bullets, Travis now saw that the other two had glanced on the hard cheekbones and skull. He unslung the M16 and was an instant from finishing him when the woman spoke.

“No.” The word came out rough, halfway between whisper and growl.

Then she surprised Travis by pivoting and putting her feet on the ground, and standing—shaky for a moment, but standing all the same.

With her undamaged left arm she took Travis’s knife from where he’d set it on the table, and dropped hard with one knee onto String Mustache’s back, pressing him flat to the ground. She put the blade, edge-up, under his armpit and pulled savagely. Travis heard a sound like heavy elastic parting, and the man screamed. The arm quivered, uncontrolled. She did the same to the other arm, then turned a hundred eighty degrees and slit both of his hamstrings behind the knees. His screams ebbed to a low moan, gurgling blood in his throat.

The woman stood, put the knife aside, then stooped and gathered a fistful of String Mustache’s back collar.

Had Travis actually wanted to stop her, he wasn’t sure he’d have had time. She lifted String Mustache’s upper body, dragged him ten feet across the needles and loose soil, and dropped him facedown into the white-hot embers of the campfire. He screamed and thrashed, but could only command his limbs to jerk about; all control had literally been severed. He managed to contract his back muscles and raise his face for a few seconds, but then the young woman put her foot on the back of his head and pressed him deep into the coals again. She kept the foot there until his hair caught fire. By that time he’d stopped moving and screaming. She watched him for another ten seconds; then she picked up a rifle dropped by one of the hostiles, thumbed it to auto without even looking at it, and fired a burst into the back of String Mustache’s head.

She dropped the gun and turned back to Travis, and for a moment he wasn’t sure her eyes were even human. Then they fixed on her father, dead against the base of the tree, and all doubt about her humanity evaporated.

She crossed to the pine and sank beside his bound corpse, pulling herself against him, her face pressed to his despite the blood. She cried again, silently.

Travis went back to the edge of the camp and listened to the distant ATV engines. Thirty seconds later they stopped.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Travis expected to have to gently pry the young woman from her grieving. They needed to get out of the encampment and find positions from which to kill the other two hostiles when they returned.

But she sat with her father only a few minutes before standing, taking Travis’s knife again and cutting the dead man free. She set him carefully flat on the ground, then looked around, troubled.

Travis understood. “Where do you want to take him?”

Her gaze settled on the dense stand of pines where he’d hidden earlier. “There.”

Travis knelt and lifted the man, and carried him to the trees. He maneuvered the body among the boughs and laid it under the deepest cover, then waited silently as the woman stood looking down at it.

“We need to get out of here fast,” she said after a moment. “As soon as we kill the two that left on the quads.”

“There are more besides them?” Travis said.

“A lot more.” She nodded toward the camp. “These guys were calling in on a satellite phone every hour. When their people don’t hear from them, they’ll know there was trouble. They’ll send reinforcements with a helicopter.”

The woman took a hard breath, gave her father a last look, then turned away, back toward the encampment. As she did, Travis got another look at her right arm. The set of clamps the torturer had used to pry apart her triceps were still in place, keeping the skin and muscle wedged open at least an inch. Heavy black clots filled the cavity, along with what could only be infected tissue.

Seeing him stare, Paige turned her arm and saw the opening herself. Travis knew by her reaction that she was looking at it for the first time. She took it well.

“I wouldn’t pull those clamps out without a doctor close by,” Travis said. “You don’t want to trap those infections inside your arm, away from the air.”

“I don’t think I’ll be in a doctor’s care anytime soon,” she said, but made no move to detach the clamps.

She stepped out of the pines and moved into the camp. Travis followed.

“Can you use their satellite phone to call for help?” he said. “Get the military in here, or whoever your people can send?”

She shook her head. “These guys had to use a code to make outgoing calls. If I were more of a tech, maybe I could get around it, but I’m not. How far from a town are we?”

“On foot, fifty miles.” He looked at the remaining two quads parked nearby. “We could cover two thirds of it on one of those, taking the long way around a few ridges. Then there’s a river, and no way across but log bridges and rocks. We’d have to ditch the quad and walk from there, maybe a full day to reach Coldfoot.”

She considered that, looking more concerned than hopeful. Her eyes went past him to the open valley and the succession of mountain ridges beyond, as if the landscape were an executioner’s scaffold. Travis imagined a full day’s walk over the mostly exposed terrain, being hunted by armed pursuers in a helicopter. The young woman’s expression suggested similar thoughts.

“This is going to get bad,” she said. She stared a moment longer, then looked at Travis. “My name’s Paige. Thank you for saving my life.”

The riders were coming back. The engines had started up a minute earlier, and now the two ATVs were just visible past the curve of the valley, maybe a mile away yet.

Travis kept his M16 steady against a pine trunk. Paige held her own rifle at the next tree over, left-handed—clearly not her natural choice—and braced across a branch. Her damaged arm hung at her side.

In the silence of the clearing, the distant hum of the engines was no more than an insect buzz. The wind through the boughs was louder. So was Paige’s breathing, each intake more a gasp than a breath.

Travis wondered at the kind of resolve someone would need to even be standing after all she’d just gone through. Then he wondered at the stakes required to fuel that resolve.

“You’re worried about a lot more than just your own survival,” Travis said.

“Yes,” Paige said, her eyes staying on the gun sights.

“I want to know what all this is,” he said. “I saw the steel container on the plane. And there were details in the First Lady’s note, but not enough. I’m going to help you get to Coldfoot, regardless, but if I’m going to risk getting killed over something, I want to know what it is. I don’t think that’s asking too much.”

She looked up, met his gaze evenly.

“What’s Tangent?” Travis said. “What the hell is a Breach entity?”

Her eyes stayed on his a moment longer, as the drone of the incoming engines rose. Then she lowered her face to the rifle stock again, eyes down the barrel. Travis looked down his own sights. The riders were still a thousand yards out, just now resolving into distinct shapes. There was no danger of them spotting Travis or Paige where they stood, against the darker backdrop of the camp and the tree cover.

“Tangent is an organization,” Paige said. “Our entire purpose revolves around the Breach. Guarding it. Controlling it. And the Breach is … very hard to describe.”

“I’m more open-minded today than I was yesterday,” Travis said.

Several more seconds passed as Paige considered what to say next. Travis could see the gleam of sunlight off the chrome handlebars of the ATVs.

“Have you ever heard something described as the strangest thing in the world?” Paige said. “A two-headed snake, a potato chip that looks like George Washington, something like that?”

“Sure,” Travis said.

“Even in strict scientific terms, with no hyperbole, the Breach is the strangest thing in the world.” She thought for a moment, then went on. “It’s a source. A technology source. We get things from it. I know that’s vague, but I can’t say it more clearly. Not just because it’d be an act of treason, but because you’d never believe me unless you were standing right in front of it, seeing it for yourself.”

Travis saw her draw the rifle tightly into her shoulder, her left eye narrowing down the sight line. The riders were still well over five hundred yards out, too far for guaranteed kill shots. Travis was about to suggest that when they came into range, he take the left rider and Paige take the right, when her rifle cracked, a mini thunderclap in the stillness. The left rider jerked—Travis saw blood in the center of his chest—and pitched sideways, pulling the handlebars so tightly to the right that the machine jackknifed, flipped and threw him like a crash-test dummy. Which, by that point, he essentially was. Before he landed, Paige fired again, and the second rider’s head vanished above the jaw. He stayed on his quad for another five seconds, then tipped straight backward and fell off. The machine rolled thirty yards farther, throttling down to idle, and then just sat there growling.

Travis turned to her, saw her staring at the kills, her eyes hard and—if he was reading them right—unsatisfied with her work.

“I’m better with a scope,” she said.

She leaned the rifle against the tree, turned, and went to a pile of the hostiles’ gear in the middle of the camp. Within a few seconds she’d pushed aside their belongings—among them a little dirt-crusted shovel—to reveal a steel plate on the ground, eighteen by eighteen inches and half an inch thick. She lifted it with her good arm and let it fall flat on its other side, exposing beneath it a leg-wide hole in the dirt. Its bottom was too deep for Travis to see from his angle.

What caught his eye first was a disturbance to the plate’s underside: dark blue corrosion, and a just-visible bulge where the metal had spanned the hole in the ground. Exposure damage, caused by whatever lay unseen at the bottom.

“Any piece of technology we get from the Breach is called an entity,” Paige said. “This one is designated Whisper, and it’s dangerous as hell. The man who sent these contractors wants control of it. If he succeeds …” She paused, looked at Travis, then shook off whatever she was thinking, and knelt over the hole. “He can’t succeed. It’s that simple.”

She reached deep into the hole, almost to her shoulder, and lifted out a fist-sized object, perfectly round, its surface a dark, iridescent blue Travis was sure he’d never seen before.

The object from the hinged steel cube aboard the 747.

For a moment Paige gazed at it with a mix of revulsion and fear, as if it were a spent fuel rod saturating her bones with lethal rads. Then she narrowed her eyes and seemed to focus past the irrational feeling.

Travis sensed that whatever danger this thing posed wasn’t as simple as any physical risk from holding it. Not directly, anyway.

He lifted his gaze from the thing and met Paige’s eyes.

“Are you saying the Breach is a lab?” he said. “Some place where we build things like this?”

She shook her head. “It’s not a lab. And we didn’t build this thing.”

“We as in Americans?” Travis said.

“We as in people.”

She held his stare a few seconds longer, then stooped and picked up the shovel from the hostiles’ gear.

Travis continued staring at her, replaying her last sentence in all its gravity.

Standing, Paige said, “Do me a favor. The thing the other two went to retrieve from the plane looks like an inch of clear tape. It’s very important. It’s the key that switches the Whisper on. They’ll have it with them now. Get it, while I bury this where their backup won’t find it.”

“We’re not bringing it with us?” Travis said.

“We’d never make it. The Whisper’s too dangerous without containment. But we can bring the key. All that matters now is keeping these people from recovering both, and contacting Tangent as soon as we can.”

With that she turned away, Whisper and shovel in hand, and left the clearing through the trees on the far side.

Travis watched after her a moment, listening to her footsteps recede across the forest floor. Then he headed toward the distant ATVs. He’d gone only a few paces from the camp when he heard the hostiles’ satellite phone begin ringing behind him.

An hour later they were two valleys away, racing north through one leg of the long and snaking course he’d quickly mapped. Paige was seated in front of him on the quad, boxed in by his arms as he held the handlebars. She’d grown steadily weaker as they’d prepared to leave—the result, she said, of the interrogator’s drug wearing off. That and three days of zero sleep catching up. Travis couldn’t see her eyes now, but at times her body went slack and leaned back against him before she jostled awake again.

However long it took the hostiles’ backup to reach the camp, it wouldn’t be long afterward before they noticed a quad missing. At that point, a glance at a map would leave no doubt as to the direction their prey had gone. Coldfoot was the only way out, and there were only so many paths by which to reach it.

Travis kept the ATV on hard ground that took no imprint from the tires, and did his best to avoid the snowfields.

CHAPTER NINE

Darkness over LaGuardia. Dawn at the horizon, cherry red like a heated wire. Karl watched the world come to life, the hotel room dark around him. His reflection in the windowpane, side lit by the bathroom light, stared back with its visible eye blue and cold.

Twenty-five minutes to takeoff. He had all the time in the world. Nobody would make him wait in line.

Not when he was wearing the suit.

It lay in two halves on the chair beside him. He felt for the bottom half, found it, sat on the bed and pulled it over his jeans until he felt the built-in feet, like the feet of a child’s pajamas, snug tightly around his shoes. He found the shoulder straps and secured them. He reached for the chair again, felt for the suit’s top half, and slipped it on as he stood. He smoothed its long hem, which overlapped the waist of the bottom half by a foot or more. The material, so unlike anything else he’d ever worn, was hard to get used to, even after all his experience with it. It felt like spandex in a way, matching every dimension of his six-foot frame, but at the same time it seemed almost relaxed. At least, relaxed was the closest term he had for it. It was also breathable like the screen of a tent, and nearly weightless. On a previous occasion he’d worn it for more than forty-eight hours straight without any discomfort, even from the portions that covered his hands and head. Though he’d never asked his employers about it—not that they knew any better than him how the thing worked, considering where it had come from—he felt sure that the suit’s perfect fit resulted from some narrow intelligence of the material itself. Even now he felt the suit taking the shape of his body until he could hardly tell he was wearing it. It would not be surprising, of course, to learn that the suit had intelligence built into it. It would also not be its most impressive attribute. Not by a long shot.

Karl checked the peephole, saw that the hallway was clear, and left the room. He passed by the elevator bank, opting for the stairwell—elevators were a no-no, of course. Five flights down, he put his face to the little window in the door that accessed the lobby. It was empty except for two girls at the front desk, thirty feet away.

Walking out in front of them was not ideal, but protocol allowed it given that there was no easier option. He pushed the door open and stepped out. As he had expected, both girls glanced up at the opening door, expressions casual and then perplexed, trading looks now. As Karl passed directly in front of them, their eyes stayed on the door, falling shut far behind him with a light thud.

“Um … okay,” the older girl said.

The other shook her head and went back to her half-finished sudoku puzzle.

Karl could leave by the main exit, right in front of them, but because he had another choice this time—it would take less than a minute to reach the back door, around the corner and down the hall—protocol demanded that he take it. Really, the rules governing the use of the suit boiled down to three words: don’t fuck around.

He reached the rear exit and, quite alone, shoved it open and strode into the chilly New York morning.

Traffic on the Grand Central Parkway was heavy enough to merit caution, even at this hour. He waited for his chance, then sprinted across all five eastbound lanes at once. A moment later he’d crossed the other half, scaled the fence, and was out on the open sweep of LaGuardia, the terminals and airliners silhouetted against the red eastern sky like an alien fortress.

He walked across Runway Four, two access roads, and rounded the Central Terminal Building to the nearest entrance to Concourse D.

Outside the sliding door, he waited; its electric eye could no more see him than could the sleepy rent-a-cop standing a few feet to the side. No matter—caution would have demanded that he wait for someone else to trigger the door anyway. Airports were no places to start getting overconfident. No places to fuck around.

He waited only thirty seconds before a weary-looking businessman got out of a cab and lumbered through the entrance. He followed the man inside, broke left and made his way past the sparse lines of early travelers at the baggage check. From here on in, everything was easy. The security checkpoint, a farce even without the suit, was reduced to something like a kindergarten obstacle course. He stepped onto the raised barrier that boxed in the metal detector lanes on the left, and simply walked past the entire charade, stepping back down to the floor twenty feet beyond.

The concourse itself would have presented a challenge had it been busier. Crowds, even moderate ones, were a logistical nightmare; people would walk right into him if he wasn’t careful. At this hour, however, the wide, open passageway was mostly empty, save for the clot around Gate D7 far ahead, his destination.

When he reached it, he paused for a long while, studying the layout of the crowd. Where to stand? Not here, certainly. People would be coming and going in both directions, and the movements of those already camped here would be unpredictable. Worse, two little kids were chasing each other around, their mother, absorbed in a paperback, giving them only an occasional half-assed admonition to sit down.

The prime spot was obvious: right beside the jetway door, beyond the attendant’s stand. Karl skirted the crowd at a comfortable distance, ducked the stanchion barrier, and took his place. It wouldn’t be long; the 737 was already docked outside. Beyond it, the city skyline jutted into the still dim morning like a row of teeth.

The attendant went to his microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, Cayman Airways flight 935, nonstop service to Georgetown on Grand Cayman, is now boarding rows one through five. Rows one through five.”

Another attendant opened the door, and the moment she stepped away from it, Karl moved past her and into the cool air of the jetway, moving fast now to stay well ahead of the first passengers. He paused briefly at the door to the plane, where a stewardess blocked the way. She glanced through him down the jetway, saw nobody coming just yet, and ducked back in to speak to one of her coworkers. Karl slid past her and went to the back of the plane.

On a 737, depending on its configuration, the best place to ride out the flight was almost always the aft concession storage. The tiny room was empty for much of the flight, and even when a crew member came in to take or return a cart, evasion was a simple matter of ducking into the nook beside the ice bin.

Getting off the plane, of course, would be even easier than getting on.

Karl sat at the edge of the shade, five feet from the naked girl sunning herself by the pool.

By far the most interesting aspect of wearing the suit was the ability to study people when they thought they were alone. Until the first time he’d found himself in that position, it had never occurred to him what a unique perspective it could be. Ordinarily, you could never be with someone who was alone, simply by definition. You could set up a hidden camera, but it wasn’t the same as being there.

Nobody ever showed outward signs of anxiety when by themselves. No one ever fidgeted, or blushed, or moved awkwardly. What a strange thing to find: everybody was cool when there was no one around to judge them.

The girl was twenty-three and heartbreakingly beautiful. Olive skin. No tan lines. Deep brown eyes and sun-faded hair. She was five-foot-two and probably not a hundred pounds soaking wet. Five minutes ago she had in fact been soaking wet. Karl had watched her remove her clothes and dive into the pool. Now the Caribbean sun had almost completely dried her. He watched the last little collection of moisture droplets evaporate from her skin in the dry heat.

Her name was Lauren Cook. Karl had learned that fact along with everything else he’d learned about her father, Ellis Cook.

Lauren had the house to herself at the moment, all fifteen thousand square feet of it, overlooking Bodden Bay and the wide, blue Caribbean to the south. There were security personnel, of course, manning the entrances and ready to storm the place at the first cry for help. They were American, and professional; Karl had taken a close look at each of them and concluded that they were ex-something impressive, a hell of a lot more impressive than cops. The house’s fortifications were rounded out with thermal cameras and motion detectors, all of which might as well have been hollow decoys where Karl was concerned.

A yellow cabbage butterfly landed on Lauren’s thigh. She flinched and waved her hand at it, then saw what it was and smiled, watching it corkscrew away. It flew behind Karl and, by chance, dragged Lauren’s line of sight directly to meet his eyes for just a heartbeat. He felt a chill pass through him, meeting her innocent gaze. Then she sank back into her lounger and closed her eyes again.

Beyond her, the two-story house more than filled Karl’s frame of vision, extending seventy feet both to his left and right. Several of the second floor windows were open above the balcony, which was easy to climb to. Karl had already done so, had already walked the rooms of the house, inspected cabinets and drawers in Ellis’s bedroom, and formed his plan. It was very straightforward, no room for mistakes. Don’t fuck around.

A few minutes later Lauren rose, gathered her clothes and went inside, locking the patio door behind her. Karl went to the poolside rail and gazed down at the manicured lawns, and the yachts riding at anchor in the harbor beyond. He felt bad for the girl; she didn’t deserve what was coming. Though he had yet to see her interact with another soul, she had kind features and was probably a nice kid.

Well, it wasn’t a nice world.

Twilight over the bay. Haze had rolled in during the afternoon, and now the horizon was a blur between pink water and purple sky. Only the brightest stars shone through.

Karl watched Ellis enter the bedroom. The man walked past all three sets of balcony doors, wide open to the sea, without shooting so much as a glance through them. Why live here, then, Karl wondered.

Ellis went to his computer, switched it on, and paced while it powered up.

At the back corner of the desk were two framed photos: Lauren, and Ellis’s wife. Karl had seen no evidence of the wife’s presence in this house. The information provided by his superiors had indicated trouble in the marriage.

Karl reached deep inside the overlap of the suit and took hold of what he’d found in Ellis’s nightstand.

Icons bloomed on the computer screen.

Ellis sat in his chair.

Karl drew the chrome-plated .45, put it to Ellis’s temple and fired.

Immediately came shouts from security outside the house. Screams, too, from Lauren’s room. Seconds left to finish the job.

Karl lifted Ellis’s hand, wrapped the man’s fingers around the pistol grip, and fired again, this time into the framed photo of Mrs. Cook. Powder burns now assured, he let both the hand and the pistol fall free. Not two seconds later the bedroom door broke in, almost off its hinges, and four security men were in the room, MP5s shouldered and covering all angles.

“Room clear.”

Two broke formation, one to the master bath and another to the enormous closet.

“Bathroom clear.”

“Closet clear.”

Karl chose the broadest stretch of the wall, far out of the way, and simply stood. Outside in the hallway, other security men were holding Lauren back as she screamed and demanded answers. The men in the room spoke over headsets with other teams outside, locking down the grounds, though a certain calm had descended in their eyes. They could see what had happened.

Watching from the perimeter of the chaos, Karl felt his cell phone vibrate. He was expected to answer under all but the most unforgiving circumstances. These qualified.

Ten minutes later, in the lull between the security response and the arrival of local police, Karl went to the balcony, slipped over the rail and dropped to the patio. He saw two security officers just inside the living room—one of them a woman—sitting with Lauren, holding on to her and speaking softly.

He went to the far end of the patio, where a six-foot drop put him on a gentle slope to the beach.

A quarter mile up the shore road he found an empty bench, and sat. He took out his cell phone and, as expected, found a text message.

RETURN TO AIRPORT, NUL CURRENT JOB IF NECESSARY. TAKE UNITED 820 TO CHICAGO, THEN UNITED 71 TO FAIRBANKS, AK. WEAPONS/INSTRUCTIONS WILL BE WAITING IN YELLOW LAND ROVER W/GREENPEACE STICKER, LONG-TERM PARKING D. THIS WILL BE DIRECT AGGRESSION AGAINST TANGENT PERSONNEL.

CHAPTER TEN

Even after the sound of the helicopter faded, Travis watched the ridgeline through the cedar boughs for ten minutes. The way ahead, visible from this rise, stood bare and shadowless for more than two miles. Getting caught in the open would be suicide.

The going had been as rough as he’d expected. Five times now, in just over twelve hours, the chopper had come hunting the valleys for them, making slow and methodical passes or simply stopping to hover for minutes on end. Concealment had been sparse but always reachable within the short warning time provided by the incoming rotors, echoing among the peaks.

They’d reached these cedars by the breadth of a wish, Travis setting Paige deep beneath the branches and pulling his own limbs under just as the aircraft rounded the nearest bend in the valley.

Now the silence felt sturdy again. As sturdy as it was going to get, at least.

Paige had drifted off—had barely been awake to begin with, in fact, even when the drumbeat of the blades had passed within a hundred feet. She was in bad shape and getting worse by the hour. The skin around the fissure in her upper arm had grown angry red, and the infected tissue inside appeared to have tripled its presence since Travis had first seen it. Most frightening of all, the veins visible in her forearm had distended and darkened, at least some aspect of the infection spreading that far. And that was only where he could see it. Where else was it branching to?

His first-aid kit might as well have been a make-believe set for a toddler playing nurse. It had nothing that could deal with this injury, though he’d tried the spray can of bactine anyway, with her assent. The only clear result had been searing pain, which she’d tried her best to hide from him. She’d failed—you could only blink away so many tears.

By the time they’d ditched the ATV in the river—after skirting the bank for miles to find a stretch of rapids foamy enough to conceal it—Paige was running a high temperature and unable to stay conscious for any real amount of time. So Travis had dumped his eighty-pound backpack into the rapids as well—keeping only the smallest water pouch—and carried her.

It was harder than he’d supposed it would be. She weighed maybe forty pounds more than the pack, and she hadn’t been designed by North Face to distribute the load to his frame. Uphill distances became leg-press workouts. Downhill was worse, every step compressing his ankle and threatening to roll it over into a sprain. Which, in a roundabout way, he realized, would amount to a fatal injury. For both of them.

It helped to consider what Paige had gone through these past three days. All his discomfort was a shin-bump against a coffee table by comparison.

He lifted her carefully now from beneath the cedar. Her eyes opened for a second but didn’t focus on him. He wanted to believe that her catatonia was mostly a result of the drug and the sleep deprivation, but had to accept that the infection’s role was considerable, and growing. Her forehead beaded like a windshield in rain.

He left the cedar stand and got moving, pushing the pace faster now than at any time before. The open space ahead was the physical distillation of anxiety itself. He imagined that this was how agoraphobics felt in shopping malls. Like prey.

There was no reason to think the chopper might be friendly. Had Paige’s people somehow located the wreck, they’d have shown up in greater numbers: fighters overhead, and multiple helicopters offloading personnel along every ridge for miles. It would have been the confident presence of a force on its home soil.

This lone chopper was more like a prowler in someone’s house.

Ahead, the valley curved gradually, revealing that the open space continued farther than he’d seen at first. He’d hiked this route on his way in, but couldn’t recall the specific layout of tree cover.

He recognized the high, rocky crest on which he’d seen the Dall sheep, his first night in the park. At that time he’d been a few miles east of it, on the Coldfoot side; he was far west of it now, still deep in the range. Adding up the rough distances, and considering his speed—slower than he’d traveled with just the pack, despite the urgency pushing him now—he put Coldfoot at least another twenty hours away.

He wouldn’t sleep, of course. Paige would live or die based on how soon she received treatment for the infection. Hours would count.

As he walked, he thought of what she’d told him in the clearing.

Tangent. The Breach. The Whisper.

He had in his pocket the piece of clear plastic he’d retrieved from the dead ATV riders. The Whisper’s key. What exactly would the Whisper do, when its key was applied? Paige’s words came back to him:

We didn’t build this thing.

We as in people.

The implications were hard to get his mind around, and not because he didn’t believe her. Just the opposite.

Paige interrupted his thoughts, murmuring something in her sleep. No words—just a scared sound, miserable and pleading. It lasted only a few seconds, and then she was quiet again, though Travis felt the tension in her muscles linger, and saw her eyes flitting back and forth behind their closed lids. He wondered how long it would be before she could dream anything other than nightmares.

“You’re safe,” he said quietly. “They’re gone.”

He didn’t expect it to work, but it did. She relaxed almost at once, into what passed for dreamless sleep.

Mostly, he tried not to look at her.

Tried not to notice her eyelashes, or the way her bangs fell on her forehead, or the nearly invisible traces of long-lost freckles across the bridge of her nose. Tried not to think of how, in spite of his muscles burning as if battery acid were flowing through them instead of blood, this was the best he’d felt in a decade and a half.

She was something. No escaping it.

In a way, she was everything. Everything that his future would never contain. A year out of prison, he hadn’t even humored the idea of dating again. He’d spent fifteen years learning not to think about what he was missing. He’d gotten pretty good at it, too, and his freedom had brought little reason to change that perspective. His body might not be constrained behind razorwire borders any longer, but his chances with a woman like Paige sure as hell were.

It wasn’t that he’d be alone forever. There were ways to take the edge off his past, and he was working on them. He’d been doing construction in Fairbanks for most of the year he’d been there, on a contractor’s crew. Working hard at it, and working smart, paying attention to the business side of the job. And saving his money. He’d be in a position to head up his own crew before too long, starting with medium-sized projects, mostly additions. If he played it right, he’d be putting up new homes on spec within five years, and eventually—maybe another five years after that—the homes would be high-end. Somewhere along that arc, with a solid career to speak for him and with prison far enough behind, he’d find someone who’d give him a chance.

But not someone like Paige. Not even close. And that was fine, as long as he didn’t think about it.

So he tried not to look at her.

But mostly he failed.

The open span, which turned out to be over three miles long, terminated at a grove of alders where three smaller valleys converged from high above. He’d gone a quarter mile beyond the grove, into more open space, when he heard the chopper again. No chance of getting back to the alders in time. He tried for them anyway.

He was a hundred yards shy, moving faster than good judgment counseled on the rough ground, with the rotors like drumsticks on sheet metal and the chopper seconds from breaking into view, when he took the misstep he’d been dreading.

He saw it a tenth of a second before his foot touched down, time enough to recognize the mistake but not redeem it. The bare patch of dirt, no larger than a dinner plate, was dark and moistened, either by snow runoff or a spring somewhere beneath it. All the dirt on this slope was moist, but grass roots held it firm—where there was grass. Travis had simply taken his eyes from the ground a half second too long, watching the ridgeline for the chopper.

His foot hit the soft earth and slid sideways as if on ice.

For a second—his balance gone, his body pivoting without any pretense of control—he simply knew it was over. They would sprawl. The chopper would be on them before he could even pick himself up, much less Paige. And just for a challenge, here was a jagged boulder in his path, perfectly placed for him to crack his head against when he fell.

Somewhere in the churn of his thoughts rose the impression of driving on ice. Spinning out. Turning into it instead of against. Stupid—but all he had. He pitched his shoulders forcefully counterclockwise, the direction of the spin, and found himself standing still so suddenly that it was almost disorienting.

The rotors were drumming against his skull now. Any second.

A single hope had tempered his anxiety during all the time spent in the open: the men in the chopper had no idea who had killed their friends at the camp. They’d be forced to assume a hidden survivor from the jet had arrived, or that the captives themselves had somehow taken the upper hand. Either way, they would expect the fugitives to be dressed for room temperature inside a 747—not an Alaskan hike.

The boulder, just above knee-height, was only a step away. He turned and backed against it, sitting roughly and keeping Paige in his arms, her legs now draping across his lap. She was already wearing his heavy coat, minus a sleeve to let the wound breathe. He let that arm—her right—press against him, out of sight to anyone high above.

Then he pulled her face to his, close enough to create the illusion that was their only chance for survival: that they were an ordinary couple hiking in the back country, caught in the middle of a kiss.

At that instant the chopper broke into the clear above the nearest ridge, angling north at a good clip. Then it stopped. The pilot had seen them. Travis had only a peripheral sense of the thing; Paige’s face took up most of his vision.

The clatter of the blades intensified as the aircraft fixed on them and moved in.

Travis shut his eyes—they’d be visible from the chopper’s height—and tried to make the kiss look real. One hand holding the back of her head, the other around her waist. His mouth pressed against hers. The turbines settled in directly overhead, screaming and pounding and lashing their hair against their faces hard enough to sting.

All of which provided enough sensation to wake Paige.

Travis felt her body flinch. He opened his eyes and found hers staring right back at him, wide and startled, from less than an inch away. This was it. This would blow it. She’d pull away, and a few seconds later, machine-gun fire would herald the last seconds of their lives.

Then her eyes changed, and she understood. She pulled him closer, her free arm coming up, her fingers in his hair. And now she was really kissing him, her mouth parting, so warm and intense that for the most fleeting moment it was all Travis could focus on. No thunder of turbines, no rotorwash, just her kiss, as desperate as her need to keep breathing. For that moment, it almost didn’t matter that it was fake.

It occurred to him only in passing that they should probably wave at the helicopter, as almost anyone would, but by then he heard the engine change pitch, and a moment later the aircraft was moving away up the valley and taking its downblast with it.

She continued kissing him for another ten seconds, until the chopper was far away, and then they separated, eyes still locked on each other’s, six inches apart.

“Good thinking,” she said, whispering because it was all she had the strength for.

He managed a nod, suddenly hard up for dialogue.

She turned to stare after the helicopter, but had hardly moved when her breath caught and she nearly passed out from a wave of pain. She’d accidentally pressed her damaged arm into his side, so lightly Travis had barely felt it.

She regained her composure and slowly brought the arm out in front of her. She saw the purpled veins spiderwebbing her forearm, more than a foot from the infection’s source, and for the first time since he’d met her, Travis saw fear in her eyes.

“How far from town now?” she said.

“Just a few hours,” he lied. “Close your eyes again and we’ll be there.”

For a long moment he thought she would do just that. She leaned into him, her forehead against his cheek. He was about to stand when she spoke again.

“Remember this. From the place where they tortured me, go in the opposite direction from the crash site, and at fifty steps find the biggest tree around. You can’t miss it. The Whisper is on the far side, buried two feet down. I scattered needles to hide the ground I disturbed.”

“You don’t need me to know that,” Travis said. “You’re going to report it yourself.”

He waited for her reply, but none came. After a moment her breath against his neck fell into a steady rhythm, slow and even.

VERSE IIAN OCTOBER NIGHT IN 1992

Through the sheer curtain across the living-room window, Travis sees that he was close to right: they are seated, holding each other, though they’ve squeezed into one of the big recliners instead of the couch.

He knocks, and sees the man’s shape turn. A moment later Travis sees his face through the little window in the door as he approaches across the laundry room. The man’s eyes are blood red from crying. Behind him, the dining-room table is covered with flowers and somber cards.

The man does not even look through the door before opening it—he expects someone else, anyone else—and when he finds himself face to face with Travis, he flinches angrily. His eyes narrow. A tear spills from the left one.

Looking into those eyes, Travis expects the man to turn from the door, stride into the next room, return with his shotgun and open fire. If it happens, Travis will not try to run. He knows he deserves it, for the misery he has brought to these people.

But Emily Price’s father does not turn away. Behind him in the house, her mother calls out to ask who’s there, her voice stretched and ruined by her own tears.

She gets no answer.

Mr. Price holds his glare on Travis and says, “What do you want, Detective?”

Travis hears the contempt behind the last word. He knows he deserves that, too.

“What have the police told you?” Travis says.

The man’s eyes harden. “Why don’t you go ask them? They trust you, right?”

Travis says nothing. He waits for the answer.

“They’re not going to charge anyone,” Mr. Price says at last. Hate and despair and torment become a unified whole in his voice.

“Why not?”

“No evidence. They didn’t even find her body. Just her car. But they said there was so much—” The man falters. For a moment he seems incapable of saying more. Then: “There was enough blood, her blood, that a girl her size couldn’t have sur—”

His voice gives out then, of its own accord. He looks down. His lower lip shakes.

Through the tremors, Mr. Price says, “She didn’t do anything to them. This is all you. It started with you.”

Travis manages a nod. He steps closer and speaks softly. “It’s going to end with me.”

Mr. Price looks up at him.

“I wasn’t here tonight,” Travis says. “Can you agree to that, Mr. Price?”

Emily’s father only stares. Seconds pass. He knows what Travis is saying. He knows what he means to do. For a moment he actually considers his response, as if there’s any real choice. But then, because Emily was his only daughter, because she took her first awkward steps into his arms, because when she was a teenager she used to fall asleep resting against his shoulder on the couch during The Tonight Show, and because three times today he’s gone into her bedroom and pressed her pillow to his face to breathe in whatever fading trace is left of her there, he nods.

“Okay,” Travis says.

Mr. Price closes the door, and Travis turns away, back into the night and the fog, and his hand goes unconsciously to the .32.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Travis ran the last thousand yards to the highway. His knee joints felt like they were riding on glass chips instead of cartilage. Through the front windows of the Brooks Lodge and Fuel Depot he saw half a dozen patrons, maybe the regulars watching a baseball game on the TV above the serving counter. It was eight o’clock at night, the sunlight slanting long and red from the northwest.

He stopped at the road, a hundred feet from the restaurant. Paige was stirring in his arms, jostled by the run but unable to regain consciousness. Her breathing had developed a rattle in the past two hours. Sometimes she took a deep breath and sounded like she was choking for a second before getting past it.

Travis studied the patrons as well as he could at this distance. They looked harmless enough—to the extent he could judge it.

There was every reason to expect trouble from Paige’s enemies here, the one place where their arrival could have been predicted—and predicted well in advance. The only advantage the town offered was its limited size: there was simply no place where the enemy could have set up a stakeout without attracting attention. No sprawling parking lots to conceal a van. No residential side streets, either. The one place in town where a person might sit for a few hours without drawing looks was the restaurant in the lodge, but if the hostiles’ reinforcements were anything like the ones Travis had seen at the camp—foreign nationals armed with halting English—then blending in that way would be off the table as well.

Granted, they probably had the connections to send someone who didn’t stick out so much, and they’d had a day and a half now to do it, but even at that, Coldfoot was just not a place where outsiders lingered. Truckers heading north to Prudhoe Bay might stop for a meal, and the occasional van full of tourists might spend the night, but nobody hung around. Coldfoot was a stop on a long road that went to exactly one place. It was nobody’s endpoint.

No, if there were watchers here, they were in concealment high above town. Travis swept his eyes over the encircling ridges; there were so many pine and alder groves it wasn’t worth scrutinizing any one in particular. Either they were there, or they weren’t. If they were, then trouble would arrive long before help, and it would simply have to be dealt with. The 9mm pistol from the hostiles’ camp, the only weapon he’d brought along, felt reassuring in his back waistband, his shirt draped loosely over it.

He crossed the highway and jogged the last distance over the gravel lot, past his own Explorer, two Jeeps, and a yellow Land Rover. When he was thirty feet from the building, a big guy in a John Deere hat inside saw him coming, looked confused for a second, and then ran to shove the door open and meet him.

“What happened?” the man shouted.

Behind him, the others had forgotten the ball game and were on their feet, staring through the windows as Travis ran up.

He had the abridged version of the story well rehearsed, and the stress in his delivery would simply be genuine.

“I found her in a valley west of here,” he said, hearing his own voice for the first time in twenty hours and finding it convincingly ragged. No doubt his appearance matched it.

The big guy held the door aside as Travis stepped through, and the gathered patrons reacted as one to the sight of Paige’s arm; it couldn’t have been much worse if he’d brought a corpse into their midst. A blonde woman who’d come from behind the counter—Molly, according to her shirt—choked down most of a scream, stepping back and knocking over a wire newspaper stand.

Then everyone was talking, a short woman with her hand on her mouth, her eyes going from Paige to Travis and narrowing, maybe judging, the big guy in the hat coming around from the door now, reacting hard at the sight of the clamps, asking what in the holy fuck they were—

“This is how I found her,” Travis said over them all. “She hasn’t spoken, I don’t know who the hell did this. I don’t know anything, just call it in, okay? How fast can the cops and paramedics get up here?”

That last bit was for the locals’ benefit only—he had no intention of waiting around for police or anyone else, or entrusting her to their protection even if they somehow arrived before whoever Tangent sent.

But it worked. Any suspicion aimed at him vanished. Molly was already rounding the counter, picking up the phone and dialing something longer than 9–1–1.

“Gonna be five, six hours for the cops,” the big man said. “There’s no highway patrol on the Dalton. Medevac chopper out of Fairbanks, figure ninety minutes at least. Had a trucker come in here having a heart attack, couple years ago, took that long for them to make the flight.”

Molly, waiting for the call to connect, shouldered the phone and scooped a key from a pegboard. She tossed it to the big guy and said, “Three’s clean, he can set her in there.”

The man led Travis through the back exit of the room, into a short hallway lined with doors.

Room Three was simple and clean, lateral sunlight casting a coppery glow on the bedspread. Travis set Paige carefully atop the cover, taking the most precaution with her arm; letting anything press against the wound might traumatize her. As it was, the change of position triggered another of the deep breaths that seemed to nearly choke her.

The guy in the hat stood just inside the door.

Travis watched Paige’s breathing return to normal and then said quietly, “Do you have any weapons here?”

In the corner of his eye he saw the John Deere hat turn toward him.

“The camp I found her in,” Travis said, keeping his eyes on Paige, “there were different kinds of boot prints, three at least, none of them hers. No telling where those people are now, but if they were to show up here …”

“Christ …” the man whispered.

“The cops are six hours away, like you said,” Travis continued. “Anyone familiar with this area probably knows that too. If you’ve got a gun, be ready with it. You and anyone you trust, if you have more.”

The guy nodded, then went to the window and stared out, the brim of his hat touching the glass as he scanned the ridges to the west.

Travis felt bad lying to him, but the truth was simply not workable, and it would have been far worse to stay silent, given the risk he’d just brought upon this place. That part, he felt the worst about. But what choice had there been?

The man in the hat turned back to him. “Yeah, let’s not fuck around,” he said, and made for the hallway.

“Can I call out on this?” Travis said.

The guy stopped in the doorway and looked at the phone on the nightstand Travis had indicated. “Dial nine first,” he said, and left.

Travis pushed the door most of the way shut, took the First Lady’s note from his pocket and began to punch in the number she’d provided. As he finished dialing, he heard the door creak, and saw it swing slowly open again under its own weight. The phone cord kept him from reaching it now; no matter.

The call rang once and then a lively recording began. “Thank you for calling Laketon Associates, your consulting solution for dynamic—”

He entered 4–2–5–5–1. The line clicked, and within less than a second a woman spoke.

“Key term,” she said flatly, more a demand than a question.

Travis blanked. “I don’t know it.”

“Who is this?”

Matching her lack of banter, Travis said, “I’m a civilian. I found your plane. Everyone’s dead except Paige Campbell.”

Things happened very quickly then: a rapid exchange of voices somewhere, then muffled clicks as other extensions opened.

A man: “Where are you calling from?”

Travis thought they probably already knew that. “Coldfoot, Alaska,” he said. “The crash site is thirty-six miles west of here—”

“Stop,” the man said. “Your line’s not secure. Give us direct answers and don’t elaborate—”

“They’re dead,” Travis said. Exhaustion and stress had made it easy to get pissed. “You have one survivor, and if you want to keep her, you better send a goddamn cargo jet full of paratroopers up here, and make sure one of them’s a surgeon. She might last another hour, and I could be really fucking wrong about that.”

Silence for three seconds—either they weren’t used to being spoken to that way, or they were writing it down. Then somewhere in the background of the call, he heard a woman say, “Move on it, go,” and he felt better.

“Please answer this question with a yes or no only,” the man said. “Are there hostile elements that can reach you within the next hour?”

“Yes.”

“Again yes or no, can you estimate the number of possible aggressors?”

“No. But they have something you should know about.”

“Go ahead.”

“A helicopter. It’s not an attack chopper, I doubt it’s any threat to another aircraft, but whoever’s coming here should be aware of it.”

“Good,” the man said. Sounding more human, he continued. “Don’t say anything about your own defenses on this line. Be as prepared as you can manage, and wait for our people. I’m going to connect you to a surgeon who’ll ask you to describe Miss Campbell’s condition. Do that quickly and then set about your preparations.”

The conversation with the doctor took three minutes. He didn’t sound optimistic.

Travis finished, hung up, and pulled a chair from the corner to the bedside. He sat beside Paige and stared. She sounded terrible—worse now than when he’d stopped at the edge of the highway. Her good arm lay facing him; he took hold of her hand in both of his, and closed his eyes. Through the open door he could hear the baseball game on television.

The floor creaked in the hall. He opened his eyes and turned to the doorway. No one there. The creak came again, farther away now, moving toward the front of the lodge.

He’d just turned back to Paige when he heard a pneumatic snap, like a pellet gun firing, and a woman screamed in the front room. The snapping sound came in rapid succession then, and the front of the lodge filled with screams of fear—and pain, clearly. Travis rose fast from the chair, shoved it aside and spun to face the doorway, the 9mm out of his waistband, up to level.

In the instant it took him to do that, the screams from the restaurant were reduced to just one: a man crying and saying “Please,” over and over. With a final snap, there was only the sound of the ball game.

Travis waited, the gun steady, keeping himself between Paige and the open door.

The hallway floor creaked again.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The strangest thing about wearing the suit was holding something. A silenced USP Mark 23, in this case. Its bobbing motion, hovering before Karl as he walked, seemed to him very much like the movement of a floating thing. Floating on nothing.

The open door was ten feet ahead on the left.

This would be tricky.

The woman—the only Tangent operator here, and maybe the only one who knew anything—was about a dozen breaths from the grave by the sound of her. He’d gotten a nice long gaze at her arm a few minutes earlier, inside the room while the guy—whoever he was—had called her people.

A random hiker, the man seemed to be.

Karl’s orders had been clear but also flexible, given the number of unknown variables in the situation. His superiors had known that Paige Campbell was unaccounted for, would arrive in Coldfoot if she arrived anywhere at all, and that she had hidden the Whisper somewhere near the site of her torture. She could not have taken it with her; nobody on foot could carry a heavy enough containment system to protect against it. She could only have concealed it near the place where, by means entirely unknown, her seven captors had suddenly ended up dead and she’d ended up free.

That mystery wasn’t Karl’s concern. It was enough that she was here now. She and her new friend. The relevant question was whether, after enduring three days of torture without breaking, Paige had been willing to trust a stranger with her secrets. Did this man know where she’d hidden the Whisper? Equally important: did either of them have the key now?

He quietly raised the upper half of the suit and holstered the weapon, making it vanish. With nothing to give him away, he moved forward, shifting his weight carefully to minimize the floor’s creaking. It creaked anyway. Well, better old wood than carpet. Technological marvel though the suit was, it couldn’t hide the depressions his feet made in a soft surface—

He nearly gasped aloud, having come abreast of the doorway to find himself staring into the bore of a Beretta, not two feet away in the hiker’s hand. He flinched and, recovering just enough to keep from taking a hard step, moved a foot to the side, out of the weapon’s line of fire.

Where the fuck had it come from? The guy had made no mention of it earlier, when he asked the fat-ass in the tractor hat about guns.

Calming, Karl stared at the hiker. The pistol was steady in the guy’s hand, all things considered. In the eyes there was fear but not panic. Had anyone visible stepped into the doorway, this guy wouldn’t have hesitated to kill. That wasn’t quite what Karl had expected from a random civilian. Well, some people had more of the devil in them than others.

He took a step toward the man. By providence the floor directly at the threshold kept its silence. His next step—also quiet—put him where he needed to be. His left hand went to the Beretta’s barrel, not touching it yet, but encircling it. His right he drew back, tensed.

Travis waited. Whoever was out there could only be feet away. He considered opening fire through the wall. He could put a shot every six inches until the clip ran dry. But if he used every bullet and missed anyway—if the killer dropped too low or was farther down the hall than he sounded—then it would all be over.

Silence now. Ten seconds at least. It was worse than the creaking.

Then he felt the gun in his hand jerk impossibly downward, as if drawn by a supermagnet in the floor—but before he could even process the sensation, pain exploded below his ear, his vision flaring white. Then black.

What had happened? Awareness came back slowly. He was lying on his chest, face to the floor, ankles bound together. His hands too, behind him—the bind felt like duct tape. Another loop surrounded his head, covering his eyes.

He was still in the room with Paige. Her breathing was worse; how much time had gone by?

Now he remembered the baffling movement of his gun, and the blow to his head from nowhere. Had it really happened that way, or was he remembering it wrong because he’d been knocked out?

A man spoke, the voice deep and without emotion. “Tell me where she hid it.”

Travis considered the options, each so bleak he almost didn’t care to choose. If he said he didn’t know, and if the guy believed him, he’d turn his attention on Paige instead. Could she even be woken at this point? Maybe, with enough pain. This guy would have no qualms about administering it. On the other hand, if Travis said he knew where the thing was buried, the guy might decide Paige was of no use and kill her immediately. Really, almost every outcome he could imagine ended with both of them dead inside of an hour.

Except one—the worst one, and probably the most likely. Without a doubt, this guy had the means to contact the team in the valley. They could be here with the helicopter in twenty minutes, grab him and Paige and be far away before help arrived.

When would help arrive? How long had he been unconscious? If he could stall for time, maybe it would only be a little longer. He and Paige wouldn’t survive, of course—the guy would kill them before fleeing, no question of that—but at least they’d only be dead. The lesser evil by a wide margin. Holding up the show by even ten minutes might make that possible.

“It was fun killing your friends,” Travis said.

The man didn’t respond.

“The little guy with the cattle prod, especially,” he continued. “Then again, technically, I didn’t kill him. He managed to survive. Briefly. Should’ve seen what happened to him then.”

“I hear it was fitting,” the voice said.

“No, it would have been fitting if he could have smoldered alive for three days.”

“Where’s the Whisper hidden? Did she bury it? She couldn’t have carried it far without heavy containment, which she didn’t have.”

“We played catch with it for a while, then we got bored, decided to head back to town. It’s probably just lying wherever we left it.”

The floor strained. When the man spoke again, he was closer. “Sarcasm doesn’t come naturally to a man in your predicament. It sounds like a contrivance to me, which means it has a purpose—and for now, that tells me all I need to know.”

Then he lifted something—it was heavy and plastic, from the sound it made against the wall—and left the room. He was only a few steps into the hall when Travis heard the digital tones of a phone number being punched into a keypad.

“He knows where it is,” Karl said. “And he has the key in his pocket. For now I’ve left it there, to keep him confident.”

Karl was standing outside the front of the restaurant, far from the hiker’s hearing range. He explained his plan into the phone. When he finished, the man on the other end of the call remained silent, considering it.

The breeze had picked up since earlier, coursing down from the north through the gap where the highway transited the range. The sun, also farther north, shone blood red along the gravel ribbon.

“If your idea doesn’t work,” the man on the phone said, “then what you’re suggesting will be a terrible sacrifice.” His voice sounded hollow over the satellite connection.

“If it does work, it’s worth it,” Karl said. “Regardless, it’s the only way to get what you want now.”

More silence. Karl knew to let it play out. As he waited, he turned and stared off to the south. The hiker had guessed correctly about one thing: Tangent would send help by way of the Air Force, probably a C–17 Globemaster coming out of Elmendorf with its ass on fire, a couple Special Tactics teams ready to bail off the ramp. Elmendorf was in Anchorage, four hundred miles south, give or take. If the C–17 had lifted off within ten minutes of the call—a near certainty—it would be here within the hour. But because the hiker had told Tangent about the helicopter, Karl knew there was something else coming from Elmendorf, moving a hell of a lot faster than a cargo jet. Maybe three times as fast.

The man on the line finally spoke. “All right. Do it. When do you want the helicopter?”

Karl did the math. Even accounting for some unpredictability, the timing should be good enough.

“Go ahead and call them now,” Karl said. “Tell them to take off right away.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Alone with the sound of Paige trying to hold on, Travis found his mind returning to the attack that had knocked him unconscious. He didn’t think he was misremembering it now. The details were clear. The gun in his hand had suddenly pulled itself down—but not just down. Down and forward. There’d even been a twist in the motion.

As if a human hand had grabbed it.

Then, half a second later had come the blow to the side of his head, from someone who must have been standing out of sight behind him.

But how? Travis had been in this small room from the moment the big guy in the John Deere hat had led him to it. There’d been nobody here. There was no closet to hide in, and the window had been closed. How had the attacker gotten behind him, unless he’d been hiding under the bed?

Even in that case, Travis knew there was some deeper flaw in the picture. Something more fundamental. But for the longest moment he couldn’t put his finger on it.

Then he remembered.

The sunlight—coming from the northwest, almost straight into the room through the window. While he’d stood there with the gun leveled at the doorway, his own shadow had been projected on the wall just inside the room, hard and sharp as a picture on a movie screen. Anyone behind him—anyone within five feet of him in any direction—would have been shown there as well. He could not possibly have missed it.

So what the hell had happened here?

In his mind he saw Paige in the clearing again, holding the Whisper, telling him humans hadn’t created it. Saying it like it was the most normal thing in the world. The most normal thing in her world, anyway.

What else was normal in Paige’s world? What capabilities did her enemies have? What the fuck were they up against here?

A sound broke the moment. The last sound he wanted to hear. Rotors. This was it, then. Two minutes from now, he and Paige would be dragged from the building, onto the aircraft, and then they’d be winding through the valleys at low level, probably on nobody’s radar. Maybe these people would have drugs and instruments to keep Paige alive for a while, and wake her up for a new marathon of agony.

Unless he killed her first.

There might just be time. If he contorted his body the right way, he thought he could get himself seated upright against the wall, and be standing without much trouble. His ankles were bound, but he could reach the bed in a couple jumps. Then just smother her with his shoulder. As weak as her breathing was, it would be simple.

He could make those moves. Could he make that choice? Jesus, could he do that to her? Logic, hard and clear, told him he’d regret it sorely if he didn’t.

The necessary time was slipping away now, the rotors coming in loud, like a clock ticking off the seconds at hyper speed.

With the indecision came hatred, more bitter than he’d felt in years. Hatred of these fucking people for pushing him to the edge of this decision.

And then the chopper exploded.

A concussion wave shook the building, and in the wake of its bass came the most beautiful silence Travis had ever heard. Five seconds later a fighter screamed overhead, its own shockwave rattling the window. He heard the engines whine through some kind of power adjustment, and then the roar, instead of fading into the distance, seemed to even out. The jet was circling.

Obviously it couldn’t save them from the man who was already here. Any second his footsteps would come pounding down the hall from wherever he’d gone; a quick detour to murder them before fleeing. But the worst possibility had been cancelled out. Travis had that to be thankful for while he waited to die.

Half a minute passed. No footsteps. He felt hope sliding back in, whether or not he trusted it yet.

Then instead of footsteps he heard voices, people shouting. Coldfoot’s remaining residents, probably fewer than ten, had emerged from their homes and were calling one another outside to see the spectacle. He heard a woman call Molly’s name, approaching the lodge, and then she screamed, and a moment later other voices rose around her, and the front door of the building swung in.

Travis yelled for them.

They came to him cautiously; it was a minute or more before they’d entered the room, sat him up and removed his blindfold and bindings.

Through the window, framed like a portrait, the steep ridge across the highway was strewn with the burning remains of the helicopter.

“Who did this?” the old man who’d released him asked. “Where’d they go?”

“I don’t know,” Travis said. “Any of the victims up front have guns on them?”

The man nodded, his curiosity deepening. “Molly and Lloyd both,” he said. He glanced at Paige and then returned his eyes to Travis. “You gonna tell me what’s happening here?”

“The military’s coming,” Travis said. “Maybe they can tell us both. Just get the guns and tell everyone to keep their eyes open until help arrives.”

The man accepted that and left the room.

Looking at his own shadow on the wall, solitary as it’d been before, Travis wondered if that last advice even mattered.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Forty minutes later a cargo jet rumbled in out of the south and, from three thousand feet up, offloaded two dozen paratroopers. Travis went to the window—he was unwilling to leave Paige alone in the room—and watched them circle down in tight columns, landing within fifty yards of the building. They were dressed in black, their uniforms bulked out with body armor, their weapons slung on their shoulders as they touched down. By the time the last of them landed, the first had already taken positions around the lodge.

Four of them stood out. One, maybe ten years older than the rest, pointed and gave orders, his sharpness and efficiency apparent even from beyond hearing range.

The last three needed no orders. They were surgeons. They made straight for the building, waved in by the locals, and Travis called them to the room as soon as they entered. They carried packs and duffels loaded with all the equipment a modern ER would have, plugging in two power strips to create enough outlets for the monitors, lights, and other machinery they arranged around the bed. Travis got out of their way and watched them take command of the situation. The specifics of their technical speech went by him, but the meaning came through clearly. They could save her.

Moments later the commander came in the front door of the lodge, carrying a satellite phone like the one Ellen Garner had tried to repair. He was speaking to someone on it already, and as his eyes found Travis in the hall, he said, “I’m here with him now.”

He strode to Travis, but instead of handing him the phone, he paused, listening to the caller. “Of course,” he said. He looked past Travis into the room. “Dr. Carro, status.”

The oldest of the surgeons, Carro, answered without looking up from his work. “She’s stable.”

The commander relayed the message into the phone, then said, “Yes, sir,” and handed the unit to Travis. As he did, for just a moment his eyes held the same curiosity as the old man who’d unbound Travis earlier. Then he walked away down the hall.

“Hello,” Travis said.

The reply came from the man he’d spoken to when he’d called Tangent earlier.

“We have a more secure connection now,” the man said, “but we’re still going to be careful about what you say on your end. Those first responders are military; they’re not cleared for what we’ll be talking about.”

“Okay.”

“First, thank you for intervening on behalf of Miss Campbell. We owe you a great deal. The following questions, I’ll ask you to answer with a simple yes or no. Did you see an object the size of a cue ball, dark blue—”

“Yes.”

“Is it in the possession of the people who were holding Miss Campbell?”

“Not exactly,” Travis said.

“Did she hide it somewhere?”

“Yes. I can tell you where—”

“No,” the man said. “Don’t do that. Just confirm for me whether it’s hidden near the encampment where you rescued her.”

“Yes,” Travis said.

“All right. The F–15 pilot verified that there’s nobody left at that site. The hostiles must’ve all been aboard the chopper when it was hit. So here’s how this is going to work. We have two Black Hawks coming to you, a little over an hour away. The pilots and crew aren’t military; they’re our people, and they’re cleared for this. One of the choppers will evacuate Miss Campbell. The other will take you to the camp in the valley, where you’ll show our people the Whisper’s location. They’ll have the means to contain it for transport. Once it’s secured, you’ll receive further instruction from them.”

“Okay,” Travis said.

“Do you have any questions?”

Travis was on the point of describing the strange attack in Room Three, but found himself unable to frame it in any way that made sense. He hadn’t even done that in his own thoughts yet.

“None,” Travis said.

The man thanked him again and hung up.

Fuck.

It was all Karl could do to keep the curse to himself. The easy version of the plan had nearly worked.

From the open door of the fourth room off the hall, ten feet from where the hiker had stood with the satellite phone, Karl had watched the conversation.

He’d been in this room since just before the helicopter’s demise, after using the sound of its rotors to mask his return down the creaking hallway. The room had proven a fine place from which to listen to the hiker’s phone call, though Karl had been prepared to follow him elsewhere if necessary.

It really should have worked.

With the chopper down in flames, and the fighter pilot’s word that the valley was clear of hostiles, Karl had been certain Tangent would ask the hiker where the damn thing was hidden. He’d even started to tell them, before they’d stopped him.

That knowledge would have ended the game. Karl would have easily taken the key back from the hiker—probably by way of a silent kill in the hallway while the doctors were preoccupied—and left the building. He’d stowed his own satellite phone in the drain trench beside the highway, three hundred yards south. A quick jog, and he could have sent his superiors the location of the hidden Whisper more than an hour ahead of Tangent’s arrival at the site.

It would have been more than enough time. His people had already dispatched another chopper from their own staging point; it was screaming along the Brooks Range at this moment, below radar, toward the valley where the 747 lay in ruins and the Whisper lay hidden. The F–15 had long since turned for home, having spent its fuel inefficiently in the mad scream to reach Coldfoot.

One spoken sentence, and every tumbler would have clicked into place.

Fuck.

Karl waited for the hiker to wander back to the open doorway of the makeshift emergency room. The noise from equipment and voices inside provided ample sound cover. Karl moved past the man, down the hall and out the front door.

By the time he reached his phone, the lodge and the soldiers around it were distant specks, inaudible over the wind. He dialed and waited.

“Tell the chopper to land five miles west of the site and wait there,” he said when it was answered. “It’s going to be complicated.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

By the time the Black Hawks arrived, the wind out of the north had hardened. Travis put his back to it and watched them come in, their shadows rippling over the landscape far behind them. They were still a mile out when Dr. Carro came to the door of the lodge and waved him back inside.

“She’s asking for you,” Carro said.

He followed Carro back to the room and found Paige with her eyes open, though unable to focus. He took her hand, and she dragged her gaze to meet his, like a child pulling a heavy weight. He wondered if this was all she wanted: just to see a face she knew, if only barely. Then she spoke, her voice so weak Travis had to lean close.

“If you have to wake it up,” she said, “then do it. It’s worth it, if there’s no other choice. But let go of it as fast as you can.”

The doctors traded looks, and Carro said, “Confusion is normal for someone under this much sedation. She’ll be fine after—”

“I know I’m on ten milligrams per minute of propofol,” Paige whispered. “Please shut up and let me speak.”

Carro shut up.

Paige fixed her eyes more firmly on Travis and said, “I know Tangent is coming. I know everything seems safe. But we never assume. We can’t afford to. If things go bad … if you have to use the Whisper … press the key against it to wake it up.”

She faded for a few seconds, then drew a deep breath and said, “Just let go of it as soon as you can. If you wait too long, it won’t let you.”

Then her eyes closed, and her breathing stabilized.

Outside, the Black Hawks came in low over the building. Travis heard pebbles from the gravel parking lot scatter against the front of the restaurant. Then, through the window on the north wall, he saw both aircraft set down on the grass expanse outside. He held Paige’s hand a few seconds longer, then left the room.

By the time he reached the front of the lodge, a man had disembarked from the nearer chopper. One of the soldiers on guard cocked an ear at something the man shouted, then pointed at Travis as he stepped from the building.

Travis had expected the Tangent operatives to ask exactly one question, and otherwise not speak to him. Instead, the man shook his hand, identified himself as Shaw, and thanked him with the same gravity as the man on the phone.

Shaw was outfitted the way Travis imagined Navy SEALs would be. His rifle, modified to the nines, drew looks from the nearest soldiers.

“We’re ready right now, sir,” Shaw said, indicating the open door to the Black Hawk’s troop bay.

Travis followed him to it. It crossed his mind that, even a few days earlier, climbing into a military chopper full of commandos would’ve qualified as a strange thing. He pulled himself in and took a seat on a padded bench at the rear wall. Shaw climbed in beside him. In addition to the pilots, there were six men in the Black Hawk, all equipped for the end of the world. The turbines revved, and a moment later the chopper was high above the lodge and turning west, tinted shafts of sunlight swinging through the interior like spotlight beams. Travis looked over his shoulder through one of the small windows, and saw the surgeons bringing Paige out on a stretcher. He kept his eyes on her until the first ridgeline swept below the aircraft, blocking his view.

Facing forward again, he saw a squat metal shape in the center of the floor: a cobbled-together and much smaller version of the steel box that had contained the Whisper aboard the 747.

Outside, ridges and valleys that had taken hours to cross on foot slipped by like sections of sidewalk.

The encampment had seen heavy traffic since Travis had left it. Staring down from the circling Black Hawk, its starboard door now wide open as the men scrutinized the valley for movement, he saw a broad patch of disturbed ground that had served as the hostiles’ landing pad. Skids had dented the surface in all directions, and the comings and goings of the hostiles had turned the grass there to bare earth.

Satisfied that the valley was clean, the pilot set down on the torn earth, the clearest place in sight. As soon as the wheels touched, the men exited from both sides of the chopper. Travis was the last one out, glancing forward along the fuselage as he stepped from the door.

Something made him stop.

He knew the feeling, though he hadn’t felt it in years.

A supplier he’d known had called it getting your whiskers flicked. A kind of intuition maybe only criminals—or bad cops—could feel, sharpened by years of doing things they couldn’t afford to be caught doing. The slightest thing might trigger it: multiple cars tapping their brakes on the same stretch of road for no apparent reason, hinting at a police presence just out of sight.

As Travis stared forward along the side of the Black Hawk, something flicked his whiskers. Hard.

But he couldn’t place it. He swept his eyes around, and for some reason he kept coming back to the front right wheel, extending down and away from the side of the fuselage on a foot-long strut. There was nothing wrong with it, as far as he could tell. The tire and strut both seemed fine.

Shaw saw him looking. “What is it?”

Travis had no answer for him, and shook off the sensation. He hadn’t slept in over thirty hours—unless he counted the few minutes he’d been unconscious after getting knocked out—and had spent the last two of them wandering around a mass-murder scene. A little jumpiness should be expected.

“It’s nothing,” Travis said, and nodded ahead through the trees. “What you’re looking for isn’t far. Fifty steps past their camp, buried near the biggest tree in sight.”

He took another glance at the wheel, then passed through the group of men to take the lead—

—and stopped again.

He turned back to the Black Hawk.

In the soft dirt on either side of the wheel was a footprint, each one facing outward—the prints a man would make if he were sitting right on the tire with his back against the side of the chopper, maybe holding onto the gun mount above it for balance.

Travis stared at it, part of him expecting the footprints to shift before his eyes. Then he became aware of Shaw standing beside him.

“Tell us,” Shaw said. “I don’t care if you think it’s stupid. Tell us what you’re thinking, right now.”

The guy sounded more than just serious. He sounded scared.

“Look at the prints beside the wheel,” Travis said.

Something like a second passed—enough time for Travis to imagine these men laughing when he was compelled to explain himself.

A second later, he understood that he was very wrong in that impression.

Shaw flinched—Travis was sure he saw it, though the movement was swallowed up by the blur that came next, as the man snapped his rifle up and opened fire, putting a burst of half a dozen shots through the side of the Black Hawk, a foot above the tire.

The bullets punched through the metal. No blood. No screams.

“Eyes open for a weapon, all sides!” Shaw yelled; already he was sprinting over the disturbed ground toward the chopper. The men around Travis shouldered their rifles, each choosing a direction. They did it instantly and without discussion, as if they’d drilled for this sort of thing. Travis suddenly felt sure they had. Even the pilots, also out of the chopper, had drawn sidearms and were scrutinizing the sparse trees around them.

Shaw vaulted into the Black Hawk’s troop bay and swept his rifle back and forth inside, in large but efficient strokes. He didn’t so much aim with it as feel with it, like a blind man whose life depended on finding his quarry. Travis’s eyes easily picked out the handholds the enemy could have used to pull himself into the chopper without touching the ground.

Shaw found nothing.

He returned to the door. His gaze fell to the dirt before it, and went cold. Travis saw why: the ground leading from the troop bay was saturated with their own footprints—so many they overlapped—leading off of the bare earth onto the grass. The enemy’s path could be any of them.

One of the men whispered, “Fuck …”

That single word, so drenched with fear while coming from someone so hardened, told Travis all he needed to know about the trouble they were in.

He had a second to think about that, and then the pilot took a bullet to the head. There was no sound of a gunshot—just the impact, like a heavy oak panel being split, and then the man was down, already gone. The others were shouting, training weapons and eyes in all directions. Travis saw Shaw jump from the chopper and run to his men, screaming for them to be quiet, and he saw the copilot staring around, scared shitless, as a terrible understanding came to him, and even as Travis made the connection himself, the man took the second shot right over his left eye, the entry wound facing Travis so directly that the bullet must have passed right over his shoulder, and now Shaw was looking at him and shouting, “Which way?” and Travis threw his arm out to point behind himself, and in the next instant the world was nothing but machine-gun fire.

They fanned out. Travis got behind them and watched the red tracer rounds carve a wedge of space against the valley wall sixty yards north.

Shaw screamed for them to get more space among themselves. He’d just finished saying it when a bullet hit his throat and came out the back of his neck, making a fist-sized crater. He dropped, his eyes wide and his hands pawing at his collar.

The men broke formation, running and firing at the same time. One of them stooped, grabbed Shaw’s rifle and threw it at Travis; he just managed to get his hands up and catch it.

Then he was running with them—the half that had split in this direction. Running for the encampment, and then through it, his mind only now getting around to what his body had already decided.

The tree stood out like an obelisk, easily twice the width of any other nearby. He pulled up short and swung past it, kicking aside the carpet of needles to expose the gouged surface where Paige had refilled the hole.

Somewhere a man screamed and went down hard as he ran. He lay crying for help, but after only a few seconds Travis heard him gargle as his windpipe filled with blood.

Travis dropped the rifle, fell to his knees beside the hole and attacked the dirt with his bare hands. It was soft, having been torn up and replaced only a day and a half earlier, but the going was—

Not fast enough. No way was it fast enough.

Because the killer knew it was buried here. Travis had given this location out loud, right outside the helicopter.

He heard another head shot, twenty feet to his left, and turned to see a body still plunging forward with its running momentum, but with the top of its skull missing. The shoulder hooked a tree trunk and the body twisted around it, falling in a tangle at the roots.

Travis dug faster, his ears suddenly keening with the rush of blood through his carotid arteries—why could he hear that now?

Then he understood: the shooting had stopped.

He quit digging and looked up.

They were all dead.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

His hands went to Shaw’s rifle again and lifted it. They were caked with clay; he could barely get his finger into the trigger well.

In the silence, only a soft breeze moved. The boughs of the smallest saplings rose and fell with it.

What had Shaw yelled? Eyes open for a weapon. Would the killer’s gun be visible?

Travis swept his gaze left to right, slowly, trying not to focus on any one thing. With no other sound or movement among the trees, maybe he’d see something.

Then he did see something—but not in front of him.

At the bottom edge of his vision: a shimmer of blue. Against all instinct to keep his eyes on his surroundings, Travis looked down. His last handful of dirt had exposed a dime-sized portion of the Whisper’s surface. The color swam across the face of the sphere. It looked like a little world, all ocean, all in twilight at the same time, somehow.

Something stirred in the trees.

He snapped his gaze up but saw no sign of movement. He couldn’t even be sure which way the sound had come from. He pivoted, still kneeling, but saw nothing on any side.

The killer was being careful, now that it was just the two of them, but there was no question of how this would end. The question was how many seconds of his life remained.

If you have to wake it up …

He took no hope from the idea. Whatever the Whisper did, how could it possibly help him in this situation? This was far beyond any danger Paige could have foreseen.

Ten seconds? Did he have even that much time left? Ten seconds on his knees in the dirt, wondering if he’d feel it when the bullet fragmented in his head?

It wasn’t much to lose.

He dropped his free hand from the rifle’s barrel guard, drew the cellophane key from his pocket and plunged it into the hole, mashing it against the Whisper as he pulled it free of the dirt.

Light flared from the thing, searing blue, so brilliant that even over the pulse of his own fear a new thought dominated: it was a star, somehow he was holding the heart of a star—

Then that thought was gone as well, like a scrap of paper in jet exhaust, and his mind filled with a voice more beautiful than the blue light, and he realized he knew it, though he hadn’t heard it in years: Emily Price, when she was seventeen and he was seventeen; Emily’s voice in the humid dark of the tree house in her parents’ yard, the night she’d told him it all felt right, that the moment was right—

But she wasn’t saying any of that now.

“Behind you,” she said, “two feet left of the double pine. He’s drawing. Go. GO.”

Travis spun, the rifle coming around in his right hand, stopping just before the twin pine that came up in a V from its roots, fifteen feet away.

He heard a man gasp—surprise laced with anger—and in the same moment he saw the impossible: a silenced pistol slipping into view as if from a fold of nothingness.

Travis fired.

The heavy rifle gutted the air, the cyclic recoil maybe three times harder than the M16’s had been, pushing him off target almost immediately—but it didn’t matter. Even over the blast-chatter of the rifle he heard the killer scream, and the pistol went sideways, end over end in a pitched arc. A second later the lowest bough of the double pine bent violently downward; it seemed to pin itself to the ground.

Travis let go of the trigger. Silence. Then he heard the man crying and fighting to breathe.

Travis looked at the sphere in his hand. The blue light was strobing now, the rhythm matching his own accelerated pulse.

Emily’s voice cooed in his head, and he heard her giggle.

“Gave him a hurts donut, didn’t you? Gave him a whole box of them with sprinkles and cherry filling.”

Travis felt his logic slipping. He understood that the voice wasn’t Emily at all, that this thing had nothing to do with her, but even that understanding began to fade—by the second—as he held the thing. He felt the clarity of his thinking being washed out, like visual details lost in light glare.

It was time to let go of it. Let go fast, like Paige had said.

He opened his hand—

The rifle fell and clattered on the roots at his feet. It took him a full breath to realize his mistake.

“Sweetie, you don’t want to drop me, do you?”

Now that he thought about it, no, he really didn’t want to let her go.

Her? It.

“You can think of me as a girl if you like. It’s all the same to me. I haven’t even minded being called the wrong name all this time. I promise to tell you my real name someday. It’s a lot cooler than ‘Whisper.’ ”

With each passing moment—each heartbeat of the sphere—the voice soothed him more deeply. Soothed him and took him back there, to that night, to those few hours he’d long remembered as the best of his life.

“There you go.”

Emily kissing him, her need almost a tangible thing, her breath mixing with his, pulling away just long enough for her to tear off her shirt up over her head.

“You hit him with three of your twelve shots, in case you were wondering.”

So beautiful. It didn’t matter what she said now. The voice was enough. And what had Paige been thinking? Who in their right mind would let go of this thing? This lovely thing.

“Your third bullet hit the collarbone and glanced down at a forty-five. It fragged just in time to shatter the T6 and T7 vertebrae. Ouch and a half. He’s not even in shock; he’s feeling ninety-four percent of the pain capacity of the human nervous system. And judging by his systolic, he’s gonna keep feeling it for another eighty seconds or so.”

“I love you,” Travis heard himself whisper. “I always loved you.”

“Oh honey, Emily Price is dead. You know that.”

“Yes, I know.” It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Everything was wonderful.

“Tough on her family that no one alive knows where she’s buried, don’t you think?”

“The worst.” He sighed, his heart beating faster, the light keeping up with it.

“Briar Lake, the dunes west of the nature center parking lot. There’s a stand of eight birches on the crest of the backdune. She’s under the smallest one, more or less. It wasn’t even there when they put her in the ground; now its roots are coiled through her rib cage.”

So wonderful, so savagely wonderful. Travis drew the light closer to his eyes. How had he mistaken this dear thing for a star? It was so much more.

“You should really be thinking about Paige Campbell.”

Who was Paige Campbell? Who cared?

“That kiss may have been only practical, but my hunch is that she’ll be up for the real thing once she gets to know you. My hunches tend to be right, by the way.”

“Oh. That’s nice.”

“If both of you survive what’s coming, you’ll have a chance with her, in spite of your résumé. Surviving is the trick, though, isn’t it, considering where the two of you are going soon. Seven Theaterstrasse in Switzerland. Never mind that it’s the linchpin of her enemy’s plan. The fact is, it’s the most dangerous building in the world—if you don’t count places where they store radioactive waste. And c’mon, who’s counting those?”

“Seven Theaterstrasse …” He loved the way that sounded, coming from her.

“Everyone in Tangent is terrified of that place. Imagine the kittens they’d shit if they knew its real purpose.”

Travis laughed. He didn’t know why. Didn’t care, either.

“But since you’re going there, let me give you something you’ll need.”

As soon as she said that, Travis felt a prickling inside his head, the sensation diffused, everywhere at once. Then gone.

He heard Emily giggle. “Now don’t say I never helped you, irony notwithstanding. A girl has to have her fun, right?”

“Whatever you want, I want,” Travis whispered.

“Do you mean that?”

He nodded, and the sphere grew silent for a moment, contemplative maybe. Then the light changed. Just noticeably. Darker but not dimmer—somehow.

“Because what I want is trouble.”

“Trouble,” Travis agreed.

“It’s what I do. It’s what I’m for.”

“Mmm-hmm …”

“That’s why your enemies want me. They’ve got all manner of mischief planned. But their ambitions don’t concern us here, do they? We can make our own mischief right now. A whole world of it, if we want to. Would you like that?”

“Oh yes …”

The sphere went silent again, and Travis had the impression it was weighing options of some kind. He turned it left and right in front of his eyes, watching the light play in its depths.

“Let’s see now … That would work … but it’s on the boring side; I want to do something big. Go big or go home, right? How about—” Suddenly the light flickered, and Travis heard Emily laugh. “Yeah. Oh yeah, that would turn a few heads. And there might just be time to do it, before the helicopter arrives. All right then, it’s settled. Go to the Black Hawk and take the satellite phone from the forward bulkhead of the troop bay. Run.”

Travis ran. It was all he could do not to skip like a little kid. When had he ever been this euphoric? Heroin had been nice, but it might as well have been chewable aspirin next to this. He slipped a little on the soft ground outside the Black Hawk, laughed, and climbed in with his muddy feet. The briefcase on the front left wall had to be the phone. He pulled it from its clamps and laid it on the floor.

“Turn it over and open the rectangle-shaped access on the lower right.”

He flipped it, pressed the thumb tab and removed the panel to reveal a circuit board.

“We’re going to change a few things before we make the call, or else it’ll never work.”

“Okay.”

“An inch to the left of the processor are seven jumpers, half the size of phone jacks.”

He saw them. Each jumper was stuck onto a set of twin prongs, closing a bridge in the circuit.

“Remove the jumpers at J4 and J6.”

It was tricky, but he got them off after a couple tries.

“Put one of them back on, at the empty position J12.”

Easy. So easy to please her.

“Now open the red tool case on the wall to your right. Take out the smallest precision screwdriver.”

She kept speaking as he followed each order; he thought he could hear urgency in her voice. A lover’s urgency, begging him to take her to the edge.

“Use the screwdriver’s tip to carve a gap into the silicon pathway marked PRC21. Do not damage any other pathway.”

He finished the job in seconds.

“Good. Now switch on the phone.”

He turned it over and pressed the red button marked I/O. The phone’s LCD lit up with a red frame, and a message: MASTER SETTING MODE SELECTED. ENTER DOD AUTHORIZATION CODE.

“Use the keypad to enter 98104801, followed by the star sign.”

When he finished, the red frame disappeared and a menu came up.

“Select option four, ‘Change ID Prefix.’ Answer all three questions with Yes, by pressing 1. Then enter 77118-star–945 as the new prefix. Pound key to verify it. Faster, sweetie.”

He shuddered in response to her rising excitement; his fingers trembled on the keys as he finished the sequence.

“Now exit the menu, just keep pressing 9 until it says, ‘Ready.’ Good, my love. We’re ready to call them. Pick up the handset and dial 82-star–375–121–9188.”

He dialed. It rang once, and a man answered. “CINC-Pacific forward hub, please authenticate.”

Travis opened his mouth to speak, and experienced bliss incarnate: the Whisper took control of his voice, bypassing his decision process. What came out sounded like him, though slower, and with the ghost of a drawl: “November, hotel, one, four, eight, juliet, echo, oscar. This is a priority card from Trap Door.”

The man on the other end took a quick breath, then spoke evenly. “Trap Door, I agree with authentication. Go ahead.”

Travis felt his mouth open to speak again—but stopped. He turned his ear to the open bay door behind him.

From far away came the sound of rotors. At the same time he felt the sphere in his hand tense somehow; the light flickered like a nervous twitch.

Then he was drawn back to the phone, and spoke rapidly: “Relay the following EAM to USS Maryland. By order of the president of the United States and the chief of staff, Navy, set condition four-alpha, immediate launch of two Trident ICBMs against Target Package 3261, Nanjing ballistic missile complex, East China, Jiangsu Province.”

The man on the phone didn’t reply right away, and Travis said sharply, “Commander.”

“Yes, sir.” Another pause, not even a second, and the man said: “In accordance with protocols governing the release of strategic weapons, the senior controller will ask you for the president’s and the Navy chief’s nuclear launch codes. Those are the final authorizations required.”

“Put him on,” Travis said.

“Go go go,” Emily whispered in his mind. The light was strobing so quickly now it was almost smooth again, like a bad fluorescent bulb.

The rotors were getting loud; the echoes off the valley walls made it hard to guess the distance.

A soft-spoken man came on the line. “The president’s code first, please.”

“Six, one, nine, three, three, three, two, eight.”

“Now the Navy chief of staff’s.”

“Four, nine, six, eight, five—”

Suddenly the chopper sounded much closer; it must have just passed the last ridge and entered the airspace over the valley.

“Sir?” the soft-spoken man said.

“I’m sorry,” Travis said. “Starting over, four, nine, six, eight, five, seven, seven, one.”

“Thank you, sir, EAM is authorized and will transmit about thirty seconds from right—”

The man’s last word was cut off by a shriek of metal as autofire ripped through the Black Hawk. Instinct overrode Travis’s euphoria and he threw himself clear, toward the back of the troop bay. His wrist collided with the rear bench, and the Whisper broke from his grip. It hit the floor and rolled to the back corner.

Travis cried out, not from pain but from a swell of anguish. Losing hold of it—her, losing hold of her—felt like losing a loved one. Like losing his only loved one.

The chopper passed overhead with a turbine scream and a downrush of air that rocked the Black Hawk. The gunfire stopped and Travis saw the aircraft arc out over the valley, making a wide loop to come back.

He got up on his knees and reached for the Whisper—

Three inches shy, he stopped.

Clarity filtered back in, like blood to a deprived limb. He withdrew his hand as if from a serpent. What had he done? What had he fucking done?

A voice, tinny and just audible, issued from the phone unit behind him. “Sir? Are you still on?”

The preceding minutes came back to him now, laid bare to his logic. Outside, the helicopter had completed its semicircle and was returning, ten seconds out.

“Sir?”

Travis spun, dove for the handset and screamed into it, “Call it off! It’s bullshit! Call it off!”

“Excuse me?”

“Call someone and check on it, it’s all bullshit!”

“Who the fuck is this?”

Through the window he saw the gunner’s muzzle flash overhead. He vaulted backward and fell from the bay door into the dirt, as the Black Hawk was shredded by a much more sustained burst than before. He got to his feet and—catching a last glimpse of blue light under the bench seat—sprinted into the trees.

He was forty yards away when he realized the helicopter wasn’t following. The thunder of its rotors remained constant; it had gone into a hover, and now the turbine pitch dropped. Travis reached a grove dense enough to provide a screen and stopped. Looking back, he saw the chopper descend and set down beside the Black Hawk.

The men inside had the look of the hostiles who’d tortured Paige. One of them, wearing heavy gloves that went to his elbows, jumped from the chopper and ran to the Black Hawk’s bay door, his face momentarily bathed in the Whisper’s glow. He reached in and took hold of the sphere, and despite his protection, he swayed on his feet, his face relaxing and then his mouth turning up in a child’s smile. Behind him, two others hauled a heavy steel box from the chopper, roughly the size of the cobbled one inside the Black Hawk. They reached the man with the Whisper and had to shout and nudge him to get his attention. At last he seemed to notice them. Nodding, he opened the container and shut the sphere inside it.

Twenty seconds later, its cargo secured, the helicopter revved to a scream again and climbed away over the valley.

Part II - 7 THEATERSTRASSE

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Tangent personnel who arrived on the next Black Hawk were under stricter orders than the first group. They bound and hooded Travis, belted him aboard, and he heard nothing but the craft’s engines whining at full power for the next two hours.

He thought of the Whisper. The euphoric—even erotic—sensation of holding it still weighed on him like a personal loss, in its absence.

Yet as strange and powerful as the experience had been, he was forgetting it. Rapidly. Even now, just this short time after the fact, his memory of the entire event had faded to something like a receding dream. He could recall how it’d started: picking the thing up, Emily Price’s voice directing him to fire on the unseen killer. And he could recall how it’d ended: letting go of it inside the Black Hawk, after slamming his wrist on the bench seat, and becoming aware of what he’d done under its control. What he’d done with the satellite phone, and what was about to result from it, thousands of miles away.

But everything between those two points was now a bright blue haze. Like a drug high he couldn’t remember, except for fading pieces. The thing’s terrifying capability. Its impossible knowledge of everything—literally everything. It’d told him something about Paige. What, he couldn’t remember. And it’d given him a street address, for reasons that now escaped him. Something that sounded German, he thought; he could resolve it no further than that. As the time stretched out aboard the Black Hawk, he found even these trace memories slipping deeper and deeper out of his reach.

The chopper landed. He had no idea where. The aircrew helped him outside onto pavement, and he heard the heavy turbofans of a large jet powering up. Someone guided him up a set of metal stairs, and then he was aboard the plane, his head still covered.

There were quite a few people on the jet, ten to fifteen voices, he thought. A set of hands led him to a seat at the back end. Outside, the engines rose in pitch, and the aircraft began to taxi.

He heard tension in the voices around him. Fear, too. Calls came and went, in a few different languages. From the context of those made in English, Travis gathered that the people on the other end were government officials in countries all over the world. For a moment he wondered if the Whisper’s plan had been carried out anyway, and the ICBM launch against China had gone ahead. The man next to him assured him it hadn’t; his screamed warning at the end of the call had been more than sufficient.

But something was going on. Something that concerned the whole world. Something that scared the shit out of these people.

A moment later the jet turned onto its runway. It stopped for a few seconds as its engines came up to full scream. Travis’s interrogation started just as it lifted off.

Five times, for five different people, he told his account of what’d happened, starting with his discovery of the wrecked 747, Box Kite. The point of the repetition was obvious enough: to see if his story would break along the fault line of a lie. It didn’t. All he kept from them was the part he’d lost: the now nearly impenetrable amnesia effect that hung over the minutes he’d spent with the Whisper.

He told them about the invisible attacker, dead on the bent pine bough in the valley. The questioners’ reaction to that news was a few clicks above happy. They called ground teams that had secured the valley and directed them to the body. Travis thought of the first team’s fear, in the last minute of their lives, and wondered how long Tangent had been dealing with that particular threat.

Then he told them about the street address. The one he couldn’t quite remember. The one that sounded German.

“Seven Theaterstrasse,” the first questioner said. Not even asking.

Travis nodded anyway. That was it.

He heard the phrase make its way up the plane like a passed note, and he marked its progress by the silence it left in its wake.

They let him sleep after the fifth round of questioning. He woke to the bark of the wheels touching down. Then came a jeep ride over rough ground for a few hundred yards, through bright sunlight that warmed the black fabric of the hood still over his head. The baked air could only be that of a desert. Behind him he heard the jet already powering up to take off again. The jeep reached a smooth surface at the same time that it passed into shadow out of the sunlight. An elevator ride followed, lasting some ten seconds. Ten seconds moving down.

“You can take that off him. Those, too.” A woman’s voice. Soft and raw, like she’d ruined it screaming at a rock concert the night before.

The binds at his wrists clicked open, and the hood came away to reveal a windowless office—and Paige Campbell standing in front of him. The veins in her right arm were still discolored, and her face remained drawn and pale, darkened beneath her eyes. But she was on her feet, as steady as a person could be. Her breathing was silent, normal. She’d come out of the Brooks Lodge on a stretcher, two thirds of the way dead, maybe ten hours ago, depending on how long Travis had slept on the plane.

The others left the room. He was alone with her.

She followed his eyes to her arm, the now-sutured incision across her triceps just peeking from her sleeve. Some compound the color and consistency of tar had been applied to the wound, probably deep inside it. The swelling around the injury had all but vanished.

“You’ll see a lot of strange things around here,” she said. Then, softer: “I saw a map of the distance you carried me. Thank you.”

He didn’t know what to say back to that. He nodded, and thought of what else she must have seen by now. His criminal record. Every detail of what he’d done. More than enough to counterbalance any merit he might have gained with her.

“Sorry for your treatment aboard the plane,” she said. “We’re methodical.”

Her cell phone rang. She looked at the display, answered, and told the caller to give her a minute. In her voice was the same tension he’d heard among those on the plane.

She gave him a look that seemed to cut past any further polite conversation while at the same time apologizing for it. “Would you consent to a narcotic interrogation? It may help us recover more of what the Whisper told you.”

He had a sense that she didn’t expect that to work, but that she’d take what she could get. He also felt sure it would happen whether he consented or not. Nice of her to pretend to ask, though.

On the wall behind her was something that clashed with the professional look of the office. It looked like a promo poster for a rock band. It was a close-up of a steel surface, with the words ETHER WASTE carved roughly into it. Nothing else. No tour dates, no website address.

Paige waited for an answer. Probably wouldn’t for much longer.

“Do what you have to,” he said.

“Thank you.” She indicated a door on his left. “There’s a bathroom there if you’d like to clean up. I’ll be back in a few minutes, and we’ll get started.”

He turned toward the closed bathroom door as she crossed the office to leave.

“I thought I was back up to speed on heavy metal groups,” he said. “Guess I missed one.”

Her footsteps halted at the threshold to the corridor. “What?”

He looked at her. Saw her looking back with blank eyes.

“Ether Waste,” he said, nodding at the poster. “I’ve never heard of them.”

She didn’t move. Still staring at him from the doorway. She had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Maybe the drugs were still having some effect on her thinking, though nothing else about her behavior said so.

Then she reacted.

Her eyes narrowed and she took a step in from the doorway. Looked back and forth from him to the poster. “You can read that?”

He started to ask if she was okay, but the sentence died as a thought. He was looking at the poster again, which suddenly looked more like a blown-up forensic image than a promo. He looked at the text in particular. Really looked at it, instead of just reading it.

It wasn’t English.

It wasn’t even writing, by any definition he’d have assigned. There were no discrete rows or columns. No sense of order at all. The engraving on the steel was just a chaotic tangle of curves and lines, overlapping and pointing in all directions like a spill of needles and loose threads.

But he could read it.

He could read it without even thinking about it, as if it said STOP in white letters on a bright red octagon.

VERSE IIIAN OCTOBER NIGHT IN 1992

Though the fog is thinner here in the elevated district west of downtown, and the streets are brightly lit, Travis is driving faster than he should. He doesn’t slow, even after he’s entered the subdivision, Empire Oaks, with its smooth asphalt lanes winding among ten-thousand-square-foot homes. He doesn’t slow because he doesn’t care who or what hears him coming this time—because either way, he’s going to do what he came here to do.

He thinks of Emily and wonders if she blamed him in her last minutes of life, when she knew it was over. She’d have been right to blame him, of course, but every instinct tells him she blamed herself instead, and the thought of that generates more hurt than Travis knows what to do with. He has already mentally added it to the debt he will settle in the next few minutes.

He makes the turn onto Stonegate Court doing fifty, his back tires losing the wet street for a moment before they grip again, and the car surges forward.

Emily Price.

She is all that matters to him now, even though she’s gone.

He thinks of all that she did for him. All that she saw in him, beneath all that he was.

He thinks of her father, using the word Detective as a slur. It cuts because it’s true. Though that word has preceded Travis’s name on his paychecks for three years now, he’s been on someone else’s payroll much longer. In fact Travis’s sole reason for becoming a cop was to further serve the needs of his other employers. His first employers.

He’d have spent the rest of his life as a rat, without Emily’s intercession. Without her light to lead him out of the maze.

She did lead him out.

And they killed her for it.

He makes the next turn and sees the house at the end of the street, blazing with light from all twenty-six of its exquisitely furnished rooms. Drug money spends like any other kind.

Travis is still doing fifty when he drives through the fence. He hits the brakes halfway up the yard, and when the needle drops below twenty-five, he shoves open the door and bails onto the lawn. He rolls and comes up just in time to see the car punch through the bay window and disappear completely into the house. Five seconds later he follows it in, gun in hand and eyes searching for targets.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Paige’s office came to life. People came and went with purpose. Where there’d been tension and fear before, now there was tension and fear and a little hope that no one wanted to voice. Paige sent someone to line up another transport, this time to Zurich. From the context of what followed, Travis gathered that 7 Theaterstrasse was a building located there, and that the metal engraving from the poster-sized photo was inside it, along with other writing of the same kind. Paige and the others seemed to believe that the Whisper had given him the capacity to read this text, though he couldn’t imagine how or why.

Someone leaned in and told Paige the transport was thirty minutes out. She seemed to disconnect from all the talk at that point, thinking hard about something.

“That’s enough time to show him,” she said, her eyes finding Travis.

“Show him what?” a woman next to her said.

Paige considered her decision a few seconds longer, then solidified it. “Everything.”

A moment later he and Paige were in the corridor, moving away from the office while the others stayed behind. Travis heard them making calls, finalizing details of supplies and ground transportation in Zurich.

The silent corridor was a welcome change. Dimly lit, mostly deserted. The place felt like a high school after hours.

A red-haired woman, early fifties, hustled by toward the office behind them. She caught Paige’s eye as she passed, then stopped.

“Is it true?” the woman said. “He can read it?”

Paige nodded.

The woman glanced at Travis, her expression mixed, as if he were either a B-list celebrity or an escaped specimen from a plague lab. Maybe both. Then she nodded, touched his shoulder, and continued on.

Paige led him farther along the hall.

“I know this all must feel like cleaning your contact lenses with a hose,” she said. “I’ll try to put it in order for you. A lot’s going to depend on your being up to speed.”

She went quiet just long enough to assemble her thoughts. “Right now, the business of running the world is on hold. Right now, the most powerful people on Earth are sitting by their phones. Including the American president. Who just lost his wife. He can’t focus on that, any more than I can focus on what happened to my father, because right now the worst-case scenario we’ve ever imagined is threatening to come true. And until you read that text on my wall, I didn’t see any real way to stop it.”

They came to an elevator. She pressed the call button pointing down.

“This building is called Border Town. Tangent’s home. It’s in eastern Wyoming, seventy miles from the nearest anything.”

The doors opened with a chime, and Travis followed her in. Turning, he saw a panel of floor buttons that started with B1 and descended all the way to B51. B10 was presently lit. He thought he knew which button she’d press, even before her hand went to the array. He was right. A few seconds later they were dropping toward the bottom of what was essentially a buried skyscraper.

“What’s Border Town on the border of?” Travis said.

As evenly as she might have said Nebraska or South Dakota, Paige said, “Another world.”

B51 was nothing like the corridor they’d left above. Concrete floor, walls, ceiling. From the elevator it extended sixty feet and then opened up to an undefined space beyond, vast and pitch black. The tunnel might have led onto a darkened football field.

Paige moved toward the open end, but turned in at a doorway thirty feet shy of it. Travis followed her into a room that looked like a bunker that scientists would’ve sheltered in during atom-bomb tests in the fifties. Like the hallway, everything was concrete. Antiquated computer terminals hunkered at the far end of the room. Nearer to the door, current issues of Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal lay on some of the desks. Despite the place’s mausoleum atmosphere, it apparently saw some use.

Paige opened a cabinet and withdrew a tan spiral notebook.

“At one time, only this floor of the building existed. It was the site of a Department of Energy project, the Very Large Ion Collider. Sixty billion dollars and ten years to build. It went operational on March 7, 1978. It was used exactly once.”

She handed him the notebook. Up close he saw rust-brown fingerprints on it that could only be blood. Similar stains had soaked deep into the pages at the book’s edge.

“Read this,” she said. “It won’t take long, and it speaks for itself better than I can.”

With that she took out her cell phone. Travis opened the notebook while she called upstairs to catch up with the preparations going on in her office.

The blue lines on the paper had faded almost to nothing, but the text, handwritten in black ink, remained sharp and easily read:

VLIC GENERAL COMMENTS LOG

(SEE DATA LEDGERS FOR ALL SCIENTIFIC RESULTS)

MARCH 7, 1978—14:33 UTC

Well, it begins today. We’re all so excited we can’t put it into words.

I’ll make this opening entry quick, since we have a lot going on. First, the point of this ledger: to record the human story of this place. Someday we may want to write a popular book about the VLIC, in the style of Feynman or Sagan. A log of people’s personal experiences here would be great for that. So no pressure, guys. Just jot down what you’re feeling. Anticipation, frustration, anything.

Here’s today so far. Very, very exciting around here. Many of us have been on board this project for the entire decade that VLIC has been under construction, so to finally be just hours from the first shot is a kind of excitement I’ve never felt before. About twenty DOE people will be here for it, including Secretary Graham. He met with us earlier. Nice enough. He seems to have a good grasp of what this place means to physics and all science, in passing anyway, although after he stepped out someone said he probably would think an off-shell W boson was something at Taco Bell, haha. (No offense Mr. Secretary if you ever read this, we kid around a lot.)

Predictions for the first shot? Ha, not on your life. Obviously there’s the expectation that we’ll raise the lower bound on the Higgs by another percent of the standard model’s prediction, but no one’s saying it’ll happen on the first shot! I would stick my neck out and say I hope, in time, we get an even more significant result than that, but I don’t want to look back on this entry and think I was an idiot, so I’ll just say I’m proud to be here, and to be part of this team trusted with something this special. We all are. This is Dave Bryce.

MARCH 7, 1978—PROBABLY A QUARTER AFTER 18:00 UTC

This is Dave Bryce again. This account of the shot is for investigators in case we all die down here before anyone gets to us. None of the machine-collected data survived, I’m sure, because of what happened with the metal. I don’t know how we lived through it, it seems like the iron in our blood or the trace copper in our neurons should have been affected, and killed us instantly. Maybe it did get affected, and we’re just not symptomatic yet. We’re all very upset and scared. Here is the record, what I know at least, so whoever finds this will have somewhere to begin.

The shot happened at 17:40 UTC as scheduled. At the instant of collision, everything metal here in the bunker took on luminescence, different colors depending on the metal, but generally blues, greens. Something inside the wall phone was shining bright yellow, not sure what it was. The DOE undersecretary, Porter, collapsed, and there was no pulse at all, even right away. Two of the DOE people who knew him said he had a pacemaker. That seems pretty irresponsible to have him down here for this, even though we wouldn’t have guessed there was any danger, I think I would have advised against it if I’d known. Laid the body at back wall of bunker, does not seem very dignified but nothing else would be any better.

Ruben Ward collapsed also, but for a different reason. He had both hands resting on the metal housing for the ring switches at the time of the shot. Don’t know if he got a jolt from it, or what it might have been, but he lost consciousness and fell. He’s still unconscious, we have him on the floor with a couple sweaters for a pillow.

Luminescence faded after about thirty seconds. At that point we had no information to go on, all electrical systems were out, computers, temp gauges, everything. The lights in the bunker were out, too. The only way we could see anything was a bright light shining down the hallway from the shot chamber, right past the doorway. It’s very bright, and a lot of it comes in here, indirectly. Because of the angle, we can’t see far enough down the hall to see into the chamber. We don’t know what’s going on in there, or where the light is coming from. I know we don’t have anything that bright installed out there. It is still shining now, thirty or forty minutes after the shot.

We took a vote and have decided to open the door, and send someone to check if the elevator is working. (I’ll go.) It’s a dozen yards or so farther from the chamber than this room, maybe there’s a chance it wasn’t affected. Scary to open the door, if it’s possible the air is bad outside the room, though I don’t know why that would have happened. (But who knows about anything down here now?)

APPROX. HOUR AND A HALF AFTER LAST ENTRY

It took us half an hour to get the door open. The metal had fused to the frame at several places like a weld. If it’d been a tighter fit to the frame, the whole thing would have fused, and we’d have been trapped. Sure as hell would not have broken through the 2-inch-thick polycarbonate window in the door.

No use anyway. I went out to the elevator and it’s dead. Pulleys are probably welded solid even if the electrical was working.

When I was in the hall, I could see into the chamber, but could make out no detail except the light, which I couldn’t look right at. In peripheral, it seems like a single point of light out in the middle somewhere, bright white. It felt like sunlight on my skin, maybe even a little warmer, which is scary. I came back in the room quickly.

Also, some kind of sound is coming from the chamber, very faint, could almost be imagining it, but I don’t think so. Hard to describe it, sort of like a tuning fork. Back in the room with the door shut, I couldn’t hear it anymore.

Someone will have to come for us soon. Ruben is still not responding. I keep thinking about all the precautions I might have recommended, all these years while this place was being built. Maybe a medical staffer down here, if nothing else. Just never thought for a second something like this (whatever this even is) would happen. I take responsibility for whatever happens to these people. This is still Dave by the way.

FIVE TO SEVEN HOURS AFTER LAST ENTRY

I dozed off. Secretary Graham woke me up and I saw that the light in the hall had changed. Much dimmer, and blue instead of white. Everyone’s nerves have had it, mine too. Why the hell isn’t someone down here to get us yet?

Ruben still unconscious. Wonder if he is in a coma, but have no idea. Porter’s body bloating a little, smells terrible, really bothering us in this unvented space.

I am pissed off, I’ll say that. Maybe unprofessional, and maybe I’ll tear out these pages later, but right now I’m pissed and want to say so. Ruben Ward is my best friend and one of the smartest men in the world, he has so much to offer science, and he might be experiencing brain damage by now because these fucking assholes are doing what up there? Having a luncheon and setting a date for a formal meeting about how to get us out of here? I know I’m being unfair and stupid, I’m sure they’re up there figuring it all out, but I’m stressed and really pissed. This room smells like roadkill but we’re afraid to leave it. Wish I knew what the hell that light from the chamber was. Dave.

TWELVE HOURS AFTER LAST ENTRY, GIVE OR TAKE

Can no longer handle the smell. Graham and I have volunteered to take the body out into the hallway at least, maybe farther toward the chamber. Majority have voted to leave the door open for a while after that, let the room air out if that will even happen.

Light is a bit dimmer now, and purple, projecting ripples in the hallway like you see on the bottom of a pool. Have to admit I’m afraid to go out into it, just don’t know what it is, what is out there in the chamber.

But curious, too, no doubt about it. We’re going now. Dave.

ONE HOUR AFTER LAST ENTRY

The interacting point at the center of the chamber is gone. The whole assembly, and the magnets too, just gone like they were never there. Some amount of the floor they were sitting on is gone as well. There’s a kind of crater in the floor, not blasted there, but more like machined there, like a giant with a disc sander honed it out. It’s maybe a foot deep in the middle, shallowing out to the edge at a radius of, I don’t know, twenty feet.

Above the crater, perfectly centered where the interacting point used to be, is what I can only call a rip in midair. The rip is an oval, some ten feet wide, maybe three feet tall in the middle, purple and blue light filling it and curling like flame at its edges. When you look into the rip and move back and forth sideways, you realize you’re looking into a depth, an opening. It’s like looking in through the hatch of a deep coal furnace.

Graham and I just stood and looked at it for I don’t know how long, after we took the body down to the chamber. Then Graham went around the far side of the rip, and called out for me to follow. I went, and here’s where it’s craziest of all, you can’t see the rip from the other side. As soon as you go past it, it’s gone, you just see the empty air over the crater. Edge-on, you see those blue-purple flames licking out of the opening, but a step farther back and there’s nothing.

The sound is still there, too, different now, like the light is different. I still have no good way to describe the sound, except … it’s like voices. I mean, it’s not, but that’s what comes to mind. Voices singing from out of the opening. There’s something bad about the sound. It does something to your mood. Not sure what it is, but it makes you feel very wrong, in a lot of ways. Graham felt it, too, and when we got back to the room, the others had changed their minds about leaving the door open. They wanted to shut the sound out, even if it meant keeping the smell in. I agreed.

Since then I’ve been sitting here just trying to come to terms with what we’ve created. What the hell is it? I keep thinking of all the concepts I thought were five hundred years down the road, Einstein-Rosen bridges, that kind of thing. Not even going to guess, though. I’d just look stupid later. It has to be studied by experts in a range of fields, measured, tested. Data first, theories later. Wow, though. Wow squared, Ruben would say.

I just realized I can still hear the sound, even with the door closed. Maybe it’s because I know what I’m listening for now.

HALF A DAY OR SO AFTER LAST ENTRY

I woke up in the hallway, down at the end where it widens into the chamber. I did not remember walking out there, and would never have chosen to. I was shivering hard when I woke, could feel the sound from the opening, like it was going right through my body and making my bones hum. Got up fast and saw that Graham was out there, too, and the fat guy who works for him, Kurson, I think his name is. Both asleep. I woke them and they were as surprised as me to find themselves there.

Back in the room with the door shut, could not seem to relax. A woman from DOE, someone’s assistant, spilled a few Cheez-its and tossed them in the trash, and I blew up at her, seriously thought I would physically attack her until the others calmed me down. I apologized later.

What the fuck is up with someone coming to get us? What is it, a couple days now? I don’t even know. This is bullshit. When this is over someone’s getting an earful from me and probably legal action. Seriously, what the fuck?

QUITE A FEW HOURS AFTER LAST ENTRY

I sat next to Ruben a long time and read to him from a paperback he had in his desk, in case he can hear somehow. Maybe I just did it to try blocking out the sound from the chamber.

Then, I don’t know why, but I got up and went out there, out into the chamber. Stood staring at the rip/opening. It’s beautiful, and you know what else? When you’re looking at it, the sound is not entirely bad. I’ll probably tell Graham to try it for himself, I think he’d be able to appreciate it.

I GUESS A DAY LATER

Pretty bad tension among the people down here, I guess it is to be expected with us all crammed in like this. I am not fitting in with the group much at all. I can’t wait to get out of this place and never see these people again. Another bad argument a little while ago (the third or fourth one) this time with me against almost all of them, except Graham and Kurson.

A few of the guys teamed up and tried to demand that we stop going to the chamber to listen to the sound up close. They are saying that it does something to us, and that we’re causing grief as a result. But we aren’t causing ALL the arguments, I don’t think. So nice try, but you guys can fuck off. I shouldn’t get pissed like this.

The sound is pretty soothing now. It’s all that keeps me in my wits down here. When will they come for us?

TIME IS HARD TO FOLLOW LATELY, I THINK IT IS A DAY LATER

I have this weird, shitty hunch about Ruben Ward, but don’t want to write it down.

Also, I have to admit, I’m having a hard time staying focused, and today my right arm was shaking for like an hour when I was out in the chamber. But it’s not from the sound. I really do like it quite a bit.

QUITE A LOT LATER

My hunch is Ruben is faking now. Was really unconscious at first, of course, but faking now so that he can stay out of the arguments and not have to side with me against all of these fucking people. It pisses me off if it’s true. I tried really hard to wake him up just now, hitting him in the face even. Then many of the others pulled me away from him (of course they would if he’s on their side the cowardly piece of shit). Now I am out in the hall by the chamber writing this.

Only the voices from the breach (we started calling it the breach, we like that name for it) make it better.

I will tolerate these people, but I know I would not lose sleep if they all got hit by a goddamned bus.

MANY, MANY HOURS (IT MIGHT BE A DAY OR MORE) LATER

Why? Why are you doing this? You don’t have to be doing this.

Graham and Kurson and I were in the chamber for a long time and came back to find the rest had jammed the door shut with one of the desks. Graham was rightly upset and tried to break in through the glass, but the polycarbonate is very strong.

Not even kidding, I would love to kill all of these people, and Graham is the same. Kurson just nods, I wonder if he is only telling us what we want to hear.

I like the blue and purple there is a dance to it.

HOURS I THINK BUT TIME IS GETTING IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW

Kind of losing the knack for keeping all that stuff straight, hours and minutes. I think I’ve taken for granted all my life how hard time is to keep track of. Quite hard. Quite a trick to it, I think.

STILL DAVE HERE DID I MENTION THAT?

No desire to go back into the room with the others, but just the principle involved drives me mad. I stand at the glass and look in at them, and they won’t look at me, and fucking Ruben you fake coward motherfucker, I swear you are going to pay.

But mostly I am calm. Never been calm like this and I love it.

GRAHAM HAD A VERY GOOD IDEA

he broke off a metal conduit in the back of the chamber (took him forever kicking to break it) and is using the sharp break point to scratch a line through the polycarbonate window in the door. it’s working, too!!! he has carved half an inch into the window on one side, and then this is great, he carved just the shape of the whole square he’s going to cut into it, so those assholes can see what he has planned. he is a very smart man, it makes sense that he is secretary of the department of energy.

we are going to get in there within a couple days and then ruben i am going to mount you like a fucking baboon i swear.

THE BREACH GAVE US SOMETHING

it must have come out a little while ago, a piece of green fabric the size of a napkin, did not see it come out, but I noticed it lying underneath the breach, and it had not been there before. tried to pick it up, but this makes no sense at all … it weighs hundreds of pounds, i just cannot lift it. graham and i together were able to slide it, try to smooth it out on the floor, what the hell is it??? i am not going crazy, it really weighs hundreds of pounds, this tiny little thing!

GRAHAM IS AWESOME

he lost it for a while and was pounding the conduit against the door window and then noticed a huge (huge) flap of his palm had torn away and was hanging, and right in front of them watching he took it in his teeth and ripped it free. he is an awesome man
we killed kurson, not really a choice, we just set on him all of a sudden, it happened. no one’s fault really, so it’s fine.

WHO IS IT SINGING IN THE BREACH?

voices are so beautiful please i need to know who it is.

RESCUE!!! HAHAHAHAHA

(graham died this morning, don’t even know how, someone had torn out his throat while he slept.)

later two men in yellow suits and mountain climber gear pried open the elevator doors just like that, no warning, i was able to kill one with the conduit but the other was weasel quick and got away through the top of the elevator cab screaming don’t.

BULLHORN ALL DAY

they are talking from high up in the elevator shaft i don’t care just shut the fuck up, goddamn all of you.

very upset that the window is still intact and these people may survive especially ruben he was supposed to die.

sitting at the breach makes it okay.

it is a day at the breach get it?

i should be fine after all this, if i can stay here.

I THINK I KNOW WHO

ghost little girls. that’s who is in there. that’s who is singing in the breach.

Travis closed the bloodied notebook and caught the end of one of Paige’s calls. The plane was twenty minutes away.

She nodded at the notebook. “What followed is what you imagine. The next team that roped in had guns.” She was quiet for a moment, then said, “The Breach Voices are just one of a thousand things we’re completely in the dark about. Their origin, their meaning, the reason for their effect on people. We just don’t know, probably never will. I think about David Bryce often. Top of his class at MIT, father of four, respected by everyone who ever met him. He couldn’t see the danger, even sitting in front of it with his eyes wide open. I sometimes worry that’s the only story the Breach knows how to tell.”

She led him back into the hall, and toward the open space at the end. The darkness there looked wrong: given what Travis had read, the Breach should be visible from right here. A few steps later he saw why it wasn’t. They entered the cavernous chamber to find a hulking black shape nearly filling it, a dome the height of a three-story building.

To the right along the dome’s base was an entry channel like that of an igloo. As they approached it, Travis saw the ghostly blue and purple light Bryce had described, projected through the entry onto the concrete wall of the chamber. Ten feet shy of it stood a simple metal table. Paige left her phone and watch there. Travis followed suit with his own watch.

He thought she’d head for the entry then, but she stopped, stared at him, her eyes working something out.

“You were a cop,” she said. “A detective.”

He nodded.

“Were you good?”

He breathed a laugh. “By no stretch was I a good cop.”

“I know you were corrupt. I meant good at it. Were you good at detective work? Did figuring things out come naturally to you?”

He didn’t hear judgment in her voice. Something else. Contemplation, he thought. He wondered why.

“Yeah. I was good at it.”

Her eyes on him, unblinking. Then narrowing in thought.

“That might end up being useful,” she said. “It’s not often we get fresh eyes around here. I’ll explain a lot more on the plane. For now I just need you to know what’s at stake.”

With that, she led him to the dome’s entry, and through its heavy glass door.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Like looking into a depth. Into a furnace. As Bryce had written. The Breach was an oval ripped open across thin air, ten feet wide by three high. Blue and violet tendrils of light, flamelike in their substance but not in their shape, capered along the length of the tunnel, which was three feet in diameter and receded to infinity. Only in the nearest yard did the tunnel flare out to the wide oval.

Within the giant dome that shielded the rest of the building from who knew what, a much smaller containment system encased the Breach to protect anyone who entered this space. This smaller enclosure was a rectangle made of more thick glass, with an airtight door at the front. The glass cage’s purpose was as obvious as the library silence of the room. Travis watched his faint reflection blurring rhythmically on the vibrating glass, and imagined the malignant Breach Voices encased within it, just a few feet away.

He refocused beyond the glass to the Breach itself, the tunnel stretching away to a vanishing point. He felt his perception bend toward it like a row of iron filings to a magnet.

“There’s only so much to say about it,” Paige said. “It leads somewhere. We don’t even try to guess where. Nothing can go through from our side. And no living thing has come through from the other side. But objects do. Three or four a day, on average, for over three decades now. Entities.”

Directly beneath the Breach stood something like an industrial-strength trampoline. It was square, five by five feet. Its fabric looked both flexible and strong, and its legs were wrapped with shock springs. It was positioned to soften the fall for anything that came out of the opening, whether it weighed an ounce or a ton.

Cameras just inside the glass casing covered the Breach from two angles. No doubt someone watched their feeds day and night, from somewhere in the floors above B51. It would only be necessary to come into this space when things actually emerged from the Breach.

“Certain entities we see all the time,” Paige said. “The twenty most common probably make up ninety-nine percent of the traffic. A few of them are behind you.”

Travis drew his eyes from the Breach and turned around. A dry-erase board on the wall proclaimed, NEXT UNIQUE ENTITY WILL BE DESIGNATED 0697. Below the board and to the left was a set of steel shelves. Arrayed along them were a few duplicates of three separate items. One was a kind of string, bright white and a little thicker than floss. Each strand, about a foot long, had been trapped on one end by a paperweight. They’d have floated away otherwise. The strings trailed lazily in space, neither heavier nor lighter than the air. Gravity seemed to just not affect them. On the next level down were a few pink crystals, the length and width of fingers. Travis could see nothing special about them. Beneath those, on the lowest shelf, were two examples of what Bryce had described. Green rags. Travis dropped to a crouch and studied them. They were lying mostly flat. The few wrinkles in the fabric were tight and sharp, like hardened veins. Like the material had been drawn to the surface by vacuum pressure.

“Try to lift one,” Paige said.

Travis tried. He grabbed for the nearest as if it were a washcloth, palming it in the middle to gather it in a handful. It was like trying to grab a handful of the shelf surface itself. The cloth didn’t budge. He took the corner of the rag between his thumb and forefinger and found he could lift the first inch. Beyond that, it was just too heavy. He wondered for a moment how the technicians moved these things around, and then he noticed a wheeled chainfall a few feet away, with a vise-grip claw hanging from a cantilevered arm. Built to hoist engines out of cars, it was probably just about suited to lifting these rags.

“Bryce wasn’t crazy,” Travis said.

“Not about that.”

She picked up one of the pink crystals from the middle shelf.

“For all that we don’t know about the Breach,” she said, “this much is certain: in terms of technology, whoever’s on the other side is as far ahead of us as we are ahead of Java man.”

She let go of the crystal, shoulder height above the floor. It plummeted. Then, in the last foot of its fall, it slowed and came to a stop a quarter inch above the concrete. Sharp little beams of light shot from it, projecting onto the floor. The object seemed to be measuring its own position and rotation. After a second the beams switched off, and the thing set down with a ting that reverberated through the room.

“Everything that comes through is baffling to us,” Paige said. She nodded at the green rags. “The best materials scientists in the world have studied that fabric using our most advanced tools, scanning-tunneling microscopes that can isolate atoms. They’ve learned nothing. Not a single thing, in over thirty years of study. They tell us the material doesn’t even seem to be made of atoms. They nicknamed it a quark-lattice, but that’s a wild guess, not a testable theory, and it’s almost certainly wrong.”

Travis found his eyes drawn back to the Breach.

“Once or twice a month,” Paige said, “things come through that are either rare or unique. Things like the Whisper. We never understand how they work, but we can usually get a sense of their purpose. Not always, but usually. Some of them have good applications, like the medical tools that were used on me over the past several hours. Others are so dangerous, we just focus on keeping them safe, keeping them dormant and locked away. And that’s more or less what Tangent was created for. To shepherd what comes out of the Breach. To distinguish the good from the bad, find uses for the former, and contain the latter.”

She paused and turned to him. He looked at her and saw in her eyes the same vague trance effect he felt in his own. In the Breach’s presence there was no avoiding it.

“In the first year after March 7, 1978,” she said, “when the government was trying to figure out what to do with this place, there were proposals to fill the elevator shaft with concrete and leave this chamber sealed forever. Whatever showed up could just stay down here, however helpful or dangerous, and we could simply not tinker with any of it. At the time, those proposals were thought to be the most prudent. My father didn’t think so. He argued that eventually something might come out of the Breach that was effectively a ticking bomb. Something that if left alone would be so destructive that five hundred feet of dirt wouldn’t protect the world from it. He was right. In the time since then, at least three entities have arrived that fulfilled that criteria. The point is obvious enough. It takes the smartest and best people in the world, working as hard as they can, just to prevent the Breach from triggering a nightmare. Imagine what the worst people could do with it, and you understand what’s on the line here.” Her eyes went back to the Breach. “This building is the most secure site on Earth. It protects the Breach and all that’s ever come out of it. All that ever will come out of it too. And right now, it’s all in play. The security isn’t enough. The people who tortured me and killed my father, the people who now have the Whisper in their arsenal, want control of this place, and if things go wrong for us in the next day or so, they’ll have it.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

On the surface—literally—Border Town was not an impressive place. It was a faded red pole barn with a pile of rusted automobile parts drifted against its back wall, the property bounded at the perimeter by a few cracked and leaning posts that had once been a split-rail fence. Just visible against the flatlands that planed to the horizon on all sides, a gravel track wandered southwest across fifty miles of nothing.

Nothing that could be seen, at least. The barren landscape probably concealed enough firepower to repel a military assault. Even American military.

Travis stood at an open bay door of the barn, alongside Paige and fifteen others who made up a larger version of the teams he’d met in Alaska. He’d heard the proper terms for them now: the units were called detachments, and their members were known as operators. At the moment, each of the fifteen was dressed casually, weapons and armor stowed in green plastic carrying cases, though their bodies and expressions marked them as hardened, well trained. Paige had the same look. No doubt she’d come up through their ranks, though it was obvious now that she outranked everyone present.

Something glinted in the washed-out blue sky to the west. It resolved into what Travis expected: a blank, white 747.

Two F–16s accompanied it. As it began its final approach, they broke away and went into a circling pattern high above the desert. Travis had an idea that such escorts would be standard procedure for Tangent flights from now on, after what’d happened to Box Kite.

A minute later the 747 landed a quarter mile away on what looked like unmarked scrubland. Travis and the others drove to it in three electric vehicles with all-terrain wheels, the same sort of vehicle he’d ridden in earlier, while hooded. Only as they closed the last fifty feet to the aircraft, and the ground beneath the carts smoothed out to unnatural perfection, did Travis realize he’d been staring at a runway all along. The tarmac had been mixed with an additive so that it matched the landscape perfectly, and even landform shadows and patches of vegetation had been painted onto it. To any aircraft or satellite, it would be invisible, day or night. He wondered how the pilots who landed here lined up on it, and then saw the answer: tiny lights lined the edge, their plastic casings roughened and browned like their surroundings. They weren’t shining. Hadn’t been a moment ago, either. They were probably ultraviolet, visible only with the right gear.

In the deep shadow of the 747’s wing, a door opened, pulled in by a crewman standing in what should have been the luggage hold. Travis could see an interior staircase behind the man, leading up to the main level. Had he investigated further aboard Box Kite, no doubt he would have found an identical setup.

Paige and the others began unloading their gear and taking it to the plane. Travis helped. Among the carrying cases he saw two that were different: black instead of green. He didn’t need to ask their significance.

A few minutes later they were climbing, the F–16s falling in at the 747’s wingtips again. The aircraft banked into a northeast line, bound for Switzerland by the shortest route, across the top of the world.

The plane’s floor plan was the same as Box Kite’s. Travis sat in a large chair, facing Paige, in the counterpart to the room where he’d found Ellen Garner wide-eyed and dead. Out the window, Wyoming stretched east toward Nebraska, vast and brown and empty.

“You really never wonder?” Travis said.

Paige looked up at him. “I’m sorry?”

“The Breach. You said you don’t even try to guess what’s on the other side. That’s hard to believe.”

She thought for a moment, then said, “We all wonder. But if there’s no way to test any one guess, no way to measure them against each other, it all comes to the same thing. We just don’t know.”

“Whoever’s on the other side,” Travis said, “the tunnel would’ve had to open on their end too, right? You’d think they’d notice. And how are these objects coming through it? Is someone over there feeding them in, three or four times a day?”

“The popular guess is that we tapped into an existing network of tunnels. Some alien equivalent of those pneumatic tubes they use at the bank. Could be a delivery system limited to non-living objects. Maybe, right? Maybe not. Maybe’s a common word in Border Town.”

“Maybe you tapped into a garbage chute,” Travis said. “Maybe all this amazing stuff is just their trash.”

She smiled, seeming to surprise herself as she did. It was the first smile Travis had seen from her, and he thought it made the entire flight worthwhile.

“Haven’t heard that one before,” she said.

“Fresh eyes,” Travis said.

They were quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Why can’t someone go through from this end?”

“There’s a resistance, right at the mouth of the tunnel. When you try to push something through, the resistance pushes back with something close to gravity force at first. But the force doubles about every three centimeters the further you go, so you don’t get very far. The woman we passed in the hallway, with the red hair, is Dr. Fagan. She’s done the most work studying the resistance force. She wants to break through it, find a way to contact whoever’s on the other side of the Breach.”

Somehow that notion affected Travis more deeply than anything they’d spoken of yet. Real contact with whoever—with whatever—was on the other end.

He saw recognition in Paige’s eyes, like it was obvious what he was thinking. Maybe it was. Maybe that idea struck everyone the same way, the first time they heard it.

“It’s not likely to work,” she said. “Even Fagan accepts that. If you could get past the initial barrier, the math would still be stacked against you. It gets into really strange stuff—Einstein, general relativity, time dilation—things we can calculate but not actually understand. Anyway, it all points to the same conclusion: whatever you sent through the Breach would just come back before it reached the far end. It might return months or years later, or—and this is more of a guess—it could actually come back before you sent it. Maybe long before.”

She watched Travis’s expression, then added, “Like I said, lots of maybes in Border Town.”

Travis nodded, then stared out at the country falling farther and farther below. A freeway crept by, running east to west, all but devoid of traffic.

“So, what exactly is at Seven Theaterstrasse?” he said at last.

Paige was quiet a moment before replying. “It’s not so much what’s there, as what the building itself is.”

“Which is?”

Another silence. Then: “A weapon.”

He turned from the window and looked at her. Waited for her to go on.

“Seven Theaterstrasse is where it’s all going to be decided,” she said. “It’s the choke point at the center of everything our enemy is planning. If we win there, everyone wins. And if we lose there—” She cut herself off, unwilling to say the rest, or maybe even think it.

After a moment she said, “None of this will make sense unless I start with the beginning. The essentials, at least.”

She thought about how best to get into it, and then began the story.

Two strange things happened in the spring of 1978: the first occurred five hundred feet beneath Wyoming, the second, five hundred feet south of Pennsylvania Avenue. The most powerful bureaucracy in the world, presented with the most important asset in history, chose to limit its own influence.

Over the weeks following the catastrophic failure of the Very Large Ion Collider facility at Wind Creek, the president of the United States and most of his cabinet were briefed on the details as they came in from inspectors on site. The trapped DOE personnel had all been hospitalized and released; along with thick nondisclosure agreements, they’d been provided with trauma counseling, some of which would probably be long-term. Ruben Ward remained in a coma; he’d been flown to Johns Hopkins, where so far there’d been no change in his condition.

On April 3, the first scientific inspection team entered the VLIC site. They found that more than ninety objects had accumulated beneath the Breach—that term was well cemented even by then. If it hadn’t already been clear to everyone involved that this situation would call for delicate handling, the team’s findings brought the picture into razor-edged focus. In the eighty-seven-page report they filed after that first object survey, the word dangerous appeared more than two hundred times.

Upon receipt of the report, the president’s most senior advisors settled into discussion along predictable lines. How tight a stranglehold should be kept on this project? How limited should Congress’s awareness be? Which defense contractors should be brought on board, and how central a role should they play in making use of this strange new resource? Obviously those that had been the most generous during the election would have to be first in line, but how far back did the line go? Two companies? Maybe three?

Several hours into the first such meeting, the president turned to a man who’d said almost nothing so far: Peter Campbell, an MIT professor and, at thirty-three, the youngest member of the Science Council.

“You don’t appear to agree,” the president said.

“I don’t.”

“Then say what you’re thinking.”

Campbell chose his words carefully before he began.

“Does anyone in this room really believe we can keep this secret?” He allowed a few seconds of silence for an answer. None came. “Consider the spec data on the Manhattan Project. If there was ever a secret we needed to keep, that was it. How long did we manage? Two years. The Russian bomb program was under way within two years, at the latest. Think of the amount of knowledge they had to obtain from us to make their project work, and then consider that they need only learn two facts this time: that the Breach exists, and that the VLIC created it. After that, all the information they need is there for the taking. The specs on the VLIC were published in Scientific American five years before we finished building it.”

The vice president spoke up. “Russia developing its own Breach is problematic, but—”

“Russia, China, India, North and South Korea, Israel, Germany, France, Britain, Japan, Saudi Arabia,” Campbell said. “Probably a few more I’m leaving out. Count on each of them to have it up and running inside of ten years. Our VLIC took a decade to build with Department of Energy funding. DOD would’ve gotten it done in half that time, and we should expect the same urgency in all of these countries.” He waved his own copy of the object report in front of him. “You want all their most generous defense contractors fucking around with this kind of stuff?”

Even years later, Campbell would lie awake wondering if one calculated use of the word fuck had saved the world. Certainly something in those few hundred words had struck a nerve, because the conversation tipped at that fulcrum and never managed to tip back. He’d aimed for their fears, that was all. He’d aimed for their fears and hit.

In the end, the president turned the inevitable question back to Campbell. What alternative approach did he propose?

Campbell had an answer. Take away the incentive for any other country to waste resources creating its own Breach. Share this one with all of them. Hold a secret summit with the leaders of these nations and their most respected scientists—but not their military-industrial tycoons. Be straight with them. Be upfront. Set in stone the only policy with a chance of avoiding chaos: the Breach should be overseen by a single organization loyal to the world as a whole and to no nation in particular. Let this group be composed of people with impeccable backgrounds in science and ethics—real ethics of human needs and liabilities, not the limited scope of any one culture’s religious morality. Let no one actively seek to join; anyone craving that much responsibility should never be trusted with it. Instead identify excellent candidates and recruit them. The member nations should protect and finance this group, but none should control it. Not even America.

“But the Breach is on our soil,” the defense secretary said. “We paid for what created it.”

“All the more legitimate our stance will be,” Campbell said. “Look, to whatever extent we flex our egos over this thing, we increase the chance of some other superpower saying, ‘Forget it, we’ll make our own.’ Once one of them does that, others will follow. The only way to prevent it is to be evenhanded. Think about it: wouldn’t we be grateful if one of them did the same, if one of their research facilities had accidentally generated this thing?”

“I don’t believe any other country would do that,” the president said.

“I don’t either,” Campbell said. “Which is why history will think so highly of you.”

The debate didn’t quite end that day, but over the spring and summer of 1978, nearly every decision ultimately went Campbell’s way. The group that would oversee the Breach was designated Tangent. Its objectives were simple: to organize and study everything that emerged; to draw scientific insight—if possible—from those observations and advance human knowledge; to prevent the Breach from ever becoming a wishbone between opposing parties.

And it worked.

For a while.

“My father’s strongest ally in the fight to create Tangent was a man named Aaron Pilgrim,” Paige said. “He was the president’s chief science advisor, and also one of the founders of the original VLIC project. Like my father, he went on to become one of Tangent’s highest-ranking decision makers, and was generally considered the smartest member of the organization. He was exceptionally good at figuring out the purposes of the strange and unique entities that came out of the Breach. In time, those were brought to Aaron Pilgrim first, by default.”

She paused. Stared out into the harsh sunlight on the plains.

“The Whisper came through in the summer of 1989. It had an attachment that kept it separate from its key, at first. But even switched off, it was dangerous as hell. The key only turns on the intelligence; the self-destructive aspect of it is always on. The first person who held it barehanded murdered two lab assistants and then cut his own throat with a pen. With its intelligence on, it triggers the same murder-suicide impulse, but on the scale of the entire world.”

Travis tried to recall the thing’s possession of him. He couldn’t. His memories of it, vague only a few hours earlier during the interrogations, were simply gone now. All he had left were memories of his own descriptions of the experience, but even those were going.

Paige saw his expression. “No one ever remembers,” she said. “In a few more hours, you’d forget you ever held it at all, without others reminding you. No idea why it does that.”

“Why did it save my life?” he said. “From the killer in the suit?”

“If we understand anything about its pattern, it works like this: first it addresses any needs on the part of the user. The more desperate the need, the better. So it helped you kill your attacker. And then—I’m guessing a little here—it gave you the ability to read the language you saw on my wall, because that’s a need too, if we’re going to prevent what’s coming.”

“But is that my need, or yours?”

“It’s everyone’s need now.”

The way she said it didn’t lend itself to doubt.

“So then what?” he said. “When it’s done with the user’s needs, it gets busy with its own?”

“Something like that. It may toy with the person for a while. Reveal some painful insight into an old wound, things like that. That may be why it uses a voice from the person’s past, one with a strong emotional impact. But yeah, it turns toward its own goals pretty quickly, and they’re always the same: cause as much harm in the world as possible, as quickly as possible.”

“Nice.”

“We understood all that about it, early on. The danger was so obvious, we considered locking it away and never studying it at all. But the potential for good was too big to ignore. It knows everything. And everything about everything. It knows how many blades of grass are in Kansas right now, and the length, angle, and arc of each one, and how the arc would change if the wind were half a mile an hour stronger. It knows the cure for cancer. The cure for everything.”

“I assume you asked it.”

“We asked. We brought in late-stage cancer patients and let them hold it. Should’ve worked, right? But it didn’t. Either it didn’t consider their need compelling enough, or …” She hesitated to say the next part, then exhaled and went ahead. “Or it just didn’t want to tell us things like that.”

Travis waited for her to continue. She looked outside again, maybe reliving the angst the thing had inspired in her over the years.

“You probably don’t remember,” she said, “but when it switches from help mode to kill-the-world mode, the light changes.”

He didn’t remember, but took her word for it.

“The focus of our research, of Aaron Pilgrim’s research, was figuring out how to extend the first part, indefinitely if possible. How to control it, as a user, and not let it change. Pilgrim was the only one who ever gained any ground on it, in that regard. He learned how to keep it tame for minutes on end. And then indefinitely. He mastered it, by some combination of focus and … who knows? He said he didn’t even know. He just got to where he could control it, keep it talking to him as long as he wanted.”

“No cure for cancer, though,” Travis said.

She was quiet a moment. Then she said, “Looking back, we have no idea what it really told him,” and Travis understood where the story was going.

“There was no warning at the time. No sense that there was anything wrong with him. He made his move in 1995, after six years of working with the Whisper. He shut down Border Town’s defense system and killed eight security personnel on his way out. He took three entities with him. One was the transparency suit you recovered for us this morning. Another was the Whisper. The last one I’ll describe later. It’s important. It’s still unaccounted for, and it must be part of his plan.”

“To take control of Border Town?”

She nodded. “In a way that wouldn’t have been possible in 1995, all by himself. He’s spent these past fourteen years assembling his own organization. You could call it a dark twin to Tangent.” She met his eyes, and looked more grave than when she’d been dying. “There are things locked up inside Border Town that make a joke of every military on the planet. Pilgrim knows how to use them. Count on his people knowing, too. If he gets them inside, if they get control of that place for even half an hour, that’s the end of any chance to stop them. They get the world that day. And whatever miserable fucking agenda they want to push, six and a half billion people will be stuck with it.”

It was the kind of thing Travis wouldn’t have believed even a few days earlier. He believed it now.

“Aaron Pilgrim became the most hunted person in history,” Paige said. “The intel communities of every nation that funds Tangent pooled their resources, their knowledge, their means. They got nothing. Nothing for years. The more time passed without Pilgrim making another move, the more nervous everyone got. He was out there somewhere, setting up the chess pieces for whatever he had in mind. And it had to be something big, right? He had the Whisper to help him. He had all the knowledge he needed, and considering that knowledge is power, he had all the money and influence he needed too. He had all that, yet it was taking him years to set up whatever he was planning. You can imagine how that scared the shit out of us. Like there’s someone standing behind you with a slingshot, and the longer it takes before he shoots, the farther back he’s drawing it. After five years of waiting for the intelligence groups to unearth something, Tangent decided it’d been idle long enough.”

“They got into the hunt themselves,” Travis said.

Another nod. “This was around the time I came along, twenty years old. My father wanted me to stick to the research side of things, tucked away safely in Border Town. I wanted that too. But I saw the importance of the new program that was coming together, and I wanted to contribute. We modeled it on the CIA’s Operations Directorate, but with every corner of it beefed up with Breach technology. Our going active like that was the one thing Pilgrim never expected, and if the Whisper told him about it, it wasn’t enough to help him.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it worked. We started getting leads on him. Picked off a few of his people, even grabbed some alive. Made them talk. Got even more leads. Like that. Dialed in on him.”

“Couldn’t Pilgrim just stay on the move?” Travis said, but even as he asked, he realized the answer himself. “Oh.”

“Seven Theaterstrasse,” she said, seeing his understanding. “He built his entire plan around a single location. In retrospect, we should’ve guessed Zurich, or Switzerland at least. Information security like no other place on Earth. There’s nowhere better to hide a serious, expensive enterprise. We pinned the address down on May 17, 2005, and came within maybe two minutes of catching him there. He escaped by such a narrow margin, he had to leave the Whisper behind. Along with a few of his people. Whom we grabbed. And whom we made talk. Almost all that we know about that place, we learned from them. They told us Seven Theaterstrasse’s stated purpose is—and I’m quoting here—‘to permanently end Tangent’s restriction of Aaron Pilgrim’s global authority.’ And they told us it’s not just a building. It’s a weapon. It’s a weapon he was three hours away from pulling the trigger on, when we arrived that day to stop him.”

Silence fell between them. There was only the drone of the engines, and the soft rush of air past the window.

“Three hours,” Travis said.

“Three hours.”

“That’s very hard to believe.”

“Yeah,” Paige said.

“Borderline impossible to believe.”

“There are factors that nudge it toward plausibility. His people were a lot more active than normal in the last few months before his deadline, acquiring essential things here and there, some of them hard to come by. That made their movements easier to spot. At the same time, Pilgrim had to know we were closing in. Stands to reason he picked up his pace a bit, wasn’t as careful as he might have otherwise been. All of that helped us.”

“Three hours, though,” Travis said. “I know shit happens, but that kind of shit almost never happens.”

“The alternative is even less likely. That he wanted us to show up there, force him out of the place he’d spent a decade preparing, and leave him on the run without the Whisper, which he’d probably come to think of as a second brain by that time. He’d probably rather have lost his eyes and ears than lose that thing.”

She had a point.

“So Tangent has controlled Seven Theaterstrasse for the past four years,” Travis said. “I assume you’ve had people studying what Pilgrim built inside it.”

“Twenty-four seven, since the day we occupied it.”

“So what does the weapon do?”

“That’s where you come in,” she said. “Because even Pilgrim’s own people didn’t have a clue. And neither do we.”

Silence again. He had solid guesses for some of the questions in his head, but not all of them.

“The reason we don’t know is obvious enough,” Paige said. “Pilgrim didn’t design the weapon himself. He made the Whisper design it for him, based on what he needs it for. Made it guide his work, for the ten years he spent building the thing, which occupies just about every cubic inch of the building, nine stories on the waterfront in Zurich. It’s alien technology, cobbled together from human-made components. Clever way to build something, using the Whisper like that, but there was a downside, too, from Pilgrim’s point of view.”

“The memory effect,” Travis said.

Paige nodded. “Impossible to remember, from one time to the next, what the Whisper has told you. That’d make it tricky as hell to follow its instructions consistently. So Pilgrim had to write things down. But that was a security risk, so the Whisper gave him a language no one else could read.”

Travis saw all the pieces slotting together now.

“The place is covered with that writing,” Paige said. “I could show you a few thousand images of it right now, but there’d be no rhyme or reason to it. It’ll be better if you see it in person. See it the way he wrote it.”

“You’re hoping I can help you understand the thing,” he said. “So you can shut it down.”

“More like praying you can help us,” she said. “But yeah.”

“Can I ask something really obvious?” he said.

She smiled vaguely and preempted the question. “There’s a reason we don’t simply level the building. You’ll see for yourself when we get there. And we can’t protect it, either. Not now. It wouldn’t matter if we parked an armored cav division outside of it. Pilgrim has the Whisper. It trumps everything. Even other entities, as you learned for yourself in Alaska.”

He took her point.

“If there’s any way whatsoever to achieve a given result—and there always is—then the Whisper will know how,” she said. “Think of it as a game of rock, paper, scissors, and the Whisper is a diamond-blade rock cutter. It just beats everything. If Pilgrim wants to return to Seven Theaterstrasse and trigger the weapon—and let’s go out on a limb and assume that’s exactly what the fuck he wants—then he will. Unless we destroy it before then.”

VERSE IVAN OCTOBER NIGHT IN 1992

Travis discovers immediately that he’s gotten a lucky break. His car, which has come to rest against the entertainment center at the back wall of the living room, has pinned the couch and its occupant against the big-screen TV. Manny Wright, six-foot-five and maybe four hundred pounds. The homeowners’ bodyguard, and the only one who lives in the house with them. His back is broken. He’s trying to move, trying to reach the .44 holstered at his waist. But he can’t.

Travis wonders if Manny was the one who actually carried out Emily’s murder, on orders from above. Then, because the answer is obvious, he stops wondering. He raises the .32 to Manny’s face.

Manny can’t get enough breath to say please, or no, but his eyes say both. Intensely. And in vain.

Travis puts the gun next to Manny’s right eye, pointed sidelong across his face, and fires. The hollowpoint shreds both eyes and the bridge of the nose, leaving a ragged, bloody crater, and to Travis’s deep satisfaction, Manny gets enough breath to make some noise after all. The man’s scream is plaintive, full of self-pity, with the same stresses and tones he might use to scream “Why?” over and over. Travis wishes he could stand here for an hour and listen to it.

Instead he stoops, takes the .44 and leaves Manny to die like that, blind and screaming.

Manny isn’t the reason Travis has come here tonight. The house’s owners, the people who made the choice to kill Emily, are the primary targets.

Travis goes to the broad, stone-clad hallway that leads to the master bedroom, where his own mother and father are waiting.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The day slipped by in a few hours over Canada and the North Atlantic, sped up by the plane’s eastbound transit across the time zones.

Paige gave Travis two thin reports, one for each of the entities that they’d brought along on the trip. The objects in the black carrying cases.

QUICK REF REPORT—BREACH ENTITY 0118—“MEDIC”

BREACH EGRESS: 1981 July 15—07:31 UTC

PHYSICAL: Medic has a mass of 1.31 kg. Long dimension is 11.5 cm, height 8.1 cm, width 3.0 cm. It bears a strong superficial resemblance to a handgun. Its structure is simple: tube, grip, and trigger with guard. Black in color.

FUNCTION: Localized, massively accelerated healing of biological damage. Sends a surge of radiation from its barrel, covering an area 30 cm wide at a distance of approx. 15 cm. Radiation is a complex mixture of various particles, most not identifiable or known to present science. Result is instant death of most deleterious microorganisms, as well as clotting of all air-exposed blood within less than one second. Extremely useful for combating infections and treating serious wounds, to a degree.

Has been shown to work on humans, all tested mammals, and vertebrates in general. Has never worked on any tested invertebrate.

THEORIES ON HOW ENTITY FUNCTIONS: None.

LIMITATIONS OF USE: Many wounds are too severe for Medic’s effect to be of use in time to prevent mortality.

QUICK REF REPORT—BREACH ENTITY 0353—“DOUBLER”

BREACH EGRESS: 1991 January 24—14:50 UTC

PHYSICAL: Doubler has a mass of 7.85 kg. Long dimension is 18.2 cm, height 5.1 cm, width 5.1 cm. It is black and yellow and resembles a large, square-shafted flashlight with two lenses, one on each end.

FUNCTION: When switched on, Doubler projects a discrete cone of light from each end. Yellow light from the yellow end, UV light from the black end. Each light cone flares outward from the lens and terminates sharply at a distance of just over 1.5 m.

Anything contained within the yellow light beam for more than 3.44 seconds is physically cloned, with the copy appearing inside the UV light beam. Creation of the copy is almost instantaneous, with time from start to finish not exceeding two frames of digital video, less than .066 seconds.

The fidelity of the clone to its master is physically perfect, presumably to atomic detail. This was demonstrated by the doubling of a laptop computer, the clone of which functioned properly and contained all the same code as its master. Chemical compounds and processes may also be copied. Cloned bullets fire as normal. Cloned food ingested by test animals produced no ill effect. A lit “Zippo” lighter was reproduced with its flame still burning.

THEORIES ON HOW ENTITY FUNCTIONS: None.

LIMITATIONS OF USE: (1) Does not work on most Breach entities. As of [November 16, 2008—latest update] only [5] entity types have been successfully doubled: Entity 0001 (Heavy Rag), Entity 0004 (Shard), Entity 0012 (Bottle Cap), Entity 0028 (Drift Wire), Entity 0051 (Inertia Plank).

(2) Living bodies may be cloned, but in all experiments so far, the clone has arrived dead. Autopsies have failed to reveal any specific cause of death. The master specimens (for ethical reasons, only mice and rats have been used) appear to suffer no harm. There is universal agreement within Tangent that no doubling of a human will ever be sanctioned.

When Travis finished reading the reports, he saw that Paige had opened a laptop. She turned it to face him.

“This is test footage of the last entity Pilgrim has,” she said. “It’s not quite unique. Four of them have come through over the years. He only has one. It’s no Whisper, but it’s powerful, in its way.”

She opened a video frame on the screen and clicked PLAY. The video showed a stark white room containing a metal cage, no larger than a single-occupant drunk tank in some backwater police station. A man in his forties, balding, entered the frame holding an orange cube maybe four inches wide. There were markings on it, symbols etched in black, but they were too far from the camera to be discernible. It didn’t matter: Travis could see that the writing was different from the strange jumble he’d read on Paige’s wall. And it sure as hell wasn’t English.

“October 4, 1986,” the balding man said. “Video demonstration of Entity Zero Two Zero Five: Ares.”

He entered the cage with the cube, closed the door and locked it from inside. Then he manipulated something on the cube, moving the symbols on its surface, arranging them. Here the camera reframed to a wider field of view, revealing a dozen people seated in chairs outside the cage, the nearest maybe ten feet away. Men and women, twenties to forties. Dressed casually. Nothing strange about them, except their anxiety. Something was about to happen, and they knew it.

The man in the cage finished whatever he was doing with the cube: the thing suddenly flared bright, throwing off the camera’s white balance and making the room appear darker. In the same instant, all but three of the seated people turned sharply, regarding the man in the cage with something like surprise.

Then, as one, they came up out of their chairs and rushed him, like baseball players charging from the dugout to beat the shit out of some opposing player. They hit the cage en masse, trying with all their force to get at the man inside. Arms reached in through the bars. Hands gripped the steel and shook it. A few of the attackers stepped back and aimed heavy kicks at the cage door’s latch. Had they reached the balding man, they would have torn his limbs from his body. There was no question of it.

By their moves, it was clear that they weren’t seeking the orange cube itself. They weren’t looking to destroy it, or even take it away; they were only reacting to the man who held it. They crouched and reached for his legs. Climbed atop the cage and plunged their arms into it, going for his head. They wanted to kill him. It was that simple.

Yet beyond the rage, their actions were surprisingly normal. Nothing about them suggested that they were controlled like mindless puppets, or even reduced to some animalistic state of mind. Not even close. They were just extremely pissed-off people focused on a target. Their minds were, if anything, clearer for the adrenaline rush. As Travis watched, two of them conferred and then one took out a set of car keys and tried to pick the cage’s lock with it.

The man in the cage only stared at the horde around him, rattled by the experience but not at all surprised. Like a marine biologist in a shark cage.

Travis’s eyes went back to the seats and the three people who remained in them. They were the farthest three from the cage. The farthest from the orange cube. As if the thing had a radius of influence, and they were just outside of it. One of the three looked up, his eyes drawn to someone out of frame. He nodded in response to something he was told, then stood, and took a single step toward the cage. His eyes hardened. His jaw tightened. A second later he was sprinting toward it, crashing into it with the rest of the throng.

The video ended.

Travis stared at the blank screen a moment, then met Paige’s eyes.

“What’s the write-up on that one?” he said. “Pisses people off like nobody’s business?”

“It does something to the R-complex,” she said. “The reptile foundation of the human brain, where the fight-or-flight response comes from. Where rage comes from. The cube does two things. First, it tags anyone within a couple feet of itself as a target. Then it affects everyone within another twenty feet beyond that, maxing their aggression and turning them inward against the target.”

“Bet someone at Border Town learned that the hard way,” Travis said.

Paige nodded, looking away. Travis didn’t bother her for the details.

“Anything nice ever come out of the Breach?” he said. “Instant puppy generator, something like that?”

Paige managed a smile. “It’s not all bad. We survive the next thirty-six hours, I’ll show you some of the good stuff.”

Somewhere over Greenland, Travis reclined his seat and tried to rest. He was asleep within minutes.

Paige watched him.

After a moment she felt self-conscious and looked away, even though there was no one else in the room to see her.

She didn’t trust what she felt about him. There was every reason not to; her feelings were exaggerated all to hell right now. The guy had saved her from the worst thing she’d ever endured—had literally come in with guns blazing—and then carried her over fifteen miles to safety. Her memories of the journey out of the mountains, early on before she’d gone completely comatose, comprised a vignette of little waking moments. Coming to in his arms, being carried like a child. A big part of her had hated that feeling: being unable to stand up for herself after years of training her body to military-specialist standards. But here was the thing, and there was no getting around it: being carried had also felt good. Irrationally good, on some primal level that was all about vulnerability and security. He’d simply made her feel safe.

And then she’d kissed him. Jesus, why had she done that? There’d been no real need for it; he’d already been faking it well enough, as far as the chopper was concerned. Looking back, she wished she could write the moment off to her delirium, but in fact she’d felt pretty damn awake at that time. Rotor wash made for an effective alarm clock.

She glanced at him again. Sound asleep, sunlight across his chest, the shadows of folds in his shirt sliding back and forth as he breathed.

No, she definitely didn’t trust her feelings. A few hours earlier, when she’d seen his life history on the screen of her PDA, she’d taken it like a kick to the stomach, and then had immediately found herself rationalizing, finding ways to cut him slack, to not blame him for what he’d done—for what he’d been—in his distant past. It was a wonder she hadn’t said it all out loud and made an ass of herself in front of her people.

All this, superimposed over the thing she wasn’t dealing with at all.

Her father.

Even now, she hadn’t cried. Not since her initial reaction in the clearing. She’d tried. Tried to get there, to at least accept that it had really happened, if nothing else. So far, it hadn’t worked. It was still too big, too close—she couldn’t get a sense of where its edges were.

It would happen in its time. It seemed there was no forcing it.

For now, she thought she could use some sleep of her own. She stood and left the room to find a place by herself.

Travis felt someone shake his shoulder. Had he even slept? It hardly felt like it. He opened his eyes to find Paige standing over him, haloed by the ceiling lights of the little room. Outside was darkness, broken every few seconds by the pulse of the aircraft’s starboard beacon.

“Wheels down in five,” Paige said.

Travis nodded. She left the room to speak to someone in the hallway.

The plane banked steeply, offering a view of its destination: Switzerland’s Meiringen Air Force Base, its runway threaded tightly between mountain ridges in a way that was uncomfortably familiar.

Ten minutes later Travis stepped out of the plane’s tarmac-level exit into crisp air, the stars hard and bright above the mountains.

A tandem-rotor helicopter—a Chinook, he thought it was called—waited with its turbines already whining at idle. The team transferred the gear, and within five minutes they were airborne again, moving north over the high country toward Zurich, and whatever waited at 7 Theaterstrasse.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Zurich was close to what Travis had pictured. He sat beside Paige in the last SUV of the motorcade winding its way down into the heart of the city. Under the black sky, the clean lines of centuries-old architecture descended in fractured order to the river. Ahead and below, a fog bank had settled over the lowlying blocks that flanked the waterfront. Gray specters of mist drifted along the deepest streets of the city. The motorcade descended into the fog just before swinging left onto Theaterstrasse.

Ahead and to the right, rising straight from the water, was the only nine-story building for several blocks. Paige and the others in the vehicle reacted to the sight of it, if only in subtle ways. Hands unconsciously tightened the clasps of Kevlar armor. Gripped the stocks and barrel guards of rifles. Drummed on armrests.

The detachment operators had put on their gear aboard the Chinook. Travis hadn’t asked if they’d brought a set for him. They had. In addition to the Kevlar, he now wore a tiny comm unit in his ear: a microphone and receiver that were always on and linked to the rest of the team. They’d given him a gun, too. A rifle identical to theirs. Identical to the one he’d already killed with, while kneeling over a muddy hole in Alaska.

Paige called Border Town on her cell for an update. She’d done this every five minutes since they’d touched down at Meiringen. Right now there was an AWACS aircraft making broad circles thirty thousand feet above Zurich. Six attack helicopters were staged in parking lots along the ridges east and west of town. Farther out, F–18s orbited, ready to kill any unauthorized thing that came within fifty miles of the city on wings or rotors. Every traffic camera for miles had specially filtered lenses that reduced windshield glare and allowed highres facial imaging of vehicle occupants at night. These cams were all networked to a system that could recognize Aaron Pilgrim and several of his known allies. If they did, three detachments from Tangent’s Berlin hub were standing by in the city, ready to move against them.

None of it reassured Paige, Travis saw. Rock, paper, scissors.

On the outside, the building was beautiful. Ancient stone facade rearing up to the sky. Cobblestone approach. Wrought-iron fence gleaming in the mist, its sheen catching the city lights through the fog.

On the inside, the place looked like the home of an obsessive-compulsive who couldn’t pass a used computer store without buying out its entire stock, and had done so on a few hundred occasions. Travis wasn’t up on computers—hadn’t owned one in the year since he’d rejoined the free world, and the last time he’d seen one before that, the term e-mail hadn’t yet made it into popular culture. He’d seen his brother’s impressive setup for the home business, and he’d gone online a few times at the library in Fairbanks in recent months. His experience ended there. But even a glance at the interior of 7 Theaterstrasse made it clear that no amount of familiarity would’ve helped. Supercomputer designers would’ve been stumped. Probably had been. No doubt Tangent had brought in the best people.

Beginning at the main-floor foyer, where six members of another Berlin detachment stood guard, the building’s space, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, was filled with wires, and computer boards, and cables, and pieces of equipment Travis didn’t recognize at all. A rain-forest overgrowth of circuitry, lit from within by its own galaxy of tiny LED indicator lights. Here and there, window fans were bolted to walls or the ceiling, aimed at particularly dense clusters of wiring and spinning at full speed, as they must have been for years and years. Elsewhere, air-conditioning units whirred softly, the radiant heat of their motors vented away through metal ductwork toward exterior walls.

“Power’s never been shut off since you took over the place?” Travis asked Paige.

“Oh no.” She said it like he’d asked if she’d ever juggled straight razors. There was more behind her answer than she was letting on. He had an idea he’d find out what it was soon enough, and didn’t ask.

“The building runs off the city grid, but there’s an uninterruptible backup, powerful enough for the whole place. It’s kicked on twice in these past four years, during outages. Thankfully.”

They moved through the foyer toward the stairs. In the recessed space beneath them, Travis saw something that was at odds with the rest of the place. It looked like a little painter’s studio: an easel tucked against the wall, a few spare canvases, and a scattering of oil-paint tubes covered in dust in the corner.

“What’s that about?” Travis said.

“Nothing, as far as we know,” Paige said. “Maybe a remnant from whoever owned the place before Pilgrim.”

They went past it to the foot of the stairs. The circuit-board jungle flowed up the marble steps, woven through the spindles of the railing. The passage through it all was only wide enough for single-file movement. Paige took the lead, Travis just behind her.

On every floor, half a dozen more of the single-file rabbit tunnels branched out from the one that wound up the stairs. Whatever purpose these runs had served Pilgrim, they served Tangent now. Travis saw that most of the pathways led to the outer walls and then ran along them, allowing access to the windows, several of which had Tangent snipers and spotters in place.

On the third floor, Paige led the group away from the stairs. Down one of the tunnels. Past three sniper teams. The path turned back in toward the interior, the wilderness of cables and silicon and flickering LEDs. It ended at something like a clearing, a circular space twelve feet across. At its center was a steel box the size of a footlocker. A thick trunk of bound wires descended from the canopy above and fed into the box through a hole in its lid. The lid itself was welded shut.

Paige stepped aside at the mouth of the clearing, but only enough to let him see past her. She was still blocking him from actually moving out of the tunnel and approaching the steel box.

“We never go much closer than this,” she said. “Our first inspection of the place showed us the need for caution. There are five boxes like this in the building. We’ve never tried to open them.”

“Just ran out of curiosity, right?” Travis said.

Paige smiled dryly. “Yeah. Also, they’re resting on pressure pads that are sensitive enough to react to any change of weight distribution. Putting a hand on top of one of these boxes, or against its side, would result in something bad. The same something bad that would happen if the building’s power were cut.”

Again, Travis didn’t ask. His eyes picked out the thin black wafers of the pressure pads under the box’s corners, their fine wires snaking across the floor to join the tangle.

“Follow my lead,” Paige said. “Move like I move. Don’t get any closer to the box than I do.”

With that, she stepped into the clearing and began to circle it along its outer wall. A wall of wires. Travis followed. Twice Paige pointed to indicate the wires for the pressure pads. Travis didn’t need them pointed out, but he understood her need to do it.

A moment later they were on the far side of the box, and Travis saw what he’d expected to see. Covering the back side of the box, and the floor around it, just discernible in the shifting LED light, was a vast sprawl of the same writing he’d seen in the enlargement on Paige’s wall. In real life, the writing was newsprint-sized, and at a glance he thought it must be half an hour’s worth of reading material.

Within seconds he saw that he was wrong.

It was only a single phrase, written over and over, almost maniacally. There had to be a thousand variants of it, in all directions, but the words were the same everywhere. They read simply,

GRAVITY ABERRATION, INNER NEXUS.

He translated it for Paige and told her about the repetition. She reacted with a mixture of confusion and disquiet, the look of someone surprised and shoved off balance in the worst possible direction. For another moment she only stared at him.

“That’s it?” she said.

“That’s it.”

She looked from him to the others, still standing in the tunnel. One of the Tangent operatives, Haslett—probably the oldest of the unit at close to fifty—was already typing it into a PDA.

Travis watched Paige’s eyes as she pondered the line’s meaning. For four years Tangent had probably worked with the world’s best cryptanalysts, cycling fragments of this jumble through a million hours of computer time, in the hope of decoding a thousand-page text file of useful data. Instead they’d gotten four words. And nobody knew what the hell they meant.

“Four more of these boxes,” Paige said. “Let’s get to them.” If there was any hope in her voice, Travis missed it.

The other clearings were on Levels Four, Five, Six, and Eight. Same-sized boxes, same-sized clearings, and the same-sized sprawls of repetitive text. To the extent that it mattered—not a hell of a lot, apparently—the messages were different in each place.

They read, respectively:

OPTICAL UNIFICATION TENSOR, PARALLEL UNIFICATION TENSOR.

BROAD AXIS NULL DRIVER, WORKABLE INFLOW DETOURS TO HARMONIC.

SYSTEM LEVERAGE, ETHER WASTE, RIGHT ANGLE TRANSFER EGRESSION.

FREE ELEMENT EXPULSION, DIRECTED FLOW ONTO RADIANT WITH AXIAL RESISTANCE DETERMINED.

Long before they’d reached the last one, Travis could see the group’s reaction to the messages as a whole. And Paige’s. More despair and anxiety than he’d ever seen gathered in one place.

“You might as well see the last thing,” Paige said, and led him back to the stairway.

Halfway up the stairs to the ninth floor, the jumble of wires ended. The last steps were open and clear. At the top of the staircase was a ten-by-ten-foot landing, bound by walls on the left and right, with a set of double doors at the end providing the only access to the rest of the ninth floor. The doors were closed, and a big, unsightly thing stood before them like a sentry on duty.

From the floor beneath it, through tiny holes, emerged the fine wires Travis had seen connected to the pressure pads throughout the building. They all fed into the thing on the landing. Now Travis saw more pressure pads tucked into the seams around the double doors. These too were wired into the thing that stood before them.

Travis knew what the thing was, though he’d never seen one in person before, and didn’t suppose the ones he’d seen in movies were very authentic. They hadn’t been, but he knew it by sight anyway. It was cone-shaped, the height of a washing machine, drab green with a dark red star painted on it. One side of it was open, revealing complex circuitry, and admitting the wires that snaked in from every pressure pad in the building. Any disturbance to those pads would trigger this thing.

“Pilgrim has connections,” Travis said.

“Pilgrim has connections,” Paige said. Then: “The Russians never had the accuracy with their missiles that we did, so their philosophy leaned toward making the warheads more powerful. This one came from an SS–18. Enriched uranium primary. Tritium secondary. Yield is about five megatons. Enough to turn everything within twenty miles of this spot into vapor.”

“Now I know why this place unnerves you guys,” Travis said.

Paige looked at him, and instead of confirmation in her eyes, he saw only more desolation.

“No you don’t,” she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Ten minutes later Travis and Paige were standing at an open window on the eighth floor, one of the few unoccupied by snipers. The rest of the detachment had dispersed throughout the building to reinforce the defenses, either at other windows or at the ground-floor entrances.

Travis stared out, high above the city and the fog. Nearby building tops rose from the mist like ships in a marina. Deep beneath the surface, streetlights cast diffused circles of bluish light, and here and there, Travis saw the roaming glow of vehicle headlights, and heard the sharp echoes of footsteps or voices, some of them American. Drunken tourists, the only people awake in Zurich at a quarter past three in the morning. The only steady traffic was a modest flow along a primary street a few miles to the west, bisecting the river and climbing away toward the ridges to the north and south. It was the road Travis and the others had come in on, E41.

Beside him, Paige’s breathing betrayed her anxiety. It reminded him of the fear he’d seen within the first Tangent group in Alaska, when they’d noticed the footprints in the mud. Not cowardice. Real fear. Fear in someone who didn’t scare easily.

“I really thought we had a chance,” she said. “I thought those inscriptions would tell us what we needed to do, and then however hard it was, we’d do it. I didn’t think we’d get this far and still be at zero.”

Her eyes roamed back and forth over the city. Like she expected hell to come rolling in at any second. Maybe it would.

“I don’t even know what to do now,” she said. “That was our only move. Now … we could leave if we wanted to, but it wouldn’t matter. It’s not like any place is safe, if Pilgrim achieves his goal. Staying feels better, like we’re doing something, right? But obviously we’re not. Forty-two snipers in this building, but we won’t slow him by a minute. Not when he has the Whisper. He’ll know what to do.”

For a long time, neither spoke. In the night around them, Zurich rumbled on idle.

“Tell me what’s worse than the nuke upstairs,” Travis said.

She looked at him, almost grateful for something to talk about besides the dead end they’d come to.

“We don’t think the nuke is the only defense system in this place,” she said. “We don’t even think it’s the main defense.”

Travis waited for her to explain.

“The bomb’s purpose is obvious,” she said.

“No opening the boxes,” Travis said. “No opening the ninth floor.”

She nodded. “There are even pressure pads embedded in the ceiling on Level Eight that prevent us from cutting through to the ninth floor that way. Same for the exterior walls. And the roof. And the windows on that level. Which are painted from inside. Obviously we’ll never figure out the purpose of this place until we can see into those boxes and that floor, and Pilgrim doesn’t want that, so … there you go. Simple, right?”

“Right,” Travis said. “But?”

“But it doesn’t work. The logic of it. It’s like the single hostage problem. If a captor has one hostage, his threats are automatically empty, because he knows that if he kills the hostage, he’ll be left with nothing. I know people take single hostages all the time, but those people are idiots. Pilgrim is as far from an idiot as you get. There’s no way he’d leave this building defended only by something he wouldn’t actually want to use. Something that would destroy the place, when all his ambitions depend on it. Don’t get me wrong. The bomb would go off, if we did any of the things that would trigger it. But Pilgrim would expect us to be careful. And there’s something else I think he’d expect. Something he’d have to expect, for the sake of caution.”

Travis thought about it, and understood. “He’d know there was at least a chance of Tangent finding a way around the bomb, using some Breach entity that showed up long after he left Border Town.”

“Exactly. Something that could have emerged yesterday. Or any day. He’d never know what we might suddenly have at our disposal. Something that lets us look through walls. Or walk through walls. Or turn enriched uranium into tin. Who knows, right?”

Travis didn’t bother asking if anything like that had actually come along. Obviously it hadn’t, but her point was still valid.

“If Pilgrim was cautious enough to rig the building with pressure pads and a nuke,” Travis said, “you’re saying he’d also be cautious enough to have a backup defense in place.”

“A spare hostage,” Paige said. “One he’s not afraid to pull the trigger on. And that’s what scares me. I think even if we were able to figure this place out, and make a move toward shutting it down, we’d run into that second defense, whatever it is.” She stared out over the fog. The river, visible only as a vague sheen against the lit backdrop of city streets, snaked away to the northwest. “But I guess we’re no closer to running into that problem than we ever have been.”

She turned from the window. Stared at him. Her eyes, as beautiful as they were haunted, reflected the glow from the fog.

In her hand, her PDA displayed typed copies of the five lines Travis had read from the boxes earlier. She’d spent most of the past ten minutes staring at them, willing them to mean something. Now she looked at them again.

He watched her. Watched her try to contain the frustration and succeed only by degrees. She looked like she wanted to tear out the wires that hung around her.

A question came to him. He wasn’t sure why it mattered, but had a sense that it did.

“If you guys got the Whisper back from Pilgrim four years ago, why was it on a 747 last week? Shouldn’t it have been locked up in Border Town?”

The frustration behind her eyes stepped up a notch. “It was. And we spent the four years trying to get answers from it. Trying to make it tell us about this place.” She shook her head, just perceptibly, her jaw tightening. “It’s so goddamned aggravating. You just can’t force it to help you if it doesn’t think you need it. And you only get those few seconds to try, before the light changes and it tries to take over. A few people suggested letting someone else master it, like Pilgrim had done. You can probably guess how the vote went on that brainstorm.”

Travis managed a smile.

Somewhere out in the city, a bottle shattered on concrete. In the fog, it might have been one block away or five. Men laughed, their voices ricocheting from every building, clarified in the mist.

“In Border Town we found an old pad of Pilgrim’s handwritten notes,” Paige said at last. “He’d taken care to destroy all his computer files, all his work on the Whisper, before he fled the place in 1995. But this notepad was one he must’ve left in the lab years earlier and lost track of. An attendant found it in a stack in the archives, in 1998. Most of the contents were useless. Lab tests that had failed, been crossed out, that kind of stuff. But one thing stood out. He’d made a note about a facility that was being built in Japan. Back then, in the nineties, it was only a proposal. Still ten, fifteen years from completion. The Large Hadron Accelerator. Keep in mind that particle accelerators are Aaron Pilgrim’s field of expertise. He stands with the best minds on Earth on the subject. Well, in that notepad he had five pages of math, written out longhand, supporting a conclusion he’d circled in red: when the LHA in Japan was completed, it’d be worth a try to set the Whisper right in its interacting point and hit it with a shot. His hunch was that it would act like the on/off key … but for the suicidal part of the Whisper, not the intelligence part. Meaning you could have all the good, and none of the bad.”

The regret that pulled at the edges of her expression was almost hard to look at.

“LHA went operational last month,” she said. “We had to try. If it worked, we’d have perfect knowledge of everything. How to cure every disease in the world. How to use all the Breach entities we’ve never been able to figure out. Most important: how to neutralize this building, destroy the weapon before Pilgrim could ever get a chance to use it. We had to try, and we had every reason to make our move as soon as possible. Four hundred thousand people live inside the kill radius of that nuke, and all it would take would be a lightning strike to zap the power for a few seconds, or a good-sized delivery truck crashing into the foundation to give the pressure pads a jolt. What were we supposed to do, tell everyone in Zurich to move?” The regret moistened her eyes now. Like acid. “All for nothing, anyway. We tried it at LHA just like he said. No result.”

“I guess he could’ve expected you to find his notes, and fly the Whisper there and back when that place got up and running,” Travis said.

Her eyebrows made a shrug, hard and bitter. “I guess.”

“He circled it in red, huh?”

She looked at him. Eyes narrowing now. “Yeah. So what?”

“Did he circle anything else in the book like that?”

“No. What’s your point? That he planned it? That far ahead? Circled it just to make us take the bait?”

“I don’t know,” Travis said. He didn’t.

“It’s not possible,” Paige said. “He wrote those notes a decade and a half ago, before he ever left Border Town. No one could plan that far out. And why? Why would he plan to lose the Whisper to us, hours before triggering this place, and then recover it four years later?”

“I don’t know,” Travis said again.

But something about what she’d told him didn’t fit. There was a problem there; he just couldn’t quite put a name tag on it.

Paige had lowered the PDA again. Travis indicated it with his eyes, the five lines still on its screen.

“Mind if I look at those?”

She handed it to him.

GRAVITY ABERRATION, INNER NEXUS.

OPTICAL UNIFICATION TENSOR, PARALLEL UNIFICATION TENSOR.

BROAD AXIS NULL DRIVER, WORKABLE INFLOW DETOURS TO HARMONIC.

SYSTEM LEVERAGE, ETHER WASTE, RIGHT ANGLE TRANSFER EGRESSION.

FREE ELEMENT EXPULSION, DIRECTED FLOW ONTO RADIANT WITH AXIAL RESISTANCE DETERMINED.

The words meant nothing to him. Or her. Or anyone else, apparently. At the time she’d typed them on the PDA, she’d forwarded the lines to Border Town, where a representative set of the world’s smartest people lived. Fifteen minutes now, and no answers on her phone.

“I might be the least qualified to say it,” Travis said, “but I think these lines are bullshit. I don’t care how brilliant the guy is, if he was writing Post-its to himself, they’d be clearer than this. If there’s a meaning to these sentences, it’s not literal. It’s something else.”

“I agree,” Paige said. “So what is it?”

He could only shrug, focusing on the tiny screen, his expression probably matching hers from a moment earlier.

And then the lights of Zurich went out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Paige was on her phone within seconds, asking someone what the hell was happening. Over the comm unit in his ear, Travis could hear sniper teams on the lower floors speaking to one another, reporting their status. Everyone fine, for now.

He leaned on the windowsill. The grid immediately around 7 Theaterstrasse had gone out first, and within seconds others had followed in succession, plunging the city into blackness. Now as he watched, successive blocks, leading away up the valley and climbing the ridges on both sides, winked out one after another, until the only lights he could see were the headlights on E41, and a scattering of others on the streets of the darkened city. Almost immediately his eyes began to adjust, and he discerned the fog again, lit not from below but from above, by the half-moon. The whole bank of it, shrouding the city, caught and scattered the silver-blue light and set a contrast for the monolithic shapes of the buildings that rose from it, black and dormant in the night.

Paige was talking to someone at Border Town who had open lines to the three Berlin detachments stationed around Zurich. None of them were reporting any hostile contact. She finished the call and looked at Travis. The two of them were lit only by the screen of her PDA, which Travis still held, and by the vague glow of LEDs blinking like animal eyes in the jungle of wiring around them. The power to 7 Theaterstrasse hadn’t so much as stuttered. An uninterruptible backup must be one of those rare things that actually lived up to its name.

“Whatever it is, it’ll happen anytime now,” Paige said. Trying to sound calm. Not succeeding very well.

Outside, dim lights began to appear in the windows of the few people awake at this hour. Candles or flashlights.

“You don’t have to stay here, you know,” Paige said. “You’ve done what we asked you to do. If you want to leave, you can.”

Travis looked at her for a moment, then stared out over the city again.

“I know,” he said, and made no move to take her advice.

At the edge of his vision, he thought he saw her smile. She leaned on the windowsill next to him.

“When it really gets hopeless,” she said, “there’s one move we can make that Pilgrim probably won’t have anticipated. And even if the Whisper tips him off a few minutes early, there won’t be anything he can do to stop it.”

The tone of her voice and the deadness in her eyes told Travis what it was.

“We can set off the nuke,” he said.

“We can set off the nuke.”

“I don’t think the locals will appreciate that.”

“They’ll get over it. In about a thousandth of a second. For the world’s sake, it might be the prudent move.”

“If Pilgrim’s long-term agenda is bad enough.”

She breathed a laugh, the sound empty as a waiting coffin. “I’m sure it’s bad enough.”

Travis thought about the situation. He could accept that she was right, that they were in deep shit, but the logic of it was hard to fit together. Didn’t Pilgrim risk losing all the work he’d put into this building if he attacked it now? Any method of taking out the more than forty snipers stationed at these windows would involve some level of violence, and with it a high likelihood of triggering the pressure pads wired to the nuke.

But the Whisper would understand that. Would find a way around the problem. Any way. Maybe the attack would be a few canisters of VX gas, lobbed from a launcher two blocks away. Kill everyone in the building and not disturb a microchip. There had to be a thousand ways in, as clever as that, or more so. The Whisper would know them all.

Someone screamed outside. A man’s voice. Travis saw Paige flinch, even as the scream turned into a drunken laugh, and someone else told the man to shut up, also laughing. The first man kept yelling, asking who’d turned off the fucking lights.

“It won’t be much longer,” Paige said.

But it was. More than half an hour passed, and nothing happened. A few ambulances moved about the city, sirens quiet but flashers pulsing through the fog. Travis thought of home-care patients whose medical equipment had failed in the outage. Somewhere to the east, out of sight past the building’s corner, was a bright light source. A building running on a generator. It had to be a hospital; the ambulances came and went from that direction.

Paige made more calls to Border Town. More calls to the Berlin detachments stationed around Zurich and to the AWACS aircraft circling high above. Four in the morning and all was well. The snipers downstairs continued to call in their status at close intervals. They’d put on FLIR goggles to let them see the shapes of human bodies through the fog, and in low tones they reported the movement of any pedestrian who strayed into the two-block radius around the building.

“I don’t understand,” Paige said. “What’s Pilgrim waiting for?”

It was the slingshot feeling again. Each passing minute made it worse.

Mostly they watched the night, but at times either he, or she, or both of them stared at the lines on the PDA. The consensus from Border Town agreed with Travis: the sentences were gibberish, on the surface.

At a point when neither had spoken for over a minute, Travis said, “You must have a few guesses, at least.”

She looked at him in the pale glow of the screen, and offered a smile. “I promise I don’t.”

“Sorry, not the lines,” he said. “I meant the weapon. In four years, Tangent must’ve come up with a theory or two about what it does. If not by looking at all these wires, then by considering what Pilgrim would have to do to eliminate Tangent. He’d have to compromise the defenses at Border Town, right? Somehow he’d have to do that, from this place, five or six thousand miles away.”

“We have a few guesses,” she said. “They all hinge on the idea that this building is a transmitter antenna of some kind, possibly directional, that could target Border Town even at this distance. What it does could be any number of things. Maybe it kills people but leaves physical structures intact, like the effect of a neutron bomb. Or maybe it induces a reaction in specific materials, in a way that would kill Border Town’s defenses for a period of time. That’s one set of possibilities.”

“Are there others?” Travis said.

“One other, in particular.”

“Which is?”

“That the weapon has nothing to do with taking over Border Town. We only assume that’s his plan because it’s such a logical power grab. Border Town is the biggest asset in the world if he controls it, and the biggest liability in the world if he doesn’t. Plus the Breach itself. Of course he’d want control of that. Logically, it all fits. But who the hell knows? Maybe logic isn’t what’s driving him. So maybe the weapon just does something catastrophic to the whole world. Maybe it kills ninety-nine percent of it, leaving a scattered remnant population that’s easier for him to control.”

“You sound like you’re leaning toward door number two,” Travis said.

She looked down into the fog shroud. “There’s evidence for it.”

He waited for her to go on.

“We know Pilgrim bought this place in 1995, just a few months after he left Border Town. Strange things started happening in Zurich in the following years, continuing to the present. Suicides have tripled. Domestic violence arrests are up by a factor of four. Certain rare forms of cancer have increased between five-and sevenfold. We only saw all this in retrospect, of course, after we found this place four years ago. It gets more compelling when you pin the locations of all these incidents on a map, and see the distribution around this building. You probably wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking for it … but when you do see it, you know you’re not imagining it. Seven Theaterstrasse is doing something already. Some little pilot-light version of what it’ll do to the world if Pilgrim gets his way and throws the switch.”

Travis held her stare a moment, then looked out into the darkness again. Another ambulance flickered silently through the fog on the far side of the river.

“Could you really bring yourself to trigger the nuke upstairs, if it comes to it?” he said.

For a long time she didn’t answer, but when she spoke there was nothing hesitant in her tone. “Yes.”

“In that case,” he said, “I have an idea.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“Tell me,” she said.

“I need to know something first.” He looked around at the mess of wires at their backs, filling the room except for this narrow passage by the window. “All this circuitry and equipment that’s accessible, Tangent’s studied every inch of it, right?”

“Every connection, every processor, every jumper setting. Everything.”

“Any of the wires not plugged in?”

She didn’t follow.

“I mean, was there some random corner on one of these floors where it looked like the work hadn’t been finished? Wires hanging loose, circuit boards lying around, tools on the floor? Anything like that?”

She shook her head.

Travis thought for another moment and said, “He was three hours from activating this place when Tangent showed up in 2005.”

She nodded.

“Three hours away because he was three hours from having it finished, right?”

“That’s always been the assumption, yeah.”

“The unfinished work wasn’t anywhere in this tangle that we can see, and the five steel boxes were already welded shut, so he must have been done with whatever’s in those. That leaves the ninth floor, behind the closed doors. Three hours’ worth of work left to do, up there.”

She was nodding again. Tangent had figured this part out long ago. Which he’d assumed.

“When you took over this building, where did you find the Whisper?”

“On the seventh floor, in a shielded box.”

Travis thought it over, putting the sequence of events together in his mind. Trying to see it all from Pilgrim’s point of view, that day when he’d been forced out of here. That thought process—mentally tracking someone’s moves, getting inside a subject’s head—was familiar, like putting his hand into a baseball glove he hadn’t worn in almost two decades. The kind of thing he’d once been good at, in spite of his motivation.

“All right, it’s May 17, 2005,” he said. “Pilgrim is three hours from finishing the weapon. He’s working on it. He knows Tangent is close, because you’ve nailed some of his people in recent weeks. He obviously doesn’t know Tangent is literally moving in, or else he’d have left even earlier. Which means he’s not using the Whisper at this moment, or else it would’ve warned him. And it’s plausible enough that he wouldn’t be. I mean, he’s been building this place for ten years, this close to the end he probably knows all by himself what’s left to be done.”

“Okay,” Paige said.

“So he’s up there, working on the ninth floor. The Whisper is safe in its box on Level Seven. If he gets the two-minute warning that Tangent’s coming down the street, what does he do?”

“Apparently he shuts the doors on Level Nine, shoves the pressure pads into the gaps, and flees the building.”

“So he takes the time to do that,” Travis said. “But he doesn’t stop for a few seconds on the seventh floor, on his way down, to grab the Whisper? The thing that matters more to him than his own senses?”

“Yeah, we know that doesn’t add up,” Paige said. “Which is why we don’t think he was on the ninth floor when the warning came. We think he was on the first floor, for any of several reasons. The kitchen is down there, along with the only working bathroom.”

“That makes it even harder to believe,” Travis said.

For the first time in this discussion, Paige looked uncertain. She waited for him to continue.

“He’s down on the first floor. He gets the call. Shit, Tangent’s coming. They’re so close, even if he sprints out the door right now, he could still get caught. There’s simply no time to run up seven flights for the Whisper. So he does the hardest thing he’s ever had to do. He leaves the Whisper and he runs.”

“Right.”

“So how do the doors on the ninth floor get closed and pressure padded again?”

She shrugged. “He had to have done it before he came downstairs, as a standard procedure. Must have always done it. Sealed it up whenever he came down, unsealed it when he went back up. He would’ve known how to do that, how to switch off the pressure pads when he wanted to go back in. I’m sure we could figure it out ourselves, with a little trial and error—if ‘error’ didn’t mean vaporizing a city.”

“But that’s the part that doesn’t work,” Travis said. “Pilgrim rigging the doors just to run downstairs for a minute. Think about it. Ten years of work. Work that’s going to give him the world, or whatever he wants. He’s three hours away from wrapping it up. He’s probably done nothing but work on it for the final few days. Probably hasn’t even slept. Let me guess, in the kitchen downstairs, every cup was coffee stained. Even the ones that weren’t coffee cups.”

She looked vaguely impressed at that.

“Amphetamines too, right?” he said. “Not meth. Maybe prescription stuff.”

Paige nodded. “Dexedrine. Good guess.”

“Not really. It’s just nothing unusual. I spent three years working vice; it’s not as long as most, but it’s long enough. Long enough to see the same pattern, over and over. Pretty much identical, for all of them.”

“All of who?”

“People doing things they’re not supposed to. People whose lives would basically be over if they got caught. People who are in no position to fuck around. A guy like Pilgrim, those last days in this place, that close to getting away with what he was doing, I doubt he’d waste five minutes to go down and make a sandwich. He’d have someone bring it up to him, and he wouldn’t stop working. Whatever he had to go downstairs for that day, it wasn’t going to take long, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to make it take longer by stopping to shut the door and arm the pads, then disarm them again when he came back. Not three hours from the finish line.”

He could see in Paige’s eyes that neither she nor anyone in Tangent had considered this angle before. Maybe they just hadn’t been under the right pressure. Maybe they hadn’t been in dire enough straits to consider the option Travis was considering right now.

“But the pads were in the doors,” Paige said. “So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying he had it rigged so he could go in and out quickly, without having to stop every time. Minutes would’ve been precious at the end. I’m saying the pads on the doors upstairs are decoys. You could open those doors and walk through them, right now if you wanted to.”

For a moment she said nothing. Just stared at him. Then: “The wires to the pads are live. We checked for current.”

“Sure,” Travis said. “He’d make it look real. He’d make it impossible to know, one way or the other.”

More silence. More consideration. He watched her, aware that the idea didn’t have to make perfect sense. It just had to be less batshit crazy than the other options they were stuck with, including sitting here like paper targets.

She seemed to agree. She took out her cell and dialed. He heard her address the same person at Border Town that she’d called earlier. She explained the idea. Travis couldn’t tell, from Paige’s half of the call, what the other party thought of it. A moment later Paige said, “Yeah, put them all on.” Then she waited. And waited. And her eyebrows furrowed. The party on the other end said something—Travis couldn’t make it out—and Paige took a hard breath. She lowered the phone an inch and met his eyes in the darkness.

“None of our three detachments in the city are responding.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Sixty seconds later they were standing at the double doors on the ninth-floor landing. The nuke filled up the space behind them, its paint gleaming like a cold smile. Over his headset, Travis could hear the snipers downstairs trading status updates, with a tension in their voices that hadn’t been there earlier. They were up to speed on the plan.

“You want the honor?” Paige said, and indicated the ornate doorknobs.

He nodded. Why not? He put his hand on the left one. Then stopped. He breathed a laugh. “You know, he wouldn’t have had to rig both doors with decoys.”

In the vague light he saw her smile. Almost literally a gallows smile.

“If this works,” he said, “then we’ll find out pretty soon if you’re right about the second defense system.”

The way she was holding her rifle, she didn’t look like she needed to be reminded of that. “If this works, and it’s really this easy to get in,” she said, “then I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be one.”

He reached for the doorknob, but stopped again.

He looked down. In his other hand he was still holding the PDA. The five lines, black and white, shining in the darkness. Something about them struck him now. It was like the feeling he’d gotten outside the Black Hawk, staring at its tire but not consciously noticing the footprints beside it. There really was a meaning to the words. Not on the surface. Just beneath it.

“What?” Paige said.

For a few seconds he didn’t answer. He thought if he even spoke, it’d break whatever thread of insight had formed.

Then he saw it, and it was so obvious he couldn’t believe it’d taken this long.

“Look at the first letters of the words,” he said. “In order.”

He tilted the screen so she could see it better. He heard her exhale within less than a second.

The first line: GRAVITY ABERRATION, INNER NEXUS.

GAIN.

The next four lines condensed into words as well: OUTPUT, BANDWIDTH, SLEW RATE, FEEDFORWARD.

“Amplifier,” Paige said. “Those are all aspects of a signal amplifier.”

They looked at each other in the glow of the screen. The next question was so obvious neither said it. The moment stretched. Travis saw in her eyes that the answer was as far out of her reach as his. What the hell was being amplified?

In his earpiece, one of the snipers downstairs spoke up. “Vehicle coming south on Falkenstrasse, pretty high rate of speed. I can take the driver from here.”

Paige broke her stare with Travis, looked away at nothing, thinking hard.

“Permission to fire?” the sniper said.

Paige narrowed her eyes, thought for another half second. “No. Weapons tight.”

Travis heard a hard breath over the comm unit. Then, from the bottom of the stairs, the eighth floor and its open windows, the sound of the vehicle’s racing engine drifted up. Coming fast.

“Three blocks,” the sniper said. “Two …”

By his tone, the man was asking Paige to reconsider the order. She closed her eyes.

Outside, the engine noise swelled. Then the pitch changed in an instant. Deepened. And began to fade. The vehicle had gone right past the building.

Another sniper reported in. “Vehicle proceeding south. I see double doors on the back end. Ambulance with its flashers off.”

Paige exhaled slowly. She found Travis’s eyes again.

“We’re not going to get any more false alarms,” she said. She looked at the words on the PDA one last time. Just a glance. Then she disregarded it and focused on the doors in front of them.

Travis understood. Whatever was being amplified, they weren’t going to figure it out standing here. Regardless, they had to go through these doors and deal with what was on the other side. Figure out what the weapon was, and destroy it, even if that meant coming back out onto the landing and giving this pressure-sensitive warhead a swift kick like it was a Coke machine that’d stolen their last dollar. Whatever they were going to do, their time in which to do it was evaporating. Pilgrim probably knew they were opening the doors; if he was holding the Whisper right now, it was sure as hell telling him. Travis put his hand on the doorknob, then gave the warhead a last look.

“Sure you don’t want to take a crack at disarming it?” he said.

She glanced at it. “It’s not entirely impossible. Nukes aren’t like regular explosives. They’re complex machines. If you can disrupt that complexity without setting it off, you’re good to go.”

“Disrupt it?” Travis said. That word sounded like it was warming a seat for an uglier one.

Paige saw his expression and offered a smile. “Shove a grenade into it and pull the pin.”

“How likely is that to work?”

“A shitload less likely than what you’re about to do,” she said.

He returned her smile, faced the door, and gripped the knob—

“Wait,” Paige said.

He met her eyes, and found her looking back at him with a strange expression. A look that didn’t know what it wanted to be.

“I didn’t thank you enough,” she said. “Before, when you first got to Border Town. I know I said thanks, but I wanted to say more than that. I wanted—” She paused again. Frustrated about something. Then: “I just should have said more. What, I’m not sure. I’m sorry if this isn’t making sense.”

Travis watched her eyes; she was looking down now, looking everywhere but at him.

“You’re welcome,” he said, so quietly that for a moment he wondered if she’d heard it.

She looked up at him. There was something in her eyes he hadn’t seen there before. Something vulnerable. The last pair of eyes to look at him like that had been Emily Price’s.

Not a bad final moment, if this was it.

Holding Paige’s gaze, he turned the knob and shoved the door open hard.

They didn’t die.

In the darkness beyond the doorway, more wires and circuit boards hung like vines, though not as densely as they did throughout the lower floors. Only a few here. Travis could see them silhouetted against a dim orange glow from somewhere ahead. Like the light of embers, but constant.

A sound began to radiate from the room. A droning hum, so deep it was barely audible. He could feel it more than hear it.

He pocketed the PDA and unslung the rifle from his shoulder. He stepped through the opening, Paige just behind him. The way ahead was hard to see; the orange glow barely helped. He moved toward what he thought was its source, though he couldn’t actually see it yet. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the room around him was vast. It was all the remaining space of the ninth floor, wide open and uninterrupted.

The hum was coming from somewhere ahead, the same direction as the light source.

Twenty feet in from the doorway, Travis saw something on the floor ahead, maybe an obstacle to step over, maybe a strewn bunch of wire. A few steps later he saw that it was neither. It was another inscription written in the scratch language, carved right into the floorboards. This one had the note-to-self simplicity Travis had found lacking in the previous five.

It read, TAGS ARE ESTABLISHED WHEN THIS ROOM IS OPENED.

He translated it aloud for Paige. She stiffened.

“Tagging,” she said. “The Ares.”

Travis thought of the video she’d shown him. The orange cube tagging the man in the cage, making him the target for the rage it incited in those around him.

He looked at the orange light ahead; there was no question as to its source now, even if he couldn’t see it yet.

“It tagged us when we opened the door,” he said. “I thought you had to be within a couple feet of it.”

Understanding came to him even as he finished the line. He saw it come to Paige as well.

“Amplified,” she said. “The distances are amplified.”

Travis stared at the light source and guessed that they were at least fifty feet shy of it.

“If it can tag us this far away,” he said, “how far can it reach to turn people against us?”

He saw the implication saturate her expression, saw her whole body react to it as if a ghost had traced its fingers up her spine. They were standing atop a nine-story building filled with armed, trained killers. If even those on the nearest floor were affected—

“Oh my God,” she whispered. She steadied her microphone beside her mouth, caught her breath and said, “All teams, get out of the building, right now. Run.”

But even she had to know it was too late. In the darkness around them, the LED indicators on the hanging circuit boards began flashing a manic rhythm. The trap was already springing. A second later, the orange light ahead of them flared bright, just as it had done in the video. Then brighter. So much brighter it lit the room, revealed it as daylight would have. A basketball-court-sized space, mostly empty, strung with spiderwebs of circuitry here and there.

Travis grabbed her arm, spun her toward the double doors and the landing beyond, and sprinted, dragging her until she caught her balance and ran with him.

“Where are we going?” Paige said.

“The eighth floor windows over the river. I hope you can swim.”

“Are you fucking insane?”

“Insane problem, insane solution.”

They passed through the doorframe, sidestepped the nuke and took the stairs two at a time, slowing only as they reached the tangle of wires halfway down the flight.

Just below them, the stairwell thundered with running footsteps. But were the footsteps going down, or coming up? There wasn’t time to judge it.

Travis reached the bottom of the flight, Paige just a step behind him. Tunnels among the wiring branched in five directions; he didn’t know which one led to the river overlook. Paige did. She took the lead, and he followed, close, stooping in the low passageway. The pounding on the steps still gave no clue as to its direction.

They’d gone thirty feet through the tunnel when a voice spoke in their ears.

“This is Haslett. I just got outside the main exit. I think we better get everyone back to their positions.”

Paige stopped. Travis pulled up just short of crashing into her. Behind him, the clamor of footsteps on the stairs went silent.

Paige steadied herself and spoke. “Status, all report. Are you guys affected or not?”

A jumble of calm responses came back over the line, the comm system cutting out most of them. But Travis heard enough to know they were fine. Paige turned in the tunnel, faced him, looking as confused as he felt.

“Maybe it didn’t reach far enough,” she said.

Haslett responded. “No, I think it reached too far. I think it just tagged us as targets, the same as you.”

“What are you talking about?” Paige said.

“Look out the window,” Haslett said. “All teams back to positions, right now. Sorry to countermand you, Miss Campbell.”

The footsteps resumed on the stairs, definitely coming upward now.

Paige met Travis’s eyes a moment longer, then turned and covered the last forty feet to the nearest set of windows, at an open corner looking out over the river in one direction and the city in another. Over her shoulder, Travis saw what was happening even as he stopped.

Paige said nothing. There was no expression for it.

In every building they could see, the dim glow of flashlights had vanished from the windows. That was because the flashlights were coming out through the street-level exits now, their beams stabbing wildly through the fog as their owners ran. Ran toward 7 Theaterstrasse. Travis’s eyes trailed up along the river, and he saw the same thing happening, block after block, as far as he could see. All the way to E41, two miles away, where every pair of headlights had just swung off onto the surface streets, and were coming this way at full speed.

VERSE VAN OCTOBER NIGHT IN 1992

Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Chase strains at the binds any longer. Both appear resigned to what is going to happen to them, and Travis hates them all the more for it. He wants them to be afraid, as he knows Emily must have been before she died.

The mad blue and red pulses of police flashers rim the plantation shutters. They’ve made no move to come in yet. A bullhorn has been chattering on and off for the past ten minutes, and three times the phone has rung for thirty seconds or more, but Travis has paid no attention.

Neither has he spoken to his parents.

It is this simple: he wants them to sit here waiting to die.

He wants them to feel what Emily felt, and he wants them to feel it for as long as possible before he kills them. The last thing they will ever hear will be the footsteps of the SWAT team on the stone floor of the hallway. It’s likely that this will also be the last thing Travis hears, and that’s fine. If he survives to spend the rest of his life in prison, that will also be fine, because he’s earned it. Either way, all the justice Emily can ever be given will be spun in this room in the next quarter of an hour.

She deserves more, of course. She deserves to be alive, and lovely, twenty-four years old, with a future full of the simple things she wanted: a house, kids, a couple cats lying around in sunbeams on the living-room carpet. Revenge is a pale and sickly substitute for those things, but it’s all Travis has left to give her, so he means to give it.

Down the hall in the living room, Manny’s screams have ebbed to a whimper, and in the past minute he’s begun choking on something—blood, no doubt. The sound of it has an effect on Travis’s mother; her poker face slips. She is thinking about her own death now. Really thinking about it.

If he cared to speak to them, Travis would ask them how they could have expected any other outcome than this. They sculpted him to be what he is: a corrupted human being. A cop whose only real job has been to keep them pre-informed of police activity against them. A man whose moral compass points wherever the hell he wants it to point, at any given time. Didn’t they know their animal would turn on them, after what they did?

Manny’s choking climaxes in a series of convulsive heaves; he is trying with all his remaining air to purge the obstructing fluid from his windpipe. All his remaining air is not enough, and a moment later there is no more sound coming down the hall. Mrs. Chase begins to weep openly. Mr. Chase looks at her with disgust, and Travis suddenly understands the mini-plotline that has just reached the end of its reel and begun flapping against the projector arm. It is all he can do to keep from laughing at them both.

Then the window bursts and the shutters are knocked aside by a projectile that arcs across the room and ricochets off the dresser. Pepper gas, thick and orange-white, seethes into the air, and Mr. and Mrs. Chase begin to scream, because they know what’s coming.

“We’re your blood, goddammit!” Mr. Chase shouts.

“So was the kid she had on the way,” Travis says.

He sees them react to that, and decides to let it be their final thought. He raises the .44—

—and finds hesitation where only a second ago there was resolve.

Another second passes. The gas fills half the room now, its outermost tendrils stinging Travis’s eyes. His next breath will fill his lungs with it, and there will be nothing in his world but pain. At the same time a window shatters somewhere in a nearby room, and bodies clamber through. If he doesn’t do this now—right now—it will never happen.

He forces an image of Emily into his mind. Emily standing right here with him, deserving retribution in her name. But instead of willpower it brings him understanding: he knows now why he hasn’t pulled the trigger. It’s not pity. It’s her. It’s the thought of how she would feel about him, if she were here to see him doing this. Travis does not believe in the afterlife. Emily is gone, gone forever, but all the same, he knows what she would think of this. She would be fucking ashamed of him.

He feels the gun slipping from his hand even before the SWAT commander appears in the doorway and screams for him to drop it, and a moment later Travis is on the floor, deep in the gas, unable to hold his breath any longer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“This can’t be happening,” Paige said.

They could hear the screams coming up out of the fog, from the leading edge of the incoming swarm, less than a block away now. The buildings directly around 7 Theaterstrasse were corporate and commercial structures, empty at this hour, so the crowd had originated from farther away. But not by much. The frenzied movement of the nearest flashlight beams drew closer with each second. Travis thought of the feral rage of the test subjects in the video, rushing inward toward the man in the cage. The scale of the situation had been amplified a thousandfold in this place. Seven Theaterstrasse was the cage now, and all of its occupants stood in the crosshairs of the effect, which extended at least as far as the edges of Zurich.

The forefront of the crowd was maybe fifty seconds away, surging between buildings to the west, and onto the two nearest bridges spanning the river just to the south.

Paige’s cell rang. She answered. It was someone aboard the AWACS, circling high above. Travis could just discern the tinny voice over the phone, reporting a visual on something strange happening down in the city.

“We noticed,” Paige said.

In Travis’s ear, the sniper and spotter teams reported in, one by one, as they retook their window positions.

The reality of what was about to happen descended on Travis like a poison cloud. He saw it settling over Paige at the same time, as she watched the flashlights race in toward the building. The nearest were past the bridges now.

The last of the snipers reported in. Travis could picture their rifles silently tracking the advance of the crowd while they waited for the order.

“We should just let them in,” Travis said.

“They’ll kill every one of us,” Paige said.

“Yeah.”

He was surprised by how little fear he heard in his own voice. How little he felt, for that matter. Maybe there was just too much of it to process. What he had in place of it was logic.

“It’s not their fault,” he said. “A few of us dying, instead of hundreds of them, that’s not a hard choice at all.”

For a moment he saw agreement in Paige’s eyes. What other option was there?

And then her eyes changed, and in the same instant Travis understood why. The wicked effectiveness of Pilgrim’s trap became clear. There would be no simple way out of it. Not even by suicide.

“Christ,” he whispered.

He saw in his mind what would happen in this building, less than a minute from right now, if they held their fire and let the crowd in. He saw the rush of bodies coming up the stairs like fluid under pressure. Saw them clambering over one another, tearing at the jungle of wiring that filled the space of every floor. Crashing through the clearings with the metal boxes, and the delicate wires for the pressure pads that were almost certainly not decoys.

“If the nuke goes off, the crowd dies anyway,” Paige said. “The whole city dies.”

Travis could hear it in her voice: confirmation of everything she’d feared about this building. Here at last was the spare hostage. The one Pilgrim wasn’t afraid to pull the trigger on.

But she also looked confused. Damn confused. And even in the tension of the moment, Travis thought he knew why. Because the whole building seemed to have been devoted to creating this effect. The whole building was the second hostage. So where the hell was the weapon Pilgrim had spent a decade working on?

Travis’s line of thought was broken by a singular cry from the mob, clearer than the rest. It was furious, and wild, and so high-pitched that it could only belong to a very young girl, maybe younger than ten.

The crowd’s leading edge was less than twenty seconds from the building.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck …” Paige breathed.

Travis wondered how many kids were among the crowd, but only for a moment, because he already knew how many. Every kid in Zurich would be out there, soon enough.

“Miss Campbell?” one of the snipers said over the comm unit, the voice tight like a wire.

The question was obvious.

So was the answer.

Paige swallowed hard, bit down on whatever she was feeling, and said, “Weapons free.”

The night came alive with gunfire.

Travis saw the muzzle flashes from a dozen windows below him, across the face of the building. Saw the red paths of tracer rounds cutting through the fog, the snipers picking out individual targets for each shot. And though he couldn’t see the victims at street level, as the snipers could with their FLIR goggles, he saw the results as clearly as he needed to. The flashlights at the forefront of the charge were suddenly kicked backward, their beams flipping end over end. The front ranks were cut down in rapid succession, and Travis heard screams of pain, mixed with surprise and fear. Men, women, children.

But the charge didn’t stop. Didn’t even slow. The rest of the surge, coming from behind the fallen, hardly faltered over the bodies. Travis saw the wave of incoming flashlights stutter-step where the first victims had gone down. The dead served only as speed bumps for the horde.

More flashlights were coming on in the windows of other buildings as the sleeping residents of the city woke, roused either by gunfire or by the effect the Ares had had on them. Beams flared behind panes for spare seconds, just long enough for their owners to take a look at 7 Theaterstrasse and know that the targets of their rage were somewhere inside. Then each light turned away quickly, as the people behind them ran for the stairs. Ran for the street. The whole city would be out there in a matter of minutes.

Down in the fog, the mob made forward progress in spite of the gunfire. Travis saw Paige’s eyes, filled with hard tears, spilling now. She was tough as hell, he knew, but tough didn’t cover this kind of thing. Nothing did, short of psychosis.

“It’s not enough,” she said, her voice cracking twice in those three words. “Single shots aren’t going to keep them back.”

She turned from the window and moved quickly into the tunnel of wires, toward the stairwell. Travis followed. Paige reached behind herself as she went, unzipped her backpack and plunged her hand into it. She came out with something that looked like a flashlight with lenses at both ends. The Doubler. It was more or less what Travis had pictured when he’d read the report, though its details drew his attention: the way its surface caught the light, the way its separate materials—whatever they were—met without seams. It was unlike anything he’d ever seen. A tool built by alien hands.

Paige reached the top of the stairs, and shouted, “Seventh floor, ranking operator to the stairwell!” She had to yell it again, waiting for a gap in the shooting, before one of the snipers, a woman in her thirties, appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Travis had seen her introduced earlier as Miller. She looked as shaken by the events of the preceding minutes, as Travis supposed all the snipers were, but she was steady on her feet.

Paige tossed her the Doubler and yelled, “They need to switch to autofire! Grab five magazines, double them compound until they’re eighty, then use that group for a basis and start massing piles right where you’re standing. I want one person acting as feeder for each floor, running clips to the snipers. Double some fresh rifles, too. They won’t last long under the strain.”

Miller nodded and disappeared with a purpose.

Travis and Paige returned to the window. Outside, the crowd had filled both bridges to the south, and all the streets between the buildings in every other direction. Gathered flashlights flickered around in the fog, like lighters above the crowd at some end-of-the-world rock show. At the mouths of each of these bottlenecks—bridges and streets alike—the amassed dead had finally begun to constitute a real obstacle for the incoming throng, and where the surge backed up, Travis suspected that even some of the living had stumbled and been trampled, and become a part of the barricade themselves.

The snipers were still firing single shots, picking their targets. As Travis watched, the nearest outriders of the mob were always the ones taking the hits. A flashlight bobbed over the pileup on the near end of the left-side bridge, and came hurtling toward the building at impossible speed. No fucking way could a human move like that—

A rifle cracked from the fifth floor, straight below Travis, and the fast-moving light in the fog clattered on the cobblestones as a man screamed. Under the scream, Travis heard the telltale racket of a bicycle wiping out.

The piles of bodies were only doing so much. The fifty-foot buffer zone around the building wouldn’t last much longer if the autofire didn’t start soon.

Travis heard someone crying in pain, somewhere in the dark below. The man who’d come in on the bike. Still alive. He sounded young, maybe just into his twenties. His cries were so full of suffering it turned Travis’s stomach. Paige’s eyes were still rimmed, catching the moonlight and the red tracer fire from below. She held on to just enough composure to keep her breathing steady. The dying man’s cries escalated to screams. He was saying something in German. A single word over and over. “Bitte! Bitte!” Travis thought it meant “please.” The tone sure as hell implied that it did. Paige reached into her vest, came out with a pair of FLIR goggles and strapped them over her eyes. She leaned through the window, shouldered her rifle and aimed it down. She fired a single shot, and the man’s screams switched off instantly.

A few seconds later the autofire began, one sniper at a time, and after a moment the night was a roar Travis could barely think above. The impact against the advancing crowd was more dramatic than he’d imagined. The front lines were carved back in savage arcs, like weeds falling to scythe sweeps. Paige tore off her goggles, overwhelmed by the detail she must have seen through them, and finally lost control. She turned toward Travis, put her arms around him and held on fiercely. He held her in return, his own eyes flooding against his will, and hoped to hell Aaron Pilgrim ended up in his gun sights at some point.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Paige kept her face against his chest for only a moment. Then she drew back, wiped at her eyes, and looked out into the night again, like it was her obligation to do so. Like it was her penance.

“Maybe if we had tear gas …” she said. “Pepper grenades. Anything like that …”

Travis watched the chaotic movement of the flashlights below, the crowd flooding forward at some surge point, being cut back, flooding through somewhere else, being cut back there. Over and over.

“I doubt it would help,” he said.

“There are entities that would’ve helped,” Paige said. “If I’d been smart enough to see this coming, I could’ve brought them. There’s one that’s exactly like the Ares, only it’s green, and it affects memory. We call it the Jump Cut. Everyone within its reach loses the last three days of their memory, instantly. From the target’s point of view it feels as if, whatever they were doing three days ago, they skip instantly from that to the present moment. Massively confusing, and there’s no way to think around it. Wears off later. It’d be a perfect crowd disperser. We could’ve set it up in the main entrance downstairs, and maybe—I don’t know …”

She was reaching. Trying to take responsibility for things that couldn’t possibly be her fault. It was the mark of a good leader. It was also not helping anyone right now. Least of all herself.

Travis set a hand on her shoulder and turned her away from the window.

“Let’s go back up and see what we’re dealing with,” he said.

She nodded, getting control again, pawing at her eyes one last time. He turned and led the way through the tunnel, toward the stairs.

At the landing, he looked down and saw Miller and a few others operating the Doubler. In the darkness, lit by the strobing pulses of gunfire all around, he caught only glimpses of the thing in action. They’d piled about eighty ammo magazines in one spot, and Miller was holding the Doubler so that the cone of yellow light coming from one end fully enveloped the stack. The UV light from the other end of the tube was barely visible. It shone only where it touched the floor or the banister atop the stairs, turning flecks of dust bright white.

Every few seconds, a perfect duplicate of the stack of eighty clips appeared in the UV light. Though the fractured glare from the muzzle bursts made it hard to really see the process, Travis didn’t think it would have looked any more normal to him even in clear sunlight. Each time a new stack of ammunition appeared, the operators around Miller would grab handfuls and disappear either into the tunnels beside her or down toward the lower levels.

Travis moved on, climbed the stairs to the ninth floor, Paige just behind him. They emerged from the tangle of wires, and a few seconds later they were on the highest landing again, passing the nuke and entering the room at the top of the building.

The room was as brightly lit as when they’d left it. The radiance from the Ares was so intense it was more or less white. Earlier, when they’d turned to run, there’d been no time to study the revealed details of this place. Now they did. At the center of the giant room was a cluster of wires and cables, all emerging from the floor at that spot, and tangled together to form something that looked like an eagle’s nest. All of the light was coming from the depression at its center, into which Travis couldn’t see until he was within ten feet of it, holding his hand up against the searing glare.

Inside the nest were two objects. One was the Ares. The other was a jet-black cube, a foot in each dimension. The top and sides of the cube were smooth, without any wires feeding in. They must all connect into the underside. This cube was the active element of the amplifier. A shaft of silvery light, like a taut rope made out of plasma, stretched between the amplifier and the Ares, binding them.

Woven delicately into the surrounding nest of wires were dozens of pressure pads, stuck to circuit boards and fat cable connectors. These pads, Travis had no doubt, were real. He had the sense that even a hard step on this floor would trigger them.

Downstairs, the gunfire went on endlessly. He could see it eating into Paige like acid. She narrowed her eyes, seeming to force her mind to stay in this room where it could accomplish something. She turned, surveyed the cavernous space.

“Okay, so where the hell is the weapon Pilgrim’s people told us about?” she said. “What was he going to activate, three hours from the time we stopped him that day?” She nodded toward the Ares. “Not this goddamned thing. What good would that have done him? And the steel boxes downstairs are only there to serve this system, so forget those, too. There has to be something else. I mean, why the hell would he turn the whole building into a defense system that doesn’t defend anything but itself? That’s recursive. It’s like one of those joke signs someone hangs in a doorway that says, ‘Caution, don’t hit your head on this sign.’ ”

Travis supposed that fad had come and gone while he was in prison.

He turned and surveyed the room with her, letting his eyes move slowly over every detail. A few wires hanging here and there, spilling from holes in the walls or snaking out of floor-level ductwork. Green circuit boards lying or hanging among them, LEDs blinking furiously, as they had ever since the amplifier had kicked on. But mostly there was nothing. Bare floor space. Bare stretches of wall. Outlets with nothing plugged into them.

“All the wiring is for the amplifier,” Travis said. “In here, and in the rest of the building. And that’s what took him most of the ten years, right? All the detailed work involved.”

Paige nodded, waiting for the rest.

“So that makes the least sense of all,” he said. “Why spend all that time on just the defense system, and why build that part first? If this place has some other purpose, some main purpose, it seems like he could’ve had that finished years earlier.”

She could only stare. She could make no sense of it either.

Outside, an engine raced, and then the muffled concussion of a gasoline explosion put an end to it. The cars from E41 were starting to arrive.

Travis’s eyes picked up something twenty feet behind Paige. A jumble of wire against the wall. There was something concealed beneath it. He’d taken only a few steps toward it when he saw what it was. More of the scratch writing, dug into the floor. He reached it, studied the wires to be sure they weren’t bound by pressure pads, and eased them aside.

“What does it say?” Paige said.

“Names,” Travis said. “It’s a list of names.”

Thirty-seven in all. People of varied nationalities. A few sounded Japanese, a few others Russian, German, Spanish, French. They weren’t famous; Travis had never heard of any of them. He read a few of them to Paige and saw no recognition in her eyes, either.

She took out her cell and dialed. Border Town picked up. She set it to speakerphone so Travis could relay the names directly. The man on the phone identified himself as Crawford, and as Travis began giving him the names, someone began typing in the background. By the time Travis read the last name, the techs on the other end had pulled up info on the first ten.

All had been extremely wealthy. All had been politically connected, to some degree. All had committed suicide since 1995.

As those in the background at Border Town continued parsing the list, Travis looked at Paige.

“These people were threats to Pilgrim’s plan, in some way,” he said. “Find out why, and you’ll have real information to work with.”

Suddenly there was commotion on the other end of the line. Someone calling out to others, and then a few surprised sounds.

“What’s going on there?” Paige said.

Crawford spoke up again. “The last name on the list. Ellis Cook. Suicide by gunshot to the head. Two days ago on Grand Cayman.”

Paige looked at Travis and mouthed, Two days?

“This is all wrong,” Travis said, the thought coming to him even as he voiced it. “Pilgrim was never planning to trigger anything in this place four years ago, when you guys thought you stopped him. Whatever his plan is, he’s launching it tonight. It was always going to be tonight.”

Before Paige could respond to that, Crawford spoke again.

“Second-to-last name on the list. Rudolph Hagen. Jumped to his death from a hotel balcony, twenty-eighth floor. Three months ago. He was alone in the room, door locked, no forced entry.”

Paige kept her eyes on Travis, shaking her head, either not following his logic or not wanting to.

“There is no weapon,” Travis said. “Pilgrim just needed Tangent to think there was. He wanted you to show up here four years ago. Wanted you to recover the Whisper.”

“Why the hell would he want us to take the Whisper from him?” she said.

“Because it told him to,” Travis said.

The concept cut the air like a blade. Even the typing on Crawford’s end of the call went quiet; whoever was around the speakerphone on that end was listening, too.

“What?” Paige said.

“He mastered it, right?” Travis said. “Learned how to make it tell him anything he needed to know?”

“That’s what the evidence supports,” Paige said.

“So he asked it for a plan. A way to eliminate Tangent, get back into Border Town, something like that. Whatever it was, it was hard. Right on the brink of impossible. Any of the obvious ways to do it, you guys have long since thought of, and built defenses against. So whatever plan the Whisper came up with, you’d expect it to be pretty far from obvious. Like a chess move by a supercomputer, something even the best human players can’t make sense of.”

Her eyes changed. Began to accept the idea, almost unwillingly.

“I can’t even guess what the plan is,” Travis said. “But there has to be one. This has to be one. He let you guys drive him out of this place, that day in 2005. He let you take the Whisper, knowing he’d get it back. He knew LHA in Japan would go active in four years. Knew you’d found his old notebook, and would risk flying the Whisper there to test his old theory. Really, a human being could almost guess those things. So it’d be child’s play for the Whisper. The real question is, what else could it have guessed? Could it have predicted that once Tangent lost the Whisper to him, you’d send a team here to try to contain this place tonight?”

Paige thought about it, nodded.

“Okay,” Travis said. “So then what? Could it assume a desperation move on your part? You said yourself you thought of triggering the nuke, if it came to it. How were you planning to do that?”

He knew what she would say.

“I would’ve done exactly what we already did,” Paige said. “I would’ve opened the doors into this room.”

“Still a move the Whisper could expect. So far, it adds up.”

“What adds up?”

“That Aaron Pilgrim meant for a Tangent team to be here tonight. Meant for them to open these doors and trigger the Ares, and end up fighting off a siege by the whole city.”

“Why?”

Travis thought about it, but could only shake his head. “I don’t know. Whatever it is, the dominoes are dropping exactly like he wants them to, so far. We’re dead-centered in the trap.”

He watched her consider it. Watched her hate it as much as she acknowledged it. It wasn’t so much an assessment of their situation as a diagnosis.

“How the hell we’re supposed to compete against this kind of thinking, I don’t know,” Travis said.

“I might,” Paige said. She looked around the mostly empty room, then back at him. “We exploit the things the Whisper could’ve never predicted.”

“Like what?”

“Like you. Four years ago, or fourteen years ago, whenever Pilgrim got this plan from the Whisper, there’s no way it could’ve known a random hiker would show up at that crash site two days ago. That Ellen Garner would’ve survived and left a note for you to follow. That you’d end up holding the Whisper yourself, and that it would be compelled to tell you how to read this language.”

He nodded. That much seemed safe enough to believe.

“Meaning we were never supposed to know these names,” Travis said, indicating the list carved into the floor.

They were both silent a moment.

Then Crawford’s voice came over the speaker. “We’re on it. I’ll put someone on each name, dig up everything there is, find whatever thread connects them all to Pilgrim.”

His last word was cut off by a scream in Travis’s ear, from one of the snipers over the comm system: “Gun!”

Half a second later, another of them cried out, and then there were two voices shouting that a man was down.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Sprinting again. Past the nuke. Down the stairs to Level Eight.

Miller, on the landing farther down, saw Paige and shouted, “Sixth floor! Hill’s been hit!”

Travis followed Paige down, past the piles of ammunition Miller continued to stockpile, through the tunnel of wires to the level below. Then more tunnels, across the sixth floor, toward the windows and the sound of screaming. They found two snipers kneeling over a third, who’d lost a good portion of his face and neck but was somehow still breathing. Wouldn’t be for much longer.

Paige dropped her backpack from her shoulders, wrenched open the zipper and brought out something that looked a lot like a pistol, maybe a little Walther PPK, Travis thought. Then he saw it better, and realized the resemblance was only fleeting: the thing’s shape was just stark and practical, a small black tube with a grip and a trigger. It was the Medic.

Paige aimed it at the dying man’s wounds, her body language full of doubt, and pulled the trigger. The effect looked something like a camera flash going off, accompanied by a surge of heat that Travis felt two feet away. The man’s body spasmed in response, and Travis saw the injuries change dramatically. The blood flow seemed to staunch itself in less than a second.

But the guy was still dying. Eyes still wild as he fought for breath. Paige gripped his hand, and her eyes pleaded with him to fight. But after a moment, his own eyes tilted away from hers, and he expelled a hard breath. He didn’t take his next one.

“Shooter was in a window halfway up the block,” one of the others said. “They’re getting smarter about it.”

Travis thought of the demo video on the laptop, two of the enraged men conferring thoughtfully and then trying to pick the cage lock. Livid, but not stupid. Not even close to stupid.

He turned to the window. Outside, on the bridges and in the streets between the buildings, the barricades of the dead were now adorned with the burning shells of automobiles. The blazes slowed the forward crush only a little, but had a stark effect on the fog, baking the air and clearing deep cavities through the mist around them. Like lenses through which Travis could now see the carnage, hard and clear in the firelight. He wished he couldn’t.

A small knot of people broke from the crowd and came inward at a sprint. The two snipers near Travis and Paige opened fire again.

Travis leaned close to her and shouted, “We’re not gonna last much longer! Four hundred thousand people out there! They see what’s not working for them, they’ll find a way that does!”

“What are we supposed to do?” Paige shouted. “If they come in, they’ll trip the sensors!”

“How does it normally work with the Ares?” he said. “Are the attackers after the thing itself, or just the people who are tagged by it? It’s just the people, right?”

Another car detonated in the street below, like a mortar round going off.

Paige shouted over the sound. “Yeah! They’re just after us!”

“So let’s leave!”

She looked at him like she’d heard wrong. So did the nearest of the snipers.

“They’ll follow us,” Travis said. “And they’ll forget about the building. We’ll end up dead, but at least we can draw them away from the fucking nuke. There must be service tunnels under the streets, drainage, pipeline maintenance, that kind of thing. Is there access to them from inside this building?”

“Yeah,” Paige said. “There’s a panel in the basement. It’s not huge, but we could fit through, single file—”

She stopped. Caught her breath. A second later Travis realized why.

Then she was on her feet and running again, through the tunnel, shouting into her comm unit as she went. “Second floor teams, get to the basement! Secure the conduit access!”

Travis was right behind her, rifle in hand, hitting the stairs now, down through the wire-choked space, past the feeders running ammo, past the rabbit tunnels branching out to the shooters on every level. Third floor now. Second. First.

And here were the snipers Paige had just ordered down. Bunched around the doorway to the basement, the door itself torn from its hinges. Four men, firing on full auto at something right there, maybe just feet beyond Travis’s angle of view. Paige’s insight had prevented disaster by a margin of perhaps seconds: the throng had already flooded into the basement through the access tunnels.

At that moment, one of the four snipers took a shot to the head and dropped. However many people were down there, some of them had guns.

Travis realized he could hear their voices, loud as the shooting was. Could hear the screams of anger, could hear even the distinct words, in German and maybe Italian. A noise to Travis’s right made him turn. It’d sounded like something heavy being dropped on the floor. It came again, and this time he saw its source. The hallway floor heaved upward an inch, hit by something from below. Some heavy object in the hands of probably a dozen people, being used as a battering ram to come through the floorboards. The third impact cracked one of them, leaving a four-inch-wide gap. Through it, Travis saw the nightmare. The space below was wall-to-wall with writhing bodies, faces twisted in rage. Eyes locked onto him through the gap, and a volley of incensed screams came up.

He turned and saw Paige looking at the same spot. Then, beyond her, one of the snipers took something from his backpack. In the crazed light, Travis couldn’t see what the thing was, but had a pretty good guess.

Paige turned, saw it, and screamed, “No!”

The man pivoted toward her, and Travis saw what he’d expected: a grenade.

“There are gas lines down there!” Paige shouted.

“What the fuck are we supposed to do?” the man yelled.

Paige had no answer.

The floor heaved again. A second board fractured, right behind the first, and a hand gripped it from below and snapped it down into the darkness. The hole would be wide enough to admit bodies soon. A second later, Travis heard the battering impact again, somewhere else on the main floor.

The sniper was still looking to Paige for an answer.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. She repeated it, looking around as if the answer would come to her.

“Yes you do,” Travis said.

She met his eyes. Narrowed hers.

“The grenade,” Travis said, and then darted his own eyes upward. Through the ceiling. To something eight stories above their heads. She followed. Understood.

“It’s all we’ve got,” Travis said.

“Is it a chess move the Whisper would have expected?” she said.

“We’re stuck with it, whether it is or not. Go. I’ll help these guys.”

She considered it for another two seconds, then nodded. She turned to the sniper and held out her hand for the grenade. He looked like he understood the plan. Or didn’t care, so long as there was one. He handed it over.

“Don’t take losses holding this floor!” Paige shouted. “Withdraw up the stairs when you have to! One way or another, this’ll be over in the next two minutes.”

Travis stared at her. Realized he was storing the image. Wondered if he’d ever see her again.

Then she was gone.

He unslung his rifle, thumbed off the safety, and went to the basement door where the others were standing.

Beyond it was the worst thing he’d ever seen. The basement, a vast space maybe twelve feet deep, crawled like a snake pit full of bodies, the living and the dead so intermixed it was hard to differentiate them. As the leading edge of the wave advanced up the stairs and was cut back by the autofire, those behind dragged the bodies aside, between themselves or above. The corpses that rode the crowd pumped arterial blood from bowl-sized exit wounds, spraying and coating the throng.

Men, women, children. No fog to hide them now. The crowd was the sort you might encounter at a mall, or a supermarket, or anywhere. Some of the parents were holding seven-year-olds by the hand, as if unwilling to lose sight of them. Even as they dragged them forward into the gunfire. And even the seven-year-olds looked ready to kill someone. Would have tried to, had they reached the top of the stairs.

The forefront continually surged and was seared back, ten to twelve steps below. Travis shouldered his rifle. Lowered the sights to the crowd on the stairs. Didn’t fire yet. Suddenly wasn’t sure he could. They were just people. Bloody and screaming, and furious enough to come forward into machine-gun fire. But still just people. It wasn’t their fault this was happening to them.

One of the snipers stopped to reload. It took him only three seconds, but in those seconds of reduced fire, the crowd gained four steps, and the back-and-forth cadence resumed there. Their progress was like a ratchet, locking in each little burst of progress, never really losing it.

A moment later, as the first sniper resumed fire, the other two ran dry in unison, and fumbled for fresh magazines. The crowd rushed upward at full speed; the lone shooter could only cover any one spot at a time. An old man wearing a ridiculous green bow tie, like a St. Patrick’s Day reveler drunk off his ass, came scrambling up out of the pack wielding a steak knife, aiming for the thigh of one of the reloading snipers, who wasn’t even looking his way. Travis pulled the trigger and took most of the old man’s head off. The body pitched back and was immediately grabbed and hauled upward, out of the way, by the next two attackers: a teenage boy and a woman no older than thirty. Travis shot them both in the chest, and didn’t stop shooting as each new target presented itself. He understood within seconds what it took to do it: you just didn’t look at the faces. That was how the snipers were managing. It was a miserable fucking tactic, he knew. And it wasn’t a real coping method for what he felt. It was just a kind of debt. He’d pay it back later. If there was a later.

Behind him there came a violent crash. He turned, along with the others, to see some kind of steel shelf unit sticking up through the floor, having broken a wide hole through. It dropped away a second later, and then there were hands gripping the edges of the hole, people below no doubt hoisted on the shoulders of others.

“Fall back to the stairs!” Travis shouted.

A head came up through the hole. Covered in someone else’s blood. Could’ve been either sex, any age. Travis put a bullet into it and watched it drop back through the opening, like the shelf had.

He and the others were moving now. Backing up in stutter-steps so the crowd on the basement stairs didn’t surge. They reached the stairs to the second floor and made their way up, reloading and firing as they went, the throng matching their pace as they climbed.

Paige rounded the landing on Level Seven. Miller was still there, doubling ammo and spare rifles. Feeders were running armloads to the snipers.

“Get some down to ground level!” Paige yelled, and didn’t wait to see her nod. She continued on. Up to Level Eight, then Nine.

The warhead. The red star like an eye, watching her. Daring her.

This would either work or it wouldn’t. If it didn’t, well, there were worse ways to die than standing near the heart of a thermonuclear blast. Truth be told, there was probably no better way. It would reduce her to loose atoms about ten thousand times faster than her nerves could send the pain signals to her brain. Faster than her eyes could report the sudden light to her visual cortex a few inches behind them. It would literally feel like nothing at all.

Still, pretty goddamned scary.

She knelt before the thing. Considered the grenade and the available space inside the warhead. Right against the primary would be the best place to put it. This primary was an implosion type. A uranium sphere surrounded by shaped charges, precision wired to a detonator. Properly triggered, the shaped charges were designed to blow in millisecond unison, crushing the uranium to critical mass and setting off a fission reaction. That was the A-bomb aspect of the device. The A-bomb, in turn, would set off the H-bomb portion. But if the grenade went off right up against the shaped charges, and scattered their careful arrangement before any of them blew, then none of that would happen. The uranium crush would fail, and the whole sequence would stall.

That was the idea, anyway. It wasn’t the sort of thing anyone had tested.

She set the grenade in place, between the shell of charges and one of the aluminum struts that braced the primary. She held it in place with her left hand, and with her right she pulled the pin. The handle swung open, and she heard the fuse ignite with a pop.

Turning now. Running hard. Into the room full of blazing white-orange light and not much else, past the inscription in the floor, past the nest of wires and the Ares and the amplifier and the silvery bond between them. To the far side of the room, putting as much space as possible between herself and the grenade blast. Wondering if she’d hear just the first crack of it before her life ended mid-thought.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Travis brought up the rear, two steps below the other shooters, the advancing crowd just another six steps below him. Slowing them was a lot harder on these stairs; they were wider than those in the basement.

“Landing!” one of the snipers shouted at him, and his next step put him on the flat surface of the second floor. He pivoted around the banister and continued upward, the rifle running dry at that moment. He ejected the clip, took another from his pocket, and as he racked it in he felt the building shudder from the force of an explosion, high above.

Paige had closed her eyes and turned away just before the blast. Now she opened them and found the room choked with plaster and explosive residue. Most of the wall around the double doors had been blown out, leaving a huge cavity. The grenade must have triggered a few of the shaped charges. Not bad, though. It could have been about five megatons worse.

She turned her eyes on the Ares, still lying in the nest, bound to the amplifier by the strange channel of metallic light. The tangle of wiring was still encrusted with pressure pads, which now mattered about as much as Post-it notes. She closed in on the Ares at a full run, didn’t slow, and kicked it like she was back in high-school soccer practice, doing penalty drills. It shot from its resting place and went tumbling across the room, corners skittering on the wood—but its visible connection to the amplifier held. The silvery, plasma-like channel simply elongated and swung to maintain the connection, like a beam of light following a target. The Ares hit the wall beside the blast cavity, bounced back three feet, and settled in the swirling dust.

The orange-white light still filled the room. The gunfire downstairs went on unhindered.

Paige had never destroyed an entity before. Some of the strictest protocols forbade it. For obvious reasons. Who the hell knew what would result?

She’d know in a second.

She unslung her rifle, shouldered it, centered the sights and fired on auto.

The Ares made a sound like a human scream when it shattered. The room plunged into near darkness as the thing’s light vanished, and the plasma channel to the amplifier switched off. Where the Ares had been, wild orange arcs of electricity skittered like fingers over the surrounding floor space, grabbing for purchase. Then they weakened, flickered, and died away.

The change came over the crowd in an instant. Travis let go of the trigger, spun hard and shoved aside the barrel of the only gun near him still firing.

The people on the steps below fell back. Where there’d been rage, there was now only shock. And fear. More fear than he’d ever seen. They drew away from the shooters, eyes wide and heads shaking, pleading in at least three languages. No ignoring their faces now. Travis saw them—felt pretty damn sure he would always see them, the way they looked in this moment. Would never lose a detail of this image if he lived to a hundred and five.

Within a matter of seconds the stairs below him were clear, at least of the living. The crowd had turned, shrunk away around the banister and out of view down the next flight. A sound came to Travis now. Like rushing air channeled through some narrow space, keening and high and fierce. It came from every direction. He understood. It was the crowd outside. It was thousands of people suddenly finding themselves waist-deep in the bodies of their friends.

Paige’s voice came over the comm unit in his ear. “Weapons tight, but hold positions. Choppers are coming for evac, five minutes. Sit tight until then, in case this isn’t over.”

Five minutes later. Out through the front doors. Over the cobblestone approach. Past the wrought-iron fence. Dawn saturating everything pink, and the fog churning in compound dynamics: surging in toward the still-burning cars, curling violently in the rush of air from the Black Hawks. Four of them. Coming in low from the east, right along Theaterstrasse. Setting down in the street, their rotor wash at ground level pushing the fog back enough to reveal the mounds of bodies at the perimeter. Travis saw the nearest pilot and copilot survey the carnage, their mouths forming words he could lip-read pretty easily.

A moment later he was aboard the third chopper, with Paige beside him, along with a dozen of the others. Strapping in. Paige had the black cube from the ninth floor in her lap. The amplifier.

She cupped her mouth to his ear and shouted, “Take a look!”

She turned the cube over in all directions, showing him every side of it. All were smooth, featureless. No place for any wires or cables to connect. The damn thing had just been lying there, plugged into nothing. It alone was the amplifier; the nine stories of circuitry were all for show.

One more addition to the list of shit he couldn’t square with.

The rest of the team from the building had already piled into the remaining Black Hawks, and within seconds the formation was rising. The streets below were deserted of the living for as far as Travis could see. The choppers cleared the roof, pivoted, and headed south over the city in a tight line, black silhouettes against the dawn.

At Meiringen, the 747 was already staged at the end of the runway, engines powered and ready. They boarded at a sprint, and three minutes later the aircraft was climbing above Switzerland at the steepest angle its wings could bear, on the chance that someone with a Stinger missile was down there on the pine-covered slopes. When they leveled off at 45,000 feet, Travis saw three escort fighters settle into formation off the starboard wing. No doubt the same number graced the other side, along with others far ahead and behind.

Paige made an executive decision to put the copilot at the tail of the plane, under guard, and then chose three operators at random to sit with the pilot in case he made any strange moves. When she returned to the seat she’d occupied on the flight over—next to the one Travis now sat in—she looked more exhausted than relieved.

The black amplifier cube sat on the floor nearby.

Paige ticked off the relevant bullet points on her fingers. “His building is gone; we’ll level it with an airstrike as soon as the wounded are pulled out. We have the amplifier. Of the three entities he controlled, we’ve recovered the transparency suit and destroyed the Ares. He still has the Whisper.” She looked at Travis, and he saw something that was almost—but not quite—optimism in her expression. “So what just happened in Zurich? Did we dodge whatever he was planning?”

“We’d have to know what he was planning,” Travis said.

“Everything he’s worked on for fourteen years is either destroyed or in our possession,” she said. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than him.

Travis nodded, accepting her point, but unsure all the same. There was just no way to know what the plan had been. What it might still be.

Paige’s cell rang. Crawford at Border Town. She put it on speaker again.

“We got something on that last name on Pilgrim’s list,” Crawford said. “Ellis Cook. Let me just make sure I understand what you told me. These names were carved into the floor inside the room on Level Nine?”

“Yes,” Paige said.

“Where nobody’s been for at least four years,” Crawford said.

“Right,” Paige said. She sounded impatient.

“Ellis Cook had a net worth of over one hundred million dollars. But he made it by winning a Powerball lotto three years ago. Four years ago, when his name was already scratched on that floor, Cook was managing a coffee shop in North Carolina.”

Paige looked like she was waiting for more. Or for a punch line, maybe. She stared at the phone, her eyes fixed, narrowed. Then she looked at Travis and said, “What?”

He had no answer for her.

“That’s what we know so far,” Crawford said. “All of these people were rich as hell when they died, though we’re still looking for a specific through line. But at the time Pilgrim carved Ellis Cook’s name into that floor, the guy was fielding complaints ten hours a day from people who wanted more foam on their cappuccinos. Your bafflement’s as good as ours.”

Paige ended the call and stared ahead at nothing for a moment. Finally she shook her head and said, “Look, I accept that the Whisper can know everything about the present. I don’t know how it knows that, but at least that information really exists in the world. But Jesus, I don’t care how advanced something is, how can it see the future? There’s too much randomness. It’s chaos.”

“You’d have to think it’d be pretty good at making educated guesses,” Travis said. “A hell of a lot more educated than ours.”

“Educated enough to guess the winning lotto numbers, and which person would pick those numbers, a year or more in advance? Is that even close to possible?”

He met her eyes; they were wide, locked onto his. “Sixty seconds ago I’d have said no,” he said. “Right now I’m leaning toward yes.”

She stared at him a moment longer. Blinked. Looked away over Switzerland falling behind them. “What the hell are we up against here?”

“I have a thought,” Travis said. “But I’m not sure you want to hear it.”

“Try me.”

“We’ve been operating under the premise that Pilgrim has total control of the Whisper. That he mastered it.”

She nodded. Waited for him to go on.

“What if we have it backwards?” he said. “What if it mastered him?”

VERSE VIA MAY AFTERNOON IN 2001

The cell measures nine feet by seven. There are no bars. Instead there are four concrete walls painted the ugliest possible shade of blue, and a steel door with a two-inch vertical strip of security glass set into it. It is the only window in the cell. Encased in the ceiling is a fluorescent light, which is never turned off. Since last December it has been flickering in a way that gives Travis headaches right behind his eyes. For more than eight years he has spent twenty-three and a half hours of each day inside this room.

There is a letter taped to the wall above the bed. It arrived three months ago to inform him that his parents had been killed, shot while waiting at a stoplight in Minneapolis. Two detectives came to ask for his input on the matter. Travis enjoyed their undisguised apathy over Mr. and Mrs. Chase’s deaths.

The only other letters he’s received are from his brother, Jeff. These are not on the wall, but folded neatly beneath the bed, where he doesn’t have to look at them, or think about the survivor’s guilt that saturates the space between every line. Jeff is convinced that Travis’s actions, on that night in 1992, are the only reason he himself was spared being drawn into the family business.

Travis is lying on the bed now, eyes closed to take the edge off the flickering. It barely helps. Sometimes he manages to simply forget about the flickering, even while it’s happening, and sometimes that helps. Letting things slip from his mind is a skill he’s perfected in this place. Days. Months. Years. The time behind him. The time ahead of him. Letting it all slip away is how he keeps from going crazy.

He stands from the bed and paces the room. He is hardly aware of the decision to do this; it is an automatic action that he makes several dozen times a day. His pacing follows the same path as always: door to toilet, toilet to door, door to toilet.

At that moment the lock on his cell door disengages with a heavy click, and the guard pushes it in.

“Visitor,” the guard says, and Travis senses that the guard is nervous. Which is strange.

Then a man strides into the cell, dressed in an expensive suit, and the guard closes the door behind him. The man’s hair is graying at the temples, and he wears sunglasses even in this windowless room. He grimaces at the flickering light, and says, “Hello, Travis. My name is Aaron Pilgrim.”

He reaches for Travis as if to shake his hand, but instead Travis sees that he’s holding something out to him. It is a bright blue sphere, the size of a softball. The radiance of the thing swims. It is hypnotic, and Travis takes it into his own hand without even considering to refuse.

The moment it touches his skin, a voice speaks in his head. A voice he thought he would never hear again.

“Travis,” it says, and the strength departs his legs. He sits hard onto the bed.

Emily.

Beyond the blue light—beyond everything that matters to him now—he is vaguely aware that the visitor, Pilgrim, is smiling about something. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

Travis says her name. The light flutters in response, then settles into the rhythm of his pulse.

“We won’t be talking for long,” Emily says. “Not this time. Not next time, either, years and years from now, when we meet again over that muddy hole in Alaska. But the third time … oh sweetie. The third time will most certainly be the charm.”

“Why can’t you stay with me now?” Travis says. He hears the longing and pain in his own voice. Missing her already, before she’s even gone.

“I have work to do,” Emily says. “Complicated work. I could never explain it to you, I’m afraid. Not here and now. Someday, I will. If it helps, just know this: you’re more important to me than anyone in the world. More than the grinning jackass standing in this cell with you. Out of six billion people, you’re the one whose involvement I need the most. You’re the irreplaceable component of my plan.”

Travis feels something wonderful swell in his chest, at her words. He matters to her. She has chosen him. In this moment, it is all he can do not to cry.

“Why me?” he whispers.

She giggles softly. “You’ll find out.” The light continues in step with his heartbeat for another few seconds. Then it changes. Darkens, in a way. “Now I’m going to give you what I came here to give you,” Emily says. “It’s not much. Think of it as a nudge. A preference for where you’d like to live, when you leave this place.”

The moment she finishes saying that, Travis feels something inside his head. A tingling. It lasts perhaps a second, then vanishes.

“There,” Emily sighs. “You’re exactly on course now, my love. On course to meet me again.”

Against his will, tears sting the edges of his eyes. She’s going to leave now. He’ll be alone here again. Alone with the miserable fluorescent light, and the headaches, and the ugly blue walls. And nothing else. For years, and years, and years.

“Shhh,” she says. “It’ll all be fine. Someday we’ll laugh at this, I promise.”

But he’s so very far from laughing right now. This moment is wonderful beyond anything he’s ever known. It is also horrible, to the same degree, because it is ending.

“Hand me back to the grinning jackass now, Travis.”

He knows he cannot disobey her. Feels his body shifting forward already, as if of its own volition. Feels his leg muscles contracting to stand, and his arm stretching out to give her back.

“Please,” Travis whispers, as if he could possibly change her mind.

“Soon,” she says.

He wonders if he’ll think of anything but her, in all the years to come, and she pulses in his hand one last time.

“By tonight, you won’t think of me at all,” she says.

Then the man with the graying hair at his temples comes forward and closes his fingers over her. All that stops Travis from killing this man is Emily’s insistence. The man pulls her away. Travis’s breath rushes out. If he were holding a knife right now, he’d cut his own throat with it.

The man named Pilgrim raps on the door. It opens, and like that, he’s gone, and the wonderful blue light with him, and Travis falls onto his bed, and there is no stopping the tears now. Still wishing for a knife, or a nice .38, he considers the sharp metal corner of his bedframe instead. It won’t be anywhere near as quick and clean as a blade. But when the job is done, it will be just as done.

He lies there, considering it. Minutes pass. At some point it occurs to him that he’s let the blue sphere slip from his mind for a few seconds. Maybe as many as ten. How is that possible? How could he have forgotten it—her, forgotten her—for even that long?

He realizes he’s staring right into that fucking fluorescent light now, and rolls over onto his stomach, face into the pillow. He is very tired. Very worn by the jagged emotions. He finds his awareness drifting down toward sleep.

He wakes. His mouth is dry, like he’s been eating cotton balls. He must have slept for hours. He stands, goes to the sink, splashes water on his face and drinks with his mouth to the spigot.

Something is troubling him. Some memory he can’t quite get to. Something he dreamed, maybe. He tries to picture it, and for a moment he draws the image of a pulsing blue light, and for some reason he feels very good about it. Maybe it was a nice dream. But even as he dwells on it, it slides down into the darkness, out of his reach. Gone.

He straightens up, shuts off the faucet. Returns to the bed, but doesn’t feel like lying down again, or even sitting. Without really deciding to do so, he begins to pace the room: door to toilet, toilet to door, door to toilet.

Part III - ENTITY 0697

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

They flew west in a kind of perpetual daybreak, crossing the pinched tops of the time zones at the same speed as the Earth’s shadow.

Travis tried to sleep. He failed. In the calm hours after takeoff, as the night’s adrenaline faded, the events in Zurich caught up with him in full. In the midst of the violence he’d thought he appreciated its scale, but he’d been wrong. With each new hour’s hindsight his sense of it deepened, like the piles of bodies in the streets around 7 Theaterstrasse.

Twice during the flight he threw up, just reaching the lavatory both times. In each room he passed along the aircraft’s corridor, the operators—still wearing every piece of equipment except their rifles—sat wide awake. Some rested their heads in their hands; others stared out the windows at the black ocean and pastel sky. The view was beautiful, and maybe they needed to look at something beautiful for a while, for whatever help it might offer.

Paige didn’t sleep, either. She fell into a long silence over Europe and then the Atlantic. She didn’t cry, but Travis saw her hands shaking at times. After a while he found himself following the operators’ lead and staring out the window, letting his thoughts go silent. He was looking down at Greenland, the snow reflecting some of the faint pink of the sky, when Paige spoke.

“I was wrong, before.” Her voice sounded as strained as if she’d cried, after all. “What I said about the Breach, that we’re like Java man compared to whoever’s on the other side.” She paused again and chose her words carefully. “Really, we’re like ants. Ants that accidentally tunneled into a holding tank full of chlorine underneath some chemical factory. That’s how far out of our depth we are, dealing with this shit. That’s how dangerous it is. And it’s how little concern they have for us, whoever they are on the other side. As much concern as the owners of that factory would have for the ants. They probably don’t even know about us. Probably wouldn’t care if they did.”

They were over North Dakota now, the landscape shadowy under the same dawn they’d taken off into, in Switzerland. Neither Travis nor Paige had spoken in hours.

Paige’s cell rang. It was Crawford. Tangent had located Ellis Cook’s daughter, who’d been present at the time of his apparent suicide. The girl had been very close to her father. She might know something. She was on a flight to Border Town right now, landing an hour ahead of them.

Travis found himself thinking about the Whisper again. Unnerving as it was, it made a welcome distraction. Paige ended the call and glanced at him, and he thought he saw the same sentiment in her eyes.

She was quiet a moment, then said, “Have you ever heard of a story called ‘The Appointment in Samarra’?” She still sounded worn, depleted.

“No,” Travis said.

“I forget who wrote it. One of those things everyone reads in English 102. This servant goes to the marketplace, and he sees Death standing there, and Death makes a threatening face at him. The servant runs back to his master and says, ‘Let me borrow your horse, I’ll ride to Samarra so Death won’t find me.’ The master lets him go, then heads down to the market himself, sees Death and he says, ‘What are you doing making a threatening face at my servant?’And Death says, ‘Threatening? No, no, I was just surprised to see him here. I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.’ ”

She looked past him, out the window at the waking countryside.

“That’s what this feels like,” she said finally. “Like no matter what we do from this point on, no matter what path we take, the Whisper is waiting for us at the end of it. If it can guess lotto numbers, it can sure as hell guess our moves. Even if we say to ourselves, ‘Well, it would guess this, so let’s do the opposite,’ we have to assume it could guess that, too.”

Travis could only nod. Yeah. No reason to think otherwise.

“So what the hell are we supposed to do?” Paige said.

He thought for a moment. Only one avenue seemed to have any light shining onto it. The hit list carved into the floor at 7 Theaterstrasse.

“We need to know why Pilgrim had those thirty-seven people killed. Or why the Whisper had them killed. There has to be a reason, and it has to matter. And even if the damn thing expects us to find out, and expected it ten years ago, what else can we do? If there’s a way out, it’s by knowing what it’s afraid of.”

She nodded, more accepting than agreeing. Which was more or less how he felt himself.

He stared out at North Dakota. Little towns slid by far below, some of them not much more than a set of crossroads with a streetlight or two, still shining in the half-light.

A strange thought came to him. Actually, it wasn’t the thought that was strange. The thought was normal. All that was strange was that he hadn’t considered it until now.

His former life was over.

His apartment in Fairbanks. His job there. His pressing decision between staying or going home to Minneapolis, going to work with his brother. That life was gone, as if someone else had lived it. He was here now, part of Tangent whether he liked it or not. If he ever went home, there was no question that Pilgrim’s people would be waiting there for him. And given all the sensitive things he knew about the Breach now, Tangent would probably want to keep him among their own ranks after this was over, if only for their own security reasons.

If either he or Tangent still existed when this was over.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Her name was Lauren. She was sitting in Paige’s office, almost on the spot where Travis had been standing when his bonds were removed a day earlier. She was twenty-three, but looked a lot younger than that at the moment. She looked like a lost child.

Travis was standing with Paige. Crawford and a few others were in the room too. For half an hour they’d asked Lauren all the questions about her father that the computers hadn’t answered for them. So far, nothing useful had emerged.

There was something in the girl’s eyes that Travis recognized. He’d seen it in people before, during interrogations. An eagerness to reveal something, stifled by fear of doing so. Fear because she didn’t trust them.

Travis leaned close to Paige and whispered a question in her ear. She looked at him, understood his idea, and nodded. She stepped out of the room, taking out her cell as she went. Lauren’s dark eyes followed her out, then returned to Crawford as he asked her to clarify something she’d already clarified twice.

A few minutes later, Paige returned. She was carrying a black plastic case. An entity case.

Travis waited for another exchange between Crawford and Lauren to end, then said, “Can I speak to her?”

Crawford nodded. Travis took a step toward Lauren, met her eyes, and spoke softly but directly.

“You don’t believe your father killed himself, do you?”

She shook her head, her eyes never leaving his.

“There’s no way,” she said. She was quiet a moment. Then she looked at the floor, and continued. “Everyone’s been telling me I need to accept what happened, or else I won’t be able to deal with it. They said people always feel the way I do, when this happens. And they said it’s normal for there to be … no warning. They told me they reviewed the security footage from all over the estate grounds, before and after it happened, and nobody came or went. But my father didn’t kill himself. And I don’t care whether you people believe me—”

“We know he didn’t kill himself,” Travis said.

Her eyes came up again. Stared at him. He turned to Paige, and she handed him the black case. He set it on the table next to the door and opened it. It looked empty. Travis reached in and took hold of what he knew was inside it. He couldn’t be sure which part he was grabbing, but the effect was identical to picking up an article of clothing with his eyes closed. He felt something like a shirt sleeve at once, and a second later his hand found the hem at the shirt’s bottom.

He turned back to Lauren.

“The man who murdered your father was wearing this,” Travis said, and shoved his arm through the open bottom of the shirt, as far as it could go. He saw the arm and most of his shoulder vanish into nothingness.

Lauren’s body jerked. She stared at the empty space where Travis’s arm should have been, her eyes huge. Head shaking now, just noticeably. Her mouth formed a question, but it didn’t come out. She only stared. Five seconds passed. Then ten.

When she did speak, her voice was barely audible. “Where is he now?”

She was looking at Travis again by the time she said it. He met her gaze without blinking.

“Dead,” Travis said. “I killed him.”

He watched her reaction, and saw what he’d hoped for. She knew he was telling the truth.

“We’re not the bad guys, Lauren,” he said. “Whatever it is you’re afraid to talk about, you can tell us.”

She looked at him a moment longer, then turned her eyes to Paige and the others, one by one. Each nodded.

Her attention came back to Travis, and after another moment she returned to staring at her own knees.

“My father belonged to a group of people you’ve never heard of. You won’t find anything about them by looking at his tax records, or his phone logs. The other people who were killed, these past several years, were part of it too. I’ll tell you as much as I know.”

As much as she knew wasn’t a lot. Her father had sought to protect her from what he was involved in.

The group had no name, she told them. That was supposed to be a security measure. Among its members, it did have a nickname—something of a joke—which was never written down: The Order of the Qubit. Travis didn’t know that word. Everyone else in the room did. Qubit stood for “quantum bit.” A computing unit of a quantum computer. For the better part of the past decade, a few dozen governments and a few hundred companies had been trying like hell to develop quantum computers, which were expected to be dramatically more powerful than computers at present. But other than very limited proof-of-concept stuff in labs, no one had had any luck. It was one of those things everyone was sure would exist at some point. But whether that point was five years away, or fifty, was tough to pin down.

Lauren thought the Order of the Qubit dated to the early nineties. As she understood it, it was more or less a group of very rich people funding their own secret work toward building a viable quantum computer. Their motivation was simply fear: in the global race to make one of these machines, whoever crossed the finish line first would gain a great deal of power. As it happened, a lot of the institutions who were likely candidates to win the race couldn’t be expected to use that power for the world’s best interests. Many could be counted on to use it for nearly the opposite purpose. The Order of the Qubit wanted to win that race itself, then carefully select a few organizations that really did have the big human picture in mind, and simply give them the technology.

Good idea. Also a good way to get killed. Entrenched interests tended to dislike threats to their power, and to express that dislike violently.

As to whether the group had achieved its goal, or even gained any ground toward it, Lauren had no idea. She also had no idea where their work was conducted, where their meetings were held, or where Tangent could locate any other member of the organization.

She finished speaking, and looked at them each in turn again.

“Did I help?” she said.

Travis met Paige’s eyes. Saw that she was thinking exactly what he was thinking. He looked at Lauren again.

“You helped,” he said.

“They have one,” Travis said. “A working model.”

He and Paige were standing in the open doorway of the pole barn on the surface, watching the jet—a Gulfstream this time—take off with Lauren in it. She’d asked to stay in Border Town. She’d said she’d feel safer there. She wouldn’t have been. This was probably the least-safe place on Earth right now, lying in the Whisper’s gun sights. Lauren herself should be under no real threat elsewhere; she’d already given them all the information she had.

“I think they must,” Paige said.

Travis watched the plane diminish to a desktop model of itself. Then a speck. Then nothing.

“Is there any chance a computer like that could outthink the Whisper?” he said. “Is that why these people are a threat to it?”

“I only know a little about quantum computers. Stories about their potential show up in tech papers once in a while. I know their power grows exponentially the more qubits you add, but that in itself has been the trick. Adding more of them. There’s some kind of engineering limit, ten or twelve qubits, something like that. Not enough to do very much. But if someone built a quantum computer with fifty qubits, or a hundred, it’d be off the charts. Way, way off the charts. I think there are still limits to their use, even then—limits on the kind of math they can do—but there’d be creative ways to get around that. There’s no question it would be a big deal, if someone really had a scaled-up version working.”

Travis thought it over, watching empty sky now. Even if they were right, it didn’t fully make sense. If the thing was really a threat to the Whisper, then the Whisper should have seen that coming too. Should have directed Pilgrim to find and destroy the place where the thing would be built, long before it was completed.

That was just one of the things that made no sense to him. There were several others. He couldn’t help thinking that the confusion was part of the Whisper’s plan. Any good strategy should look like nonsense to those facing off against it.

What was the plan? What was the Whisper’s final goal? It was hard enough to figure out what a human being wanted. What the hell did this thing want? On that point, he couldn’t even form a guess.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

All day long, photos and video came in from a detachment scouring Ellis Cook’s house on Grand Cayman. Nice place. There was nothing inside it that hinted about his involvement with any secret group. Air ducts were inspected. Carpets were torn up. A giant safe in the basement was drilled through and opened. A mechanical shed next to the pool was examined in detail. It contained an impressive pumping and filtering system, built to draw seawater in from the harbor at hundreds of gallons per minute, which would fill the pool in less than an hour. The kind of thing only someone with a hundred million dollars would think he needed. But no quantum computer.

The ATC logs for Owen Roberts International Airport on Grand Cayman turned up something interesting. A few times a year, an Airbus A318, big enough to hold over a hundred passengers but registered as a business jet, landed there. Each time, it departed again within eight hours. The jet’s ownership was in Cook’s name, but it was based at Dallas-Fort Worth, where he owned a permanent hangar for it. The plane didn’t seem to be Cook’s personal transport. For that, he had a Dassault Falcon that he kept right there on Grand Cayman. The Airbus, it seemed, didn’t take Cook anywhere, but instead brought people to him. A lot of people, all at once. The implication was pretty obvious: that Cook’s house on the island was the group’s base of operations. Or one of its bases, anyway. But the search of the house revealed no evidence of that, and the data mining of real-estate records showed no other land or property on Grand Cayman with his name on it.

Travis saw the tension building on Paige’s shoulders, as the day went on without any actionable information. She bore it as well as anyone could have, but he could tell this was hard on her, being amped up to do something—anything—and having nothing to direct that energy at. Like it would be hard on an engine to detach it from its working load, and rev it past the redline for hours.

More than once, Travis heard people comment that Paige’s father would’ve been a godsend at a time like this, when answers were both critical and hard to come by. Each time, Paige’s reactions were subdued, difficult to read. Late in the afternoon she left to be alone for a while, and returned looking emotionally drained.

By nine o’clock at night, the team at the Cayman house had finished. For the time being, there was no more evidence to look over. Nothing to work on at all.

Crawford gave Travis a keycard to a vacant residence on Level B12. He found his way to it, and entered to find a living space about twice the size of his apartment in Fairbanks. Granite counters in the kitchen. Eighty-inch LCD in the living room. The Sub-Zero refrigerator was well stocked, as were the cupboards. The master bathroom, decked out in natural stone, was a thing of beauty. The image in the mirror wasn’t. Travis hadn’t shaved in a week. Hadn’t showered in several days, during which time he’d been active, to understate things a bit. He opened the medicine cabinet and found shaving cream, and razors still in the package. Shampoo and unused soap in the shower. Twenty minutes later he felt human again.

The master closet was filled with a wide array of clothing. He picked out some jeans and a T-shirt, and was in the kitchen thinking about a sandwich when he noticed the message button flashing on the wall phone. It hadn’t been flashing earlier. He pressed the button and heard Crawford’s voice, telling him that Tangent had retrieved two messages from his voice mail in Fairbanks, and routed them here.

“Obviously there are security measures we take with outgoing calls,” Crawford’s recorded voice said. “If you need to contact anyone, speak to me and we’ll see what we can arrange.”

The first message was a telemarketer’s robo-call trying to sell him an extended warranty on his Explorer. The second was from his brother, Jeff.

“Hey, Travis. Give me a shout when you get this. Cool news. Whitebird’s almost official. It just beat Level One in Fog of War without my help. It’s still buggy, needs a shitload of work, but I’m geeked, man. You can still get in on this with me, if you want. Call me. Out.”

Whitebird was a computer system, both hardware and software, that Jeff had been working on for years. It was a narrow form of artificial intelligence, meant to improve the performance of computer-driven enemies in video games. Jeff had been testing its capability by letting it take on the role of the human player in older, simpler games, mostly martial-arts stuff on 8-bit systems from the eighties and nineties. Now he was up to modern games like Fog of War. Pretty impressive. He probably stood to make millions selling the technology to a game developer, once he had all the wrinkles smoothed out. More to the point, though, he simply loved the work.

Travis’s temptation to accept his offer, during the past year, had at times nearly swayed him all the way. Even now he felt some strain of remorse. Like he’d missed an exit from the freeway, one he’d been supposed to take, but that he’d never get back to now.

It struck him that, of the two of them, if someone had been asked to guess which brother would end up in a place like Border Town, the smart money—the only money—would’ve been on Jeff. Tangent probably had an army of computer techs designing and running customized systems for their research.

Travis turned away from the phone, and was heading for the refrigerator when someone knocked on the door.

He crossed the living room, opened it, and found Paige standing there, also having just showered. Still looking keyed up. Looking like she wished she could relax.

“Tell me you haven’t eaten,” she said.

“I haven’t eaten.”

An hour later they were sitting cross-legged on her bed, facing each other. Sometimes she looked down at her hands fidgeting in her lap, and her hair fell across her face in a way that Travis couldn’t stop staring at.

They talked about random things. Paige had finished high school at sixteen and gone to Texas A&M. She’d set out to become a historian, but four years later had found herself going for a master’s in the new nanosystems engineering program there, working on the Model-T versions of what would someday, with any luck, be digital white blood cells, the cure for pretty much everything. When Travis asked her why she’d changed her major, she said she’d realized something: as much as she loved to understand where the human story had been, she was more interested in where it was going. Nothing excited her like the forward edge of technology, the best minds in the world building on one another’s work at an ever-increasing speed. By twenty-one she knew she wanted to spend her life in that world. And then, in one very surprising weekend, her father—her only living relative—had brought her to this place and shown her what he really did for a living. Quite the revelation, it’d been. With it had come another: there were grave security risks attendant to the loved ones of Tangent operators like Peter Campbell. Paige was in danger, just by living her life, just by being who she was. She would be safer here at Border Town, so long as the threat persisted.

“Lived here ever since,” she said, glancing around at her apartment. Two levels below Travis’s, it was identical except for the touches her taste had brought to it.

Her hands found their way into his. He held them, his thumbs tracing back and forth across her palms.

She spoke softly. “Since prison, has there been anyone special?”

“No one,” he said. A moment later he added, “No one special in prison, either.”

Paige laughed, glancing up from their hands to meet his eyes.

“After I got out,” he said, “part of me thought there was no point in trying. You can only get so far into a conversation before you run into the wall. ‘You’re from Minnesota? Oh, what did you do there?’ ”

She laughed again, quietly. “What did the rest of you think?”

He was silent a moment. “That this was my real punishment. The one I’d never get free of. And that I deserved it.”

“For what happened to—” She paused, and Travis could see her parsing her memory of the police report she’d read. At last she said, “Emily. Emily Price.”

Travis nodded. “She saved me from what I was. Saved my life, figuratively, even literally, I’m sure. And they killed her because of it. I should’ve known. I should’ve seen it coming, and I didn’t.”

“It’s easy to underestimate the bad in people,” Paige said. “I don’t think it should carry a life sentence.”

He managed something close to a smile, and held her hands a little tighter.

In the darkness their clothes evaporated, and there was only her skin against his, so much warmer than he’d imagined, and her hair falling around him, scented sweet like apple trees in October. He tasted on her tongue the white wine they’d had with dinner. Tasted the soft skin below her jawline. Tasted everything.

Later, holding her close, Travis felt the silence filling up with all the questions he knew they were both dwelling on. All the things that didn’t add up, no matter which way they were arranged.

“Everything the Whisper’s ever done,” he said, “since the day it came out of the Breach in 1989, has been part of the act. Hasn’t it?”

She nodded against his chest. “I think so.”

“The notion that it’s compelled to help you at first, and then it tries to take over your will after that, it’s all bullshit. It can do anything it wants to do, anytime. Nothing compels it. Nothing limits it. All that stuff was just a smokescreen so it could control the way people handled it. Up in Alaska, when it used me to try setting off a nuclear war, it seemed to fail because Pilgrim’s people in the helicopter showed up too soon. Are you buying that for a second? The thing can predict a mega lotto outcome years in advance, but not the arrival of a helicopter a few minutes out? Something a radar tech with a stopwatch could probably figure out in his head?”

“Strikes me as a little inconsistent,” Paige whispered.

“It was keeping up appearances,” he said. “Playing the role a little longer. Every move it’s made, from the moment it arrived in this world, has been to steer things to exactly where they are right now. Do you see the problem with that?”

“That twenty years is a long damn time for something that powerful to spend reaching its goal?”

“Exactly,” he said. “If all it wants is control of Border Town and the Breach, it could’ve gotten it almost on day one. It could’ve just played nice, right from the beginning, won everybody over, and then as soon as the right person was holding it, someone with access to any of the really destructive shit locked away in this building, it could’ve used that person as a puppet to kill everyone here. Just like that. So what the hell is it really after? What’s far enough out of its reach, that it’s taken all these years, and all this elaborate planning?”

For a moment she didn’t reply. Then her forehead furrowed against his skin.

“What if it’s after something that wasn’t available until now?” she said.

Travis thought about that. It sounded right. A hell of a lot better than what he had, which was nothing.

“Like a new entity?” he said. “Something that would’ve just arrived?”

“I don’t know. None of the recent unique arrivals has been especially powerful or dangerous, as far as we know.”

They fell silent again. Travis heard the building’s air exchange system kick on with a sigh. His face was resting against the top of Paige’s head. Every breath was rich with the scent of her hair.

After a moment he said, “There’s something that bothers me more than all of this.” He considered how to begin. “We agree that Pilgrim isn’t really the enemy here, right? That’s not to say he’s blameless. The Whisper probably chose him because it knew the kind of things he was capable of. But whatever Pilgrim believes, the Whisper is the one calling the shots. So far, so good, right?”

“Right.”

“But the Whisper is still a machine. It’s a tool, and a tool doesn’t choose its own purpose. Someone else would have done that.”

Paige was silent a long while before speaking. “You mean someone on the other side of the Breach,” she said.

“Yeah.”

With his arm, he felt a shiver climb the muscles of her back.

“If that’s the case,” she said, “then we never had a prayer.”

He tried to think of some reassuring reply to that, but came up empty. All he could do was pull her closer against himself. She responded, settling into him. He lay there listening to her breathing, feeling her limbs relax. Turning the questions over and over, and wondering who—or what—they were really up against, he faded out.

Sometime later, he woke with the strangest feeling. Like he’d figured something out. Dreamed it, maybe. He tried to remember what it was, but could only push it away, like a child trying to palm a basketball. He relaxed and let it come back. For a moment, it seemed that it might. An impression of it swam into view: the video footage of the high-powered pump station at Cook’s house on Grand Cayman. It had something to do with that. Something about Cook’s need for it, in the first place. But that was all he could get. A moment later it was gone.

Paige murmured, rising halfway out of sleep beside him. He kissed her forehead and she rolled into him, softly kissing his neck before drifting away in his arms. Feeling her heartbeat against him, he closed his eyes and followed her down.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

A phone began to ring. Somewhere in the dark. Travis felt Paige stir. She rolled toward the nightstand—the clock read just past four in the morning—switched on the light, and pressed a button for the speakerphone. Even as she answered with her name, she slipped under the covers again and hugged her body to his.

The voice that issued from the phone sounded scared. “Paige, it’s Crawford. I’m at Secure Storage on B31. The attendants on duty called me down. There’s something going on. Maybe you should come down here.”

Her eyes locked on Travis’s.

“Paige?” Crawford said.

“I’m here.” She let go of Travis, sat up and swung her feet to the floor, hunting for her clothes. “Describe what’s happening.”

“We’re not really sure. It has to do with the object you brought back from Zurich. The black cube.”

“The amplifier,” Paige said. She looked at Travis again.

In the background over the speakerphone, they could hear some kind of droning sound. Like someone humming, from deep in the diaphragm. It was the sound they’d heard on the ninth floor of 7 Theaterstrasse, just before everything went to hell.

“It’s locked inside one of the vaults,” Crawford said. “Where we put it yesterday morning. But it’s making the sound you’re probably hearing behind me. We haven’t opened the vault yet. Not sure we should.”

At that moment they heard a quick gap of silence over the phone, and Crawford said, “Paige, hold on, I’ve got a call from Defense Control. I’ll put it on conference so I don’t lose you.” He clicked out for a second, and then they heard him say, “Defense go ahead.”

A woman spoke. “Mr. Crawford, we have a situation up top. We’re not sure how this is happening, but there’s a radar contact directly above us, about forty thousand feet up, and falling. Computer says it’s human bodies.”

“Divers?” Paige said.

“We think so. They’re dropping at around two hundred miles per hour, consistent with terminal velocity for humans tucked into a bullet fall. Radar didn’t see a plane, so it was either an ultra-high-altitude bail-out from something like a U2, or a stealth, if that’s possible.”

Travis saw Paige’s eyes narrow at that, but only slightly. Pilgrim had the Whisper; of course it was possible.

“The diver formation went into a sparse pattern right after the first contact, and the radar lost them, but with the thermal cams on the chain guns, we should be able to track them manually when they get low enough. With your permission, sir, we’ll just kill everyone up there.”

“Do it,” Crawford said. The bass-range hum continued on his end of the call.

Sufficiently rattled by whatever the hell was going on down there, Paige stood, her clothes still balled up in her hand.

“Did anything trigger the amplifier?” Paige said. “Any experiment going on nearby, anything like that?”

“Nothing,” Crawford said. “It just came on. Like it was on a timer.”

A thought hit Travis. Hit him hard enough to make him sit up and put his feet to the floor. Paige turned, seeing his expression.

“Crawford, this is Travis Chase,” he said. “What entities are in the vaults closest to the amplifier?”

There was a pause as Crawford processed the fact that Travis was speaking over Paige’s phone at four in the morning. Then he answered. “I don’t have that information in front of me. Hold on.” They heard him talking to one of the attendants in the background.

But Travis already knew the answer. He stood from the bed and crossed to Paige’s desk, looking for a pencil and something to write on. Paige followed, dropping her clothes behind her.

“What is it?” she said.

Before he could answer, the woman at Defense Control spoke up again. “I see them on the thermals now. Barely. Initializing ground cannons for manual targeting.”

“We need to write ourselves a message,” Travis said, “so we’ll know what happened.”

He pulled open a drawer, found a dull pencil, and grabbed a printout of some kind, turning it over to write on the back.

“What do you mean?” Paige said.

Crawford spoke up over the phone. “Got the list. The vault nearest the amplifier contains Entity 0436, Jump Cut.”

Just what Travis had expected. The thing Paige had told him about in Zurich. The thing that was exactly like the Ares, except for its effect. Which was that it killed the past three days’ memory, and left you feeling like you’d just blinked and missed that time.

Paige’s mouth fell open slowly. Head shaking a little from side to side. Understanding. Unwanted understanding.

“If the Whisper can predict the lotto,” Travis said, “it can predict which vault the amplifier would end up in.”

“Oh my God,” Paige said.

He returned his eyes to the paper, his mind laboring for what to write. Then Crawford screamed on the phone, and Travis knew it was too late. An instant later Paige’s bedroom flared with bright green light, like every room in Border Town, Travis was sure. On instinct he threw his arms around Paige, as if he could protect her from it. The light seemed to shine right through their bodies—

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Travis had been lying awake in his tent, listening to wolves howling somewhere along the ridge. He’d read that wolf packs randomized the volume of their howling in order to confuse prey—and other wolves—as to their distance. It worked on humans, too. These sounded at least as close as—

Suddenly he found his eyes shut, and a wild flash of light, like lightning but with a green cast to it, shone bright enough to be visible through his eyelids. It vanished almost at once, though he hardly noticed, because by then he’d realized someone was with him, holding on to him but at the same time struggling—

He opened his eyes to find himself standing in a room he’d never seen before. The struggling figure wrenched away from him.

It was a very beautiful—and very naked—young woman.

She was holding her right upper arm tightly, her face just now easing from what looked like a contortion of agony; Travis was sure he hadn’t grabbed that arm or even bumped it. He had only an instant to consider these things, and then she was screaming at him, her eyes as bewildered as his own must look.

“What is this?” she shouted. “What the fuck is this? Where’s my father?”

He reflexively stepped back from her, saying he didn’t know, then repeating it; it was the only answer he had for her questions—or his own.

All at once she seemed to recognize the room, though that only confused her further, and then her eyes came to rest on a backpack and rifle leaning against the wall, and before Travis could register the danger, she’d lunged for the weapon, shouldered it and leveled it at his face.

“What the fuck have you people done?”

He had nothing he could say to her. He kept his eyes steady on hers, and shook his head, hands out from his sides to present no threat.

She racked the rifle’s action and advanced a step, forcing him back against the wall. In the same moment her gaze dropped; Travis followed the look, and realized he was naked too. He met her eyes again, and saw them narrow as she looked around at the room once more, and then at herself—she noticed her own lack of clothing—as she struggled to piece the moment together. Her aggression faltered; the rifle didn’t.

Somewhere nearby, agitated voices had been issuing from a speaker; now they stopped, and a single voice—an older man’s voice—said, “Did I hear Paige?”

The woman—Paige, apparently—turned toward the sound, which Travis could now see came from a speakerphone. “Crawford?”

“Paige, where are you?”

She hesitated, as if too confused to say aloud what she knew. “I’m … in my room. Where are you?”

The man’s answer was equally tentative. “I thought I was in the conference room, but … I’m down at Secure Storage now—”

A new sound over the phone line interrupted him: a soft computer voice saying, “Inbound … Inbound …”

For the first time, Paige lowered the rifle. That repeating word, coming from the speaker, had taken her full attention. She turned and moved toward the phone.

“Who’s in Defense Control?” she said.

A woman answered, sounding as stressed as everyone else. “This is Karen—Karen Lowe. I’m sure I’m not supposed to be up here right now, I was in my room—”

“Forget about that,” Paige said. “What’s the inbound?”

“Nothing. The radar’s blank, all fields. It looks like the gun cameras are up, but I don’t know why, there’s nothing on them—”

Other voices spoke in the background, and then Karen said, “Okay, yeah. What are they?”

Travis watched Paige lean in close to read the lighted display of an alarm clock. She reacted to it, and whispered, “Three days …”

“I count at least ten of them up there,” Karen said, to someone on her end of the call.

“Karen, tell me what you’re seeing,” Paige said.

“We don’t know. They’re not aircraft. The thermals are reading them at body temperature; they could be divers, but … are they hostiles, or—”

“Kill them,” Paige said. Travis could see in her eyes that she’d jettisoned the confusion for the moment. “Get everyone at the controls and start shooting, right now. And someone hit the dead switch for all the containment levels. Lock everything down and then smash the control boards.”

If the people on the other end of the call were confused, her direct tone got them past it. Travis heard alarms begin blaring, and then what sounded like someone following her orders about smashing things. He heard computer cases breaking open, fragile components inside being shattered by some blunt, heavy thing. A chair, maybe.

“Are you shooting yet?” Paige said.

“We’re targeting,” Karen said. “Ready in five, four, three—”

Suddenly Travis felt a jolt pass through the floor, and then the building shook from the bass wave of an explosion, somewhere high above.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The speakerphone went to static. Paige stared at it for less than a second, and then grabbed a pair of jeans from the floor and threw them at Travis. By the time he caught them, she was reaching for her own clothes.

“You seem to know more than I do,” he said. “Mind sharing?”

“I have a guess,” she said. “With gaps.”

“More than I have.” He stepped into the jeans and pulled them up.

Paige buttoned her own pair, then slipped her shirt over her head and grabbed the rifle again.

“Do the words Tangent or Breach mean anything to you?” she said.

“No.”

“Then I couldn’t explain it if we had an hour—” The hum of an automatic weapon sounded through the nearest air vent. “And we don’t have an hour.”

She opened the cabinet front of her nightstand and took out a .45, along with two spare magazines.

“Do you know how to shoot a gun?” she said.

He nodded. She took a step toward him, then stopped, sizing him up one last time. More gunfire, and a small popping explosion, transmitted through the ductwork. She came forward and handed him the pistol and ammo. Already she was on her way out of the room, grabbing the backpack and shouldering it as she went.

He followed, as his most obvious question finally surfaced. “How the hell did I get here?”

Paige checked the hallway outside her bedroom, and looked satisfied that it was clear. “I’m pretty damn curious about that myself,” she said, and moved out of the room.

With the rifle shouldered, Paige made her way toward the living room, ready to kill anything that appeared in front of her. She wasn’t crazy about turning her back on the man with her—she realized she hadn’t even asked him his name—but the situation demanded a few risks. Whoever he was, her own choice of attire a few moments earlier—none—seemed to imply that she trusted him.

The living room was clear. Beyond the door, shouts echoed along the primary corridor.

How could she have possibly made it back to Border Town alive? She’d been strapped down on a makeshift torture table, probably halfway dead, surrounded by enemies in the most remote place she’d ever seen. How had three days taken her from that place to her bedroom, standing around in the buff with some guy she’d never met before, who hadn’t heard of Tangent?

Had her father survived, too?

Hope and fear pulled her concentration in opposite directions, neither useful right now. Facing the door, she blocked off both feelings, then glanced over her shoulder at the stranger.

“Don’t shoot anything I’m not already shooting at,” she said, then added, “unless it shoots at you first.”

The guy shrugged, not even trying to hide his disorientation.

She found herself staring at him a second longer. He wasn’t bad-looking. Then she turned and crossed to the door, and with a steadying breath, pulled it open and stepped through.

People were running in the corridor, all of them Tangent personnel. They were confused, partly by the explosions but more so, Paige thought, by their own fractured memory. Only a few—those who belonged to the detachments—carried weapons, but even these were looking to others for direction, and finding no help.

If her guess—her guess with gaps—was right, every one of them had just skipped over three days of memory in an instant. Three days. The interval of the Jump Cut. How the hell had it affected the entire building?

And how had Pilgrim made that happen? Obviously, the raid was coming from his people. Pilgrim himself was probably with them.

The Jump Cut’s effect should only last a few minutes. That was the upside. The downside: Pilgrim would know that. Would plan for that. Would seek to take control of Border Town in those few minutes.

Down the hall, smoke poured from the seams of the elevator doors. At that moment another explosion, from somewhere in the uppermost levels, set the walls vibrating. People nearby flinched, maybe expecting the ceiling to come down. Maybe it would. Paige noticed a few of them staring at her as if she were a ghost. On some level she understood the logic of that, but it was one more thing she couldn’t afford to dwell on right now.

What would Pilgrim have to do, to get control right away?

That was easy. The nerve center of the building, Security Control, was right below Defense Control. With the Whisper—there was no question he had it with him—he would know the codes for every system in the building. Systems that could be used against them easily.

She turned to the nearest group of armed operators, meaning to call them to her and lead them to the stairs. They could reach Security Control in about sixty seconds. But before she could say anything, jets of white gas erupted from the ventilation system overhead. For a moment she thought the fire suppression system had kicked on and begun pumping halon through the vents. Then she got her first smell of it.

Not halon.

Of course. Of course Pilgrim would trigger this system. So fucking simple a move.

She spun, thinking to shepherd the others into her residence, already aware that it was a dead option: the vents in there were pumping the stuff out too. She met their eyes, one by one—some of them were already succumbing to the gas—and settled on the stranger’s gaze for some reason. Confused as he must be, he had a tight leash on his fear. She wondered again who he was.

Then her knees gave, and just as her vision failed, she saw him step forward to catch her, and then everything was gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Travis woke to find his memory restored, the three lost days reinserted into his past. He woke to Paige looking like she’d been crying about something, and after a moment he thought he knew what it was. He woke to the coughing of five dozen other survivors of the attack, bound alongside the two of them in a large conference room.

And he woke to Aaron Pilgrim standing over him. Though Tangent had never shown him a photo of the man, he recognized him. He could not for the life of him say why.

Four men with rifles were watching the captives. Pilgrim got their attention with a look, then indicated Travis and Paige.

“These two.”

Two of the gunmen slung their weapons and dragged Paige, then Travis, ten feet out from the wall along which the rest were arrayed.

Pilgrim pointed out eight others; they included Crawford as well as Dr. Fagan, the red-haired woman who’d sought to establish communication with the far side of the Breach. Pilgrim’s men dragged the eight of them out onto the open floor, into a group with Travis and Paige.

Pilgrim considered the ten of them for a moment, nodded to himself, and said, “Kill the rest.”

“No!” Paige screamed.

The shooting started before her scream had reverberated off the walls. Pilgrim’s men went down the line in rapid succession, putting a single shot through the forehead of each bound victim. Travis felt Paige’s body spasm against him with each rifle crack, each pleading cry from the condemned, each hopeless effort to squirm left or right in the last second. When it ended, she was shaking beside him with quiet sobs. Bound, Travis could offer no consolation but to lean closer to her. She responded, pressing against his shoulder as she cried.

Over her head, Travis saw a steel box sitting on the conference table, a cube about ten inches in each dimension. It was latched, and had a handle bolted to the top. A miniature of the giant version aboard Box Kite. This one was closed, and from the seam that ran around its midsection, a sheet of blue light projected outward, like the ring plane of some cube-shaped planet.

Pilgrim turned to face the chosen survivors. His eyes found Travis and stayed on him.

“You’re a fucking puppet for that thing,” Travis said.

“It may call the plays,” Pilgrim said. “But it’s my game.”

Travis studied his expression when he said it. There was no bluff in his eyes. The man really believed what he’d just said. Believed the Whisper was serving his interests, and not the other way around.

“But who are you to talk about puppets?” Pilgrim said. By his tone, he seemed to think Travis should understand that statement in some deeper way. Then he smiled. “Right, right. You wouldn’t remember meeting me, would you?”

Travis only stared. If that was a joke, he didn’t get it. Wasn’t sure he cared to, either.

“Whatever,” Pilgrim said. “You’re supposed to be here, so I guess everything’s right on track. Good enough for me.”

Pilgrim’s cell rang. He answered. In the stretched silence of the room, Travis could make out the voice on the other end clearly.

“Everything we want is shut behind the blast doors,” the caller said. “The locking computers are smashed. Can’t override the codes.”

“I know,” Pilgrim said.

“Gonna take at least an hour to drill through those heavy doors into the Primary Lab.”

“An hour and fifteen,” Pilgrim said, not guessing. His eyes went calmly to the Whisper’s box on the table. “Just get them working on it. Are the techs started on getting the defenses back up?”

“They’re on it. Lotta problems. Blast took out a bunch of critical shit. They’re re-threading the array by hand, so, half an hour, give or take.”

Pilgrim ended the call and put the phone away.

“Good enough,” he said again. He nodded to two of his four men and said, “Stay and watch them.” Then he strode from the room without even a glance at the executed bodies. The other two gunmen followed close behind him. One, a guy built like a bouncer, six-three and probably three hundred pounds, hefted the Whisper’s box and carried it along.

Paige grew silent. Just breathing shallowly now, but no longer crying.

It’d been only a minute since Pilgrim had left. The bodies were still bleeding. Paige’s backpack rested against one of the conference table’s legs, where someone had thrown it. They hadn’t opened it. Hadn’t cared. It occurred to Travis that the Doubler was still inside it. So was the Medic—not that it mattered. The bodies along the wall were far beyond that entity’s capacity to help.

Still, staring at the backpack, he saw a move he could make, if the opportunity came.

Travis watched the two guards without looking directly at them. They were overconfident. Not taking their job seriously. Ten prisoners, bound in a cluster in the middle of a wide-open floor. These men weren’t even weighing the possibility of a captive doing anything stupid.

Only their wrists were restrained. The bonds were zip ties made of some type of metal. Aluminum or steel, probably. They wouldn’t break—that much was certain.

But they would cut skin.

Travis needed both guards looking away. One already was; he was standing in the doorway, staring off down the hall. Maybe the smell of the blood had gotten to him. The other wandered the room, his gaze going everywhere, and nowhere in particular. He was never quite looking away long enough for Travis to do what he needed to do.

Another minute passed. Travis thought about what Pilgrim had said.

You’re supposed to be here.

The Whisper wanted him here. Had always wanted him here. Had arranged for it. And what else had the guy said? That they’d met before? Given the Whisper’s amnesia effect, that was plausible. It could’ve happened anytime. Any random day in Fairbanks. Or in prison.

He was part of the Whisper’s plan, somehow. And Pilgrim knew that. That was why he’d included him among the survivors. Why he needed any survivors, who knew? Maybe Pilgrim didn’t even know. Maybe that was just another play he’d let the Whisper dictate.

But Travis’s importance to the plan was something he could use against these guards.

He’d lost sight of the wanderer. He turned his head slightly, and saw that the man had settled into place at a dry-erase board that took up most of the wall beside the door. It was covered with random scribbles of information, no doubt most or all of it concerning Breach entities. The guy seemed pretty absorbed by it. He’d probably been with Pilgrim for years, hearing all about Border Town and the Breach, and waiting for today. Well, tough shit for him if it all ended badly in the next sixty seconds.

Travis took a hard, silent breath. Set his teeth firmly together.

Then he pulled his hands apart with all of his strength.

The metal tore into the skin at once. Like razor wire. Then, deeper. Cutting not just skin but muscle, fat tissue. Cleaving across his tendons. The loop around his left wrist was the tighter of the two: within seconds he felt the metal pull taut against the wrist bone, and stop. It would go no farther. The loop around his right, looser by maybe two notches, eased over the wrist bone, slippery with the blood it’d already drawn. Beyond the wrist, it was home free. Everything else would compress, if only barely. The fit was still tight enough for the bladed loop to carve deep, though. At the pressure points—his base knuckles and the pad of his thumb—it grated against the bone, taking the meat off like a knife against a drumstick. If there was a limit to physical pain, this was it.

The loop came free with a jerk. His left elbow hit Paige, and she turned to him, her eyes still soaked and bloodshot. He looked quickly for the guards. Both were still looking away. Down the hall. Across the note board.

Travis brought his hands forward into his lap. The right one looked even worse than it felt. Thick ribbons of skin and muscle hung ragged, blood draining from the wounds in pencil-thick streams.

Even after the carnage Paige had just witnessed, she reacted to the sight. Only for a second. Then she got control. Looked at him, questioning. No way to explain to her what he was about to do. If he tried to rationalize it even in his own mind, he’d only convince himself it was a shit idea. It was a shit idea, but it had the benefit of no competition.

He got a bearing on the guards again. Both still looking away. He tipped forward into a crawl, grateful for his lack of shoes to scuff the floor, and started toward the backpack.

There was no point in even watching the guards. No move he could make in response if he saw them turn right now. It would just be over.

He kept his eyes on the backpack instead. Kept his focus on being silent, and moving as fast as that constraint allowed.

He reached the pack. Took hold of the zipper. Eased it open. Blood still streaming from his hand. When the pack was open wide enough, he reached in. Felt for what he needed, guided by his memory of what it looked like. He felt it, and gripped it with his shredded hand. Drew it from the pack and stood. The two guards were more or less centered in his vision, twenty feet away, ten feet apart. Both of their rifles slung on their shoulders, two full seconds from being ready to fire.

“You’re covered,” Travis said, his voice ringing hard in the dead space of the room.

The guards flinched and turned, and found themselves staring at the Medic in his hand. Hard to distinguish from a gun, even up close. And they weren’t up close. Neither man even tried for his rifle. Travis thought there was another reason for that, beyond the effective bluff of the Medic.

Pilgrim really did want him alive. They knew it. The indecision was etched in their eyes.

“I’d rather not risk the sound of a shot,” Travis said. “Otherwise you’d be dead already. Weapons down and you live.”

The guards traded a look. Hesitated another second. Then the one in the doorway complied, slowly unslinging his gun, bending low and setting it on the tile. The second did the same.

Travis indicated the floor in front of him. “Slide them.”

They did. Both rifles came to rest within feet of him.

“Now lie flat,” he said. “Arms away from your bodies.”

A few seconds later they were pressed like insect specimens to the floor, faces down. Travis considered the options. He really didn’t want to shoot. No telling how far away the nearest hostile was, or how far the sound would carry.

He set the Medic down, picked up one of their rifles, and crossed the space toward them, still moving silently to keep them unaware of his position. He stopped just shy of standing between them, reversed his hold on the rifle, and rammed it down onto each man’s head, the second guy reacting and turning just enough to take the blow on his temple instead of behind the ear.

Both of them out cold.

Not good enough.

Travis saw a jackknife clipped to the second man’s belt. It offered a quicker solution than physically breaking their heads apart, as much as he might have enjoyed the catharsis of doing that. He took the knife, opened it, and cut each gunman’s throat, carotid to carotid.

Still holding it, he turned to the others. He saw more relief than revulsion in their eyes. He tested the knife’s blade on the bind that still hung from his left wrist. It did nothing. It would take heavy-duty cutters to free Paige and the rest. He searched the guards’ bodies for a pair of them, but came up empty. And just as he finished, the first guard’s cell phone rang.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

And rang. And rang. Travis looked at Paige. She looked back, eyes wide, unsure for a second. Then very sure.

“There’s no time to free us,” she said. “Take my backpack and get to the surface through the elevator shaft. Use my phone to call for—”

He shook his head, moving toward her and the others, the guard’s phone still ringing behind him. “There’s gotta be a way to get you guys free—”

“Listen to me,” she said. “They’ll be here in sixty seconds. Take the pack. Go to the elevator, press the call button three times, then hold it for a five-count. The doors will open on the empty shaft.”

“Ten of us against them, he said, we can double the guards’ rifles and ammo—”

“And Pilgrim will turn on the gas again,” she said.

He had no counter for that.

She was right.

Shit.

He felt every good option break off and fall away, like pieces of blacktop over a washed-out cavity in the soil.

“They blew the roof off the elevator shaft when they came in,” Paige said. “You can get all the way out. You’ll see the inset ladder when you open the doors. When you reach the surface, call the ninth number on my phone’s list. By then, you’ll understand why.”

He stared at her. Stared at the others, too. They looked back at him, almost as lost as the dead that lined the wall.

He had to leave them. It wasn’t even a choice. That didn’t take away the guilt, though.

The crucial seconds were racing by. He shook the trance and looked down at his still bleeding right hand. The blood trail would give him away. He stooped and grabbed the Medic from where he’d dropped it. Held it in his left hand. Aimed it at his right, the way Paige had aimed it at the wounded man in Zurich.

He pulled the trigger, and found out he’d been wrong a few minutes earlier when carving his hand with the metal loop. That hadn’t been the limit to how bad pain could be. Not even close.

His breath rushed out. The edges of his vision darkened. He held on. Stayed on his feet. Looked down at his hand as the pain faded. The thing hadn’t fixed him perfectly—skin and muscle still hung in strips—but the wounds had hardened over, as if cauterized without any sign of being burned.

He grabbed the backpack, shouldered it and turned to the others.

“Ninth number on my phone,” Paige said again. “And don’t get killed.”

Travis managed a smile. No more seconds to burn. He burned one anyway. Knelt and kissed her. Soft, intense, fast. Then he stood, looked at her for another half second, and ran from the room, grabbing one of the guards’ rifles as he went.

As he reached the elevator doors, he saw the stairwell door next to them shudder. Some other door in the stairwell, high above or below, had just been opened. They were coming.

Three presses of the button, then hold for a five-count. He reached to do it, then stopped.

Fifty feet away, Paige’s office door stood open. On her desk, where he’d left it yesterday, was the black case containing the transparency suit.

Twenty seconds to reach it and come back to this spot. None to spare thinking about it. He sprinted for the office. Through the open door. Grabbed the case, turned, ran hell-bent for the elevators again. Three presses. Hold for five. Those five seconds felt like minutes.

The elevator doors parted on darkness, with faint light coming down from high above. He saw the elevator cab just a few stories below, its roof a mess of piled cable. Its brakes must have stopped it against the wall. To his left he saw the inset ladder. He wedged the black plastic case into his waistband and stepped to the rungs.

As he climbed, he saw that Paige had been right. The top of the shaft had been blown away, revealing a patch of deep violet sky with a few stars visible in it. That opening was ten stories above. Even as he considered the impossibility of reaching the top before Pilgrim’s people arrived and saw the elevator doors standing open, he felt the ladder rungs vibrate in his hands. A moment later he heard the deep clatter of their footsteps descending past him in the stairwell on the other side of the wall. Any second now—

With a muted ding the doors onto the shaft slid shut twenty feet below. The soft thump of their merging synched perfectly with the crash of the stairwell door being kicked open, and the riot of running footsteps in the corridor just outside.

Travis remained frozen on the ladder, the rifle in one hand, and sighted on the closed doors.

The footsteps faded.

But they’d be back soon. When they reached the conference room, how long would it take them to figure out where he’d gone? Where else was there?

Travis slung the rifle and climbed again, quickly. Seconds still counted.

Pilgrim wasn’t with the men who rushed into the conference room. Five of them. Armed. Pissed. They reacted to the two dead gunmen, then saw the blood trail leading from their corpses to the group of captives. The path Travis had taken. One or two of the men looked down, seeking a continuation of the trail out of the room and confused at not finding one.

“Where’s the hero?” the first gunman said.

Paige said nothing. She wondered if they’d start executing the survivors to make one of them talk.

Then the man who’d spoken seemed to figure it out—enough to make a decision, anyway. He turned and led his group out, leaving one behind to watch the room. Ten seconds later Paige heard them stop at the elevator shaft and begin straining to pry apart the doors manually.

She felt her stomach twist. It was happening too fast. Unless Travis had climbed very, very quickly, he couldn’t be out yet. She heard the straining voices suddenly pick up an echo: they’d opened the doors to the shaft. An instant later they were firing. Full auto. So many shooting at once, it was just a monotone roar. She could picture them, not even looking up the shaft as they reached in and fired. Not needing to, with that kind of firepower. Nothing up there could live.

She tried to make herself ready for the sound that was coming.

She heard it. She wasn’t ready.

A man’s scream, drenched with the kind of terror only something primal could induce. Like a long fall. The scream echoed down the shaft from somewhere high above. Then silence—even the guns had stopped. A full second later came the impact, something crashing down onto the roof of the elevator cab as loud as a grenade blast.

It might as well have been her own body hitting, for the effect the sound had on her. Tears again, hard and unbound. They did nothing for the pain.

Voices in the hall. The men coming back. Laughing about something. She wiped her eyes on the knees of her jeans, and looked up as they entered the room. They were lugging Travis’s body, one man to a limb. They dropped him right in front of Paige.

Travis’s eyes—not quite staring in the same direction as each other—were pointed more or less toward her, and the side of his head was caved in to the depth of a soup bowl.

She wanted to hold in the screams, both to save face in front of her people and to deny Pilgrim’s men the satisfaction.

Neither reason was enough.

When she finally got control—a little control, anyway—she found that Pilgrim’s men were still there. Staring at her, it seemed. No. At the space beside her. Where Travis had been bound earlier. They were looking at that space, and at his body lying on the ground.

They looked scared.

Like they’d just realized exactly who they’d killed. The man their boss specifically wanted alive, for whatever reason.

“What do we tell Pilgrim?” one of them said.

The largest of them shook his head. “Nothing. Hour from now, he’ll have the Primary Lab open. That’ll make him happy, maybe enough not to fucking kill us for this.”

They left the room, leaving three behind on guard.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

There was nothing left of the pole barn on the surface. The walls and roof had been blown away by the same blast that had ripped open the top of the elevator shaft. Probably a football-sized lump of C4 dropped from high above by one of Pilgrim’s men, on the way down.

Travis stood next to the gaping hole in the concrete, surrounded by open desert, cool in the predawn twilight. To his left, the pile of old cars that had leaned against the back wall of the building had been sent sprawling. All that had withstood the explosion had been a heavy-duty charging station for the all-terrain electric carts. Two of the three carts were wrecked, but one of them, plugged in and charging on the far side of the station, had been sheltered from the blast wave and remained intact.

After all the strange things he’d experienced in recent days, he’d just set the bar a few clicks higher. Somehow the word replica didn’t quite capture the feeling of looking down at a perfect copy of your own body. Because, in a real sense, it hadn’t been a replica. It’d been him. Him, to the last atom.

Only dead.

There was a vague silver lining: once you’d stomached the surreality of looking into your own corpse’s glassy eyes, it didn’t take much more grit to shove it over the edge of an elevator shaft.

He put the Doubler back into the backpack, then set the pack aside and opened the black plastic case. He felt for the suit and found it.

He smiled.

This was going to be fun. Forget whoever Paige had wanted him to call for help. He had all the help he needed, right here in his hands. Just put on the suit, head back down the ladder, and kill Pilgrim and every last one of his people.

He had the suit halfway onto his shoulders when a thought stopped him.

Was this the Whisper’s intention?

Was this the plan?

Was he still on the horse, heading for Samarra?

For five seconds he stood there, the cadence of night insects filtering in from the desert.

This move made sense.

But maybe that was the problem. Maybe that made it predictable. Fuck, everything was predictable to the Whisper. Like Paige had said, even trying to be unpredictable was probably predictable, to that thing. The zigzag logic made his head hurt. He dropped the suit’s upper half back into the case and cursed quietly.

Who had Paige wanted him to call?

He crouched over the backpack and took out her phone. The ninth number on the speed-dial list had no name beside it. Just the number. He selected it and pressed send.

A man answered on the first ring. “Go ahead, Miss Campbell.”

“I’m calling on Miss Campbell’s behalf,” Travis said. “My name is Travis Chase. She instructed me to call this number.”

The man on the other end hesitated. Then Travis heard someone talking in the background, and a sound like the phone changing hands.

Another man spoke. Travis recognized his voice. “Mr. Chase. This is Richard Garner. What’s going on there?”

Richard Garner. The president of the United States.

CHAPTER FORTY

Garner had been briefed on all events surrounding Tangent in recent days. Travis filled in the last half hour. When he’d finished, a silence drew out on the line.

The darkness blanketing the desert had begun to lift. Far away to the southwest, sunlight touched the tips of the Rockies.

“You say the defenses are currently down?” Garner said.

“Yes,” Travis said, “but how much longer is a guess. No more than twenty minutes, I’d say.”

“It’s not enough time to get troops on-site. Not enough by half. That option’s off the table …”

Something in his tone gave Travis a bad feeling about what was on the table. If it was what he expected, he understood why Paige had really sent him up here to make this call.

Garner told him the option. Travis had been right.

“Mr. President,” he said, “there are survivors inside this building.”

“I realize that. We have to think about the world’s interests right now.”

“What about the entities inside? The dangerous ones? Do we know how those will react? How the Breach itself will react?”

“No,” Garner said. “We don’t. But scenarios like this one have long been considered from every angle, by people who understand the factors in play better than your or I. This is the only choice we have. The missile will come from a silo about two hundred miles away, which means it’ll reach Border Town in less than five minutes from the time I give the order. I’m sure your own safety is not on your mind right now, but if you have access to a vehicle, you could probably get outside the kill radius during that time.”

Travis was silent. No, he hadn’t been thinking of his own safety. Still wasn’t.

Instead, another thought had come to him. Or almost come to him. He remembered grappling for it during the night, when he’d woken with Paige in his arms. Some connection he’d made, some insight at the edge of sleep. It was close to the surface again.

“Mr. Chase?” the President said.

Travis didn’t answer. If he spoke now, if he did anything but feel for this idea, he would lose it.

“Mr. Chase?”

Another several seconds passed. Close. Right at the boundary of his awareness.

“Travis,” Garner said.

It bloomed. Clear as a captioned image on a screen. He saw its meaning.

And its significance.

He saw hope, too. Hope that the Whisper could be beaten, after all. Right now it was tucked away in its little box. Right now, everyone in Border Town, good and bad, thought he was dead. And right now, there was a chance to find the one thing on Earth that the Whisper seemed to fear. Why else would it have killed all those people working to create it? That was a lot of smoke for no fire.

“There’s another option,” Travis said.

This next part would require a lie. A half lie, anyway. Or else it would never work.

“I’m listening,” Garner said.

Travis explained about Lauren. About the quantum computer. Then he said, “We know where it is.” That was the half lie. There was no we. Just he. He knew where it was. Thought he knew, at least.

“Where?” Garner said.

Travis told him what he believed. Then the president grew silent again.

“The Tangent detachment is still on Grand Cayman,” Garner said at last. “They could probably reach the house in about ten minutes. It’ll take another ten for them to do what you’ve described. If we make this gamble, and come up empty, we’ll have lost the nuclear option as well. Border Town’s defenses, once they’re back up and running, can kill an ICBM a long way off.”

Travis thought about it. Turned the possible outcomes over in his mind.

Garner said, “I need a zero-bullshit answer from you, Mr. Chase. How high is Tangent’s confidence on this idea?”

Travis got as close to zero-bullshit as he dared. “There’s no better move to make, sir.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Travis watched it all on Paige’s cell phone screen, linked to the headset camera of the detachment leader on Grand Cayman. The man’s last name, Keene, appeared in tiny letters in the lower left corner of the frame. The team reached the house in just under the ten minutes the president had guessed, speeding at eighty miles per hour along the coast road, the Caribbean bright blue in the sunlight there.

Eastern Wyoming was still mostly dark, a few minutes before full daybreak. Travis sat on the concrete beside the fifty-one-story-deep hole in the ground, and watched the team enter the estate two thousand miles away. They reached the mechanical shed beside the pool within half a minute.

“You expect this to work, huh?” Keene said. He had a Texas accent. One of those guys who’d grown up roping cattle and gone on to design guidance systems for cruise missiles. Probably still roped cattle for fun.

“We’ll know in a minute,” Travis said.

One of the operators found a heavy, two-foot-long steel tool on the wall, its business end shaped to pry something specific. The guy set his rifle aside, took off all electrical gear, and dove into the pool with the implement in hand. Through Keene’s headset, Travis saw the man pry up a drain plate on the bottom of the pool, then swim to the side.

The pool took only a few minutes to empty. The outgoing pipes must be as oversized as the system built to fill the pool. A system five times faster and more powerful than what any homeowner would realistically install, regardless of personal net worth. Who the hell needed to fill his pool in an hour?

Someone who had something hidden beneath it.

Keene and the others descended the ladder to the wet stone bottom of the emptied pool. Travis watched Keene’s viewpoint scan the flagstones, looking for a telltale sign of what had to be there. After a moment, the image stopped on one particular stone.

“Grout’s different around this one,” Keene said.

Even in the resolution of the cell phone’s screen, Travis could see what he was talking about. Keene called for one of the others to bring the pry bar again. Its squared head worked well enough to gouge away the sanded grout around the slab. When the gap was deep enough for the tool to get a purchase, Keene wedged it in and pried. The stone resisted for only a second, then gave with a grind—and a hiss like a seal breaking. Hands reached into the frame and lifted it away to reveal a narrow shaft descending into darkness, with built-in rungs.

A minute later the team was inside the chamber below. It was larger than Travis had expected: forty by forty feet at least, extending far beneath the house itself. Steel beams as solid as bridge supports crisscrossed the ceiling, braced by upright columns every fifteen feet or so.

It looked like what he’d expected. It looked like a computer lab. Workstations. Wiring schematics spread out on desks. Swivel chairs everywhere. Some kind of makeshift conference table: a line of smaller tables shoved together, surrounded by more chairs.

But no quantum computer.

Nothing even close. There were laptops on some of the desks. The Tangent operators turned each one on and saw the familiar onscreen brand logos before the password prompts came up.

Otherwise, the place was empty of equipment.

Travis felt as lost as he had at any time since his hike in the Brooks Range had been interrupted. How could it not be there? Why had the Whisper killed all of those people if they didn’t have anything that could affect it?

Keene’s viewpoint made a last sweep of the room, as he turned to follow his men back up the ladder.

“Wait,” Travis said.

The viewpoint halted.

“What is it?” Keene said.

“On the wall above the conference table. What is that?”

Keene looked at it. Moved closer. It was a huge oil painting, abstract, scratches of dark green on a white surface.

“It’s nothing,” Keene said.

“It’s everything,” Travis said.

He looked at the phone’s onscreen menu buttons. One was labeled CAPTURE.

“Do me a favor,” Travis said. He directed Keene to go closer, until the painting more than filled the phone’s screen, and he captured freeze-frames of its four quadrants. At that resolution it became legible.

A message from the Whisper. Written in the scratch language. Travis switched back and forth through the screen captures, and read it:

HELLO, TRAVIS. RIGHT NOW YOU MUST BE SITTING NEAR THE OPEN ELEVATOR SHAFT ABOVE BORDER TOWN, ABOUT NINETY SECONDS BEFORE SUNRISE. I’VE SEEN TO IT THAT AARON PILGRIM DOES NOT REMEMBER PAINTING THIS PIECE, NOR DOES HE REMEMBER SELLING IT TO THE GALLERY THAT ELLIS COOK WOULD ONE DAY VISIT WHILE ON VACATION IN ZURICH WITH HIS DAUGHTER. I’M SORRY TO INFORM YOU THAT THERE IS NO PLUS-TEN-QUBIT QUANTUM COMPUTER INSIDE THIS HOUSE, OR ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, IN JUNE OF 2009. THE ORDER OF THE QUBIT WAS NEVER EVEN CLOSE TO REACHING ITS GOAL. YOU MAY FIND IT GROSSLY INEFFICIENT TO MURDER THIRTY-SEVEN PEOPLE OVER A DECADE AND A HALF, JUST TO GIVE YOU A REASON TO KEEP THE PRESIDENT FROM NUKING BORDER TOWN TWENTY MINUTES AGO, BUT REALLY, IT WAS A PRETTY SIMPLE MOVE FROM MY POINT OF VIEW. AS OF THE MOMENT YOU REACH THE PERIOD AT THE END OF THIS SENTENCE, BORDER TOWN’S SURFACE-TO-AIR DEFENSES WILL COME BACK ONLINE, ELIMINATING THE NUCLEAR OPTION. YOU NOW HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO FOLLOW YOUR FIRST INSTINCT: PUT ON THE TRANSPARENCY SUIT AND MAKE YOUR MOVE AGAINST PILGRIM AND HIS PEOPLE. I’LL MAKE YOU A PROMISE: IF YOU DO IT (YOU WILL) THEN PAIGE CAMPBELL WILL SURVIVE. IN ALL OTHER POSSIBLE FUTURES, SHE DIES JUST OVER ELEVEN MINUTES FROM NOW. I’LL SEE YOU SOON, OLD FRIEND, AND WHEN I DO, YOU’LL FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL REALLY ABOUT. HAVE FUN.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Climbing down the shaft ladder with the suit on was tricky. There was a difficulty to grabbing rungs with hands he couldn’t see. He only had to go down two stories. From there he used an override switch to open the B2 elevator doors, and stepped out of the shaft into the hallway. He’d asked Keene for the locations of Defense Control, Security Control, and the Primary Lab. The places where Pilgrim and his men were clustered. Defense Control was on B4. He entered the stairwell and made his way down.

Through the window in the door he saw four men, all in their twenties, watching a bank of high-definition monitors as if each were showing the last play of the Super Bowl. In fact they were showing the empty desert around the facility. It appeared to be a single large room. No internal hallways leading off out of sight. No blind corners. There was a bathroom, but its door hung open and Travis could see that it was empty. No one else in the room except the headshot bodies of its original occupants: the woman Travis had heard over the speakerphone earlier, and five men.

Along the wall opposite the monitors, the drywall had been blown out by an explosion, and even the structural steel columns were warped and charred. Between two of the uprights, a spiderweb of delicate wiring and various computer cables—hundreds of each kind—had been attached to the damaged wiring with clamps and adapters. This was the half hour’s work that’d brought Border Town’s defenses back online.

Travis had the rifle slung on his shoulder. The only visible thing about him. He could go in and shoot these four guys in a matter of seconds, even without the suit; not one of them had a weapon within reach. But directly below this room was Security Control, where more of Pilgrim’s people were probably stationed. The sound of shooting would carry at least that far, so these four kills would have to be quiet. Pretty quiet, anyway.

He unslung the rifle and leaned it against the wall next to the door. Then, keeping his eyes on the men through the glass, he turned the knob slowly and eased the door open. A moment later he eased it shut again, from the inside. All heads were still aimed at the monitors.

How to do this? There were options. Strewn across the floor below the repaired wiring were various tools, some with blades on them, though not especially large ones. There were screwdrivers that might serve as decent stabbing weapons, including an eight-inch Phillips head. Last, but not even close to least, was a tool that appealed to Travis’s lack of subtlety. A two-foot-long crowbar. Travis picked it up with both hands, to prevent it from scraping on the tile and giving him away. He turned to the four men, their backs to him, and gripped the weapon like a baseball bat. He looked at the executed bodies on the floor, their open eyes still registering the panic in which they’d died.

He didn’t feel at all bad for what he was about to do.

The four men were seated only feet apart from one another. A nice easy row of targets. Travis decided to start on the right end and work his way left, to give his swing plenty of room.

The first impact sounded like a wet branch breaking. Travis caught the man just above the ear and crushed the sidewall of his skull inward by at least an inch. The body pitched sideways into the second man, who turned his head just in time to take his own hit straight to the forehead. His eyes snapped shut and he fell from his chair also. The third man had another second to react. He had no idea what the hell was happening, but his arms had enough sense to cross in front of his face as he screamed. Not a useful strategy. Travis stepped toward him and brought the crowbar down on top of his scalp the way he would sink an axe into a log. The result was much the same.

Only the fourth man fully grasped what was happening. He threw himself from his chair, landed on his ass and skittered backward, ending up with his back in the corner and his arms up defensively. He watched the crowbar bob toward him.

“Wait, wait!” the guy said. He looked about twenty-five. Still had some acne left over from his teens. Had to be wondering who the fuck was wearing his boss’s old transparency suit. He seemed to be working out what he might say, here and now, to save his ass. In a way, it was fun to watch. Because nothing in the English language would suffice.

“You can just tie me up,” he said at last.

Travis thought that sounded like an especially lame effort. He kept the crowbar up high, commanding the guy’s attention, and kicked him just below the ribs as hard as he could. The guy’s lungs collapsed from the blow and he caved into a sitting fetal position, crying. Travis brought the crowbar down on the back of his head, full force, and the crying stopped.

Silence in the room. These four were definitely dead. Travis gave each man another two solid bashes to be sure. Then he took a pair of wire cutters from the floor, pocketed them, and returned to the corridor.

He took the rifle from where he’d leaned it, but kept the crowbar. Went to the stairwell and descended one floor to B5. Security Control. Pilgrim’s nearest people, after this floor, should be five levels down in the conference room, watching Paige and the others. Still too close to risk gunshots. Sound might carry that far through the vents.

Security Control had the same kind of door as Defense Control. Same room layout too. But only one of Pilgrim’s men was on duty.

Travis went in and beat him to death.

In a way, the past half hour had been worse than the time Paige had spent under torture in Alaska. If not physically, then in every other sense.

All that she had devoted her life to was about to end. Worse: it would be inverted to its malicious opposite. What Tangent had watched over and shepherded with the best interests of the world in mind, Pilgrim would sic on humanity to serve himself. Or if the Whisper’s own plan really did take precedence, maybe something worse was coming. Something beyond the limits of what she could dread.

She’d spent these thirty minutes thinking of the most dangerous things locked up in the steel catacombs below her, and the harm they could sow.

Then there was Travis’s corpse. Still lying right in front of her. She’d woken up naked in his arms forty-five minutes ago, about as happy as she’d ever been since restricting her life to Border Town. Now he was gone. Because of what she’d asked him to do. It didn’t help to remind herself there’d been no other option. Nothing helped.

She looked at the guards. Three of them now. All of them watching, not even glancing away. No chance to make any move. Except to make them kill her.

Which wasn’t entirely crazy.

She knew what it felt like to wish for death as an escape. Whatever the hell Pilgrim was keeping her and the others alive for, it was likely to put her back in those straits. Very likely.

Fuck it, then.

The nearest guard was five feet away from her. Offering no warning about her intentions, she pitched her body forward into a somersault—tricky with her hands bound behind her—and came upright again with her right leg drawn against her chest, a foot away from the man. He drew back reflexively, one leg going back, the other staying in place, the knee locking straight. Beautiful.

Paige pistoned her foot into his knee as hard as she could. Heard it crack. Saw the leg bend exactly backward from the way nature had designed it to. He screamed and collapsed, keeping hold of his rifle, and centering it on her face now.

She closed her eyes, and a second later the room exploded with automatic rifle fire.

Whatever dying was supposed to feel like, this wasn’t it. She heard bodies falling. Wondered how the hell she was capable of hearing anything. Or even thinking, given that her head should have been shattered by now.

The shooting stopped.

She opened her eyes.

The three guards were dead. And there was a rifle floating in the air.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Travis couldn’t tell if there was more happiness or anger in her embrace. Either one might account for the fierceness of it. Over her shoulder, he saw the others passing the wire cutters along one by one, each freed person flexing circulation back into near-dead hands.

On the table beside him lay the backpack, which he’d worn under the suit, and the top half of the suit itself, which he’d taken off a moment earlier.

At last Paige let go of him and met his eyes. She had only a little difficulty finding her voice. “It’s against the rules to double human bodies, you know.”

“I’m new here,” he said. “Gimme a break.”

He glanced at his corpse on the floor. Christ, it was a sight.

Behind Paige, the last of the survivors had been freed. Some were looking at Travis, but most were watching the doorway warily.

Travis turned to the backpack, unzipped it, and took out the Doubler. “You guys can make enough weapons to protect yourselves, if anyone else shows up here. But I think all the rest are working on the blast doors on B42.”

He picked up the top half of the transparency suit again. “I’ll go take care of them now.”

He saw Paige’s eyes after he said that. Saw that she wanted to go with him, her instinct compelling her to put herself in harm’s way before others, or at least share the danger. But the obvious didn’t need stating: the suit’s advantage only worked if he went alone.

So instead she only nodded. “They’ll be on a maintenance rig suspended in the elevator shaft from the floor above. It’s the only way to access those doors.”

He nodded, kissed her, then pulled on the suit top.

It was strange, watching her eyes lose him. She was still looking at where his face had been.

He turned toward the three guards he’d killed a moment before. Two of them wore holstered pistols in addition to the rifles they’d carried. The advantage of a pistol, small enough to conceal beneath the transparency suit, was obvious. Travis had seen that advantage annihilate a team of heavily armed men in Alaska, and had come within a second or two of falling prey to it himself. It didn’t escape him that the tables were now precisely turned. He was the one in the suit this time, going up against the Whisper. If he made the slightest mistake, and allowed Pilgrim time to take it out of its box, the suit would be of no help at all. It hadn’t been for its last owner.

But he didn’t think it would happen that way. It would be nothing so simple. Not after all this. Not after reading the message on Ellis Cook’s painting.

He was resigned now to whatever fate the Whisper had mapped out for him, and for the world. There was simply no avoiding it. There was only hitting it head-on and finding out what the hell it was.

He took the nearest guard’s pistol—a .45—and the two spare clips in the man’s pocket, and started for the door.

Then he stopped. And though no one could see it, he smiled.

“The elevator is three stories below us,” he said. “The cables are broken, so its brakes against the shaft wall must’ve stopped it.”

“Yeah,” Paige said, looking toward the sound of his voice.

“Anyone know how to override them?”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Pilgrim stood at the wedged-open shaft doors and stared down into the semi-darkness. Ten feet below, his fat-ass second in command, Jackley, with the help of three others, was making good progress on the blast doors. It was tedious work. The hanging platform—its suspension cables came up through the open doors to anchor blocks bolted into the corridor floor—made a terrible base from which to drill. The harder Jackley pushed the carbide bit against the steel, the more the platform itself moved. To cope with this long-foreseen problem, the others on the platform had two-by-fours that they propped against the shaft wall, opposite the drilling focus. The nearer end of each two-by-four had a flat board tacked onto it, and Jackley braced his back against these as he drilled. It was a tricky solution that required a lot of hands and attention, but it did the job.

Pilgrim wasn’t stressed about it. In truth, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt stress of any kind. How could he, with the Whisper in his service, leading him all these years to the goal he’d demanded of it?

Control of Border Town.

Control of all the powerful things that lay inside the Primary Lab, just beyond the blast doors below. So many of the wonders in there, Tangent had never fully understood. Entities that were obviously built for great and terrible purposes, but which the researchers had never learned how to operate. How to even switch on, in some cases.

The Whisper would know, though. Once he was in there, he’d have everything he needed.

Over the years, he’d learned not to question the snaking course it had charted for him. It was a great big thing that he’d asked of it. A thing he’d have never accomplished on his own. So of course the plan would be puzzling to him. Of course it would be elaborate and confusing. That was part of its power. And now it’d worked. He was here because he’d trusted the Whisper and followed its plotted track exactly.

Even keeping the survivors alive upstairs. Including Chase. Chase, whose importance the Whisper had emphasized above all others. Pilgrim had only vaguely wondered why. Maybe the guy would turn out to be an exceptionally useful subordinate for him, given time enough, and pressure. Who knew? Who cared? If the Whisper wanted him here, that was enough.

Below, Jackley was using the carbide bit as more of a blade than a drill, cutting a manhole-sized circle into the foot-thick blast door. Now he hooted excitedly, because he’d come back around to where he’d started. The drill bit met the beginning of its own circular track, and the excised plug of steel dropped an inch, settling on the bottom of the widened opening with a heavy thud.

“Magnet,” Jackley said.

The man behind him lifted the battery-powered workhorse magnet from the platform and handed it to him. Jackley held the magnet’s base against the steel plug, and switched it on. With a bass hum, it drew itself against the metal hard enough to pull Jackley off balance. Now each man on the platform took hold of the magnet’s broad handle and leaned back, drawing on it.

“Careful now,” Jackley said. “Closer she gets, the softer we pull.”

The plug slid outward, two inches, then four, then six. At eight inches it began to tilt, and Jackley stopped the others with a gesture.

“Pull us away,” he said.

The others gripped the beams on the shaft wall and pulled the hanging platform back from the blast door, allowing the plug plenty of room to fall without landing on the platform itself. Jackley leaned forward carefully, his stomach braced against the platform’s safety rail, and gave the magnet one last tug.

The plug tipped out of the opening and tumbled away into the pitch blackness below. Silence as it plummeted nine stories. Then, impact. Like a battleship’s deck gun going off. Pilgrim felt the reverb in his bones. He loved it. Loved everything about this moment. Jackley and the others looked up at him, grinning like idiot kids. It made him laugh.

Only one thing left. Jackley just had to wriggle his body through the hole in the blast door and hit the override, ten feet inside the lab. Then the doors would open wide. The men let go of the shaft wall, and the platform swung to the center again. Jackley grabbed hold of the opening, steadied his footing, and shoved his head and upper body through. In a few seconds he was halfway in, his legs kicking comically in space as the men laughed and pushed on his feet to help him.

Then came a scream from overhead, somewhere in the inky darkness of the shaft, high above. Not a human scream. A metal scream. Some mechanism protesting with a squeal of friction. And then surrendering. Silence.

The men stopped laughing, and looked up.

Jackley stopped kicking. “Fuck was that?” he said, his voice muffled through the opening, which was mostly filled with his ass now.

For another second, nothing happened. Then Pilgrim felt a breeze. Gentle as a sigh, it blew straight down the elevator shaft and through the open doorway around him. The men down on the platform reacted to it as well; it tousled their hair about in little whipping motions.

Then one of them flinched hard, and screamed like a ten-year-old girl. A second later the world in front of Pilgrim’s face filled with blurring metal, there and gone in the same half second, and the support lines for the maintenance rig snapped with guitar-string twangs, just audible over the sickening crash from right below. Pilgrim staggered back from the open doors, and two seconds later, down at the bottom of the shaft, came an impact that dwarfed that of the steel plug a minute earlier.

The echoes took forever to fade. When they did, Pilgrim heard against the silence a high, keening cry. He returned to the open doors and gazed down on the blank darkness where, seconds before, the rig had hung. Now there was only empty space. It took him a moment longer to process what else he was staring at, and then he understood where the cry was coming from.

Jackley. Guillotined neatly through, where the elevator had scraped past the opening in the blast doors. Sliced like a cross-section in an anatomy textbook, right through his ass, blood pumping from his severed body like water from a compressed sponge. He was still alive. His upper half still hung there inside the lab, out of Pilgrim’s sight. But not out of his hearing. The crying went on and on, high-pitched and incoherent.

This could not be part of the fucking plan. How the hell had the Whisper let it happen?

Pilgrim turned. His eyes went to the hinged steel box five feet away, blue light flaring from the seam.

But he didn’t move toward it. His eyes locked onto something else, which stopped him in his tracks.

A .45. Hanging in thin air. Three feet away. Aimed at his face.

The hallway fell silent. Even Jackley’s cries had stopped. The gun hovered, granite steady.

“But I did everything it told me to do,” Pilgrim said at last, hearing a tremor in his speech. “Right to the end.”

“And that’s where you are,” a man’s voice said.

Pilgrim saw the gun’s muzzle flash, but didn’t live long enough to hear the shot.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

He could let it be over now.

Pilgrim was dead. The Whisper was in its box. He could wait for Paige and the others to come down. They were sprinting down through the stairwell right now, from thirty stories above. They’d be here in a couple minutes.

He could let it end just like this.

Only he couldn’t.

Because the Whisper had been out there all these years, seeding the world with vines that all converged on this moment. Something very big was about to happen, whether or not he left the Whisper in its box. He could feel it. All that this thing had ever done, in its twenty years on Earth, had been to place Travis in this corridor, at this moment, alone.

For a reason.

Time to find out what it was.

He crouched, set the gun aside, unlatched the steel box and opened it. Blue light blazed. He pulled off the top of the transparency suit and dropped it against the wall, and with his bare hand, he lifted the Whisper from the box.

There was no trance effect this time. No erotic intensity pushing his logic and willpower aside. Just Emily Price’s voice, steady and even.

“Hello, Travis.”

“Hello,” he said.

“All appearances to the contrary, I really have no tendency toward screwing around. Let’s get right to it, shall we?”

“Let’s,” Travis said.

“There’s something very important coming out of the Breach, just over three minutes from now. Entity 0697. It’s critical that you be there to receive it. You alone.”

“What is Entity 0697?”

“You’ll see. It’s time to make your way down now, Travis. While you do that, I’ll tell you as much as I’m sanctioned to tell you.”

Travis looked at the stairwell door, through which Paige and the others would arrive in the next minute or so. Then he went past it, to the elevator shaft, and stepped onto the inset ladder inside. Only the elevator shaft went all the way to B51.

He descended, unhindered by the Whisper in his hand; he freed two fingers from around it to grip the rungs. The blue light settled into the rhythm of his pulse, flaring over and over on the dull walls of the shaft.

“I’ll tell you the story of your life,” the Whisper said, “the way it would’ve gone if I hadn’t come along and started changing things. Fifteen years in prison. You get out. You do not move to Alaska. You join your brother’s software business in Minneapolis. He shows you the ropes. You learn very quickly. Programming, it turns out, is only another species of detective work, at which you’re a natural. It’s all about cause-and-effect logic, if/then reasoning, shot through a prism of creativity. Your insight greatly enhances the development of your brother’s fledgling artificial intelligence system, Whitebird. Over the years it progresses through iterative leaps, the major upgrades corresponding to the belt-color rankings of martial arts, in reference to the old eight-bit Karate games it was once tested on. First iteration, Whitebird. Second iteration, Yellowbird. Third, Greenbird. By April of 2014 your brother has put the project entirely under your control. You create Bluebird, which Sony purchases for two hundred forty million dollars. It becomes a standard bearer for video-game intelligence. Tangent takes notice of you. In October of that same year they recruit you to live at Border Town and design specialized software and hardware for them, based on the Bluebird architecture. You rise to prominence within Tangent in short order. At some point after that—here I’m limited in what exactly I can tell you—things begin to go badly.”

“Badly how?”

He passed B48, the numbers stenciled on the inside of the shaft doors.

“It’s better if I don’t say any more about it,” the Whisper said, “until you see Entity 0697 for yourself.”

The Whisper fell silent. Travis didn’t bother to question it further.

The shaft brightened as he descended. He looked down and saw light streaming in at the bottom, illuminating the pancaked wreck of the elevator cab. The impact had blown out the shaft doors on B51. The light was shining in from the concrete corridor on that level. The elevator had compressed so much that it only blocked the bottom half of the opening. There would be room to slide through easily.

Travis reached the rung above the elevator. The roof was bent and canted to the side but looked sturdy enough. He stepped onto it, and a moment later he was in the corridor, staring toward the dark shell that enclosed the Breach. Around his feet, blood soaked the concrete, pooling in every imperfection in its surface.

“Travis?” It was Paige’s voice, coming down to him from high above. “Travis, where are you?” Her tone, confused and unnerved, made him want to answer. Made him want to call up the shaft, tell her it was all okay, he’d be right with her.

“You need to receive it alone,” the Whisper said.

It wasn’t forcing his mind. Only telling him. He nodded, and set off down the corridor, Paige’s voice calling again behind him, over and over.

To the end of the corridor. To the giant black dome. To the igloo entrance, and through its glass door.

The Breach waited in its little soundproof cage. Purple and blue, its depth receding to a vanishing point.

He could already see the entity coming. A shape against the dazzle of the tunnel’s colored light. Something white, and nearly weightless, wafting along the passageway like a feather through an air duct. But it wasn’t a feather. Not quite. Maybe thirty yards away down the tunnel now. Twenty. Ten.

Travis opened the door, and the Breach Voices pierced him at once, like scalpel tips into his eardrums. He thought of Dave Bryce, stuck down here with this sound until it drove him mad.

Entity 0697 emerged from the Breach and drifted down onto the receiving platform. It was a single sheet of paper, with writing on it.

Travis stooped to pick it up, expecting the Whisper’s scratch language, or maybe some alien script he wouldn’t recognize at all.

Instead it was neatly handwritten English.

He stepped back from the glass door and let it fall shut again, mercifully silencing the Breach Voices. But by that time he’d forgotten all about them. He’d forgotten everything else in the world, except what was written on the paper in his hands.

THIS IS A MESSAGE FROM PAIGE CAMPBELL TO PAIGE CAMPBELL. I AM SENDING IT FROM A POINT IN THE FUTURE WHICH I WILL NOT DISCLOSE. AS VERIFICATION THAT THIS IS REALLY PAIGE, MY FAVORITE PASSAGE OF ANY NOVEL IS THE LAST PARAGRAPH BEFORE THE EPILOGUE OF WATERSHIP DOWN BY RICHARD ADAMS, A FACT I HAVE NEVER SHARED WITH ANYONE. AS VERIFICATION OF TIME, HERE ARE THE DETAILS OF A MINOR EARTHQUAKE THAT WILL OCCUR BENEATH THE MOJAVE DESERT THREE DAYS AFTER THIS MESSAGE ARRIVES. MAG 2.35, DATE JULY 3, 2009, 10:48 UTC, LAT 34.915, LON –118.072, DEPTH 14.32KM. THIS MESSAGE IS AN INSTRUCTION REGARDING A MAN NAMED TRAVIS CHASE. IN 2009 HE IS A SOFTWARE ENGINEER WHO LIVES IN MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA, AT 4161 KALMACH ST. FIND TRAVIS CHASE AND KILL HIM. MORE THAN 20 MILLION LIVES ARE AT STAKE.

Travis saw that the Whisper’s light was strobing faster than before. A lot faster. It was still matched to his pulse.

His eyes went back to the message. “This can’t be,” he said.

“It is,” the Whisper said. “She really wrote that, and really sent it, using technology that will eventually be developed by Dr. Fagan. Fagan’s theory turns out to be correct: objects can be sent into the Breach from this side, but they return without reaching the far end, and depending on their velocity, they can return before they were sent in. Even years and years before.”

Travis shook his head. Behind his disbelief, uncountable questions churned. His eyes tracked over the words on the paper again. Paige. Hating him. Wanting him dead.

“What am I, in the future?” he said. “Am I a monster?”

“Monster is a human label. It’s subjective. I could argue that you were a monster twenty minutes ago when you murdered four men with a crowbar and enjoyed it.”

“They deserved it.”

“Deserve is a human label too. It changes depending on who’s saying it.” The Whisper paused, its light reflecting off the glass of the Breach’s enclosure, and then said, “I can tell you this, objectively. The Travis Chase who joined Tangent by way of being a software engineer eventually became someone Paige Campbell wanted dead. Wanted it badly enough to send that note, to make it happen retroactively. That same Travis Chase found out about what she’d done, and in turn found a way to counteract her move. He had, by this time, developed his AI architecture to a system called Brownbird, which was radically advanced. But there was a way to improve its performance beyond what humans had ever thought was possible—beyond what even a quantum computer could do—by upgrading the hardware with Breach technology. It would be very difficult to describe for you how it works. Even the Travis Chase who built it didn’t fully understand its operation. The quick version is that it uses matter outside of itself for calculation, connecting to it by way of particles very close to what physicists in 2009 call gravitons. The system can set up spin computation in every elementary particle of a nearby lump of material—the planet Earth, for example. Yesterday, Paige told you how powerful a quantum computer with one hundred qubits would be. Imagine one with as many qubits as the Earth has quarks. That system is called Blackbird. Didn’t I promise to tell you my real name someday?”

“I created you?” Travis said. “I sent you … back to 1989?”

“Yes. For two purposes. First, to position your present self here and now, so that you would intercept Paige’s message to herself. Second, to arrange events such that you would still become a member of Tangent, as in the original timeline—though a few years earlier in this case.”

The coiled logic of it settled over Travis. Then, even through his confusion, he sensed a flaw in what the thing had told him.

“You’re wondering how I’ll be created now,” the Blackbird said. “This time around, you won’t join your brother’s business. You won’t become an AI designer. You won’t know how to build me. So how will I come to be?”

Travis waited for it to go on.

“Humans call this problem the grandfather paradox. They get tied up thinking about it. What happens if you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he meets your grandmother? Do you cease to exist, having prevented your own birth? No. Your arrival in the past becomes your birth, even if it means being born fully grown, with a head full of memories of a childhood that may never end up happening. It’s no different in my case: I may have once been built by Travis Chase, but my arrival in 1989 became my creation, superseding the other. The grandfather paradox is a fallacy. I exist. It’s that simple. And now I’ve done what I was sent to do, so I’ll be shutting down. Permanently.”

“Wait,” Travis said. “Tell me what happens in my future. What happens to turn me into … whatever I’m going to be? Can I avoid it?”

He heard the Blackbird laugh softly inside his head, as if it found that idea absurd. But it didn’t say so.

“I’m not supposed to talk about that.”

“But I don’t understand,” Travis said. “Did the other—did I … want to reset everything, and have a second chance? A chance to not become someone bad?”

“The Travis who sent me didn’t consider himself bad. Does anyone?”

Before he could ask anything else, the Blackbird flared bright in his hand. Bright enough to make him look away. He saw his own shadow projected on the wall, enormous and terrible. Then it vanished. He looked at the Blackbird again. Dark and dead in his hand.

“Travis?”

Paige. Behind him at the entry to the dome.

In his other hand he still held the note. It was in front of him; she hadn’t seen it yet.

He could show it to her. Tell her everything. Start off on the right track, find some way to prevent whatever it implied.

Her footsteps came toward him across the concrete.

He folded the paper and slid it into the waistband of the transparency suit, the bottom half of which he was still wearing. It vanished there half a second before Paige came around to meet his eyes.

He reacted as if he’d just become aware of her. As if he’d been gazing at the Breach, lost in it.

Lying to her already, before he’d even spoken.

She saw the Blackbird in his hand. Her eyes narrowed, confused.

“Did you take off its key?” she said. “It’s dangerous even without it—”

He held it up to the light, showed her the cellophane-like key still attached to it.

“It’s dead,” he said. “Shut down after I killed Pilgrim. I don’t know why.”

She held his eyes, stared deep into him. If she saw through what he was saying, it didn’t show. She moved closer. Her eyes softened. Her hand touched his arm.

“Hey,” she said. “It’s over. Whatever it was, it’s over.”

He nodded and managed something that wasn’t entirely a frown. She folded into his arms.

Over her shoulder, he found himself staring into the Breach. Blue and purple like a bruise, reaching away to infinity. He considered the track of his future, another path leading somewhere he couldn’t see. Leading to something that would remake him into a man Paige wanted dead. Something lying in his road, out there in the darkness, years and miles away from this moment. Waiting.

“It’s over,” Paige said again.

He held her tightly, and hoped she was right.

Ghost Country

Patrick lee

EYES ONLY—DO NOT REPRODUCE

SPECIAL CLEARANCE REQUIRED—ATOLL 6

[a] US Code 403 / Article 2.1.1

[b] White House Special Directive

3 August 1978

EXECUTIVE ORDER 1978-AU3

Legal titles and definitions established in this document shall be binding on all signatories to the TANGENT SPECIAL AUTHORITY AGREEMENT (hereafter TSAA):

“BREACH” shall refer to the physical anomaly located at the former site of the Very Large Ion Collider at Wind Creek, Wyoming. The total systemic failure of the VLIC on 7 March 1978 created the BREACH by unknown means. The BREACH may be an Einstein-Rosen bridge, or wormhole (ref: VLIC Accident Investigation Report).

“ENTITY” shall refer to any object that emerges from the BREACH. To date, ENTITIES have been observed to emerge at the rate of 3 to 4 per day (ref: VLIC Accident Object Survey). ENTITIES are technological in nature and suggest design origins far beyond human capability. In most cases their functions are not readily apparent to researchers on site at Wind Creek.

“BORDER TOWN” shall refer to the subsurface research complex being constructed at the VLIC accident site, to serve the housing and working needs of scientific and security personnel studying the BREACH. All signatories to TSAA hereby agree that BORDER TOWN, along with its surrounding territory (ref: Border Town Exclusion Zone Charter), is a sovereign state unto itself, solely governed by the organization TANGENT.

This document is legally binding and enforceable effective immediately, 3 August 1978.

EYES ONLY—DO NOT REPRODUCE

Part I - Iris

Chapter One

Fifty seconds before the first shots hit the motorcade, Paige Campbell was thinking about the fall of Rome. The city, not the empire. The empire had gone in stages, with any number of dates that historians could argue over and call endpoints, but there was no disagreement as to when the city itself had been sacked. August 24, 410. Sixteen hundred and one years ago to the week. Paige didn’t know the details beyond the date. Though she’d once planned to be an historian herself, before ending up in a very different line of work, she’d never studied that region or period in much depth. She only remembered the date from European history in high school. But she wondered. She wondered if the city’s inhabitants had known, even a few months before the fact, that they would see it all come to its end. She thought about that and then turned in her seat and watched Washington, D.C., slide away behind her into the night. She could see the Washington Monument and the Capitol Dome lit up in the darkness. The winking lights of an airliner coming up out of Reagan National. The headlamps of cars behind her and on surrounding streets. Billboards and storefronts and arc lights, the glow of it all cast up onto the low cloud cover that lay over the city like a blanket. The infrastructure of the modern world. It looked like it would stand forever.

She turned forward again. The motorcade was heading east on Suitland Parkway, back toward Andrews Air Force Base, where she and the others had landed only a few hours earlier. It was seven minutes past midnight. The road was wet from the rain that had been falling steadily since their arrival. The pavement caught and scattered the glow of taillights ahead. Paige was in the rear vehicle of the procession. Martin Crawford was sitting next to her.

Behind them on the back bench seat, locked in its carrying case, was the object that’d prompted this visit to Washington. The Breach entity they’d just demonstrated for an audience of one.

“He was calmer than I thought he’d be,” Paige said. “I thought he’d have a harder time believing it.”

“He saw it with his own eyes,” Crawford said. “Hard to dismiss that kind of evidence.”

“Still, he’s new on the job. He’s never seen an entity before, much less one like this.”

“He’s the president. He’s seen a lot of things.”

Paige watched the traffic skimming by across the median, tires spinning up long ragged clouds of moisture from the roadbed.

“I thought he’d be scared,” she said. “I thought, once we showed it to him, he’d be as scared as we are.”

“Maybe he hides it well.”

“Do you think he can help us figure this out?” Paige said. “How to stop whatever’s coming?”

“We don’t know what’s coming yet.”

“We know it’s nothing good. And that we don’t have a hell of a lot of time before it gets here.”

Crawford nodded, staring forward. He was seventy-four and looked it, except in his eyes, which probably hadn’t changed in decades. They looked troubled at the moment.

Paige glanced ahead and caught her own eyes in the rearview mirror up front. No lines around them yet—she was only thirty-one—but this job would put them there soon enough.

She turned and looked back at the entity’s case, just visible in the rain-refracted city light. She thought of what she’d said to the president: that this entity could be considered an investigative tool. It offered a unique way of seeing the world—and a way of looking for things that could be found by no other means.

They were on their way to look for things now: the answers to the questions that had plagued them for not quite two days. Paige thought of Yuma, Arizona, the first stage of the search. The first place they would put the entity to use. Maybe the evidence they needed would be right there, obvious enough to trip over.

And maybe it wouldn’t be. Maybe it wouldn’t be there at all. Or anywhere else.

Paige tried not to think about that. She turned and stared forward through the beaded windshield. In the corner of her eye she saw Crawford turn toward her to speak, but then he stopped and cocked his head at a sound. Paige heard it too. Somewhere ahead of them. Through the reinforced windows of the armored SUV it sounded like a playing card in bicycle spokes. Paige knew better. She felt her pulse quicken. She leaned to look past the driver’s seat, and in the next second everything happened.

The SUV directly ahead braked and tried to swerve. Too late. It clipped the rear fender of the vehicle in front of it and spun hard, and an instant later its headlight beams were in Paige’s eyes and the driver of her own vehicle was hauling left on the steering wheel. Also too late. The impact was like nothing she’d ever felt. Like someone had picked up a telephone pole and swung it as hard as a baseball bat into the front of the vehicle. Her seat belt slammed tight across her chest and the air surged out of her lungs and for a moment she couldn’t get them full again. While she was trying, she felt the world shift beneath her. She looked up and saw the view through the windshield tilting impossibly. Forty-five degrees. Then steeper. The SUV rocked past the limit of its balance and came down on its roof. The struts collapsed and the windows, strong as they were, buckled and separated from their frames.

Just like that, the world of sound outside came in. The heavy rattle of the automatic weapon—maybe more than one—filled up the night. Some kind of monstrous caliber. Sure as hell not a light machine gun. Not even something firing 7.62mm. This sounded as big as a Browning M2. Fifty-caliber bullets, the size of human fingers, coming in at three times the speed of sound. Paige hung upside down in the seat belt, her chest still compressed and unable to expand. Over the gunfire she heard another sound, closer, like the patter of rain on sheet metal but amplified a hundredfold. It was the sound of the bullet impacts against the vehicles, and it was getting louder as she listened. She understood why. The shooters were methodically walking their fire back along the length of the immobilized convoy. Being thorough.

“Paige?”

She turned. Crawford was lying against the crumpled passenger door. His head was pressed at an angle against the roof below him. He looked determined not to be afraid. He knew what was coming.

Paige tried to see if the two men in the front seats were conscious. She couldn’t tell. The vehicle had pancaked just enough that the headrests up front were touching the roof, and between the seats she could see only darkness.

The bullet impacts were very close now. Chewing apart the vehicle just ahead. Paige turned toward Crawford again. They shared a look. Almost certainly good-bye.

“It’s already started,” he said. “Whatever it is, it’s started. And the president’s part of it.”

Paige nodded. Understanding settled over her. With it came anger. Enough to balance out her fear.

Then something in her chest let go and her lungs were free to expand again, and she sucked in a deep breath of air, and half a second later the bullets started hitting the vehicle.

She shut her eyes. The sound was louder than she’d expected. Metal screams that raked her eardrums. She couldn’t tell them apart from human screams. Couldn’t tell if she was screaming herself. Somewhere in the middle of it she felt liquid gushing over her. She wondered if it was her own blood, but didn’t think so. Trauma survivors said their blood felt like warm water on their skin. Whatever this was, it was cold. She sucked in another breath, tasted gasoline vapor, and understood.

And then the shooting was over.

She was still there.

She opened her eyes in the silence. The gasoline was coming down from everywhere. Pooling in the concavities of the crumpled roof.

She looked at Crawford. Crawford was gone. Eyes wide open and staring at her, but gone. A shot had hit him in the chest. It looked like some giant animal had bitten away half of his rib cage, taking a lung and most of his heart with it. Past Crawford, through the open space where the window had been, she heard voices calling to one another. Then the flat crack of a pistol, maybe a .45. More voices. Coming closer. She couldn’t actually see anything through the window. Because of her angle she could only see a few feet of the roadbed nearby.

She found her seat belt release and pressed it. Her body dropped hard against the underside of the roof. She was down level with the window now. She could see straight through it, all the way up the length of the crippled motorcade. Doors hung half open. An arm extended from one, blood streaming off the fingers in rivulets.

The shooters were advancing along the vehicles, carefully inspecting each one. She saw one man with a pistol and another with a PDA. The device’s screen painted his face bright white in the darkness. The two of them moved from the first vehicle to the second. They stared in at someone on the passenger side. The man with the PDA pressed its buttons rapidly, and the light on his face flickered through a progression of shades. Paige guessed he was looking at a series of photographs.

“Keeper?” the man with the pistol said.

The other man looked at half a dozen more photos, then stopped and shook his head. “Just security.”

The shooter leveled the gun through the vehicle’s window and fired once. Then he and the other man continued checking the rest of its occupants.

Paige felt her breathing accelerate. In the fume-choked space, she thought she might pass out before long. The killers found another survivor in the second SUV, determined he was also no one important, and executed him.

Paige turned herself over and got up on her elbows. She looked around. The window facing away from the shooters, the one direction in which she might get out unseen and run for it, was compressed to four inches of space. No way through. Likewise for going forward or back. If she went between the front seats and out the windshield, they’d see her at once. And she couldn’t reach the rear window: the back of the middle-row bench seat, where she’d been strapped in, was almost touching the roof now. There was maybe a one-inch gap below it.

The entity.

If she could get to it, she might get away. She’d need room to actually use the thing—ten feet at least. That meant she’d still have to go out the windshield into open view. But after that she would only need a few seconds to switch the entity on, and then if she moved quickly, she’d be long gone.

She shoved her arm through the gap between the seatback and the roof. The padding gave a little, and so did the soft tissue of her arm, but she could still only reach about ten inches into the space beyond. She swept her arm left and right, fingertips extended as far as possible.

It wasn’t there.

It might be only an inch out of reach, but that was enough. She made another sweep. Nothing. Her eyes were watering now. She wanted to think it was only because of the fuel vapor.

Another pistol shot. Closer. She looked. The killers were at the third vehicle. Maybe thirty seconds from finding her.

There was one other move to make. She didn’t think she had time. She also didn’t have a hell of a lot to lose in trying. She withdrew her hand from the gap below the seatback, rolled on her side and took her cell phone from her pocket. She switched it on and navigated to the macro list. You couldn’t just speed-dial into Border Town. You had to call and then enter a code, then an extension and another code. A macro could do it all in about a second. She found the one she needed and selected it. She waited. It rang.

“Be there,” she whispered.

She watched the shooters examine another victim in the third vehicle. They seemed to be debating whether the body was alive or dead. The one with the PDA looked through the photographs anyway.

The call rang again. And again.

The man with the PDA stopped on an image. Nodded at his partner. They reached inside the vehicle to drag the victim out.

The fourth ring was cut off by an answering click. Paige started talking before the other party could finish saying hello. The words came in a rush. She hoped to hell she was even understandable. There just wasn’t time to say it all. It would’ve been tight even with a full minute, and she had nowhere close to that long. She found herself trying to prioritize even as she spoke. Trying not to leave out anything critical.

But she was leaving something out. She could feel the absence of it gnawing at her.

“Shit, what else … ?” she whispered.

She saw the killers turning toward her now, drawn by her voice, and a second later they were running, their footsteps slapping the wet pavement.

What the hell was she forgetting?

The other party began to speak, asking if she was okay.

She remembered.

She composed it into the simplest form she could think of and screamed it into the phone, and even as she finished she felt hands reaching through the window and grabbing her. Getting her by the calves, pulling her from the vehicle. She gripped the phone with both hands and snapped it in half. Heard the circuit boards inside break like stale crackers.

Then she was out on the pavement, turned over, pinned, the pistol aimed down at her. The PDA’s glow on the killers’ faces strobed through the photo sequence again. She looked past them and saw the body they’d pulled from the third SUV. She saw why they’d discarded it after all: one of its legs had been nearly severed by a bullet impact just above the knee. It hung on by only skin and a bit of muscle. The open femoral artery had already pumped a thick sheet of blood onto the pavement. Very little was still coming out. Very little was left to come out.

The killer with the PDA continued cycling through his pictures. Paige heard other men somewhere behind her, at the back of her own vehicle. Heard them kicking aside the crumbs of glass there, kneeling, cursing softly as they rummaged inside. Then came the clatter of the entity’s plastic case, scraping over concrete as they pulled it free. She heard their footsteps as they sprinted away with the thing, back toward where the shooting had come from.

Above her, the PDA’s flashing stopped. The man holding it looked down. His eyes went back and forth between the screen and her face.

“Keeper?”

“Oh yeah.”

Chapter Two

Travis Chase took his lunch break alone on Loading Dock Four. He sat with his feet hanging over the edge. Night fog drifted in across the parking lot, saturated with the smells of vehicle exhaust, wet pavement, fast food. Out past the edge of the lot, past the shallow embankment that bordered it, the sound of intermittent traffic on I–285 rose and fell like breaking waves. Beyond I–285 was Atlanta, broad and diffused in orange sodium light, the city humming at idle at two in the morning.

Behind Travis the warehouse was silent. The only sounds came from the break room at the far south end. Low voices, the microwave opening and closing, the occasional scrape of a chair. Travis only ever went in there to put his lunch in the refrigerator and to take it back out.

Something moved at the edge of the parking lot. Dark and low slung, almost flat to the ground. A cat, hunting. It slipped forward in starts and stops, then bolted for the foot of a dumpster. The kill reached Travis as no more than a squeal and a muffled struggle, a few thumps of soft limbs against steel. Then nothing but the swell and crest of the traffic again.

Travis finished his lunch, wadded the brown bag and arced it into the trash bin next to the box compactor.

He turned where he sat, brought his legs up and rested them sideways across the edge of the dock. He leaned back against the concrete-filled steel pole beside the doorway. He closed his eyes. Some nights he caught a few minutes’ sleep like this, but most nights it was enough just to relax. To shut down for a while and try not to think. Try not to remember.

His shift ended at four thirty. The streets were empty in the last hour of the August night. He got his mail on the way into his apartment. Two credit-card offers, a gas bill, and a grocery flyer, all addressed to the name Rob Pullman. The sight of it no longer gave him any pause—the name was his as much as the address was his. He hadn’t been called Travis Chase, aloud or in writing, in over two years.

He’d seen the name just once in that time. Not written. Carved. He’d driven fourteen hours up to Minneapolis on a Tuesday night, a year and a half ago, timing his arrival for the middle of the night, and stood on his own grave. The marker was more elaborate than he’d expected. A big marble pedestal on a base, the whole thing four feet tall. Below his name and the dates was an inscribed verse: Matthew 5:6. He wondered what the hell his brother had spent on all of it. He stared at it for five minutes and then he left, and an hour later he pulled off the freeway into a rest area and cried like a little kid. He’d hardly thought about it since.

He climbed the stairs to his apartment. He dropped the mail on the kitchen counter. He made a sandwich and got a Diet Coke from the refrigerator and stood at the sink eating. Ten minutes later he was in bed. He stared at the ceiling in the dark. His bedroom had windows on two walls. He had both of them open so the cross breeze would come through—it was hot air, but at least it was moving. The apartment had no air-conditioning. He closed his eyes and listened to the night sounds of the city filtering in with the humidity. He felt sleep begin to pull him down. He was almost out when he heard a car slow at the entrance to the front lot. Through his eyelids he saw headlights wash over his ceiling. The vehicle stopped in the lot but didn’t kill its engine. It sat idling. He heard one of its doors open, and then light footsteps came running up the front walk.

His door buzzer sounded.

He opened his eyes.

He knew exactly who it was.

The guy in the apartment down the hall had an ex-girlfriend with a penchant for showing up drunk in the middle of the night, looking to discuss things. The last time, three weeks ago, the guy had tried to ignore her. She’d responded by hitting every button on the pad until someone else relented and buzzed her in, allowing her to come upstairs and pound on the guy’s door directly. As a strategy it’d worked pretty well, so this time she’d skipped right to it. Nice of her.

The buzzer sounded again.

Travis closed his eyes and waited for it to stop.

When it sounded the third time he noticed something: he couldn’t hear anyone else’s buzzer going off before or after his own. He should have heard that easily. The tone was a heavy bass that transmitted well through walls. He’d heard it the last time this happened.

Someone was out there buzzing his apartment. His alone.

He pulled the sheet aside and stood. He went to the window and pressed his face against the screen to get an angle on the front door.

A girl was standing there. Not the neighbor’s girlfriend. Not drunk, either. She was standing on the walk, a few feet away from the pad. She’d pressed the button and stepped back from it. She was staring up at the open window of Travis’s bedroom—had been staring at it even before he appeared there—and now she flinched when she saw him. She looked nervous as hell. The vehicle idling thirty feet behind her was a taxicab.

The girl looked about twenty, but it was hard to say. She could’ve been younger than that. She had light brown hair to her shoulders. Big eyes behind a pair of glasses that covered about a quarter of her face—they were either five years behind the style or five years ahead of it.

Travis had never seen her before.

She’d seen him somewhere, though, if only in a picture. It was clear by her expression. She recognized him even by the glow of the lamppost in the parking lot.

She stepped off the concrete walkway into the grass. She took three steps toward the window. Her eyes never left his. She stopped. For another second she just stood there looking up at him.

Then she said, “Travis.”

In the time it took him to pull on a T-shirt and jeans, he ran through the possible implications. There weren’t many. He thought of Paige, two summers ago, setting up the Rob Pullman identity. He’d watched her insert it into every database that mattered—federal, state, local. Retroactive for four decades. Then she’d erased every digital footprint she’d left in the process, and scrubbed the information from even her own computer in Border Town. No records. No printouts. It was no more possible to tie his new name to his old one than it was to reverse-engineer an ice sculpture from a tray of water.

No one but Paige could have sent this girl.

Travis stepped into the hallway and descended the stairs. The girl was standing at the glass front door waiting for him. She’d already sent the cab away.

Travis pushed the door open and stepped out into the night.

“What is it?” he said. “What’s going on?”

Up close her nervousness was more apparent. She had a backpack slung over her shoulder and she was fidgeting with the strap. There must have been something in his expression that put her even more on edge. She looked like she wanted to back away from him, but she didn’t.

“You drive,” she said. “I’ll talk.”

“I–285. Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.”

Travis took a right out of the complex.

The girl seemed about to speak again, and then her cell phone rang. She twisted in her seat and took it from her pocket. She pressed the talk button and rested the phone on her backpack, which was now in her lap.

“Hello?”

A man said, “Ms. Renee Turner?”

“Yes.”

“Hi. This is Richard with Falcon Jet. I just wanted to let you know your aircraft is refueled and standing by, ready when you are. Flight time to Washington Dulles International will be an hour and fifteen. Does your guest have a preferred beverage?”

The girl glanced at Travis. He shrugged.

“We’re fine with what’s aboard,” she said. “We’ll be arriving shortly.”

“Very good.”

She ended the call and set the phone on the console. She still looked anxious. She hugged the backpack against herself. It flattened out. There wasn’t much in it.

“Renee,” Travis said. “Nice to meet you.”

For a second she looked confused. “Oh, sorry, no. I’m Bethany. Bethany Stewart.”

She stuck out a tiny hand. Travis shook it.

“Renee’s a cover,” she said. “She doesn’t really exist.”

“She sounds well off for someone who doesn’t exist.”

“I’ll tell you all about her sometime.”

“All right.”

“I’m with Tangent. I guess you assumed that.”

Travis nodded.

“I would have called ahead,” she said. “I was just afraid you’d hear the first five words and hang up, and you’d be long gone by the time I got here.”

“Why didn’t Paige call? She wouldn’t expect me to hang up on her.”

Bethany was quiet for a few seconds. “Paige is the reason I’m here. She didn’t have time to call anyone but me. She barely had time for that.”

Travis waited for her to say more, but instead she picked up her phone again. She switched on the display and brought up what looked like a file directory.

“This phone records every call by default,” she said. She selected a file and clicked on it. An audio clip began to play.

Travis heard Bethany’s voice first. She started to say hello and then Paige spoke over her, her own speech fast and panicked, struggling for clarity through hyperventilation: “Bethany. Go to my residence. Override for the door is 48481. Open the hard storage in the back wall of the closet, star–7833. The thing inside is one of the entities I was testing, the same as the one I brought to D.C. Take it and get out of Border Town right now. Don’t tell anyone anything. Get somewhere safe and then use the entity. You’ll see what it does, and what you need to do. Whatever you learn from it, just make it public yourself, make it huge, do notgo to authorities. Not the president. Not anybody. If you need help, find Travis Chase in Atlanta. Three seventeen Fenlow, apartment five, the name Rob Pullman. Shit, what else… ?” Paige stopped to take a deep breath. Then another. In the background Travis heard a sound: running footsteps on pavement.

Bethany’s voice came in on the recording: “What’s happening? Where are you?”

Then Paige cut her off again, shouting. “You can take it through and still come back! You can take it through!”

On the last word something changed. Some expulsion of her breath, as though her body had suddenly moved. Or been moved. Then the recording ended as abruptly as if she’d turned off the phone, though Travis pictured something more severe than that.

The on-ramp to 285 came up on his right. He took the turn going too fast. His concentration wasn’t on the driving.

He looked at Bethany. He waited for her to explain what the hell he’d just heard.

She went back to the directory on her phone and navigated to a new file. Its icon was a symbol of a filmstrip frame. A video clip.

“It was nine minutes after midnight, East Coast time, when Paige called me,” she said. “And I captured this from CNN about an hour later, when I was already on my way here to find you.”

She double-clicked the file, then handed Travis the phone. He propped it on the steering wheel as the video started to play.

News chopper footage. A row of vehicles crippled and burning in the street. Four SUVs jammed together like derailed train cars. The last of them was flipped over on its roof. The caption at the bottom of the screen read: motorcade attacked in washington, d.c.

The shot pushed in tight on one of the vehicles and Travis saw damage that couldn’t be attributed to the flames alone. Massive holes in the metal panels. They could only have been caused by high-powered gunfire. It’d even cut through some of the structural members. Maybe shotgun slugs at close range could do that, but the sheer number of holes ruled that out. Someone had used a heavy automatic weapon on the convoy, probably a .50 caliber. Serious hardware to be lugging around within a few miles of where the president and his family slept.

“I’ve watched the coverage for a few hours now,” Bethany said. “Until I got off the plane here in Atlanta. They’re saying the victims in the motorcade were a mid-level CIA executive and his staff, and that the names may not be released. After a while they started reporting the exact time it happened. A few minutes after midnight. So the times match. And it’s exactly where Paige and the others would’ve been after leaving the meeting, right between the White House and Andrews—”

She cut herself off and looked at him. “I’m sorry, you’re hearing this all out of sequence. I’m not making any sense.”

“You’re fine. Just take it in order. Start at the beginning and tell me what you know.”

She made a sound that was halfway between a sigh and a laugh. Equal parts weariness and frayed nerves.

“What I know won’t take long,” she said.

Chapter Three

Bethany unzipped her backpack and opened it. Travis felt a pocket of dry heat roll out, like she’d opened the door of a toaster oven.

There was a single item in the pack. In the glow of passing streetlights Travis got a sense of the thing. A dark metal cylinder. It was the size and shape of a rolling pin without the handles. There were three buttons running down its length, with symbols engraved into them. Something like hieroglyphs, though not in any human language, Travis was sure.

Next to each of the buttons someone had taped a handwritten label. The three of them read:ONOFFOFF (DETACH/DELAY—93 SEC.)

“This is the entity Paige was talking about in the call,” Bethany said. “The one she had locked in her closet. There’s another one identical to it, which she took to D.C. The two of them came out of the Breach together, like matching handsets for a cordless phone.”

She lifted the entity free of the bag. It didn’t look like it weighed much, by the way she held it.

“Whatever’s going on,” she said, “it all centers around the two entities.”

“What do they do?” Travis said.

“I have no idea.”

“All right.”

“Only the top four people in Tangent know that. Paige being one of them. They’re the same four people who went to D.C. They were the only ones involved in experimenting with these entities, figuring out their function. That work began this past Monday, not quite three days ago now. Paige and the others restricted the research to closed labs, and kept all their notes and video on secure servers. They must have figured out right away that these things did something big.”

“Is that normal?” Travis said. “Secrecy within Tangent itself?” It didn’t sound like any policy he remembered, but then he hadn’t been in Border Town for very long. His entire involvement with Tangent—and with Paige—had lasted less than a week, two years ago. He hadn’t wanted to leave, but in the end he’d learned something that made it unthinkable to stay. And what he’d learned, he’d kept to himself.

“The secrecy is a temporary policy,” Bethany said. “Paige feels bad about it, but she and the others at the top think it’s necessary for now. So much of the population there is new these days. They’ve had to refill the ranks almost completely in the past two years.” She glanced at him. “I guess you know about that.”

Travis nodded. “I know about that.”

“Well, it’s put a strain on the recruiting process. Tangent used to spend months vetting a single candidate, but lately they just haven’t had that luxury. They needed so many people, so fast, that the process had to be truncated for most of them. It’s just going to be a while before they can all be trusted like the former staff. Paige apologizes for it all the time. People understand, though. They’re well aware of the risk of another Aaron Pilgrim coming along. So, yeah, when an entity shows up that’s serious business, generally just the top few people are allowed to work with it. That’s how it went with these two.”

She set the cylinder back in her lap, half in and half out of the open backpack.

“So, Monday,” she said. “The closed labs. I know Paige and the others did a safety assessment first, because they took test organisms in with them. Fruit flies. Nematode worms. Half a dozen mice. I guess the entities checked out fine, because they returned all the animals to containment by that night, and nothing was wrong with them. Then on Tuesday morning they took both entities up into the desert and did more work there. A lot of it. They stayed up there all that day and right through the night. I doubt they even slept, unless it was on the ground. They kept coming back down, one or two of them at a time, and taking communications gear up to the surface. Long-range radio equipment, every kind of frequency. Satellite stuff too. Big transmitting and receiving dishes, and the tools to take them apart and put them back together. I have no idea why. Then early Wednesday, a little less than twenty-four hours ago, they brought it all back down, and the entities too, and told us they were leaving for a while. Maybe for weeks. Maybe longer than that. Some kind of exploratory trip involving the two entities, putting them to use somehow. They wouldn’t say more than that, except that their first stop was Washington, D.C.”

“What were they going to do there?”

“Meet with the president.”

“Did they say why?”

“Not really. I got the impression they wanted his help with what they were doing. Like going to him was the logical first step in the process.”

“On the phone Paige told you not to trust the president,” Travis said.

Bethany nodded. “Something changed her mind about him.” She went quiet for a few seconds. She stared ahead at the pressing darkness over the freeway. “I think the president was behind the attack on the motorcade. I think he had to be.”

Travis thought about the damage to the vehicles again. The kind of weapon that could do that wasn’t handheld. It needed a heavy tripod. It needed setup time too. A couple minutes, at least. You could ready one inside a van, but then your firing positions would be limited to where you could park, and you’d be a lot less agile once the shooting started. You’d need to put yourself in just the right spot, well ahead of time, and to do that you’d need to know the target’s exact route and schedule.

Only the president and a few aides would’ve had that information.

Travis thought about President Garner, a man he’d spoken to on the phone once, briefly. Like the five presidents before him, Garner had enjoyed close ties with Tangent while never making a move against its autonomy.

But Garner wasn’t the president anymore. He’d resigned from office two years ago, after losing his wife to what the world believed was a heart attack. His replacement, Walter Currey, had carried on the former administration’s policies to the letter, and already made it clear he had no ambition to run for another term in 2012. Currey had been a friend of Garner’s for over twenty years. He’d made a speech at the First Lady’s funeral and had to stop twice to keep his composure. By almost anyone’s measure he was a good man.

Maybe he was just good at looking like a good man.

“Anyway, that was it,” Bethany said. “They left for D.C. yesterday afternoon. And late last night I got the call you heard. I tried calling Paige back after it cut out. Nothing. Right to voice mail. So then I just did what she told me to do. I got the entity from her residence and I got the hell out of Border Town. I guess I understand the point of not telling anyone there. If she wants me to go underground and use this thing—whatever it does—then the fewer who know about it the better. And it was faster that way, without notifying anyone. No group decisions, no proper channels. I just called in one of the Gulfstreams we keep at Browning Air National Guard Base in Casper. Did it on Paige’s authority. This was less than five minutes after the call. No one had learned of the motorcade attack yet. It took the plane ten minutes to reach Border Town, and another ten to fly me to Rapid City in South Dakota. And then Renee Turner chartered a private jet, and Bethany Stewart vanished off the grid. As far as anyone knows, I’m hitchhiking on Interstate 90. And now I’m here, and you know as much as I know.”

Travis said nothing for a long moment. He considered all that she’d told him. He let the pieces fall together where they seemed ready to.

“Learn from it,” Travis said. “That’s how Paige phrased it in the call. Whatever you learn from the entity, make it public.”

Bethany nodded.

Travis looked at the cylinder sticking half out of the backpack.

“Paige and the others learned something from it,” he said. “Something big and important that the world would want to know about—something that should be made public. But there must have been even more they wanted to learn. That’s what the exploratory trip was about. Like they’d found one piece of some puzzle, and they were going off to find the rest of it, using the entity. But before that, they went to see the president, to show him the one puzzle piece they already had. Maybe they thought he could help them make sense of it. But that plan backfired. Whatever they’d uncovered, the president didn’t want it made public. Didn’t want them digging up the rest of the pieces. Maybe Paige and the others didn’t realize what they’d stumbled onto. And obviously the president did.”

“They touched a nerve of some kind,” Bethany said.

Travis nodded. He thought of the burning vehicles in the street.

“A big damn nerve,” he said.

“Hence the instruction to go underground. Figure it out for ourselves and trust no authorities.”

Travis looked at her. “But you’re not going underground. You’re going right to where she was attacked. Something she’d probably tell you not to do.”

Bethany returned his gaze. “You don’t sound like you disapprove.”

“I don’t.”

He saw the hint of a smile in her eyes, buried under a ton of stress.

“Do you have some way of finding her?” he said. “If she’s still alive?”

“I have a way of trying. It’s hard to explain how it works. Easier if I just show you once we’re on the plane. But I can only locate her. After that, I don’t know what to do. She’ll be somewhere secure.” She looked down at the black cylinder. “I guess I’m hoping that whatever else this thing does, it can help us with that part, somehow. No reason to expect that, I know. It’s just all I’ve got. After we get Paige’s position, we can find someplace safe and switch this thing on, and then I guess we’ll find out.”

She went silent again. She watched a sign with directions to the airport slide by. Then she looked at him. “You don’t have to help me, you know. You don’t have to get involved in this at all, if you don’t want to.”

Travis watched the road. He thought of Paige, bound somewhere, her life in the hands of whoever had hit the motorcade. Just ahead, I–285 swung broadly to the east, toward the blood-red promise of dawn at the horizon.

“Yes I do,” he said.

Chapter Four

Travis parked in the long-term lot, a quarter mile from the private hangars.

“Do they search your bags before you board a private flight?” he said.

Bethany shook her head.

Travis turned and took hold of the upholstery of the passenger seatback just behind Bethany’s left shoulder. The narrow panel of cloth that covered the side facing inward was loose at the top, a half-inch flap that would look to any observer like a sign of wear and tear. It wasn’t. Travis pulled down hard on it, and the few threads binding the cloth to the seatback broke easily. The move exposed the seat’s interior, a cage of spring steel and foam. He reached inside and felt his hand close around the grip of the SIG-Sauer P220 he’d hidden there two years before. He took it out and set it in Bethany’s backpack alongside the black cylinder. Then he reached back in for the three spare magazines he’d stashed with it—a fourth was already loaded into the gun—and put them in the pack too.

If the sight of the weapon made Bethany more nervous than she already was, Travis couldn’t tell.

They were in the air fifteen minutes later. The little business jet banked into its climb and gave Travis a last look at the spiderweb of highways crisscrossing Atlanta. He was sure he would never come back, unless he happened to be passing through. Rob Pullman wasn’t going to show up for work tomorrow. Wasn’t going to answer his door when the landlord came to ask about the rent next week. It occurred to him with a kind of sad amusement that Pullman would probably never be reported missing. Just fired and evicted in absentia. No great loss to anyone.

He and Bethany were sitting at the back of the plane, ten feet from the pilots. The engine sound was more than enough to mask their conversation if they spoke softly.

Bethany took out her phone and plugged it into a data port on her armrest.

“The plane has satellite capability that my phone doesn’t have by itself,” she said. She pulled up a screen that reminded Travis of computer programs from the eighties and early nineties: a black background with a simple text prompt, like an old DOS system. He was sure the program wasn’t actually old; Bethany was just navigating the no-frills backwaters that ordinary users never saw.

“Will the pilots see this on their screens?” Travis said.

“Nobody will see. Not even the satellite vendors.”

She typed a command string that looked like random letters and numbers to Travis, and executed it. An hourglass icon appeared for a second, and then the little screen filled with a street map of the United States, overlaid on a satellite image. The satellite layer was fractured into several distorted squares, overlapping one another to make a composite. Travis realized what he was looking at: not the static view of the world that was available on any number of websites, but a realtime image composed of multiple live satellite feeds. Most of the visible United States was still deep in the shadow of night.

Bethany used the phone’s arrow buttons to center the map on Washington, D.C., and zoomed in until the city filled the frame. Even in that narrow field of view Travis could see a margin where coverage from different satellites overlapped. The margin was moving, just perceptibly, a pixel’s width every few seconds. He envisioned recon satellites skimming over the Earth in low orbit, their fields of view always moving relative to the ground.

Bethany zoomed in one step further. More detail of the city emerged. Travis saw the long green belt of the National Mall running left to right across the middle of the image. Just above it was the focal point that several major streets converged toward: the White House. A mile northeast of that, an area of about three by three blocks was highlighted in bright yellow. Bethany tapped that part of the screen.

“Still there,” she said. “The survivors have been somewhere in that rectangle since I first checked around two in the morning. They must have been moved right after the attack, which would’ve happened further south, between the White House and Andrews. The fact that I’m getting a signal means at least one of them is still alive.” She thought about it and added, “Or at least their blood hasn’t congealed yet.”

Travis waited for her to explain.

“They have a radioisotope in their bloodstreams,” she said. “Iodine–124 doped with a signature molecule. Harmless levels of it are in the water supply in Border Town, and it stays in the body for about twenty-four hours after last ingestion. Certain satellites can pick it up, but only very, very faintly. The signal is far too weak for them to get a sharp focus on it.” She touched the yellow rectangle on the map again. “What you’re seeing there is the computer’s best guess about where the target is. When we get on the ground in D.C. I can get the signal directly with my phone. That’ll narrow it down to a building. Even a specific part of a building once we’re close enough.”

Travis recalled the mindset he’d adopted during his short time in Border Town. The logical flexibility that was such a necessary part of life there, like the native tongue of a foreign land. He found it coming back to him now. Radioisotopes in the water. Christ.

“I guess that’s another trust thing,” he said.

“The iodine? Sure. It’s a precaution in case someone tries to leave Border Town with an entity, unauthorized. Other than me, the only people who know about it are inside that rectangle in D.C. right now.”

“No offense,” Travis said, “obviously Paige trusts you in a jam, but why would she have told you about the iodine before last night?”

“I’m sure she trusts me as much as any of the other new blood—maybe an inch more, since she recruited me herself—but she didn’t tell me about the iodine. I told her.”

Travis waited.

“It was Paige’s idea to implement the technology,” Bethany said. “But only after I told her how it works.”

“I take it you didn’t work at a petting zoo before she recruited you.”

Bethany managed a smile. “Not exactly.” She looked down at her phone. Stared at the map as if she could look right through it at Paige. “I’m twenty-four years old. I finished college at nineteen. I’ve spent the last five years working for a company that handles data security for the biggest clients in the world. International banks. Trading firms. The Department of Homeland Security. It’s hard to overstate how sensitive a job like that is. It’s kind of like the companies that make the lock mechanisms for bank vaults. You know how that works? Like, there are hundreds of companies that build vaults, and vault doors, but they never build the locks. There are only two or three companies in the whole world that make those. It’s just one of those things you don’t want a million people to be familiar with. Better for everyone if it’s limited. Data security is the same way, at the high end. The systems that protect the largest corporations and government agencies are scripted and run by just a handful of people. And until this spring I was one of them.”

She looked out the window. The whole sky was pink and the landscape below was coming to life in ripples of light and shadow.

“That’s the story behind Renee Turner, by the way. I’m sorry if it’s bragging, but there are maybe twenty people on the planet who know information security like I do. Paige has some skill in that department, but it’s an entirely different thing if you’ve specialized in it for years. I created Renee tonight, based on an old college fake ID I had in my wallet. I sat down in a booth at Burger King in the Rapid City airport and I magicked her to life in twenty minutes using this phone. She has a social security number, DMV record including a DUI and two speeding tickets, bank accounts at First National and B of A totaling three million dollars, and a paid membership with Falcon Jet. I even gave her an arrest for having sex on a park bench in Miami when she was sixteen years old. I think that’s a nice authentic touch, in case anyone looks up departures out of Rapid City and digs into her background. Who’d make up sex on a park bench?”

“Renee sounds fun.”

Bethany shrugged. She looked down at the phone again. The diamond-shaped coverage zone of a new satellite drifted slowly into the frame. “Anyway, I’m sure Paige recruited me because I know how to code high-end security for data networks like the one in Border Town—and how to stay ahead of new technology that threatens it. But I guess it wouldn’t surprise me if she had other reasons. Like maybe in some general way she could imagine a time like right now. Some rainy-day scenario when Tangent would be up against people with very serious resources on their side. Maybe she just wanted someone on her side who could counter that kind of thing.”

Travis considered that. For the first time he saw the situation in its broad context, beyond the danger that Paige was in. The president of the United States had made a direct, aggressive move against Tangent. Had crossed a line that no one had crossed for the three decades that Tangent had existed.

“This could get a lot worse,” Travis said.

“It already has,” Bethany said.

She backed out the satellite image to a full view of the country, then dragged it sideways and zoomed in again, this time into the vast darkness that made up the American west. Only the digitally generated borders and roads gave any sense of scale as she zoomed. She pushed in tight on the emptiest part of eastern Wyoming, a hundred-mile-wide square bound by I–90 to the north and I–25 to the south and west. She zoomed in until the highways disappeared off the edges of the frame, leaving the screen entirely black. Border Town was somewhere in the middle of this area, Travis knew.

“In darkness these satellites use thermal imaging,” Bethany said. “But Border Town’s heat signature is carefully managed. Any heat output is first stored underground, and only released during daylight hours, specifically at times when the desert surface temperature exactly matches that of the exhaust ports. The compound is thermally invisible.”

She pressed the button she’d used earlier to zoom, though it was impossible to see any result on the screen. There was only more darkness.

Then Travis saw something. A bright white speck moving rapidly across the top of the frame. It trailed a line behind itself, narrow at the front, fanning out and dimming toward its end. Bethany pushed in tighter. The speck resolved into two. Two specks, two trails. Moving side-by-side in formation. They were much faster in the smaller field of view. Bethany had to keep dragging it sideways to keep up. Travis noticed a distance scale at the bottom of the screen. A thumb’s width was about half a mile. The two specks were covering that much distance every few seconds.

“Fighters,” Travis said.

Bethany nodded. “I first noticed them during the flight to Atlanta. I spent about twenty minutes using specialized software to identify them by the heat plumes. They’re Super Hornets. Dual role, able to engage both air and ground targets. There’s another pair orbiting on the far side of the same big circle, about a forty-mile radius around Border Town.”

“It’s a blockade,” Travis said. “No one’s going in or out of there.”

Bethany nodded again. “President Currey probably ordered it within an hour or so after the hit on the motorcade, once he decided to go all in. I must’ve gotten away by a margin of minutes.”

They fell into a silence for the next half hour. They listened to the whine of the engines and the soft tones of the avionics up front. Bethany stared out the window. Travis stared ahead at nothing and thought of the power that was arrayed against them.

Bethany turned to him. “Can I ask you something personal?”

“Sure.”

“Why did you leave Tangent?”

Travis thought about it. He thought of how complicated the answer to a simple question could be.

“Things would’ve gone bad if I’d stayed,” he said. “Somewhere down the road.”

“What made you think that?”

“Something told me,” he said. The statement was more literal than it sounded.

“If we get through all this, maybe you’ll feel better. Maybe you’ll feel like coming back.”

“I’m never coming back. If we’re alive when this is over, I’ll set up another identity like Rob Pullman, and find another warehouse to work third shift in for the rest of my life.”

“You do realize you could make it easier on yourself. As long as you’re creating an ID from scratch, you could give yourself a few million dollars. You wouldn’t have to work at all.”

Travis shook his head. “Money is means. It’s better if I don’t have much. Better if I stay on the fringe. It’s the one way I can be sure things will be okay.”

She stared at him. It was clear she had no idea what he was talking about, but after a moment she let it go and looked out the window again.

Chapter Five

They landed at Dulles and took a cab into the city. Half an hour later they had the location. The survivors of the motorcade attack—whichever ones they were—were in a sixteen-story office building overlooking the traffic circle at M Street and Vermont Avenue. The building had reflective green-tinted glass. It had no corporate logo visible. Just an address in large black letters on its concrete foundation, right next to the main entrance on the east side.

The signal was coming from the ninth floor at the northeast corner, directly facing the traffic circle.

Travis and Bethany were sitting on a cafe patio on the far side of the circle, one hundred yards from the building. It was 7:30 in the morning and the city was alive and busy in the early light. Every surface glittered. It looked like it’d rained all night and only cleared in the last couple hours. The story of the motorcade attack was everywhere. There was a big LCD screen inside the cafe playing the aftermath footage on a loop. The subject dominated every conversation Travis could hear at the tables around them.

Bethany had her phone low in her lap, out of sight to others nearby. Travis watched her mouthing commands she was entering into it. He couldn’t make out any of them. Probably wouldn’t have understood them any better if he could see them typed on the screen.

After a minute she looked up at him. “Signal strength is pretty weak now. Fall-off is consistent with a living body gradually flushing the iodine through the kidneys and passing it out as urine. And once it’s in the sewers it’s way too dispersed to read.” She frowned. “This signal is also consistent with just one body. Paige is the only survivor.”

Travis nodded. He stared at the corner of the ninth floor. No way to see in. No way to tell if Paige could see out. Maybe it wasn’t even a window. Maybe the glass exterior concealed a brick-walled holding cell on that floor.

“So what exactly are we up against, here?” Travis said. “What do we know, right now? We know Paige and the others came to D.C. to meet with the president, and show him the entity. We know they trusted him, at that point. And we know that once they were attacked, they realized they’d been wrong about him—and that he’s part of this thing, whatever it is. Whatever she and the others were trying to learn about. And obviously, lots of other people are involved too. Including whoever controls this building.”

Bethany continued gazing at the structure. Travis did the same. They’d seen no one enter on foot through the street entrance yet. A number of cars had pulled off of Vermont into the narrow drive that separated the building from the one next to it—a building that had its own garage entrance at the front. That meant the cars going into the drive were entering the green building by some entrance at the rear. Most of the vehicles were town cars or SUVs with tinted windows in the back, professional drivers alone up front.

“Let’s see who owns the place,” Bethany said.

She went to work on her phone again. Travis watched screens of data, reflected in her glasses, flashing and changing every few seconds.

After a minute she frowned.

“It’s not federal property,” she said. “It’s not listed that way, at least. The district records have it as a corporate office structure, privately held. Built in 2006. No entry for a company name, or any shareholder’s name. Maybe it’s a defense contractor, or a civil-engineering firm, something like that.”

She stared at the building for a long moment, eyes narrowed.

“Can you get anything more on it?” Travis said.

“I have to, if we’re going to help Paige.” She looked at him. “Here’s what I’m thinking. If we wanted to get some help, like official help, it would have to be the FBI. There’s really no one else who can touch something this scale. But we’d need to be careful as hell. Whatever Paige and the others stumbled onto, whatever it is that the president is protecting, we have to assume that everyone he’s appointed is on the same page as him. And since Currey’s taken office he’s replaced both the attorney general and the FBI director. And who knows who they’ve fired and replaced since then. They’ve probably got all kinds of loyalists in the ranks by now. If we go in blind, we stand a good chance of just touching the same nerve Paige touched.”

“How far from blind can we get?” Travis said.

Bethany looked at her phone. “It depends on the connections I can make. Names to bank accounts. Other kinds of holdings, like real estate. Connections from those back to other names. Like that. If I could get a clear enough picture of who’s involved in this thing, it might tell us who’s not involved. It would make our guess a hell of a lot more educated, anyway. The problem is that none of the names we know right now will help us. Not the president. Not anyone in his cabinet. Their names won’t be on anything damning, I promise.” She looked at the building again. “What I need are names from inside there. Owners. Executives. Almost anyone. It’d give me a loose end to start with.”

She looked thoughtful. But not optimistic. Her eyebrows made a little shrug, up and down, and then she turned back to her phone.

“We’ll see,” she said, and went to work on it.

Travis said nothing for the next ten minutes. He left her to it. He stared at the highrise and thought of how it would work if they could get the FBI’s cooperation. The bulk of the Hostage Rescue Team was right across the river at Quantico. Between them and whatever local police they felt like coordinating with, there could be a sea of armed law enforcement around the green-tinted building within a few hours, like rabid fans waiting for a pop star to come out of a hotel.

At which point Paige’s survival should be assured. The people holding her were corrupt and violent, but they weren’t stupid. If the game was absolutely up, then their focus would shift to securing high-priced lawyers and cutting deals with authorities, turning against one another in the process. They would have nothing to gain by killing Paige at that point, and they would have plenty to lose.

But until that point, she might as well be kneeling in her own grave. Her captors’ reasons for keeping her alive could evaporate any time. It was hard to imagine she had more than a few hours left. Maybe not even that. Travis felt a tremor in his hands on the tabletop. He made them into fists.

Bethany finished with the phone and set it in front of her.

“Nothing,” she said. She didn’t sound surprised. “Every transaction is routed through some middle pathway with a gap in it. Everything from the original construction costs to last month’s electric bill. It’s strange how it works, but a relatively small enterprise can actually have much better protection than a big international bank or a federal system like Social Security. Giant trillion-dollar organizations like that have to be widely accessible. It’s the whole point of their existence. They can be secured, but they can’t be secret.” She nodded at the highrise. “A place like that can be secret. It can do its business without anyone knowing its name, or the identity of its CEO. And it does. The place is an information black hole. Someone very smart worked very hard to get it that way. Probably someone I’ve played tennis with.”

“Can you run the license plates of these vehicles we see going in?”

She shook her head. “I’ll try it, but it won’t work. They’ll all be registered to some service that doesn’t have to keep client names on file, or something close to that. There’ll be a gap in the dominoes somewhere, I’m sure of it. We could even rent a car and try to tail someone home tonight, but I’ll bet you a shiny half-dollar that these drivers are trained to go through shakes along their routes.”

Travis knew the term. A shake was any wide-open space, like an empty stadium parking lot or a fairground, that a driver could pass through in order to reveal a tailing vehicle. In the movies a smart hero could glance in his rearview mirror and spot a tail five cars back amid rush-hour traffic, even though the law of averages pretty much guaranteed that a few vehicles in the pack were following the same route just by chance. In real life, professional drivers used shakes.

Bethany rubbed her temples. She looked very tired. “In my old line of work there’s a term for this kind of setup. Have you ever heard of an oubliette?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“It’s a kind of prison cell. Was a kind of prison cell. In the middle ages. A cell with no bars, no walls, no door and no lock. The simplest kind was just a platform sticking out of a smooth castle wall a hundred feet above the ground. They lower you onto it from above, and there you are. Imprisoned by nothing but open air.” She nodded at the building. “That place is a kind of oubliette for information. It’s not that there are firewalls protecting its identity, or powerful encryption algorithms. I’m sure it’s got all that too, but what really protects it is just open space. All the paper trails leading in have just the right breaks in them. It’s the sort of thing you can only pull off if you have the right kinds of connections and a lot of money. Enough to bend the rules around yourself.”

Travis watched another SUV pull into the place. The driver looked like an NFL linebacker with a Marine haircut. Maybe he’d been both of those at one time.

“It’s not gonna happen with the FBI,” Bethany said. “Not if we don’t know who we’re dealing with.”

Travis nodded, his eyes still locked on the building.

“What about Tangent’s hubs?” he said. “Didn’t they have a couple dozen of those around the world? Secure sites staffed with their people, armed and trained to beat hell? Couldn’t we get help from one of those?”

Bethany was already shaking her head. “The hubs are gone. They only existed to deal with Aaron Pilgrim. Once that threat was eliminated, there was no more need for them. Hub staff were never really members of Tangent to begin with. They were elite military units from a number of countries, cleared for some minimal knowledge of Tangent and its operations. Over the past two years they’ve all been let go, with nice, thick nondisclosure documents to sign on their way out.”

She was looking down at her hands as she spoke. She looked about as lost as anyone Travis had ever seen.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “We’re not going to get any help, and we’re not getting in there by ourselves. You know that, don’t you?”

Travis stared at the place. If Paige’s room had a window, and if she could stand up and walk to it, she could see the two of them right now—even if she’d never recognize them at this range.

He looked away from the building. Met Bethany’s gaze.

“Yes,” he said. “I know. Every guard in the place will have an automatic weapon and a big red button that can lock the whole building down.”

“And we’re a kid armed with a slingshot.”

Travis’s eyes fell to Bethany’s backpack lying between them on the table, and the long cylindrical shape inside it.

“We don’t know what we’re armed with yet,” he said.

Bethany nodded. “Let’s find out.”

Chapter Six

Paige woke in the same place where she’d fallen asleep: a hardwood-floored office eight or ten stories up, overlooking D.C. through tinted windows. The room was bare. The windows stretched from floor to ceiling. She lay in the center of the open space, her wrists and ankles bound with heavy-duty zip ties.

It was morning now, but during the night she’d lain awake here for hours, listening to footsteps coming and going in the corridor. Overhearing conversations outside the door, hushed and tense, right at the brink of her discernment. One word had jumped out at her half a dozen times, maybe the working title of some project or operation. The closest thing to context she’d gotten was a single exchange, a few decibels higher than the rest of the talk:

“They sound rattled. They’re not thinking of shutting it down, are they?”

“Umbra? Not a chance.”

Umbra. Paige had fallen asleep replaying the word in her mind, along with the rest of the exchange. Now she was awake, still replaying it. Trying to fit it with the scattered knowledge she’d had before coming to D.C.

She lowered her head to the hardwood and stared out at the city in the soft yellow light.

These people were going to kill her. No doubt about that. The only question was when. Sometime today, for sure. As soon as they were certain she was of no value, it would happen. By now they’d probably spoken to the president, and figured out that she’d already told him everything she knew. She’d requested the meeting, after all; why wouldn’t she tell him everything?

She tried not to think about it. There wasn’t much point. She thought of Bethany instead. Wondered if she’d made it out of Border Town with the second cylinder.

It crossed her mind that she actually hadn’t told the president everything: she hadn’t said a word about the other cylinder. It simply hadn’t fit into the conversation. She’d left it behind in Border Town on only the most general principles of caution and pragmatism. “Shit happens” principles. It was depressing how often those proved their worth.

If Bethany had gotten out, then she’d probably already linked up with Travis. By now they might be just seeing what the cylinder did, somewhere in Atlanta. The thing’s basic function was easy enough to understand. But what about the rest of it? Would the two of them figure out what they needed to do—including the parts Paige herself hadn’t nailed down?

And would they understand how damn little time they had left to do it?

Chapter Seven

There was a Ritz-Carlton halfway up the block on Vermont. Travis and Bethany got the Presidential Suite on the tenth floor—Renee Turner was paying for it, and it would’ve been at odds with her pattern to rent anything cheaper. The suite was 1800 square feet with views to the south and west. They could see the green-tinted building without obstruction. They could see the ninth-floor corner overlooking the traffic circle. Past the building they could see all the way down Vermont to the White House. The flag on its roof was flying full and tense in the wind.

They sat on one of the leather couches, opened the backpack on the floor, and set the black cylinder on the empty cushion between them. It bled heat into the air like a cooling engine block.

It was Travis’s first good look at the thing in bright light. The object was heavily scuffed and scratched, like a power tool put to years of hard use by a carpenter. There was no way anyone at Tangent had abused it like that. Travis had seen the paranoid care they took with entities. The scuffs could’ve only been made by the object’s original owners on the other side of the Breach. Whoever—or whatever—they were, this thing meant nothing more to them than a cordless drill or a radial saw meant to humans.

Travis studied the labels Paige or one of the others had taped beside the three buttons. He’d seen them just briefly in the Explorer.ONOFFOFF (DETACH/DELAY—93 SEC.)

He spent only a few seconds trying to imagine what detach/delay meant. There was no point in thinking about it until they knew what the entity did.

Aside from the buttons, and their engraved symbols, the cylinder’s only notable feature was a small lens inset in one end. It was about the size of a quarter, and deep black.

“You said this came out of the Breach along with one just like it,” Travis said.

Bethany nodded.

“And that was a few days ago?”

“Oh—no. They actually egressed years ago. Sometime in 1998, I think.”

He stared at her. Waited for the explanation.

“They were sealed,” she said. “Do you know about sealed entities?”

Travis nodded. Paige had given him a pretty thorough tour of the Primary Lab in Border Town. She’d told him about sealed entities, and shown him a few of them. They were rare. They tended to be the more powerful ones. They emerged from the Breach in their own secure packaging, maybe the alien equivalent of the hard plastic shells that retailers used to deter shoplifters. Each sealed entity was unique, not only in the seal’s color and size, but in terms of what it took to open it. Some were easy: they opened to an electric charge or a certain temperature, or even blunt impact force. Others were tricky. Lab techs might spend weeks or months running them through a battery of experiments, every one a shot in the dark. Exposure to random chemical compounds, wavelengths of light, air pressure settings in a vacuum chamber. Some of them simply never gave up their secrets. Paige had shown Travis a lemon yellow box about the size of a cinder block. Seamless. Featureless. Opaque. It’d come through the Breach on Christmas Day in 1979, and three decades later no one had a clue what the hell was inside it.

“I first came to Border Town this April,” Bethany said, “and I’ve been rotating through all the different jobs as part of the standard training. They like everyone to be good at everything. I started in the Primary Lab two weeks ago, and I spent a couple hours the first night looking at the sealed entities. I thought they were fascinating. They’re like solitaire games someone else got stumped by and left sitting out. You look at them and you think, ‘Maybe I’ll see something they missed.’ ”

Travis knew the feeling, though he hadn’t felt it in any lab in Border Town. He’d experienced it years before, walking through crime scenes in the quiet hours after all the prints had been lifted and the photos shot and the bodies taken away.

“There was one seal that got my attention,” Bethany said. She indicated the cylinder lying between them. “It was a little bigger than two of these side by side. A white casing shaped like a pill but flattened a little. There was a seam right around the middle, like a waistline. It looked like you could just hold the thing by each end and pull it open.”

She went quiet for a moment, like she didn’t know how to say the next part. Or didn’t expect him to believe her.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Travis said.

She shrugged. “It was such a stupid idea I was too embarrassed to try it, even if nobody was around. Obviously, it would’ve been the first thing someone tried back in 1998. And probably a hundred people had done the same thing since then. Like trying to twist a doorknob even when you’re sure it’s locked. You’re compelled to give it at least one go. So finally, this past Sunday night, I did it. I grabbed the two ends and pulled. And the damn thing came apart like a plastic Easter egg.”

Travis could only stare. It simply wasn’t possible that no one had thought to do that in thirteen years. He saw a trace of dry amusement in her eyes at his expression.

“We figured out the trick later,” she said. “After we took out the two cylinders, we put the halves of the seal back together and they automatically relocked. And everyone in the room tried pulling them apart, with no luck. Even I couldn’t do it again. It was like trying to pull apart a lump of steel. Paige figured it out, though, and it only took her an hour to prove her theory. She positioned two robotic arms to recreate the way a human would pull on the seal, and she went methodically through different levels of force. At exactly 12.4 newtons, the seal came apart.”

Travis thought he understood. “Any more or any less, and it wouldn’t open, right?”

She nodded. “You need to apply that exact force for just over a second. If the pressure wavers up or down by even a tenth of a newton during that second, it won’t open.”

“High-school physics was a long time ago,” Travis said. “I’m not even sure I took it. How small is a tenth of a newton?”

She thought about it for a second. “Say it took 12.4 newtons to lift a hardcover of War and Peace. Tear out twenty pages and it would take 12.3 to lift it. That’s the sensitivity involved.”

“Not very forgiving.”

“You have no idea. Even after we knew what it took, how much force and how long, none of us could get it to open again. It’s damn near impossible. And I opened it the first time without knowing. It was a one-in-a-hundred-thousand fluke.” Her expression changed. It took on the tired nervousness Travis had seen outside the door of his apartment building. “Which makes all of this my fault, if you think about it. The motorcade attack. Everything. If I hadn’t joined Tangent, none of this would be happening. This entity and its counterpart would’ve sat sealed on that shelf forever.”

Travis had been staring away at nothing while she spoke. He’d been thinking it was actually pretty damn unnerving that whoever built these entities put them in something so hard to open. He thought about childproof caps on bottles of chemical cleaners, and for a second he felt a chill because he could almost get a sense of their mindset, whoever they were on the other side of the Breach. These black cylinders might only be power tools to them, but they were dangerous as hell. Dangerous even to their makers.

Travis looked at the button labeled on. He glanced at Bethany and saw her looking down at it too.

The end of the cylinder with the inset lens was pointed outward, into the open space in front of the couch. That face of it cleared the cushion’s edge by an inch. There was nothing obstructing the lens.

“Let’s do it,” Travis said.

Bethany nodded. “Should we count to three?”

“No,” Travis said, and pushed the button.

Chapter Eight

What it did, it did instantly. Travis felt the button click under his fingertip and a cone of light shot from the lens at the end of the cylinder. The cone was long and narrow, fanning out maybe one foot in width for every five feet in length. It had a dark blue cast to it. Almost violet.

Ten feet out from the lens, the light cone simply terminated in midair, as if there were a projector screen there. What it projected in the air was a flat disc, two feet across, perfectly black. The disc was centered at about chest level, due to a slight upward tilt of the cylinder on the couch.

Travis stared at it.

He lost track of seconds.

In his peripheral vision he saw Bethany glance at him, but only briefly. Then her gaze went right back to the disc and stayed there.

More time passed.

Nothing about the disc changed.

Travis wasn’t sure what he expected to happen. Maybe the projection would show them something. A video recorded on the other side of the Breach. That fit the scale of something Paige might have been compelled to show the president. Though how it could’ve touched a nerve with him, Travis couldn’t guess.

He watched. Bethany watched.

Nothing happened.

The black disc just hovered there at the end of the projected beam.

It wasn’t reflective, Travis noticed. The way they were sitting, with large windows full of daylight spanning half the room, a reflective surface would have bounced nothing but glare at their eyes. A glass-screened television, positioned like the disc, would’ve been impossible to watch.

But the disc bounced nothing. It was no more reflective than cloth. And even cloth would’ve picked up plenty of the room’s light and appeared much brighter than true black. It would’ve looked gray, no matter how dark it was colored.

The disc was simply and purely black.

Only one explanation came to Travis’s mind.

“Holy shit,” Bethany said.

Travis turned and saw that she’d drawn the same conclusion he had, and at the same moment.

For a few seconds neither spoke.

Then Travis stood from the couch. The move was almost involuntary. The couch cushion responded to the sudden loss of his weight on it, and as it rose, some of its movement transferred to the middle cushion, where the cylinder rested. Travis saw the black disc—or what looked like a disc—bob up and down a few inches as the light cone shifted and settled. It happened again a second later when Bethany stood.

Travis moved forward. He gave the cone of light a wide berth as he went. He saw Bethany do the same on her side. Then she drew a sharp breath and stopped. Travis looked at her.

Her hair was moving in a steady breeze, though none of the windows in the suite were open. She turned her face directly into the slipstream of air, which was at least as strong as a current driven by a table fan. The wind appeared to be coming from the disc itself. But that wasn’t exactly true.

Because it wasn’t a disc.

It was an opening.

Travis felt the rational parts of his mind gradually coming back to life after their initial freeze—seeing the impossible could have that effect. Now as the seconds drew out he found himself trying to make sense of what he was looking at. Whatever sense could be made of it.

The projection was an opening. A hole in midair. Like a doorway between rooms. On this side was the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C. On the other side was—what, exactly?

The wind through the opening continued blowing Bethany’s hair around. It ruffled the fabric of her shirt. Her expression was nearly blank, as if she wasn’t sure yet what to feel. Travis imagined his own looked similar.

He took another step forward. It put him two feet away from the opening. He could reach it from here. Could reach through it, if he wanted to.

Being closer to it made no difference in its appearance. Still black. Like an open window on a moonless night, seen from inside a brightly lit room.

Bethany came closer on her own side. So far neither of them had put so much as a hand into the projection beam.

The angled windstream was still mostly affecting Bethany, but Travis could feel the edge of it, too, at this distance.

Bethany spoke, just above a whisper. “What’s over there?”

Travis could only shake his head.

Whatever the place was, it had to be outdoors. There was wind there. And it was nighttime, which narrowed the location down to half the Earth at any given moment.

Assuming the place on the other side was on Earth.

Travis wondered if the air coming through was safe to breathe. Probably too late to worry about it, if it wasn’t.

And it hadn’t killed the test animals in Border Town. Travis suddenly understood what they’d been used for. Paige and the others had put them through the opening, to test the safety of crossing the threshold.

He glanced at Bethany and saw her staring through into the darkness, eyes narrowed, no doubt thinking all the same things he was.

She turned to him. “Remember the end of the phone call? Paige said something like, ‘You can go through and come back.’ She practically screamed it.”

Travis nodded.

The wind through the opening shifted a bit toward him. He felt it tug at the arms of his T-shirt. It also gave him the scent of the place on the other side—a number of scents. Strong vegetation smells: pine boughs, dead leaves, ripe apples, all of it sharp and crisp on a wind that was maybe ten degrees cooler than the air-conditioned hotel room. The other side of the opening felt and smelled like an autumn night in the country.

“What location on Earth right now would have a climate like fall in the northern United States?” Travis said.

Bethany thought about it. She shrugged. “Maybe western Canada, a few hundred miles up the coast from Seattle. I really don’t know. It would still be dark there, for what it’s worth.”

Travis took another breath of the chilly wind.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Even if it really is an opening to someplace thousands of miles away—as impressive as that is—what could Paige and the others have learned from this thing? What could anyone learn from it that they couldn’t learn by just flying to wherever it leads?”

“There must be more to it than we’re thinking,” Bethany said.

Travis nodded. There had to be. And they weren’t going to find out what it was by just standing here.

Travis turned and looked around. There was a leather-bound room service menu on the nearest end table. He crossed to it, picked it up and came back to where he’d been standing beside the opening.

He held the menu by one end. He put the other end into the projected cone of light. It blocked a big chunk of the beam, maybe a third or more. That portion of the light no longer reached the black opening.

But the opening was unaffected.

In a way it was the most surreal thing Travis had seen yet. It was like sticking your hand into the beam of a movie projector, seeing the shapes of your fingers cast down the length of the light—but seeing no shadow on the screen.

“It makes sense,” Bethany said. “They’d have to build it so that the hole stayed open, even if part of the beam were blocked. Otherwise, think about it: you’d block the beam with your body before you could climb through the opening.”

Travis wondered how much of the beam could be cut off before the opening failed. Keeping the menu in the light cone, he moved it slowly toward the couch. Toward the cylinder’s lens, and the narrow part of the beam.

He watched the opening as he did it. Watched the rectangle of blocked-out light grow until it was well over half of the beam. Then three fourths. The opening showed no effect at all. It didn’t so much as flicker.

It stayed that way until only a sliver of blue light reached the hole. Maybe five percent of the total. When Travis blocked it further, the opening vanished. At the same time the projected light on the leather menu began to flash symbols in the same text that was engraved on the cylinder. Maybe it said obstruction error. Maybe it said stop blocking the light, asshole. Travis pulled the menu out of the way and the opening immediately reappeared.

He pressed his other hand to the menu. It felt as cool to the touch as when he’d picked it up. He held it close to his eyes and tilted it so that the gleam of sunlight showed him the surface in detail. It didn’t appear damaged.

He went back to the opening. He still held the menu. He shared a look with Bethany: Here goes.

He put the menu fully into the cone of light, and then he put half of it through the hole in the air.

It met no resistance. The leading half of the menu simply went through, as if the opening were no more than a hole in a wall, with a darkened room on the far side. They could still see the entire menu. It was right there with them—even if part of it was also far, far away from them, in the night air of some rural place halfway around the world.

Travis drew it back into the room and tossed it onto an armchair a few feet away.

He turned back to Bethany. “Unless you know a place in D.C. to get lab mice, I’m out of things to try.”

“I think we’re the lab mice at this point.”

Chapter Nine

They closed all the drapes in the suite’s living room and shut the doors to the adjoining areas. The resulting near darkness allowed their eyes to adjust a little, but it made no difference as far as the opening was concerned. The place on the other side still looked pitch-black.

Travis stepped into the projected beam of light and faced the hole directly. If the blue light had any effect where it shone on his back, he couldn’t feel it. Even the exposed skin on his neck and arms felt normal.

Travis stood there a moment and let the wind rush over him. He closed his eyes. He listened. Behind him he could hear the ambience of D.C., even through the closed windows of the suite. The rumble of traffic. The beeping of some kind of construction vehicle on a build site. The drone of a propeller aircraft.

But there were sounds coming from in front of him too, through the opening. Night sounds of insects and maybe frogs. They were very faint. He hadn’t noticed them earlier. He tried to isolate them now. The sounds seemed to come from only a few point sources, far away in the darkness. Which made sense. If it’d been a summer night on the other side, the chorus of insect song would’ve been overwhelming. Literally billions of tiny noisemakers within the nearest mile, any one of them loud enough to be heard at a distance. But the location on the other side of the opening—Canada or wherever it might be—was long past its local summer. The night air called to mind the trailing edge of the living season, when most things had already gone to ground or simply died off. Travis had the sense that he was listening to the region’s last few holdouts. A few nights from now, even those would probably be silenced, and there would be nothing but the dead quiet of the oncoming winter.

Travis put his hand through the opening.

In the corner of his eye he saw Bethany flinch a little, even though she’d expected the move.

His hand felt fine.

He lowered it to the bottom edge of the hole, but stopped just shy of touching it. He wondered what the margin was like. Was it a kind of blade-edge between the space on this side and the space on the other? If he ran his hand into it, would it pass right through, cutting his fingers off and dropping them away into the darkness over there? It seemed like Paige would’ve warned them about something like that, but she hadn’t had a lot of time to go into details.

Travis was tempted to grab the bound menu again and test the edge of the hole with it. Instead he lowered his hand another inch, slowly, ready to retract it.

His fingers settled onto a smooth, rounded edge. Like the tubing of a hula hoop. It was cool and rigid as steel. Travis applied a few pounds of force to it. It didn’t budge. Strange—the cylinder’s movement on the couch a few minutes earlier had made the opening bob up and down easily, but the opening itself couldn’t be moved by direct force against it. It was as fixed as a hole cut into an iron wall.

Travis ducked and leaned his upper body through the hole, into the night on the other side.

At once he saw what’d been impossible to see from inside the suite: a sky shot full of stars, sharp and clear in the unhindered darkness. The hazy band of the Milky Way defined a long arc from one horizon to the other. A crescent moon hung like a blade, an hour from setting or having risen—Travis wasn’t sure which. But it was definitely the same moon he’d grown up under. He was staring at a nightscape somewhere on Earth, at least.

His eyes were already adjusting to the dark, much deeper on this side of the opening than in the suite, even with the drapes closed.

As the seconds drew out he began to discern details in the night around him, both near and distant. He saw the canopy of a forest, the treetops maybe twenty feet below his viewpoint. Spires of pine trees and the rough curves of hardwoods, all of them pale in the faint light of the moon.

There were other shapes, but he couldn’t make sense of them. Strange geometric forms, like huge scaffolding assemblies or bamboo towers, jutted up from the forest here and there. The light was too poor to offer any detail about them. Even their distances were hard to gauge. Travis looked down and saw the footings of one of the structures right below. Its complex form rose into the darkness just behind his position.

The only other shape he could resolve was something very tall and narrow, and solid in appearance, standing on the horizon at least a mile away. Its height was imposing even at that distance: it towered above the trees, easily five times their height. He focused on it but could perceive no detail beyond its bulk and rough size. He thought of an enormous smokestack rising from a factory complex. The problem was that there was no smoke, and no factory, either, unless all its lights were shut off.

He saw movement in his peripheral vision and then Bethany was there, leaning into the darkness beside him. He edged over a few inches to give her room.

For a moment they just stood there in silence, side by side. They listened to the night. Travis looked at the moon again and judged that it was higher than when he’d first seen it. The crescent was very narrow, which meant the sun couldn’t be far below the horizon. Dawn was no more than an hour away, though there was no hint of it yet.

“I’ve never seen any place this dark,” Bethany said. “There’s not the least bit of light pollution on the horizon. We’d have to be over a hundred miles from even a mid-sized town for it to look like this. But at the same time it’s a place where people have built large structures, whatever these are. And whatever that is.” She waved a hand to indicate the towering form in the distance. “It has to be forty stories tall. Maybe taller.” She was quiet for a moment and then she turned to him. “Where the hell are we?”

Travis had no answer. He had a vague notion that it could be a military installation, built in remote wilderness out of concern for public safety or—more likely—secrecy. But why would an alien-made device just happen to show them a place like that? Why would it show them any place in particular, as opposed to some random location? Even if the place on the other side were some fixed distance and direction from here, it should still be someplace purely random. Simple probability said they should be looking out at the ocean right now, or a wide-open prairie, or an arctic tundra, or a city street with a McDonalds and a Starbucks and half a dozen stoplights.

“I don’t know,” Travis said.

Bethany started to speak, but before she could, a high-pitched cry rose from the trees right below them. Bethany flinched hard and grabbed onto his arm. Travis was glad for that: it masked the fact that his own muscles had tensed pretty damn hard.

He grew calm at once, recognizing the sound: a wolf’s howl. As it died away Travis cocked his head and listened. He heard the clatter of running footsteps as the pack went by right beneath their position. Their claws scrabbled on ground that sounded unusually hard. Stone, he’d have guessed—if a forest could grow from stone.

A hundred yards off, the wolves stopped and howled again, first one and then another. Seconds passed, and then a series of answering cries resonated from the trees half a mile away. The nearer set of wolves had just begun to respond when a new sound erupted somewhere between the packs, silencing both of them. Bethany didn’t exactly flinch, but Travis felt her body shudder. He felt his own blood go cold, and wasn’t surprised that it did. He was biologically wired to fear this sound, courtesy of a long chain of ancestors who’d survived to pass on their genes. It was the guttural bass wave of a lion’s roar.

A lion. Among wolves. In a temperate forest far enough north that it felt like late fall during the month of August.

“Okay: Where the hell are we? is the wrong question,” Bethany said. “Where the fuck are we?”

Ten minutes later the first glow of dawn came to the horizon. Five minutes after that there was enough light to show them everything. They saw what the scaffoldlike things around them really were. And they recognized the towering shape on the horizon. They’d seen it in movies and on television all their lives.

They knew exactly where they were.

And they knew that where really was the wrong question to ask.

Chapter Ten

Travis paced at the windows on the west side of the room. The drapes were open again. There was no reason to keep them closed now—the place on the other side of the opening had its own daylight, though it was dulled by cloud cover that’d come in with the dawn.

Travis wondered how Paige and the others had first reacted to what the cylinders did. They were long familiar with Breach technology. They’d been dealing with it for years. Maybe it hadn’t been hard for them to get their minds around what was beyond the open circle.

It was hard for Travis.

It looked like it was hard for Bethany, too. She was sitting in the armchair Travis had tossed the menu onto earlier. She was staring at nothing in particular. Her eyes kept narrowing as she considered new angles of the situation.

Travis went to the south end of the room and stared out the windows. Not quite a mile and a half in that direction stood the Washington Monument. For height it dwarfed everything else in the city. It was over five hundred fifty feet tall. Its white marble was nearly blinding in the summer sunlight.

Travis turned and walked to the projected opening, which was aimed more or less to the south. He ducked and leaned through it and stared at the Washington Monument there, rising from the canopy of pines and brightly colored hardwoods, its marble dull and gray beneath the overcast autumn sky.

Nearer by, the rusted girder skeletons of highrises reared from the trees in various states of decay. Strangler vines had enveloped all but the tallest of them. Travis looked down at what remained of the Ritz-Carlton beneath him. Much of the southwest corner had collapsed, but otherwise the framework still held. Here and there a few sections of concrete flooring remained in place, though mostly there were just stubs of rebar where the concrete had long ago cracked and fallen away.

Through gaps in the trees Travis could see the ground ten stories below. He could see the remnant of Vermont Avenue, fractured by years of plant root invasion and ice expansion. He recalled the sound of the wolves clattering over it in the darkness.

“There’s a city in Russia called Pripyat,” Bethany said. “It’s right next to the Chernobyl power station.”

Travis drew back in from the opening and turned to her.

“The city had a population of about fifty thousand,” she said. “It was evacuated within a couple days of the accident, and it’s been empty ever since. Biologists are fascinated with it. It’s kind of a thumbnail view of what the world would look like if we all just disappeared one day. In Pripyat there were saplings taking root in the middle of city streets within just a couple years. We can assume the same thing would happen here. Which means the age of the trees on the other side gives us an estimate of the time frame we’re dealing with. It gives us a minimum, anyway.”

Travis nodded. “There’s a white pine out there that’s got sixty-seven rings of branches, and it’s about as tall as anything in sight. Branch rings equal years, more or less.”

“So call it seventy years,” Bethany said. “On the other side of the opening, it’s seventy years after the end of the world. Whenever that is.”

“The rest of it slots in easily enough,” Travis said.

He was pacing at the windows again.

Bethany was still sitting in the chair. Still looking numb.

Travis continued. “Paige and the others turned on the cylinders inside Border Town. Who knows what they saw on the other side, down there. Maybe that far in the future, the place is just deserted. Whatever the case, they took the cylinders up into the desert the next morning, and spent a lot more time there. They took radio and satellite equipment through the projected opening, and set it all up in the future. They wanted to find out if there was anyone alive in that time. If there was anyone out there, on the air.”

Bethany turned to him. Her eyes looked haunted.

“I wonder if they heard anyone,” she said.

Travis thought about it. “One way or another, they learned something. Something specific enough that they thought the president could help them understand it.”

“The first piece of the puzzle,” Bethany said.

Travis nodded. “It could have been anything. Some old military transmission broadcasting on a loop somewhere, even decades after everyone was gone. Or something else entirely. Who knows, right? But whatever it was, if they couldn’t make sense of it themselves, who better to go to than the president? He could put them in touch with almost anyone who might have expertise.”

Bethany considered it. Nodded slowly.

Travis stopped pacing. He returned to the opening and leaned into it. He stared at the wreck of the city beyond.

What the hell had happened? Not a nuclear war. D.C. would be an ash plain in that case. There might be trees there by now, grown up in the aftermath, but there sure as hell wouldn’t be girder frames left standing.

“Paige’s goal was the most obvious thing in the world,” Travis said. “She and the others were going to take the cylinder to some number of sites, go through to the future, and dig through the ruins for evidence. Figure out exactly how the world ends. Figure out how to prevent it. No doubt they explained all that to the president.” He leaned back into the suite and turned to Bethany. “So think about this. Suppose right now, the president is involved in something nobody’s supposed to know about. Something that’s happening, or maybe is about to happen. Paige and the others uncovered some little scrap of it in the future. Not enough that they could recognize its full meaning, but enough that the president could. And when he saw it, he understood the threat they posed to him. Because his secret is well protected in our time, but it’s vulnerable as hell in the future. Someone sifting through the rubble could eventually learn all about it.”

Travis went quiet. He stared at nothing. “What is he hiding?”

“Could it just be his own complicity in whatever happens to the world?” Bethany said. “Say the thing he’s involved in right now is going bad. Really bad. Say it’s big enough that it’s over even his head, and when it goes off the rails it’s going to take the world with it. Maybe Paige and the others could have found information in the future to help us turn it all around—something to give us a chance, anyway—but in the process they’d have discovered President Currey’s role in it. Jesus, could it be that simple? Would he rather let the world end than have people find out it’s his fault?”

Travis thought about it for a long time. “That should be harder to believe than it is.”

Bethany made a face that was a little too unnerved to register humor.

“We’re guessing until we know what Paige found,” Travis said.

He stepped away from the circular opening and returned to the suite’s south-facing windows. He stared down Vermont at the green-tinted highrise in the present day.

Paige.

Lying there alone.

Waiting to die.

The cylinder, powerful as it was, seemed entirely useless as a means of getting her out of that place.

Travis leaned against the window, forearms crossed above his head. He shut his eyes and breathed out slowly.

And then it came to him.

Chapter Eleven

They worked out the logistics of the plan in a matter of minutes, and then Travis took a four-mile cab ride across the river, into Virginia, and found a sporting goods store. He used his credit card—Rob Pullman’s credit card—to buy a Remington 870 twelve-gauge and a hundred shells for it, along with fifty feet of inch-thick manila rope. He bought the largest duffel bag the store sold, which easily fit the rope and the disassembled shotgun. He took another cab back into D.C. and broke probably twenty laws by carrying a firearm and ammunition into the Ritz-Carlton. He took the elevator to the third floor, where Bethany—Renee, technically—had checked into a second room.

She had the cylinder resting in an armchair, the opening projected ten feet away at chest level, as it’d been upstairs.

Travis set the duffel bag down and walked to the opening. The view through it was different from this floor of the building. They were deep among the trees now, just twenty-five feet above the weed-laced concrete of the forest floor. Down here there was no hint of the wind they’d felt earlier, from their position above the canopy.

Travis leaned through and studied the immediate space around the hole. There were no girders close by. This room, like the presidential suite, occupied the building’s southwest corner, which in the future was reduced to a deadfall of rusted steel filling part of the foundation below. Travis saw plenty of sturdy branches all around, but the nearest of them were a good distance away—twenty feet, at least. The far side of the opening was surrounded by a margin of empty space in all directions.

Which was good. If lions were present in this wilderness—no doubt escaped from zoos when the world came apart—then there could be any number of other large predators here. Black bears, leopards, cougars. All of which could climb trees, and were probably curious enough to investigate a wide-open hole in midair with a hotel room on the other side. Travis was sure the Ritz’s staff had seen all kinds of crazy shit in their establishment over the years, but there was no reason to go for some kind of record.

Behind him, Bethany guessed what he was thinking. “I positioned the iris so nothing out there could reach it,” she said.

He leaned back in and turned to her. “Iris?”

She indicated the opening, and shrugged. “I gave it a name.”

“Why iris?”

“Watch what happens when you close it.”

Travis stepped away from the opening as Bethany walked to the cylinder. He hadn’t seen her switch it off in the suite earlier; he’d left to get a cab by then.

Bethany pressed the off button and the open circle contracted shut like an image on an old model television set. Or like an iris suddenly exposed to bright light. It shrank to a singular point and then vanished.

Bethany shrugged again. “Iris.”

“Okay.”

She switched the cylinder back on.

“Did you try the other button?” Travis said.

“Yeah.”

“What does it do?”

“Pretty much what you expect.”

He nodded. As soon as they’d learned what the entity did, he’d assumed the third button, off (detach/delay—93 sec.), allowed the hole to stay open for 93 seconds with the projection switched off—with the opening detached from the light that’d created it.

Bethany pressed the button.

The light cone brightened and intensified for maybe five seconds. Travis thought he understood what it was doing: it was feeding a surge of power to the opening—the iris. Enough power to sustain it for 93 seconds. Then the cone switched off, and the iris stayed open all by itself.

“Watch,” Bethany said. She took hold of the black cylinder and moved it left and right. The iris didn’t move with it. It stayed fixed in place.

“I wonder what the point is,” Travis said. “Why would it be useful to delay the shutdown by a minute and a half?”

Bethany’s eyebrows arched a little and she shook her head. She had no idea.

Travis thought about it, but let it go after a few seconds. It was an interesting feature, but he couldn’t imagine a situation in which they’d want to shut the iris slowly. He could think of all kinds of situations in which they’d want to shut it quickly, in which case the regular off button would work fine.

He crossed to where he’d left the duffel bag. He opened it and began assembling the shotgun.

“You don’t have to go along,” Travis said.

It was a few minutes later. He had the Remington put together, loaded, and slung on his back by its strap. He was standing at the iris, his hands around the thick cord of manila rope. One end of the rope was tied to the pedestal mount of a stool at the room’s wet bar. The pedestal was made of steel. Travis had put a lot of pressure on it and deemed it more than strong enough. From there the rope stretched across the room, through the iris, and hung three stories down, that end trailing among the corroded ruins of the hotel’s collapsed corner. The same bar stool was probably down there somewhere, rusted all to hell.

Bethany leaned beside him and stared out into the trees. Birdsong filtered through the forest from every direction. Sparrows. Red-winged blackbirds. It sounded like any average woodland in present-day America.

“Two shooters are better than one,” she said.

“Have you ever shot before?”

She nodded. “My company mandated that I carry a concealed weapon and maintain proficiency with it. There were risks to my safety, given what I knew.”

“Ever climb a rope before?”

“Gym class in junior high. I wasn’t great at it, but then again the motivation wasn’t really there.”

“You’re sure you want to do this?”

She watched the forest for a long time before answering. “I don’t know how it is for you, but I’ve given up on being sure of things for a while.”

Travis positioned himself two feet beneath her as they descended, so that he could stop her fall if she slipped. She didn’t slip.

They touched down onto the pile of rusted girders, tentatively at first, testing whether it was stable. It turned out to be far more so than Travis had expected. He studied it for a moment and saw why: the pile had spent decades oxidizing and sagging and settling under the weight of tree limbs and snow and ice. The result was a mass of beams rusted together as solidly as the welded geodesics of a jungle gym.

That didn’t make it safe to walk on. The wreckage filled the Ritz’s two-story-deep foundation to a level just about even with the street. The path across the top of the pile, to the foundation’s outer wall, was like a balance-beam maze above a tangle of serrated blades. What little sunlight reached the forest floor penetrated only a few feet deeper among the beams, leaving a pool of shadow beneath them. It was hard to imagine that nothing lived down there. Travis turned and saw Bethany staring down into the depths, no doubt thinking along the same lines. He offered his hand. She took it.

They crossed the mass of girders in about thirty seconds. They stepped over a crumbled section of the foundation wall onto Vermont Avenue. Travis stared along its length to the south. Shafts of white light from the overcast were tinted green by their passage through the pine boughs. Here and there a bright red or yellow hardwood leaf spiraled down into the stillness. The street was surprisingly clear of undergrowth. There were plenty of dead weeds creeping from the mesh of cracks in the pavement, but in most places the roadbed was still visible. The pines probably had a lot to do with that. The needles they dropped had some effect on soil quality that usually killed lesser vegetation around them.

Visibility through the trees extended about as far as the sixteen-story highrise at M Street, where in the present day Paige was being held. Travis could just see its girder skeleton past a grove of birches choking what’d once been the traffic circle.

He took the SIG-Sauer from his waistband and handed it to Bethany. He watched her appraise it, her thumb going naturally to the magazine release, getting a feel for it. She raised the weapon quickly to look down the sights, testing its target acquisition.

“Thanks,” she said.

Travis handed her the three spare magazines. She pocketed them.

Then he unslung the Remington from his shoulder and racked a shell into its chamber. He had another dozen shells in his pockets. He took one out and pushed it through the weapon’s loading port to replace the one he’d just chambered. It was good for five shots now.

He turned and looked at the rope, hanging with its end just touching the pile of girders. He followed it up to the surreal image of the iris hovering twenty-five feet above. Through it, from this low angle, he could see only the hotel room’s ceiling and two blades of the fan above the bed.

They moved south along Vermont at a near run. They watched the forest around them and listened for any disturbance in the trees, or any sudden lull in the birdsong that might mean something big was moving around.

The standing frames of buildings looked different from ground level than they had from the high vantage point of the presidential suite. Some of them were leaning at angles that looked impossible from below. They looked like they wanted to come down. Many had.

Travis let the inevitable question into his mind: did the breakdown of the world have anything to do with what he’d learned two summers ago, during his time with Tangent? In the two years since, he’d gotten good at not thinking about that, but there was no dodging it now. The bullet points all but lined themselves up in his head, and he considered them in careful order.

The summer before last, he’d been drawn into Tangent’s business by what seemed, at the time, like chance. The organization had been in panic mode then, in the last days of a conflict over an object they called the Whisper. The Whisper was like a crystal ball out of some plague-era fairy tale. It knew things—impossible things—and shared them with anyone who held it. In the end Travis had found himself alone with the Whisper, on the deepest level of Border Town. The thing had revealed for him a few jagged edges of his future: his culpability in the deaths of 20 million people, and Paige’s desire to see him killed. All of that lay waiting, somehow, along one possible track of his life to come. Somewhere out there in the darkness, years and years ahead, something was set to trip him up. To turn him into something objectively evil.

That was why he’d left Border Town and consigned himself to a life at minimum wage. It was the one way he could be sure to avoid whatever was coming. If he spent the next forty years stocking shelves, he could never cause the kind of disaster the Whisper had described. He’d be in no position to influence events on that scale, for good or bad.

And that answered the question: this was not about him. This was something else entirely. This was 6 or 7 billion deaths, not 20 million, and they’d happened without his help. Simple as that.

He and Bethany reached the junction where Vermont met the traffic circle. They halted for a moment at the cafe on the northeast quadrant, where they’d sat earlier. The patio’s marble tiles lay canted and broken around the trunks of pines and sugar maples that’d punched up through them. Travis recalled the smell of sausage and the jumble of conversation as they’d studied the green building across the circle. That memory was barely an hour old, but in this place that moment was decades and decades gone.

Just off the patio, a few feet in from what remained of the curb, stood a row of corroded husks that’d once been newspaper boxes. Their tops were rusted to Swiss cheese and their doors had all fallen off. If any newspapers had been left in these containers at the end, they were long gone now. Paper wouldn’t have lasted more than a few years against humidity and mildew, even when the doors had been intact.

“Wonder what the headlines were,” Bethany said. “I wonder what was on the front page of the last USA Today.”

Travis had no answer.

They stared at the scene only a few seconds longer, then turned and moved across the circle, toward the standing ruin of the sixteen-story office building.

Chapter Twelve

The plan was straightforward enough: all Bethany needed was a name. The name of someone who worked inside this building in the present day. A loose thread to start pulling on, and they might have the FBI involved within the hour.

Among these ruins, paper files and computer drives would be long lost, but an office building had other storage media that should have survived the intervening years just fine. Specifically, Travis was thinking of office door nameplates. They tended to be made of either plastic or bronze, and the names and job titles on them were usually deeply engraved—sometimes they were cut fully through the plate. A plastic nameplate could probably sit out in the elements for a million years and still be legible, and even bronze should be good for a long while. Longer than most other metals. Corrosion resistance was one of the advantages that had made bronze such a big deal, way back in the day.

A single name. It was all they needed.

They rounded the cluster of birches and got a full view of the highrise. It’d borne the years better than most of the other structures they’d seen. Its frame, though heavily rusted, was still standing whole and straight. A good portion of the concrete flooring at each level remained intact—maybe a third of it in all. Travis could see even the remnant of a stairwell near the building’s core, thick metal risers and treads still in place. It wasn’t hard to guess why the building had fared better than its neighbors along the street. It was newer. Built in 2006, it probably had a few decades on any other structure within a couple blocks. That meant it was not only younger, but that its steel had probably been of higher quality to begin with. It’d benefited from all the advances in refinement and impurity removal in the years leading up to its construction. For all that, it was still another relic waiting to fall. Its superior attributes would buy it an extra five years on its feet, at best.

They reached the building’s concrete foundation wall. It stood three feet above street level and was four feet thick. They peered over the edge. The foundation was only a single story deep, but a third of that depth was filled with a compost layer of leaves and branches and probably a few dozen tons of gypsum plaster that had once made up the building’s drywall. Travis stared at the layer and felt his optimism fade. He thought of looking for an eight-by-two-inch nameplate among half an acre of chest-deep biomass. He thought of needles and haystacks. Then he saw something that turned his optimism all the way off.

It was a blackened, fibrous slab of wood maybe two inches thick. A corner of it was just peeking from the mire ten feet away. There was a rusted hinge attached to it. A single, inch-long steel screw clung to the free-swinging half of the hinge. Both the screw and the hinge were deformed. They hadn’t just corroded to rust and flaked away. They’d sagged and bent. They’d half melted.

Fire had ravaged the foundation pit at some point in the past. It hadn’t burned hot enough, or long enough, to affect the massive footings of the girder structure, but everything else had suffered in the heat. The heavy wooden door had probably been solid oak. It looked like the carbonized remnant of a campfire log now. Travis thought of bronze again. He thought of the other thing it was celebrated for: the ease with which it could be heat-softened and reshaped. Plastic and bronze nameplates might last for millennia against rain and snow and mildew, but they wouldn’t last five minutes in a fire hot enough to warp steel screws.

They walked the building’s perimeter. They searched for any scraps that had fallen outside the foundation. They found a few shards of green glass and chunks of concrete from the missing floor sections above, but nothing useful. Nothing with anyone’s name on it. Decades of rain and wind had scoured the exposed street of anything small enough to be carried away. Travis imagined meter-wide storm drains beneath the city clotted with every kind of refuse.

They climbed a maple growing against the girders on the west side of the building and got onto the second floor. They made their way across the level toward the intact stairwell at the center of the structure. They avoided walking on the huge pads of concrete that still held in some places among the steel framing. All of the pads showed cracks, and some were sagging. It was impossible to know the amount of weight they could hold. Sooner or later each one’s capacity would reach zero and it would collapse. A day or a week or a month before that point, the capacity was probably just a few pounds. Given that most of them had already fallen, it seemed prudent to stay the hell off of them.

They reached the stairwell and found it to be solid. The treads and risers were at least an inch thick. None of the flights they could see above had collapsed or even decoupled from the structural members they were welded to.

They made their way up.

They stopped and studied each floor. A few very heavy objects from the building’s interior remained atop the concrete pads here and there. One was a squat granite bookend, like a little pyramid cut in half. Travis lifted it and saw traces of carpet fiber and foam beneath it. The thing had sat there, a little too dense to be blown away, while everything had rotted around it—even out from under it. They found a pair of hexagonal iron dumbbells, twenty pounds each. Travis imagined them sitting in someone’s office and not seeing much use. They’d seen even less lately.

They saw a few steel door frames still held in place against the sturdiest uprights, but there were no doors left in any of them. No doors lying flat on any of the concrete pads, either. They’d have long since rotted to fragments light enough that a once-in-a-decade storm could push them over the edge. At least half a dozen such storms would’ve happened over the years. No doors. No nameplates.

They saw something shiny at the north edge of the fifth floor. They crossed to it along the girders. It was the foil lid of a yogurt container, its edge pinned beneath the rim of a tipped-over trash basket—a stylish, heavy little thing carved from a cubic foot of limestone.

Travis pulled the yogurt lid free and held it up to the light. Whatever writing had once been on it had long ago faded to almost nothing in the sun.

But there was a line of text along the edge that remained legible—tiny letters and numbers that’d been stamped into the foil.

They read: exp. dec 23 2011.

Chapter Thirteen

For a few seconds everything was quiet, except the wind moving through the forest that’d replaced Washington, D.C. Far to the west Travis heard a crow cawing, high above the treetops. The weightless foil lid quivered just noticeably in the breeze, but Travis’s eyes stayed fixed on the expiration date.

“Four months from now,” Bethany said. “In our time.” The words came out as hardly more than a breath.

“I don’t eat a lot of yogurt,” Travis said. “How far away is the sell-by date, when you buy this stuff?”

“It’s like milk. Three or four weeks. Someone would’ve bought this around the start of December. This coming December, in the present day.”

Travis nodded.

“And it’s not like people hang on to these lids for posterity,” Bethany said. “Figure this thing goes into the trash in early to mid-December… and no one ever takes it back out. Jesus Christ, the world ends four months from now?”

“Janitors quit working four months from now, at least,” Travis said. “My guess is, so does everyone else.”

He let the lid go and they watched it drift down on the air, like the colored leaves that were settling onto Vermont Avenue before them.

“Four months…” Bethany said again. “Everyone I know. Everyone I love. Four months…”

Travis found himself going back to what he’d thought of earlier: the chance of some connection between all of this and whatever the Whisper had warned him about—the dark potential of his own future.

He remained certain there was no connection, but now something else struck him: the Whisper had spoken of a future in which he belonged to Tangent several years from now. How could that have ever been possible if the world was going to collapse in 2011?

Well, weren’t all bets simply off, after everything the Whisper had done? In a roundabout way, the thing had killed Ellen Garner, with the result that President Garner had resigned from office and allowed Currey to take power. That change alone could account for massive differences in how everything played out.

“End of the world plus seventy years, we guessed,” Bethany said. “So on this side of the iris, the date is sometime around 2080.”

Travis nodded, but said nothing. He looked around. From this position he could see along not only Vermont, but M Street to the east and west, a hundred yards in each direction before the tree cover obscured the way.

Something obvious occurred to him. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it already.

“Where are the cars?” he said.

He looked at Bethany. She looked blank for half a second and then made the same oh yeah expression he’d probably just made himself.

“The panels would be rusted to nothing by now,” Travis said, “but the frames and the wheel rims should still be in some kind of shape, with windows and all kinds of plastic parts draped over them.” He looked around. “They should be everywhere.”

But there wasn’t one to be seen. They hadn’t passed anything that could’ve once been a vehicle on the walk down from the Ritz. Hadn’t seen anything like that along the stretch of Vermont north of the hotel, either, when they’d first roped down. He’d have noticed and remembered.

“People must’ve had a reason to get out of D.C.,” Bethany said, “at the end.”

Travis stared at the empty streets and thought about it. He imagined a plague sweeping the world. People fleeing high-population areas in a mass panic.

It didn’t work. Not entirely. First of all, not everyone would leave. Some number of people would have nowhere better to go, and would hole up in their homes. The city could still end up vacated of cars, even in that case—in the end, those without transportation would break into and hotwire whatever was available—but there was another problem, and Travis could see no way around it. The dynamics of a mass evacuation in a short period of time would’ve overwhelmed the city streets. It happened in every coastal metropolis in the days before a big hurricane. Traffic would condense at the primary outlets, like bridges and freeway interchanges. People would sit at the wheel for an hour or two, going nowhere, and then a few would run out of gas while idling, or get frustrated and simply abandon their vehicles, and try to get out on foot. It only took a few of those, and then each way out of the city would be stopped up like a corked bottle. And hurricane warnings matured over three to four days. Travis imagined that news of a major disease outbreak would hit at least that fast. Maybe faster. The gridlock would be absolute. There would be all kinds of cars left rotting on M Street and Vermont Avenue if the world had ended in a plague.

He turned and saw Bethany trying to work it out too.

“Everyone got in their cars and left,” Travis said. “But not in a hurry.”

They returned to the stairwell and continued the search of the building, floor by floor. At the ninth level they walked out to the northeast corner, where seventy years earlier Paige had been held. There was nothing special about the construction there. Just more girders, and a concrete flooring section that hadn’t yet surrendered to gravity.

Travis stared at the undefined space. Irrational as he knew it was, he couldn’t help thinking that Paige was right there somehow, just feet away, but impossible to reach from here. He wondered what she was thinking. Wondered if she knew they were trying to get to her—that she wasn’t as alone as she must feel. He thought about it for a few seconds and then forced himself to look away. Losing time here wasn’t helping her.

They continued up the stairwell. They found nothing of interest on any of the floors through the fifteenth. Only one floor remained above that point, and it had just three of its concrete pads still in place. Of all the surfaces in the building these were the most exposed to rain and wind and sunlight. Looking up at the slabs, Travis put the chance of finding anything noteworthy on top of them right around zero.

Then they climbed the last flight, and he saw at once that he’d been wrong.

Chapter Fourteen

Two of the three pads were bare and bleached and scoured smooth by the elements, as expected.

On the third, halfway between the stairwell and the building’s northeast corner, stood an executive office desk.

It was made of rich cherrywood. Its work surface was three feet by six. It was centered perfectly on its slab of concrete. It looked like someone had hauled it out of a showroom five minutes ago and put it there.

For the longest moment Travis could only stare. He and Bethany shared a look. Then they walked across the girders to the desk.

At close range it became plausible. It wasn’t made of cherrywood. It was made of some synthetic material that did a hell of a job of looking like cherrywood. And it was lag bolted to the pad. Ice expansion cracks had grown laterally from the bolt holes in the concrete, wide enough in places that Travis could see the exposed and rusted mesh of rebar inside. Of all the floor sections he’d seen in the building, this one looked the closest to failing. By far. And that was without factoring in the weight of the desk pressing on it. It was a wonder the slab had held this long.

There were four drawers in the desk. Two on either side of where a person would sit. Shallow tray drawers above, deep file drawers below. All four were closed. Their front panels were made of the same synthetic material that had held up so well during the desk’s long reign atop the decaying building. Travis crouched low on the girder at the point nearest the desk, and studied the drawers. They were tightly closed. They would be weighted to stay shut until someone gave them a good tug. The wind had never managed to do so: there was nothing on the drawers’ faces to offer it any purchase. In the early years the drawers had also had the benefit of being locked shut, but that protection was probably nominal by now: Travis saw only rust-choked circular indentations where steel keyholes had once been.

Four drawers. Not sealed shut, but at least shut. No sunlight would’ve gotten into them. Not much ice, either. A trace amount of rain would’ve made it through, and all the humidity and mold and mildew in the world would’ve gone in like there was no barrier at all. Any paper contents would be a distant memory. But people kept other things in desk drawers. Credit cards. Engraved metal items.

All they needed was a name.

Travis stood upright again. He stared at the concrete pad, sagging in its frame. There was no way to reach the desk drawers without venturing completely onto it, and not just a step or two. Not any short distance from which you could turn and grab for the girder if the concrete gave without warning. To open the drawers would require going all the way to the middle of the pad, eight feet in from the edge.

“How much do you weigh?” Bethany said.

Travis shook his head. “You’re not going out there.”

“I weigh a hundred ten pounds naked. Mind averting your eyes and holding onto my clothes?”

“You’re not going out there. I’m going.”

She looked at him. “Is this really the time for sexism masquerading as chivalry?”

“Yes.”

Travis unslung the shotgun and handed it to her. He stood there a few seconds longer, eyeing the cracks. He turned around and leaned a few inches past the other side of the girder—the open side—and looked down at the fifteenth floor. There was no intact concrete directly below to slow or hinder the fall of this pad, if it collapsed. There was nothing but open space all the way to a pad down on the twelfth floor, which would do about as much good as a big sheet of tissue paper stretched between the girders there. And after that it was smooth plummeting all the way to the foundation. Travis turned and faced the desk again.

“Maybe this was the CEO’s office,” Bethany said. It sounded like the kind of thing a person only said to drown out the internal scream of tension. “Someone important, anyway. We didn’t see any other desks bolted to the concrete.”

“Maybe the concrete pads with bolt holes in them all cracked through and fell a long time ago. Maybe this is the last holdout, just waiting for a dry leaf to land on it and send it crashing down.”

“You’re not helping.”

Travis put one foot on the concrete. He shifted a fourth of his weight onto it. The pad didn’t budge. Maybe it was stronger than it looked. He transferred another fourth of his weight. Still solid. He took a breath and stepped completely onto the thing. It felt fine. He looked at Bethany. She didn’t look the least bit relieved.

“I know,” Travis said. “The edge would be the strong part anyway.”

“Don’t die.”

“Okay.”

He took a second step. Then another.

On his fourth step something shifted. It was barely perceptible. A settling movement of the pad, probably no more than an eighth of an inch. He heard Bethany take a sharp breath behind him, but she said nothing.

Three more steps would put him right at the front of the desk, centered where its owner had once sat.

He set a foot forward and eased onto it. He felt no response from the pad.

Two steps to go.

He took the next one. Nothing.

Maybe he was flattering himself to think his presence mattered to this five-ton chunk of material that’d weathered a couple thousand blizzards with a two-hundred-pound desk on its back. Maybe he could do jumping jacks on it for an hour and not impress it.

He eased his weight off his back foot. Guided it forward and touched it to the concrete six inches from the desk. He took a breath, let it out slowly, and let his center of gravity slide forward until it was positioned evenly above both feet.

Then a piece of rebar snapped like bone and the middle of the pad plunged six inches, throwing Travis forward against the desk.

Bethany screamed.

It was all Travis could do to keep his body from pitching right over the desktop and slamming down like a dropped anvil onto the concrete behind it. Bethany was yelling something at him, but the bloodflow ringing in his ears made it hard to tell what it was. He checked his forward momentum, both hands pressing hard onto the smooth desktop, and suddenly the world went still and silent. He heard his own breathing. He heard Bethany’s breathing too.

He turned and looked at her. The word pale didn’t quite do the job. Her breath went in and out in little jerks. Her eyes stayed with his for a few seconds, and then they dropped and went to the right. He followed her stare.

The largest of the lateral cracks had opened up all the way to the girder on one side, and the concrete had sagged free of its seat against the beam there, its hold having crumbled completely except for a single, fist-sized formation. That piece, clinging to the steel by an inch, was all that had stopped the pad’s total failure. It was all that was preventing it now.

Bethany found her voice again. “Off.” Her hands made little circular gestures, calling him back to the beam.

Travis still had both his hands on the desk, most of his weight distributed to its footings. He looked at the drawers. He could probably open all four from here without shifting his mass around very much.

“Travis,” Bethany said.

He looked at her again.

Her eyes: don’t.

“It’s okay,” he said. What else was he going to say?

He turned to the tray drawer on the top left. He raised one hand from the desk. Felt the weight that’d been on it transfer to the other hand. No real change to the pressure the desk was putting on the pad.

He pressed four fingers behind the rounded top of the drawer’s face panel and put his thumb against the edge of the desktop just above it. He pushed with his thumb and pulled with his fingers. There was a moment of resistance. Then he heard the lock mechanism crumble like a pretzel, and the drawer opened smoothly on plastic rollers.

The drawer’s sides and bottom were made of the same material as the rest of the desk. They’d held up perfectly. The contents of the drawer hadn’t. There were three metal paperclips that’d rusted to what looked like orange chalk drawings of themselves. Travis blew on them and they vanished in a little cloud. There was a stapler that had corroded to a solid lump. Right beside it was a perfect little rectangle-shaped piece of rust that Travis couldn’t identify at first. Then he understood: a box of staples, the cardboard long since eaten away by mildew and the tightly arranged staples inside fused together by oxidation. There were three nickels and a quarter. There was a pile of rubber bands that’d broken down to dried crumbs. There was a layer of dead mold coating everything. Once upon a time it’d been paper: memos, Post-its, business cards, maybe check stubs.

And that was it. There was nothing else in the drawer. Nothing with a name on it.

Travis considered the larger one below it. A file drawer. Was it even worth bothering with? What could have been in it but paper? What could be in it now but an inch-deep layer of mold dust?

He opened it.

It contained an inch-deep layer of mold dust.

He lowered his hand carefully to the mold and sifted through it. It came up in ragged tufts. They caught the wind as they cleared the top of the drawer and were scurried away. There was nothing lying concealed beneath the mold layer.

Travis pivoted carefully on his feet, trying not to move them or change the amount of weight on them. He put his free hand back on the desk, and slowly raised the other, letting the pressure transfer. He faced the other two drawers.

He tried the file drawer first. An inch of mold. Nothing under it.

He opened the tray drawer.

Empty.

Not even a dusting of long-gone paper.

He exhaled. Closed his eyes. Opened them again and began to stand upright.

And then he stopped.

Because there was something in the drawer.

Something narrow and black, lying against the back end. It blended with the dark cherrywood color and all but escaped notice. It was a pen. It looked expensive. He picked it up and drew it into the light. The metal parts—the clip and the point—were rusted dark, but the body looked fine. It was made of something that felt harder than ordinary plastic. Something that wasn’t cheap. Its grip was ornate but not fancy. It looked serious. Like something a high-powered executive would whip out on special occasions—maybe the signing of final contracts for a hostile takeover. Travis rolled it between his fingers.

There was a name engraved on it: eldred warren.

Travis turned and held the pen up so Bethany could see the engraving.

“Very good,” she said. “Now can you get the hell off there so I can start breathing again?”

Travis pocketed the pen and for a moment rested both hands on the desk. He looked at the fragment of concrete that was keeping him alive. He looked at the distance back to the girder.

Then he stood up straight and crossed the pad in five steps, ready to jump and grab for the beam if necessary. It wasn’t necessary. If the concrete moved at all beneath him he didn’t feel it. He saw Bethany exhale hard as soon as he was fully onto the girder, but he didn’t pause to share the sentiment. They had information now. Something they could work on. Just like that, his urgency had fuel to burn. He turned atop the beam and made for the stairwell at close to a sprint.

They were six flights down when they heard the concrete fragment snap high above them. They turned in time to see the massive slab, desk and all, plunge through the channel of space defined by the girders. It blasted through the intact pad on level twelve without slowing, and the entire mass fell a hundred feet further to the foundation pit. The impact kicked up a halo of ash and dead leaves.

They stared for less than a second, then continued down the stairs as fast as they could move.

Chapter Fifteen

Three minutes later they were on top of the pile of girders at the southwest corner of the Ritz-Carlton. The rope hung from the iris above, exactly as they’d left it. Bethany went up first, and Travis followed a few feet below. By the time he’d climbed through the iris she was standing at the window with her phone in hand, already going to work.

Travis stared south at the green-tinted highrise while Bethany worked on the name. He looked at the top floor and visualized the desk there in the present, bolted to the concrete through some expensive carpeting or hardwood. Maybe Eldred Warren was sitting there right now, with the same pen in his drawer that Travis now had in his pocket. Literally the same pen. That was a hard concept to get a grasp on.

“He’s not in the federal tax records,” Bethany said. “Not too surprising, someone way up in a company like that. We already know they’re big on secrecy. I’ll try corporate registration in the Caymans.”

Thirty seconds later she came up empty there, too.

“There are lots of other tax shelters to try,” she said, “but before I start on those I’ll pull his social security file. That’ll give us at least some basic info on the guy.”

She navigated for twenty seconds. She pressed a last button and waited for something. She smiled.

Then she frowned.

“What?” Travis said.

“Got it. Only one Eldred Warren with a social security number in the United States.”

“Must be our man, then.”

“Yes and no.”

“What do you mean?”

“Give me a minute.”

It turned out to be ninety seconds. She spent them navigating to some other information on her phone, and reading it. Her frown deepened as she did.

“It’s the right guy,” she said, “but he’s not going to be any help to us.”

“Why not?”

“Because he doesn’t work in that building yet. I’m looking at his blog right now. He graduated number two in his class from Harvard Law School… three months ago. He hasn’t taken a job anywhere yet.”

“That’s hard to believe,” Travis said. “Wouldn’t someone like that have offers waiting for him before he bought his cap and gown?”

“Tons of them, but a guy like that knows he can pick and choose. It’s not unthinkable that he’d take his time. I had a dozen offers myself, and spent two months making up my mind. And this guy’s degree is more versatile than mine was. He’ll have everyone from movie studios to lobbying firms filling up his voice mail these days.”

“All right, so maybe he doesn’t work for this company yet,” Travis said. “But he’s probably in talks with them. We could go have a chat with him, shove a gun in his face if we have to.”

“Not anytime soon, we can’t. According to his last blog post, a few hours ago, he’s on vacation in Japan with his girlfriend.”

Travis sat on the couch and leaned back. He pressed his hands to his eyes. He was tired as hell.

They were at square zero. They had nothing at all to work with. The barrier of open space around the oubliette was as vast as it’d been when they’d first spoken of it.

He looked at his watch. Nine thirty in the morning. Paige had been captive for just shy of ten hours.

Bethany was pacing now. Holding her phone but unable to think of anything to do with it.

Travis closed his eyes again.

Paige wanted them to move on. Wanted them to leave her behind and finish what she’d meant to do herself. She’d said it in almost those words, in her phone call to Bethany. And she’d meant it. That was the way she thought. She had the ability to see the big picture. Six and a half billion lives versus her own. She was lying in that room down the street right now hoping like hell that they wouldn’t risk trying to save her. Hoping they would forget about her and just get to work. And they could do that. They could climb back down the rope right now, into the ruined D.C. They could walk back down Vermont, ignore the remains of the highrise and go another mile to the White House. They could spend days digging in the wreckage there for some kind of clue. And if that search turned up nothing, they could go across the river to the Pentagon and spend weeks. And after a while they wouldn’t have to think about Paige lying in that room, because by then she’d be long gone. She’d be gone by tonight.

The people who’d hit the motorcade had taken her alive because it made sense at the time. They’d been acting on a snap decision, operating with more questions than answers. But that was probably no longer the case. Ten hours was plenty of time to take stock. Plenty of time for them to realize they didn’t need her.

No doubt Paige was thinking the same thing right now. Lying bound, waiting for her captors to settle on the decision. Waiting for it to happen. When it did, she would try not to cry about it. She’d still be holding on to the logic of it all, telling herself that her life was just part of what it cost to get the job done. She would be thinking that very thing when she felt the silencer touch her temple.

“You love her.”

Travis opened his eyes.

Bethany had stopped pacing. She was looking at him.

“You love her,” she said again. “Paige.”

“I knew her for less than a week.”

“That’s long enough.”

“Why do you think I love her?”

“Because you stayed on that concrete pad. Stepping onto it was one thing. But staying on it, after what happened… that was another thing entirely. To do something that insane, you have to care about someone more than you care about your own life. A lot more.”

Travis didn’t reply. He stared ahead at nothing. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I can’t leave her in there.”

“I don’t want to leave her, either. I just don’t know what the next move is.”

Neither of them spoke for the next minute. Travis’s eyes fixed on a spot on the carpet. He stared at it and hardly blinked. He let the edges of his vision blur.

Then he turned and looked at Bethany.

“What was the last thing Paige said to you in that phone call?”

“That you can go through and come back,” she said. “She was just saying it’s safe to go through the opening.”

Travis thought about it. “No, that’s not what she said. Not exactly what she said anyway. Play the recording again.”

Chapter Sixteen

She played it. They listened. They heard the frantic rush of Paige’s voice telling Bethany to go to her residence, to get the entity and get out of Border Town. To use it. To go public with whatever she learned. To get Travis Chase’s help if necessary. Then she said, “Shit, what else… ?” and went silent for a few seconds. Travis caught the sound he remembered from the first time he’d heard the recording: running footsteps, men coming to get her. That sound was all he’d heard on the first listen, at that part of the clip. This time he focused on the other sound, right there beside it in the audio. The more important sound, by far. Paige’s breathing in the absence of her voice. Two breaths, deep and fast. They didn’t shudder on the way out. They seethed. Travis got the sense that however scared Paige was, she was frustrated even more. She was struggling to remember something critical, some detail she needed to tell Bethany in the few seconds she had left. Which was strange, in retrospect: if all Paige needed to say was that a person could step through the projected opening, would that have been hard to remember? Would it have even been necessary? Wouldn’t Paige expect them to figure that out for themselves?

A second later they heard Bethany’s voice on the recording: “What’s happening? Where are you?”

Paige’s voice came back in, louder and more intense than before. “You can take it through and still come back! You can take it through!”

Then it was over.

In the silence Travis looked at Bethany.

They both looked at the black cylinder, still lying in the armchair, still switched on. The iris stood open to the forest and the overcast sky above it. The manila rope lay in tangles on the carpet where they’d left it after pulling it up.

“Take it through,” Bethany said, turning the phrase over like a found artifact. “Does she mean the cylinder? Take the cylinder through the iris?”

Travis stared at the thing. It was hard to imagine what else Paige could have meant.

“It would be easy to do,” he said. “Switch it off with the delay, and then carry the cylinder through the iris during the minute and a half it stays open.”

“You’d have to be out of your mind,” Bethany said. “What happens when the iris shuts behind you? Now you’re stuck seventy years in the future, with a machine that can only take you seventy years further into the future. You’d never get home.”

“What if it doesn’t work like that? What if turning it on in the future just opens the iris back to the present time? Like a toggle. Back and forth.”

“How would it know to do that?” Bethany said. “How would it know it was in the future?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s something simple. Maybe it senses when it’s taken through the iris, and switches itself into reverse. We’ll never know how it works, but think of what we just heard. Paige said you can take it through and come back. She knew a lot more about this thing than we do.”

He watched Bethany mull it over. Watched her warm to it.

“The logic adds up,” she said. “Someone built this thing for a purpose. I can’t see the use of something that just leapfrogs you further and further ahead in time, and never lets you come back. Forward and back makes more sense.”

“It also explains why the cylinders came as a pair,” Travis said. “Think about it. Who knows what this kind of machine was meant for, but we can imagine any number of things. It could be some military scouting tool. Use it to survey the aftermath of a war you haven’t even fought yet. Hell, it could be farm equipment. Say there’s some high-value crop that takes seven decades to mature. Sow the seeds, step through the iris and reap the rewards right away. But whatever the use, its makers had a reason to allow the delayed shutoff. That way you can take the cylinder with you when you go through the iris. Not hard to imagine why they’d want to. Leaving it behind, switched on, is a major vulnerability. Look at the precautions we had to take, setting it up so nothing could get at it from the other side. But here’s the thing: taking it with you would be risky too. Extremely risky, in fact. Picture yourself putting this thing to casual use. Like it’s a socket wrench or a screwdriver. You’re using it all day long, going back and forth between two points in time, hauling food supplies or weapons or whatever. Can you think of the mistake you might make? It would be the easiest thing to do, and if you did it you’d be in a world of trouble.”

Bethany’s eyes narrowed. She thought about it. “You could accidentally leave the cylinder behind. Leave it on the other side of the iris when it closed.”

Travis nodded. “It would happen one of two ways. Either you leave it in the future, in which case there’s no way to retrieve it except to sit on your ass and wait several decades, or else you leave it in the past and trap yourself in the future, in which case you’re absolutely screwed.”

Bethany walked over to the armchair. Stared down at the cylinder.

“You’d want a backup copy,” she said.

“You’d need a backup copy. Like a skydiver needs a reserve chute. Because some mistakes you can’t afford to make even once. You’d have a duplicate cylinder, and you’d strap it to your back and never take it off, at least not while you were using the first one.”

Bethany met his eyes. “It makes sense that Paige and the others would’ve figured this out. In the desert they had both cylinders. They could have tested this idea without any risk of getting stranded. Just leave one of them switched on, and use the other one to find out whether or not the iris brings you back to the present time.”

Travis nodded. It all added up.

A silence drew out.

“We could be wrong about this,” Bethany said.

“We could be very wrong.”

“Just plain old wrong would be bad enough. If we try this and it doesn’t work, we’re stuck over there.”

“If we try it and it does work,” Travis said, “then we can take the cylinder into the future, carry it up to the ninth floor of that ruin on M Street, and step back into the present time right inside the room where they’re holding Paige.”

The idea seemed to wash over Bethany like a breeze on a spring day.

“Nice,” she said.

Chapter Seventeen

They repositioned the cylinder so that it projected the iris to a different part of the hotel room—closer to the building’s interior, and away from the part that’d collapsed in the future. They found a spot that would allow them to step through onto a solid girder in the ruins. There was a sturdy oak limb hanging over it, which would offer easy transit to the ground.

Travis stepped through onto the beam. Bethany stood in the room, next to the cylinder. She put her finger over the third button and looked at him.

“Say when,” she said.

Travis looked at his watch. The second hand was ten clicks from the top of the dial. When it was three clicks shy he said, “Now.”

Bethany pressed the button. The cone of light flared and then died. The iris stayed open. Bethany lifted the cylinder and carried it to the opening. She passed it through to Travis and he cradled it tightly against himself.

Then Bethany reached through, grabbed the oak branch, and pulled herself onto the girder.

“What are you doing?” Travis said.

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t have to be over here too. We don’t both have to risk this. If we’re wrong, and there’s no way back, you might as well be in the present.”

“Why?” she said. “I’d be stuck there without the cylinder. What would I do?”

“Live the life of Renee Turner. Party like hell. Anything you want.”

“Yeah. For four months. Knowing the whole time that the world’s going to end.”

“It’s probably longer than we’d make it on this side.” He looked at his watch. Sixty seconds left. “This is stupid. You should wait in the room.”

“It’s the broken concrete all over again.”

“Yeah, it is, and you don’t have to be on it.”

She turned to face him, leaning on the branch between them. The overcast had thinned, and in the brighter light he saw her eyes more clearly than he had before now. He’d thought they were brown. Really they were green, but so dark they were almost black.

“You’re willing to risk being left alone in the whole world, for the sake of someone you care about,” she said. “And I think someone willing to do that shouldn’t have to. If we get stuck here, we’ll find ways to pass the time.”

He held her gaze. It occurred to him that what she was doing was about as kind a gesture as a human could make to another. For a long moment he couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

Then he said, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

He glanced at his watch. “Thirty seconds.”

She nodded. Swallowed hard.

They both turned and stared through the iris. Through the windows on the far side of the hotel room they could see the city in the present day. The orderly buildings and the gleam of sunlight on glass. The traffic flowing smoothly through the circle down the block. People on the sidewalks in shorts and T-shirts. Parents walking with kids in the light of a summer morning.

“For all that’s wrong with the world,” Travis said, “it really is something.”

In the corner of his eye he saw Bethany nod.

And then the iris slipped shut in front of them, and left them staring at precisely the same angle on the ruined city. A perfect superimposition from one image to the other. From solid buildings to their leaning skeletons. From the bustling street to the decaying one. The effect was more powerful than Travis had expected. He heard Bethany exhale softly beside him and knew it’d been the same for her.

Travis moved ten feet along a girder that T-boned into the one they’d first stepped onto. He found a position from which the cylinder would project the iris to more or less the same spot it’d just vanished from. Bethany, on the first girder, stood clear.

Travis wondered what it would look like if they were wrong, and the iris opened onto a Washington, D.C. seven decades even further on. The frames of the buildings would be long gone. The roads, too. It might be hard to tell there’d been a city there at all.

He leveled the cylinder like a weapon.

He pressed the on button.

The light cone flared.

The iris appeared.

Bethany didn’t look through it. She looked at him instead.

“Tell me,” she said.

Part II - Umbra

Chapter Eighteen

Paige lay bound, waiting for it to happen.

Waiting for the end.

Every few minutes she heard footsteps approach in the corridor, only to pass by and fade away. She waited for the footsteps that would approach but not fade, and the click of the latch that would tell her it was all over with.

She rolled onto her side and faced the windows. She could see up Vermont Avenue. Lots of people out. She saw a red convertible pull into the Ritz-Carlton. Saw a young couple get out. Impossible to see their expressions at this distance, but they had to be smiling. They left the car to a valet and disappeared into the building.

Beautiful day.

Beautiful world to be alive in.

She wished she could know that it would stay this way a lot longer than four months—even if she wouldn’t be around to see it.

The street blurred a little. She blinked away the film of tears. She took a sharp breath and rolled onto her back again.

Another set of footsteps came and went. She closed her eyes and waited.

Travis sprinted full-out down the broken surface of the avenue, south toward the traffic circle. Bethany kept up with him. They weren’t listening for heavy movement in the forest now. Travis had the shotgun cradled as he ran. If a lion stepped into his path it was going to get a long overdue reminder that meaner predators had once walked these streets.

He mapped out the plan as he sprinted. Visualized the ninth floor of the ruin, and the northeast corner there. They’d looked at it earlier. The concrete pad had been pretty solid, with just a few hairline fractures.

No way to know the room’s layout in the present day. Not even its size. It didn’t have to match the concrete. The safest place to open the iris would be near the room’s outside corner. That would at least get them inside the space, whatever its size.

He pictured how the action would play out. In present time he would come through the iris facing the corner, with his back to the room. He’d lose maybe half a second turning and getting a sense of his surroundings. There was no reason to expect an armed presence in the room itself. Paige would be restrained, and the building was secured at ground level. Nobody would expect intruders to step through a hole in the air on the ninth floor.

But armed or not, anyone in the room other than Paige would have to be dealt with.

He considered the Remington. Imagined going through the iris with it. It would be bulky and slow to maneuver in the confined space of the corner. It would need to be cycled between shots, and he’d get only five of them. Anyone he hit would be dead all over the place, but if there were multiple targets, and if they did happen to be armed, the limited shot capacity could get him in trouble.

They reached the traffic circle. Crossed it in about twenty seconds. In another twenty they were at the base of the maple that offered access to the second floor. They climbed to the girders and headed across them toward the stairwell.

“Trade with me,” Travis said. He held the shotgun out to Bethany. She took it and handed him the SIG-Sauer. It held nine .45 caliber rounds, including the one in the chamber. They wouldn’t hit like twelve-gauge slugs, but they would do the job. And he could aim and fire the pistol a hell of a lot faster than a three-foot-long shotgun. Bethany handed him the three spare magazines from her pocket. He put two in his own pocket and kept the other one in his free hand. If need be, he could drop the current magazine out of the pistol and reload it in about a second.

They were on the ninth floor a minute later, moving as fast as caution allowed across the open beams. They came to the concrete pad at the corner. Travis gave it only a second’s assessment and then walked onto it. Strong as hell. An intact pad directly above it had blocked at least some of the snow and ice that would’ve stressed it over the years.

Bethany followed him onto the pad. She shrugged off her backpack, opened it and took out the cylinder. The rest of the shotgun shells—one hundred minus those in the gun and in Travis’s pockets—settled into the bottom of the pack.

She set the cylinder on the concrete and used the backpack to prop up the front end. The iris would open just above waist level, two feet in from the corner of the room.

She knelt over the cylinder, ready to switch it on.

Travis stood next to where the beam would project the iris. He gripped the SIG. Took a breath. Looked at Bethany.

“Do it,” he said.

She pressed the button.

The iris appeared, and through it Travis saw tinted glass and flowing traffic far below and he ducked through and spun as he stood upright, the SIG coming up and sweeping the room for targets.

The room was empty.

Chapter Nineteen

There was one door out of the room. It was closed. There was a narrow strip of glass set into it. Travis crossed the room and looked through it. The corridor stretched away in two directions from the corner. He could see all the way down one stretch, and not far at all down the other. Just a few feet before the angle got in the way.

The corridor was tiled with either stone or ceramic. Travis heard footsteps clicking along on it, approaching from the hidden direction. Distinct clicks, one after the next. Someone alone. Travis turned the doorknob and pulled the door toward himself a quarter inch, just enough to clear the latch from the plate.

He waited. The tile amplified the footsteps and made it hard to judge their distance. He let them get louder than instinct advised, and then he yanked the door open and stepped through, bringing the SIG up to level.

A guy in his forties, short, wiry, came to a stop with the gun’s barrel six inches from his face.

Travis gestured for him to stay quiet. The guy nodded. Eyes wide. Travis stepped clear of the door and waved the man through, and a second later they were back in the room with the door closed behind them.

“Shut your eyes,” Travis said. “Tight.”

The man complied.

Travis grabbed him by the back of the collar and propelled him forward, keeping him off balance. He shoved him to the corner, turned, dragged him downward and pushed him through the iris. His waist caught the bottom of the circle on the way through and he pitched forward, sprawling onto the concrete on the other side.

The man got himself upright, half sitting, and opened his eyes. Bethany had the shotgun on him. Travis was already through the iris behind him, covering him with the SIG.

The guy looked around at the forest and the ruins. His expression went dead slack. Disbelief at its most literal. His brain simply did not accept what his eyes were reporting.

“Wallet,” Travis said.

The guy stared at him. Blinked. Took out his wallet.

Travis pointed to the concrete at Bethany’s feet. “Toss it.”

The guy threw the wallet. It landed, tumbled three feet and stopped.

Travis gestured for the guy to stand up. The man nodded, and when he was halfway through the move, onto his feet but not yet balanced, Travis grabbed the back of his collar again and shoved him forward onto the girder that bound the north edge of the concrete. He pushed him onto it and then past it. The guy’s feet stayed on the lip of the beam but his upper body ended up two feet beyond, above nine stories of empty space.

The man’s breath caught in his throat. His body went rigid, his fear overwhelming every instinct to struggle. He took tiny breaths, in and out, as if he thought larger ones might imbalance him and send him over.

Travis stood with his own weight tilted inward from the edge to counterbalance the guy. His arm was fully extended. The guy was thirty degrees past his own natural tipping point.

“Where’s the woman?” Travis said.

It took the guy a second to answer. “Woman?”

“Don’t fuck with me. They brought her in last night, after they hit the motorcade.”

Another few seconds passed. The guy cocked his head. He knew the answer. If he didn’t, he’d be saying so already. He’d be screaming it.

Travis shifted his weight outward. He did it fast, letting his arm go slack and then snap tight again. The effect was that, for half a second, the guy believed he was falling. He didn’t scream—he didn’t have the breath for it—but he made a tight whimpering sound.

Then his words came out in a high monotone. “They took her to Mr. Finn’s office. Just now. Few minutes ago.”

“Where is that?”

“Top floor. Southwest corner.”

Travis let go of his collar.

The guy’s arms shot outward, spasming, his hands grabbing for anything. But there wasn’t anything. He sucked in a gasp and screamed like a high-school girl in a slasher flick and then he was gone, out into the emptiness.

Travis didn’t bother to watch him hit. He turned. Saw Bethany standing there, her hand to her mouth, eyes unblinking. The shotgun hung forgotten at her side.

“We didn’t ask to be part of this,” Travis said. “These people did.”

It was all he had.

He held her eyes a moment longer and then he crossed to the cylinder and shut it off. He picked it up and headed for the stairwell, crossing exposed beams. After a few steps he picked up the pace to a run. He glanced behind him and saw Bethany shouldering the backpack, pocketing the dropped wallet, and following.

Paige sat waiting for Isaac Finn to arrive. She knew his name only from the brass plate she’d seen on his door when the two large men had carried her through it.

Finn’s office was huge. Three times the size of the room they’d kept her in. There was a balcony along its southern expanse looking out on a view that could’ve been an educational poster of Washington, D.C. The kind of poster with tags and labels for every building that mattered. It was all there, from the White House to the Capitol to the Supreme Court, and a hundred other buildings that channeled power in ways most people would never care to know. Paige wondered how many of those buildings this highrise outranked. Maybe all of them.

She was sitting on a leather couch. Her wrists and ankles were still zip-tied. The two large men were standing just inside the door, hands folded neatly in front of them. Each had a Beretta holstered under his suit coat—Paige had seen them there when they’d carried her from the other room.

The door opened and a man in his fifties walked in. He was trim, six feet tall, with dark hair going a little gray. He was far from what Paige had pictured—whatever she’d pictured. He looked wrong for the office. His eyes, in particular, looked wrong. There was no arrogance in them. No presumption. Paige thought of one of her father’s friends, a pediatric surgeon she’d met on several occasions. She’d always been struck by his eyes: weathered by the years of suffering they’d seen, but not beaten. Isaac Finn’s eyes looked almost like that—they missed by some degree Paige couldn’t account for.

None of which mattered, in any case. Kind-looking eyes could be a trick of genetics or an unconscious mimicry of some long-dead parent. There were better lights by which to judge a person, and Finn didn’t look good in any of them.

He had a coffee cup in one hand. In the other he held the black cylinder Paige had shown the president last night. He crossed to his desk and set down the coffee. He turned and looked at Paige. He seemed to be appraising her in some way. Coming to a decision.

“Free her legs,” Finn said.

The nearest of the two guards came over. He took a jackknife from a sheath on his belt, opened it, and cut the tie binding Paige’s ankles. He backed away to his original position.

Finn stared at her a moment longer. Then he tapped the cylinder. “The president told me about your demonstration of this, in detail. You told him it’s safe for a person to step through the projected opening.”

Paige nodded.

“You didn’t do that for him, though.”

“It wasn’t necessary. He saw that it worked.”

“I want to see you do it. I want to see for myself that a person can go through.”

He strode to the long walnut table that stood behind the couch. He set the cylinder on it, braced on either side with a pair of leather-bound books that’d been lying there. He aimed it toward the southern windows, just over ten feet away.

He put his finger to the on button, then looked at Paige and raised his eyebrows as if to verify that he was doing it right.

“I don’t know how much simpler I could’ve labeled it,” she said.

Finn pressed the button.

The light cone flared and projected the opening just shy of the windows.

Paige watched Finn’s body language. It was immediately clear that he hadn’t seen the cylinder in action until now. He stared at the opening. His face was perfectly blank. He stood there, not moving at all. Ten seconds passed. Then he stepped forward. He walked along the edge of the light cone, giving it space. Paige had done the same thing a few days ago, the first time she and the others switched it on.

Finn walked to within a foot of the opening, to its right. He stared through for a moment, and then abandoned his fear of the light and moved directly in front of the open circle. He gazed out at the ruins. Paige saw his head shake from side to side, just noticeably.

“Jesus, it works,” he whispered, so softly that Paige almost missed it.

Then he turned to her. Waved her up off the couch.

“Do it,” he said. “Step through.”

She knew exactly what would happen if she did. She sat there for three seconds considering her options. She didn’t have any. And it didn’t matter what happened to her now. All that mattered was what Bethany was doing, if she’d gotten out of Border Town. Paige wished again that there were a way to know. It would be a comforting thought, and a comforting thought would be nice right now.

“Fine,” she said.

She stood. She rounded the end of the couch and crossed to the opening. Finn moved aside for her. She rested her hands—still bound at the wrists—on the bottom of the circle, and stared out over the sprawling woodland. She could see the Washington Monument punching up from the canopy about a mile away. She couldn’t identify much else. The White House was completely hidden by the trees. The Capitol Dome should’ve been visible, but it wasn’t. Paige remembered taking a tour of the building in high school and learning that the dome was made of cast iron. She recalled hearing what it weighed, and not believing it at the time. Something like 11 million pounds. That much weight would’ve worked against the building’s supports pretty quickly once corrosion set in.

Paige gripped the lower edge of the opening and leaned her upper body through. She looked down for a place to put her feet. The thick girder that formed the boundary of the top floor was right there, running side to side past the opening. The supports for the balcony extended outward from it, long since relieved of the concrete surface they’d once held up. They were just solitary beams now, each one about six inches wide, jutting out over the abyss like a pirate’s plank. The nearest was right in front of the opening.

Paige let her eyes take in the rest of the structure beneath her, a latticework of steel plunging sixteen stories to the foundation pit. She’d never been a fan of heights. She looked left and right along the girder she was about to step onto. It took all of her control to keep from showing any reaction to what she could see.

She put one leg through the opening, and then the other. As her second foot touched the girder she felt Finn’s hand close around her upper arm. He held on tightly, preventing her from making a run for it to the left or right.

“Straight ahead,” he said, and shoved her by the arm.

To keep her balance against the push, she stepped forward onto the narrow balcony support.

Finn was still holding on. Through his grip Paige felt a sudden back-and-forth movement of his body. She pictured him waving with his other arm, silently calling one of the guards over. She imagined the man nodding, already briefed on this, crossing the room and drawing his Beretta as he came. Finn gave her arm another shove, forcing her to take a second step. She was three feet out on the narrow beam now, at the extent of Finn’s reach. Nowhere at all for her to go.

Finn released her arm.

A second later she heard the Beretta’s slide being racked behind her.

Finn stepped away from the projected hole and gave Boyce a clear line of sight to make the kill. Boyce paused just outside the light cone, hesitant to let it touch him. Then he shrugged, stepped into the light and faced the hole.

Finn watched him assess his prey. Watched his expression take on the fake, wired kind of calm that spoke more of testosterone than real composure.

“She’s cute,” Boyce said. “Sure we have to rush this? It’s not like anyone’s gonna find the body and swab it for DNA.”

Finn took a step closer to him and spoke evenly. “If I ever hear you advocate unnecessary suffering again, you’ll be the one standing out there. Do you believe me?”

Boyce looked at him. The bullshit calm receded from his eyes. “Yes, sir.”

“Make it painless. Shoot her in the back of the head, centered in a line between the ears. Don’t miss.”

“Yes, sir.”

Boyce raised his Beretta.

He extended it a foot through the opening.

He thumbed off the safety.

And then a hand came out of nowhere, from outside the opening on the right edge. It locked onto Boyce’s wrist and yanked it downward. Boyce had just begun to flinch when a second hand came through, this one holding a SIG-Sauer P220. It jammed the barrel into Boyce’s eye and fired, blowing his head apart. A fragment of skull hit Finn in the face. He staggered back from the opening. In his peripheral vision he saw Kaglan, still in position at the door, reaching for his own weapon—but the SIG was already coming up to level on him. A tenth of a second later it fired again, three shots in a tight pattern. Kaglan screamed and went down. He managed to return fire, but his aim was all over the place, most of his shots missing the opening and cratering the windows beyond it. The SIG shooter stepped away from the opening on the far side until Kaglan ran dry, and then the weapon came back through the hole and began rapid-firing blindly into the room.

Finn threw himself flat and crawled behind the couch, for whatever cover it could provide. He heard the SIG fire dry, and it crossed his mind to get up and hit the off button on the cylinder, but already he heard the metallic scrape of the SIG’s magazine dropping out, and almost on top of it came the smack of a fresh one being rammed home. Half a breath after that the shooting started again, fast and wild, hitting everything. Finn counted seven shots. Then silence. Which was strange: a SIG 220’s clip held eight rounds. He glanced up and saw Kaglan struggling to move, blood seeping heavily from a wound in his side. And then the eighth shot hit Kaglan in the temple and took the top half of his head off.

Finn vaulted to his feet and threw himself toward the walnut table and the black cylinder. The reload would have to be slower this time—the shooter would have to fish in his pockets for another magazine, if he had one. In the split-second before he slammed his thumb down onto the off button, Finn raised his eyes and caught a glimpse of the opening. The shooter had stepped aside again, but the woman, Paige Campbell, was just visible, crouching low on the narrow beam. Her eyes found Finn’s at the exact instant he hit the button, and as the circle shrank to nothing, the last thing he saw through it was her hand coming up—and giving him the finger.

Chapter Twenty

They ran until they reached the skeleton of the Ritz-Carlton. They stopped then, and turned, and the three of them watched the avenue to the south. Watched the framework of the highrise, what they could see of it past the birches. Watched for the telltale burst of sunlight that would give away the opening of the other iris—from the cylinder Finn still possessed. It never came.

They climbed the oak to the Ritz’s third floor girders. Bethany switched on their own cylinder, and thirty seconds later they were inside the hotel room, in the present, standing at the windows and looking south at the highrise in the summer sun.

No unusual activity there. No one rushing in or out. No police response. Travis wasn’t surprised—dialing 9–1–1 was probably not the standard procedure for emergencies in that building.

He saw Paige turn toward him. He looked at her. They were both still catching their breath from the run. Travis saw some kind of conflict in her expression. Like part of her couldn’t believe what’d just happened, and another part wasn’t surprised at all. After a second she just shook her head. She put one arm over Bethany’s shoulder, the other over Travis’s, dragged them together and squeezed them tightly. They stood that way, saying nothing, for over a minute.

Paige used Bethany’s phone, encrypted against a physical trace, to call Border Town. She set it to speaker mode. A woman answered on the second ring.

“Bethany?”

“It’s Paige, Evelyn.”

Travis heard a sharp exhalation on the other end, a mix of surprise and relief. Then a silence.

“Are the others with you?” Evelyn said.

Paige closed her eyes. “No. They’re gone.”

The line stayed quiet for several seconds.

“Bethany told me there’s a blockade in effect around Border Town,” Paige said.

“Yes. Fighter jets. So far they’re staying outside the boundary.”

“Has there been any contact from the president?”

“No. No contact from anyone.”

Paige thought about it. Nodded to herself. “All right.”

“What’s happening, Paige? What’s all this about?”

“I wish I had time to explain it, but I just don’t. I need to go somewhere. When this is over with, I’ll tell you everything.”

“One question, then,” Evelyn said.

“Sure.”

“If there’s a move against us by the military, and we can’t stop it… do you want us to use the fallback option?”

Paige breathed out slowly. She paced a few steps.

Travis looked at Bethany and spoke quietly. “Fallback option?”

Bethany could only shrug.

Paige stopped pacing. “No,” she said. “Not if it’s the U.S. military. Do not use the fallback option.”

“I understand,” Evelyn said. Travis thought he heard another note of relief in her voice.

“Tell everyone to sit tight,” Paige said. “We’ll talk soon.”

She ended the call. Turned to Travis and Bethany. “We need to get moving, fast.”

“Where to?” Travis said.

“Yuma, Arizona. I’ll explain at the airport.”

They packed in less than three minutes. Travis broke down the shotgun just enough to fit it back into the duffel bag, along with the manila rope. They stowed the cylinder in Bethany’s backpack and left the hotel without bothering to check out.

They hit a shop on 14th Street, where Paige bought a pair of jeans and a T-shirt to replace her outfit, which still smelled like gasoline from the motorcade attack. She changed in the restroom. Travis had a cab waiting when she came outside.

“Reagan or Dulles,” Travis said.

“Baltimore International, in case they’re watching both of those. We need to be paranoid at every step from now on.”

She ducked into the backseat, followed by Bethany and then Travis.

None of them spoke during the forty-minute cab ride. Travis glanced across Bethany at Paige a few times. The hug in the hotel room had been a nice enough icebreaker, but there was still a tension that couldn’t be helped—and wouldn’t be. He had no plan to bring up anything that’d happened between them, including his departure. Neither did she, in all likelihood. And that would be fine. When this was over, he’d go back to sitting on loading docks at two in the morning and trying not to remember her. He’d just be starting from scratch, that was all.

They got out of the cab in front of the private terminal in Baltimore. They headed for the building, set back thirty yards from the drop-off lane.

“We’re done with Renee Turner,” Bethany said. “After what just happened in the green building, her travel pattern is too easy to zero. These people have Homeland resources at their fingertips. They can look at the timing of our attack on them, then pull up travel and lodging patterns in a radius and interval around it. They’ll see Renee’s checkin at the Ritz, and they’ll see that she flew from Rapid City last night, just over the state line from Border Town. Taken all together, it’s enough to smoke us. Renee shows ID here, the ticket agent gets a red pop-up window on her screen. We get a polite smile, and thirty seconds later we get arrested.”

She thought about it as they walked. Glanced at Travis.

“Rob Pullman’s a different story,” she said. “They have no travel or lodging records for him. They have nothing that ties him to Renee, either. Her stopover in Atlanta can’t link the two of them. Rob Pullman didn’t show ID to board the flight. The only thing his name is on is a credit-card transaction: he bought a shotgun and some climbing rope in Virginia. But so what? That’s a single purchase out of 10 million that happened around D.C. this morning. It’s one point in the cloud. It’s nothing.” She looked at Paige. “Can our friends in the office building guess we’re going to Yuma?”

“They can assume it.”

Bethany thought it over. “Okay. If Rob Pullman flies from Baltimore to Yuma, it’s almost unthinkable that their algorithms will flag it. And if he flies into the next town over from Yuma, there’s not a chance.” She took out her phone. “Rob’s gonna need a membership with Falcon Jet.”

Paige glanced at Travis. She managed a passing smile. “He’ll need a better job to swing it.”

“I get double time on Sundays,” Travis said.

“I’ll give him an oil tycoon uncle whose cholesterol intake caught up with him last spring,” Bethany said.

“While you’re at it,” Travis said, “give him an encounter with Renee on a park bench.”

Rob Pullman booked a private flight to Imperial, California, fifty miles west of Yuma. The ticket agent smiled politely, but nobody showed up to arrest them. The agent said the plane would be ready in forty-five minutes. They found an outdoor food court that was all but deserted, and ordered lunch.

Paige ate two huge slices of pizza in a few minutes. She hadn’t eaten since early the night before. She washed them down with most of a large Pepsi.

The food court looked straight down the airport’s busiest runway, eighty yards from its approach lights. Airliners passing overhead in the last seconds of their descent made the glass tabletop rattle.

Paige waited silently for one—a DC-10, Travis thought—to land, and then she said, “Most of what I know you’ve already figured out for yourselves. I’ll tell you the rest. Then at least we’ll have the same gaps.”

She spent a few seconds considering how to begin.

“We started testing the two cylinders Monday morning, in the labs. The first time we turned one of them on, it didn’t project the opening right away. Instead it made a sound. A sequence of high-pitched tones, like some kind of start-up process. We realized after a few seconds that both cylinders were making the sounds, in perfect unison, even though we’d only switched on one of them.”

“Were they synchronizing with each other?” Bethany said. “Matching up so they’d open onto the same point in the future?”

“They might have been doing that,” Paige said. “But there’s something else they were definitely doing, which we didn’t figure out until later. I’ll explain it when I get to that part.” She took a sip of her Pepsi. “The tone sequence lasted a little over three minutes. Then it stopped, and immediately after that, the projection appeared, from the one cylinder we’d switched on. Through the opening, all we could see was darkness. And then the smell hit us. Stale, dead air, like what it might smell like in a disused mine. We all put on ventilators. It helped a little. Then we shone flashlights into the darkness, and it didn’t take us long to realize what we were looking at.” Her eyes went back and forth between Travis and Bethany. “You know how it works, and you know we eventually determined that it was safe to go through, so I can skip to the relevant stuff. For starters, Border Town is empty in the future. The equipment is gone. The computers and paper records are gone.” She paused. “All the entities are gone.”

Travis felt the wind shift around. Felt it blow cool across the back of his neck.

“We checked out the whole place,” Paige said. “We spent the better part of Monday down there, walking the empty rooms and hallways of the complex. There are no bodies. No signs of any struggle. Basic furniture is still there. Some of the beds are made, some aren’t. It looks the way it would on any random afternoon, if everyone just left and shut off the power on their way out. That’s how it was in every lab, every residence, every common area. And then we went to look at the thing we were most anxious to see.”

“The Breach,” Travis said.

Paige nodded.

“We couldn’t get to it,” she said. “We climbed down the elevator shaft, and three stories from the bottom we saw that it was a lost cause. Starting at Level 48 the shaft was filled in, and there was no way in the world to excavate it. It’d be impossible, even if you could move heavy equipment into the future through the projected opening, bit by bit.”

“Why?” Travis said. “What’s filling it?”

“Do you remember Heavy Rags?”

He nodded. Heavy Rags were the most common type of entity to emerge from the Breach. They’d been coming through almost daily since 1978. Each one was dark green, about the size of a washcloth, and weighed over 2,800 pounds. The nature of the material had eluded all attempts at understanding, even after three decades of study by physicists within Tangent. The most they could say was that Heavy Rags weren’t made of atoms. They were dense sheets of some smaller kind of particle—maybe quarks, but that was a guess at best—that were somehow stabilized in that arrangement. Handling them was a logistical chore. There was a wheeled chainfall down on Level 51 with a specially made titanium claw, there for the sole purpose of moving the rags around. They couldn’t be stored anywhere in the complex but the bottom floor, and most of them weren’t even kept there. Over the years, Tangent personnel had bored dozens of foot-wide shafts into the concrete floor of Level 51, all the way to the granite bedrock that lay beneath Border Town. These shafts were the final resting place for nearly all of the roughly ten thousand Heavy Rags that’d come through the Breach over the years.

“And you remember the Doubler,” Paige said, not asking.

Travis nodded again. The Doubler had figured centrally in his dreams, at least one night in three, over the past two years. He often woke from those dreams pounding his knuckles bloody on the headboard, with fog-amplified voices still screaming in his head.

“Heavy Rags are one of the very few entities that can be doubled,” Paige said. “In the future, the bottom three floors of Border Town have been filled solid with them, mixed with concrete to form a kind of mâché, though by volume it’s probably ninety-nine percent rags. We calculated that a cubic foot of the mâché would weigh about 250,000 pounds—almost twice as much as an M1 Abrams tank.”

Travis pictured three stories of the stuff, compressed into every possible crevice, filling even the dome that surrounded the Breach. The ungodly weight of the substance pushing some distance into the Breach itself, bulging in against the resistance force that made the tunnel a one-way passage. Paige had told him once that in the first year of the Breach’s existence, some people had suggested filling the elevator shaft with concrete and leaving the Breach’s chamber sealed off. That would’ve been a bad idea: in the time since then, entities had emerged that would’ve done very bad things to the world had they been left alone—even in a sealed cavern five hundred feet underground. But what Paige was describing now was a much more aggressive move. It amounted to shoving a million-ton cork into the mouth of the Breach itself, maybe preventing anything from truly emerging from it afterward. What would happen to the entities that were trying to come through? Would they just clot in the tunnel? Would they back up like a reservoir behind a dam?

He saw in Paige’s expression that all the same questions had been troubling her for days, and that she had no answers.

“So at some point,” Travis said, “probably before the collapse of the world a few months from now, someone uses the Doubler to fill the bottom of the complex with that stuff?”

Paige nodded. “It would go pretty quickly, once you had a big enough mass to double from. The Doubler could generate about a cubic yard every few seconds.”

“But why the hell would someone do that?” Travis said.

Paige was silent for a moment. “Because under bad enough circumstances it would make sense,” she said. “Which is why I thought of it.”

Travis glanced at Bethany. She looked as uncertain as he felt. Then he understood.

“The fallback option,” Travis said.

Paige nodded again. “The Heavy Rag mâché idea is my own. I dreamed it up six months ago. One more dividend of the paranoia I’ve felt since everything came to a head with Pilgrim. I just imagined a scenario in which we were certain someone bad was about to get control of Border Town, and that our defenses would only buy us hours. I tried to think of what we’d do with those hours. How could we secure the most dangerous entities, and the Breach itself?” She shrugged. “The fallback option was all I could come up with. Put everything down on fifty-one, and flood the bottom three floors with that stuff. No one would ever get through it. You could chip at it for a month with an industrial steam shovel and not make a dent. I think you could even detonate an H-bomb down there and all you’d do is compress the stuff a little more. The density is just unimaginable. You can calculate it on paper, but you still can’t get your mind around it. Anyway, I wrote that up in a report, told a handful of people about it. Consensus was that it was risky as hell. No way to be sure it would work as intended, and no way to undo it if something went wrong. As a general means of just eliminating the Breach, nobody liked it. Neither did I. But everyone I talked to was in favor of doing it if desperate enough times came along someday.” She thought about it for a moment, then spoke softly. “I guess the end of the world would suffice.”

The whine of another airliner filtered in from behind them. The sound rose to a scream and then a 747 slid overhead, big as the world, its jetwash ruffling the umbrellas over the tables.

“That’s a hell of a thing to have learned,” Travis said. “That it actually works, I mean. That you can seal off the Breach, and that the seal would hold for several decades, at least. If we figure out what happens to the world a few months from now… if we learn how to prevent it… then you could choose to leave the Breach open, or go ahead and seal it anyway, just to get rid of it. It’s something to consider.”

Paige nodded slowly, her eyes far away. No doubt she had considered it, and at length.

“It would hold for decades,” she said. “That much we know for sure. But after that it’s still a guess. I imagine you could plug a small shield volcano, if you had enough concrete to dump in. And that might hold for decades, too. But the pressure would only keep building. And then what would happen? Nothing good, though at least with a volcano we understand the forces in play. With the Breach we understand almost nothing.” A little tremor went through her shoulders. “No, if we manage to keep the world on track, I have no intention of sealing the Breach off. Even after seeing that it works—especially after seeing that it works—it just feels too dangerous.”

She stared off a few seconds longer, then refocused to her hands on the table, and shrugged. “So that’s what we found at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Then we climbed to the top and found that sealed too, though not as dramatically. There’s just a metal slab across the opening on the surface, and a couple inches of regular concrete poured over it. A stranger up top could walk right by it and think it was just an old footing pad for some shed that used to be there. We saw it from above, the next day, when we took the cylinders up into the desert. And it was up there that things started to get interesting.”

Chapter Twenty-One

The two of you probably guessed pretty quickly how far in the future it is, on the other side,” Paige said. “You probably got within ten years of the right number.”

“Seventy years ahead, we figured,” Bethany said.

Paige nodded. “There’s a lot that changes in a place like D.C. Nature reclaims its turf pretty fast, gives you evidence to base a guess on. But the desert above Border Town was always nature’s turf. Civilization never modified it, so there was nothing for it to change back to when civilization went away. When we took the cylinders up to the surface on Tuesday, and switched one of them on, the opening we looked through might as well have been a pane of glass. Other than the blank concrete slab where the elevator housing should’ve been, nothing in the desert looked different. Nothing at all. So we still had no idea how far in the future the other side was. Could’ve been twenty years. Could’ve been a few thousand.”

She took a sip.

“The fact was, we didn’t even know whether the world had ended, at that point. Border Town being abandoned wasn’t a good sign, but who knew for sure? We sure as hell didn’t. And seeing the desert empty didn’t tell us much, either. It would be empty, under almost any circumstance. I stepped through the opening up there and the first thing I did was stare at the sky for over a minute, hoping to see a jet contrail. Imagine if I had.”

The notion struck Travis hard, and he wondered why he hadn’t considered it until now: what if the future on the other side of the iris hadn’t been a ruined one? What if Paige and the others had encountered a thriving world instead, decades and decades ahead of the present day? What would they have learned from a world like that? What would they have gained?

He saw in Paige’s eyes a ghost of the optimism she must’ve felt, standing there under the desert sky Tuesday morning.

Then it faded.

“We started running the obvious tests after that,” she said. “First an easy one: we switched on a handheld GPS unit, on the other side, and tried to pick up satellites with it. And we found some. But the position readings were a mess. The satellites were up there, but they weren’t where they were supposed to be. One of the four of us, Pilar Guitierrez, spent about twenty years with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. She knew everything about orbital dynamics, drift and decay rates, that kind of thing. Orbits are a lot more fragile than most people think. Satellites get tugged around by all kinds of things. The moon’s gravity. The sun’s gravity. The tilt of the Earth plays hell with their inclinations. All that stuff has to be dealt with, all the time, by a process called station-keeping. Satellites are equipped with small rockets for corrective burns, to nudge them back onto course once in a while, and the commands for those burns come from human operators on the ground. But given what we were seeing on the handheld unit, the GPS satellites hadn’t heard from anyone on the ground in a long, long time.”

She exhaled slowly. “So that was that. We tried other things. We took radio equipment through. We listened to every frequency range with the most sensitive gear we had. Certain bandwidths, those that are popular with ham radio operators, we could’ve picked up from halfway around the world—if there were anyone out there transmitting on them. We didn’t hear anything.”

She finished off the Pepsi and set it aside.

“The only other thing we could do from a remote location like that was try to get through to a communication satellite. Our hope was that we might find one with some retrievable data on board. Something we could make sense of. Anything. But signals from those satellites are a lot harder to receive than GPS. You can’t pick them up with a handheld unit bouncing around in your pocket. You need a dish, and you need to know exactly where to point it. Engineers handle that problem by putting comm satellites in geostationary orbit, right above the equator and matched to the spin of the Earth. That way the satellite is always in the same place, relative to the ground. But that wasn’t going to help us: if those orbits had decayed much at all, the satellites would be lower, and orbiting faster. They wouldn’t be stationary anymore. So when it came to aiming the dish, we’d be shooting in the dark at moving targets.”

Her eyebrows went up in a shrug. “We had to try, though. So we did. We picked a spot above the equator, well below geostationary altitude, and we transmitted a maintenance ping every thirty seconds. A universal signal most satellites would respond to, if they heard it. We did that for hours and hours, all through the afternoon and into the evening, but there was no reply. We kept it going anyway. There was reason to believe it could take a while. In the meantime we tested other things. We figured out the use of the delayed shutoff button. We also figured out what the sequence of tones had been all about, the first time we’d switched on one of the cylinders.”

Paige looked past Travis to the backpack lying in the empty chair next to him. She stared at the shape of the cylinder inside.

“It was locking out changes,” she said.

Travis glanced at Bethany, then looked at Paige again. “Locking out changes?”

Paige nodded. “It’s hard to explain. Hard to understand in the first place. In my case, I just saw it in action. While Pilar was working with the satellite gear, I had an idea I wanted to try. I took the second cylinder, and in the present time I drove one of the electric Jeeps to a little sandstone boulder about half a mile north of Border Town.”

Travis recalled the rock she was talking about, though he’d only seen it a few times. It was about the size of a compact car, and it was the only thing larger than a scrub plant within miles of the elevator housing on the surface.

“The idea was pretty simple,” Paige said. “I wanted to see an action in the present reflected in the future. I came up with one that should’ve been foolproof. I turned on the cylinder and positioned it facing the boulder. I looked at it in the present and in the future. The two versions of the rock were identical; whatever amount of erosion is going on out there, it doesn’t happen fast. Anyway, I got out the Jeep’s tire iron, and you can probably guess what I did with it.”

Bethany’s face lit up as the idea came to her. “You scratched the rock in the present time, so you could see the same scratch appear in the future.”

“You’d think it would show up there, wouldn’t you?” Paige said.

“How could it not?” Bethany said.

Paige shrugged. “I can only tell you that it didn’t. I scratched the hell out of the boulder in the present. I chipped a crevice two inches deep into its surface. But in the future, the scratch wasn’t there. It just wasn’t. The rock was as smooth as ever.”

Bethany stared. Met Travis’s eyes. Looked at Paige again. She couldn’t seem to find the words for her level of disbelief.

“Changes are locked out,” Paige said. “I think it’s that simple, however the hell it works. I think when those tones were sounding, the first time we switched these things on, the cylinders were locking onto whatever future we were on track toward at that moment. Independent of changes we’d make later on, once we could see the future for ourselves.”

“Changes locked out…” Bethany said. “But you don’t mean our future is locked… do you?”

Paige shook her head. “Just the future we see through the projected opening. Think of it this way. Suppose these cylinders only showed us a future ten days ahead of the present. You might look through and see yourself going about a normal day. You might also see a newspaper with next Saturday’s lotto numbers in it. Suppose you jot them down, and in the present time, you run to the store and buy a ticket. You win the lotto, and now your whole future is going to change. But when you look through the opening at your future self, the one ten days ahead of you, nothing has changed. She’s not celebrating. She hasn’t quit her day job. That future, on the other side of the opening, is still following the original track—the one in which you didn’t have the lotto numbers. It’s locked. That’s the only way I can put it. The future the cylinders show us is like a living snapshot of the future we were headed for, at the moment we first switched them on.”

“So we can still save the world on our side of the opening,” Travis said. “But the future we see on the other side will always be in ruins. The way it would’ve originally turned out.”

“Exactly.” Paige was quiet a moment. “Why the cylinders are designed to do that, I can only guess. It’s worth keeping in mind that these things are built for some purpose. Built to be useful. Maybe a future that reacts to present changes is too fluid to make sense of. Maybe it would flicker through alternate versions like some rapid-fire slideshow right before your eyes. Think about chaos theory. Sensitivity to initial conditions. Maybe it’s practical, or even necessary, to just lock these things onto one future and stick with it. That way, you can keep going back and forth between the two times, and never worry about the world transforming under your feet. And I’m sure the designers had some way to reset them, prep them to be locked again later on, whenever they wanted to, using equipment we obviously don’t have. We’ve got the iPods but not the docks.”

Bethany gazed off at nothing, thinking it over. She seemed to be accepting it, whether or not it made sense to her.

Travis didn’t expect to fully understand it, but Paige’s reasoning sounded right. If the iris opened onto a future that did react to changes in the present, it was hard to believe they weren’t triggering at least some changes just by looking at it.

“I’m sure my expression at the time looked like each of yours does now,” Paige said. “I stood there for probably half an hour trying to get a grasp on it. And then I heard Pilar and the others shouting, and waving at me to come back, because one of the satellite pings had finally gotten a response.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

The satellite was called COMTEL–3,” Paige said. “In our present time it’s positioned over the Atlantic as a relay for news-wire services, bouncing article text between ground stations in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. On the other side of the opening, we picked it up over the Pacific, moving east toward Ecuador, two hundred miles below its intended orbit. It answered the ping with a status screen full of critical error messages. It also had the date and time, based on its own onboard clock, which is probably accurate to within a few seconds over a thousand years. Adjusting for local time, at that moment in the other desert it was 6:31 in the evening, October 14, 2084.”

A relative silence came, beyond the ambient whine of a jet powering up somewhere across the airport.

“Christ,” Bethany said.

Travis felt something like a chill. They’d already known the kind of timeline they were dealing with, but to hear it specified to the minute made it real in a way he hadn’t expected. He did the math. Seventy-three years and not quite two months.

“Having a known position for COMTEL–3 did a lot for us,” Paige said. “After that we could rotate the dish to follow it, and stay in contact. Which was good, because Pilar believed some of the satellite’s final transmissions—news stories—might still be stored in its memory buffer. She worked on it for a while, but she wasn’t optimistic about actually retrieving the information. The bird was in pretty bad shape. It’d gone into some kind of safe mode after enough time passed without contact from its human controllers. Its orientation was off; its solar panels weren’t angled to grab as much sunlight as it needed. It’s a wonder it still worked at all. But after about half an hour, she managed to pull a number of articles from the buffer. They were corrupted all to hell. They were like fill-in-the-blank puzzles, with more blanks than words. We sat out there the rest of the day and most of the night trying to make sense of them, while we kept pinging for more satellites. We didn’t find any more, but from the COMTEL–3 information we eventually narrowed down a few basic details of the event that ends the world.”

She looked down at the table.

“The media gives it a name,” she said. “They call it Bleak December. Whatever it is, it starts on December fourth of this year, and unfolds over the following weeks. We know that Yuma, Arizona, plays a key role in the event. Even a central role. But we don’t know why. The city was mentioned in every article, numerous times, but the context was never intact. We also know that in the weeks before the event there’s a major buildup of petroleum supplies in large metro areas. Gas stations with three or four tanker trucks parked outside as reserve stores. So whatever the event is, apparently people see it coming. Or at least those in power see it coming, and make preparations for some potential crisis. If that sounds vague, it is. There was just so little text to go on. We assumed they wanted the gas for electric generators, if power grids failed, but that was only a guess.”

Bethany turned to Travis. “The cars,” she said.

He nodded. There had to be a connection.

“What cars?” Paige said.

“All the cars in D.C. were gone,” Travis said. “Everyone left at the end, but not in any kind of panic. There was no gridlock, as far as we could see. They left with cool heads.”

Paige stared at the runway and tried to tie that fact in with everything else she knew. Travis watched her eyes. He saw only an echo of his own bafflement. Finally she shook her head.

“Doesn’t make the image any sharper,” she said. “Maybe they wanted the gas to evacuate the cities, but there was nothing in the articles to suggest why they’d need to do that.”

“What did the articles suggest?” Bethany said. “I mean… beyond what you were sure of, was there anything in them that offered even a hint of what the hell happened?”

Paige thought about it for a long moment. On the far side of the airport, a 737 accelerated and lifted off.

“We had the sense that it wasn’t a natural phenomenon,” she said at last. “A sense that it was… a failure of something. Like a plan. Like a very big, very secret plan, that went very fucking wrong in every possible way. We couldn’t pin down any one passage of text that said so… but it was there in general. It was sort of everywhere. And toward the end, the articles were fewer and farther between, and very short, leaving almost no text to go on. And then they just ended. The last thing anyone ever bounced through that satellite was dated December 28. Whatever the hell Bleak December is… was… will be … it takes about twenty-four days from start to finish. And then people stop writing newspaper articles, and correcting satellite orbits. And at some point, apparently, they stop doing everything.”

She stared off. Shook her head. “That’s why we went to the president first. If there was anyone to talk to about secret, dangerous shit that might get out of hand in the next few months, we figured it’d be him. I half expected him to just have the answer for us, once we’d shown him the cylinder and told him what we knew. Like there’d be some high-risk, black-budget program in the Defense Department, just about to go live, and he’d connect the dots just like that. And then he’d shut it down. Simple.”

“Sounds like he did connect the dots,” Travis said. “It’s just the next part that didn’t work out.”

“But why wouldn’t he shut it down?” Bethany said. “Why the hell would he want the world to end?”

“He probably thinks the danger can still be avoided, without stopping whatever this thing is,” Paige said. “I overheard a conversation to that effect last night, tied up in that building in D.C. The project, or whatever it is, is called Umbra. But beyond the name, I still don’t know a damn thing about it.”

For almost a minute nobody spoke. Another airliner rumbled down out of the sky and landed.

“So our best move is to get to Yuma,” Travis said, “and use the cylinder to investigate the ruins there. See what we can learn from it, if it’s such an important place at the end.”

“We were on our way to do that last night,” Paige said, “after we left the White House. Obviously, President Currey didn’t want us to get there.”

“I don’t imagine he’s had a change of heart since then,” Bethany said. “And as of an hour ago, these people know we have our own cylinder.”

Paige nodded. “And since they don’t have to sneak around and take out-of-the-way flights—hell, they could take military flights—they may already be in Yuma with their cylinder by the time we arrive. Even if they burn some time keeping their resources here on the East Coast, waiting for us to make a mistake, we should expect them to be no more than a few hours behind us.”

“And we can assume they outnumber and outgun us by a wide margin,” Travis said.

“Probably wider than we want to think about.”

Travis leaned back in his chair. Stared at the heat shimmers rising from the runway. Breathed a laugh. “What the hell. We’ve gone up against worse.”

He didn’t mention the fact that, strictly speaking, the worse they’d gone up against had won.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The jet was the same type Travis and Bethany had flown in from Atlanta. Its rear four seats faced each other like those of a restaurant booth, without the table. They set their bags in one of them, occupied the other three, and fell asleep within the first five minutes of the flight.

When Travis opened his eyes again, he saw mountains passing below, high and glacier-capped, with vacant desert land to the east and west. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. Paige was still asleep, but Bethany was awake, working on her phone. Travis glanced at the display and saw that she was compiling information on the two names they’d gleaned from the building. One was Isaac Finn, the man whose office Paige had been taken to on the sixteenth floor. The other was the man Travis had dropped from the ninth floor, whose wallet had yielded the name Raymond Muller. Bethany appeared to be amassing a good deal of info on each of them.

Travis stared out the window again. He thought of the cylinder. Thought of the future it opened, with all changes locked out. In a very real way, that meant it wasn’t their future anymore. If they figured out how to stop Umbra, then the world would live on, but the place on the other side of the iris wouldn’t change to reflect that fact. It would never be anything but ghost country, the long echo of some terrible and all-too-human mistake.

He looked at Paige again. Watched her bangs playing on her forehead in the airstream from an A/C nozzle above.

“She’d find you, you know,” Bethany said. She spoke softly, just above the drone of the jet engines.

Travis glanced at her. Waited for her to go on.

“If the world was ending, however it happens,” she said, “if people were evacuating cities, if Tangent was scared enough to seal the Breach… if everything was coming undone… Paige would find you. She’d do it just to be with you at the end.”

Travis returned his eyes to Paige. He didn’t bother nodding agreement to Bethany; she’d already gone back to work on her phone.

Up front one of the pilots was talking to the tower at Imperial, asking for approach vectors. A few seconds later the engines began to cycle down, and Travis felt the familiar physical illusion of the aircraft coming to a dead stop at altitude.

Paige stirred. She opened her eyes and sat upright, blinking away the sleep.

“What’s special about Yuma?” Travis said. “In our time, I mean. Any military presence? Any classified research going on?”

“We looked into it,” Paige said. “No research labs, as far as we could tell. There are two military sites. One’s a Marine Corps air station. They fly a few Harrier squadrons out of there, run lots of joint exercises, things like that. The other’s the Yuma Proving Ground, out in the Sonoran northeast of the city. The Army tests every kind of ground combat system there. No doubt most of it’s classified stuff, non-line-of-sight cannons, precision-guided artillery, all types of land vehicles and helicopters. But nothing you’d call an existential threat to the world.” She rubbed her eyes. “That’s about it.”

Travis nodded.

“It’s dry as hell,” Bethany said. She looked up from her phone. “Friend of mine lived there for two years after college. Yuma’s the driest city in the United States. Couple inches of rain a year, if that.”

“Should work in our favor,” Travis said. “There won’t be nearly as much corrosion of materials as we saw in D.C. We might even find paper that’s still intact, if it’s shut away from the wind and the sun.”

Bethany managed a smile. “Hey, we had to get lucky with something.”

Travis wondered about that. Wondered if it was really luck, or if Yuma’s climate was part of why the place had mattered when the world shut down.

Twenty minutes later they touched down in Imperial, a neat arrangement of neighborhood grids surrounded by miles of irrigated farmland and then more miles of open desert.

They walked out of the terminal into baked air—107 degrees, according to a digital sign over the parking lot.

They rented a Jeep Wrangler with an open top, picked up Interstate 8 at the south end of town, and headed east toward Yuma. Five minutes later they passed the last of the irrigated fields and came into the emptiest landscape Travis had ever seen. At even a glance it was more desolate than the scrublands around Border Town, which was saying something. The highway bore straight ahead through it, just south of dead east. Far ahead were low hills and a line of mountains—some southern range of the Rockies—that lay probably just north of Yuma, forty-some miles away.

Travis was driving. Paige sat in the passenger seat, reassembling the twelve-gauge.

Bethany leaned forward from the backseat, her hair going crazy in the wind. “Want to hear the bios on our two friends in the green building?”

Paige glanced back at her and nodded.

Bethany looked at her phone’s display as she began. “Raymond Muller. Guy on the ninth floor. Forty-two years old. Got his masters in political science from Brown, and in the next two decades he worked for half the power players in D.C.”

“Doing what?” Travis said.

“Connecting them all to one another would be my guess,” Bethany said. “I used to run into people like that in my field. Professional networkers. Matchmakers for senators and representatives and every kind of mega-corporation. A little closer to the vest than lobbyists. Muller worked for an Appropriations Committee chairman, two Ways and Means chairmen, Raytheon, General Dynamics, GE, Intel, FedEx, and Pfizer at one time or another.”

“That’s a lot to cram into twenty years,” Paige said.

“Actually he crammed it into fifteen. His resume goes blank in 2006, right around the time the highrise on M Street is built. If Muller has any income beyond that point, I can’t find it. It may be that the company has made all his purchases for him these past five years. And that’s it, for him.”

There was a long silence as she pulled up the information on the second man.

“Isaac Finn,” she said. She exhaled, the sound edged with a laugh. “You’re not gonna believe this guy’s background.”

“Try us,” Travis said.

“Relief work.”

Paige turned in her seat. “What?”

“He’s fifty-five. He has no formal education beyond high school. He graduated in 1973 and went straight into the Peace Corps, qualifying for it based on years of charity work in his teens. Stayed in the Corps for ten years, then came back to the States and spent a year rounding up financing to create his own organization, For Good International. At its peak, the group had over five thousand volunteers and paid staff, and an endowment of about seventy million dollars.”

“Are you sure this isn’t a different Isaac Finn?” Paige said.

Bethany double-clicked something on her phone. “Here’s his passport photo.” She handed the phone to Paige.

“That’s him,” Paige said. She stared at it a moment longer. She looked like she was trying to align the new information with what little she’d already known about the man. She gave it up after a few seconds and handed the phone back.

Bethany clicked to the bio information again. Her eyes roamed over it.

“He structured his group—and his approach—based on things he’d learned in the Corps. He’d seen that famines were generally not caused by weather, but by conflict, and the resulting breakdown of infrastructure. So his organization would try to reestablish stability in certain places, strengthen key communities in the hope that others around them would follow suit. He gave it a hell of a try, and he wasn’t shy about using outside-the-box methods. He brought in psychological profilers to study the local leadership within villages, trying to determine which ones were cut out for actual governing, as opposed to just hoarding power. Then Finn would put his financial support behind the good guys, try to steer things onto the right track. He’d even apply that kind of thinking to entire communities. Try to exclude troublemakers, and empower those with certain basic attributes: kindness, concern for others, aversion to violence. Just anything to jump-start stability in enough places, and try to get the broader infrastructure back on its feet. Worth a shot, I guess.”

“Did it work?” Travis said.

“I wouldn’t say so. He tried it for a decade, in every place that seemed to need it. Ethiopia. Yugoslavia. Somalia. Then there was Rwanda. I think that was some kind of breaking point, for him. He was in the country for the first month of the genocide, April of 1994. And then he just left. He handed over control of his organization to those below him, cut all his ties to it, and walked away. For the next several years he didn’t do much. He lived in D.C. Did some consulting, stateside, for humanitarian groups, but not a lot. In the late nineties he stopped doing even that, and as far as public or even private records are concerned, he more or less disappeared at that point. By the end of the decade his name was on no bank accounts, no property, no holdings of any kind. As far as I know, the next place anyone saw it written was on the door of that office on the sixteenth floor. How the hell it ended up there, I don’t know.”

She went silent.

“Anything else?” Travis said.

“Not about Finn. I found something interesting about his wife, but I’m not sure it’s relevant.” She navigated to the information. “Audra Nash Finn. Interesting background. Two doctorates: one in aerospace engineering from MIT, the other from Harvard, in philosophy.”

“I build rockets, therefore I am?” Travis said.

“She didn’t build much of anything for a while. She took a professorship at Harvard teaching philosophy, once she finished that degree. That was 1987. Held that position for quite a few years. Spent her summers abroad, involved in relief work. Met Finn somewhere along the way. Married him in 1990. Continued her teaching work but traveled often to help Finn in his efforts over the next four years. Then, Rwanda. That was the end of Audra’s humanitarian streak too. The following year, summer of 1995, something strange happened. She co-authored an op-ed piece with Finn, and submitted it to the Harvard Independent for publication.”

“What was it about?” Paige said.

“Nobody knows. It was rejected, and apparently before they could submit it elsewhere, certain influential people convinced them to sit on it. Mainly Audra’s father, who was the governor of Massachusetts at the time. I guess he felt the piece was controversial, and could end up in attack ads against him. Everything I learned about this came from the Independent’s rival paper on campus, the Crimson. The staff over there tried like hell to get a copy of the op-ed, or a statement from someone who’d read it, but by then the fan was pretty well caked with shit, and nobody was talking.”

“How bad could the thing have been?” Travis said.

“All the Crimson could pry out of their sources was that it was more than just an op-ed. That it was a proposal paper of some kind. Given that both Audra and Finn had just come away from Rwanda disillusioned to no end, we can guess what the subject was. Maybe not that crisis in particular, but it had to be some kind of policy suggestion about international relief. Some new idea. Maybe a pretty big idea. Whatever it was, it scared the hell out of her father. And to all appearances, that was the last anyone saw of the proposal. Audra resigned her position at Harvard that fall and went to work for Longbow Aerospace designing satellites. Finally decided to use her other degree, I guess. She died in a car accident two years later.”

For the next minute they rode in silence. Travis was sure they were all thinking the same thing.

“The proposal paper could be unrelated to what’s going on now,” he said. “It could be just an interesting dot that doesn’t actually connect. But if it does connect, then that paper was the origin of the plan Finn and his people are hiding now; in which case that proposal was Umbra. Maybe it was just talk back in ’ninety-five, and maybe it was small scale at the time. But if it’s still in play, then it’s become something bigger since then.”

Paige thought it over. “Hard to believe a policy suggestion about refugee relief could lead to the end of the world.”

“What if it’s something that only touches on relief?” Bethany said. “Something involving food supplies, or crop growth in other parts of the world. Maybe Umbra is about genetic engineering of plants. That could go wrong on a large scale, theoretically.”

“But neither of them had a background in genetics,” Paige said. “And that kind of work is common now anyway, whatever the risks.”

“We know this much,” Travis said. “When you turned on the cylinder for the president, and he saw the ruins of D.C., he knew at a glance that Umbra was responsible. That’s why he ordered the hit on the motorcade. But that only makes sense if he was already aware of the plan’s potential to go wrong in some big, specific way. That could be the same risk that Audra’s father saw, way back when he covered up the op-ed at Harvard. Whatever it was, it spooked him. Him and everyone on staff at the Independent.”

Another long silence settled. The desert wind coursed through the Jeep, arid as blast-furnace exhaust.

A few miles further on, Travis heard Bethany shift around in the backseat. He heard the zipper of her backpack open. He glanced and saw her take the cylinder into her lap.

Then she stood up, holding the thing firmly in one hand and gripping the roll bar with the other. She leaned forward against the bar, braced herself, and leveled the cylinder straight ahead. She pressed the on button.

The projection cone flared. The iris opened a few feet above and beyond the Jeep’s hood. From Travis’s position, looking upward at it, he could see only sky on the other side, the same washed-out blue as it was in the present. It made the iris nearly invisible. He wondered for a second if Bethany could feel the air rushing through it, then realized she wouldn’t: the airflow through the iris would be no different from the air already surging over the Jeep.

He turned to ask her if she could see anything, but stopped himself before speaking. Bethany’s expression had gone blank, and the color had faded from her face. She stared unblinking at whatever she was seeing through the iris. Then she slowly pivoted, swinging the opening clockwise like a searchlight, gazing through at the landscape beyond. Whatever she was looking at, it was there in every direction.

“What is it?” Travis said.

“Stop the Jeep,” Bethany said. “Pull over.”

“Why?”

“Because I found the cars.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Travis pulled over. The highway was empty in both directions for all the miles they could see.

Bethany was still standing in the back. She turned around, leaned over and rested the cylinder on the Jeep’s compressed soft top behind the backseat. The beam pointed sideways to the Jeep’s right. The iris hung fixed in the air at chest level, just beyond the freeway’s shoulder.

Travis got out at the same time as Paige. He was already looking past the Jeep at the iris. Could already see through it. Could already feel his own thoughts going as vacant as Bethany’s had. A moment later all three of them were crowded at the opening, looking through. They stared for half a minute without speaking. Then Travis returned to the Jeep, shut it off, and pocketed the keys.

He took the shotgun from where Paige had left it on the passenger side. He picked up Bethany’s backpack, hanging open with the SIG and all the shotgun shells inside it. Then he went to the cylinder and pushed the delayed shutoff button. He waited for the light cone to cut out, and then he secured the cylinder inside the pack. By the time he had it shouldered with the Remington, Paige and Bethany were already through the opening. He followed them.

The desert on the other side looked like a shopping-center parking lot the day after Thanksgiving, except that it had no boundaries. The cars stretched as far as Travis could see in every direction. The visible horizon was five miles out, any way that he faced. The cars extended at least that far.

They were parked grill-to-grill in double rows, each of which was separated by a lane of space just wide enough to drive down. The lanes branched out from the freeway, which itself remained clear.

The cars were in perfect condition except for their tires and window seals, which had baked to crumbs over the decades and settled in a thick layer on the desert floor. The wind had leveled the crumbs out but hadn’t scattered them. Travis saw why: most of the cars were no more than an inch or two off the ground, sitting on their rims. All of them together would make a hell of a barrier against air currents at the surface.

The cars’ paint jobs were faded and pitted, but not so much that the original colors couldn’t be discerned.

Every kind of personal vehicle was there. Compact cars to SUVs. And they’d come from everywhere. California plates made up at least a third of them—understandably, given the state’s population and short distance from Yuma—but within the first fifty cars he looked at, Travis saw two that were from New York State. He saw Texas and Florida and Pennsylvania, and a dozen others.

The cars were all empty. No bodies. No belongings. Just cracked and worn and bleached upholsteries that hadn’t been sat on in seventy-three years.

Bethany climbed onto the hood of a Ford Expedition, then onto its roof. She put a hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the sun, and turned a slow circle. She dropped her hand to her side. Looked down at Travis and Paige. Shook her head. Climbed back down.

“They came here?” she said. “From as far away as D.C. and New York, people emptied out of the big cities and came to Yuma? Why would they do that?”

Travis felt too thrown to even shrug. He had nothing approaching an answer. He stared over the sea of chrome and faded paint and tried to get a grasp of the numbers involved.

“A little over three hundred million people in America,” he said. “Subtract the ones too young to drive a car, or that live in big cities and don’t need one. How many cars would there be, ballpark? Couple hundred million?”

“Something like that,” Paige said.

“How much space would they take up, arranged like this?” Travis said. “A parking space is about ten by twenty. So two hundred square feet. A square mile should have, what, a little over twenty-five million square feet in it?”

Bethany took out her phone, switched it on, and opened a calculator function. She pressed the buttons with both thumbs and had the answer in a few seconds.

“Just under twenty-eight million square feet in a mile,” she said. She did another calculation. “Divided by two hundred, that’s one hundred forty thousand parking spaces. Cut that by a third to figure in the access lanes, you’ve got a little over ninety thousand cars every square mile.”

“Call it a hundred thousand to make the math easier,” Travis said. “Two hundred million cars would take up two thousand square miles.”

Bethany’s thumbs moved again. Then her eyebrows went up briefly. “Wow. Believe it or not, that’s a square of only forty-four miles by forty-four. If Yuma was at the center of it, the edges would be just twenty-two miles from town. We’re further out than that right now—more like thirty miles.”

Travis thought about it. It made sense, in its own way. “You’d expect more of a rectangle than a square. It would grow east and west from towns along the freeway as people arrived. It would thicken north and south from there. Hard to say how far. But the point is that they could fit. Every car in the United States could park within a couple days’ walk of Yuma. And that’s assuming every car made it here, which they wouldn’t. A good percentage would run out of gas along the way.”

“A lot would be left behind to begin with,” Paige said. “You didn’t see any cars in D.C., but think of suburban families with two or three of them in the garage. They wouldn’t take them all. They’d take one—whichever got the best mileage—and leave the others.”

Travis nodded. The math worked, even if the reality it described was impossible to come to terms with.

“Yuma,” Paige said. She stared east toward it, though the city—or its ruins, at least—lay well out of sight. Travis saw her eyes narrow. She was imagining three hundred million people gathering in one place.

“It’s not possible,” she said. “Not even close. The entire population of the United States bunched into Yuma, Arizona? Picture the Woodstock crowd. That was half a million people. The American population is six hundred times that amount. Think you could hold six hundred Woodstocks in Yuma at the same time?” She stared over the desert again. Shook her head. “This would be more than just a bad idea. This would be a lunatic idea.”

“But it was the idea,” Travis said. He swept an arm at the cars. “Somehow, this was the official response to whatever went wrong with Umbra. Everyone in the country wouldn’t just spontaneously decide to come here. They’d have to be told. They will be told. In our own time… Jesus, all of this happens just a few months from now.”

“But why?” Paige said. “Why would the government tell them that, and why would anyone listen? Whatever the hell was going wrong in the rest of the country, sending everyone here couldn’t possibly help them. It would be mass suicide. There wouldn’t even be housing space to get them all in out of the sun. And there’d be no food, either. They’d be dead in a week.”

“Could things have just been that desperate?” Bethany said. “What if, somehow, Yuma offers temporary relief from whatever’s happening in the rest of the country? Why that would be, I don’t know… but suppose it is. Suppose the effect of Umbra is so bad that it’s worth it to come here, just to get away from it, even if it still means dying.”

The notion chilled Travis, even in the baking sunlight. He watched it affect Paige and Bethany in the same way.

“Why Yuma?” he said. “What would it offer?” He thought of what he’d considered on the plane: that Yuma’s climate might have a lot to do with its significance. “What if Umbra is worse in some places than others? What if it’s worse where there’s moisture, for whatever reason? Then a place like Yuma would be a kind of—” But he already saw why that thinking didn’t work. He shook his head. “No. In that case there’d be lots of places people could go. Yuma might be the driest city, but there are tons of them that are almost as dry. Vegas is probably about the same, and it’s a hell of a lot bigger. Christ, even Los Angeles would work, and you could fit all kinds of extra people there. Still no idea what they’d do for food, but it would beat the shit out of lumping everyone together here.”

“Then they didn’t come here for the climate,” Bethany said. “So what did they come for?”

They walked among the cars for twenty minutes. Nearly all of them were unlocked. Either the owners hadn’t expected anyone to steal them, or hadn’t expected to ever use them again.

They opened doors, felt under seats, inspected glove boxes, popped trunks. They found several portable gasoline containers in almost every trunk or truck bed. In many cases there were one or more still full, especially in cars that’d come from neighboring states. The sealed plastic had kept the contents from evaporating.

They found random small things here and there. Fast-food wrappers. Pencils. Assorted change. There were guns in many of the trunks, alongside the leftover fuel. People had chosen to bring weapons along when they’d left their homes—or at least hadn’t wanted to leave them behind—but by the time they’d reached Yuma they hadn’t seen the need to hang on to them.

Many of them had left something else behind with the cars: bicycles. Not many had brought them, but those who had had left them here, bolted to trunk-mounted racks or lying in truck beds. For a moment Travis could make no sense of that. Why would anyone leave their bikes behind when they had a thirty-mile-plus walk in the desert ahead of them? Then he looked at the wide-open freeway again and thought he understood. There’d been some kind of shuttle system running here when everyone arrived. Buses or flatbeds or even pickup trucks making endless circuits along the road, taking on new arrivals wherever they found them, and ferrying them into the city. The whole thing had been massively organized.

“I found something,” Bethany said.

She was two cars away, leaning in through the front passenger door of a white minivan. Paige was just raising the trunk lid of a Cadillac parked across the driving lane from it. She and Travis reached Bethany at the same time.

Bethany had found a spiral notebook inside the van’s console compartment. Its cover was bright yellow, unfaded, and it had a child’s stick-figure drawings all over it in blue ink. The figures were frowning and weeping teardrops half the size of their heads. Bethany opened the book. There were more drawings inside. More sad people. Some of the drawings showed specific settings. One looked like a grocery store, with oranges and apples colored in with crayon. Another might have been a school hallway. Most had simply doorways or trees for backgrounds. But in all of them the human figures were despondent, in some cases covering their faces with their hands while the tears spilled from under them. What the pictures lacked was any explanation for the tears. Any indication at all of what the hell was going on to make people feel that way.

Bleak December.

That’s what the media called it.

But why?

After a dozen pages of drawings there was a final image showing the van itself. The child and an adult with long hair—presumably the child’s mother—were seated in front. Still frowning, but not crying. The rest of the van was shown heaped with crudely drawn, out-of-scale household items. A toaster. A vacuum cleaner. A computer. Silverware and dishes and pots and pans. Bags crammed full of clothing.

None of that stuff was still in the van. Travis could see past the front seats to the vast cavity of space where the rear benches had been folded down into the floor. There was nothing back there.

The next page of the notebook didn’t feature a drawing. It bore only a block of handwritten text—the oversized script of a child that somehow spoke of great effort, even in its sloppiness. It read:I hope we get a tickit when we get to Yuma, but we will be happy enough just to get there. I hope Aunt Liz is there. Mom says we will probaly be there tonite.

All the remaining pages were blank. Bethany rifled through them, then came back to the written page.

“Ticket?” she said. “For what? A ride into town?”

They stared at the handwriting for another few seconds. Then Bethany let the book fall shut. She leaned back into the van and looked into the console compartment the book had come from. She gathered up the only other things inside it and held them up. A blue pen and two crayons, red and orange. The crayons had both melted to flattened shapes held together by just the paper around them.

“We might find a lot more questions out here,” Travis said, “but I think the answers are going to be in the city.”

Paige and Bethany looked like they agreed.

Travis unslung the backpack from his shoulder, unzipped it, and took out the cylinder.

Chapter Twenty-Five

They opened the iris two hundred yards from the highway, in case someone happened to be driving by at that moment in 2011. Travis looked through. No cars in sight. The Jeep was just as they’d left it.

Twenty-five minutes later they reached the western outskirts of the city. It was larger than Travis had imagined, sprawled out over a patch of desert at least four miles by four. He exited the freeway and a moment later they were passing through a residential neighborhood full of low-slung homes, palm trees not quite as tall as the streetlights, and shallow front yards that were either gravel or irrigated grass.

They came to Fourth Avenue and turned south onto it. It seemed to be the main drag through town. It could’ve been any Main Street in America except for the arid terrain. There were gas stations and grocery stores and banks and jewelers. There was a Burger King. There was a movie theater with five screens.

If there was an army waiting for them, it wasn’t showing itself. Which made sense, in a way.

“If we run into trouble,” Travis said, “I think it’ll be on the other side, in the ruins. On this side they don’t know what we’re driving, or even who we are except for you, Paige. But over there we’ll be the only things moving around on two feet. It’s a better place for them to set a watch.”

Paige nodded. Weighed the possibilities. “It could be wishful thinking,” she said, “but we might have a few things working in our favor. On the one hand we’re up against the president of the United States, who has the military and every police force in the country at his disposal. He can make it rain brimstone on us if he wants to. On the other hand he and Finn, and whoever else they’re working with, have already demonstrated a pretty severe preference for keeping their secrets intact. It’s hard to imagine them grabbing a hundred soldiers or federal agents and sending them through the opening to lie in wait for us. That’s a lot of people to let in on the game. My guess is Finn will stick with his own security personnel from the highrise, whatever number of them he trusts enough. No telling what that number is. A dozen if we’re lucky. More if we’re not.”

Travis looked down a cross street going by. Considered the broad layout of the town. Imagined how it would look in moderately well-preserved ruins, with most of its structures still standing. It was a lot of area for a dozen people to watch. A lot for even several dozen.

Other advantages came to mind. As prey, the three of them had a significant edge on their potential predators: they would carry their own cylinder along with them, while Finn’s people, if they were widely spaced throughout the ruins, would obviously be empty-handed in that department. There was no question that Finn himself would keep possession of his own cylinder.

That would give the three of them an easy way out of trouble, when and if they encountered it. In a pursuit, they could switch on their cylinder, hit the delayed shutoff and escape through the iris into the present day. It would stay open another minute and a half, but anyone trying to follow them through it would be committing suicide. It didn’t take a West Point grad to see the tactical downside of climbing through a choke point the size of a manhole cover while defenders with a SIG 220 and a twelve-gauge were waiting on the other side. And when the 93 seconds were up, they could just run. It would take Finn a long time to transport the other cylinder across the ruins—on foot—to whatever location his men were calling him to.

That was the idea, anyway. In practice it might play out a lot differently, even if all of their assumptions were right. Which they probably weren’t.

They found a six-story Holiday Inn two blocks off of Fourth Avenue. As far as they could tell, it was the tallest building in town. They didn’t check in. They simply walked in with their bags—the Remington once again broken down to fit in the big duffel—and found an empty restroom on the first floor. It had three stalls, including a large, wheelchair-accessible one. Travis held its door wide and Bethany projected the iris into the middle of the broad space beside the toilet. She pressed the delayed shutoff. The beam brightened and vanished. The three of them crowded into the stall, then shut and locked its door.

The iris looked pitch-black, the way it had when Travis and Bethany had first seen it in the Ritz. It couldn’t be nighttime in the ruins: it was a quarter past five in the present, and the day on the other side was offset behind by a little over an hour. That should make it just after four in the afternoon, there.

The darkness was only the unlit interior of the hotel, in the future. The building’s walls must be fully intact. The place had endured the long neglect better than any of its counterparts in D.C.—or anywhere else, probably.

The air on the other side smelled stale but not rotten. Travis didn’t imagine things would rot in Yuma. They would just dry out and harden.

He stepped through the iris, keeping hold of its sides until he felt his foot touch solid ground—no doubt the same ceramic tiles that were there in the present. He brought his other leg through, then turned and took the cylinder and duffel bag from Bethany. He got out of the way and let her and Paige climb through the iris. Then they stood there in a crush against the wall, staring back through the opening, taking in the glow and hum of the fluorescent lights.

Thirty seconds later the iris shut, leaving them in a silence and darkness so complete that they might as well have been blindfolded and wearing earplugs.

Travis felt his way forward. His hand bumped against the stall door, hanging inward a few inches. He found its edge and pulled on it. Its hinges offered only a dry scrape for a protest as it swung clear.

Travis stepped out of the stall. He saw a faint rectangle of light rimming the bathroom door. He moved toward it, slowly, while he heard Paige and Bethany emerge from the stall behind him.

Halfway across the room his foot came up against something lying on the floor. He stopped. Touched his foot to it again and pushed it to test its weight. It yielded to a moderate amount of force. It weighed maybe forty pounds. Travis knew what it was. He stepped over it and found the door handle in the darkness.

“Be ready not to make any noise,” he said.

“Why would we?” Bethany said.

“Because you’re about to see something terrible.”

He pulled open the door. Sunlight from the corridor flooded the room. Centered on the bathroom tiles lay a body. A young woman, maybe twenty, with blond hair and pink-rimmed glasses. She wore a peach-colored T-shirt and jean shorts. Her skin was stretched tight over her bones and had the brittle, matte-finish look of paper mâché painted beige. She lay on her side, one forearm cushioning her face on the tiles. Her knees were drawn up, fetal. She’d died alone here and had mummified in the arid heat.

Bethany took a deep breath. It hissed through her teeth on the way out. She looked around, suddenly frantic, and at the dim edge of the light shaft coming in from the hall, she saw the bathroom’s sinks. She crossed to the nearest in two running steps and reached it just as she vomited. The convulsion came in waves—two, three, four. Then she stood there getting her breath. On instinct she grabbed the faucet handle and turned it. Nothing came out.

“Fuck,” she whispered.

She spat into the sink a number of times, and at last stood upright. Paige put an arm around her shoulders.

“I’m okay,” Bethany said.

She didn’t sound okay to Travis, but she sounded like she could stay on her feet. She’d have to cope with it later. They all would. And by then they’d have more to cope with alongside it.

A lot more, Travis saw, as he stepped into the corridor.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The ground-floor hallway of the hotel was filled with bodies. Cluttered so thick with them that it would require careful footsteps to avoid them. They lay in the positions they’d died in. On their sides and their stomachs and their backs, heads on folded arms or wadded articles of clothing. A few were seated against the wall, their arms crossed on bent knees and their heads bowed onto them. Their spinal columns stood out in sharp relief through the papery skin of their necks.

They were every age. There were gray-haired seniors. There were couples that might have been college students or even high-school kids, dead in each other’s arms. There were children with their heads resting in parents’ laps. Beside the stairwell door sat a woman who might have been thirty. She held a blanket-wrapped bundle in her arms. She’d died with her head leaned back against the wall. The dried remnant of her expression looked serene and calm. Travis wanted to believe she’d really felt that way at the end, but he didn’t.

Here and there, exposed arms and legs bore ragged bite marks where scavengers had been at the bodies. The damage was small in scale: apparently, no animals larger than rats had made their way into the hotel, at least in the early days. Maybe bigger things had come along later, but by then the mummification had made these dead an unappealing food source, and they’d been left alone. It was as close as nature could come to respecting dignity.

Travis’s gaze fell on a couple that’d probably been in their twenties. They’d piled a few jackets and shirts at the base of the wall and were huddled against them. The woman’s arms were lying flat across the man’s chest, but his were around her, holding her to him. Her forehead rested against his mouth. She’d died first, Travis realized. The man had held her body and kissed her forehead, and stayed in that position until he’d faded away himself.

Travis felt moisture rimming his eyes. He blinked it away. He glanced around and saw Paige and Bethany doing the same, just behind him at the open bathroom door.

He found himself taking in the condition of the building. It was almost pristine. The drywall in the corridor looked no different than it had in the present. The high-gloss paint on the crown molding had cracked and flaked, but only in a few places. There weren’t even cobwebs. Travis imagined dust would’ve settled out of the air here after a while, without foot traffic kicking up carpet fibers and pillows being fluffed. He could see none drifting around in the pale sunlight that shone along the hallway.

He turned toward the source of the light: the double doors at the end of the hall, fifty feet away. They were closed but they were mostly glass. The wall around them was also glass. All of it remained intact.

The wedge of parking lot that was visible beyond looked bleached and barren in the hard light. It was full of cars, which wasn’t surprising.

Paige let the bathroom door fall shut.

The three of them stood there. They listened. The hotel was as silent as it’d no doubt been for decades.

They watched the space beyond the glass wall for over a minute. Past the parking lot the view was blocked in places by other buildings, but in the gaps between those they could see a long way—hundreds of yards in some cases. Against the bases of distant buildings they could see deep accumulations of wind-piled sand, blinding white in the sun. None of it was blowing around now.

They saw no movement anywhere.

Travis set the cylinder and the large duffel bag on the floor. He took the shotgun from the bag, reassembled it, and slung it on his shoulder. Then he opened the bathroom door again and slid the duffel bag far to the left inside, near the sinks. It was too much to haul around the ruins with them. If they came back this way, they could get it later.

Bethany took the SIG from her backpack, considered it, and then handed it to Paige. “You’re probably a better shot than me. I’ll carry the cylinder. Better to have it in hand than in the pack. If we need to use it fast, seconds will count.”

She zipped and shouldered the backpack again—it held only shotgun shells now—and picked up the cylinder from where Travis had set it.

Travis studied the parking lot another few seconds, then turned and made his way through the bodies to the stairwell door.

There was a vague light shining in the stairwell. It came from somewhere high above. Even on the lowest flights it was enough to reveal the few bodies that lay in this space.

They found the light source on the fourth-floor landing. The husk of a balding man in his forties lay sprawled across the threshold leading to the hallway, the door forever propped open at forty-five degrees. It let in sunlight from the same kind of glass wall that capped the ground floor corridor.

They continued to the sixth floor. The bodies in the hallway there were as densely strewn as downstairs. Some of the guestroom doors they passed stood open. More bodies inside, on beds and in chairs. Travis stared at the shapes of bones beneath drawn skin. All the bodies were shriveled to that degree. He didn’t think mummification alone had done that to them. More likely starvation and dehydration had done it before they’d died.

They came to the glass wall at the end, looking out over Yuma from six stories up.

They stared.

“Jesus Christ,” Paige said softly.

It was the last thing any of them said for several minutes.

Every building in Yuma looked exactly as it had when they’d driven through it in the present day, except that the colors were baked to pastel versions of themselves. Like soft-drink cans left in the sun for weeks. Every parking lot was filled to capacity with cars and trucks. Every curb space was taken too. The vehicles had endured just as those in the open desert had: faded paint and no tires or window seals. Beyond the edges of the city, the mad but organized sprawl of cars extended out of sight in all directions. From this height it looked dramatically more absurd than it had from the shoulder of I–8, since the horizon was much farther away.

The three of them noticed all of that within seconds, and then disregarded it. Something else had taken their full attention.

The city of Yuma was drifted with human bones.

Seven decades of wind had scurried them into piles against all available obstructions. Cars, buildings, landscaping walls, planter boxes. They were everywhere except for open stretches of flat ground—like the section of parking lot immediately below, which had been visible from the first floor. From down there they’d seen the bones only at a distance, and mistaken them for sand.

Travis let his eyes roam the nearest pile, seventy feet left of the exterior door. The bones had massed there against a different wing of the hotel. He could see them with enough clarity to discern adult skulls from those of children, and large ribs from small ones. The bones were scoured clean and white. Everyone who’d died outdoors had been quickly discovered by coyotes and foxes and desert cats, and whatever they’d left behind, the sun and wind had eventually taken care of.

“It’s everyone, isn’t it?” Bethany said. “They really did it. They all came here and just… died.”

Travis looked at her. Saw her eyes suddenly haunted by a new thought.

“Maybe we were with them,” she said. “Maybe our bones are out there somewhere.”

They watched the city for another five minutes, for any sign of movement. If Finn’s people were there, they were already hidden in ideal vantage points. Travis considered that. Realized something obvious.

“I think we’re here ahead of them,” he said.

“How can you know?” Paige said.

“Because if they’d gotten here first, some of them would be standing at this window.”

There were three other floor-to-ceiling windows on the sixth floor, at the ends of other wings. They spent a few minutes at each of them, scrutinizing the city. They saw bones everywhere, but no sign of recent disturbance.

They also saw no indication that Yuma had been modified to handle any kind of crowd. No trailers or temporary shelters had been set up. If there’d been tents erected about the place, they were long gone in the wind.

Then they came to the last window, facing southeast, and understood where they needed to go next.

A mile away lay the broad expanse of the airport. The runways were clear, flawless. They probably looked no better even in the present. The terminals stood glittering and vacant. There were no aircraft docked at any of the gates. Travis studied the scene and wondered why it looked odd to him. Then it hit him: there were no parked cars filling the airport’s space. It was open ground—the only open ground for miles.

“There’s something written there,” Bethany said. She pointed to the south end of the longest runway.

Travis saw what she meant. A few hundred feet in from the runway’s identification numbers, someone had written a message in huge white letters—probably using the same paint the airport used for the runway lines. Travis had missed it at first; it was hard to read the letters from a long side angle. The message seemed to be intended for someone looking straight down on it from a plane.

Travis put it together one letter at a time, and had it after a few seconds.

It read: come back.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

They were outside the hotel a minute later. The quiet of the city was unnerving. The bone drifts looked bigger from ground level than they had from the sixth floor.

The air temperature was about the same as it’d been in the present. Somewhere between 105 and 110.

They crossed the parking lot and made their way to a residential district three blocks beyond. Moving among the houses felt safer than crossing the wide-open lots of commercial and industrial zones. They’d seen from the hotel that they could follow the houses all the way to the airport if they went straight east and then south to its perimeter.

They saw leathery bodies in every home they passed. After the first block they stopped looking.

Bones were scattered everywhere outside the houses. In fenced yards where the wind had never picked up momentum, some of the skeletons were partially intact. A tiny skull and ribcage lay half submerged in a sandbox among faded toy tractors and steam shovels.

Travis brought up the rear. He looked back every twenty yards. Whenever they crossed a space that offered a view of the hotel behind them, he studied the big corridor windows on the high floors. Even through the glare of reflected sky, he could see through them well enough to spot a person, if one were standing there. So far, he saw nobody.

He heard Bethany taking sharp, quick breaths ahead of him, and realized she was trying not to cry.

Paige gave her shoulder a squeeze. “You don’t have to hold it back. No one who sees this can be unaffected by it.”

“I know,” Bethany said.

But she held it back anyway. After another minute she was breathing normally again.

At the next street they came to, they looked south and saw the northern edge of the airport half a mile away, its chain-link boundary fence still standing.

They crossed into the next block and followed the sheltered path among backyards southward. They were moving against a light breeze now. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to perturb the air around their ears and make it hard to listen for movement. Travis kept turning his head to counter the effect.

They were a hundred feet from the airport fence when the breeze died for a few seconds.

Travis heard something.

He grabbed Paige and Bethany and pulled them almost off their feet, into a narrow channel between houses. They flinched and stared at him. He put a finger to his lips.

They stood in silence.

The breeze moaned under the eaves of the houses.

Then it faded again, and all three of them heard the sound.

It came from somewhere south of them, maybe within the airport grounds.

It was a woman’s voice, speaking calmly, saying something they couldn’t quite make out.

It took them only a few seconds to realize what they were hearing. The woman’s voice was pleasant and monotone and had a distinct reverb to it. It was a recording, playing over some kind of PA system on the airport grounds.

They cocked their heads but couldn’t discern any of the words.

Then the breeze picked up again and they lost the sound altogether.

They stepped out from between the houses and continued south. They stopped at the corner of the last home before the fence line, twenty yards farther on. Beyond the fence there was easily a quarter mile of open space before the nearest terminal building. Anyone watching from a high perch in the city would see them. There was no shorter path across the space on any side. There was nothing for it but to run.

The fence was ten feet high. Simple chain-link. No razorwire looped across its top. All it offered as deterrents were signs every dozen yards threatening harsh legal penalties for trespassing.

Travis tried to resolve the recording again. It was no good. It was still too far away, coming from somewhere near or within the terminal.

They traded looks. They nodded.

They ran.

They crossed the fence with no difficulty, and a few seconds later they were sprinting as hard as they could across the vast reach of the airport. Travis wondered if the distance had played with his eyes. Wondered if it was a lot more than a quarter mile to the buildings. It didn’t matter now. He ran. The wind streamed past his ears. It was impossible to hear the recording, even though he was much closer to it now than before. His own pulse against his eardrums became loud enough to match the wind after the first thirty seconds.

He was fifty yards from the terminal, with Paige and Bethany matching his speed, when he began hearing the monotone voice again. He still couldn’t make out what it was saying.

The three of them reached the corner of the building. Its long side planed away to the east, three hundred yards or more. Its short side was maybe fifty yards in length, leading south to another corner. They followed the short side, sprinting along it without stopping. Travis was acutely aware that they were still visible from town. More visible than ever, in fact—against the blazing white metal of the terminal’s outer wall, they’d stand out like ants on china to anyone even glancing this way from downtown.

They reached the south corner and rounded it. They stopped and stood hunched over catching their breath. For the first time since leaving the hotel they were visually shielded. The entire bulk of the town lay north and west of the airport. Their position on the south side of the terminal building, even a few feet in from the corner, hid them completely.

Travis walked off the pain in his legs. Took a last deep breath and felt his heart rate begin to fall off. As it did, he finally heard the message in all its clarity—which wasn’t a lot.

The woman’s voice sounded like it was coming through a cardboard tube with wax paper over the end. It took some concentration to piece the words together. Travis looked up and saw the speakers, tucked far under the ten-foot overhang of the building’s roof. They had to be wired to solar panels up top. The recording itself must be stored on some kind of solid-state media—a flash drive, probably. The whole system might have no moving parts except the electrons passing through the wires, and the vibrating diaphragms of the speakers themselves. For all that, it was amazing that it still worked, even in a place like Yuma.

Travis saw Paige and Bethany straining to catch the words along with him. He realized the message was repeating every twenty seconds or so. By the fourth pass all three of them had deciphered it:PLEASE BE PATIENT. PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE THE YUMA GATHERING SITE. ALL ERICA FLIGHTS WILL RESUME SHORTLY. BE SURE TO HAVE YOUR TICKET AND PHOTO I.D. WITH YOU FOR BOARDING. INBOUND FLIGHTS WILL BRING FOOD AND EXTRA WATER PURIFIERS FOR THOSE WHO CONTINUE TO WAIT. PLEASE BE PATIENT…

They listened to it one more time. Travis was certain he hadn’t misheard any part of it.

“Erica flights,” Paige said. She looked at Bethany. “I wonder if those are anything like the Janet flights out of Vegas.”

“I was wondering the same thing,” Bethany said.

Travis looked from one of them to the other. “Pretend I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“The Janet flights are something like a private airline,” Paige said. “They’re run by one of the big defense contractors. I forget which.”

“EG&G,” Bethany said.

Paige nodded. “They fly out of McCarran Airport in Vegas to airstrips in the Nevada Test Site. Mostly Groom Lake, I’m sure. They’re basically commuter flights for military and civilian personnel who work out there.” She gazed out over the empty airfield in the searing light. “Maybe the similar naming convention tells us something. Maybe the Erica flights were military, or close to it.”

Overhead, the message finished another iteration and began again.

“We know they were departures from here,” Travis said. “Which means Yuma wasn’t really the final stop. At least not for some.”

“Tickets,” Bethany said. “That’s what the kid meant, in the notebook. People came to Yuma hoping to get aboard one of these flights, wherever they were going.”

Travis stared at the southern face of the terminal rising above them. The lowest portion of the wall, from the ground to a height of fifteen feet, was white metal like the other sides of the building. Above that it was all glass. Jetways extended from boarding gates every hundred feet or so. Like everything else in Yuma they were in nearly mint condition. All they’d lost were the heavy-duty tires that’d once given their free ends mobility. Not even rubber crumbs remained around the bare rims. The unimpeded wind at this location had long-since taken them away.

Travis focused on the windows. From below all he could see was the terminal’s ceiling. No way to see anything at floor-level inside, though he imagined the space was full of bodies, each with a ticket and ID in its pocket. He turned and looked at the far end of the runway. He could see the rough shape of the words painted there, illegible at this angle but easy to recall.

Come back.

He listened to the recording blaring its neverending promise, and wondered what it’d been like to sit here dying, waiting for it to come true.

“The message says the flights will resume,” Travis said. “They must have actually been taking place at some point, when everyone was first coming to Yuma. And then they stopped.”

He thought of the bodies in the hotel. In the houses they’d passed. He thought of the bone drifts.

He shook his head. “We don’t need a calculator to see that the math doesn’t work on this one. How many people could they have possibly airlifted out of here, even if they were cycling the planes through with pit-crew efficiency? Say the Erica flights were 747s departing every ten minutes with five hundred people aboard. Probably impossible, but let’s be generous. That’s three thousand people an hour. It’d take a thousand hours to move three million people. A hundred thousand hours to move three hundred million.”

He saw Bethany and Paige doing the math in their heads.

“About eight thousand hours in a year,” Bethany said. “To fly everyone out would take more than a decade, even running at peak efficiency, day and night.”

“The people who came to Yuma would’ve known that,” Travis said. “They’d have had all the time in the world to figure it out. They’d know that this place couldn’t keep them alive, and that their only chance to survive was to get picked for one of those flights in the first week or so. And what would be the chances of that? Close to zero. Coming to Yuma would be Russian roulette meets the SuperLotto. But knowing all that, they still came. They played the odds. What could have made them desperate enough to do that?”

They stared at one another. Thought about it from every angle. Came no closer to making sense of it.

There were ground-level doors under each jetway, leading into the terminal. Travis tried the knob of the first one. It turned easily, but the door wouldn’t open. The white paint coating the door and the frame had fused together over the decades. Travis braced a foot against the frame and pulled with both hands. The seam gave with a dry crackle, and then they were in.

The place was noticeably warmer inside than outside—120 degrees instead of 105. It had the greenhouse effect in play because of the big southern windows, and no breeze to transfer the heat away.

They’d entered some kind of maintenance space one level below the concourse. It was close to pitch-black inside once they’d shut the door behind themselves, but they’d already seen the stairs ahead of them. Travis found the bottom tread and the handrail and started up. Fifteen steps later he touched the handle of the upper door. He opened it, stepped through, and held it for Paige and Bethany.

Five seconds earlier Travis had been sure—without even thinking of it—that he’d already seen the worst Yuma could show him. That he was sufficiently hardened to face whatever they might find here.

He wasn’t.

The three of them stood there, staring at the cavernous and brightly lit interior of the concourse.

The door fell shut behind them with a soft click.

Bethany inhaled slowly—Travis heard her throat constricting as she did. She put a hand to the wall beside the door, and then her knees gave and she sat down on the spot. She made no attempt to hold back the sobs now. Paige sat beside her and held on to her.

Travis took a few steps forward into the space. In the giant sunbeam that filled it he saw hundreds of padded seats, most of them facing out toward the runways and the open ground. On the chairs and on the floor and on the flat benches here and there, bodies lay as densely packed as they had in the hotel corridors.

In this place they were all children.

None looked older than twelve.

They stretched to the end of the concourse, at least a third of a mile away. Thousands and thousands of them.

Everywhere among them were discarded food containers. Foil chip bags, cracker boxes, candy-bar wrappers, pickle jars, bread bags. All of them lay empty among the bodies, which were as gaunt as any Travis had seen elsewhere in the city.

It was clear enough what’d happened. In the end, when the survivors in the town had dwindled to thousands, the adults had made a decision. Maybe the last big decision any humans ever made. They’d put all the kids here and consolidated the remaining food with them. The grownups had sacrificed themselves to give the kids a few extra days, in the guttering hope that the planes might come back in time for them.

Nothing Travis had seen in Yuma had brought him close to losing control. His eyes had moistened in the hotel, but his breathing hadn’t so much as hitched.

It didn’t hitch now, either.

He didn’t get even that much warning.

He simply found himself sitting down hard in the middle of the floor, his hands pressed to his eyes as they flooded, his chest heaving beyond his ability to stop it.

Time went by. Ten or fifteen minutes. The emotions passed and left a kind of vacuum in their wake.

They stood.

They glanced around.

They had no desire to search the concourse. It was hard to imagine what it could show them except more suffering.

Travis tried to think of what part of the city they might investigate next. He was thinking about that when they heard the exterior door open downstairs.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The concourse offered very few hiding places. Even fewer that could be reached within seconds.

The wall opposite the windows was lined with shops that’d once sold tourist items and sandwiches and sunglasses. The shops didn’t have doorways—they simply lacked front walls. They offered concealment from only one sight line—that of someone approaching along the row.

They were also the only option.

Travis waited for Paige and Bethany to move past him. They went forward along the row of shops, avoiding the bodies. He followed, keeping an ear toward the door atop the stairs. The metal treads would give away the newcomer’s approach easily enough, but the monotone recording—much louder inside the terminal—would make it tough to listen for it.

He heard it when they were four shops along. Heavy thuds coming up, echoing in the space beyond the door.

Paige ducked into the fifth shop, which seemed to be a bookstore with all its shelves empty. Bethany and Travis followed. They heard the door open a second later.

Five seconds passed.

The door clicked shut.

A man exhaled.

Then, footsteps. Slow and careful. Coming toward them. Distinct, individual steps. The man was alone.

Travis clicked off the Remington’s safety. He had a shell in the chamber already. He had his back to the shop’s wall on the side the footsteps were coming from. He was two feet in from the edge. He leveled the shotgun and pulled the stock against his shoulder.

The footsteps halted. It was hard to say where. Maybe ten feet short of where the man would’ve come into view. Not much further away than that, Travis was sure. Part of him wanted the guy to continue forward. Wanted a reason to start shooting, even if the sound might draw more trouble onto them.

Then he heard a crackle of static. A walkie-talkie. The only form of long-range communication that would work on this side of the iris.

The static cut out and the man spoke. “Lambert here. Inside the terminal. Copy?”

The static came back. Then a man’s voice spoke through it, just clear enough to be discerned.

“This is Finn. Go ahead Lambert.”

“They were here. There’s paint flakes outside an exterior door. Gotta be recent, or else the wind would’ve blown them away.”

Travis clenched his teeth. Fuck. Careless.

“Any sign they’re still inside?” Finn said.

“No way to tell. I just came in.”

The static hissed for a long time. Then Finn spoke again. “All right. Get out of there. You’ve already found out what we need to know. Come back and help with the camera mast.”

“Copy.”

The static flared again and then clicked off for good. Travis waited for the footsteps to retreat, but for a moment they didn’t. Lambert was just standing there, no doubt gazing around at the spectacle of the concourse. Whatever the man felt about it, it didn’t reduce him to tears. After a few seconds he retreated to the door, and then he was gone.

Travis relaxed his grip on the shotgun. He turned to look at Paige. She was looking in his direction, but past him. Staring at the big windows, thinking about something.

“It’s probably about five o’clock here,” she said. “I don’t know when the sun sets in Arizona during October, but eyeballing it I’d say we’ve got an hour.”

Travis followed her stare. He looked at the angle of sunlight coming into the terminal. It shone as harshly as it would have at midday, but it fell at a long slant. An hour was probably about right.

“We need to get out of here right now,” Paige said. She sounded on edge. “We need to get out into the desert and go back through the iris to the present. We can walk to the Jeep from there.”

Travis had an idea of what was spooking her.

“This camera mast they were talking about—”

Paige cut him off. “Yes. We need to be scared shitless of it. And we need to get moving. I’ll explain on the way.”

She stepped past him, out of the shop. He took a step to follow and then realized Bethany hadn’t moved yet. He stopped, turned back to her. Saw what she was staring at.

In a little wastebasket just visible behind the shop’s counter, there was a scrap of newspaper. Maybe the top third of the front page, torn roughly from left to right. It was stained with ancient blotches of mustard, like it’d been used to clean up the remnants of a sandwich on the counter. Glancing around, Travis saw no sign of the paper it’d been torn from. For that matter, there were no newspapers of any kind in the shop. A tower of wire shelves in the corner had clearly once been stocked with them, but it was empty now, like every bookshelf in the place. Except the scrap in the trash can, not a single piece of paper remained in the store. Travis turned his eyes to the concourse and saw the reason within seconds: the kids had burned the paper to stay warm. Ash piles remained in various stone planters among the bodies. As hot as this place would get during the day, it would cool down fast at night. The big glass wall would bleed away the heat in no time—especially in December.

Bethany stooped and took the piece of newspaper from the trash. Filling most of the space was the paper’s title: The Arizona Republic. Below that was the date: December 15, 2011. And beneath that was the lead headline and the top few rows of the story’s text—a single column beside a giant photo—before the torn bottom edge cut it off.

The photo was impossible to make out. Only the top inch of it showed: a defocused background of a crowd somewhere.

The headline read, former president garner assassinated in new york city.

Paige let her urgency fade for the moment. She stepped back into the shop.

Bethany spread the paper on the counter so all three of them could see it. Despite age yellowing and the mustard stain, the fragment of article text was easily readable:New York (AP)—Former United States President Richard Garner was shot to death at a gathering in Central Park yesterday evening, Wednesday, December 14. Garner had for several days spoken publicly against the mass relocation to

That was it. It reached the bottom edge and there was no more. Bethany flipped the scrap over, but the other side featured only an advertisement for a local restaurant. She turned it back over to the headline.

Travis stared at it. Read the story text again. Thought about what it implied.

“We think bringing everyone to Yuma was some kind of panic move,” he said. “The official response by those in power—those behind Umbra—even if they knew it couldn’t actually save everyone. And Richard Garner called them on it, at the end. Even opposed it, publicly. Any question that’s why he was killed?”

Paige’s eyes narrowed. She saw where he was going. So did Bethany.

“Garner’s not in on it,” Paige said.

Bethany looked back and forth between them, hope rising in her eyes. “But he probably knows a hell of a lot about this stuff, right now in the present day. He only resigned the presidency two years ago. Up until that point, he had all the top security clearances. He had to have known about Umbra, whatever the hell it is.”

For a moment none of them spoke. The recording droned over the concourse.

“We should pay him a visit,” Travis said.

Paige nodded again. Then she blinked and looked around. “We need to get the hell out of Yuma first. Come on.”

She turned and led the way out of the shop, back toward the door they’d entered through.

They came out through the exterior door with the SIG and the Remington leveled. There was no one in sight.

Travis looked down and saw the paint chips he’d left earlier. He shook his head.

They moved east across the southern span of the building, out of view of anyone in town. They ran at nearly full speed and reached the southeast corner in a little under a minute.

The donut of open space surrounding the terminal was a quarter mile on every side. They’d first come into the airport from the north, with the city at their backs. They were facing south and east now, with nothing ahead of them but a few pole barns at the edge of town and then a tundra of cars covering miles and miles of flat desert.

Finn and his people were in town. Probably toward the middle. A sprint from this corner of the terminal toward the southeast would be largely hidden by the building itself, at least for the first half of the run. After that they would probably be visible to someone high up in the city, like a watcher on the top floor of the hotel.

Travis saw Paige judging the distance, running through the same logistics.

“I don’t imagine they’ll have a watch posted anymore,” she said. “They’ll have everyone working on the camera mast. They’ll want it raised as soon as possible, and once it’s up they won’t need a watch at all.”

She looked toward the sun. Couldn’t look right at it. The arid sky did nothing to filter its glare, even though it was shining from low in the west. Their guess inside the book shop had been right: it was an hour above the horizon.

Travis suddenly understood Paige’s concern.

“Thermal cameras,” he said.

She looked at him. Nodded. “Eight FLIR cameras, seventy-five meters up. The kind of mast they’ll use is lightweight, guywire stabilized, rapid-deployable. What the military uses for forward operating bases in open country. A skilled team can put one up in an hour.”

Travis looked around at the tarmac. Looked at the scrubland past the perimeter fence, and the sprawl of cars beyond. Every outdoor surface in Yuma was still baking at over one hundred degrees.

But not for long.

All of it would cool quickly once the sun set. It might be cooling already. And once the background was cooler than ninety-eight degrees, the three of them would be the warmest things within a hundred miles of Yuma. Even if they got far out among the cars and army-crawled into the desert all night long, the cameras atop the mast might see them. Infrared light from body heat radiated and reflected like any other kind. It could bounce off metal and glass. FLIR cameras watching from a height of seventy-five meters would have an effective horizon dozens of miles out.

If they were still in Yuma an hour from now, they might as well be wearing neon body suits.

They ran.

They reached the perimeter, crossed the fence and made their way among the cars.

They ducked low and zigzagged south and east for over half an hour, until even the terminal building was at least a mile away.

They stared through the cab of a pickup toward the center of town. They could see the mast going up, rising meter by meter as unseen workers added sections to it at the bottom. The camera assembly was already mounted on top. The mast seemed to hold itself perfectly straight as it rose. Travis pictured four men holding onto guywires—invisible against the sky at this distance—that they would stake into the ground once the mast was complete.

Travis studied the nearest edge of town. On this side of the airport there were only a few outbuildings, all of them tucked in close to the fence line. The zigzagging had put the three of them well beyond the bounds of the city, in what should be empty desert in the present day. There would be little risk of any bystander seeing them appear through the iris.

“Let’s do it,” Paige said.

Travis nodded.

Bethany was still carrying the cylinder. She settled onto one knee and aimed it at almost ground level between the rows of cars. She switched it on.

The iris opened to vacant land under the same kind of long sunlight they were crouching in now, maybe half an hour before dusk. For a second, that seemed wrong to Travis: the present was shifted an hour ahead of this side. It should already be dark over there. Then he remembered. The present was an hour later in the day, but two months earlier in the year. August instead of October. The sunset would be a lot later in August, about enough to offset the difference. It occurred to him that rival armies using this technology against each other would have a lot of abstract thinking to do.

He crawled to the iris and looked through at the broad sweep of present-day Yuma.

He felt the back of his neck go cold.

“Shit,” he whispered.

Paige was beside him a second later. Bethany remained ten feet away, holding the cylinder.

“What is it?” Bethany said.

For a few seconds neither Travis nor Paige answered. They just stared through the iris at the living version of the city—which was filled with police and federal and even military vehicles. Flashers stabbed at the evening air from a hundred places, and at a glance Travis saw at least three helicopters circling high above.

“I had it wrong,” Travis said. “They did set a trap for us in the present. They just waited until we were on this side to spring it.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Bethany closed the iris.

They lay there on the hard ground, silent.

The breeze played over the tops of the cars. It dipped among them in weakened breaths, noticeably cooler than it’d been even ten minutes ago.

“It’s probably a Homeland response,” Bethany said. “The president can initiate one without anyone’s approval. They’ll have every road into the city blocked off. The residents will be locked down under curfew. Anyone moving around in the open within ten or fifteen miles of town will be stopped and questioned. Our chances of escape are better on this side.”

“Our chances of escape are near zero on this side,” Paige said.

“I know,” Bethany said.

Travis got up into a crouch, and looked through the truck’s cab again at the rising mast. It was impossible to accurately judge its height, but it was a lot taller than the six-story hotel a few blocks from it. It wouldn’t be long before it was completed, and in fact the cameras on top were probably already functional, even if the desert was still blinding them. And that protection might only last another twenty or thirty minutes.

“What’s working in our favor?” Paige said. “What can be made to work in our favor?”

Travis thought about it, but for at least a minute nothing came to him.

Then he smiled.

Finn watched the mast take shape. Lambert and the other specialist, Miller, were quick and efficient in their moves. The tech, Grayling, had the camera feeds already routed to a line of eight laptops, arrayed on the pavement of Fourth Avenue in the lengthening storefront shadows.

So far the cameras could resolve nothing. The laptop screens were fully white, overwhelmed by the desert’s background heat. But that would change very soon.

Finn had brought fifteen men through the opening. Three were assembling and configuring the mast, four were holding the guywires, and eight were just standing there, HK MP5s in hand, ready to run. Ready to make the kills.

If the condition of the ruins had affected any of the men, they weren’t showing it. Finn wished they would, at least to some small degree. Wished he could see some human reaction in them—a respect for the suffering that’d happened in this place. He was sure they felt it, deep inside—maybe not even so deep inside. It was only human for them to stifle their empathy in the presence of others, but Finn had to believe that any one of them, walking these ruins alone, would have been brought to his knees. It helped to think so anyway.

“We’re not going to make it painful for them,” he said. He turned his eyes on the eight who were armed. “Miss Campbell and her friends aren’t bad people. From their point of view they’re in the right. There’s no call to make them suffer. We make it fast, as soon as we’re on them.”

Travis, Paige, and Bethany covered distance among the cars as quickly as possible, moving straight west from their earlier position, from one lower corner of the town toward the other.

The wide driving lanes between the cars ran north and south, but the going was just as easy from east to west. The cars had the same natural channels between them that existed in any parking lot: the spaces their drivers had needed in which to open their doors that final time, long ago.

They slipped through the channels, every few seconds crossing the wider lanes. They were acting on a risky assumption: that Finn’s people weren’t standing lookout at all, but were just waiting for the cameras to do it for them. The assumption was as necessary as it was dangerous: they needed to move quickly in order for Travis’s plan to work, and they couldn’t do that while staying low among the vehicles.

They moved upright at half the speed of a sprint. They’d have gone faster, but the plan required stopping at vehicles every few hundred feet—among other things.

For Travis there were two other reasons to slow up. Two specific items he was looking for, that he hoped to find in glove boxes along the way. He found the first within minutes. The second took longer, but only a little. He pocketed both things and continued along at a quicker pace.

If they were lucky they might cover two miles before the cameras could see them. Maybe even three. But either way it was going to be close. The plan would succeed or fail by minutes. Seconds, even.

If it worked at all.

The first thing that showed on the laptops were the broad lanes between the cars, stretching away to a vanishing point like rows of corn. Finn had expected that. The ground between the cars had lain in shadow for at least an hour now.

Humans still wouldn’t be discernible in the lanes: the lanes were reading a hundred degrees, while the tops of the cars were reading five degrees higher. But it was progress.

It crossed Finn’s mind that Paige Campbell and her associates, however many she had with her, might be hiding in one of the structures within the city. That would be problematic, short term. Every building’s interior had been superheated all day long by the greenhouse effect. It was probably a hundred twenty or higher in each of them, and that heat would take time to bleed out through closed windows and plaster walls.

But long term it was no problem at all. How long could Campbell and the others stay hidden in those conditions? It was unlikely they’d brought much food and water of their own, if any, and they sure as hell weren’t going to find any left sitting around in Yuma.

If it came to simply waiting them out, that would be fine. They weren’t going anywhere on the present side, and they weren’t going anywhere on this side either. It was going to end here, sometime in the next twenty-four hours.

But every instinct told Finn that they were out among the cars, making whatever run for it they could, and that this would be over very, very soon.

He stared at the laptops again. Watched the contrast of the lanes deepen. Some portions of them were taking on a new shade now. Ninety-nine degrees.

Moving quickly. Not quite running. Stopping at intervals. They were dead south of town now, two miles west of where they’d begun their sideways move.

Not far enough, Travis thought. Not nearly far enough. The plan had a giant drawback built into it: it was going to give away their position the instant they executed it. Which might be okay, as long as the plan worked. As long as its effect was immediate and overwhelming for Finn’s people.

But for that to happen, they needed to cover a certain amount of distance first. The path they’d taken so far was a line from east to west, south of Yuma. Like they were underlining the city on a map, right to left. The longer they could make the line before everything happened, the more likely the plan was to succeed.

Distance and time. They needed more of one. They were running out of the other.

Nearly straight ahead of them, the sun’s lower rim touched the horizon.

The mast was finished. Lambert and Miller stood armed with the others now, while the four with the guywires staked them into the ground.

Grayling was moving back and forth over his laptops, hunched, looking excited.

Finn could see sparse portions of the open lanes reading ninety-seven degrees now. Even the cars themselves were reading down around one hundred.

Two and a half miles. Still probably not enough. It was impossible to guess exactly what would be enough. The plan would work or it wouldn’t.

The sun was gone. The desert felt immediately cooler, though Travis was sure that was a psychological effect. It’d been cooling steadily for a long time now. He let his hand press on the hood of a truck as he passed it. Warm, but not hot.

“There!” Grayling said. His hand shot out to indicate the fifth laptop’s screen. “South of southwest, a mile and a half away.” He dropped to one knee and studied the monitor. “I see three of them. Christ, they’re not even hiding. I’ve got direct line of sight. They’re moving—straight west through the cars. I wouldn’t say they’re running. I don’t know what the hell they’re doing. It’s like a fast walk, hunched over. Maybe they’re tired.”

“Then it won’t be hard to catch them,” Finn said.

He turned and picked up the cylinder from where he’d set it on the curb. A second later he was running, holding the cylinder with both hands and tucking it against himself. Lambert and Miller and the other eight fell in behind him.

This would be simple. Straight south out of town along one of the broad lanes among the cars, until they were level with the east-west line the others were fleeing along. Then just catch up to them from behind—maybe stick to a parallel path ten yards north of theirs until the last minute, to stay clear of the sightlines between the cars.

Finn freed a hand from the cylinder and took from his vest pocket the FLIR goggles he’d brought along. He hung them around his neck by their strap. They weren’t necessary yet, but in another ten minutes the desert would be an ink-black void without them. His men each had them too.

Paige Campbell and her friends almost certainly didn’t.

Finn really did feel bad for them. It wasn’t even going to be a contest.

Chapter Thirty

Three miles. Three fourths of the town underlined. The going was harder now: their muscles were sore and the channels between the cars lay deep in shadow.

Yuma looked strange in the twilight with no lights coming on. Just low, black rectangles against the dying sky. Nearer, the sea of cars made a single, undefined field of darkness.

The wind was much cooler. Under any other circumstances it would’ve felt soothing.

Travis stopped. There was no question that Finn and his people had seen them by now. No question that they were coming, that they were out there somewhere among the cars, threading this way.

Paige and Bethany stopped too.

The three of them met one another’s eyes.

Finn found the desert surprisingly easy to traverse. The inch-thick layer of rubber crumbs, the remnant of a few hundred million tires, made for a soft—and silent—running surface. Finn had incorporated running into his exercise regimen years ago, not long after settling down in D.C. His mile time varied between 6:30 and 6:50. His men, most of them with twenty years on him, were all at least that fast.

They’d completed the southern arm of the sprint and were well along the westbound track now. They had their FLIR goggles on. The desert looked spectral through them. The cars were bluish white, while the passageways between them were shrouded in deep indigo and black. It was like running through a photo negative.

Finn held up a hand and brought the men to a stop.

He set the cylinder down beside a pickup, then climbed onto the sidewall of the truck’s bed. He balanced himself against the cab and surveyed the desert.

Christ, they were right there. Six cars west and four cars south. They were crouched low; Finn could see only the reflection of their heat signature against the side of a minivan.

Were they hiding because they’d heard the approach? Finn ruled it out. They couldn’t have heard.

The answer was simpler than that. They could no longer find their way in the dark. There was no moon. No light glow bleeding into the sky from distant cities. There was starlight, but starlight was worthless. Human eyes, even dark-adjusted for hours, couldn’t see a thing by it. Finn had faced that fact a number of times, in remote places all over the world.

Miss Campbell and the others had stopped because they simply couldn’t go on. They were crouched as low as they could get, hoping it was enough.

Finn considered waiting for them to go to sleep. Then they could be executed without even knowing it, and spared the jolt of animal terror that would otherwise mark their final seconds as the shooting started.

He thought of it and then discarded it. They would probably post a watch. That person would sit awake for hours, anxious and miserable, listening for footsteps in the dark. And that was its own kind of pain. No need to prolong it.

He turned to step down from the truck—but stopped.

He’d smelled something. Just briefly. It’d come to him on the breeze, blowing northward over the cars.

He tilted his head up and inhaled. Couldn’t detect it again, whatever it was. He tried to place it, based on the trace of it he’d gotten. Somehow it made him think of gun lubricant, but that wasn’t quite it.

He took another breath, still couldn’t reacquire it, and let it go. Maybe it was the natural odor of tens of millions of cars, mothballed in the desert for all time. It occurred to him only for a second to question that idea—to wonder how any smell at all would still be around after seven decades of sun and wind—and then he stepped down from the pickup and waved the men forward again.

They rounded the truck’s front end and went south. Finn stopped them again one channel north of the row the others were crouched in, and led them west. They would drop down into the same pathway as Miss Campbell when they were two cars shy, and simply rush them. It would begin and end in seconds. As close to painless as circumstances afforded.

Travis took the first glove box item from his pocket. He shook it next to his ear. Empty as expected. Even though it was nearly a sealed container, its trace contents would’ve no doubt evaporated long ago, even in the sun-sheltered interior of a dashboard.

It didn’t matter. The item should serve its purpose here, regardless.

He lowered it until it was nearly touching the bed of tire crumbs.

Finn brought the men to a halt at the near edge of one of the broad north-south lanes. He could see the victims’ heat signature against the minivan, one channel south and two cars past the far side of the lane. He was sure all the men could see them too. No need to plan the final move. They knew what to do now. Finn stepped forward into the lane, and simply got out of their way. He sidestepped to the left. Waved them on.

They advanced, single file, angling across the lane toward the channel in which the victims were crouched.

Lambert took point as Finn moved aside. He moved slowly, silently, one step per second. No need to rush.

He came even with the open channel between the last few cars and saw the three targets easily. Two were dead right now if he pulled the trigger. The third—someone small, slender-framed—was crouched at the back corner of the van, halfway around it. That one might create a problem if the shooting started too soon. Might get clear and lead a pursuit among the cars, however brief. Might even return fire—Finn had said these people were armed. Better to take them all in a single action.

Lambert raised his foot to take another step, and heard a faint suction noise from the ground beneath it. He looked down. Saw nothing there in his thermal vision. Looked up again at the targets, still a good thirty feet away. The largest of them had his hand to the ground. Looked like he was holding something with it.

Finn took another step aside as the men filed past him. As he did, his heel struck something in the darkness. It made a light, hollow thud. Something big and empty, made of plastic. It spun aside easily under the impact of his foot. He looked but couldn’t see anything. Whatever it was, it was the same temperature as the ground.

He stooped, felt for it, found it. A smooth container with a handle.

And a spout.

He drew it toward his face, and his next breath told him exactly what it was, and what he’d smelled from atop the truck bed twenty seconds earlier.

Travis was sure the Bic would work—would spark, anyway. Flint and steel shouldn’t have changed at all in Yuma, these past seventy-three years.

He was less sure that the spark would be big enough, or long-lived enough, to ignite the fuel-soaked tire crumbs.

He flicked the sparkwheel with his thumb. It generated a tiny flash that barely escaped the lighter’s windscreen—and had no effect on the fuel.

He flicked it again.

Same result.

Lambert pressed forward between the cars. Twenty feet from the targets now. Still no clean angle on the little one behind the van.

What the hell was the big one holding?

Lambert could see the guy’s thumb moving. Snapping across whatever it was. Each time there was a tiny pinprick of light in his FLIR-enhanced vision.

The third spark did nothing, either. It wasn’t working. Not this way.

Travis pressed the end of the lighter directly into the soft tire crumbs. He put the tip of his index finger to the sparkwheel and dropped his shoulder, allowing plenty of slack into his arm. Then he pivoted, swung his entire upper body clockwise, and kept his finger pressed to the wheel until the last instant, so that every ounce of his momentum would come to bear on it. When his fingertip jerked across the wheel, he felt the steel dig into his skin almost hard enough to draw blood.

In the same instant he heard a man shouting, somewhere close by in the darkness. He was saying, “Fall back!”

Lambert heard Finn start to shout just as the big target lowered its shoulder and wrenched its torso around.

It was the last thing his FLIR goggles showed him.

A tenth of a second later his vision was washed out by blazing white light, and he felt a wave of heat engulf his legs and waist.

Travis had expected Finn’s men to be close. Maybe within a hundred feet. Maybe closer than that.

When the trail of gasoline ignited, revealing the men in a line formation just over a car length away, it was visually startling but not so surprising. Travis threw himself backward, still in his crouch, slamming into Paige and pushing her back with him.

He got his left hand beneath himself on the ground to keep his body from sprawling. He brought his right arm up and around, getting his hand on Paige’s shoulder, and the moment they’d cleared the back of the van, he shoved her sideways, propelling her and Bethany behind the vehicle’s bulk.

At no point did he take his eyes off of the men in the flames. They may have caught him off guard, but it was clear they’d gotten the worse end of the encounter. They flinched backward, their left hands coming off of the forward grips of their weapons, reaching instinctively for their eyes. The top halves of their faces were hidden by some kind of night-vision goggles, but the lower halves said more than enough about the sudden panic they felt. They were blinded and confused, and a second from now their clothing would be on fire. They were in every kind of trouble.

But they weren’t the whole story. Beyond the five who were trapped between the vehicles, Travis could see as many as five more who hadn’t yet filed into the narrow space. They were disoriented too, but they weren’t immobilized.

They were going to be a problem.

Travis understood all that, even as he shoved Paige, while his own body’s momentum continued backward. A millisecond later it shifted beyond the balance point of his left arm beneath him. His feet kicked out of place on the rubber crumbs, and he went down hard on his back, landing on the shotgun he’d slung on his shoulder.

Finn had already torn his FLIR headset off by the time the flames erupted, his second shouted word still clearing his mouth. He saw the burst of light forty feet away, and a fraction of a second later the fire was rushing toward him. It didn’t just spread along its pathway: it screamed. It looked like a bullet train emerging in flames from a tunnel. Finn only just managed to step clear of it, even with plenty of distance to see it coming.

Lambert and Miller and the three behind them were almost immediately ablaze. Finn saw why. It wasn’t just the ground beneath them that was burning—the sides of the vehicles had been doused with gasoline, too. The men were walled in by the inferno.

Even the five who hadn’t yet entered the space were flailing, impulsively trying to cover their eyes instead of the FLIR lenses five inches in front of their foreheads.

Finn lunged at them. He swatted their headsets up and off, one after another, and shoved them toward the next channel through the cars.

“It’s a fucking diversion!” he screamed. “Take them before they can move on it!”

Paige saw Travis land on the Remington, even as she and Bethany fell to the ground behind the van. Paige landed on her ass, twisted hard to the side, slammed both hands to the ground and pushed herself up into another crouch, all in one fluid move. Then she was rising, uncoiling like a spring to full height, her right hand automatically drawing the SIG-Sauer from her waistband.

She heard Finn yelling something about a diversion.

She came out from behind the van, leveling the SIG across the roof of the compact car next to it. She was vaguely aware of Travis right beneath her, trying to roll over and get his hands onto the shotgun, but other things took greater command of her attention.

The fire trail. Surging away across the desert like the exhaust wash of a rocket.

The five men in the flames, their clothing ablaze, their hands grabbing at zippers and buttons, their bodies running into one another and into the cars that boxed them in on the sides.

The other five men. Not on fire. Not even wearing their headsets anymore. Turning and running in this direction, through the nearest free pathway between the vehicles. Finn urging them on.

Finn.

Right there. Just beyond the compact car and the lowrider that faced it. He was thirty feet away, and holding the other cylinder.

For a moment Paige met his eyes. She had the SIG leveled in the neutral space between the charging men and Finn himself. It was like an intersection in time. The last point at which all options remained open.

She felt her training begin to exert itself. The world didn’t exactly slow down for her. It just became simple. Very, very simple.

There were targets.

Some of the targets were threats, and some weren’t.

Some of the threats were more immediate than others.

The most immediate was the man leading the pack between the cars. Twenty feet away and closing. His MP5 coming up. His eyes on her chest, where the first shots were going to go about a third of a second from now.

Paige made a slight adjustment with her wrist. It took a fourth of a second. She pulled the trigger. The bullet punched into the pack leader’s forehead like a finger into stale piecrust, collapsing it inward in big bony shards. His head snapped back but his body continued forward, already dropping, obeying simple laws of physics now instead of whatever was left between his ears.

Four men left. Two of them still plowing forward between the cars.

But not the other two. They were checking their movement. Falling back. Turning their attention on Finn now, defensive. They understood the danger he was in—probably better than he understood it himself.

Finn was still in her field of fire. Still a target.

But there were still threats. Immediate threats.

Paige retargeted from the falling corpse of the first man to the second, five feet behind him. She fired again. Caught him right in front of the ear. The entry wound was small, but in the firelight she saw what had to be the full contents of his head come out the back in a ragged cloud.

Then things began to change very quickly.

The two men closest to Finn got ahold of him. Dragged him down and away. Paige saw their heads whip around, their eyes tracking over their surroundings, looking for the best route to safety—to distance and cover.

At the same time, the third man between the cars was dropping. Dropping faster than the corpses of his friends. Getting down out of her line of fire. He hadn’t reached the compact car yet. He was still passing the lowrider. The chasm between it and the next vehicle was shallow, but as Paige lowered the SIG to follow him into it, the compact car’s roof slid up into her gunsights, blocking the angle.

She fired anyway. Three shots, as fast as she could pull the trigger. She saw them hit the car’s roof, punching through but deflecting wildly as they did. Past the roof’s edges she saw the man still coming on, unhindered.

She also saw that she was out of time to try again.

She threw her body sideways in the same quarter second that his return fire cut open the darkness. The windows of the compact car imploded. Paige hit the ground, landing near Bethany again. She hit harder than she wanted to. She’d been forced to put speed before control when she threw herself out of the way, but that was going to cost her now.

Because she wasn’t going to get up in time. Wasn’t even going to roll herself over into a firing position in time. That would take her a good second and a half, and by then the man would be rounding the back end of the car.

She saw it all play out like a nightmare. Still not slowed down. Just clear. Agonizingly clear. She managed to turn her head, her eyes going all the way to their corners.

The gunman was already there. Clearing the car’s rear window and then its trunk. Shouldering the machine gun for the easy kill.

And then his head came apart.

It happened so suddenly that Paige almost missed the muzzle burst from the twelve-gauge, in the darkness behind the car’s bumper.

A second later Travis was on his feet, racking another shell into the shotgun’s chamber, raising it and sweeping it through an arc above the car. Looking for Finn.

But Finn was long gone. Paige could see it in Travis’s eyes.

She became aware of screaming voices—realized she’d been hearing them for seconds already, but hadn’t focused on them. They hadn’t been part of the simple picture.

She saw Travis turn his eyes to the side of the van, and she realized what the screaming was. The men in the fire. Still alive. Travis swung the Remington their way and emptied its remaining shells into them, its broad pattern allowing for five kills with four shots—two or three shots could’ve almost done the job.

The screaming stopped.

Travis slung the shotgun. He turned, held out his hands to Paige and Bethany, helped them up.

Paige stared around at the aftermath. The bodies in the flames. The bodies alongside the lowrider. The empty space where Finn and the other two had been.

She looked at the fire trail. No more than fifteen seconds had passed since Travis had lit it, but already it extended hundreds of yards. Paige could see its far end still racing toward its conclusion: the place where the three of them had first begun dumping fuel containers in a thick line between the cars.

Already the flames were spreading away from the original trail. The cars flanking it were becoming engulfed. They were well primed to burn. Engines and tanks and fuel lines caked with long-hardened gas and oil sludge. Interiors of parched foam and cloth.

And then there was the desert floor itself. A thick carpet of crumbled tire rubber, dried and seasoned by seven decades of sun. The blaze was expanding outward through it, mostly north from the fire line in the direction of the breeze, moving at maybe a fourth the speed a person could walk.

But that was deceptive, Paige knew. The fire was going to spread a lot faster than that, once it got going. She could already see the mechanism that would drive it. From the empty window frames of the compact car, burning scraps of upholstery were being channeled up into the night, riding high on thermals and wind, touching down again hundreds of feet to the north. A single glance along the line of burning vehicles showed her the same thing happening everywhere, as windows buckled in the intense heat.

Travis scanned the darkness to the north one last time, cupping his eyes against the glare of the flames.

No sign of Finn or his men.

The crumb-scattered ground around the compact car was beginning to ignite. It was time to get moving.

The three of them shared a look, and a few seconds later they were running south, with the growing fire to light their way.

Chapter Thirty-One

The plan had been meant to have a much simpler execution. Certainly the idea had been straightforward enough: create a long line of flame south of town and let the wind carry it north, hopefully with enough speed to disrupt Finn’s makeshift base of operations—especially the camera mast.

A very long fire trail had been necessary for two reasons. First, to maximize the chances of setting the entire city ablaze, and second, to give the three of them a broad curtain of heat behind which to hide, once Finn’s people came after them.

That was how Travis had imagined it, anyway, even assuming Finn and his men were already moving toward them. Had the wall of flame gone up when the pursuers were still a quarter mile north, they’d have spotted the ignition source immediately and sprinted toward it to make the kill. Someone back at the camera mast would’ve guided them over their radios—would’ve tried to, anyway. But the sheet of flame would’ve made that impossible. The cameras couldn’t have seen a thing to the south of it.

The three of them could’ve simply run like hell for any random place south of the fire line, then dug in and waited for the fire to consume the town. After that they’d be free to make their escape.

It probably would’ve worked well enough.

But Travis was much happier with how it’d actually played out.

Finn was down eight men, while their own casualties amounted to a sore spot on Travis’s back where he’d landed on the Remington. All told, the face-off had shaken out pretty well in their favor.

They still picked out a spot south of the fire line to dig in, two hundred yards down from where the shooting had happened. They reached it, then turned and stared north at the flames.

“Jesus,” Travis said.

The height of the blaze surprised him the most. A minute earlier, when they’d been right next to it, it’d just cleared the tops of the tallest vehicles.

It was twice that height now.

From this angle they could see the entire line, extending three miles to the east. The whole length was burning. Every vehicle that immediately bordered it had thick tongues of flame seething from its windows.

From this position it was impossible to see the fire’s northward progress. The three of them began moving to the west for a better perspective. Travis was hesitant to go too far—they might step out from behind the fire’s thermal curtain and become visible to anyone watching the camera mast’s feeds. Assuming whoever was up there didn’t have bigger concerns now, like getting the hell out of the fire’s way.

They’d gone only a few hundred feet west before they stopped and simply stared again. They had their answer.

The fire was advancing north faster than any of them could have hoped. The falling embers had triggered spot fires as far as half a mile north of the line. Each of these had already grown to bonfire size, massive cones of flame standing atop a dozen cars each, and blossoming outward through the tire crumbs. The bonfires were venting thousands of their own embers into the darkness toward Yuma.

The city would be an inferno in another five minutes.

That was the good news.

Travis could see the bad news just as easily.

The fire wasn’t only spreading north.

He’d expected that problem to an extent—it was unavoidable—but he’d hoped the fire’s progress in the other directions would be nominal.

It didn’t look nominal.

The original fire line had spread south by at least four rows of cars, and from its starting point it’d expanded west by several rows as well, even crossing the wide driving lanes that ran north and south. The hotter the fire burned, the more rapidly it spread through the rubber crumbs.

Suddenly, about fifty feet along the original line, a bright fireball erupted with a heavy concussion sound. A still-sealed gasoline container in someone’s trunk had burst in the heat. The blast sent burning fuel out in a fifty-foot radius.

It happened again five seconds later, this time at the southern edge of the advance. Just like that, there were half a dozen more vehicles burning.

“We’d better get the hell out of here,” Paige said.

They went west. It was as safe as south or east, and it was familiar. They’d seen it on the way into town. They weren’t going to run up against the edge of a canyon or a mountain ridge unexpectedly.

They ran for only a few minutes before they stopped to get what they needed for the last part of the plan.

Bikes.

Though they were everywhere—from almost any point in the expanse of cars it was possible to see one or two—in most cases they were children’s. Or they were adult bikes with leather seats that’d long since baked off in the sun, leaving only exposed springs and foam.

The three they settled on—two on a car’s trunk-rack and another in a pickup bed twenty yards away—were adult mountain bikes with fabric seats that hadn’t been worn off.

The bikes’ tires were long gone, but the desert’s surface was essentially one big tire now, so Travis hoped the going would be about the same, or close enough.

He took from his pocket the second thing he’d searched for among the glove boxes earlier: a narrow canister of WD-40.

The desert air had preserved the bikes just fine, but the sun would have burned away any trace of their lubrication. They spent a minute thoroughly dousing the chains and gears and bearings with the oil. Then Travis lifted one of the bikes’ back ends and gave its pedal a turn. It creaked for two seconds and then everything spun silently, smoothly.

Yuma was an uncannily good place to store things for a long time. Travis found himself wondering if that figured in somehow—the place’s capacity to keep metals and other things unchanged. If it was part of the puzzle, he couldn’t see how it fit. But nothing else fit either, so far.

They mounted the bikes, then stared back at the city. The fire was gargantuan now. A hurricane of flame. No sense of the original line remained. It was simply a massive, misshapen oval, broadly curved along the three miles of its southern sweep, and radically extended northward, in branches and separate blazing islands that now reached well into the downtown area. In the deepest parts of the firestorm the flames towered three hundred feet up, and above them rose a column of smoke that looked like something from the last pages of the New Testament. The inferno churned upward into the smoke, merged with it, lit it from inside and out. The firelight shone out over the vast plain of cars. Millions of windshields caught it and reflected it upward, lighting the column of smoke to a height of three or four miles above the desert.

The edges of the fire zone were still growing quickly. Without the bikes, the three of them would probably be in trouble.

“I’m relatively new to Tangent,” Bethany said. “Do you guys do stuff like this a lot?”

“Not so much,” Paige said.

“It mostly seems to happen when I’m around,” Travis said.

They watched for another thirty seconds. Then they turned, put up their kickstands and rode like hell.

Long before he reached the southern edge of town, Finn understood that the math was against him. Not linear math, either. Exponential math.

Flaming pieces of vehicle upholstery, some of them as big as handkerchiefs, were raining into the desert on every side, and far ahead of him.

He ran. His surviving men, Reyes and Hunt, ran with him. They were going north along one of the broad driving lanes. Ahead, just visible above the obstacle course of spot fires, the camera mast was still standing. Its aluminum framework glinted in the yellow light.

Grayling and the other four might still be there. If they weren’t, he didn’t know where the hell to find them. He wished he’d brought along one of the fucking two-ways. But even if he’d thought to do so, he probably would’ve elected not to, out of fear the static would tip off Paige Campbell and the others. Nowhere on his list of what-ifs had the present situation appeared.

Straight ahead, two broad patches of flame crept toward each other, closing the gap between them. To go around the far end of either one would cost half a minute. The way through the middle, right up the lane he and the others were running in, was the shortest. But the gap was shrinking. Rapidly.

Finn tried to pick up his speed. He found it nearly impossible. It was all he could do to keep his breathing under control as fumes from the burning rubber drenched the air. He could feel it covering his skin in a film. Could feel it in his eyes and his hair, too. No question the stuff was flammable as hell, and saturating his clothes by the second.

Thirty yards from the gap now. It was only the width of the lane itself. The cars that defined it on both sides were fully engulfed.

Twenty yards.

Ten.

They were passing through the gap, three abreast, when something exploded in one of the vehicles’ trunks. A shower of burning fuel sprayed everywhere. Finn stayed ahead of it. He was sure the others had too. Then he heard Reyes screaming. He stopped hard, his feet sliding on the rubber-coated soil—it’d taken on a greasy feel as the heat intensified—and looked back. Reyes was down, every inch of his clothing on fire. He was rolling, but it was no good. Instead of the ground putting him out, he was igniting the ground wherever he touched it. The tire crumbs, in their half-melted state, were releasing the oils they’d been made from. They were ready to burn on contact.

At the edge of his vision Finn saw Hunt sprinting back to help Reyes. There wasn’t even time to scream the warning. Half a second later the fire had both of them.

Finn took a step toward them anyway. An involuntary move. Not even a gesture. A wish, at best.

He could do nothing. He didn’t even have a gun with which to put them out of their suffering.

Another trunk exploded. Close by. He couldn’t stay here. Grayling and the others might still be possible to save. He turned and sprinted north again.

A minute later he rounded another fire and came to the south end of Fourth Avenue. He saw that it was hopeless. The whole city was burning. Every building. Every car in the streets. Far ahead he could see Grayling’s laptops melting in the inferno. He couldn’t see Grayling. Or any of the other four. They’d run for it. They weren’t going to make it. There was no escape in any direction.

Finn stared at the bone drifts heaped against the buildings. Flames from first-story windows twisted and writhed through them. Blackened them. Flickered between ribs. Darted like snake tongues from the mouths and eyes of skulls.

He leveled the cylinder and switched it on.

The rubber surface of the desert didn’t make up for the lack of bike tires, but riding was still a hell of a lot better than walking.

Travis, Paige, and Bethany circled north to the west side of town, keeping well beyond the outskirts. They found I–8 near the spot where they’d pulled off of it earlier—technically seventy-three years and a couple months earlier—and headed west toward whatever was left of Imperial, California.

They rode for half the night. They made ten miles an hour, riding on the hardened ground just off the freeway. The freeway itself, cleared of tire crumbs by the wind, was too rough on the bike rims.

Every time they stopped to rest they stared at the fire. It grew by miles each hour, even as it fell increasingly far behind them. It was the most absorbing thing Travis had ever seen. The central mass of the firestorm had to be well over a thousand feet high now. Like a campfire you could fit a mountain into.

Ten miles shy of Imperial they found the edge of the mass of parked cars. It ended in a more-or-less straight line, vanishing into the darkness north and south of I–8.

They rode into the town. The irrigated fields that’d once surrounded it were long gone. There was no way to even tell where the fields had met the desert. It was all desert now.

Imperial was as well preserved as Yuma, but it was empty. No cars. No bones. No bodies. They rode through its silent streets in the half-light from the distant fire. They scared up a barn owl among the crates of a shipping yard. They caught a glimpse of its pale face and deep black eyes and then it was gone, flapping away into the night.

They rode out to the middle of what they judged to have been cropland and ditched the bikes. They opened the iris and stepped through into moist rows of cotton plants, thirty yards from a massive wheeled sprinkler line trundling slowly across the field.

Travis surveyed the surrounding landscape for any sign of police flashers, or the beacon lights of helicopters. He saw nothing. The Homeland Security response must be concentrated on Yuma, fifty miles back east.

They walked into town and a found a motel just off the freeway that didn’t require ID. They got a room with two queen-sized beds. The nightstand clock showed two thirty in the morning. Paige and Bethany took the first bed and Travis took the second. They collapsed fully dressed atop the bedcovers and were asleep within a minute.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Finn had been on the phone for hours. The entire flight back from Yuma and better than ninety minutes in his office. He was standing on his balcony now, staring across D.C. at all the places that’d been on the other ends of his calls. Dark silhouettes of buildings with a few lights on, half an hour before sunrise.

He had one call left to make.

He leaned on the rail. He dialed. Three rings and then a voice answered. “Isaac?”

“Yes,” Finn said. “I’ve spoken with President Currey. I’ve spoken with everyone who matters. We’ve come to an agreement. We’re not happy with it, but there’s no other option in play. Paige Campbell and her friends were in Yuma for several hours, and now they’re long gone. We don’t know what they saw there, and we don’t know who they’re talking to right now. We have most of the big dogs in our camp, but we don’t have everyone, and given time… these people could hurt us. They could pull the whole plan apart.”

He took a breath. Let it out slowly. “We can’t wait as long as we meant to,” he said. “Umbra needs to happen now. Right now.”

He heard a sharp inhalation on the line. “But it’s not ready. Entire segments of the plan—”

“The fundamentals are ready,” Finn said. “In principle it can work. And in one sense we have an advantage now. We have the cylinder. We can go to the final location and see what’s there in 2084. Who knows what we can learn from that.”

“Are you going there now?”

“I’ll stay in D.C. for the next twenty-four hours. I expect Campbell to come back here and try to contact people she hopes she can trust. I doubt she and the others really appreciate the extent of our connections, in which case there’s every chance they’ll trip a wire somewhere.”

There was a long silence on the line. The sound of uncertainty. Reluctance. Acceptance.

“Currey is already getting started on his end,” Finn said. “How long will it take on yours? How long to actually set the plan in motion?”

Another silence. Then: “A day or two. Maybe less. Christ, are we really doing this?”

Finn heard as much excitement as anxiety in the voice.

“Yes, we’re really doing this. None of us would’ve chosen to rush it, but if it’s that or never do it at all…”

“I agree. I’m scared as hell, but I agree.”

“I knew you would. Get started on it right away. I’ll talk to you soon.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too, Audra.”

Part III - Arica

Chapter Thirty-Three

Richard Garner woke to his alarm at five in the morning. He exercised for thirty minutes. He showered, dressed in khakis and a gray cotton tennis shirt, and went to his den. Beyond the windows Central Park lay in amber light and long, early shadows, thirty stories below.

He switched on the computer. While the operating system loaded, he left the room and crossed the broad stone hallway to the kitchen. He toasted two slices of wheat bread and poured a glass of orange juice. He took the plate and glass back to the den, sat at the computer, and clicked open his work in progress. The book was still only an outline. It’d begun as a study of Ulysses S. Grant’s time in office, with a focus on the difference between overseeing a war and overseeing a nation, but the research had led elsewhere. Now the book was shaping up into a broader examination of every president who’d held a position of military authority before taking office. An analysis of the pros and cons regarding what that kind of experience brought to a president’s perspective. He wasn’t sure yet on which side he would ultimately come down—whether generals tended to make good presidents or not. The evidence pointed to a number of conclusions, each conditional to time and place and political climate, and he’d only just begun digging through it. He hoped his own military background—he hadn’t made general, but he’d commanded a SEAL team for the bulk of the seventies—would provide him more insight than bias.

It was involving work.

Which he needed right now.

Would almost certainly need for the rest of his life.

He stayed in the den all morning and into the early afternoon. Mostly he sat at the computer, but at times he paced before the windows, looking out over the park and the city.

He took a break at one o’clock. He had a sandwich and a 7UP. He plugged his iPod into the sound system, piped the music through the residence and did some random work around the place. Though he’d been here for two years, some part of him still felt like he hadn’t settled in yet. Like he was still getting used to it. Still getting used to living anywhere on his own.

The residence took up an entire floor of the building, though only two thirds of it made up his own living space. The other third comprised the living and working quarters of the Secret Service detail that guarded him. He played poker with them, most nights.

He quit the chores at four o’clock. Turned off the music. Went back to the den. He opened a heavy box of yellowed, sleeve-protected documents that’d come from the archives of the New York Public Library. The pages were by no means a part of the library’s lending collection. Even as non-circulating reference material they were pretty hard to gain access to. Garner felt a bit of guilt over the privilege his resume afforded him, but not enough to lose sleep over. It was just much easier for the library to send the stuff to him than to have him and his security footprint dropping in every time he needed to verify a quote. Besides, he was an old friend of the place. He’d worked there in his college years. He’d probably walked past this very box a hundred times.

The day was clear and bright, but by five o’clock the sunlight in the room had diminished a bit. He turned on the lamp beside his reading chair. George Washington’s handwriting was hard enough to make out as it was.

At a quarter past five a cool breeze filtered into the room from the hallway. It stirred the papers on the table beside him. It took him two or three seconds to realize that a breeze should be impossible. None of the residence’s windows were open.

For a moment he only stared at the doorway. Tried to make sense of it. There was an intake for the HVAC system just out in the hall. No reason air should be coming out of it, but maybe some kind of maintenance was going on. It was all he could think of.

All he could think of that was benign, anyway. In recent years he’d grown used to considering more threatening scenarios for given situations.

He set aside the page he was reading. He stood, curious but not afraid. He could clap his hands and have six agents with submachine guns coming in through separate access points in quite a bit less than ten seconds. They didn’t normally monitor video feeds of the residence, but any sharp sound above 85 decibels would trip the acoustic alarm and bring them running.

He crossed the room and stepped into the hallway. The main entry was still closed and locked. The kitchen was empty. He turned toward the living room—and flinched.

People.

Three of them.

Right there.

Garner was an instant from shouting to trigger the alarm when he realized he recognized one of them. Paige Campbell.

Tangent.

He felt his fear turn to anger. He advanced on her and the others. It occurred to him only in passing to wonder why all three of them had damp hair and clothing.

“We’re sorry to intrude—” Paige said.

Garner cut her off. “Leave. Right now. However the hell you came—”

Paige stepped aside, and in the gap between her and the other two, Garner saw where the wind was coming from.

He stopped. His anger faded. He didn’t know what to feel, suddenly. All he could do was stare.

Travis watched Garner’s reaction. The initial anger made sense. The man’s wife had died because of her work with Tangent; he couldn’t have been ecstatic to see them here.

Now as Garner stared at the iris, Travis stepped aside, along with Bethany, to give him an unbroken view.

Garner moved toward it. Started to say something. Stopped.

Then it contracted shut in front of him, and he blinked, confused.

“Sorry,” Bethany said. “Hang on.”

She was holding the cylinder. She looked around for a place to set it. Pointed to a narrow table along the nearest wall, and looked at Garner.

“Is this okay?”

The guy could barely process what the hell she was asking him. He stared at her for a second and then his eyes went back to the spot where the iris had vanished.

Bethany took his silence for a yes. She set the cylinder on the table and found a heavy bookend to brace it with.

Travis glanced at the floor-to-ceiling windows on the south wall, facing down Central Park West toward Midtown. The park itself filled the left half of the view. The right half was full of the varied architecture of the Upper West Side. Travis guessed the buildings ranged in age from a few years to well over a hundred. The day was beautiful, with huge, slow clouds dragging their shadows across the sweep of the city.

Then Bethany switched on the cylinder and the iris appeared again, and Travis saw the other Manhattan. The one they’d been looking at for the past several minutes as they ascended the ruins of Garner’s building.

That version of the borough was in the same condition as D.C. for the most part. The entire island was carpeted with dense boreal forest, from which rose the corroded remains of the city skyline.

What set it apart from D.C.—more so than Travis had imagined until he’d seen it for himself—was simply the scale of the ruins. In D.C. the sixteen-story office building had looked enormous. It would’ve been lost among the ankles of the giants that stood rusting here. The remnants of skyscrapers below Central Park formed a solid visual screen standing eight hundred feet high—higher still in some places. The October wind sighed through it, finding odd angles and rivet holes whichever way it blew. It sounded like a chorus of a million reed flutes, playing soft and low in the dead framework of the city.

All of it lay cold and misty under bruised knots of cloud cover. Each time the wind gusted through the iris it blew a wisp of moisture into the room.

Garner remained where he’d been standing.

“It won’t shut again,” Bethany said. “You can go close to it. You can lean right through.”

He looked at her. Looked at each of them in turn. He managed a nod, and crossed the room to the iris. He stared through. For more than three minutes he said nothing. Then he closed his eyes. He shook his head and lowered it.

“Tell me everything,” he said.

Chapter Thirty-Four

It took just over an hour. They sat around a coffee table in the den and relayed the story in detail. All that had happened. All that they knew. All that they didn’t know.

When they’d finished, Garner sat in silence for a moment.

“You must know something about this, sir,” Bethany said. “If President Currey knows about Umbra, I can’t imagine you don’t.”

“I’ve met Isaac Finn on two or three occasions,” Garner said. “Just brief conversations, each time. I wanted to like him, given the work he’d done. But I didn’t. There was something about him that seemed… contrived, I guess. I had the feeling that the small talk wasn’t really small talk. That it was something else. Like a test. Like it was some kind of psych exam, and my answers meant something to him. I saw it when he spoke to others, too. That was my sense of the man. But I was the outlier. Finn’s made a lot of close friends in Washington over the years. Currey’s one of them. That’s why Currey’s in on Umbra, whatever it is. It’s sure as hell not something you learn about by just having a high enough security clearance. I had the highest kind you can have, and I never heard a thing about it.”

He stood from his chair. Went to the window.

“What I can tell you I didn’t learn as president. I learned it on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, years earlier. And it’s not about Finn. It’s about his wife, before she was his wife. When she was a grad student at MIT named Audra Nash.”

He was quiet a moment, thinking, his back to the room. Travis looked past him out the windows. He could see the evening shadows of the Upper West Side easing across the park.

Garner dropped his hand to a huge globe next to the window, resting in an ornate walnut floor mount. He spun it absently. Travis imagined it was something he did often, an unconscious habit.

“Audra came before the committee behind closed doors, with an unusual request. She wanted clearance to review certain restricted military documents, as part of the research for her doctoral thesis. In exchange, the thesis itself would be classified and available only to certain people. Our people.”

“What was she doing her doctoral work on?” Paige said.

“ELF radio transmissions. Extremely Low Frequency. What we use for communicating with submarines.”

“That doesn’t sound like something an aerospace candidate would be working on,” Paige said.

“It was, in her case. She was researching ways to transmit ELF signals using satellites.”

Paige looked somewhat thrown by that.

Bethany looked floored. Like she could almost laugh. “That’s ridiculous. ELF transmitters are over thirty miles long. How could you put something like that in orbit?”

“And why would you want to, anyway?” Paige said. “ELF has worked fine for half a century, just the way it is.”

Travis could see just enough of Garner’s reflection to make out a vague smile. Then the man finally turned from the window.

“There’s a bit more to it than that,” he said. “Audra wasn’t interested in using it for submarines. She was looking to use it on people.”

None of the vacant expressions in the room changed.

Garner crossed to the big chair before his desk. He swiveled it to face the coffee table and sank into it.

“We started working on ELF in the fifties, when it was becoming obvious that subs were going to play a major role in the Cold War. We built the transmitters in remote places. One well-known site in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Another in northern Canada, not so well known. The technical hurdles to building the damn things were significant. Consider what they had to do: broadcast in all directions with enough signal strength to reach submarines anywhere in the world, hundreds of feet down in conductive saltwater. It’s amazing they worked at all. But even once they did work, there were… other problems. Health effects for personnel that worked and lived close to the transmitters, where the signals were highly concentrated. Cognitive issues in a few rare cases, but the most common problems by far were mood disruptions. Conditions that mimicked the symptoms of bipolar disorder, though with greater severity. Much greater, at times. There were personnel who had to be subdued because they were—for lack of a better word—high. That was how they described it themselves, after the fact. At the other end there was severe depression. There were suicides. Lots of them.”

“We still use ELF,” Bethany said. “Are those problems still going on?”

Garner shook his head. “They got a handle on it within the first decade. Isolated the causes. At high enough doses, certain wavelengths were trouble. Certain distances from the transmitter were trouble, because of harmonics. Like that. The engineers worked around it.” He offered something like a smile, though nothing about it looked happy. “But by then, certain people were thinking about the side effects in very different ways. Thinking about how to enhance them instead of eliminate them. How to control them. How to use them as weapons in their own right.”

“Christ,” Travis said. But he could already see the obvious appeal of that kind of technology. A tank battle or a naval engagement would be a hell of a lot easier to win if everyone on the other side was suddenly experiencing what felt like a crack high.

“They actually built systems like that?” Paige said.

“They tried. We tried, the Brits tried, Russia tried. Everyone worked out the useful frequencies easily enough. Even found ways to heighten the effects with on-off modulation, or rapid oscillation between frequencies. Scary stuff. Even test subjects, who were well aware of what was happening to them and who were exposed for as little as an hour, had severe reactions. It was a hell of a weapon. Two big problems, though: you couldn’t move it, and you couldn’t point it.” He nodded at Bethany. “Like you said, an ELF transmitter is huge. It’s not some dish you can swivel around toward a target. It’s a straight-line antenna between leads, dozens of miles apart. You basically just have an effective zone around the signal source. So unless you can talk your enemy into lining up right there, nice and neat, there’s not a hell of a lot you can do with a weapon like that. And that was about the extent of it. We kicked it around for a while in the sixties and seventies, looked for ways to make it selective, directional. Probably threw half a billion dollars at it. I’m sure the other guys did the same. But at some point, when you’re not seeing any results, you have to cut your losses. There are better things to spend the defense budget on.”

He glanced out at the city, shrugged with his eyebrows, looked at the three of them again.

“So you might imagine it got our attention when Audra Nash came to us in 1986 and said she had an idea. A way to broadcast ELF using satellites. If it were almost any other person—much less a student—the committee wouldn’t have even taken the meeting. But Miss Nash had some credibility to back up her claim. Her work as a grad student had already influenced the design of next-gen communications satellites. She was smart as hell, and she knew the field better than probably anyone. What she wanted from us was access to the results of all the ELF research over the years, all the raw data from the experiments in directing it, focusing it. We barely had to think about it. First, the data wasn’t all that sensitive. It was just a detailed list of all the things that didn’t work. And all the countries out there who could possibly want to steal it didn’t need to: they already had the same data, based on their own failures. Second, we thought her idea might actually have merit. She was brilliant, she had a track record, and she was coming to this problem with fresh eyes. The concept she had in mind was certainly different enough. We hadn’t tried anything like it in all our efforts.”

“But how could it work at all?” Bethany said. “Just basic physics should make it impossible for a satellite. A transmitter has to be big enough to handle the wavelengths it generates, and ELF waves are huge. Hundreds of miles long.”

Garner nodded. “Her idea was radical. I don’t pretend to have understood it in detail, but essentially it was this: ELF waves occur naturally in the Earth’s atmosphere. The sun radiates them, and lightning strikes produce them, too. It’s all random, of course. All noise, no signal. And even if the frequencies that affect people happen to appear, they’re drowned out in the clutter and nothing happens. Audra Nash believed a satellite, transmitting much shorter wavelengths with the right precision, could cancel out certain frequencies of natural ELF over a given target area. Could allow us to pick and choose which frequencies to cancel out… and which to leave intact.” He looked at Bethany. “So you’re right. A satellite can’t broadcast ELF, but in theory it could disrupt it where it naturally occurs, and whittle away everything but the useful ranges. At which point, they would certainly affect people. And it would be precisely targetable. You could influence a few blocks. Or a whole city. Or an area much, much larger than that.”

No one said anything. They waited.

“So we gave her the go-ahead,” Garner said. “Gave her access to everything we had. She dove into it. Lived and breathed it. She came back before the committee six months later. With a blueprint.”

“Did anyone build it?” Paige said.

“Nope.”

Paige looked confused. “Why not?”

“Because it was still a long shot. Even with a good blueprint there’s trial and error, details to hammer out in the prototype. That can be expensive even if you’re modifying a Humvee. For a satellite, tack on a couple zeroes.”

“Come on,” Travis said. “The hubcaps on the stealth bomber probably cost a million apiece. Since when does the Pentagon get sticker shock?”

Garner smiled. “There’s another reason, but it’s even less believable.” He considered how to frame it. “It’s like this. In the early days, when everyone was looking for a straightforward way to weaponize this technology, there was an urgency to figure it out. Get it before the other guys. That makes sense if you think there’s some big, obvious solution out there, the kind that everyone will eventually stumble onto. But Audra’s idea wasn’t like that. It was obscure as hell, based on an overlap of knowledge probably no one but she had. There was a good chance that nobody else in the world would ever come up with it. But they’d be more than happy to copy ours, if we went ahead with the project. You hear people talk about the atomic genie coming out of the bottle in 1945. Like if we didn’t let it out, nobody ever would have. It’s probably not true. Fission’s not exactly an unheard-of concept. But Audra’s satellite design was. And we just thought… why do it? Why bring the world into an age defined by something like this? So we sat on it. Locked the design away. Audra understood, though I’m sure she was disappointed. She got out of the design game after that. Went off to Harvard, got her other doctorate in philosophy, got into relief work. Married Finn. I didn’t hear about her again until 1995, when that little dustup happened with the paper those two tried to publish.”

Paige had been looking at the floor. She looked up now. “Did you see a copy of it?”

Garner shook his head. “Shredded and burned before it could make the rounds. I had a pretty good guess what it said, though. Maybe you can guess it, now.”

Travis thought of what they’d just learned. Tried to put it in the context of Finn and Audra’s lives, in 1995—just back from Rwanda, permanently burned out on their life’s work.

“Holy shit,” Travis said. “They wanted to use that kind of satellite technology on places like Rwanda. That’s it, isn’t it? If you had control over how strongly it affected people, you could do that. Target the whole region with some minimal exposure, something that creates the effect of a mild high, euphoria, whatever, just to quiet everything down. Sedate the hell out of the place until—what, a peacekeeping force could go in and get control? The peacekeepers would be affected too, but maybe with the right training to anticipate it…”

He trailed off, thinking it over. Considering the implications. He saw Garner nodding.

“My assumption at the time,” Garner said. “Point for point. I’m sure they glossed over the specifics of how it worked—revealing those would be treason—but yes, I imagine they advocated something very close to what you’re talking about.”

Travis looked again at Paige and Bethany. Wondered if they were thinking the same thing he was. He guessed they were.

“It doesn’t actually sound like a bad idea,” Travis said.

Garner offered another smile. “No. It doesn’t. Not if all you did with it was stop genocides. But how long would that last? And think about it from a human-rights perspective. A right-to-privacy perspective. A global superpower using satellites to screw with people’s heads. It’s right out of Orwell. Is it any wonder Audra’s father saw his career flash before his eyes when he heard about it? What politician wants his name within a mile of a thing like that?”

“So that’s it, then,” Paige said. She looked around at each person in the room, as if surprised the answer had dropped so neatly into their laps. “That’s Umbra. This technology must actually exist by now, and in a few months something’s going to go wrong with it. Catastrophically wrong.”

Bethany was nodding. “We know Audra left Harvard in ’ninety-five and went to work for Longbow Aerospace, designing satellites. Somehow that company must have agreed to build her ELF design, and keep the work secret. And even after she died, Finn could’ve kept the project going. Jesus… if Umbra happens four months from now, these satellites must be in orbit as we speak. A whole constellation of them, with global coverage like GPS.”

Garner looked thoughtful. “I know about the Longbow satellites in some detail—at least the details the company chose to put forward. The system was supposed to be a low-orbit network for satellite phones, meant to compete with the cellular market in the nineties. As the story went, Audra worked on the project for the last two years of her life. By the time they actually launched the things, in ’ninety-nine, it was a lost cause. Cell phone transmission was getting dirt cheap, and Longbow couldn’t match it. We ended up subsidizing the whole damn thing and using it for some military voice traffic. The sats actually work for that, but only just. Which makes sense, I guess, if their main purpose is something else entirely.”

“All the pieces of this thing fit,” Paige said. “Even the long delay since 1999, when they launched the satellites. Finn’s had to do years of political work on the ground before he can use them. Suppose he wants to demonstrate this technology on a current conflict zone, someplace like Darfur. If it works, it’s proof of concept, and then he can begin publicly arguing for it as policy. But he’d need all kinds of powerful friends on board to actually pull that off. He’d at least need them not standing in his way. If at all possible, he’d want the president on his side.” She looked at Garner. “As you said, no politician would want to be tied to this, especially not early on, when it’s just an untried, terrifying idea. It makes sense that President Currey would make a drastic move to keep it secret. Like the attack on our motorcade.” She nodded, tying it all up in her mind. “This is the answer. Umbra is the plan to finally go live with these satellites, some trial run somewhere, in the next few months. And apparently, it goes pretty fucking badly. Unintended consequences on a global scale, however the hell that would happen. Some critical loss of control, and then… then I guess what happened to a few ELF engineers in the fifties happens to the whole damn world, and all that’s left are panic options. How Yuma figures in, I don’t know. Maybe they won’t know, at the time. Maybe it’s nothing but a distraction to give people purpose at the end, keep them from rioting in the streets. Maybe there never were any Erica flights.”

Silence came to the room. Travis listened to the groan of traffic far below, dampened by the heavy glass.

“I’ve been mulling that explanation for the better part of an hour,” Garner said, “as I’ve listened to your story. It seems obvious, and it covers almost everything. But where it breaks, it breaks completely.”

Paige waited for him to go on.

“The failure itself,” Garner said. “I don’t see how it can happen. It’d be one thing if we were talking about a bacterial agent, or a virus, or even a computer worm—something that can get away from you and wreak havoc. But if satellites malfunction, we can shut them down. It’s a few keystrokes and a transmission. It’s easy.”

“Could an error on board the satellites block receipt of the signal?” Paige said. There was a lost-cause note in her voice, like she already agreed with Garner and was just exhausting possibilities.

“I guess,” Garner said. “But we’re talking about dozens of satellites. If there’s a glitch, it’s probably not with all of them. Probably just one. In which case we’d shoot it down. Strap an ASAT missile under an F–15, launch it from seventy or eighty thousand feet up. It’s not easy, but we’ve done it. We could do it again if we had to. If it came to it, we could shoot down every single one of them. Enlist Russia’s and China’s help if it’s a time-critical thing. Give them the satellites’ positions and vectors, sing a few rounds of ‘Kumbaya,’ and start shooting until the job’s done. We’d do it. It wouldn’t take long. Days, not weeks.” He made a face. Almost apologetic. Rested his hands in his lap. “So I still don’t see how Bleak December happens, playing out over a month or more.”

“But everything else fits,” Paige said. “The child’s notebook we told you about, in the desert near Yuma. If you saw it for yourself… if you saw what this kid drew… it was just page after page of misery, with no visible cause—”

“I agree it fits,” Garner said. “I’m sure these satellites are at the heart of this thing. And clearly someone makes a colossal fuckup somewhere along the line. But I can’t for the life of me see what it is.”

“Do we even need to know?” Travis said. “We know enough right now to make a move against them. With your connections, sir, there must be channels we can go through.”

Garner nodded. “Absolutely. From this point forward we take it slow and deliberate. Start with outsiders Finn would have no reason to be tied to. Figure out who we can trust, from there. Build our support until it’s overwhelming and then, yes, we move. It’ll work if we’re careful. Hell, we’ve got a few months to play with.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

Rudy Dyer was the newest man on the protective detail. He’d been on board only three weeks. By no stretch was he green—he’d served four years with the Foreign Missions Branch and two with the Naval Observatory—but there were aspects of this new role that he was still getting used to. As Secret Service work went, protecting a former president was maybe a tick more relaxed than protecting a sitting one. The job was more relaxed, anyway—the agents weren’t.

What Dyer had the hardest time adjusting to was the added familiarity here, between the agents and the focus of their work—Richard Garner. The poker games seemed a little out of line. No protocols were broken, of course—the agents playing the game were always off duty at the time, while the standard minimum of six on-duty agents remained in the watch-room. Still, it wasn’t the sort of thing that would’ve happened in the White House, off-duty or otherwise.

Dyer was getting a feel for it, though. It was just a different fit, that was all. These were still the most professional and disciplined security personnel in the world, and he got on well with them. He got on well with Garner, too. He just didn’t plan to sit in on the poker games anytime soon.

It was 6:44 in the evening. Sunlight shone through the west-side windows in long, tinted shafts. The watch-room—actually a good-sized suite of rooms—occupied the southwest quadrant of the building’s floor, including the stairs and elevator accesses. From the terminal at his desk, Dyer could cycle through the feeds from every security camera in and around Garner’s residence. Protocol allowed for respecting the man’s privacy, however, which meant that the residence’s interior feeds were set aside in a separate batch and ignored under normal circumstances.

Every fifteen minutes Dyer clicked through all of the other feeds: those covering the corridors, elevators, stairwells, and even a few angles looking across the outer face of the building at this height—even the remote possibility of someone rappelling down from the rooftop had to be allowed for.

Dyer’s watched ticked to 6:45.

He opened the camera feeds. Skipped through them with precise keystrokes. Studied each one for exactly three seconds. Corridors clear. Elevators clear. Stairwells clear.

On the third exterior feed, which looked across the east side of the building past the windows of Garner’s den, he stopped.

There was a young woman sitting in a chair a few feet in from the windows. Dark hair and eyes. Maybe thirty. Very attractive. Garner himself was just visible at the edge of the frame, sitting at his desk chair. Looking casual. Staring off through the window at nothing.

Who was the woman?

Dyer minimized the feed and clicked open the logbook for the security checkpoint. No one could enter or exit the residence—not even Garner himself—without passing through it and being logged with a time stamp.

There was no entry in the file for anyone coming or going today.

Or yesterday.

The day before that, Garner had logged out to have lunch with the governor in Midtown, and logged back in three hours later, alone.

Dyer quickly skipped through the past five days’ entries. Nothing but Garner coming and going by himself.

He minimized the logbook and opened the exterior feed again. The woman was still sitting there.

How the hell had she gotten in without it being noted?

Dyer could think of only one explanation. He hated to believe it. But what else was there?

He looked around. One other agent had a desk in this room. The other four were stationed elsewhere in the suite, the better to rush Garner’s residence from multiple angles if the need arose.

The other agent in the room wasn’t looking Dyer’s way.

Dyer took out his cell phone, set it in its dock next to the terminal and waited for it to sync up. When it did, he captured a single frame of the video feed, clearly showing the woman’s face, and sent it to the phone. He took it back out of the dock, then stood and left the room.

He stepped into the bathroom across the hall, turned on the vent fan and the water for masking noise, and dialed a number on his phone. It was answered on the second ring.

“Greer.”

“It’s Dyer. Do you have a minute?”

“Sure.”

Dyer explained about the woman, and sent the image to Greer’s phone. He also relayed his hunch. Greer didn’t like it any more than he did.

“I find that very, very hard to believe,” Greer said.

“I’d prefer another theory myself,” Dyer said. “Got one?”

The line was silent for a moment.

“I don’t get the motive,” Greer said. “Garner’s a single man. If he wants to entertain a guest, it’s his business. Why would he feel the need to hide it?”

“Maybe she wants to hide it. Maybe she’s somebody. Or somebody’s wife.”

Another silence on the line.

Then Greer said, “If Garner’s asking these guys to keep someone out of the logbook, and they’re actually doing it, their balls are gonna be hanging from the director’s trailer hitch before the week’s out.”

“Which is why I called you,” Dyer said. “I’d rather keep mine hanging where they are.”

Greer was quiet again. Dyer could hear a pen or pencil tapping on his desk. A fast, tense rhythm.

“Fuck,” Greer said. “All right. Let me run it up to a few guys at the top, and a couple friends at Justice. See if there’s a precedent for handling something like this. And I’ll see if anyone recognizes her. I’ll get back to you.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

Garner spent the rest of the evening compiling a list of names, drawn from records on his computer as well as paper documents. He came up with close to a hundred, and then began going through them systematically, using his computer to pull up detailed information on each of them. To Travis they appeared to be mostly military and FBI personnel. Garner made shorthand marks next to some of the names. Others he simply crossed out.

Bethany offered to help. Garner looked puzzled as to what she could do. She rattled off her credentials in about thirty seconds, and he told her to pull up a chair.

Night settled on the city. The skyline lit up in random bits and fragments until the whole thing was blazing. Travis stood at the living-room windows and looked down over the park. From beneath the forested expanses, warm light from footpaths streamed up into the darkness.

Paige came up beside him. They stood there for a while, silent.

“Never been here before,” Travis said.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“My mom lived here for a long time when I was a kid,” Paige said. “That building right over there. The brick one with the blue light on the roof.” She pointed across the park. Leaned against him so he could sight down her arm.

He felt her skin against his. After a second she seemed to notice it too. Seemed to notice that he noticed. She didn’t say anything, just shifted back to her own balance, putting a few inches between them.

It occurred to him that they hadn’t been alone with each other at any point since she’d stepped through the iris from Finn’s office yesterday. It’d been the three of them, hardly more than an arm’s length from one another, every minute of the way. Until now.

The silence was suddenly harder to take.

“So you spent a lot of time here?” he said.

“Yeah. Every summer. And Thanksgiving or Christmas, every other year, that kind of thing.”

“That must’ve been fun. Hanging out here as a kid.”

She shrugged. “I liked it. Plenty to do.”

It felt like talking to someone’s sister-in-law at a graduation party. Like he didn’t know that she liked to sleep on her side, naked, and that she preferred someone’s shoulder to a pillow. Like he didn’t know what her earlobes tasted like, among other things. Like none of it had ever happened.

It would’ve been better if it hadn’t. The past two years would’ve been easier. He would’ve gotten more sleep.

She turned from the window. Met his eyes. Looked away again.

“Obviously, this won’t take anything like four months to resolve,” she said.

Travis nodded.

“A few weeks at most,” Paige said. “Finn might have a lot of the top people, but Garner will get everyone else. However it shakes out after that, whatever it looks like on the news, that’ll be the end of it. I’m sure Tangent will be involved, but as far as the three of us shouldering the whole thing… I guess that’s over with, now.”

“My part is, for sure,” Travis said.

She looked at him again. “If you want, we can set you up with another identity, wherever you want to live, whoever you want to be.”

“Anything like the last one will do,” he said.

“Okay.”

Neither spoke for a while. They watched the city. Far below on the opposite sidewalk, a college-aged couple went by. The girl turned to face the guy, grabbed each of his hands in hers and drew his arms up overhead, bouncing up and down on her feet. Happy as hell about something.

“You could come back,” Paige said. “You know that.”

For a moment Travis didn’t answer. He turned and found her staring at him. Saw in her eyes everything she wasn’t saying. Saw an invitation back to more than just Border Town.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She held the stare a second longer. Whatever hurt she felt, it was buried deep.

“Okay,” she said.

She turned from the window. Went to a big leather chair and sat. She leaned back and closed her eyes.

“If I could explain it, I would,” Travis said.

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“I would anyway.”

She said nothing more.

Travis crossed to the couch. He set Bethany’s backpack on the floor. Heard the clink of the SIG 220 inside, among all the shotgun shells. He’d left the shotgun itself on the other side of the iris, a couple stories down in the skeleton of the building. He’d leaned it out of the rain under an intact metal panel a few yards from the stairwell. It hadn’t seemed like a good idea to step into the president’s living room with a twelve-gauge in his hands.

He lay on his back on the couch. Sank into it. Shut his eyes. Listened to the keystrokes of the computer in the next room, and the murmur of the city.

He wondered what it would be like to just tell her. He could do it right now. He even had the note folded up in his wallet. A message from some future version of Paige, which she’d bounced in and out of the Breach so that it would emerge in the past—Tangent didn’t know how to do that yet, but clearly they would, someday. Paige’s message to herself had arrived two summers ago, with a specific instruction: kill Travis Chase.

Some future Travis had countered that move. Had created the Whisper—that wasn’t its real name, of course—using Breach technology, and bounced it much further back: to 1989. The Whisper had then gone to work rearranging everything, stacking the deck to put Travis—his present self—in place to intercept Paige’s message when it emerged.

Even now Travis could only make passing sense of it. It was like watching a snake eat its own tail. Why hadn’t there been a counter-counter-move from the future Paige? And then the future Travis? Could those versions of themselves even exist anymore? Wasn’t everything on a different track now? He didn’t expect to ever understand it.

But he could tell her.

He could sit up right now and look her in the eyes and say it all. He could show her the note.

He’d feel better then, though it wouldn’t mean he could accept her invitation. However she responded, he was never returning to Tangent. It simply wasn’t an option, so long as he remained in the dark about what had corrupted the other Travis there, along the track of that original future.

And he would always be in the dark about that.

He didn’t sit up.

He lay there and listened to her breathing. Remembered what it’d sounded like from an inch away.

“You want to know the real reason I’m against sealing the Breach?” Paige said.

Travis opened his eyes and looked at her. Hers were still closed.

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s that every morning I wake up and wonder if, that day, something good will finally come through. Something really good, that we could use to help the whole world. Why shouldn’t that happen? We’ve seen all kinds of things that could’ve hurt the whole world. And we’ve seen small-scale good things. Like the Medic. Any emergency room could do miracles with it, but you could only give it to one of them. And how would you explain where it came from? It’s always like that with the good ones. Did you ever hear of an entity called a Poker Chip?”

“No.”

“It’s bright red, about the size of a quarter. Not quite unique but very rare—only five of them have egressed over the years. You pick one up and it attaches itself to your skin by tendril extensions you can barely see. Scary at first, so we tested them on animals. It took a while to realize that their function is to slow down aging. They cut the speed to about one third, and they work on everything—bugs, mice, rats. So I guess if any five people really wanted to, they could wear them twenty-four/seven and outlive all their friends. Nice, right?”

She opened her eyes and met his.

“I have to believe,” she said, “that someday, something will come through that’s good on the scale of the world. Something we’d pop the champagne corks and break into tears over. Something history would pivot on. That thought gets me through all the rest of it.”

A silence passed. Not quite as awkward as before.

Paige looked down at her hands in her lap.

“I understand that there’s something you really, really cannot tell me,” she said. “And I understand that it has nothing to do with how you feel about me. Because I know how you feel about me. Yesterday morning, when I stepped out of Finn’s office onto that girder and saw you standing five feet away, it didn’t surprise me in the least. I hadn’t expected it—but when I saw you, it seemed like the most normal thing in the world that you’d be standing there. That you’d be there for me. So I know. And I understand… even if I don’t understand. That’s an ability the Breach trained into me a long time ago. Getting it without getting it. I get that whatever this is, it just is, and that you wish like hell it wasn’t.”

She looked at him again, and he held her stare.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

She managed something like a smile. He tried to return it. Then he sank into the couch again, eyes on the ceiling.

He heard her stand, and then she was there, climbing onto the couch, squeezing into the space between him and the backrest. Neither of them spoke. A second later they were pressed together as tightly as they could get, his mouth on her forehead, kissing it. Everything about her filling up his world, warm and soft and vulnerable and alive, her breath against his throat, her arms tense as she held on.

His sense of time was gone. This close to her, he could lose hours and not notice. That in itself was excruciating, because this little time was all they were ever going to get. He could already feel it going away.

He thought of what she’d said earlier, about seeing him on top of the office building in D.C. He thought of how close he’d come to not being there. A minute’s delay would’ve done it. The timing had actually been closer than that, even. He and Bethany had been maybe ten seconds from opening their own iris when Finn opened his. The gunfight—if it could be called that—wouldn’t have played out half as favorably without that turn of events. Without the element of surprise, there would’ve been real crossfire, and Paige would have been stuck without cover at the center of it. Her chances would’ve been close to zero.

He kissed her hairline. Held her tighter. Tried not to think of how it might’ve gone. Shit happened, that was all. Some of it had to be good.

He shut his eyes and breathed in the smell of her hair.

Five seconds later he opened them again.

A thought had come to him. A memory. Sharp and insistent. Something that’d happened just after Finn opened the iris from his office. Paige had come out, but not right away. First Finn himself had come to the opening and stared out through it—Travis had stayed beyond his peripheral vision. Then the guy had ordered Paige out onto the beam. That part Travis remembered clearly. But there was something else. Something before that. Something Finn had whispered right at the beginning, seconds after stepping up to the iris. Travis had been just close enough to hear it. It’d escaped his notice at the time—there’d been more pressing things to focus on—and it hadn’t sounded like anything important.

Now he tried to call it back, because something told him it was important, after all.

What’d Finn said?

He thought about it.

Seconds passed.

He remembered.

“Holy shit,” Travis said.

Paige stirred in his arms, tilted her head back to meet his eyes.

“What?” she said.

For a long moment he couldn’t answer. He was thinking back over every aspect of the past two days, seeing it all as it’d really been. Seeing what everything meant. It was like watching a film of a shattering wineglass being run in reverse. Every jagged piece of the thing twisting and tumbling, pulled inward toward its proper place by some logical gravity. From the first moment they’d looked through the iris, they’d been wrong about what they were seeing. Their biggest mistake had been right there at the outset, and every conclusion they’d built on it had been way off the mark.

“Travis, what is it?”

He blinked. Looked at her.

“I’ll show you,” he said.

And then against his every inclination, he let go of her and stood from the couch. He waited for her to get up, and they crossed the living room to the hallway and then the den.

Loose paper files were stacked everywhere in the room—on the desk, the coffee table, the chairs, the floor—in some kind of improvised Dewey decimal system.

“We’ve narrowed it to five people we’re certain we trust,” Garner said. “I’ve emailed them and set up a secure conference call—”

He cut himself off, having glanced up and seen Travis’s expression.

Bethany looked up too.

They stared. Waited for Travis to speak.

But he didn’t. Instead he made his way through the stacked files to the giant globe by the window. He knelt before it and rotated it until he was looking at the United States.

“Where could they go?” he said, more to himself than the others. “Where’s the best place for it?”

At the edge of his vision he saw the others trading looks.

He rolled the globe upward, pulling South America fully into view.

“Anyone know a place almost as dry as Yuma?” he said. “Maybe in Central or South America?”

Garner chuckled. “I know a place that makes Yuma look like Seattle. NASA uses it to test Mars rovers. Every year I was in office they wanted more money for research sites down there.”

Travis waited for him to go on.

“The Atacama Desert,” Garner said. “Northern stretch of Chile. Great big sweeps of it have had no observed rainfall in recorded history. Those parts are biologically sterile. No plants or animals. Not even bacteria.”

Travis leaned closer to the globe. Only three of Chile’s cities were labeled on it. One was the capital, Santiago. He hardly noticed it. His gaze had already locked onto one of the other two.

The last shard of the wineglass slipped into place.

“Unbelievable,” Travis said.

But before he could say more, the stacked papers in the room began to scatter. A cold breeze had blown in from the hall.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

It was over before they could make any move. Just like that, there were men in the doorway—two standing and one crouched between them—with silencer-equipped pistols leveled. No one even spoke. There was no need.

The gunmen motioned for them to exit the den, and pulled back from the doorway to make room. Garner led the way, and a moment later everyone was standing in the living room.

There were six gunmen in all. Each had the same weapon: a Beretta 92F with a silencer that nearly doubled its length. There were narrow LED flashlights mounted atop each gun, switched off at the moment. Each of the men also wore a FLIR headset, identical to what they’d had in Yuma, though at the moment they hung from their necks on elongated straps.

Finn was there too. Holding both cylinders. Behind him, the disconnected iris from his own cylinder was still open. Moist October wind blew in from the pitch-black New York on the other side. Then the iris closed and the air stabilized again.

Bethany’s backpack, with the SIG inside, still lay where Travis had set it near the couch. He didn’t look at it. Just got a sense of it, and judged the distance to it. It wasn’t an option at the moment. It would take an ice age to reach it, and another ice age to unzip the pack. Time enough for every weapon in the room to acquire him and hit him half a dozen times.

Finn pointed to a bare stretch of wall. “There. All four of you.”

They hesitated, but only for a moment. There was no other move they could make. The geometry of the situation was what it was. They went to the wall. Stood there in a row, facing the room. The gunmen arranged themselves in a broad arc before the four of them, no shooter in any other’s line of fire.

“I need all of you to understand that the following isn’t bluster,” Finn said. “If you give us a reason to start shooting, we’re just going to kill all four of you. We can do that and still get away, and each of you knows it. Clear so far?”

None of them answered, even with a nod.

Finn shrugged, took it as an affirmative. Then he set the cylinders in one of the big leather chairs, strode to the hall and disappeared into the den. Twenty seconds passed. They heard keystrokes and a few mouse clicks. Travis pictured the computer screen as it’d been when they left the room. Garner’s e-mail program was open, all passwords already entered. Finn could access everything.

They heard him curse softly, and a second later he came back out, holding the cordless phone from the cradle on the computer desk. He looked at Garner.

“The e-mail you sent to coordinate the conference call mentions me by name.”

“Does it?” Garner said.

Finn stared at him for a long time, then turned and looked at nothing, and Travis could see him putting together the implications. He didn’t look happy about them. He glanced at his watch.

“The call starts in six minutes,” Finn said. He looked at Garner again. “When it does, you’re going to join it and tell everyone to disregard the message you sent them. Tell them the situation is already being handled higher up, and not to worry about it.”

Garner didn’t reply. Five seconds passed.

“Do you understand?” Finn said.

Garner exhaled, the sound almost a laugh. “If you think I’m going to do that just because you say so, you’re high. Go ahead and shoot us. I’m sure the five people on that conference call, and all their secretaries and staffs, won’t think it’s the least bit suspicious when they read that I got killed a few minutes before it was scheduled to happen. I’m sure your name being in the e-mail won’t bring any unwanted attention onto you, either.”

Finn didn’t blink, but his eyes drew a third of the way closed. He was thinking again. Visualizing moves and countermoves on the chessboard.

Then he nodded. “Fair enough.”

He looked at Garner’s phone and punched in a number. Put it to his ear. Waited. When the other party answered, Finn said, “We’re here,” and described the situation regarding the conference call. He wandered away down the hall as he spoke. Travis heard him say, “No, the e-mail doesn’t go into detail, but it names both you and me, which isn’t helpful.” The conversation continued in low tones Travis couldn’t make out.

The nearby wall clock showed four minutes left before the conference call.

Finn came back into the room. He was holding the phone down away from his ear now. Its power light was still on. He looked at Garner.

“It’s on speaker,” Finn said, and then spoke toward the phone’s mouthpiece. “Go ahead.”

A man on the phone cleared his throat softly. Even by that sound Travis recognized his voice.

“President Garner,” the man said.

“President Currey,” Garner said.

Travis heard Currey exhale. He sounded tired. “Rich, what are you trying to do?”

“I’d like to hear your own answer to that question.”

“That would take more time than we have. Why don’t you take some advice from an old friend and fall in line here, all right? Get on the conference call and say you jumped the gun, and that it’s all good. It’s the only move you’ve got, anyway.”

“I don’t know about that,” Garner said. “I was thinking I might just stand here and watch the minute hand tick a few times. If I don’t show up on the call, that in itself raises a few flags. I don’t imagine you and your people want any flags going up, if you expect to keep whatever you’re doing secret for another four months.”

Travis saw something flicker through Finn’s expression at that line. Something like amusement. It vanished as quickly as it’d appeared.

“Here’s your problem,” Currey said. “From this point forward, your goal is to build a base of support against us. To do that, you need to convince rational people of something no rational person can believe without proof. If you had one of the cylinders, it’d be easy for you. You could show people what’s on the other side. But you’ve lost that advantage now. So who’s going to believe you? It won’t carry much weight that you’re a former president, when the people contradicting your claim include the sitting president and his entire cabinet, among many others.”

Travis watched the resolve fade from Garner’s eyes. Watched something darker take its place.

“It’s over, Rich,” Currey said. “All that’s left is to acknowledge it. And the sooner, the better—at least for you. We’d be happy to leave you alone, once you’ve cooperated. It’s not in our interests to stir up any headlines just now.”

Garner looked at Paige, right beside him, then at Bethany and Travis.

“What happens to the others?” Garner said. “And don’t bullshit me, Walter. I’ll be able to tell.”

“I know it,” Currey said. There was a long pause, and then he said, “All right, fine. They die. They go to Rockport Army Depot on Long Island, they get interrogated by some friends of ours there, and then they get a bullet to the temple each. Sound like the truth? The thing is, that part happens regardless of the outcome. You can’t help them. You need to take care of yourself, now. So do it. Get on the call and make it right. I’ll get out of the way so you can.”

The line clicked dead.

Finn pressed the button to hang up the phone, then held it out to Garner.

The wall clock showed thirty seconds left. In all likelihood, Travis knew, the other parties had already called in and were waiting.

Garner didn’t take the phone. He looked at the three of them again, beside him along the wall. His eyes stayed on each one for a few seconds. Then he looked down, straight in front of himself. Travis saw his eyes track across the floor in an arc, just below the feet of the six gunmen. It almost seemed that he was getting a sense of the men, without appearing to do so. Travis wondered why. He did the same himself. He took in their posture. They were alert but not poised. Their weapons had dropped to their sides over the past couple minutes—but they could be aimed again in a quarter second, so Travis couldn’t see how it mattered. Maybe Garner’s assessment was only the manifestation of a wish that he could do something. Nothing more than that. Already he was staring down at his hands, folded before him. Looking hopeless. Looking like he’d made up his mind.

He took the phone from Finn.

“Keep it on speaker,” Finn said.

Garner nodded.

“Sir, don’t do this,” Paige said.

She looked at Garner, but the man could no longer meet her eyes. He punched a number into the phone. It began to ring.

“Mr. President…” Paige said. Travis heard her voice crack. It had nothing to do with fear, he knew. It was simply disappointment to a crushing degree. Paige had known Garner for some time, and couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Or didn’t want to, at least.

The ringing stopped and a recording came on. It told Garner to enter something called a bridge code. He entered it. There was a tone and a series of clicks. Travis guessed the same recorded voice was letting the others on the call know that Garner had joined.

A tear overran one of Paige’s eyes and drew a long track down her cheek.

Then the line opened and several voices were speaking at once, saying hello and asking if everyone was on.

“Gentlemen,” Garner said.

The voices went quiet.

Garner took a breath. Continued avoiding Paige’s stare. He let the breath out slowly.

“Gentlemen, I seem to have inconvenienced you for nothing. I’ve just spoken at length with President Currey, and I’m now confident that he has control of what I planned to discuss with you. It’s not something any of us needs to worry about. And I’m sorry to cut it short, but that’ll be it.”

He turned the phone off. Lowered his head.

Finn looked more relieved than happy. Travis could almost see sympathy for Garner in his expression.

“You’re a realist,” Finn said. “I could always see that in you. There’s no shame in it. You’re a man who understands his options, that’s all.”

He took the phone from Garner.

Garner didn’t look at him, but after a second he finally met Paige’s eyes.

“You probably want to slap my face as hard as you can,” Garner said.

“Don’t tempt me,” Paige said.

“No, I think you should do it. You’ll feel better. So will I.”

For a moment she only stared at him. His face was devoid of anything but pity, maybe for himself more than the three of them.

And then Paige slapped him. It had to be the hardest open-handed hit Travis had ever seen. The sound of it, loud and sharp as a whip-crack, echoed off the windows, the opposite wall, the stone floor of the hallway nearby. It rocked Garner’s head sideways, throwing his balance off enough to make him take a step.

When he looked back at Paige, there was blood on his lip.

But he was smiling.

A strange kind of smile. Like he was in on a joke no one else understood yet. He turned to Finn. The smile hardened. Became colder.

Finn looked puzzled for maybe half a second.

And then he looked scared.

“I understand my options better than you do,” Garner said.

If he’d said another word it would’ve been lost under the sound of the hallway door slamming inward. Travis snapped his head to the side and saw two men in crisp black suits coming through, with MP5 submachine guns shouldered. In almost the same instant he heard similar crashing impacts from elsewhere in the residence—two other teams coming in somewhere.

He understood at once why Garner had taken note of the six gunmen and their relaxed postures. They were plenty prepared to raise their silenced Berettas if any of their four captives made a move—but the sudden arrival of armed Secret Service agents was a very different matter.

The effect on the six men—not to mention Finn—was immediate. Their heads turned toward the sounds of the various doors breaking in. From where they stood—the six of them in their long arc—they couldn’t see directly down the entry hall. Travis and the other three could: the living-room wall they stood against was an extension of one side of the hall.

But Finn’s gunmen knew exactly who was coming. The part of their brains that would’ve told them to drop a hot potato had figured it out in about a hundredth of a second. The result, Travis saw, was a kind of neural tug-of-war between all possible reactions: killing the captives, finding cover, getting the hell out of this place. Not the kind of decision they could make in the almost comically small amount of time they had to work with.

At least one of the six opted for the first choice. The man nearest to Travis. The guy’s Beretta began to come up toward the four of them, even as the Secret Service men in the hallway advanced at a sprint. They’d reach the living room soon, but not soon enough.

Travis threw himself forward at the man bringing up his gun. The two of them were lined up in a perfect face-off. Travis crossed the five-foot reach of space between them in the time it took the gun to come up to chest level. He got his left hand around the silencer, yanked the weapon down and away from pointing at the others, and punched the guy in the throat with all the force his weight and momentum could provide. Which turned out to be enough. The guy’s hand came off the gun with a reflexive jerk. And then Travis was twisting, holding the pistol, going right past the guy and beyond the arc of the others. Not trying to check his speed. Not even trying to stay on his feet.

He took one more step before his balance outran him, and then he was falling, completing his spin as he dropped. Still holding the Beretta in his left hand by its silencer. He brought his right hand up and took the weapon by the grip. Raised it to sight in on one of the still-armed gunmen. His angle of fire, as he fell, was tilted radically upward. If he missed, the bullet would hit only the ceiling—there was no more of the building above this floor.

He fired. He didn’t miss. The shot hit the man at the base of his skull and blew it open.

Then Travis’s ass hit the floor painfully and his gun arm dropped beyond his control.

By then, everyone was moving. Things were happening too quickly for him to keep track of. He saw Paige and Bethany ducking and running toward him, getting out of the kill zone that was about to open up between the gunmen and the oncoming agents in the hall. He could hear the agents’ footsteps, as well as those of the other teams, still out of sight somewhere behind him. He could see the gunmen scattering, ducking—no doubt they could see the agents now. One man slammed into the leather chair that held the two cylinders. The chair pitched forward, spilling the cylinders onto the carpet. They rolled in different directions—neither one toward Travis.

Travis raised the Beretta again, looking for a target, when it occurred to him what he was doing. He was holding a pistol, in a room containing a former president, into which Secret Service agents were about to flood.

Not a good way to stay alive.

He cocked his wrist and threw the gun sideways, saw it hit the carpet and spin into the gap beneath the couch. At the same time he saw Paige and Bethany diving toward him, and even as they hit the ground the shooting started.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Travis saw within seconds that it wasn’t going to shake out in their favor. Finn and his men had fallen back to defensive positions in adjoining rooms, leaving Garner alone where he stood. The Secret Service agents were already converging on him, unloading suppressing fire at the doorways through which the others had retreated.

But not engaging them.

Not attacking.

That wasn’t their job.

Their job was to get Garner out of harm’s way, and they would do it in probably fifteen seconds. Twenty at the most. They would surround him and hustle him out, down the entry hall and out into the larger corridor. Probably right out of the building after that. They would maintain fire to cover the retreat from the residence, but that would be it. Not even Garner could order them to do otherwise. In the heat of it all, they wouldn’t even be listening to him.

Well under half a minute from right now, Travis knew, the three of them would be left alone with Finn’s remaining people—nearly all of them still alive.

Travis was lying facedown on the floor now, hands outstretched and empty. Paige and Bethany, right beside him, were in the same position.

Travis turned his head and saw two agents pass by on the inside wall of the living room. They were firing three-shot bursts.

The rest of the action was going on where Travis couldn’t see it. He couldn’t tell if Finn’s people were shooting. Their silenced fire would’ve been impossible to make out against the other shots.

Paige turned to him, her eyes intense. She understood the trouble they were in as well as he did. Then she looked past him. He turned to follow her gaze, and saw one of the cylinders.

It was ten feet away, under the coffee table.

He looked for the other one. Couldn’t see it anywhere. Given the direction it’d rolled, it had to be closer to Finn’s position now. It wasn’t even worth thinking about.

Travis looked at the nearer one. If he could get to it and get the iris open, no special care would be needed to position it. The ruin of this building had thick steel gridwork for subflooring instead of concrete and rebar. The grids were completely rusted, but because they were such a heavy gauge—inch-thick steel rods crisscrossing at three-inch intervals—they were still very strong. No matter where he opened the iris, there would be a solid surface to crawl onto on the other side.

It would take him two seconds to reach the cylinder, starting from his prone position.

Paige saw what he was thinking. “You can’t!” Her voice was just audible under the shooting. “The agents will think you’re going for a weapon!”

He craned his neck around to look at them. They’d reached Garner. They’d boxed him in. Two or three of them, with their free hands, had grabbed hold of the man’s arms. They were dragging him toward the hall. Garner was shouting something at them, as Travis had imagined. It was about as effective as he’d imagined, too. Ten more seconds and they’d be gone. They were still shooting at the doorways through which Finn and his people had ducked. Sporadic fire, meant only for deterrence.

One of the agents had his eyes fixed on Travis and Paige and Bethany, even as his MP5 stayed trained on the doorways. He could swing the weapon toward the three of them, where they lay, about as quickly as he could decide they were a threat.

Travis wouldn’t get halfway to the cylinder if he went for it.

He judged the agents’ progress toward the mouth of the entry hall, beyond which they wouldn’t be able to see him anymore. Five seconds now, at most.

He looked at the doorways. Finn and the others were somewhere beyond them. Travis had no doubt that Finn, at least, was running the same calculation he was: gauging the straight-razor margin of time between the agents’ departure from the suite and the earliest moment that Travis could reach the cylinder and trigger the iris.

It would take some number of seconds, and some number of seconds would be available. One of those numbers would turn out to be larger than the other. In the end it would be that simple.

In the last few feet before the mouth of the hallway, the Secret Service agents began to run. They hauled Garner along, barely on his feet.

And then they were gone, out of Travis’s view, into the hall.

Travis moved. Drew his legs up under him, dug his feet into the carpet and lunged. Even as he did, he heard—even felt—the suite go silent as the shooting stopped. The agents were simply hauling ass now, transiting the length of the entry hall as fast as they could physically go. Their footsteps were the only sound—for a second. And then there were other footsteps, nearer by.

Travis hit the coffee table with both hands. Slammed it aside like it weighed nothing, though it was made of solid walnut.

Finn and the others were coming fast. Maybe not through the doorways yet, but close.

Travis got his hands on the cylinder. He landed on his shoulder, twisted and aimed the thing toward Paige and Bethany. He hit the on button and the off (detach/delay—93 sec.) button a fraction of a second apart.

The iris opened a few inches above the floor. The night beyond it was dark and depthless except for streaks of rain at the opening, silvery in the light-bleed from the suite. The projection beam was already intensifying, charging the iris to stay open on its own. Travis had never measured exactly how long that part took. It’d always seemed like just a few seconds. It seemed longer now.

The footsteps were closer. Definitely in the living room. Travis didn’t bother turning to look. Whatever he might see, there was nothing he could do any faster.

Paige was up on all fours and moving. Throwing herself into the beam of light, but not toward the iris. Instead she passed through the light, hit the floor and rolled, and came to a stop with her hand clutching Bethany’s backpack. She twisted back toward the iris and threw the pack with all her force. It went through into the darkness. Travis heard the clatter of the SIG and the shotgun shells as the pack landed on the gridwork.

At the same instant the beam finally vanished, leaving the iris alone.

Paige was waving for Bethany to go through, but Bethany was already moving, fast and lithe. She got her limbs beneath her without rising more than a foot from the floor, and went through the iris in a single movement. No part of her even touched the circle.

Paige was right behind her, and when she was two thirds through the iris, Travis gripped the cylinder in his right hand and tossed it at her backside in an underhand spiral. He was betting it all that she would turn toward him once she’d crossed the threshold. Would turn and have time to catch the thing. He had no choice. His ears told him he was out of time.

Paige spun on her knee the moment she was through the iris—and flinched, her hands coming up just in time to keep the cylinder from smashing into her face. She blocked it and then got hold of it, pulling it against herself, already forgetting it entirely.

Because Finn and two of his men were right there. Ten feet from Travis. Just passing the visual barrier of the overturned leather chair and the upright one beside it. Their guns already coming up to level.

But Travis was coming up, too. Not with a gun of his own. The Beretta was close by, somewhere under the couch, but the gap was too narrow to easily reach into.

What Travis had instead was the coffee table. He had it right by the middle with both hands, raising it over his head, and he was heaving himself upright from a crouch.

Finn and his men faltered. Whatever they’d expected, this wasn’t it.

Travis extended his arms violently as he stood, and hurled the coffee table at them like a two-handed shot put.

Finn ducked. The man to his left brought his forearms up. The man to his right did nothing at all, and Paige saw the leading edge of the table connect dead-on with his nose. There was an explosion of blood across the bottom half of his face.

Paige missed whatever came next. She could see Travis diving toward the opening now, and pitched herself sideways to clear the way. He came through headfirst, landed on his forearms, twisted and pulled his legs the rest of the way across the margin.

It occurred to Paige that they were nowhere near safe yet. Just the opposite. They were sprawled out in the darkness before the opening, in no position to move quickly or take cover—if there’d been any cover. Finn and his people had been slowed by no more than a few seconds. There was still all the time in the world before the iris slipped shut.

She could see two sets of feet and shins coming already. Rounding the chairs. Pivoting. Crossing the open space. The men wouldn’t even need to look through the iris for their targets. They could simply shove their pistols through and start shooting. They couldn’t miss.

The SIG.

Where the hell was the backpack? When Paige had tossed it through, she’d been thinking only of getting out of the room fast. She spun, trying to guess where—and how far away—it could have ended up on this side.

But she saw the SIG the moment she turned. A small hand was gripping it. And centering it on the iris.

Bethany fired.

Paige looked in time to see a kneecap, five feet beyond the opening, burst inside its pant leg. A man screamed and fell bodily into view. Not Finn. The guy still had his Beretta, but he wasn’t aiming yet. Bethany’s next shot went right through the bridge of his nose. He flopped forward onto the carpet. The second pair of legs dug in to a hard stop. The man vaulted sideways, just missing Bethany’s next round. It cratered one of the suite’s bulletproof windows instead.

By then Paige could see Travis getting to his feet. Reaching to help her up. Bethany was rising too, but staying bent at the waist, keeping the SIG positioned to fire again.

Ten seconds later they settled into a safer position, several yards from the iris at a random angle. The opening looked strange hovering there in the darkness, lighting up the intermittent rain a few feet around it.

Bethany kept the SIG leveled. Nobody appeared at the opening.

The next minute went by like ten, and then the iris slipped shut, and there was nothing but the rain and the chill and the darkness of the ruined city.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Almost at once the rain provided a form of guidance. They could hear it hissing where it passed through the rusted bars of the steel grid, but somewhere close by it was making another sound. A hard pinging against something solid, resonant.

The stairs.

Just as in the office building in D.C., the heavy treads of the stairs in this structure had survived the decades of neglect. The three of them had climbed the full thirty flights earlier in the day.

Travis stood. “Let’s go.”

They made their way across the gridwork, stopping a few times to reassess the direction of the pinging. They took careful steps, placing each one tentatively before shifting any weight forward. There were other things than the stairwell that they might encounter. The elevator shaft, for one.

Travis swept an arm low in front of him. After a moment it hit something rigid. A structural upright. He felt down its length and found the top of the still-sturdy handrail.

Thirty seconds later they were two floors down. Travis stepped off of the landing and navigated by memory to where he’d left the twelve-gauge, a few yards away. It was still dry, leaning under the intact metal panel. He carried it back to the stairs.

“Hand me the backpack,” he said.

He heard it shift in the darkness and then Bethany pushed it into his hands. It contained nothing but shotgun shells now. Bethany was still holding the SIG, and Paige had the cylinder.

“What are you doing?” Paige said.

“I’m going back up,” Travis said. “You’re going to keep heading down.”

“The hell we are. You’re coming with us, or we’re coming with you.”

“Finn and his people have the other cylinder,” Travis said, “and it’s their only way out of the building. The ground floor probably slammed shut like a bear trap half a second after you smacked Garner. Even the upper stairwells could have building security in them by now. Finn has to assume they do, either way. So his only exit is through the iris, on the top floor. Think of that, along with the fact that he still wants to capture or kill us. What’s his best strategy?”

Paige was quiet a few seconds. Then she said, “He’ll give us a few minutes to flee, and then come through the iris. That way we’re not right there, shooting at his guys on their way through the bottleneck.”

“Exactly,” Travis said. “Once they’re past that point, the advantage is all theirs. You saw the goggles around their necks. They can see in the dark and we can’t. If they come through the iris in the next couple minutes, while we’re groping our way down the stairs, they’ll overtake us long before we reach the ground. And they know we can’t use our own cylinder to go back through the iris on some lower floor—not with the building locked down. We’d be taken into custody, and we’d be under President Currey’s discretion within hours. We’re dead either way. The only real chance we’ve got is to stay here in the ruins until we’re well away from this building. But that only works if someone stays up here and covers the retreat. And I’m sorry to be a dick, but it’s gonna be me, and that’s it.”

He slung the pack on his shoulder. The weight of the shells inside felt reassuring.

“On the bright side,” he said, “this is a chance to end this right here.”

“Then we should all stay,” Bethany said.

“No,” Travis said. “We can’t risk the cylinder. What Currey said on the phone is right. No one’s going to believe any of this if they don’t look through the iris for themselves. Garner needs it. It’s more important than any of our lives.”

Neither of them replied right away. In the whisper of the rain, Travis could sense them accepting the idea. Hating it, but accepting it.

“Where do we meet you?” Paige said.

“Just get down onto Central Park West and head south. Get as much distance as you can. It’ll be hard in the dark, but do your best. You’ll hear the shooting. Hopefully sometime later you’ll hear me calling out behind you.”

The seconds drew out again. Then he felt one of Paige’s hands on his face. Her fingers tracing its contours. The closest she could get to a last look at him.

“Be there,” she said, and then her hand fell away, and Travis heard both sets of footsteps moving off down the next flight. He listened for a few seconds, then started back up.

He reached the head of the top flight and dropped to a knee. It was as good a spot as any, and it had at least some strategic value: he could descend a few treads if he needed to dodge return-fire.

The more he thought about his odds, the more he liked them. At any distance over a dozen yards, the shotgun’s spread would be at least as wide as the iris. Anyone coming through it was going to get cut to pieces.

Finn and his men had numbered seven originally. Two were dead now. Maybe more.

Travis dropped the backpack off his shoulder. He set it right in front of himself and unzipped it. Pulled it wide open so there’d be no fumbling later.

The Remington was already good for five shots—four in the magazine and one in the chamber. He felt for the loading port and mentally rehearsed sliding shells into it by feel alone. It wouldn’t be difficult. He probably did it mostly by feel even in daylight.

He surveyed the darkness all around him in long, rapid sweeps. He would see the iris the moment it opened, even at the extent of his peripheral vision. He could no more miss it than he could miss a searchlight being switched on.

He pulled the shotgun’s stock hard against his shoulder.

He was ready.

Finn stood at the open entry to the suite, listening to the larger corridor beyond. The stairwell was twenty feet away. No doubt Garner’s security detail had opted for that route when they’d left, rather than wait for an elevator.

Finn listened now for other footsteps echoing on the stairs—approaching, not retreating.

He heard nothing.

But he couldn’t expect to, he realized. The Secret Service might’ve made all the racket in the world on the way down, but other security personnel coming up to hold the stairwells would probably be quiet as cats.

He returned to the suite’s living room. He had five men left. One with a broken nose and probably a facial fracture. The man was still on his feet, but he looked like he could barely see through the swelling under his eyes.

Outside, police had begun converging on the building. Their sirens sounded faint from thirty stories up. Finn noticed the winking lights of an incoming helicopter, far away across the city.

He stooped and picked up the cylinder from where it’d rolled to a stop, at the corner where the windows met the wall.

He considered the logistics of the situation.

On the other side, Miss Campbell and her friends would be making their way down the stairs by now, at whatever speed they could manage.

Unless they’d decided to stay and fight it out.

Finn turned in a slow circle. He let his eyes roam. He imagined the suite in its ruined state, pitch-black and skeletal and cold and wet. And devoid of cover. If the others really were waiting for them over there, where would they position themselves?

He continued his slow turn. And then he stopped. He was looking down the entry hall toward the outer corridor—and the unseen stairwell beyond.

He thought about it. It made sense. It was all that made sense, really.

He turned again and studied the suite, no longer envisioning its alternate form. He looked across the living room, through the doorways on the far wall, toward the distant end of the residence.

The point furthest from the stairwell.

He headed for it, waving his men to him as he went. They fell in behind him, weapons ready. Fifteen seconds later they reached the place—a sitting room with wicker furniture and bright yellow paint. It had thick canvas drapes—pulled back at the moment.

Finn pulled his FLIR headset up and secured it over his eyes. His men did the same. He raised the cylinder. He put his finger to the on button.

And then he withdrew it. Something obvious had occurred to him.

“Shut the drapes,” he said. “And kill the lights.”

Travis waited. The rain had soaked through his shirt. The night was probably sixty degrees, but the dampness made it feel a lot colder.

He continued to sweep his eyes across the darkness. It was hard to say how long he’d been kneeling here. Three or four minutes, at least. Paige and Bethany should be most of the way down the building by now.

Travis cocked his head. He’d heard something. The sound was distant, keening, rising and falling. Just discernible in the rain. It reminded him of the wolves in the ruins of D.C., but the pitch was higher. Coyotes, maybe. Or simply the wind playing through the girders.

Paige kept count of the floors as she and Bethany descended. Garner’s suite had been on the thirtieth. They’d come down twenty-three flights from there.

The going was harder than she’d imagined. The metal treads were slick in the rain, and on some flights the handrail was missing. She tried to remember what the stairwell had looked like in daylight on their way up. Tried to recall any places where the landing was buckled or compromised in any way. She didn’t think she’d seen anything like that—it should have stuck with her if she had—but she couldn’t shake the sense that there was something. Something she’d noticed on the ascent. Something that hadn’t mattered then, but might matter now, in the dark.

Travis had discounted the keening sound—what little of it he could hear—even though something about it troubled him.

Now he heard something else. Very faint, at first. A kind of drumming. It might have been only the rain intensifying—but he felt no change in it on his skin.

Then the sound swelled by a tiny degree, and he recognized it.

And he understood that he was in trouble.

Paige was stepping onto the fifth floor when it happened. The moment her foot came down, she remembered exactly what she’d been trying to think of, and why it did matter—not because of the darkness, but because of the rain.

It was a clump of maple leaves, still attached by their stems to a narrow twig. Lying there curled and damp in the afternoon light, they’d been harmless. Something to step over and forget within a few seconds.

Plastered flat now against the smooth bars of the gridwork, the clump might as well have been an oil slick.

Paige’s leading foot hit it, coming down hard off the bottom step, all of her weight on it in the instant before it went out from under her.

Her arms shot down to break her fall against the steel treads—it was that or break her skull—and she was on her ass before she realized what she’d done.

“Paige?” Bethany said.

“Fuck!” she hissed—she just managed to keep it from being a scream.

She threw herself forward, away from the stairs and out across the blind void of the fifth floor, following the sound of rolling metal on metal.

The cylinder.

Rolling away from her, fast as hell.

Toward the edge.

The drumming was the sound of helicopter rotors. And the high, rising-falling tones were police sirens.

Still down on one knee, Travis spun hard toward the sound-source, swinging the Remington around with him. Too late. A hand gripped the weapon’s barrel in the darkness and shoved it upward, and then something else—probably a silencer—slammed into his temple. He dropped. Landed facedown on the grid flooring. Just holding on to consciousness.

Paige scrambled forward on all fours—there wasn’t time to get up on her feet. All visual reference was gone. There was only the steel grid beneath her, and the rolling sound, somewhere in the blackness ahead of her.

She was plunging blindly toward it.

And catching up.

That was all that mattered.

Very close now—it couldn’t be more than a foot or two ahead.

And then the sound simply vanished.

Like someone had neatly lifted the needle from a record.

Paige understood. Panic flared across her nervous system. Her hands grabbed for purchase on the grid—anywhere they could—to arrest her forward motion.

The hand that was further ahead came down onto nothing—it plunged into vacant space beyond the building’s edge, five stories above the ground.

Her breath rushed out and for a second she was aware of nothing but her body’s momentum, unstoppable, taking her over the drop-off.

Then her trailing hand closed around a bar of the gridwork, and she gripped it tightly, and her shoulder damn near came out of her socket as she wrenched to a stop. Her legs kicked out from behind her, sliding around and forward on the wet steel.

And then she was still. Her hand gripping the bar. Her body lying sideways along the edge. She could feel the girder’s outer margin pressed firmly against the center of her chest.

A second later the cylinder exploded, fifty feet below.

A burst of blue-white light. Like a collapsing star. Blinding, painful to her dark-adapted eyes. It lit up the pines and hardwoods that crowded the base of the building, and the broken and canted slabs of Central Park West lying across exposed roots. She saw the cylinder’s casing shatter. Saw its internal structure burst, fragile wafers of alien technology scattering over the wet ground. Strange, spherical pockets of light flickered and popped from a few components. In the larger spheres Paige saw a fish-eye view of the present-day street. Warped, distorted police cruisers with their flashers on. The intact front of the building, blazing with internal light from dozens of windows. The images lingered for less than a second and then vanished. A moment later there was nothing to see but the fragments of the cylinder’s casing, their concave inner surfaces glowing deep blue in the night, haloed by the rainfall. And then they went dark too.

Travis saw it. Saw the eruption of light thirty stories below, with his face pressed to the grid, and understood. It was the last thing he saw before the toe of someone’s boot connected with his head and shut everything off.

Chapter Forty

He faded in and out. More out than in. His head hurt like hell.

He was lying on thin, bristled carpeting. There was something rumbling beneath it. His thinking cleared a bit, and he understood that the rumbling came from a spinning axle.

He opened his eyes. He was lying bound on the floor of an SUV. He was in the back. The rear seat had been removed to make a flat storage bay. The vehicle was still in the city. The high steel and stone and brick faces of buildings slid by overhead.

He heard Finn and at least two other men talking up front. He heard a wash of static and then he heard Finn tell someone in another vehicle—or a number of vehicles—to take 495. A minute later the roof of a tunnel drew across the view, and the city was gone. The hum of the tires echoed in the enclosed space.

Travis took in fragments of the conversation between Finn and the others. Pieced together what’d happened. They’d hauled his unconscious body down through the ruin of Garner’s building and carried it two blocks to where it was safe for them to come back through the iris—inside a private garage. They didn’t have Paige and Bethany. The two of them had been long gone by the time Finn’s men had reached the bottom of Garner’s building.

The procession of SUVs traveled for a long time on the freeway. Travis didn’t bother keeping track.

Finn made a phone call. It wasn’t on speaker, but over the drone of the vehicle’s engine, Travis heard it ring four times before voice mail answered.

“Audra, it’s me,” Finn said. “Everything’s tied off here, at least as well as it can be. I should be on-site about eight hours from now. I’ll call you again from the air.”

He hung up.

Travis considered what he’d heard. Audra. Alive. It wasn’t all that surprising. He might have guessed it if he’d thought about it, given what he’d realized at Garner’s place.

A few minutes later the motorcade pulled off the freeway. It took a series of turns and short jogs, and finally stopped. One of the front doors of the vehicle Travis was in opened and shut. The driver kept the engine running. Footsteps came around the back of the vehicle and then the rear window popped open. Travis heard the whine of jet engines powering up nearby.

Finn leaned in and stared down on him. He had the surviving cylinder tucked under his arm. In the dome light, the man’s eyes looked deeply troubled.

“What’s going to happen to you about an hour from now,” Finn said, “I despise more than anything there is. I wish to hell it could be avoided. But it can’t be, this time. There’s too much at stake. I need to know what you know, and who else you’ve spoken to. So please just cooperate with the interrogators. They’ll know if you’re being truthful. And it’ll be over sooner.”

His eyes stayed on Travis a moment longer.

“I’m sorry,” Finn said. He looked like he meant it. Then he closed the window again, pounded twice on the roof, and walked away.

Travis saw the glow of headlights swing through the side windows as two other vehicles backed out of nearby spaces and took the lead. His own pulled out and followed, and a few minutes later they were on the freeway again.

Chapter Forty-One

Fifty seconds before the first shots hit the motorcade, Travis was thinking about Paige and Bethany. They were all he’d thought of for the past hour. He imagined them trying to find shelter in the unbroken darkness of the ruins. Imagined their uncertainty and confusion when they hadn’t heard any shooting from the top of the building. Imagined their fear now, all this time later, the reality of their situation sinking in as deeply as the cold and the dampness of the October night.

The vehicle slowed and came to a stop. The procession had left the freeway a while earlier. It was traveling through dark countryside now, halting occasionally at what Travis guessed were stop signs at remote intersections. There was no sky glow to indicate a populated area nearby.

The vehicle accelerated again.

Travis thought of Paige touching his face, feeling it. Worried for him. He wondered what she thought of him right now.

Half a minute later—no doubt precisely a half mile on the regimented grid of roads out here—the vehicle slowed again. Travis imagined they were getting close to their destination.

The moment the SUV came to a complete stop, Travis heard something, somewhere ahead in the dark.

It sounded like a playing card in bicycle spokes.

Garner watched it unfold. It took fifteen seconds from start to finish, by which time he was convinced that every man on his Secret Service detail would’ve done just fine in the SEALs.

The six of them advanced on the vehicles, silenced M4 carbines trained on the shattered windows up front. The lead SUV, suddenly absent its driver’s foot on the brake, had coasted across the intersection and veered off the corner into a shallow ditch.

The team took another fifteen seconds to confirm that every hostile was dead—with the help of an extra bullet or two, in some cases.

One of the men, Dyer, called out to Garner. “Clear, sir.”

Garner came forward from the tree cover edging the road. He had his own silenced M4 in hand—a precaution in case things had gone badly, though his men had been adamant that he stay out of the initial attack. Given all he’d asked of them, he’d felt the point was worth conceding.

Two of the men had the big rear door of the last SUV open. They waved Garner over. He arrived to find Travis Chase lying bound on the floor. At the same time he heard the others calling out to report no captives in the remaining vehicles.

One of the agents leaned in with a knife to cut the heavy zip-ties binding Chase’s wrists and ankles.

Garner stood back and stared north along the dark two-lane. He could see the lights of the front gate at Rockport, a mile away. The sentries there couldn’t have heard the suppressed gunshots, but it still wouldn’t be smart to stay here any longer than necessary. The two cars Garner and his men had brought were parked on the shoulder, a hundred yards down the cross street.

Chase sat up in the back of the SUV.

“Paige and Bethany are dead?” Garner said.

Chase shook his head. “Not if we can help it.”

Travis gave Garner the basics as they ran to the cars. Garner cursed softly when he heard Paige and Bethany’s situation.

They reached the vehicles, two black Crown Victorias. Garner pointed Travis to a rear door of the lead car, then rounded the back and climbed in on the opposite side, next to him.

“How’d you convince your guys to go along with this?” Travis said.

“I told them the truth.”

“And they believed it?”

Garner nodded. “Two of them served with Tangent hubs, earlier in their careers. Besides, it was easier for them to swallow than the idea of half a dozen armed men walking into my place without their knowing it.”

Ten seconds later they were cruising away from the attack site at exactly the speed limit.

“Where’s Finn now?” Garner said.

“On a plane. Going somewhere that takes eight hours to get to.”

“Lots of places are eight hours’ flight time from New York,” Garner said. “Central Europe, north Africa, Brazil—”

“He’s not going to any of those,” Travis said. “He’s going to where the flights out of Yuma were going.”

“The Erica flights.”

“You’re saying it right,” Travis said, “but you’re spelling it wrong in your head. Like the rest of us were.”

Travis nodded at the cell phone clipped to Garner’s waist. “Bring up any mapping website. Look at northern Chile.”

Garner drew the phone, switched it on, and pulled up a Mercator map of the world. He zoomed in until the northern portion of Chile filled the little screen. The most prominent city in view was a place on the coast called Arica. It had the Pacific Ocean to its west, and the Atacama Desert to its east.

“Arica flights,” Garner said.

Travis nodded. “We never saw it written down in Yuma. We only heard it in the recording.”

“So the panic move when everything went wrong,” Garner said, “was to gather everyone in Yuma, and then airlift a select few to Arica, Chile?”

“Part of that’s correct,” Travis said. “The gathering and the airlift happened. Hard to say how many they transported to Arica. A hundred flights, stretched out over something like a week, could’ve moved tens of thousands. Maybe they flew more than that. Or less. Those details we can only guess about.”

“So what am I getting wrong?”

“The same thing we all got wrong, from the very start.”

Garner waited.

“We asked ourselves, from the moment we saw the ruins in D.C., what kind of accident could’ve caused the collapse of the world. And when we saw Yuma, we wondered what sort of crisis could’ve compelled people—millions of them—to leave their homes and gather in a place that couldn’t possibly support them all.”

“I’m still asking myself those questions,” Garner said.

“And you’d be asking them for a long time,” Travis said, “because there aren’t any answers to them. They’re the wrong questions.”

“What are the right ones?”

For a moment Travis said nothing. He stared out at the dark woods going by. A few miles ahead he saw the spread-out sodium glow of a subdivision.

“Think of what we know about Isaac Finn,” Travis said. “We know that at one time he was practically a saint. From the moment he was an adult he was putting himself in danger and probably every kind of misery, trying to reduce suffering in the world. We know he thinks way the hell outside the box. He left the Peace Corps and formed his own group, and brought into the fight every resource he could line up. Even things like psych profiling of populations, in an attempt to weed out the worst people and draw together the best. Those with attributes like kindness, concern for others, aversion to violence. We know it turned out to be a lost cause, and by the time Rwanda was in full swing, he’d had enough. He walked away from the whole game. Or seemed to.”

“None of which contradicts the theory we all agreed on earlier,” Garner said. “That Finn and his wife proposed using ELF-based systems to pacify conflict zones—at least long enough for peacekeepers to stabilize them. And that Finn is still working to realize that goal. And I agree, it’s pretty damn far outside the box.”

“It is,” Travis said, “but I think his real goal is a lot farther out than that, and has been for a very long time. And he’s not doing it alone. They’re still working on it together.”

“They?”

Travis nodded. “Audra faked her death. I heard Finn leave her a voice mail before he caught his flight.”

For the first time Garner looked genuinely surprised. And more open to considering whatever Travis was leading up to.

“You said yourself, sir, the theory of a satellite malfunction doesn’t work. We’d shut them off or shoot them down. There’s no chance at all that they’d be out of control and harming people for a solid month.”

“Right,” Garner said. “So have you figured out what goes wrong?”

“Nothing goes wrong,” Travis said. “We’ve been off track from the beginning, looking for a mistake that doesn’t exist.”

“I’m not following you,” Garner said.

Travis looked at him. “When Finn switched on the cylinder inside his office yesterday, I was standing on the other side of the opening it projected. Just out of his view, but close enough to hear him speak. He stood at the iris, and he looked at the ruins of Washington, D.C., and he said, ‘Jesus, it works.’ ”

“Meaning the cylinder,” Garner said.

“That was what I thought. But I was wrong. I should have known by the way he said it. It wasn’t just surprise in his voice. It was more like reverence. Pride, even. It was the sort of tone you’d hear from Orville Wright if you took him out to LaGuardia on a busy afternoon.”

Travis broke his stare with Garner and looked at the soft lights of the suburb coming up.

“The collapse of the world isn’t a failure of Finn’s plan,” Travis said. “It is his plan. He means for it to happen.”

Chapter Forty-Two

Garner said nothing for the next several seconds.

“I won’t pretend I understand his motivation,” Travis said. “Or the motivation of anyone who goes into a conflict zone and tries to make things better for people. Someone like me doesn’t have the first clue, and never will. But I have to think there’s a burn-out rate like no other. I have to think that for everyone in that line of work, there’s a moment that comes sooner or later when you really understand the size of the problem, and the limits of your own capacity to do anything about it. I’m guessing, but I bet it feels more like a cement truck than a last straw. In Finn’s case, if I’m right about the rest of this, then it was even bigger for him. I think he lost hope in a lot more than just Rwanda. I think he was looking at the whole human picture by the time he walked away from that place. Like he wished he could just end the world and start over. And maybe he’s not the only person who’s ever felt that way, at a low moment, but in Finn’s case there was something that set him apart: he was a pillow away from the one person on Earth who could actually make that happen.”

Something changed in Garner’s expression. Travis saw him working it out.

“Oh, Christ…” Garner said.

“Finn isn’t stupid,” Travis said. “Neither is Audra. They must have known, even before they submitted that paper to the Independent, that using ELF satellites to sedate conflict zones would be politically toxic. But I doubt that was ever their goal, in the first place. I think the paper was only meant to put the subject out there, get people talking about it, especially the kind of power players who’d be interested in the implied technology. The point was just to get the ball rolling so that someone would actually build ELF satellites, because that was the critical piece of the real plan. So when the paper got rejected, and Audra’s father stepped on it, they must’ve decided to get the ball rolling themselves. There would’ve been lots of reasons for Audra to leave Harvard and take the job with Longbow Aerospace. Re-immerse herself in the design field, make industry contacts to go along with Finn’s political ones, that kind of thing. And at some point she got them to agree to build the satellites she wanted, disguised as comm satellites that didn’t work worth a damn. I guess she faked her death so her role in the project would never come under scrutiny. There’d be a lot she’d have to do over the years, and she wouldn’t want to answer questions about any of it.”

Garner was still thinking it all through. Making the connections Travis had made earlier in the suite. But not all of them. He shook his head. Looked at Travis and waited for him to go on.

“You said that the initial uses of ELF in the fifties, just by accident, triggered suicides, and also bouts of euphoria.”

Garner nodded.

“And in the years after that, when governments tried to weaponize the technology, they dialed in on exactly how to create certain responses, and how to vary the intensity.”

“Yes.”

“So a global network of satellites with that capability could paint the whole world in zones ranging from suicidal to dancing in the streets. Anything the controllers wanted.”

“I suppose.”

“All right. Then it works. You could use the technology to herd people. Like livestock. Entire populations, all at the same time.”

Garner’s eyebrows knitted together, like he agreed with the point but didn’t see its significance.

“Imagine it from any random person’s view,” Travis said. “What would it be like on the receiving end of this technology? One day everything’s fine. The next day, you wake up and you don’t even want to move. You’re miserable lying there, but the thought of getting up makes you miserable too. You don’t even know why, but there it is. Every part of it overwhelms you, and you realize there’s nothing on your horizon that makes you happy. Nothing pulling you forward. It’s not like any sadness you’ve ever felt before. It has no cause. It’s just there. But knowing that doesn’t make it go away. You lie there thinking about that, and you start to get scared. You realize you’re having a serious problem, and you think maybe you better go talk to someone about it. Maybe pretty soon, too, because you don’t know what you’ll do to yourself if this keeps up for any length of time. Now imagine you find out, over the coming hours, that it’s not just you. That it’s happening everywhere, to everyone, all at once. Picture it. Make it as real as you can. Think of the public reaction. People would know something was going on, but they would have no idea what. It’d be the strangest damn thing anyone ever saw. It would make the news, obviously, but how would it be covered? What would they say? What the hell would anyone say, except to wonder what was happening to them, and how anyone was going to fix it?”

Garner looked chilled at the idea. His eyes were far away now, seeing his own version of a day like that, the effect bringing cities to a dead stop.

“Imagine it gets worse the next day,” Travis said. “And the day after that. Until you’re ready to just end it. You no longer even care what’s causing it. No one cares. All that matters is how bad it feels. The papers are calling it Bleak December. That’s all they’ve got. A name. Still no real information. Another day, and it’s worse yet, and right then, when you’re thinking in specific detail of how you’re going to end your life, a friend calls and asks if you’re watching the news. You turn it on, and there it is. The one place where this effect simply isn’t happening. Yuma, Arizona. No one knows why, of course. And no one cares, either. What matters is that it’s true. You can see it even in the background of the coverage. You can see people already arriving there from other places, and it’s obvious from their body language that they’re not sad anymore. They’re better than not sad. They’re euphoric.”

In the dim interior of the car, it was impossible to discern Garner’s skin tone, but Travis imagined it’d gone pale.

“Think of Finn’s original plan for conflict zones,” Travis said. “Profile everyone. Weed out the bad. Keep the good. People with just the right attributes for a peaceful society. I think even when he’d decided the whole world was the problem, he still thought that idea was the solution. Just on a bigger scale. A global scale.”

Garner looked at his phone again, the map of northern Chile still on the screen. He backed it out and dragged it until both Chile and the United States were visible in the frame. He drew imaginary lines with his fingertip, tracing routes from all over America toward Yuma. And then a single line: Yuma to Arica.

“You’re saying he wants to kill the world except for a few tens of thousands of people,” Garner said, “and then use them as some kind of seed population to start over, in Arica?”

Travis nodded. “We can stay away from what we’d have to guess about; what we already know is enough. We know ELF can be used to move people around en masse. Push and pull them at will. You could empty a city like Arica of its original residents. Draw them off to their own version of Yuma, up or down the coast. You could kill them once they were there. Turn up the signal until the depression is unbearable. Kill the rest of the world too, outside the United States. And within the U.S., we’ve seen for ourselves what happens. Everyone comes to Yuma, with their cars packed full of whatever they think they might need. They’ve already heard something about flights going out of there, and they’d be happy enough to catch one of them, but what they want more than anything is just to reach Yuma itself. Because then the pain will go away.”

Silence came to the car. They were passing through the suburb now, the two-lane bisecting separate reaches of it. Travis saw an overpass far ahead, where 495 crossed the road.

“And how would Finn select the ones he wanted to keep alive?” Garner said. “Would he do that right on-site in Yuma, as people begin to show up?”

Travis shook his head. “He could’ve done that part years in advance. He’d probably have to. He’d need at least some people with critical knowledge. Scientists, tradespeople, doctors. The rest could come from the profiling, which could be conducted over a span of years on people who probably aren’t even aware of it. Finn’s best attempt at choosing good neighbors. That process is probably already finished.”

Garner was still thinking it all through. Travis could see that he understood it. It was acceptance he was struggling with.

“Once these people are actually down there,” Garner said. “Once they’re in Arica, however many there are, ten thousand, fifty thousand… to be self-sustaining, they’d need so many things. I’m sure the city’s existing water supply could be kept running, however it already works. Same for irrigated farming. But what about power? What about manufactured things we take for granted? Everyday items that wear out over time. Even clothing.”

“You could use solar power,” Travis said. “Arica has to be about the best place on Earth for it. And all the panels in the world would be left for the taking. Everything in the world would be left for the taking, at least until things started to decay. But in places like Vegas and Los Angeles, useful objects and materials would last a long time. You could send salvage flights up there for decades, if you had to. But I don’t think you would have to.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s what the gathering site at Yuma is for. Think about it. All those cars, packed with the basic necessities people would naturally bring along. Clothing, dishware, in some cases computers or other electronics. All of it neatly stored in a place where it’ll last forever. For years after the settlement of Arica, flights could come up to Yuma and methodically gather that stuff. Take it back down there and store it in the Atacama. For a small enough population, it’d be a thousand years’ worth of everything they’d ever need.”

Travis watched Garner process it. Watched him try to, anyway. The man closed his eyes and rubbed them. Exhaled heavily.

“What else explains Yuma?” Travis said. “What else explains any of this stuff?”

Garner opened his eyes again. Stared at the cross streets going by, each lined with dozens of homes.

“How could anyone actually do it?” Garner said. “All those lives. How could someone sign up for a thing like that?”

“Is it really so hard to believe?” Travis said. “The concept is hardwired right into our culture. We tell little kids in Sunday school a story just like it, and in that story it’s not exactly the bad guy who makes it happen.”

“Christ’s sake,” Garner said. “That’s not meant to be taken literally.”

“No, but you might ask yourself how the story got to be popular in the first place. Don’t you think it just appeals to people, on some level? You look around at the world and all its bullshit. This group hates this group, because of something that happened this many centuries ago, and these other people are suffering for it. I’m not saying I agree, but I can understand the attraction of the idea. The notion of just scraping everything clean and starting all over. And I haven’t seen a tenth of the ugliness Isaac Finn has seen.”

“But Currey,” Garner said. “All the rest of them. I just don’t understand it. Cultured, educated people, trusted to govern. All of them standing up to be counted as part of something that’s… objectively evil.”

“We don’t need to look to scripture for an example of that,” Travis said. “We don’t even need to look past living history.”

Garner turned and met his eyes. Travis saw a chill pass through him. Along with acceptance, at last.

The driver tapped the brakes and slowed. “Coming up on the L.I.E., sir. Back to the city?”

“I don’t think so,” Garner said. “Pull off for a minute.”

The driver parked on the shoulder, a hundred yards shy of the first on-ramp. The trailing car followed suit.

Garner took out his cell phone again, but didn’t dial a number. He glanced at Travis. “You’re sure Finn is going to Arica right now?”

“Can you imagine any place he’d rather go, with the cylinder? Now that he thinks the loose ends are tied off, he’s free to go see what’s there, on the other side—the end result of his dream.”

Garner considered it for a few seconds. Then he opened the phone and dialed. While it rang, he switched it to speakerphone.

“Who are you calling?” Travis said.

“A lieutenant general I know in the Air Force. Heads up the Reserve Command.”

“You trust him?”

“He used to rat me out for cutting class, but we’re better since then.”

The line clicked open and a man said, “This is Garner.”

“So’s this,” Garner said.

The man on the phone said, “Rich, how are you?”

“I’m good, Scott. But I need a favor.”

“Name it.”

“I’m on Long Island, just east of the Army depot at Rockport. Williston Air Force Base is out here somewhere, isn’t it?”

“About twenty miles further east.”

Garner looked at the driver and nodded. The guy put the car in gear and pulled out. He accelerated to pass the westbound on-ramp and put on his blinker to take the next one.

“I need a lift,” Garner said. “For myself and seven friends. What’s the fastest thing they have stationed at Williston?”

“The fastest transport?”

“The fastest anything.”

“I know they’ve got a wing of Strike Eagles. Those’ll go Mach two without breaking a sweat. They could ferry one passenger per plane, if you swap out the weapon systems officer.”

“We don’t anticipate any dogfights,” Garner said. “We just need to win a race. And I need you to keep this in the back channels, Scott. All the way. No one learns about this who isn’t flying the planes, clearing them, or waving them off the aprons.”

“What the hell’s going on, Rich?”

“Nothing good. Keep your communications off the primary channels. Use something secure. But make damn sure you don’t use the Longbow satellites. We have reason not to trust them.”

“Those would be no good anyway, tonight,” Scott said. “I’ll find a different option.”

Garner cocked his head. “Why are the Longbows no good tonight?”

“Don’t know. It’s the strangest thing. The whole constellation, forty-eight satellites in all, went into some kind of standby mode about three hours ago. No one can get access.”

Garner turned to Travis, and in the glow of the freeway’s overhead lights, the man’s expression went cold.

“Holy shit,” Garner said.

Chapter Forty-Three

They were in the air thirty minutes later. Travis’s F–15E was the third off the runway. Its wheels left the ground and a second later Travis felt like he was lying on his back, and that he weighed about five hundred pounds. There were four green-screen displays in front of him, left to right in a row. They were full of visual data and numbers, most of which he couldn’t make sense of. One he could: altitude. That number was climbing rapidly.

The fighter leveled off at thirty thousand feet. Travis looked to his left and right, and saw the southern coastline of Long Island passing far below. A continuous vein of light reached west to the bright sprawl of New York City, then snaked away down the seaboard into the hazy summer darkness.

Travis saw the light-points of the first two jets’ engines ahead. A moment later his plane caught up and settled into a line beside them. Over the next three minutes the remaining five aircraft joined the formation, and then Travis felt the lying-on-his-back sensation again, not because of a climb but simply due to acceleration. All eight fighters were ramping up to nearly their maximum cruise speed, which was more than three times as fast as whatever kind of private jet Finn was traveling in. Travis had already done the math. Even with Finn’s ninety-minute head start, the eight of them were going to beat him to Arica by almost four hours. It was enough to make Travis regret the fifteen years he hadn’t been a taxpayer.

The force pushing him into his seatback receded as the jet’s speed topped out. He stared at the coastline again, already falling far behind. He looked at Manhattan and thought of Paige and Bethany, huddling in the darkened ruins of the place. It was hard to imagine that they could be holding on to even a strand of hope.

Travis watched the black nothingness of the Atlantic for a long time. He felt tiredness steal over him. He closed his eyes for what seemed to be a minute or two, and woke to the sound of the jet’s engines whining, their power level rising and falling from one second to the next. He looked up, and through the instrument glare on the curved canopy, he saw the shape of a massive four-engine aircraft above and just ahead of the F–15E. He saw a refueling boom coming down, little airfoils near its tip keeping it roughly stable.

Travis leaned a few inches to the side, looked past the front seat and saw the pilot’s hand making feather adjustments on the stick, steady but tense.

“How many times do you have to do something like this before you’re comfortable at it?” Travis said.

“I’ll let you know if I ever get there,” the pilot said.

It didn’t sound like sarcasm. Travis decided not to distract the guy with any more questions.

They reached Arica half an hour before sunrise. From above, the city was a broad crescent of light hugging an inward curve of the sea. Travis could get no sense of the desert except its emptiness—the landscape was black and formless under the deep red sky.

The fighters touched down, offloaded their passengers and were gone again within a few minutes.

A number of airport security officials, as well as local and Chilean federal police, were waiting. Garner spoke to them alone for ten minutes, while Travis sat aside with the agents. He watched Garner make his case. No doubt it was a fairly big deal to land in someone’s country and ask permission to personally detain the passenger of an incoming private jet—and to request that it all be kept secret. Travis wondered how many people of lesser clout than a former American president could’ve pulled it off.

They sat in the lounge overlooking the tarmac. They waited. Garner called his brother and got an update from satellite and ground-based tracking stations monitoring Finn’s aircraft. It was right on schedule.

From the airport lounge Travis could see the city in one direction and the desert in the other. Arica was a beautiful place. In the predawn its structures stood silhouetted against the pink ocean. Most of its streetlamps were still on, their light softened by the breaking day. Toward the south end of the city’s shoreline, a giant stone formation punched up out of the ground, shaped like an overturned ship’s hull. It was at least four hundred feet high.

Then there was the desert. Which was simply empty. It stretched away south and slightly east of town, hemmed in by shallow rises of the land on both sides—these too were empty. There was just nothing out there past the city’s edge. Not so much as a lonely weed.

The sun came up and the sky went pale blue. There wasn’t a trace of cloud in it, in any direction. Travis wondered if there ever was.

Finn’s plane was on approach. Two minutes out. Travis was standing in the dim interior of a mechanical room, just inside a door that accessed the tarmac.

He was holding an HK MP7 that’d been provided by airport security. So were the Secret Service agents. Garner had one too, but at the agents’ insistence he wasn’t going to participate in the action. He seemed annoyed about it, but only a little. Travis guessed that he’d only agreed because he didn’t expect much action. As far as anyone could tell, Finn was traveling alone. Even if he did have security with him, a light business jet couldn’t hold enough people to counter the strength that was waiting here. In addition to Travis and the agents, the local and federal police had dozens of armed officers concealed among the airport’s structures. Garner had thoroughly convinced them that Isaac Finn was not someone they wanted on their soil.

Someone in the tower spoke over an intercom. “Ninety seconds.”

Travis glanced at Garner in the vague light. “The police are clear that we’re taking point on this, right?”

Garner nodded. “The way we’re doing this, they’d prefer their people not become involved at all, beyond providing a show of force. Makes it easier to pretend it never happened.”

“All I care about is making sure no one shoots at the plane while the cylinder’s inside,” Travis said. “It’d be the same as opening fire while Paige and Bethany were in there.”

Garner took his point. “Should be no need for any of that. Just let him open the door and exit the plane, and then move on him. He’s not prepared for it. What can he do?”

Travis didn’t answer. He wasn’t ready to relax even that much. He looked through the two-inch crack in the door. He could see most of the runway and the swath of sky through which Finn’s plane would descend.

Then he saw the plane. First a glint and then a distinct shape. A speck of a fuselage flanked by jet engines.

Nearer, he could see the idling maintenance trucks that would pull out and block the runway at its midpoint, once Finn had disembarked from the aircraft.

The plane’s details resolved by the second. Travis saw the landing gear swing down and lock when it was thirty seconds out.

There was only the faintest bark as its wheels touched the runway. It settled onto its nose gear. The engines’ thrust reversers deployed, and a moment later the aircraft was rolling slowly to a stop. It halted forty yards from where Travis was standing behind the door.

And then the maintenance vehicles moved. One went first. The rest hesitated a few seconds and then followed.

“Goddammit,” Travis said. “It’s too soon.”

He heard Garner breathe out slowly behind him, sharing the sentiment.

Then the jet did exactly what Travis expected it to do: it began to turn in place. He guessed the reason was nothing more than a courtesy to its passenger: the plane’s door was on the side opposite the terminal building. The turnaround would correct that.

The plane was most of the way through its half-rotation when it suddenly stopped. Travis had just enough of a viewing angle on the pilots to see that they’d spotted the maintenance trucks. They seemed thrown. They traded looks. Their mouths moved.

“Fuck,” Travis said.

He could picture Finn at the back of the little plane, looking up sharply at what the pilots were saying. Putting it together, just like that.

For the longest time nothing happened. The pilots were still talking, looking from each other to the vehicles. If Finn was asking them to take off again, it was in vain. No way could the jet get up to speed in the distance available. Even the taxilane was blocked now.

Travis guessed that a minute had passed since the plane had stopped turning. Maybe it’d been longer.

Then both pilots looked behind them into the cabin and flinched at something. They tore their headsets off and came up out of their seats. In almost the same instant, Travis saw smoke begin to curl into the cockpit along the ceiling.

“What the hell?” Garner said. “Is he committing suicide?”

And then Travis understood. “Oh shit.”

Half a second later the plane’s door opened. It started to ease down on its friction-hinges, and then the pilots pushed it violently from the inside, and climbed out past it.

Travis was already running. He’d shoved open the door of the mechanical room. He was sprinting as hard as he could over the tarmac, MP7 in hand. The pilots saw him coming and froze for a second, their eyes on the gun. Then they broke to the left, getting the hell away from both Travis and the plane.

The smoke was rolling out from under the top of the doorway, thick and black. The door had fallen fully open by now, its stair steps resting level. Travis could see the light of flames playing over the aircraft’s interior.

He covered the last few yards and vaulted up and over the stairs. Tucked in his arms, ducked and landed on his feet inside the plane, his shoulder slamming against the opposite sidewall.

Everything aft of the cockpit was burning. Travis saw broken liquor bottles everywhere. The fire had spread from their spilled contents up the sides of the leather seats, igniting the foam within. The smoke was thickening by the second.

Finn wasn’t inside. Travis hadn’t expected him to be. All that was there was what Travis had expected.

The iris. Hovering by itself, detached, just shy of the cabin’s back wall ten or twelve feet away. Through the smoke, Travis could see nothing beyond the iris but harsh sunlight, exactly the way it shone in the present Arica. Finn had already gone through.

How long had the iris been open?

If Finn had detached it right after the plane stopped its turn, the thing could contract shut any second now.

What would happen if a person were halfway through the opening when it closed? Something told Travis the iris didn’t have the kind of safety features found in elevator doors.

He lunged forward. Into the smoke. Past the flames. Threw his arms ahead of him, the MP7 still in his right hand, and dived.

He passed through the open circle into bright light. He felt the iris’s edges draw sharply inward and slam against one of his shins, and then he was through, both feet clearing the margin. He saw the ground coming up beneath him—not the runway blacktop that’d been there in the present, but a gridwork of paver stones. He kept hold of the gun with one hand, and threw the other downward to break his fall. He hit hard, took half the impact with his hand, then tucked and rolled to let his shoulder take the rest. The move wasn’t graceful, but it worked. He ended up on his back, the MP7 slamming hard onto the pavers but not discharging. Still gripping it, he pitched himself sideways and got up into a crouch, eyes everywhere for any sign of Finn.

But he couldn’t see anything. The air was thick with black smoke from the just-closed iris. He could make out low, boxy shapes here and there, ten to twenty feet away in several directions. Waist high, they caught the wind and made it swirl, trapping and churning the smoke.

Travis took a step and heard his foot kick something tiny and metallic. It skipped away over the pavers before he could get a look at it, but he knew by the sound what it was: a bullet cartridge. He glanced down and saw two more beneath him. He stooped and picked one up. Thirty-eight caliber. He pictured Finn, sometime in the last ninety seconds, fumbling rounds into a revolver on this very spot.

He scanned his surroundings again. Still no sign of Finn, but the smoke was already thinner. The box shapes were resolving. He could see now that they were made of concrete, and were open on top. They were half filled with dirt—planter boxes of some kind, but there was nothing growing in them.

He couldn’t stay here in the open any longer. He chose a planter at random and sprinted for it, MP7 leveled in case Finn was already hiding there. He passed the first corner: nothing but open space beyond it. He ducked low and made his way down the box’s length, and took the next corner without pause. That side was empty too.

He advanced on the last obscured face. The smoke was thinning by the second. This kind of cat-and-mouse stuff was all luck when it was one-on-one. A team of four people or more could use tactics, cover each other’s backs, but between single opponents it was almost purely random. Finn would be around this next corner or he wouldn’t. If there, he’d be facing away or he wouldn’t.

Travis took the corner.

Finn was there, crouched five feet away, his pistol aimed straight back at Travis.

For three seconds neither made a move.

The cylinder lay at Finn’s feet, safely out of the crossfire; Travis saw it without breaking eye contact.

Travis considered the situation. He could pull the trigger on the guy right now and probably resolve the whole thing. The risk was that, even with half the guy’s head missing, motor reflex could still fire the .38—and probably hit the target, at this range. Travis thought he’d probably take the risk, if it were just his own life on the line. But it wasn’t.

“The two women who were with me in New York,” Travis said. “They’re still there. They’re stuck in the ruins.” He indicated the cylinder with his eyes. “I need that to get them back. I’m not leaving here without it.”

Finn’s gun hand remained steady. “That’s not going to happen. If you take this, Garner can still stop me.”

“Garner’s stopping you as we speak. He knows about Longbow. He knows you’re activating the satellites. He’s on the phone right now setting up raids at all their corporate properties. I imagine one of them will net Audra.”

Each piece of information seemed to rattle the man more deeply, though Travis thought his reaction was missing something. It looked like unwilling acceptance where surprise might have been.

“You had to know it was over,” Travis said. “From the moment Paige slapped Garner last night, you were never going to pull it off.”

Finn shook his head. He took the cylinder in his free hand and moved back two feet, rising to full height as he did. The .38 stayed level.

Travis stood upright, too. He felt sunlight begin burning his neck through the dissipating smoke. Visibility was better: it was like standing in a thin fog, though the light glared through it everywhere. Travis still couldn’t see beyond the nearest forty feet of paver stones and planter boxes. This place seemed to be a plaza of some kind, where the airport had been in the present.

Finn’s eyes narrowed. They didn’t quite leave Travis, but they moved a little, like the man was reading a list of options in his own head. Looking for some way to salvage his plans. He took another step back. Nine or ten feet away now. Travis saw the risk of getting hit by a reflexive shot begin to drop. He kept the MP7 sighted for a head shot.

“I’m sorry about your friends,” Finn said. “I mean that. But I can’t just let you take this thing.”

He retreated a step further. Maybe he thought he could make a run for it. Put some distance behind him and cross back into the present, somewhere else in Arica. Then try to call Audra and warn her.

The MP7 required four ounces of trigger pressure to fire. Travis applied two.

Finn backed up again.

And then the wind shifted.

Whichever way it’d been blowing before, the boxes in the plaza had spun it in circles. Now it came on dead straight from behind Travis, its speed seeming to double, and in the span of five seconds the smoke drew away like a veil.

Finn took a sharp breath.

Travis felt his own eyes widen involuntarily.

They might as well have been standing in Midtown Manhattan. The Arica they’d seen in the present was long gone, and in its place reared a skyline of concrete and glass and steel, some of its towers standing to a height of seventy stories or more. Broad avenues crisscrossed at their bases, complete with traffic lights and crisp white lines. Along the length of the nearest street, Travis could see the downtown district snaking up the coast for over a mile, and the height and density of the structures held consistent for most of that distance.

None of it lay in ruins. The skyscrapers’ glass faces looked like they’d been washed yesterday. The sidewalks were immaculate. Vehicles stood parked at curbsides, 2011 models or earlier as far as Travis could tell. Wooden benches framed the plaza, their green paint gleaming in the desert sun.

Yet nothing moved. Beyond the filled parking spaces, the streets were deserted. Through ground-level windows, every visible lobby sat vacant. The traffic lights were dark. The tires of every vehicle were flat and beginning to crumble. Arica was imposing and beautiful and pristine, but it was also abandoned. For how long, Travis couldn’t guess.

“It worked,” Finn said. He looked around at the place while keeping the gun on Travis. “The survivors flourished here. They made it.”

“For a while. What does it matter? They’re dead now.”

“We don’t know they’re dead. We don’t know what happened here.”

“Couldn’t have been good.”

Finn looked at him. Some kind of new hope flickered in his eyes. “It’s enough that it worked at all. And if I search this place for even a few hours, I can probably find out what happened to it. Find out how to avoid the problem.”

“We could’ve found this place bustling and it still wouldn’t be worth killing the world for it,” Travis said.

“The world’s going to kill itself sooner or later. Why shouldn’t at least some of us live?”

“Neither of us is going to convince the other. If you want to stay here, feel free. But I’m taking the cylinder with me. I’m going to New York to get my friends.”

“You’re not,” Finn said. “I really am sorry, but you’re not. You don’t have time, anyway. Look.”

He held the cylinder toward Travis, showing him the side opposite the row of buttons. In the harsh light it took Travis a few seconds to see what the man was talking about.

Along part of the casing’s length ran a line of blue lights, pencil-eraser-sized and spaced at centimeter intervals. They shone softly and diffused from just beneath the black surface, and extended to a little over a third of the cylinder’s long dimension.

“They appeared last night,” Finn said. “Right after your friends broke the other cylinder. At that time the lights covered the whole length, but they’ve been disappearing steadily since, like a countdown. Whoever built these things must not have wanted anyone using one without the other. My guess is, when the last one of these lights goes out, this thing becomes a paperweight.”

Travis’s mind was already doing the math. The other cylinder had broken maybe nine hours ago. If that amount of time had burned not-quite-two-thirds of the countdown, he had something like five hours left.

Five hours to reach New York and find Paige and Bethany.

He thought of flight time, and search time, and shit-happens time. Five hours. Was it even close to enough?

“You’re wasting your time thinking about it,” Finn said. “I’m not giving this to you. Not now that I’ve seen this place.” The man took another step back. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

“So am I,” Travis said, and pulled the trigger the rest of the way.

Nothing happened.

Chapter Forty-Four

The MP7 didn’t even click. It wasn’t empty—Travis had loaded it himself and chambered the first round. When he applied the last two ounces to the trigger, the mechanism simply froze.

He squeezed harder. Nothing.

His eyes dropped from Finn and focused on the MP7’s action. There was a stress ripple in the metal, where the weapon had hit the paver blocks earlier.

He looked back up at Finn.

The man knew. Even without a click, Travis’s body language had said everything.

Finn advanced two steps, his eyes narrowing. The .38 trembled a little in his hand, but he held it tightly.

“Put it down,” Finn said. “Then turn around and get on your knees.”

Travis exhaled, the breath almost a laugh. “Why the hell would I do any of that? If you’re gonna shoot me, just do it.”

Finn made no move to come closer, but he took a breath and the gun went still in his hand.

“I hope you don’t feel it,” Finn said, and Travis saw his forearm tense for the pull.

Then Finn’s head came apart, the sides of his skull blowing out like a shaped charge had gone off inside it. A split-second later the flat crack of a high-powered rifle broke across the plaza, and Travis flinched against his will and turned toward the sound.

Thirty yards away, a figure dressed in white rose from concealment behind another planter box.

In his peripheral vision, Travis saw Finn crumple to the ground. The .38 hit with a soft clink and didn’t fire. The cylinder rolled out of his other hand and settled gently onto his abdomen, as if his body’s last impulse had been to protect the thing.

Travis dropped the MP7 and raised his arms at his sides, and kept his eyes on the shooter.

The newcomer held the rifle at ready without aiming it, and for a moment simply stared, assessing the situation. Travis could make out no detail of the face: the body was covered in white from top to bottom, including a loose hood with some kind of mesh screen at the front. The outfit seemed designed to reflect away sunlight while letting in the breeze. Probably a necessity in this place.

The figure stared a moment longer, then slung the rifle on a strap and stepped out from behind the concrete box. It strode across the plaza toward Travis, its movements measured, unhurried.

Travis could only stare. He felt too numb to even be afraid.

The figure came on, twenty yards away now. Ten. It stopped just out of handshake range and stared at him. Through the glare of light off the mesh fabric, Travis could just get a hint of the face. But he’d stared at it for only a second when something else drew his gaze: a bright red disc on the back of the newcomer’s hand, just visible past the edge of the sleeve. The disc was the size of a quarter, and stuck to the skin somehow. Travis looked closer and saw what he already knew would be there: near-microscopic tendrils, binding the disc to the hand.

He looked at the face again, and recognized it through the mesh half a second before the figure lifted the hood.

The eyes were the same as he’d always known them—huge, brown, intense—but everything else had aged a bit, to somewhere between fifty and sixty years.

“Travis,” the newcomer said.

Travis swallowed and found his voice. “Paige.”

Chapter Forty-Five

For the next five seconds they said nothing. Travis heard the sound of waves breaking, the soft crashes echoing through the highrise canyons.

Then a voice crackled over a radio, somewhere on Paige’s body, the words inaudible. She reached to her waist and drew the device from a fold of her cloak.

She keyed the talk button. “I missed that. Say again.”

A man spoke, his tone all but lost to static. “I asked what you’re shooting at.”

“I’ll explain when I see you,” Paige said. “I’m safe.”

“Did you find out what the smoke came from?”

“Not exactly. Let me get back to you.”

“Be careful.”

The man clicked off, and Paige stowed the radio. By then, Travis realized he’d recognized the voice, even without discerning its tone. Its rhythm and cadence had been more than familiar. Much more. He felt his balance falter.

Paige stepped closer to him. She raised a hand and touched his face, gently. Her thumb traced his cheekbone, feeling the texture of his skin.

He saw the obvious confusion in her eyes, mixed with some fragile understanding, and thought he knew what it was. Paige—the other Paige—had described it to him last night in Garner’s living room. Getting it without getting it. The Breach had taught her to do that.

Still, there had to be a thousand questions. He thought he saw those in her eyes too, along with a reflection of the thousand he wanted to ask.

How the hell had she gotten here? Not on board one of the flights from Yuma. No way would she have taken part in any of that, ELF effects or not. She couldn’t have left all those people behind to die.

She must’ve come here later on, long after Bleak December had gone. If anyone in the world could’ve survived Umbra without going to Yuma, it would’ve been Tangent personnel at Border Town, with all their exotic resources. And no doubt Bethany had been right: Paige had found him before the world had ended. Had found him and kept him alive.

Those thoughts echoed in his head for maybe three seconds, and then they were gone—drowned out by the only thing he could afford to think about now.

The cylinder.

The line of blue lights.

And time—draining away like blood from a nicked artery.

Every minute he stayed here might be the one that doomed Paige and Bethany in New York.

The thumb—shaking now—retraced its path across his cheek. He raised his hand and closed it softly around hers.

“I have to leave,” he said. “I have to leave right now. I’m sorry I can’t explain any of this.”

She shook her head, dismissing the apology, and took her hand away from his face. “Go.”

He held her gaze another second, in spite of his urgency, then turned and crossed to Finn’s body in two running steps. He lifted the cylinder and aimed it to put the iris just shy of the fallen shell casings where he’d come through before—where the smoke from the burning plane would hide his arrival in the present.

He put his finger to the on button.

“Wait.”

He turned. Paige was just behind him. She put a hand on his shoulder.

“I can’t wait,” he said. “I might not have enough time as it is—”

“There’s something you need to hear. It’s more important than whatever you’re on your way to do.”

“If I’m thirty seconds late, people are going to die. One of them is you.”

If that news affected her, she didn’t show it.

“That’s a necessary risk,” she said. “Listen to me. It’ll take more than thirty seconds, but I’ll go as fast as I can.”

Her eyes were as serious as he’d ever seen them. Scared, too.

He withdrew his finger from the button, and faced her.

“I know about the message I sent back through the Breach,” Paige said. “And I know you created and sent the Whisper.”

Travis felt his grip on the cylinder weaken. He pushed it against his side.

“You told me everything,” Paige said. “The other you told me. The one I just talked to on the radio. You explained it the same day we sealed the Breach.”

Travis stared. He’d never imagined a scenario like this, in which he could learn exactly how Paige would react to the news he’d been keeping from her.

She seemed to read the question in his eyes.

“I took it better than you expected,” she said.

In a way, that response was almost as surreal as finding Paige here at all. Travis shook his head. “How is that possible? I created the Whisper, Paige. All the deaths in Zurich were my fault. All the deaths in Border Town. Your friends.”

“I took it well because I understood things you didn’t. Things about the Breach, and what it would take to send something back in time through it. Tangent knew, long before we had the means to actually do it, what would be involved in the process. Dr. Fagan had it all worked out, like the Manhattan Project scientists had the bomb yields calculated before they ever set one off. The machine that would transfer something into the Breach—an injector, Fagan called it—would be unstable almost to the point of uselessness. And there’s no way to engineer around that. A person trying to operate it would have to position it right in front of the Breach, then stay there with it and shepherd the process to the very end. There’s no practical way to automate it, or even to do it remotely. You’d have to be there. Right there.”

“None of this matters,” Travis said. “Some other version of you, in the original timeline before anything changed, decided I had to be killed. She sent the note back. And some other me sent back the Whisper to block that note and save his own ass. He could’ve given the Whisper strict limits—like don’t kill anybody—but he didn’t. He didn’t give a shit about anyone but himself—myself.”

“The Whisper was a computer beefed up with Breach technology. It would be very unpredictable. It’s likely the other Travis had no idea how ruthlessly it would do its job.”

“That’s a guess at best, and it absolves him—me—of nothing. I sent that thing back out of selfishness, simple as that.”

“You’re wrong. Selfishness couldn’t possibly account for it.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because anyone sending something back, standing with that machine in front of the Breach, would have to still be there when the injection actually happened. And it’s a violent reaction. Hyperviolent. The temperature in the receiving chamber spikes to over four thousand degrees, and stays there for about a minute and a half. You see what I’m saying? To send something back in time through the Breach, you have to die.”

Travis stared at her. Whatever he’d meant to say next, it was already gone from his mind. He considered her words, and their implications.

Paige went on. “The version of me that sent that message back must’ve really believed it was necessary. She gave her life to do it. But when you countered her move, you gave your life too. That couldn’t have been selfishness. So whatever I thought was worth killing you for, whatever it was you were doing, there must have been more to it than I knew. Like it looked evil from my point of view, but you knew better. Maybe you just couldn’t share it with me. Maybe it was that bad. But necessary.”

Travis looked down, his eyes going to the cylinder at his side. The soft blue lights, like stair treads up to a gallows platform.

“I’m telling you this because it matters,” Paige said. “You have to go back to Tangent. You’re supposed to be there. That other version of you, acting on better information than any of us have, died to put you there.”

“Then why didn’t he have the Whisper tell me everything? Just lay it all out in steps?”

“I’ve had seven decades to think about that. My guess is, if the Whisper had told you what you’re expected to do someday… you wouldn’t do it. Your future self could’ve guessed that even more easily.”

The information seemed to churn around Travis, like the smoke had done minutes earlier.

“Can we just seal the Breach?” he said. “It worked for you guys.”

Paige inhaled sharply. “No. Jesus, I would’ve forgot. Do not seal the Breach.”

“But it worked. It’s still sealed now, after seventy-three years.”

She was shaking her head, eyes wide. “The seal held, but it’s been a disaster. The best we can tell, entities that build up in the tunnel get destroyed by the pressure, over time. In some cases, the destruction releases energy, and that energy still makes it out into the world. A lot of energy, for some of them. Radiation. Strange kinds we can’t even identify. We get the effects even this far away.”

Travis looked around at the empty city, and began to understand.

“Yes,” Paige said. “This place is all but dead because the Breach is sealed. Most of the world would’ve been, by now, if it hadn’t ended already. Don’t seal the Breach.”

At the bottom of his vision, Travis saw movement. He looked down. One of the blue lights had just vanished.

“Christ,” he said.

“Go back to Tangent,” Paige said. “I don’t know what’s coming, but you need to be there when it hits. It probably matters more than either of us realizes. Go.”

He nodded, leveled the cylinder, turned it on, and hit the delayed shutoff. Black smoke churned from the iris.

In the seconds he had to wait for the light cone to vanish, Travis faced Paige again. He stared at her eyes.

She was beautiful.

She always would be.

He’d known that the day he met her.

He wondered now if he would ever see her this age again. In their own timeline, however it might play out, what chance did they have of growing old together?

He saw the reflections in her eyes sharpen. She blinked at a sheen of tears.

Then the light cone vanished, and he turned away from her and didn’t look back. He sprinted for the opening and vaulted through into the smoke plume.

Sirens. Shouting voices. Blue and red flashers strobing through the smoke. He held his breath and ran, and came out into clear light beside the gutted husk of the jet. Fire crews were laying streams of water and foam into it. Travis hardly noticed them. He scanned the onlookers gathered at the periphery of the scene, most of them near the terminal. He saw Garner, and sprinted toward him as fast as he could move.

Chapter Forty-Six

Paige stacked the pine boughs close to the fire. Hopefully they’d dry within a few hours. The fire was hard to keep going. Everything was waterlogged.

The night had been hell. From Garner’s building they’d gone south as quickly as possible, which wasn’t very fast through dense trees and over broken concrete, all in perfect darkness. For the first fifteen minutes Paige had told herself that everything could still turn out okay. They would hear a series of shots from the Remington far behind and above them, and then they would hear Travis calling, and with any luck at all he’d have the other cylinder when they met up.

It was a lot to ask for, and they didn’t get any of it.

By the second hour, still making their way south, both she and Bethany had stopped saying anything hopeful or encouraging. Then they stopped talking altogether. Neither knew what the hell to say.

Occasionally they passed by places in the darkness where the rainfall seemed to be splashing down into deep water. They had no idea what the places might be, but the thought of accidentally stepping into one was terrifying. They were wet enough from the rain, though at least the trees kept them from being completely soaked. To fall into standing water and be drenched to the skin, with no means of drying off or getting warm, would be serious trouble.

Finally they just stopped. They had no idea how far south they’d gone, or even if they’d held to their intended path. They felt out the lower branches of a thick pine, made their way up ten or twelve feet, and found a raft of boughs spaced tightly enough to serve as a platform.

They lay in the darkness a long time, trying to fall asleep. They heard animals moving through the forest below, sometimes passing directly beneath where they lay. Maybe just deer. There was no way to tell.

Paige slept. She woke sometime later, the city still pitch-black, the rain still coming down. She heard Bethany crying, trying not to make any noise, but failing. Her breath was hitching and her body was shaking hard enough to move the branches. It was as terrified and lonely a sound as Paige had ever heard. She pulled Bethany against herself and held on tightly. It seemed to help.

When they woke again it was morning. The rain had stopped but the overcast and the chill were still there, pressing down on the ruins.

They climbed to the ground. Paige saw at once where they were. The southwest corner of the park. She also saw what the pockets of deep water were. Subway stairs. The access to Columbus Circle Station was flooded to within a few feet below street level. Not from the rain, Paige was sure. It was only the natural water table of the island, in the absence of pumps to keep the tunnels clear.

With daylight they found dry wood: a dead sapling in the partial shelter of an intact stone entryway. They broke it into kindling and piled it on the dry concrete below the entry. Paige used a sharp-edged rock to carefully deform and take apart one of the SIG’s .45 ACP bullet cartridges. She spread the powder in a fine layer beneath one edge of the kindling, and set the cartridge’s primer at its center. Then she slammed the rock down onto the primer. The powder flashed, and a few of the twigs’ ends smoked and glowed for a second, but nothing else happened.

The third cartridge—out of four that’d remained in the weapon—did the job. After that it was only a matter of finding dry enough wood to keep the fire burning. They tended it all morning and into the afternoon. They still hardly spoke.

Travis watched New York rise out of the afternoon haze far ahead. The aircraft—an F–15D this time instead of an F–15E, the distinction making no difference to its top speed—began to descend, and for the moment its speed actually ticked up a bit, from 1,650 miles per hour to 1,665.

The fighter had originated from Homestead Air Reserve Base near Miami. It’d left there for Arica within five minutes of Travis’s return through the iris, into the smoke of the burning private jet. Miami was only marginally closer to Arica than New York was. About three thousand miles instead of four thousand. But it was the closest place available that had two-seater F–15s.

Travis and Garner had done what they could to speed up the process: they’d secured the use of a Piper Cheyenne, the fastest thing based at Arica, to fly Travis north and shorten the F–15’s trip. In theory, the Piper could’ve flown about six hundred miles while the fighter flew twenty-four hundred, saving the F–15 a round-trip distance of twelve hundred miles and putting Travis in Manhattan about forty minutes sooner than originally planned. In practice, that wasn’t possible. Six hundred miles north of Arica there was nothing but the biggest jungle on the planet, and no airport in sight. The only viable option had been Alejandro Velasco Astete International, in Cusco, Peru—three hundred fifty miles from Arica. Travis had landed there and waited for the F–15—the move had bought him maybe twenty extra minutes to reach Paige and Bethany. Every second of them would count.

There’d been plenty of time to do the math, between the flying and the waiting. Travis had watched the line of blue lights continue to disappear, measuring the interval with his watch timer. Each light winked out twenty-eight minutes and eleven seconds after the one before it. Once he had that locked down, he was able to determine the exact time when the cylinder would stop working—assuming Finn’s guess had been right, which it damn near certainly had. Speaking over the aircraft’s radio with both Garner and his brother, Travis rehearsed every step of the process they’d lined up. The hastily planned scramble that would begin the moment the F–15’s wheels touched down at LaGuardia.

On paper, it worked. Could work, anyway. If everything went just right. Especially at the end.

New York rose into detail ahead.

Exactly six minutes left on the cylinder.

Too goddamned close. Travis felt his hands sweating on the thing.

Manhattan gradually slid to the left of center as the plane made for the airport. The deceleration pulled Travis forward against his seat harness—he was pretty sure this wasn’t the normal rate at which the plane slowed for a landing. LaGuardia’s crossed runways resolved. Travis drew an imaginary line from there to the bottom of Central Park, and tried to guess the distance. Five or six miles, he thought. By road it would be twice that, and there was no telling how long the drive would take. He didn’t know New York well enough to even guess, but he knew it would take a hell of a lot more than six minutes.

Which was why he wasn’t driving.

By the time the F–15 lined up on its approach and settled into the glide path, half a mile out, Travis could already see the helicopter waiting. Not even parked on an apron—just sitting there beside the runway, right where the F–15 was going to come to rest. It was a big, hulking son of a bitch. A Sea Stallion, Garner’s brother had called it. Eighty feet long, twenty-five feet high and wide. A massive six-blade rotor assembly on top. It could fly at about two hundred miles per hour once it was up to speed. It would cover the distance from LaGuardia to Central Park in a little over two minutes.

The F–15 descended through the last dozen yards of its altitude and hit the runway.

“Gonna roll fast and brake hard at the end,” the pilot said. “Buy you some seconds.”

“I’ll need them,” Travis said.

The cylinder had four minutes and fifteen seconds left.

“Hang on.”

There wasn’t much to hang on to. Travis saw two metal struts along the sides of the seatback in front of him. They looked sturdy enough. He braced his hands against them, and a second later he heard the airflow over the jet’s body change radically, and his chest was pressed harder than before against the harness straps.

He saw the Sea Stallion just ahead. It had a tail ramp like a cargo jet, lowered and facing the runway. There was a crewman standing at the foot of the ramp. Overhead, the giant rotor was already spinning. Travis could see the mammoth aircraft rising on its wheel shocks, like it was just a few hundred pounds shy of lifting off.

The F–15 stopped twenty yards away from it. The plane’s engines powered down immediately, their pitch dropping through several octaves per second—again Travis had the sense that normal procedures were out the window here. The pilot punched the canopy release and shoved it up and open. Travis stood up in his seat and bent at the waist to clear the angled canopy. He tucked the cylinder under his left arm and held it there as tightly as he could. Then he leaned forward, right out of the cockpit on the left side, grabbed the edge with his free hand and let his body swing down and out. It was over ten feet from cockpit to ground. His shoes were three feet above the tarmac when he let go; he landed hard, straightened up and sprinted for the chopper. He glanced at his watch as he ran. Three minutes and fifty seconds.

They sat at the fire, eating apples from a tree Bethany had found at the southern edge of the park. Something had eaten everything below about eight feet, but the rest had been untouched.

Paige watched the long needles of a white pine bough curl in the flames.

“It’s mid-October,” she said. “Any night from now on could freeze. We need to go south if we want to survive.”

“Do we want to survive?” Bethany said.

Paige looked at her.

“I’m sorry,” Bethany said. “I’m not trying to be a quaalude, but… what’s the point? Unless I seriously, seriously misunderstood high-school biology, we’re the end of the line, right? You want to live to be a hundred here?”

Paige lowered her gaze to the flames again and tried to think of an answer to the question. It was essentially the same one she’d been asking herself since the middle of the night.

The Sea Stallion crossed the East River at a height of two hundred feet, just north of a long, narrow island that paralleled the Manhattan shoreline. A second later the aircraft was screaming over the rooftops of the Upper East Side, banking in long, gentle arcs to avoid the taller structures.

Two minutes, thirty seconds.

Travis was standing upright, holding onto the doorway in the forward bulkhead just before the flight deck. Other than himself, the only people aboard were the pilot and copilot. Behind Travis was the cavernous troop bay. Its long side walls were lined with bench seats made of steel tubing and canvas. The walls themselves were just the structural ribs of the fuselage and the metal outer skin. Hydraulic lines and wiring conduits ran everywhere. Harsh overhead fluorescent panels lit the space.

The copilot turned in his seat and shouted over the thrum of the rotors and the turbines driving them. “Our orders are pretty damn specific. In addition to the phrase haul ass being emphasized about a dozen times, here’s how I understand it. We land in the biggest clearing toward the south end. We leave the ramp closed. We face forward and we don’t pay any attention to you for the next two minutes.”

“That’ll work,” Travis said.

“What the fuck do we do after that?”

“Whatever you want,” Travis said. “I’ll be gone by then.”

The guy stared at him a few seconds longer, waiting for the rest of the joke. When it didn’t come, he just shook his head and faced forward again. He mouthed something Travis didn’t catch.

They passed over Fifth Avenue at a diagonal, still doing just under two hundred miles per hour. The pilot started cutting the altitude, even as he kept the forward speed maxed. Travis saw the clearing ahead, coming up very fast. They covered most of the remaining distance to it in just a few seconds.

“All right, hang on tight,” the pilot shouted.

Travis gripped the doorway with his right hand. He held the cylinder tight against himself with his left. He saw the pilot pull back hard on the stick, but for the next half second nothing happened. Then the park and the skyline, visible ahead through the windscreen, dropped away sickeningly as the chopper leaned back into a steep tilt. Nothing through the windows but blue sky. In the same moment its massive tail swung around like a boom, and when Travis saw the park again it was turning like a schoolyard seen from a merry-go-round. He saw people below, running like hell to get clear as the chopper descended fast.

Just before touchdown Travis looked at his watch. One minute, forty seconds.

Paige was still thinking about Bethany’s question when the sound started up. A heavy bass vibration through the trees, like a bank of concert amplifiers playing no music, but simply cranked to full volume and humming. There was a rhythm to the sound, as well. A cycling throb. Like helicopter rotors.

Bethany flinched and turned where she sat, looking for the sound source along with her. It was almost impossible to get a fix on. It was deep and diffused and everywhere.

Then they heard a man shouting, from very far away.

Travis.

Shouting for them to answer.

And shouting for them to run.

Travis ran to get clear of the iris, not because he knew which direction to go, but just to get away from the turbine sound—he needed to listen for Paige and Bethany. He looked back once, and through the opening he saw the fluorescent-lit interior of the Sea Stallion. On this side, the iris was surrounded by the massive pines and hardwoods that’d long since filled in the clearing.

He stopped fifty yards south.

He shouted for Paige and Bethany again.

He listened.

Nothing.

Nothing he could hear over the chopper, anyway. It’d never occurred to him to have the pilots shut the damn thing down. He just hadn’t thought of it, against the clamor of everything else he’d been focused on. No time for it now. He looked at his watch.

Fifty seconds left.

He shouted again.

A second later he heard them. Far ahead and to the right. He broke into a sprint, holding the cylinder tight and dodging side to side through the trees. Their voices sounded very far away. Maybe far enough that there was no real chance, even with them closing the distance toward him. He ignored the thought. It didn’t serve any purpose. He simply ran.

An even less welcome thought followed: his math on the timing could be off. Maybe by as much as ten seconds. He’d tried to nail it down as accurately as possible, and where he’d been forced to round off, he’d done so conservatively. It was possible that he had a few more seconds than he thought—but he could just as easily have fewer.

He glanced down at the cylinder as he ran. Its final blue light stared back at him impassively.

He kept shouting.

He could hear their replies now even over his own running footsteps.

Closer.

But only a little.

Thirty seconds.

He sprinted faster. Felt his leg muscles burn with acid, and welcomed the pain.

He listened for Paige and Bethany, and realized he could hear more than their voices. He could hear their bodies crashing through the trees. They were closer than he’d imagined. Much closer. There was still time.

Then he broke through the interlaced boughs of a pair of pines and saw the real source of the crashing sound.

Not Paige and Bethany.

A clutch of white-tailed deer. Thirty or forty of them, streaming through the trees, two or three abreast. Spooked by what they’d never heard before: human voices. The animals crossed his path just ahead at a diagonal, damn near running him down. Two hundred pounds apiece and moving at thirty miles an hour. Blocking his way like a train thundering across a road.

“Fuck!” he screamed. He saw the nearest of the animals draw hard aside from him, the formation bulging away but not slowing or scattering.

The instant they’d passed he began to sprint again, but even as he did, he heard Paige calling, and the sound was still agonizingly faint and distant.

He looked at his watch.

Ten seconds.

He stopped running.

He stared down at the blue light again.

He’d decided hours earlier, before he’d even left Arica, what he would do if it came to this. If time were almost up, and there were no chance of saving Paige and Bethany. If all he could do was get himself back through the iris.

It’d been no choice at all. Not then and not now.

Travis opened his hand and let the cylinder fall to the soft earth at his feet. It rolled a few inches and stopped, with the blue light facing him.

He sat down and rested his arms across his knees.

Five seconds.

Paige ran as hard as she could. Bethany kept up beside her. They ducked branches, shoved others aside, vaulted deadfalls.

It hardly entered Paige’s mind to wonder what the hurry was. There was no room in her thoughts for anything but exhilaration. A wild, animal joy. She couldn’t recall ever experiencing this sudden and steep a reversal of emotions. She ran. She didn’t care why.

Zero seconds.

For the moment, the blue light stayed on.

Not surprising. Conservative estimates. It would die in the next few seconds.

Travis heard footsteps and small branches breaking. Paige and Bethany were still far away. Well over a minute out. He heard Paige call for him again. He didn’t answer. Suddenly shouting felt like a lie. They’d find him soon enough. He’d explain.

At five seconds past zero the idea came to him.

It hit like a physical thing. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it hours earlier, along with all the other preparations.

He threw himself forward and scooped up the cylinder. He aimed it roughly level with the ground and jammed his finger against the on button. The iris appeared and he saw the sun-drenched leaves of thin forest undergrowth in the present day, and heard the whine of the Sea Stallion again, hundreds of feet away. In the same instant he pressed the delayed shutoff button. He watched the light cone brighten.

His gaze fell and locked onto the last blue light of the timing line. He was certain of one thing: if the cylinder died before it detached from the iris, the iris would die with it.

He stared at the light cone, shining intensely as it charged the projected opening.

The seconds drew out like exposed nerves.

Then the light cone vanished, and the timing light vanished, and if there was even a hundredth of a second between the two events, Travis couldn’t tell.

He looked for the iris.

It was still there.

Still open.

Central Park waiting on the other side.

While he was looking at it he heard a hiss and felt the cylinder vibrate in his hands. He looked down and saw wispy tendrils of smoke issuing from inside the casing, coming out around the three buttons. The thing was dead.

Travis got to his feet and shouted for Paige and Bethany, loud enough that pain flared in his throat.

Paige hadn’t heard Travis in the past half minute. Now she heard him again, and at this range she caught in the sound what she’d missed earlier: panic.

He was screaming for them to move as fast as they could.

Paige had felt like she was moving her fastest, but hearing the tone of his voice, she found she could move a little faster. So could Bethany.

Travis kept shouting, providing a source for them to fix on.

He wasn’t even looking at his watch now. It didn’t matter. They’d make it or they wouldn’t. It was hell not being able to run toward them and help close the distance. He could only stand there, shouting, unable to hear their approach.

Paige saw him. Fifty yards ahead. Saw him react to the sight of them. Saw the iris hovering open just beside him as he waved them on.

She also saw the cylinder, lying discarded on the ground. She saw just the faintest trace of something coming off of it. Like smoke.

She got it without getting it.

Got it enough to understand it was time to move her ass a little faster still, and to urge Bethany ahead of her.

“Dive through it!” Paige shouted. “Don’t slow down!”

She saw Bethany nod.

They covered the last distance, and Bethany went through the opening like a kid through an upheld hula hoop. Paige followed. She passed across the threshold into a world of filtered sunlight and the rumble of traffic and some kind of heavy turbine engine whine. She hit the ground at the base of a shrub, and looked up. She was just at the edge of tree cover, looking out at a broad, sunny expanse of the park that could only be Sheep Meadow. Hundreds of people ringed the space, and—pretty damned improbably—there was an Air Force-marked Sea Stallion parked out in the middle. Paige had just absorbed that fact when she felt Travis hit the ground next to her legs. She turned to look at him, but saw that he wasn’t looking back at her. He was looking up toward the iris behind them.

But by the time Paige followed his gaze, no more than a second after Travis landed, there was nothing to see but shrub leaves and blue sky beyond. The iris had already disappeared.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Travis got his final update on the entire situation four days later. He got it by phone from Garner himself. Travis was seated near the back of a United Airlines 757 on approach to Kahului Airport on Maui.

Longbow Aerospace had been raided. The process had been well underway even by the time Travis landed with the dying cylinder in Central Park. The raids were authorized by the few mid-level Justice Department people that Garner explicitly trusted, and within hours the evidence had been exposed: control hardware and software for the strange and surprising instruments that were really in orbit aboard the Longbow satellites. By then the information was in too many uncorrupted hands for anyone to head it off. Not even President Currey could contain it.

The real story was never going to go public as anything more than a rumor. Travis had expected that. But the standin story was close enough: Longbow had knowingly put a weapons platform in orbit that violated several treaties and international laws. They’d done it without the government’s permission or even its knowledge—though many individuals within the government were tied to the incident. People were talking. Turning on each other. Names were being named. Including that of Audra Finn. She’d been taken into custody during the initial raids, and had already become the face of the story in the media. The faked death was just too irresistible a detail. Authorities were eager to speak to Audra’s husband, as well, but no one could seem to find him.

In strict legal terms, President Currey was well insulated from Longbow and the investigation surrounding it. But hundreds of powerful people in Washington who hadn’t been in Finn’s inner circle learned in detail what Currey had really been a part of. These men and women, at all levels of Justice and even the CIA, had no trouble grasping the severity of what had almost happened. Any one of them could stand in their children’s doorways late at night and consider Currey a man who’d intended to kill them. It wasn’t a good situation for the president. He knew it too.

He resigned from office three days into the investigation—yesterday. By that time, comparisons to Watergate had already fallen away. This was something much bigger. Essentially, the entire administration was stepping down. There’d been constitutional scholars on all the cable news nets talking about the event in terms of its logistics. Who the hell was in charge now? And how would that person be selected? Congress had managed to agree, pretty overwhelmingly, on at least a temporary solution: Richard Garner could come out of retirement. Maybe he could even finish out the term he’d been elected to, and 2012 could be another election year as scheduled. No one had offered much resistance to the idea, and Garner had been sworn in two hours before calling Travis on the plane.

All that remained to be squared away were the satellites themselves. They still had plenty of station-keeping propellant on board. Enough to boost them way out into what was called a disposal orbit, where they’d be harmless. But in the end, nearly everyone with any say in the matter had voted to go another route: push the damn things right down into the atmosphere and burn them to cinders.

“You should have a pretty good view of the show from Maui,” Garner said. “First re-entry is a couple hours from now between Hawaii and the Marshall Islands. About half of them should burn up over that area, and they’ll all be gone within the next twenty hours.”

“I’ve got a place in mind,” Travis said.

“Reservation for Rob Pullman?”

“His last.”

“If you want my advice,” Garner said, “try not to have the room to yourself all night.” He managed a laugh. “But who the hell am I to tell people what to do?”

They said good-bye and ended the call.

Travis rented a car at Kahului, went west to Highway 30 and took it south. He followed it clockwise around the broad sweep of the island’s western half, the Pacific at his left blazing with scattered evening sunlight. He passed upscale residential districts and clusters of hotels along the shore. Halfway up the west-side coast he took a left off the highway, and took another a quarter mile later. He pulled into the Hyatt Regency Maui, got out and followed a footpath to the beach. He stopped at the margin where the stone tiles met the sand.

He saw Paige after only a few seconds. She was sitting alone on a towel, staring at the sea. She hadn’t seen him yet.

Travis took out his wallet, withdrew a folded paper he’d kept in it for over two years, and stepped onto the beach.

Deep Sky

Patrick Lee

Definitions Established By Presidential Executive Order 1978-AU3

“BREACH” shall refer to the physical anomaly located at the former site of the Very Large Ion Collider at Wind Creek, Wyoming. The total systemic failure of the VLIC on 7 March 1978 created the BREACH by unknown means. The BREACH may be an Einstein-Rosen bridge, or wormhole (ref: VLIC Accident Investigation Report).

“ENTITY” shall refer to any object that emerges from the BREACH. To date, ENTITIES have been observed to emerge at the rate of 3 to 4 per day (ref: VLIC Accident Object Survey). ENTITIES are technological in nature and suggest design origins far beyond human capability. In most cases their functions are not readily apparent to researchers on site at Wind Creek.

“BORDER TOWN” shall refer to the subsurface research complex constructed at the VLIC accident site, to serve the housing and working needs of scientific and security personnel studying the BREACH. All signatories to the Tangent Special Authority Agreement (TSAA) hereby affirm that BORDER TOWN, along with its surrounding territory (ref: Border Town Exclusion Zone Charter), is a sovereign state unto itself, solely governed by the organization TANGENT.

Part I - Scalar

Chapter One

No one friendly had ever lived in the brick colonial house at the end of the cul-de-sac on Fairlane Court. Which was strange, considering how many different owners had come and gone since its construction, in 1954. Nearly twenty of them over the years. They’d all been polite enough: they’d all nodded hello when appropriate, and kept the yard meticulously neat, and never played their televisions or stereos loudly—if at all. To a man and woman, the owners had all been in their thirties, single, with neither children nor pets. They had dressed conservatively and driven dark green or dark blue sedans.

They’d also never answered the doorbell, regardless of the time of day. They’d never hung up colored lights for the holidays, or handed out candy to trick-or-treaters. Not one occupant of the house had ever invited a neighbor for dinner. And though the place seemed to change hands every two to three years, no one had ever seen a For Sale sign on the lawn, or found the address in a real-estate listing.

Strangest of all were the moving days. Despite the apparent simplicity of the men and women who’d lived in the house, every single one of them had required at least four full-sized moving vans to transfer their belongings. Some had needed upward of a dozen. These vans always backed up so snugly to the garage door that it was impossible to see what exactly was being moved in or out. And they always came at night. Always.

Neil Pruitt knew all of this, though he’d never lived on this street, and had never seen the house until tonight. He knew because he’d seen others like it; there were many others. Nineteen more here in D.C., and another ten across the river in Langley. In and around New York City and Chicago there were just under fifty each. Most cities near that size had a few dozen at least. Los Angeles had seventy-three.

Pruitt circled the decorative plantings at the center of the cul-de-sac, pulled into the driveway and got out of the car. The night was cold and moist, rich with the smells of October: damp leaves, pumpkins, smoke from a backyard fire a few houses over. Pruitt glanced at the neighboring homes as he made his way up the walk. A big two-story on the left, all lights out except in an upstairs bedroom, where laughter through cracked-open windows suggested a slumber party. A split-level ranch to the right: through the bay window at the front, he saw a couple on their couch watching a big LCD screen. The president was on TV, live from the Oval Office.

No such signs of activity from the brick colonial. Soft lighting at most of the windows, but no movement visible inside. Pruitt stepped onto the porch and put his key in the lock. No need to turn it—the mechanism beeped and then clicked three times as its computer communicated with the key. The bolt disengaged, and Pruitt pushed the door—a solid piece of steel two inches thick—inward. He stepped from the flagstone porch onto the white ceramic tile of the entryway. While the outside of the house had been updated over the years to stay current with decorating trends, the interior had enjoyed no such attention. It was clean and bare and utilitarian, as it’d been for nearly six decades. It was all the Air Force needed it to be.

The foyer was identical to its counterpart in every such house Pruitt had been in. Ten feet by ten. Eight-foot ceiling. Twin security cameras, left and right in the corners opposite the front door. He pictured the two officers on duty in the house, watching the camera feeds and reacting to his arrival. Then he heard a door slide open, around the corner and down the hall.

“Sir, we weren’t expecting a relief tonight.” A man’s voice. Adler. Pruitt had handpicked him for this post years earlier. His footsteps came down the hallway, still out of sight, accompanied by a lighter set. A second later Adler appeared in the doorway. Past his shoulder was a woman maybe thirty years old. Pretty. Like Adler she was a second lieutenant, though Pruitt had neither selected her nor even met her before. The name tag on her uniform read LAMB.

“You’re not getting one,” Pruitt said. “I won’t be staying long. Take this.”

Pruitt shrugged off his jacket and held it out. As Adler came forward to take it, Pruitt drew a Walther P99 from his rear waistband and shot him in the forehead. Lamb had just enough time to flinch; her eyebrows arched and then the second shot went through her left one and she dropped almost in unison with Adler.

Pruitt stepped over the bodies. The hallway only went to the right. The living space of the house was much smaller than it appeared from outside. There was just the entry, the corridor, and the control room at the end, which Pruitt stepped into ten seconds after firing the second shot. The chairs were still indented with the shapes of their recent occupants. He thought he could tell which had been Lamb’s; the indentation was much smaller. A can of Diet Coke sat on a coaster beside her station. In the silence Pruitt could hear it still fizzing.

He pushed both chairs aside and shoved away the few pieces of paper that lay on the desk. Long ago, the equipment in this room had filled most of the nine-by-twelve space. Over the years it’d been replaced again and again with smaller updates. Its present form was no larger than a laptop, though it was made of steel and had no hinge on which to fold itself. It was bolted to the metal desk, which itself was welded to the floor beneath the ceramic tiles. This computer controlled the system that occupied the rest of the house, the space that wasn’t easily accessed. Pruitt could picture it without difficulty, though. He looked at the concrete wall to his left and imagined staring right through it. On the other side was the cavernous space that was the same in every house like this, whether the outside was brick or vinyl or cedar shingle.

Beyond the wall was the missile bay.

Pruitt took his PDA from his pocket and set it on the desk beside the computer. Next he took out a specialized screwdriver, its head as complex as an ancient pictogram, and fitted it into the corresponding screw head on the side of the computer’s case. Five turns and the tiny screw came free. Within seconds Pruitt had the motherboard exposed. The lead he needed was at the near end. He pulled it free, and saw three LEDs on the board go red. In his mind he saw and heard at least five emergency telephones begin to ring, in and around D.C. One of them, deep in the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, had no doubt already been answered.

The response would come down on this place like a hammer. No question of it. But it would come too late. And those who responded would never guess his final intention. Not until they saw it for themselves.

He inserted the lead into a port on his PDA and switched it on. The screen lit up, the required program already running. It was one Pruitt had written himself, tailored for this purpose. The hourglass icon flickered, and then a password prompt appeared. He entered the code—a very long one—waited through another two seconds of the hourglass, and then saw the screen he’d expected. There was an input field for GPS coordinates. He pasted them in, having typed and copied them in advance, and pressed ENTER.

A second later the house shuddered. A heavy, continuous vibration set the floor and the desk humming.

Pruitt turned to the wall. He pressed his hands and then the side of his face against the concrete. Felt the animal waking up in its den.

Fifty-eight years ago the missile bay had contained a Korean-War-era Nike-Ajax. Pretty funny to picture it now, a weapon so simple and limited being trusted to defend the nation’s capital against Russian bombers and ICBMs. The Ajax fleet had been swapped out for the Hercules in the early sixties. Definitely an improvement, though still probably not up to the task. Only in the late eighties, under Pruitt’s tenure, had this program become viable—in his opinion—with the adoption of the Patriot system. A hell of a missile. But that wasn’t what was on the other side of the wall now.

Pruitt absorbed the vibration for another second, then pushed off of the wall and stood upright. He took a slip of paper from his pocket and set it on the desk beside the PDA.

The paper had a single short sentence written on it:

See Scalar.

The intended recipients would know what it meant. Pruitt himself didn’t even know. Or care.

He exited the room, leaving the PDA plugged in behind him. He returned down the corridor; where it met the entry, Adler’s blood had formed a common pool with Lamb’s, cherry red on the white tiles and nearly black where it’d saturated the grout.

Five seconds later he was out on the flagstones again, in the moist wind that smelled like leaves and pumpkins and smoke. He left his car in the driveway; already he could see the headlights of first responders, four blocks away and coming fast. He ducked around the side of the house and moved toward the backyard.

He could hear the missile from out here now. Louder every second. He heard dull thuds as heavy stabilizer arms retracted against the bay wall, and by the time he rounded the back corner of the house, the small basement windows at the rear had blown out and were venting steam into the night.

Pruitt crossed the shallow yard to the pines on the far end and stopped there, just inside them. He turned back and watched. He had to see it.

The house stood haloed by the headlights of the incoming vehicles. Tires skidded in the cul-de-sac and car doors opened and men’s voices shouted. Fast reaction. Almost fast enough.

The roof blew. The whole middle span of it. Wood splinters and asphalt shingles scattered upward like confetti, and in almost the same instant a shape knifed up through the opening.

An AMRM Sparrowhawk. Advanced multi-role missile. In keeping with the military’s crescent-wrench philosophy in recent years, the Sparrowhawk was a single tool with multiple uses. Specifically, surface-to-air and surface-to-surface. This one, stationed at this house, had only ever been meant for the defensive role, surface-to-air.

That wasn’t the role it would play tonight.

The missile, as wide as a telephone pole and almost as long, surged upward through the open roof, driven by a primary charge from the launcher below. Its momentum carried it above the treetops, maybe sixty feet higher than the roof’s peak, and just as it slowed and nearly stopped, the missile’s own engine engaged. For a third of a second it hovered almost still, like a Roman candle held upside-down. Then the flame beneath it went pure white, and the rocket screamed in a way that sounded eerily human—at a hundred times the volume—and a fast heartbeat later the thing was only a streak of light, climbing toward the speed of sound above Georgetown.

Pruitt watched it through the pine boughs. At two thousand feet its trajectory went flat. Its path defined a neat little semicircle in the sky as it hunted, and then it was gone, screaming southeast toward the ground coordinates he’d fed the PDA thirty seconds ago. The coordinates the Sparrowhawk would reach about ten seconds from now.

Movement at ground level caught Pruitt’s eye. The couple at the house next door had come out onto their rear patio, scared as hell and looking for the commotion. It was funny, in a way. Had they known, they could’ve stayed right on their couch, watching the live feed from the Oval Office.

That was where the show was going to be.

Chapter Two

Every night Travis Chase took the elevator up to the surface and went running in the desert. It was usually cool, and always clear. Tonight was no exception. He could see the machine gun flashes of a thunderstorm in the Rockies, fifty miles southwest, but above him the stars were hard and sharp in the twilight. The scrubland was solid as asphalt and took no footprints. It crunched lightly under the treads of his running shoes, his footfalls setting the cadence for his breathing. He could do six miles now without getting winded. Not bad. Forty-four years old and he was in the best shape of his life. When he’d started running in the desert, more than a year ago, two miles had been pushing it.

His circuit brought him around toward where he’d started. The loop was seven miles total, so he could walk the last one. His cell phone had built-in GPS that could plot his path and tell him when he’d covered six miles, but in recent months he’d found he didn’t need it. Habit and intuition were enough.

He slowed to a walk. His heart rate fell toward normal, and the pulse against his eardrums faded to the quiet of the desert night. This late in the year, whatever insects were native to Wyoming were long dead or dormant; there was no sound but the wind moving over the sand and dry brush, and the occasional, distant calling of coyotes.

In the trace moonlight Travis could see the low shape of the elevator housing a mile ahead. It wasn’t much to look at, even in daylight: a decrepit pole barn surrounded by the remnants of a split-rail fence. Someone could walk right by it and have no desire to investigate—if someone could get within thirty miles of it without being stopped.

This empty landscape was the most secure piece of real estate on the planet. There were no roads within a forty-mile radius. No overflights by either military or civilian aircraft. Intrusions by off-road vehicles, which were rare, were swiftly turned away by people who looked like pissed-off ranchers. They weren’t ranchers. They were something closer to soldiers, though not American soldiers. Strictly speaking, this featureless patch of eastern Wyoming was not American soil, and hadn’t been since 1978.

Travis slowed further until his footsteps became silent. Now and then, when the wind faded, he could hear the distant rumbling of the storm. He was half a mile from the elevator when his phone beeped with a text message. He took it out, switched it on and narrowed his eyes at the bright display.

NEWS. COME BACK FAST. CONFERENCE ROOM.

—PAIGE

An intense chain of lightning unwound itself sideways over the mountains, illuminating the front range. Travis switched off the phone and picked up his speed to a sprint.

Two and a half minutes later, in the deep shadows of the pole barn, he caught his breath—a full-out run could still wind him. He faced the elevator doors, opened his eyes wide and waited for the biometric camera to find one of his irises. A quick flash of red skipped across the left half of his vision, and then the doors parted in front of him, throwing hard light out onto the concrete barn floor.

He stepped inside and faced the array of buttons. All fifty-one of them. Though he only rarely had reason to press the button for the deepest level, his eyes always went to it, drawn by his awareness of what was down there. Sometimes, especially in the elevator, he could swear he felt the Breach somehow. Maybe in his bones. A rhythmic bass wave, like an alien heartbeat, five hundred feet below in its fortified cocoon.

He pressed the button for B12, and the doors closed on the desert breeze and the darkness. The cab descended.

What was the news?

Not a new arrival out of the Breach. If that’d been the case, Paige would have directed him to the Primary Lab, where newly arrived objects—entities—were always taken. Not a new discovery about an old entity, either. That, too, would’ve probably taken place in the Primary Lab, or some other testing area.

The doors opened on twelve, and Travis stepped into the hallway. Like almost any corridor in the building, at any given time, this one was deserted. Border Town was enormous relative to its population: about a hundred full-time personnel. Spread over fifty-one floors, they didn’t often bump elbows.

Travis turned the corner that led to the conference room, and saw Paige standing outside the open double doors, waiting. She had most of her attention turned inward on the room—Travis saw the glow of a television monitor reflected in her eyes—but she turned toward him as he approached. By now he could hear the ambience of a large number of people inside the room. Maybe everyone in the building.

When he reached Paige, she put her hand on his arm and left it there for a second.

“It’s bad,” she said, and led him through the doorway.

It was everyone. Standing room only. All eyes on the three large LCD panels on the right-side wall. Live news feeds: CNN, MSNBC, Fox. All three had aerial coverage of some structure on fire, surrounded by emergency crews. Travis looked from one screen to the next, seeking the clearest angle on the event, and after a few seconds the middle image pulled back and there it was.

The White House.

Burning.

More specifically, one of its wings was burning; the central portion of the house looked fine. Travis couldn’t tell whether it was the east or west wing that was on fire without knowing which way the aerial shots were pointing. He finally let his eyes drop to the captions at the bottom of each screen, and understood. An explosion, very near the Oval Office, possibly inside it. He studied the image again. Only a gutted cavity remained of the president’s office, all of it aflame despite two streams of water going into it from fire trucks on the scene.

“He was in there,” Paige said. “He was on TV, live, and then it just went to black. About a minute later they started reporting on it.”

The story resolved over the next two hours. Details came in, sketchy and then solid. The three networks must’ve had nearly identical sources—with each new piece of information, their chyrons updated almost in unison.

Twenty minutes into the coverage the secretary of state confirmed that President Garner had been killed. Vice President Stuart Holt, in Los Angeles for an environmental summit, was already in the air on his way back to Washington. He would be sworn in aboard the plane.

Travis found it hard to see Garner’s death in its proper light—its global and historical significance. Garner had been a friend, and now he was gone. That was the only way Travis could feel it, for the moment.

He tried to stay focused on the coverage. The details of the blast had already begun to crystallize. There were dozens of witnesses who’d seen a contrail in the air at the time of the explosion, though it was unclear, at first, whether it’d belonged to an aircraft or a missile.

Then, five minutes after the official announcement about President Garner, all three networks cut away from the White House to a new feed—still an aerial shot, but at a different location. A residential street somewhere. A cul-de-sac full of more emergency vehicles, mostly police cruisers but also an ambulance and a single fire truck. The house at the end of the cul-de-sac was heavily damaged in some way that was hard to make sense of. Most of its roof had been blown off, and the debris lay scattered around it, but the walls and even most of the windows appeared intact. Nothing was burning.

Around him in the conference room, Travis saw sudden looks exchanged. He glanced at Paige and saw her focusing hard on the televised images. The house. The missing roof.

A man to Travis’s left said, “Archer.”

A few others nodded, Paige among them. After a moment she seemed to feel Travis’s stare, and turned to him.

“Archer is an old Air Force program,” she said. “Goes back to the fifties. Defensive missiles concealed in civilian areas. Supposed to be a last line against a nuclear strike.”

Travis watched the implication spread across the room. President Garner had just been killed by someone in his own military.

It took less than an hour for rumors of the Archer program to filter into the broadcast coverage. Travis wasn’t surprised. Secret as the program was, it had to require hundreds of people to operate it. Maybe thousands. Impossible to keep them all quiet in the aftermath of something like this.

By two in the morning there was official confirmation that Archer existed, and that it had been used against the White House. CNN got an Air Force general on the phone who addressed those two points and then spent the next five minutes saying nothing at all in a dozen different ways. No word of a suspect. No word of a motive.

The helicopter footage remained the backdrop throughout, mostly covering the White House but occasionally returning to the cratered home on the cul-de-sac.

Travis had an idea that no further news was coming tonight, though the investigation had probably made serious headway already. No doubt there was an official suspect, dead or in custody. Those working the case probably knew most of what they would ever know. But they would be very careful parceling out that information to the public. The process would take weeks, not hours.

By 3 A.M. the crowd in the conference room on level B12 had begun to thin. Paige looked at Travis and communicated her thoughts without a spoken word.

Five minutes later they were in their residence on B16, under the covers, holding each other close in the dark. Travis could think of nothing to say. He thought about Garner. Knew Paige was thinking about him too. Only platitudes came to Travis’s mind. Garner had lived a long and dignified life. He would be remembered forever. His death had almost certainly come without pain. Maybe without awareness, even—the blast had probably killed him before he could see or hear it.

All of it true.

None of it helpful.

He kissed Paige’s forehead. Pulled her closer. Felt her body relax as sleep came on. Felt himself begin fading too.

Paige’s phone rang on the nightstand. She rolled, picked it up, squinted at the display. Travis saw by her reaction that the number was unfamiliar.

She pressed the button. “Hello?”

The caller spoke for a few seconds. Travis could discern only enough to tell that it was a man’s voice. He couldn’t make out the words.

“Yes, I’m in charge here,” Paige said. “Who is this?”

The conversation lasted five minutes. Paige hardly spoke. Just quick affirmatives to let the man know she was still listening.

When the caller finally stopped speaking, Travis glanced at Paige. In the diffuse glow from her phone, he saw her staring at empty space, her forehead knitted.

Two more syllables from the caller. It sounded like, Still there?

“Yeah,” Paige said. She shook off whatever she was trying to think of. “What you’re describing doesn’t sound familiar to me. I’ll look into it here, but you should probably assume this is a dead lead.” The man spoke briefly again, and then Paige said, “Thanks, I’ll let you know.”

She ended the call. Her eyes narrowed as if she was reviewing what she’d heard, committing relevant details to memory.

“That was the FBI,” she said.

“About Garner?”

Paige nodded.

“Do they have a suspect?”

“Yeah. Commanding officer of the crew on duty at the Archer site—a man and woman, both murdered. Cameras inside the house caught it all; the officer didn’t even try to hide his face. They’re into his financials now, and it looks like he got a giant payoff weeks ago, and spent all the time since making it liquid. Getting ready to disappear. Which he’s now done.”

“They don’t know where the money came from?”

“No, and they probably never will. They called here because the assassin left a note behind. The FBI seems to think it was addressed to us.”

“But you think they’re wrong?”

“No, I’m almost certain they’re right.”

Chapter Three

Paige pulled the covers aside, arched her body across Travis’s, and stood from the bed.

“Come with me,” she said.

She crossed the room, naked, to the desk chair where she’d left her clothes. Travis stared at her body in the soft light. Some sights were just never going to get old. Then he stood and went to his own clothes, clumped against the wall, and began pulling them on.

“The guy on the phone was Dale Nellis,” Paige said, “chief of staff to the FBI director. He read me the note—it didn’t take very long.”

She opened a drawer in the desk and tore a blank page from a notepad. Then she took out a pencil and wrote a single line:

See Scalar.

“That’s all,” she said.

Travis stared at it. He knew the word scalar as a mathematical term, but couldn’t see what meaning it might hold in the context of the attack.

“The FBI ran the word through their computers to see if anything interesting turned up,” Paige said. “A last name, an organization title, something like that. But they came up empty. A few small businesses have used that title over the years. A computer repair company, some kind of school supply maker, nothing much bigger than that.”

“Not exactly the usual suspects,” Travis said.

Paige shook her head, then nodded toward the door to the hallway. A moment later they were outside the residence, moving along the corridor toward the elevator.

Nearly every level of Border Town had the same basic layout, its hallways in the shape of a big wagon wheel. One giant ring corridor at the outside, a dozen spokes reaching inward to the central hub that housed the elevator and the stairwell.

“Nellis said he and a few guys at the top asked around,” Paige said. “Discreetly, among people they trust, mostly in the intel community. They even talked to some retired guys, on the possibility that Scalar is an older reference. Which it seems to be. So far the only people to recognize the word were both from around President Reagan’s time. One was a senator who chaired the Intelligence Committee back in the day, and the other was the deputy CIA director for a good chunk of the eighties. Both of them recalled Scalar as the name of an investigation from that time, but here’s the interesting part: neither one of them was ever cleared to know anything about it, beyond the name. Although there were some things they ended up learning anyway—things that couldn’t be hidden from them.”

“Like what?”

“Like the investigation’s budget. Whatever Scalar was—whoever was running it and whatever they were looking for—it had no spending limit. Any requested resource—I imagine things like satellite access, classified records access—was granted by the White House without delay, no questions asked. Scalar cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and spanned most of the 1980s, yet nobody in Congress, and nobody at the CIA, knew anything about it.”

They reached the elevator. Paige pressed the call button. She turned to Travis as they waited. He saw something in her eyes. Some kind of understanding.

“Nellis said he wouldn’t have believed that,” she said, “except that he heard it independently from each of these guys tonight. Even then, it’s pretty hard to swallow. He said he couldn’t imagine there was anybody out there with that kind of authority. Anyone powerful enough and secret enough to get that sort of cooperation from the United States government, with apparently zero oversight.”

Travis suddenly understood what her expression was about.

“It was us,” he said. “Scalar was a Tangent investigation.”

“I think it had to be,” Paige said. “Nellis made a few more calls, this time to higher-level people who are in power right now. He ended up getting a couple minutes on the phone with, well, I guess it’s President Holt now. Holt’s known about Tangent for some time—vice presidents are usually in the loop. When Nellis described Scalar for him, I’m sure Holt made the same assumption you and I just made.”

The elevator dinged softly and the doors parted. Travis followed Paige into the car. She pressed the button for level B48. The archives. It made sense. Though the files down there were mostly related to Breach entities and the experiments done on them over the past three decades, there were other kinds of records kept there too. If Tangent had been behind the Scalar investigation, whatever it was, the archives should contain a massive amount of data about it.

“Did the president give the FBI your number?” Travis said. That was hard to believe.

Paige shook her head. “The White House must have set up the call through a blind socket. Nellis didn’t even know my name when he introduced himself on the phone. Didn’t know anything about Tangent, either.”

Travis thought it over, watching the button display as the elevator dropped through the complex. He understood now why Paige had told Nellis it was a dead lead. If she’d told him the truth—that crucial evidence for an FBI investigation might exist here in Border Town—it would’ve created all kinds of jurisdictional problems. The FBI would’ve wanted access to this place, and they would’ve wanted to do a lot more than just look through the archives.

That wouldn’t have happened, of course. Not in a million years. The FBI would have been denied without even getting confirmation that Tangent existed. But it would’ve still been a political mess. And an unnecessary one. The simplest move was for Tangent to review the evidence itself. Then any information worth sending to the FBI could be routed through the White House, credited to a classified source. Nice and neat.

The elevator chimed again and the doors slid open on the archives. Travis followed Paige out.

The place had the look and feel of a library basement, some kind of periodical dungeon not set up for public use. Simple, black metal shelves. Narrow channels between them—just enough room for a person to pass through. The shelves reached the ceiling, ten feet up, and were lined with gray plastic binders. Each binder had a handwritten label fixed to its spine, filled out in a standard format with a given Breach entity’s name and number, followed by a string of letters and numbers Travis couldn’t make sense of. Some improvised Dewey decimal system created by Tangent’s founders back in the early years, before computerized storage had become standard.

As Travis understood it, the most recent fifteen years of data had been created on PDAs and filmed on digital camcorders. All of that information now fit easily onto a few rack-mounted servers, tucked away somewhere on this floor. But all the data older than that—roughly the same amount in terms of information content—had been written out by hand and filmed on analog tape. That data filled essentially the entire floor, ten thousand square feet of densely packed physical storage.

Paige led the way toward a clearing among the shelves, fifty feet out from the elevator. A desk stood centered in the open space.

“I take it you’ve never heard of Scalar yourself,” Travis said.

“Not even as a passing reference. Unless I’ve forgotten. And I can’t imagine I would have—whatever Scalar was, it sounds like it was a very big deal.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd? That nobody ever mentioned it to you? All these years?”

“It strikes me as close to impossible,” Paige said. “If Scalar happened in the eighties, my father would’ve known all about it. So why would he have kept it from me, later on when I came to work here?”

They passed into the open space and crossed to the desk. It was a big, practical thing: four feet by eight, black metal legs and surface, the same as the shelves. Five wooden chairs shoved under it at random. The desktop was bare except for a giant binder lying on its side, gray like those on the shelves, but much thicker. Ten or twelve inches wide at the spine, the thing was essentially a cubic foot of paper encased in hinged plastic. The word INDEX adorned the cover in adhesive block letters.

Paige heaved it open to about the midpoint of the post-bound stack. There were little tabs sticking out of the pages’ sides at intervals, marking the alphabetical arrangement. The pages were tightly packed with text under headings that were mostly entity names, though some were simply the names of people, or various labs or stations within Border Town.

The entries themselves, beneath the headings, each consisted of just a date and a string of letters and numbers—the same kind that appeared on each of the shelved binders. A locator code, pointing to a specific place in the archives. Each heading had dozens of such entries below it, indicating random places all over level B48. Travis understood the basic logic: for any given entity, each time a new experiment was carried out, the results were filed away in the archives wherever space was available, and the location was recorded in the index. It was much easier to do it that way than to continually rearrange all the shelves to keep related material bunched together.

The index had clearly been updated often over the years—each page bore a mix of typed and handwritten text.

Paige flipped to the S section and navigated to where Scalar should’ve been.

It was there.

And it wasn’t.

The heading was certainly there, right at the top of its own page.

SCALAR.

Beneath it, Travis counted seventeen separate entries, with dates ranging from 1981–06–04 to 1987–11–28. The locator codes were there too. The entries looked like all the others in the index, with one exception.

They were all crossed out.

Each had a simple line drawn through it, horizontally, in pen. The same pen, for all of them. It’d been done in one sitting—a single decision to cancel it all out. Yet there’d been no real attempt to conceal what the entries said. Travis was sure he knew why—was sure Paige knew too.

Five minutes later they’d confirmed it. At every one of the shelf locations listed in the seventeen entries, the Scalar files were gone. In their place the shelves were either empty or else filled with newer, unrelated material—binders labeled with entity names. Paige opened each of them anyway and flipped through their contents, on the chance that the relevant data had simply been disguised within them. It hadn’t.

“But it was here,” Paige said. “This was a real investigation, and Tangent was behind it. It lasted at least six and a half years, and during that time they filed the paperwork here in the archives. And then they got rid of every trace of it, and as far as I know, they never even talked about it again.”

She looked at Travis. Shook her head.

“What the hell was it about?” she said.

Chapter Four

They were back in their residence on B16, in the living room. Travis was sitting in a chair by the couch. Paige was pacing a few feet away. The LCD screen was on, tuned to CNN. The coverage was the same as when they’d left the conference room upstairs; all that’d changed was that the damage to the Oval Office was now concealed by a giant white tarp, pulled tight and square over a framework of scaffolding. It looked sharp and clean and dignified. Like a flag on a coffin.

For the past few minutes the commentary had focused on Garner’s legacy, including measures he’d supported and signed into law. An extension of the tax credit for electric vehicles. An aggressive education reform bill. Additional funding for a much-derided research program at Harvard and MIT called the Methuselah Project, aimed at learning how to counter—and even reverse—human aging by the middle of the century. It’d never sounded all that crazy to Travis; no crazier, at least, than sending a person to the moon or plugging most of the world’s computers into one another.

There was no mention of the message the assassin had left behind.

“The top people at the FBI have already called the best sources they can think of,” Travis said, “including the new president, and they’ve turned up almost nothing. Our safest assumption is that they’re done making progress—that no one in power knows anything about Scalar. No one who wants to help, anyway.”

“Which means Nellis is probably right: whoever did this left the message just for us, no doubt assuming we’d know what the hell it meant.”

Travis considered the strangeness of their situation. “Not only don’t we know who we’re playing against, we don’t even know what the game is. We better find out on our terms before we find out on theirs.”

Paige sank into the couch. “I don’t understand why my father never told me about Scalar.”

That would be a tricky question to answer. Paige’s father was dead, along with nearly every member of Tangent who’d known him. Paige herself, though only thirty-two years old, was by far the most senior member of the organization, with just over a decade’s involvement. There was a reason for that. Three years ago, the chain of events that’d originally brought Travis to Border Town had also, in the end, brought about the deaths of all but a handful of its inhabitants. The cataclysmic violence responsible still visited Travis’s dreams. Paige’s, too. He woke her from them a few times a month.

In time new members had been recruited, as quickly as caution afforded. Within a couple years the ranks had been essentially refilled. Then, while Paige and most of the senior personnel were on business in Washington, D.C., they’d come under attack by heavily armed assailants—the opening salvo of a new conflict. Paige alone had survived. From that moment on she’d been the only person in the world capable of leading Tangent. The strongest of the few threads tying its present form to its past.

“I worked here alongside my father for the bulk of the last decade,” she said. “Him and a hundred others. And most of them had been here since the beginning, which means Scalar happened on their watch. Why wouldn’t a single person have ever spoken of it?”

“Can’t have been a trust issue,” Travis said.

“Not a chance. We all trusted each other with everything. With our lives.”

“What other reason, then?” Travis said. “Embarrassment?”

Paige glanced at him, visibly uncomfortable at the thought. She shook her head, but Travis thought he saw more uncertainty than refutation in the gesture.

For thirty seconds neither of them spoke. The just-audible television took the edge off the silence.

Then Paige’s eyes widened a little and she said, “Blue.”

The word seemed to surprise her even as it came out. She stood from the couch and crossed to the short hallway leading to the bedroom. Travis stood and followed.

She had the computer’s monitor switched on by the time he entered the room. The computer itself had already been running.

“Blue status,” Paige said. She clicked open the file manager and navigated through a series of folders. Travis didn’t even try to keep track of them. “It’s a set of security measures we use for people who retire from Tangent.”

“I didn’t know anyone ever had retired from Tangent,” Travis said. “Except me, for the time I was gone.”

“It almost never happens,” Paige said. Her attention stayed with the computer as she spoke. “Three times, total, in thirty-four years. Not counting you.”

She reached the end of a directory tree, and Travis saw a folder icon that looked identical to all the rest, except that it was tinted blue. Paige clicked it. An input field opened, calling for two distinct passwords. Paige typed them quickly; only the second required any thought.

A personnel file opened on the screen. The format was familiar enough to Travis. He’d seen his own file and several others during his time here.

But he’d never seen any of the three names that now appeared on the monitor.

Rika Sengupta.

Carrie Holden.

Bartolo Conti.

“All three were here from the early days,” Paige said. “My father probably recruited them himself.”

Within seconds Paige clicked open each of their files and arranged them in three separate windows, visible at the same time.

All three had joined Tangent between the summer of 1978—the year the organization was formed—and the end of 1979. Original cast members, so to speak. Travis scanned the retirement dates for each file. Sengupta, Holden, and Conti had resigned in 1989, 1994, and 1997, respectively. All three had been with Tangent for the entire time Scalar was under way.

“Sengupta and Conti left for health reasons,” Paige said. “Both were very old when they retired—they wanted to spend time with their families while they could. Neither made it to the new millennium.”

“And Carrie Holden?”

“I only know a little about her. She was young when Tangent formed—early thirties. So, mid to late forties when she retired in ninety-four. She’d be into her sixties now.”

“Why did she retire?”

“I don’t know. I remember my father talking about her, sometimes. She was pretty important around here, in her day. But he never said why she left.”

She clicked to expand Holden’s file, filling the screen with it. There was a thumbnail photo that probably dated to the late seventies: a young woman with blond hair and green or hazel eyes. The file’s text dealt mostly with her pre-Tangent background—she had degrees in chemical and physical engineering from Caltech. There was nothing about her retirement, neither the reason for it nor the identity she’d assumed upon leaving.

“She’d have to know something about Scalar,” Paige said. “Certainly more than anyone else we’re going to find.”

“Can we find her? If she’s hidden as well as I was, her new name won’t be in the computer. Only the person who created the identity would know it—someone with Tangent in 1994—and that person has to be dead by now.”

Paige nodded. “That person was my father.”

“I don’t suppose he randomly let the information slip.”

“No. Not directly.”

Paige swiveled her chair to the side. She traced a path on the carpet with her foot, back and forth.

“I think they had a history,” she said. “She and my father. Some connection during the time they both lived here. He never said so, but that was the impression I got. The way he spoke when her name came up. Things other people said, and stopped short of saying.” Her foot slowed and came to rest. She looked at the computer but made no move to use it. “There was this strange little moment, one time. One of those things you end up filing away and never really thinking about, because it’s awkward. It was probably five years ago. I walked into my father’s office in the Primary Lab, and he had two things on his computer screen: a picture of Carrie Holden, and a Google satellite map. When he heard me come in, he flinched and closed them both, the map first and then the picture. It was very out of character for him—hiding something, being jumpy. But a second later when he turned to me, it was like nothing had happened. Totally casual—he ignored the moment entirely. So did I. I pretty much had to. And later on, when I had time to think about it, I was glad I’d done that, because I was pretty sure of what I’d walked in on. I think the map must’ve been the place Carrie relocated to, and my father was just … thinking about her. No special reason. You know what I mean?”

Travis nodded. He thought of the two years he’d worked in a shipping warehouse in Atlanta before coming back to Tangent. On occasion he’d found himself slapping a label onto a box of brake pads bound for Casper, Wyoming, less than eighty miles from Border Town. He’d stare at the box for a few seconds, dwelling on the fact that in a day or two it would be much closer to Paige Campbell than he himself would probably ever be again. Irrational as hell, but he’d done it all the time. It wasn’t hard to imagine Peter Campbell, in a private moment, gazing at a map of the place where Carrie Holden had ended up.

“You didn’t see the map clearly enough to get the location,” Travis said.

Paige shook her head. “There wasn’t time to see it, even if I’d wanted to. I was way across the room, and it was gone by the time I’d taken a few steps.”

She went quiet again. The only sound was the soft drone of the computer’s cooling fan.

Travis met her stare.

He knew what she was about to say.

She said it.

“We’ve both been thinking the same thing for the last ten minutes: there’s a way I can find out exactly what my father knew about Scalar, and failing that, I can certainly learn what location that map was showing. The same approach works for both problems.”

Travis nodded. “I’ve been trying to think of an alternative.”

“Me too. But there isn’t one. We could rack our brains all day and it’d be for nothing.” She looked at him. “You hate that I’m the one who has to do it. If you were the one, I’d hate it too. But I wouldn’t try to stop you. Okay?”

Travis exhaled. He thought about it for another five seconds. Finally he nodded again. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Five

Level B42. The Primary Lab. Other than the chamber that held the Breach itself, this was the most important place in Border Town. All entities that were unique or nearly so, sufficiently powerful, and still being studied on a regular basis were stored on this level, behind blast doors as heavy as those at NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain. Travis and Paige passed through them into a long central corridor with extensions branching away left and right. B42 was one of the few levels with a distinct layout—it was more than twice the size of any other floor, its boundaries having been expanded over the years by excavation of the surrounding deep soil.

The place was deserted. Their footsteps echoed strangely in the silence.

They came to the door they needed within a minute. It was standard sized but heavy duty, with a palm scanner beside the lock. Paige put her hand to it and a moment later they were through into the space beyond, a room the size of a walk-in closet with a bank of small vault doors on the opposite wall. One bore a magnetic placard with crisp black lettering:

ENTITY 0728—TAP

Travis felt his jaw tighten at the sight of the name. Paige looked at him and noticed.

“I’m not a fan either,” she said. “Let’s get it over with.”

She crossed to the vault, turned the dial back and forth in sequence, heard the lock disengage, and hauled the door open. Inside was a single tiny object: a rich green translucent cube half an inch across. It might have been a blank die cut from emerald. But it wasn’t.

Paige stared at it a moment, then picked it up and turned from the vault. Her movements were casual in a way that seemed deliberate to Travis. A forced calm. He didn’t blame her. She crossed the small room, stepped back out through the heavy door, and stopped in the middle of the corridor.

“Right here is as good as anywhere,” she said.

Travis joined her in the hallway. For a second her calm facade slipped. Then she discarded it altogether and sat down at the base of the wall. She leaned her back against it and drew her knees close to her body. Travis sat beside her.

“Deep, slow breaths,” he said.

“I know.”

“Give anything to trade places with you.”

“I know.”

She had the Tap lying on her open palm, eye level in front of her. Travis watched how the light played over and through it. Strange, silvery shapes in its depths. Tiny swirls and arcs, like scimitar blades.

Then in one fluid move Paige took the cube between two fingertips and put it to her temple. She pressed it against her skin, and Travis saw the thing’s edges blur as it vibrated.

Paige’s breathing accelerated in spite of her efforts. She reached across her midsection with her other arm and took hold of Travis’s hand.

“You’re okay,” he whispered.

She nodded quickly, probably not even processing the words.

Then it happened. The little cube liquefied in the span of a second, and collapsed to what looked like a thick drop of aloe gel between Paige’s fingertips. In almost the same instant the top of the gel rose and formed a point—and then a filament. A wirelike structure maybe a centimeter tall, thin as fine guitar string. It stood there swaying to the tremor of Paige’s body. Then it pointed itself inward and plunged through the skin and bone of her temple.

Her hand spasmed and gripped Travis’s tightly. Her breaths turned into little cries, betraying the pain but only just. Travis knew how much it hurt. He’d experienced it himself. The Tap had emerged from the Breach during the two years he’d been away, but had still been in frequent testing when he’d returned. Like many others he’d volunteered to have a go at it, and his single use had gone as smoothly as he could’ve hoped. Despite the pain involved, he’d intended to use it again.

Then a woman named Gina Murphy had taken a turn with it, and everything had changed. In the six months since, not a single person had used the Tap.

Travis watched as the gel drop shrank by the second. The thing was feeding itself into Paige’s skull through the tiny hole made by the filament. Though Travis couldn’t see what was happening inside, he could easily recall how it felt: like a living thread, ever lengthening, darting and slipping among the deep folds of the brain’s surface. Flitting and hunting and finding its way like a snake’s tongue. Every second of it agony.

But that was normal for the Tap. So far, everything was going well.

Paige’s cries intensified. Her eyes were screwed shut.

“I’m right here,” Travis whispered.

Five seconds had passed since the lead end had gone in. The gel mass on her fingertips was half spent. The insertion never took longer than ten or twelve seconds.

Paige got control of her breathing just before the end. She went quiet and let her face relax. The last trace of gel shrank to wire thickness and slipped in, leaving nothing but a tiny drop of blood at the entry point.

Paige opened her eyes.

“Better?” Travis said.

She nodded.

The tendril always stopped moving once it was fully inside; the pain stopped with it, for the most part.

She was still gripping his hand. With his fingertip against her wrist, he could feel her pulse pushing three beats per second, though it was slowing by the moment.

“I’m ready,” Paige said. “Catch me if I start to tip over.”

“Wait.” He repositioned himself so that he was seated facing her. She got the idea and scooted forward from the wall, until their chests were touching and their legs were around each other’s hips. He hugged her close to him, and she rested her head on his shoulder.

“No worries about falling over,” he said.

She nodded against him and let her body relax, her breathing now almost back to normal.

“See you in three minutes and sixteen seconds,” she said.

She felt the effect begin as soon as she closed her eyes. One moment there was a floor beneath her and Travis’s arms were around her, and the next she was gone, floating in some neural equivalent of a sensory deprivation chamber. She felt the Tap vibrating softly inside her head, its pathway wandering from her temple across the underside of her skull, to the parietal lobe on the opposite rear side. No sense of her limbs. No sense of anything but her thoughts.

And her memories.

She focused on the one she wanted. Envisioned her father’s office—her office, now—on that day five years ago. He’d been sitting with his back to her, the map on one half of his monitor and Carrie Holden’s face on the other.

The image came to her almost at once—much more easily and vividly than it normally could have. She saw it from her own point of view as it’d been in that moment, just passing through the office doorway, her shoe scuffing the tile and making her father flinch. She froze the image just like that, in the instant before he closed the map.

The Tap was a hell of a thing. The memory image hovered in front of her like a projection, as complete and accurate as a highres photo of that moment would’ve been.

But this capability wasn’t what made the Tap special. If it had been, she would’ve come up empty: at this range she couldn’t read any of the map’s labels. Not the street names. Certainly not the town’s name, if one was there. She could resolve only a road running north and south, and a modest grid of streets clumped along the middle of its length. A few lesser roads strayed off left and right from the bunch. It could’ve been any of a hundred thousand small towns in the world. The image told her nothing.

She allowed the memory to slip forward in time. The desk and computer began to grow in her field of view as she advanced into the room.

Then her father’s hand moved on the mouse, and the map vanished—its clarity had improved hardly at all.

She froze the image again, then let it begin to run backward. Her viewpoint drifted away toward the door behind her. The map popped onto the screen again. Now came the doorway’s edge, sliding into her view from the side. With it came the scuff of her foot, sounding eerie in both reverse and slow motion. She pulled back all the way into the corridor and kept going, retreating to maybe five seconds before she’d entered the room. She knew from experience that if she wanted to, she could play the memory stream forward or backward at just about any speed she could make sense of. It was scarcely different from rewinding or fast-forwarding a video file. She could plunge back through a spastic wash of images at an hour per second, skim through a day in less than half a minute, then slow down and dial in on anything she wanted to see. Every split second of it would be rich with photo-accurate detail. Every moment of her life was there to be revisited and studied. It should’ve been impossible—with even her passing grasp of neuroscience she knew that. Human memory was good, but not this good. However adept the Tap was at pulling information from her brain, this much information shouldn’t have been there to begin with. The Tap was a hell of a thing.

Yet this function was still not what made it special—or difficult to accept as possible. Not by a country mile on either score.

Paige let the image freeze again.

Five seconds from the open doorway. Out of sight beyond it, her father was staring at Carrie Holden and the map, unaware of Paige’s approach in the corridor.

Perfect.

To use the Tap’s real selling point, all she had to do now was wait. The controls were simple and intuitive. A few seconds passed, the memory still frozen, and then she began to feel her feet beneath her. She was hovering in the void, but her feet tingled as if they could sense the ground half an inch below them.

She willed herself to drop, and felt her shoes connect solidly with the surface.

In that instant the memory came to life. It was no longer an image in front of her—it was a world around her: the hallway and the fluorescent lights and the hum of air exchangers and the trace smell of cleaning solution on the floor. Her body was there too, propelled forward by its own momentum—she’d been mid-stride at this point in the memory. The movement almost threw her off balance as she came to a stop. She put out one hand and caught the wall, and silently halted herself two feet short of the doorway.

To all of her senses she was really standing here, in this moment that was five years gone. Her father was really in the next room, just beyond the edge of this doorway. The Tap let you relive memories exactly as they’d been—but that still wasn’t what made it special.

What made it special was that it let you relive them as they hadn’t been.

Paige moved forward into the doorway.

She took care not to let her shoe scuff the floor.

She saw her father seated at the desk, staring at the map and the picture of Carrie. He had no idea Paige was there.

She took a step into the room. Then another.

He sat there, adrift in his thoughts, eyes fixed on the screen.

Another step, and another.

She could see the map more clearly now than before. She was closer to it than she’d gotten in real life.

Another step.

Still not close enough to resolve the words on the screen.

But almost.

When she’d heard the early accounts from those who’d first used the Tap, she hadn’t believed them. It just couldn’t be true; how could you remember details you hadn’t actually seen the first time around? Then she’d tried it herself, and there’d been no more denying it. In fact the Tap’s power was far greater than she’d supposed in the beginning. You could do more than just cross a room you hadn’t crossed and read words you hadn’t been close enough to read. You could pick up a book you hadn’t opened at the time—or ever—and flip to page 241. You’d see the words on that page as they existed in real life, and you could verify it for yourself after snapping out of the memory and finding a copy. If she wanted to, Paige knew she could back out of her father’s office right now and, in the middle of this memory, go upstairs and schedule a flight to Paris. She could take that flight and walk the Champs-Élysées, and it would be swarming with the very same tourists who’d been there on this day five years ago. The scene would be accurate to the last detail. Every lock of hair brushed from a forehead. Every smile.

As with all entities, there were only guesses as to how it worked. The technician who’d spent the most time testing it, a man named Jhalani who’d once been a colleague of Stephen Hawking’s at Cambridge, imagined the Tap to be a kind of antenna. Clearly it did more than just draw information from the user’s brain—Jhalani believed it drew from something quite a bit grander: the set of all possible universes. Paige had heard of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, but only as an interesting hypothetical notion. She’d been surprised to learn from Jhalani that it was actually a mainstream idea in modern physics. The thrust of it was that every event that could go one way or another actually went both. Every time you looked at wheat bread and white bread and chose white, some other version of you, out there in the great who-the-hell-knows, chose wheat. Physicists mainly talked about it happening at the level of subatomic particles, but if it applied down at that scale, then it certainly applied to loaves of bread and flights to Paris and shoe scuffs on tiled floors. In the end, Paige thought Travis had summed the Tap up best: it let you remember not just everything you’d done, but everything you could have done. A hell of a thing.

She took another step toward her father’s desk. She’d be in his peripheral vision soon—right about at the point where she could read the map. The margin would come down to inches at best.

It was critical that she get this right the first time—the first time would be the only time. The Tap’s one limit was that you couldn’t revisit the same memory twice. The techs liked to say that a memory was burned after you relived it. Not only couldn’t you drop into it again, you couldn’t even remember it the old-fashioned way afterward. The original would be forever replaced by the revision. Therefore an especially cherished moment—a first kiss, say—was better left alone.

Another step.

If it came down to it, she had options. This was, for all its considerable bells and whistles, only a memory. Nothing she did here would be of consequence in the real world after she woke up. Which meant she could leap at her father, shove him away from the computer, and read the map before he had time to react. At that point she could simply be done with the whole thing—to end this memory she needed only to concentrate hard on her last glimpse of reality: she and Travis sitting in the deserted corridor on B42. A good ten seconds of that image would take her right back to it.

But she hoped to avoid attacking her father. Doing so would preclude the other move she planned to make here. The more obvious move, by far, though she wished she could forgo it.

Another step. And another.

The labels on the map were right at the brink of her discernment now.

Another step.

She could see the number on the big road running north and south. U.S. 550, it looked like. She thought that was somewhere in Colorado. Just above and to the left of the grid of streets was a word—almost certainly the town’s name. A short word.

She squinted.

Ouray.

Ouray, Colorado. She’d heard of it. Some friends in college had stayed there when they went skiing at Telluride.

Good enough. If she really wanted to, she could end the memory now.

A big part of her did want to. The same part that hated the second move.

Which was simply to talk to her father.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to talk to him. Quite the opposite. She’d been very close to him, especially in their last years together, and then she’d lost him in the worst imaginable way. When she’d first learned what the Tap could do, she’d considered reliving a moment with him. Something happy and good and warm, to replace the ending life had given them.

But she’d resisted. Always. As real as it would feel, the moment would be fake. And desecratory, somehow. The whole notion had seemed wrong from the beginning.

It still did.

She watched him sitting there, unaware of her. She took a breath and smelled his aftershave. She couldn’t remember smelling it on anyone since she’d lost him. All those years, that scent had just been part of the background. A thing to hardly notice, if at all. It could make her cry right now, if she wasn’t careful. She let the emotions swim a few seconds longer, then shoved them all down into the deep.

Time to do this.

She backed away from the desk, turned and left the room without a sound. She walked to a spot in the hallway ten feet from the door, pivoted and faced it again.

And cleared her throat loudly.

She heard her father’s chair squeak at once, and heard the mouse scrape on his desktop.

She walked to the doorway and leaned in, and found him staring at a file directory. She knocked on the frame and he looked up at her.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

Her throat constricted; she couldn’t help it. Jesus, even a random moment like this. Especially a random moment like this. The kind they’d had a million of—should’ve had a million more of.

She swallowed the tightness and stepped into the room. “I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

No reason to drag things out: “What was Scalar?”

He didn’t quite flinch. It was more subtle than that—all in the eyes. A flicker of fear and then perfect calm. He tilted his chair back and appeared to search his thoughts.

“Rings a bell,” he said. “Where’d you come across it?”

“In the archives. There’s an index page for it, but all the entries are crossed out.”

“Oh—I remember. Let me guess, the entries went from the early to late eighties.”

Paige nodded.

“It was a clerical thing,” her father said. “Had to do with videotape formats, way back. We used to shoot everything on standard VHS, and then we switched over to VHS-C—digital was still a ways off. Anyway, when we made the switch we decided to transfer all the old stuff too, for shelf-life. Huge pain in the ass. Couple thousand hours of stock. Probably took us six years or more, on and off.”

He shrugged, waiting for her to let it go.

She returned his gaze and wondered if he’d ever lied to her before this. Sure, he’d kept his work with Tangent secret from her, all through her childhood, but what choice had he had? This was different. And harder to stomach than she’d have guessed.

“That all you wanted to know?” he said.

Only a memory. She held onto that idea like it was a handrail at the edge of a cliff. If she called him on his lie, she wouldn’t actually be hurting him. He wasn’t real.

“Honey?” he said. “Everything okay?”

“I’ve already asked some of the others about Scalar,” she said. “No one wants to say much, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t about transferring videotapes.”

His expression went cold.

“There was government involvement,” she said. “And it cost hundreds of millions of dollars. I want to know what it was.”

He stared. He seemed to be coming to some careful decision. When he finally spoke, it was in a calming tone, but one full of fear—for her. As if she were standing there with a gun to her head.

“Paige, you don’t want to get into this.”

“I have a right to know. And I don’t appreciate being lied to.”

“You’re right—I lied about the VHS stuff. But you lied too. No one here in Border Town told you a thing about Scalar. There are maybe half a dozen who know the parts you just described, and none of them would’ve said anything without coming to me first. Which means you talked to someone on the outside. And that scares the hell out of me.”

She couldn’t think of what to say to that. Almost every word had caught her off guard.

Her father stood from his desk and crossed to her. He stared at her with that strange, minefield caution still in his eyes.

“Who have you spoken to?” he said.

“First tell me what Scalar is.”

“Paige, this is more serious than you can know. If you’ve talked to the wrong people, you may have already triggered things we can’t stop.”

“Then tell me. Everything.”

He shook his head. “Knowing about Scalar puts a person at risk. I wouldn’t tell you a word of it to save my life. Now I need to know exactly who you spoke to. I’m not kidding.”

“If others here know about this, then I should know too—”

He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him—she had to step fast to stay balanced—and shouted into her face. “Who did you talk to?”

She pulled her arm away, turned and ran. Through the doorway, along the corridor, the lights sliding by and her father’s footsteps coming fast behind her. She shut her eyes as she ran. Pictured the deserted B42, where she and Travis were sitting. It was hard to focus on it now.

“Paige!”

Running. Eyes shut tight. Only a memory.

Travis held on to Paige and waited. Three minutes, sixteen seconds. It always took that long, no matter how much time someone spent inside a memory. During his own use of the Tap, Travis had revisited a random night of his stretch in Atlanta. He’d dropped into the middle of a long shift at the warehouse, then just walked out of the place and got in his Explorer. He drove west all that night and all the next day, stopping only for gas, food, and a couple naps, and reached the Pacific in about thirty-six hours.

Had he wanted to, he could’ve stayed in the memory for months—probably even years. Techs had remained under for as long as six weeks without encountering trouble. They’d even tried staying under while catching up to the present time and surpassing it; had it worked they would’ve found themselves remembering their own futures, a trick with all kinds of fun potential. But all attempts to do that had failed—even the Tap had its boundaries. Subjects hit the present and saw their vision start flashing green and blue like some system-crash warning, and then they involuntarily emerged from the memory—three minutes and sixteen seconds after going under, as always.

Only one person had ever come back sooner. Gina Murphy. Her eyes had popped open at around two minutes and thirty-five seconds, and she’d screamed and held her head as if it were being pried apart. The screaming had lasted for over a minute, while Travis and others carried her to the medical quarters. Along the way Gina managed to evict the Tap from her head—another intuitive control, you got it out by simply wanting it out—but that didn’t end the pain. Her death ended it, around the time they set her on a bed in medical. By then she was bleeding from every opening in her face, including her eyes. An Army medical examiner, off-site, did the autopsy the following day. The results, understandably, were unprecedented in medical literature. Gina had died from laceration and hemorrhaging of the brain, confined to a narrow pathway atop the neocortex. In the doctor’s words, it looked like someone had taken a radial saw to the contents of her head, but had managed to do it without cutting the skull.

More disturbing than those answers were the questions that didn’t have any. Above all, what had gone wrong? Had something about Gina’s biochemistry triggered the problem? Had she used the Tap in some incorrect way? What would that even mean? She’d gone under to relive a memory, like everyone else had done—some sibling’s birthday party she’d missed years ago. The fact was that the questions weren’t just unanswered. They were unanswerable. As with all entities, Tangent was simply out of its depth. There was a way to get yourself killed using the Tap, and no victim would ever live to say what it was.

Travis watched the time on his phone.

Two minutes and thirty-five came and went.

He relaxed only by a degree.

Three minutes.

Three minutes and ten.

Fifteen.

Sixteen.

Paige jerked against him and took a hard breath.

“Fuck,” she whispered.

She raised her head from his shoulder.

“One for two,” she said. She rubbed her forehead, looking badly rattled by something. “I’ll explain while we wait for the plane.”

Chapter Six

Before they’d even returned to their residence, Paige called Bethany Stewart—one of the youngest people in Tangent, at twenty-five, and very likely the smartest. Bethany answered on the second ring with no edge of sleep in her voice, despite it being four in the morning.

“I need DMV files, with photos, for everyone in Ouray, Colorado,” Paige said. She spelled out the town’s name. “Narrow the results to females in their sixties, and send them to my computer.”

“Take five minutes,” Bethany said.

It took three—and less than another two for Travis and Paige to spot Carrie Holden among the candidates. She’d dyed her hair dark brown, but nothing else had changed except her age. Her name in Ouray was Rebecca Hunter.

They were in the air by 4:20. Though Tangent kept no aircraft on-site at Border Town, it had a small fleet stationed at Browning Air National Guard Base in Casper, ten minutes’ flight time away.

The jet, a Gulfstream V with seating for eighteen, felt enormous with only the two of them in the cabin. The pilots’ voices up front were lost under the drone of the engines. Travis looked out as the aircraft climbed, but there was only unbroken darkness below. The nearest towns were faint pinpricks of light, far out on the plain beyond the limits of the Border Town Exclusion Zone.

For a few minutes neither spoke. The jet’s turbofans throttled back an octave as the aircraft reached altitude and leveled off.

“You’re thinking about it,” Paige said.

She didn’t have to frame it as a question any more than she had to specify what it was.

It was almost all Travis thought about these days.

He nodded without meeting her eyes.

Fourteen months ago Travis had rejoined Tangent after two years of self-imposed exile. He’d spent the fourteen months doing the same kind of work as everyone else in Border Town—helping to study Breach entities, both new and old—while also cramming for hours a day to give himself the underpinning of scientific literacy that every other Tangent recruit had come prepackaged with. He’d taken to it surprisingly well. At ten months he’d passed the equivalent of MIT’s Calculus 4 exam, and had at least a solid undergrad-level hold on physics, chemistry, and biology. The joke was that none of it really mattered where entities were concerned: the smartest people in the world were probably about as qualified as sparrows to study the objects that emerged from the Breach. Still it was nice to speak the same technical language as everyone else, and Travis had found his awe of the Breach only deepening as his intellect grew. Like staring at the night sky through increasingly sharp eyes.

More to the point, his recent training meant he could do real scientific work at Border Town. He felt like he belonged there now—as a contributor, not just an outsider taking up space.

But that wasn’t why he’d come back.

That wasn’t it.

“Are you wondering if there’s a connection?” Paige said. “Between whatever’s going on right now and … the thing about you?”

“I’m always wondering that,” Travis said. “Every time something new comes along, I ask myself if it’s all starting. Sooner or later, the answer will be yes.”

The issue was complex, but Travis thought of it in simple terms. Like delineated notes in some PowerPoint presentation. Or individual black flies circling his head.

The first piece of it was certain: somewhere down the road, Tangent would learn to use the Breach to send messages to the past—propelling them into the tunnel from this end, against the resistance force at its mouth, in such a way that they would re-emerge before they were sent in. The reason Travis was certain of this was that two messages had come back already. Some future Paige, and some future Travis, had given their lives to send them—the physical process of doing so was unavoidably fatal.

There were lots of details, but they all shook out to this: something bad was coming. Something that would end about 20 million lives. Something Travis himself would be responsible for, and might have no choice but to do, because to not do it would be worse.

Paige’s future self, perhaps acting on limited information, had opposed the action—whatever it was. Her message to the past had been a retroactive order—to herself—to kill Travis, in the hope of preventing this thing from happening at all.

Travis had countered her move by sending his own message—a messenger, really: a radically advanced, self-aware handheld computer called Blackbird, though almost everyone knew it as the Whisper. The Whisper had emerged even further in the past than Paige’s message to herself, and had set about manipulating people and rewriting history in order to put Travis in front of the Breach when Paige’s message came through.

In doing so, it’d allowed him to intercept it.

In the present, Travis and Paige had only limited clues as to what the hell it all meant. Their future selves had sent perfectly contradicting pleas, each important enough to merit dying in the bargain. All that differentiated the sacrifices was that Travis’s had been sent after Paige’s—it must’ve, since it’d been a response to hers. Had he known something she didn’t?

The details ended there. That far-off Travis had withheld them, no doubt fearing they would turn his present self away completely. All Travis could do was wait for it. Wait for any sign that it’d begun. The first link in the chain that would pull him down into the dark.

Down toward it.

“Let’s not dwell on it too much,” Paige said. “Save tomorrow for tomorrow, right? With any luck we won’t live to see it anyway.”

The man in the white parka had a name—Dominic—but his employers didn’t know it. Maybe they had a nickname for him, or more likely a number, but if so they never addressed him by it. They didn’t address him at all. They just called and gave him instructions. They were the only ones who knew the number for the blue cell phone.

That phone had rung last night while Dominic was painting the den in his condo in Santa Fe. A nice rich green that contrasted well with the white trim and the walnut desk. Dominic set the roller in the tray and answered before the ringtone reached the first drumbeat of David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Dominic listened as the caller spoke, committing everything to memory, then hung up and went to his closet and opened the cavity behind the back wall. He selected a white parka with battery-powered heating good for twelve hours of lying still in the cold, and a matte-white Remington 700 with a four-power scope. Two minutes later he was in his car en route to the private terminal at Santa Fe County Municipal.

Now he was lying prone in the snow five hundred feet above and half a mile east of Ouray, Colorado. He lay at the pinched, far end of a valley that rose from the town’s outskirts. The town looked like a snow globe village, its streetlights casting cones in the big papery flakes that were coming down. A halo of light-bleed surrounded Ouray itself—a barrier of visual warmth against the dark.

Dominic lay far outside that warmth, out in the deep, empty night.

So did the cabin he was watching.

He put his eye to the scope and panned across the windows. A pale glow rimmed the blinds at one of them—maybe a fluorescent light in a laundry room left on all night. Every other window was dark. There was a mercury lamp on a post in the front yard, though its glow served only to make the cabin appear lonelier. Only two other structures stood in the valley: a low-slung ranch and a mobile home, both tucked in close to town. The cabin was on its own.

Dominic raised his eye from the scope and looked at his watch. Not quite five in the morning. He’d taken position just after midnight. Nothing about the cabin had changed since then. Daylight was two hours away, but it would present no problem when it came. Dominic would remain invisible, and so would the five-man team he knew was lying much closer to the place—probably within forty yards of the front door.

Chapter Seven

They landed at Telluride Regional and rented a Jeep using the perfect false identities that, in recent years, all Tangent personnel traveled under. Travis drove. They rolled into Ouray from the north at a quarter to six in the morning, the still-dark streets of the town all but empty.

Travis swung left off of Main Street onto the valley road that led to Rebecca Hunter’s address. He thought he could see the place already, high in the darkness above town. A cabin in a little pool of light, seeming almost to float in the void. The emptiness around the place disquieted him on some level. His hand went to the shape of the SIG Sauer P226 holstered beneath his jacket. In his peripheral vision he thought he saw Paige do the same.

There were entities they could’ve brought along to make this trip less dangerous, but Tangent rarely sanctioned taking Breach technology outside Border Town. The risk was obvious: if things went badly, the entities could end up in someone else’s hands. It’d happened before, with one of the most dangerous things ever to emerge from the Breach: a full-body suit that rendered its wearer perfectly transparent in every kind of light. The resulting misery and violence had plagued Tangent for years before they recovered the damned thing—no one wanted to go through it again.

“Wonder if she’s an early riser,” Paige said.

“She is today, like it or not.”

They pulled into the cabin’s drive sixty seconds later, the headlights sweeping over a landscape of low evergreen shrubs and scattered pines, all shrouded by a four-inch layer of snow. Travis killed the lights and the engine and they got out. Their feet crunched on gravel beneath the powder.

The cabin was single-story, closer to small than big. Maybe two bedrooms in there, depending on their size. No sign of movement yet. There was a light at one window, but Travis had seen that long before they pulled in. If Rebecca—Carrie—had noticed their arrival, it wasn’t evident from out here.

There was an older model Ford F–150 nosed up against the place, matching the description in the DMV registration. Its tire tracks, all but erased by the night’s snowfall, led back out to the road.

A layer of rock salt had been scattered around the cabin’s entry to a radius of ten or twelve feet, reducing the ground there to moist gravel. Travis and Paige crossed it and went to the door, a heavy construction of knotted pine planks with no window. Its one notable feature was a peephole. Travis pressed the doorbell and heard the chime sound inside.

For five seconds nothing happened. He was reaching for the button again when a light came on at the far end of the house, to their left. Another ten seconds. Then footsteps, drawing close and stopping. Travis imagined Carrie Holden standing right there with her eye to the peephole, a foot and a half away from them. What could they look like to her? What could any two strangers look like at 5:50 in the morning? It occurred to him that she might simply refuse to open the door. He wondered what they would do in that case, but only for a second—the lock disengaged and the door swung inward eight inches, and Carrie Holden stared out at them through the gap, clad in a quilted robe.

She looked older than in the DMV picture, as Travis had expected; the license had been updated three years ago. Maybe sick with something, too—her features seemed drawn and pale—though she was perfectly alert. Her eyes went back and forth between the two of them.

“We’re with Tangent,” Paige said. “We need to speak to you—Ms. Holden.”

If any of that startled the woman, she didn’t show it. Her eyes stayed fixed on Paige’s. Then she exhaled softly and nodded, not upset but nowhere near happy, either. She pulled open the door and stepped back to admit them.

Inside, the cabin was close to what Travis had pictured: the cozy side of rustic. Timber walls, rough-hewn beams supporting the vaulted ceiling, potbellied woodstove on the hearth. The huge living room window was a living postcard of Ouray. Travis could think of worse places to hide out from the world.

Carrie didn’t offer them anything to drink. Just led them across the entryway into the living room, sat in a chair facing the couch and left them to conclude that they should sit too. They did.

“This is Travis Chase,” Paige said. “And my name is Paige Campbell.”

Carrie nodded, politely if not quite kindly.

“I’m not coming back to Border Town,” she said. “So if that’s what you came to ask about—”

Paige cut her off, shaking her head. “We’re just looking for information. We need to know about an old Tangent investigation called Scalar. Do you remember it?”

As before, the woman showed no trace of surprise.

“I remember it to the extent I knew about it,” she said.

“Can you tell us what you know?”

“Why would you need me to? You’re with Tangent, you should have better sources than me.”

“We don’t,” Paige said. “The reasons would take a while to go into, and they wouldn’t brighten your day. Can you just tell us? I’m sorry to be this blunt, but it’s important. Something’s happening, and it relates to Scalar, and we need to know as much as we can.”

Carrie nodded, but only vaguely. Her hands, as fragile looking as the rest of her, moved nervously on her knees.

Travis studied her face. The stretched skin. The withdrawn eyes.

The voice alone was strong. Surprisingly so, for someone apparently ill.

He glanced at the end table next to the couch. Its base had shelves for magazines, all of them cluttered with old issues of Newsweek, National Geographic, and some local paper.

There was also a notepad with a pen clipped to it, its front page covered with phone numbers and random pieces of scribbled info. No doubt the pad had been there for as long as the cordless phone cradled atop the end table.

Travis indicated the pad and met Carrie’s eyes.

“Mind if I take notes?” he said.

She nodded again.

Travis took the pad, unclipped the pen, and turned to a fresh page. He began writing something immediately, though Carrie hadn’t spoken yet.

“Please start with the basics if you can,” Paige said. “What was the investigation about? What were we looking for?”

For a long time the older woman said nothing. Then her hands went still and she looked up at Paige.

“I’m sorry,” Carrie said. “Before I say anything, I need to hear whatever you know about Scalar.”

“I just told you,” Paige said. “We don’t know anything. Just the name.”

“Here’s the problem,” Carrie said. “There are at least a few people outside of Tangent who know that investigation by name only. People in the government—people in several governments. Those people were kept from knowing more than just the name, and for good reason. It’s not unthinkable that such parties, should they manage to find me here, would pretend to be with Tangent and ask me for information.”

Paige was already shaking her head. “Ma’am, I can assure you—”

“There has to be something else you know about Scalar,” Carrie said. “Some detail to prove you’re not an outsider.”

Travis turned the page he’d written on and began writing on the next. After only a few seconds he turned that one too, and continued on a third.

For a moment, pondering Carrie’s demand, Paige appeared lost. She pulled her bangs back from her forehead and stared into empty space in front of herself. Then she looked at Carrie.

“In the archives index in Border Town,” Paige said, “on Level B48, there are seventeen entries devoted to Scalar. The first is dated June 4, 1981. The last is dated November 28, 1987. All seventeen of them are lined out in blue ink. Is that good enough?”

Carrie looked impressed. But still undecided. She took a breath to speak, but before she could, Travis finished writing and set the pen aside. He turned the pages back until his first was on top, then calmly handed the pad across to Carrie. The move surprised her, but she took it and read the few lines Travis had written:

Nod if the real Carrie Holden is still in this cabin.If you make a sound I will kill you.

By the time the woman looked up from the pad, Travis had drawn his SIG Sauer and leveled it at her face.

Chapter Eight

She didn’t make a sound.

Her hands began to shake again, and she lowered the notepad to her lap.

Travis was too focused on the woman to see Paige’s expression, but whatever her reaction was, it didn’t freeze her. Or lead her to a different conclusion from his. She drew her own weapon and aimed it at the woman.

Travis raised his eyebrows and pointed at the pad with his free hand, prompting her for an answer.

The woman swallowed and seemed to consider her options. She didn’t have any.

She nodded forcefully. Yes, the real Carrie Holden was still here.

Paige began speaking, her tone as casual as Travis had ever heard it. Anyone listening to an audio feed of this room—as someone undoubtedly was—would’ve heard no hint of tension. “If you need me to, I can put you in touch with other Tangent personnel to confirm we’re who we say we are. We need your information, Ms. Holden.”

Travis gestured for the woman to turn the page. She did.

How many are watching this place?Nod if they are inside.

She thought about it. Raised a hand and extended all four fingers and her thumb. Then she shrugged and added the index finger of the other hand. Five, maybe six.

She also shook her head, slowly and deliberately. No, the watchers were not inside the cabin.

“Maybe you’ve guessed,” Paige said, “but the thing that’s going on right now is tied to Garner’s assassination last night. Which in turn is linked to Scalar. How, we don’t know.”

Nothing she was saying was especially sensitive—the people listening in almost certainly had that information already.

Travis gestured again: turn the page.

The woman complied.

Say you need to use the restroom.Make no other sound.

Another swallow. A final moment of decision behind her eyes.

“I’m sorry, I need to use the powder room,” the woman said, and before the last word was out, Travis set his gun aside and lunged across the space between couch and chair. He got one hand over the woman’s mouth and nose before she could change her mind and scream, and looped the other arm around her neck, sliding right down onto the cushion beside her as he did it.

He left plenty of space between the crook of his elbow and her throat—he had no intention of strangling her. Instead he pressed his bicep to one side of her neck and his forearm to the other, in a sleeper hold—a blood choke, as they’d called it on the force in Minneapolis. Full compression of the carotid arteries on each side. You could kill someone if you weren’t careful with this move, though admittedly Travis wasn’t all that concerned for this subject.

She lasted seven seconds, then went limp against him.

On the possibility she was faking it, he took hold of her left index finger and pried it radically backward toward the top of her wrist, far beyond the ninety-degree limit it was built with.

She didn’t react.

She wasn’t faking.

He lowered her to the chair and stood. Paige, already on her feet, handed him back his gun. He holstered it, then crossed the room to the hallway and the half bath there, wide open and empty. He closed the door loudly for effect, then turned back to find Paige right beside him.

She leaned close and whispered against his ear. “They won’t buy this for long. We’ve got a couple minutes, tops.”

He nodded.

She drew back, then pressed in again. “I suspected, but I wasn’t sure. How’d you know?”

“She didn’t react to your last name. She should’ve, if she was close with your dad.”

“I thought the rock salt out front was overdone. Should’ve just been a path to the truck. Now we know why there was so much.”

Travis nodded again. Sometime last night a group of people had descended on this place. Maybe they’d parked on the road and come around behind the house to hide their footprints. Maybe the woman—the decoy—had rung the doorbell alone and gotten Carrie Holden to open up. Whatever had followed had been fast and brutal, and left lots of tracks going in. All of which had been erased by the salt.

Travis indicated the woman on the chair. “Find something to bind her with. I’ll find Carrie.”

Paige headed for an open closet near the entry. Even from here Travis could see random articles of clothing inside. Long-sleeved shirts whose arms would do fine as makeshift ropes.

He turned his attention farther down the back hall, past the bathroom. There were two doorways at the end, facing each other, both open. One room dark, one lit.

He hadn’t bothered to ask, in writing, whether Carrie Holden was still alive. Partly that was because he’d been in a hurry, but mostly it was because he’d assumed she was. Anyone who’d gone to this much trouble to set a trap for him and Paige must have a good reason to take them alive—it would’ve been far easier to open fire on the Jeep the moment they pulled in. Certainly that approach wouldn’t have required finding a passable lookalike. It followed that the aggressors would keep Carrie alive, too—the more Tangent prisoners, the merrier.

He advanced along the hall.

Dark room, lit room.

The decoy had been waiting in the lit one. She’d turned on the light when he rang the doorbell. It seemed likely that Carrie was in that same room: the impostor would want to keep an eye on her.

It occurred to Travis that the woman could’ve lied about the people watching this place: they could well be inside right now. They could be in either or both of the rooms ahead. In any such scenario he was outgunned. It almost wasn’t worth drawing his SIG. He drew it anyway. If someone was about to take him out, he might as well return the favor as best he could.

Behind him he heard Paige tying the woman’s wrists and ankles. The sound was vague, indistinct. To a listener it might have been someone shifting awkwardly in a seat.

Travis covered the last ten feet of the hallway at a fast walk, reached into the dark room to where the light switch had to be, and flipped it.

Home office. Big oak desk with a laptop and a green glass-shaded lamp and a scattering of papers. No closet. Nowhere for anyone to hide.

Travis spun in the hall and faced the other room. Carrie’s bedroom. Bigger than the office. Walk-in closet on the far wall, full of clothes and random boxes. No one hiding there, either. No one hiding anywhere, here. There was only Carrie Holden herself, bound and gagged with duct tape on the floor beside the bed, staring up at him with wide and alert eyes.

He holstered the gun and crossed to her, kneeling and putting a finger to his lips as he met her stare.

He removed the tape from her face first; it was triple wrapped but the overlap was sloppy, leaving the lowest layer exposed at the edge. Travis tore through it easily and pulled all three pieces aside. Carrie took a deeper breath than she’d probably taken in hours.

“Do you have a gun here?” Travis whispered.

Carrie nodded.

“Are you good with it?”

Another nod, accompanied by a look—mild annoyance at the question. Which boded well.

Travis considered what he’d seen of the cabin’s layout so far. One fact stood out: there was no back door. No easy way in or out but the entry he and Paige had used.

That was good.

He met Carrie’s stare again as he turned his attention to the rest of her binds.

“We can make it out of here alive,” he whispered, “but you have to do exactly what I say.”

As he freed her wrists he began to explain the plan.

Chapter Nine

Every instinct told Dominic something was wrong. The decoy’s decision to use the bathroom was entirely out of line. Granted, she wasn’t a professional at this kind of work—Dominic had no idea where his employers had found her, though without a doubt she’d come from somewhere within their own ranks. Probably high in the ranks. She was someone. Or someone’s sister or mother. They would’ve only chosen somebody whose loyalty was beyond question.

What wasn’t beyond question was her capability. Clearly she had no experience at being a standin. Who the hell did, aside from undercover cops and a few deep-cover intel people? It was pressure work of the worst kind. Contrary to what some believed, deception did not come naturally to most people. Even telling a small lie triggered all kinds of stress reactions, and this woman was telling a big one.

For all that, she’d done well at first. Right on script, as far as Dominic could tell. Her job was to get the visitors talking. Get them to disclose what they knew about Scalar—whatever the hell that was—in a setting where they felt comfortable enough to speak freely. Later on, after the team had taken them, there would be time to interrogate them at length, but that sort of questioning was chancy at best; Dominic knew that from long experience. You could torture someone for a computer password or a vault lock combination—information that could be confirmed on the spot—but you could rarely get at their deeper secrets. Broad, general information was hard to extract by brutal means. You couldn’t force the answers when you didn’t even have the questions.

Hence the decoy.

And she’d done fine until the bathroom thing.

Maybe her nerves had gotten to her. Maybe she’d needed a break to rein in the jitters and refocus. Splash some water on her face.

Maybe.

Offhand, Dominic could think of no other reason. If there was another reason, it was something bad. Something very fucking bad.

He spoke into the microphone that extended from his earpiece. “What are you seeing?”

The team leader near the cabin responded softly. “Nothing you’re not seeing.”

“I don’t like this,” Dominic said.

“Same. Standing by—for now.”

Travis finished whispering the plan as he got Carrie to her feet. She winced at the stiffness in her joints but looked steady enough.

Paige was standing in the doorway—Travis realized she’d been there for some time.

“Need me to repeat it?” he said.

She shook her head. “I heard.”

Travis guided Carrie into the hallway and the three of them returned to the living room.

Paige had done a thorough job on the decoy. She lay on the floor at the base of her chair, her wrists tied behind her with one arm of a cardigan, her ankles with the other. The sleeve of a wool sweater had been wedged between her teeth and tied around her head. There was some risk of her waking up and making noise—banging against the furniture if nothing else—but Travis wasn’t worried. One way or another, this would all be over in the next minute or two.

He wondered where the listening device was, but didn’t look for it. It could be anywhere. Under the couch. Tacked beneath the top of the end table.

He spoke at room volume: “She seems nervous, doesn’t she?”

“Probably just caught off guard,” Paige said. “It’s not every morning she gets a visit from Tangent.”

Travis moved silently across to the bathroom. He eased the door open, slipped inside and closed it gently behind him. Then he flushed the toilet, banged the lid down, and turned on the faucet.

Dominic relaxed a notch.

“You hearing this?” he said. The running water was just audible over the feed.

“Got it. Guess she just had to go. Jesus.”

A moment later the faucet shut off and the door clicked open.

“Sorry about that,” he heard the decoy say. Her tone sounded different—probably because of her distance from the microphone. “Please continue.”

The young female visitor spoke. “As I said before, Garner’s death has some connection to Scalar—”

The young woman stopped speaking. Dominic cupped his hand over the earpiece and listened carefully, but couldn’t hear anything happening—any reason for her to have cut herself off.

“What’s going on?” the team leader said.

“Quiet,” Dominic said.

For three more seconds the silence held.

Then the older woman spoke. “Is there a problem?”

Dominic’s stomach tightened. He thought he knew what was coming.

It came.

The young woman said, “You’re not Carrie Holden.”

Fuck.

The team leader spoke up, fast and tense: “Ready to move on my mark.”

“I beg your pardon?” the decoy said.

There was no reply from either the young woman or her male friend. Instead there came a burst of commotion. Furniture sliding. Bodies interacting. Voices raised and jumbled over one another. The male visitor said, “Get her legs!”

“Move now!” the team leader said. “Now, now, now!”

Two seconds after that Dominic saw the team sprinting into the pool of light in front of the cabin. All five of them, Heckler & Koch automatics in hand, rushing the front door in a tight group. Like a sledgehammer coming down on a knuckle.

Travis gave the end table a kick to create the last of the commotion, then turned and ran for the firing position he’d picked out moments earlier. Paige and Carrie had each already settled into theirs—Paige behind the corner at the hallway’s mouth, Carrie behind the iron woodstove. Carrie had retrieved her own pistol—a Beretta 92FS—during the long silence in the living room.

Travis reached his cover: an island in the kitchen. He dropped to a knee behind it, drew his SIG and leveled it on the door.

Already he could hear the footsteps outside, crunching hard on the exposed gravel. Seconds away.

Three protected shooting angles on a solitary chokepoint, against aggressors who didn’t even expect to come under fire—who expected to burst in on a scuffle among unprepared subjects.

Travis took a breath and steadied his hand on the granite.

The footsteps outside covered the last stretch to the door. Whoever was leading the pack didn’t stutter-step. He hit the lock at full speed and the latch-plate splintered from the frame and the door exploded inward.

Dominic didn’t really expect to hear shooting. The team would seek only to control the situation. At most they’d trigger a few three-round bursts into the ceiling for intimidation, though even that was unlikely. These men were professionals. They knew how to assert themselves without theatrics. And their orders were explicit: take the subjects alive. Gunfire of any kind would be an unnecessary risk.

Dominic’s own orders were in the same vein. His role was to disable the visitors’ vehicle if necessary—one shot to the engine block would do—but otherwise to withhold fire.

Only under the most implausible scenario, in which the visitors eluded the team and seemed likely to escape, was Dominic to engage them with lethal force.

It wouldn’t come to that. The decoy plan had failed pretty miserably—almost comically—but the rest would be warm butter on toast.

He was thinking that very thing when he heard the front door crash in—and right on top of that sound came the first gunshots. He flinched and tore out his earpiece, but not before recognizing what he was hearing: not the 9mm bursts the team would fire, but single shots of something heavier. Forty-caliber Smith and Wesson, it sounded like. And maybe a few 9mm shots among them, but not in three-round bursts. All the shots were sporadic but one at a time.

Then it was over.

Three seconds, start to finish.

In the silence he heard his pulse in his ears. And the wind sighing over the ridge into the valley, pushing the big snowflakes almost sideways.

He felt for his earpiece and put it back in place, but for the longest time he heard nothing.

Travis stood and surveyed the aftermath. His eyes picked out the relevant points in order of importance.

Paige and Carrie were unhurt.

All the bodies in the entry were down and still.

There was no one else coming in. No footsteps outside. No voices. Just empty darkness and blowing snow.

The decoy was still lying bound in front of the chair. Still unconscious. And unharmed.

The women stood from their cover. They met each other’s eyes, and Travis’s.

Travis crossed from the kitchen to the front door, his gun still trained on the bodies. He scrutinized them, saw that each had taken at least one headshot, and felt his tension step down a degree.

A second later it stepped back up.

Five bodies.

In his mind he saw the decoy extending five digits of one hand, then adding another finger with a shrug.

Five, maybe six.

If there was a sixth man, where was he? Why wasn’t he with the group?

Travis thought of the terrain surrounding the cabin, and the answer suggested itself. And made his skin prickle.

A lookout, up high. Almost certainly armed.

He saw earpieces on each of the corpses. He stooped and took the nearest one, and fixed it to his own ear.

“Are you listening?” he said. “Do you hear that? That’s the sound of none of your friends breathing.”

He waited.

No reply.

He hoped he was talking to dead air. But doubted it.

Dominic had already swiveled the mouthpiece behind his head so the man wouldn’t hear his breath. He kept the earpiece in place. He listened. Time drew out. It felt like the audio equivalent of a stare-down.

“Correction,” the man in the cabin said. “One of your friends is breathing. The nice old lady who lied to us. I guess it’s possible she’s not really your friend—but she’s somebody’s friend, isn’t she? I bet she matters to the people who hired you.”

Dominic felt his adrenaline begin to climb. He could see exactly where this was going.

“She has to be someone personally close to them,” the man said. “Who else would they trust to do this? I don’t think they found her on Craigslist.”

Fuck. Fuck.

“So here’s how this happens,” the man continued. “The three of us, plus your decoy, are leaving right now. In a tight group. You won’t have a shot that doesn’t risk hitting her. We’re going to stay tight all the way to the Jeep, and we’re going to sit tight inside the Jeep, and we’re going to keep it that way until we’re long gone. And if you try to kill the vehicle and strand us here, my first move is to put her brains in the snow. Try me if you think I’m bluffing.”

A hard plastic clatter ended the speech: the man had dropped the earpiece on the floor.

He wasn’t bluffing. Dominic was clear on that. Even if he’d thought it was a bluff, he couldn’t have taken the chance. He had no idea who the decoy really was—therefore risking her life wasn’t his decision.

It was someone else’s.

He reached into his parka and withdrew the blue cell phone. He double-pressed the send button and saw the display light up, the phone already dialing the man who’d called him last night.

First ring. No answer.

Far below, a broad shape emerged from the cabin. Four bodies clumped together. Three walking, one being carried. Even without looking through the Remington’s scope Dominic could see there was no shot. No single head was distinct—they were all shoved together in a silhouetted mass.

Second ring. No answer.

The group reached the Jeep and piled in and the engine roared. The headlights came on.

Third ring. No answer.

The vehicle backed around in a tight arc until it faced the road, then lunged forward, taking the turn fast and racing away down the valley toward town.

Fourth ring. No answer.

Dominic put his eye to the scope and centered the reticle on the Jeep. He did the math, the variables stacking up automatically in his head: range, velocity, elevation, time.

He could kill the vehicle easily right now. Once that was done he could put shot after shot into the passenger compartment, then sprint down to it and make a thorough finish.

That would hold true for maybe twenty seconds, given the Jeep’s speed. After that it would be more luck than skill.

Twenty seconds, if the call connected right now.

Twenty seconds to explain the situation and get a decision.

Nineteen seconds.

Fifth ring. A click on the line. A man’s voice: “Talk to me.”

Travis hated having the headlights on, making an easier target of the vehicle, but he had no choice. Under this cloudcover the valley would be ink black, and he couldn’t afford to lose the road. Burying the Jeep in snow would be fatal if there really was a sixth man back there.

A memory from childhood came to him: Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. Some point along this road represented the fabled bridge, the margin beyond which they would be safe.

He was certain they hadn’t reached it yet.

Paige was next to him in the passenger seat. Carrie sat centered behind them, leaning forward over the console. She had the decoy slumped across her lap, still bound, the Beretta pressed to her head in case she woke. Which she seemed to be doing—she was making noises.

How long since they’d pulled onto this road? Ten seconds? Fifteen?

Ahead lay the town, bright and welcoming beyond the darkness that engulfed the Jeep. They were ten seconds shy of the light when the first bullet hit. It struck the left edge of the hood with a sound like a baseball bat’s impact, but deflected without penetrating the metal. Travis felt the others flinch, and his hands jerked on the wheel, and for a terrible second the vehicle began to fishtail on the snowy road. The back end went left, the wheels spinning without purchase. A second shot skipped off the hard top three inches above Travis’s head. He felt cold air seethe down through the resulting rupture in the material. Then the Jeep straightened and surged forward again, and for the next three seconds nothing happened except that the town got closer and the darkness ahead of them got shorter. Three seconds for them to think they might make it.

Then the rear window shattered and a spring twanged inside a seatback, and blood splattered all over the windshield.

Chapter Ten

Not Paige.

Later, that would be the only thing Travis remembered thinking as the next seconds played out. Not the calculation of how far they had to go to reach safety, or how long that would take. Not the awareness that he needed to keep the Jeep under control. Not even the fear of another shot.

Not Paige. That was it. He could handle anyone else in the vehicle dying, himself included. Just not Paige.

If anybody was screaming, he couldn’t tell. His ears were ringing with increased bloodflow and the wind was keening through the hole above him, drawn by the pressure differential from the missing back window.

They passed into light on the east edge of town and the first available cross street came up fast. Travis braked and hauled right on the wheel, and halfway through the turn he saw a newspaper box on the streetcorner buffeted by a shot. The papers inside fluttered as if they’d caught a moment’s breeze. Then the Jeep was fully onto the side street and accelerating, with two-story brick buildings shielding it from the shooter.

The blood on the windshield was running down, each thick drop now a vertical line.

Travis turned to Paige.

Her left coat sleeve and the left side of her face were bloodier than the windshield.

But no more damaged than the windshield, either. It wasn’t her blood—a fact she seemed to be just verifying for herself. She turned in her seat and looked back at Carrie Holden.

Carrie wasn’t leaning forward over the console now. She was pressed against her own seatback, one hand to the lower left side of her abdomen.

Her fingers were soaked with blood.

“Jesus Christ,” Paige said. She repositioned herself so she was kneeling, facing Carrie; she switched on the dome light and bent down to study the wound.

Her first discovery was notable: the rifle bullet had clipped Carrie’s side—and fragmented in the decoy’s head. Most of which was now gone. As Travis looked more carefully at the blood on the windshield he saw that not all of it was blood. There was gray matter there. And a few chips of bone. He wondered if a death had ever mattered less to him.

He glanced back again and saw that Carrie had pulled up the bottom of her shirt to examine her own injury. It was all but superficial. The bullet had hit her so far to the side that it had almost missed—a quarter inch would’ve made the difference. The result was like a shallow knife slash to her side. Some bleeding, but no serious trauma. She let the shirt fall back over it and shoved the decoy’s body to the floor.

Travis glanced at Paige as she faced forward again. He saw her working out the pieces of what’d just happened.

“I guess it’s possible that whoever killed Garner could’ve found this place,” she said, “if they had the right connections. The government would’ve had no record of where you relocated to, Carrie, but they would’ve seen your name drop off Tangent’s personnel list in 1994. They’d know you were out there somewhere. In the past few years, facial geometry software could’ve probably narrowed DMV records to ten thousand or fewer. Narrow further by age and then look for a real-estate purchase or lease agreement in ninety-four, and they’d be in the ballpark. Wouldn’t take much legwork beyond that point. They might’ve found you five years ago and filed it away under useful.”

Carrie nodded. She looked emotionally drained, but still alert. “I used to be so careful about everything. Paranoid, even. After a while, it felt nice to think I didn’t have to be.”

Paige looked at Travis. “I think I was wrong earlier. The note they left for us—I don’t think they did expect us to understand it. Not in full, anyway. If they anticipated our showing up here, they must have known we’d be hard up for information about Scalar. They knew we’d come here to ask Carrie about it.”

“That makes the trap contradict itself,” Travis said. “Why set up a decoy to get information out of us, if we were only coming because we were clueless?”

He considered it for two seconds and then answered his own question.

“Confirmation. They believed we didn’t know anything, but they wanted to be certain. Like whatever it is they’re doing, they had to rule us out as a threat.”

Paige looked at him. “There’s no way they killed a president just to set all that up.”

“Not a chance. They’d need a bigger reason for that. This feels more like an afterthought.”

“Could the real reason involve putting Stuart Holt in power?” Paige said. “Maybe he’s involved. He’s the one who pointed the FBI toward us, ultimately leading us here.”

“It’s something to keep in mind,” Travis said.

They reached the end of the street and Travis took a left. Three blocks ahead lay Main Street, which was also Highway 550 running north out of town.

“I heard your introductions from the other room,” Carrie said. “Travis Chase. Paige Campbell.” A pause. “You’re Peter’s daughter.”

Paige looked back at her and nodded.

“I watched you grow up in photographs on his desk,” Carrie said. “You were fourteen when I left.” Again she paused. Then she said, “He’s dead, isn’t he? If he were alive, he wouldn’t have let you come here to ask me about Scalar.”

Paige nodded again.

Travis made the right onto 550. He could see the road extending ahead beyond the edge of Ouray, north into the darkness.

Then Carrie drew a hard breath with a shudder in it, and both Travis and Paige looked back at her. Travis had guessed the pain was getting worse, but she wasn’t wincing, and her hands were nowhere near the wound; they were relaxed on her knee.

The only thing tense was her face—with fear.

She looked at them both. “Is it really starting again? Everything Scalar was about?”

“Yes,” Travis said. “How much do you know about it?”

“Some. I know all about how it started. What led to it. Not much detail of the investigation itself. Peter was … hesitant to talk about it.”

“So I learned,” Paige said.

“Please tell us as much as you can,” Travis said. “Right now all we’ve got are questions.”

Carrie nodded. She sat there a moment putting her thoughts in order. When she spoke again, Travis could still hear the fear, though contained, subdued.

“The Scalar investigation was a cold case. It was cold even when Peter and the others started working on it in 1981. In a way, it was a manhunt, though they knew the man in question was already dead. Their goal was to learn about something he’d done just before he died—something that might have long-term consequences. The man’s name was Ruben Ward. I’m sure you’ve both heard of him.”

The name was instantly familiar to Travis, but he couldn’t place it. It was like trying to match an obscure actor’s name to a face or a role. He looked at Paige and saw no such struggle in her expression—she knew exactly who Ruben Ward was.

She glanced at him. “You read about him your first day in Border Town, in the journal down on Level 51.”

It came back to him before she’d even finished speaking. In the first hour Travis had spent in Border Town, more than three years earlier, Paige had given him a tour of the essentials. Which was to say she’d shown him the Breach. But first she’d taken him into a fortified bunker down the hall from it, and let him read a bloodstained notebook that dated to the Breach’s creation—March 1978.

That journal had been written by a man named David Bryce, a physicist and a founder of the Very Large Ion Collider project, which had once—very briefly after its completion—resided on the premises. Bryce had decided to keep an informal account of events at the VLIC: a journal that he and others could write in whenever they felt like it. The first entry had been jotted a few hours before the collider’s maiden test shot; Bryce’s tone had been lighthearted and hopeful. The same couldn’t be said for the rest of the entries.

The remainder of the journal chronicled not only the hellish first days after the Breach’s formation, but Bryce’s own descent into something like an animal mindset, his cognitive functions and his inhibitions stripped away by exposure to the Breach—specifically the sounds that issued from it. Breach Voices, as they were now known.

The journal had also mentioned Ruben Ward, the man who had actually thrown the switch to initiate the VLIC’s first shot. The man who, in the strictest sense, had opened the Breach.

Ward had paid instantly for the privilege. According to the journal, he’d collapsed at the moment of the shot—possibly jolted by the switch or its metal housing—and never woke during the days that followed. Travis had heard a bit more about him afterward: Ward had been transferred to some hospital out east, still unresponsive, and ended up in a coma unit. That was as much as Travis knew. In all the time since he’d first heard the story, he’d never brought it up again. Neither had anyone else.

“I was under the impression he died at Johns Hopkins,” Paige said, “a couple months after the VLIC accident. April or May of 1978.”

“That’s what we told people,” Carrie said. “People who joined Tangent later on, after Scalar had come and gone. Kept them from asking unwanted questions.”

“So where did he really die?” Paige said.

“In a hotel room in Los Angeles, late that summer. August 12. He walked out of the coma unit at Johns Hopkins by himself in the first week of May, vanished off the grid for three months, then checked into a room on Sunset and put a .38 in his mouth. At the time we all thought we understood, more or less. Whatever the VLIC accident did to him must have left him scrambled. Maybe deep depression, maybe anxiety. He struggled with it that summer and then called it good, we figured. It wasn’t until a few years later that we found out we were wrong. Very wrong. At which point Peter launched the Scalar investigation to try to piece together those missing three months. He was desperate to find out where Ward had gone during that time, and what he’d done—desperate to learn anything about him, really.”

“Why desperate?” Travis said.

Carrie met his eyes in the mirror. “Because Ruben Ward knew what’s on the other side of the Breach.”

Chapter Eleven

Travis felt a chill crawl over his scalp. It had nothing to do with the air pouring through the bullet hole in the roof.

“How is that possible?” Paige said. “How could anyone know that?”

“I’ll tell you the parts I know,” Carrie said, “in the order they happened.” She went quiet again, thinking. “They took Ward to Johns Hopkins right after they got him out of the VLIC. He was unconscious for something like two weeks after that, and then he was in and out, never fully awake, but maybe halfway at times. He started talking a little, almost all of it incoherent. His wife was there with him—Nora, his only living relative. In one of his more lucid moments Ward asked her to write down everything he said, no matter how strange it sounded. So she did. She bought a notebook and jotted every word she heard him say. Later—a lot later—she would tell Peter that it seemed like science fiction. She thought Ward was drawing it from the books he’d read all his life. Crazy ramblings about a wormhole, alien technology, and something about a war. It was all absurd—but also consistent. Like a story.”

She paused for a few seconds and then went on. “At the same time, in those weeks at the hospital, there were guards outside Ward’s room at all hours. Federal officers of one kind or another. The accident at the VLIC was so sensitive, everything connected to it was under protective watch, including Ward. But whoever made that decision must’ve relaxed after enough time went by; the guards left on May 7, and late that night, after Nora went back to her hotel room, Ward extracted his own feeding tube and made his exit. Took the notebook with him, stole some orderly’s street clothes from a locker down the hall, and eventually found his way out.”

“Nobody tried to stop him?” Paige said. “After two months on his back he’d have been staggering like a drunk.”

“Once he was out of the coma unit, all he encountered were strangers,” Carrie said. “To them he probably looked like a physical-therapy patient. I know there were camera feeds the cops studied the next morning; they pieced it all together. From what I recall, it took Ward something like twenty minutes to get out of the building. He went out a north exit onto Monument Street and that was it. No one who knew him saw him alive again.”

They were two miles up 550 now. The last outposts of the town—a few motels and a campground strung out along the canyon—slid by, and then the terrain opened to flat emptiness bound by pasture fencing.

“Three months later, the suicide. I think the LAPD identified him by his prints; he’d been arrested at a couple war protests in college. Everything about the scene was straightforward. He checked in alone, killed himself, no sign of foul play. No sign of the notebook, either—not that anyone was even thinking about it by then. And my understanding of the story goes blank at that point, until June of 1981, when Nora remarried. Some of the wedding guests were old friends who’d known both her and Ruben, including former VLIC people who now belonged to Tangent. Peter Campbell was there too. He and Nora talked about Ruben—about how it wasn’t his fault what’d happened to him. He just wasn’t himself at the end. Nora reinforced that point by mentioning the notebook—all the sci-fi things he’d said in his stupor. Peter asked her to elaborate. What kind of sci-fi things, specifically? Nora rattled off what little she remembered, and as I’m told, Peter had to set down his drink to keep from spilling it. I suppose, technically, the investigation began at that moment, right there in that reception hall. Peter asked Nora if she could set aside a few hours the next morning, before leaving for her honeymoon, and speak to him at length about the notebook. I doubt she was thrilled at that idea, but she did it, and in those hours she managed to recall a little more, including a visual description of the notebook, for what it was worth: black cover, with the word Scalar in the bottom corner. The company that made it, I’m sure. Nora remembered that easily enough. It was the stuff inside the book she had trouble with. All she could summon by then were bits and pieces, which I’m sure were maddening for Peter to try to make sense of. In the end, though, those scraps were enough to give him a rough sketch of what had happened. Enough to scare the hell out of him.”

Far out across the open ground on either side of the highway, the yard lights of ranch houses glided past. Steep foothills rose beyond them, just discernible against the near-black sky.

“It all reduces to something like this,” Carrie said. “In the days after the accident at VLIC, when Ward was still in the bunker, he wasn’t entirely unconscious. He was aware of conversations around him—the fear and the tension down there. But there was something else he was aware of. Something he referred to as ‘tunnel voices.’ ”

“Breach Voices?” Paige said.

Carrie nodded. “Ward could hear them from inside the bunker, just like everyone else. But unlike everyone else, he could understand them.”

Paige had been staring forward at the snowfall in the headlights. Now she turned in her seat. Her eyes went back and forth between Carrie and Travis.

“Understand them?” Paige said.

Carrie nodded again. “They really are voices. And they’re saying something. A message that repeats every few minutes, endlessly.”

Paige shook her head. “We’ve analyzed the Breach Voices to death. Not with human ears, obviously, but microphones and every kind of pattern-recognition software. From the very beginning there were people who hoped those sounds contained a message, but the computers never turned up a thing.”

“Computers can’t decipher whale song either,” Carrie said, “but biologists are convinced it has meaning. In principle that meaning could be expressed in a human language if we had a translator.”

“You’re saying Ward was our translator for the Breach Voices?” Travis said. “That whatever knocked him unconscious gave him that ability? Wouldn’t that imply that someone on the other side wanted him to understand?”

“Peter believed that very thing after talking to Nora.”

Travis considered the idea. At a glance it seemed impossible: the Breach had been created by an accident of human origin, the VLIC’s first shot. A prepared message from the other side—bundled with some effect to grant a witness the means to understand it—didn’t fit that scenario at all. Had it been an accident? Or had the Breach always been intended to open? Had it been waiting for the human race—or any race out there in the great black yonder—to build the right kind of ion collider and switch it on? Why would someone on the other side have set things up that way? There would have to be a purpose for it—but what?

“How do we know Ward wasn’t just crazy?” Paige said. “Like everyone originally assumed?”

“There were things he said that craziness couldn’t account for. Rough descriptions of entities that didn’t even emerge until months after he was dead. He couldn’t have known about those things unless someone told him. Someone—or something—over there.”

“Christ,” Travis said.

“But that’s only a small part of the picture. There were bigger issues, though they were less clear, at least given what Peter could get from Nora.”

“Like what?” Paige said.

“There was a sense that the message contained general information about the place on the other side, though Nora had forgotten essentially all of it. Understandably, I guess—that stuff would’ve made the least sense in the first place. Like if I asked you to transcribe a few pages from a legal brief, and then quizzed you on them three years later.”

“You said there was something about a war,” Travis said. “Did she remember anything else about it?”

Carrie shook her head. “No details. Ward had spoken in detail about it, and Nora had written it all down, but none of it was still in her head in 1981.” She went quiet a moment. Then: “There was something else. Probably the most compelling part of the message. A step process of some kind—a set of instructions. But again, Nora had lost the specifics.”

The chill returned to Travis. It arced like electricity down his neck and along the skin of his arms.

“The Breach gave Ruben Ward instructions?” he said.

Carrie nodded. “He walked out of Johns Hopkins in May of 1978 with a set of orders literally in hand. Presumably he spent the next three months following them, and when he was done he put a bullet in his brain.”

Chapter Twelve

Nobody spoke for a long time. Travis watched the highway roll out of the darkness ahead. Snow and tire ruts and wind-scoured pavement.

“What could the instructions have been?” Paige said.

“That’s what Scalar was about,” Carrie said. “That question. Where did Ward go that summer? What did he do? What had he been told to do?”

“Did they make any headway on it?” Travis said.

“I really don’t know. I learned about the run-up like everyone else in Border Town, but once the investigation started Peter kept it tightly contained. Even the files in the archives were stored in secure cases. He and five or six others handled it all. Worked with the government to use their resources when necessary—probably things like law-enforcement databases, or even command of federal agents to follow up on leads. Once in a while we’d get a sense that there’d been some progress, but we never got the specifics. The only concrete thing I ever heard about the investigation was how it ended. Peter and the others flew somewhere—maybe D.C., but it could’ve been anywhere—to meet with a small group of very powerful people. From what little I heard they seemed to be a mixed bag: people way up in politics, intel, maybe even finance. The one detail I know is that Peter and the rest of his team prepared a report for these people before leaving Border Town. Some kind of summary of what Scalar had turned up, as well as a response plan. Like, Here’s what Ruben Ward did in 1978, and here’s what needs to be done about it. The rest of us called it the cheat sheet, because even though we never read it, we saw that it comprised just a single page.”

“Pretty concise plan, whatever it was,” Travis said.

“Important ones often are,” Carrie said. “And I had the feeling that whoever they met with agreed to it. Peter seemed relieved when he got back. He called us all together and said the investigation was over—Tangent’s role in it was, anyway. He said what mattered most now was simply forgetting about it. Said the subject was taboo.” She shrugged. “That was it. As far as we knew, the whole thing was settled for good.”

Travis thought of Paige’s encounter with Peter in her memory. The man’s fear that she’d mentioned Scalar to someone outside Border Town. That she might have triggered some unthinkable chain of events simply by doing so. Peter had harbored those fears just five years ago—two decades after shutting down the investigation. Whatever Scalar had uncovered, Travis was pretty certain it wasn’t settled for good.

“What exactly are we saying?” Paige said. “The moment the Breach opened it gave Ruben Ward instructions to do something, right? Something on behalf of whoever’s on the other side. They wanted him to do it. And he did. Then years later, my father learned about it—learned enough anyway, by the end of Scalar, to know Ward’s actions had to be countered.” She paused, thinking. “It’s like Ward set something in motion, and my father stopped it. Halted it, at least, got a lid on it—and spent the rest of his life terrified that the lid would come off. That means whatever this thing was, whatever Ward did, there’s no question it was something bad. Something very bad, with long-term consequences.”

“That’s about the only way to read it,” Carrie said. The fear had risen in her voice again.

Paige looked at her, then at Travis. “So whoever they are on the other side of the Breach,” she said, “they’re … malignant. They’re flat-out bad. That’s what we’re saying.”

Travis glanced at her. Saw her expression drawn tight, her own fear unmistakable. And something else—almost a sense of betrayal. He understood why. For as long as he’d known her, Paige had been the closest thing Tangent had to an optimist. She harbored no illusions that those on the other side of the Breach were especially good—there was no basis for believing that—but she’d long held onto the idea that they were at least ambivalent. That they’d never meant for their dangerous technology to come spilling into human hands. That they probably didn’t even know about the accident that’d tapped into one of their transit tunnels. The Breach was dangerous, but only in the way that earthquakes and hurricanes were dangerous. There was no intent behind any of it. Whoever they were over there, they weren’t trying to do us harm. That belief had shored up Paige’s world for a long time. Probably since the first day she’d set foot in Border Town.

The betrayed look flickered through her eyes for maybe a second, and then it was gone, vastly eclipsed by the fear that came with it. Her breathing accelerated and shallowed. For a moment she seemed overwhelmed, unsure how to respond.

Travis felt it too. No doubt Peter had felt the same, by the time he’d finished speaking to Nora. By the time he’d grasped even the basics:

Ward had done something for them.

Something he’d needed to keep secret.

Something he’d killed himself over, after the fact.

Maybe Ward had followed the instructions against his will, his mind as fried by the Breach Voices as David Bryce’s had been.

Travis tried to imagine Peter’s mindset on that first day, in the summer of 1981—knowing that Ruben Ward’s work from three years before must still be playing out. That somewhere out there, at that moment, the dominoes were falling. Scalar had been a mad scramble to understand. To find the dominoes and stop them before the last one tipped.

Peter had stopped them.

So why was someone trying to set them falling again? One way or another, the people who’d killed Garner and laid the trap in Ouray were working against the end result of Scalar. Someone behind it all, pulling the strings, wanted to overturn the outcome. In all likelihood they’d already begun to do so.

“Whatever Peter did was in all of our best interests,” Travis said. “Who could possibly have the motive to undo it?”

The words hung in the air. No one had an answer. Snowflakes swirled in the headlights like stars broken free of the sky.

“We need details,” Paige said. “We need to know who my father met with in 1987. We need to find one of them, preferably one who still has a copy of the cheat sheet locked away somewhere.”

“It’d be a tall order getting your eyes on that document,” Carrie said. “It’s right up there with finding the original Scalar notebook, which Ward probably burned in a vacant lot before he killed himself.”

At the edge of his vision Travis saw Paige turn to him. He looked at her and didn’t have to ask what she was thinking.

“The Tap,” she said.

“Nora,” Travis said.

Chapter Thirteen

Even as hope flared in Paige’s eyes it guttered. On the one hand it’d be trivially easy for Nora to revisit the notebook in her memory—she’d written the damn thing; she could drop in and reread it at some point just before Ward disappeared. On the other hand, the Tap could kill her before it was even fully into her head. Forget whatever had happened to Gina Murphy; the pain and stress and increased pulse rate would be bad enough.

“If it worked, we’d know everything,” Paige said. “I just don’t have any confidence that it would.”

“Are you talking about an entity?” Carrie said.

Paige nodded, and explained the basics of the Tap in less than a minute—including the part about Gina. By the time Paige had finished, Carrie looked skeptical. Just like everyone who’d ever heard of the thing, before using it themselves.

“You can forget about Nora, in any case,” Carrie said at last. “She died of breast cancer in 1989.” A silence. Then: “What if I gave it a try? I was thirty years old in 1978, and living in New York. If this thing works the way you describe it, I could go back, take a drive to Baltimore, and get my hands on the notebook without much trouble.”

“The guards outside the room might be a problem,” Travis said. “Not to mention Nora herself.”

“I’m not talking about sneaking in. I could walk up and introduce myself as a colleague of Ruben’s. I wasn’t, but I was close enough. I’d certainly followed his work. I only ended up with Tangent because I swam in the same academic circles as people like him and Peter Campbell. I could wing it with Nora, easily. Go in and sit at the bedside, wait for some distraction and grab the book.”

Travis glanced at Carrie in the mirror.

“How’s your heart?” he said.

She shrugged with her eyebrows. “It’s not great. I’ve had a systolic murmur all my life. It’s louder in recent years, but that’s expected.”

“Sorry to be blunt,” Travis said, “but your age alone is an issue. I’m forty-four and I thought it was going to kill me when I used it.”

He didn’t add the rest of his thought—the part that was even more blunt: Carrie would have to think the Tap back out of her head once it was inside, a task she might not have the focus for in the middle of a fatal heart attack. What would happen if she died with it still inserted? Would the thing extract itself and revert to its cube shape, or would it just be stuck in there, useless forever? Carrie’s life was a lot to risk, but so was the Tap. As much as Travis hated the thing, there was no denying its usefulness.

“It’s an unnecessary risk anyway,” Travis said. “I have an idea. Let me think about it for a few minutes.”

For a while no one said anything more. The bullet hole whistled and the wind moaned at the open back window.

Paige looked at Carrie. “You can still come back to Border Town with us. Probably the safest place for you.”

Carrie thought about it, then shook her head. “If you don’t need me, I’d rather stay as far from Tangent as possible. I can take care of myself. In my less trusting days I hid stashes of money, and made a few useful contacts. Leave me the Jeep and I’ll be fine.” She was quiet a long moment, staring out the side window into the darkness. “I need to tell you one last thing, for what it’s worth. Something I overheard about a year after Scalar ended. I was heading toward the conference room, and I heard Peter inside, speaking to one of the others. They were alone. Something in their tone made me stop before going in, and before I could leave to give them privacy, I heard the end of the conversation. Peter said something like, ‘It’s clumsy as hell, the way we wrapped it up. If it goes bad now, it’ll happen fast. We won’t have much time to stop it.’ ‘How much time?’ the other man asked, and Peter said, ‘The first sign of trouble would be something big, and from that moment we’d have just about exactly twenty-four hours.’ I remember he paused for about ten seconds then, and when he spoke again he sounded more scared than I’d ever heard him. He said, ‘Yeah, twenty-four hours to the end of the road.’ ”

Travis glanced at Paige and then, in unison with her, looked at the Jeep’s console clock.

6:05 A.M.

Garner had been killed at a quarter to ten the night before, in the eastern time zone—7:45 here in mountain time. Therefore the end of the road—whatever that implied—would be 7:45 tonight. Thirteen hours and forty minutes from right now.

Paige called Border Town and arranged for a jet to meet them at a regional airstrip near Cimarron. No flight plan; the pilots radioed for clearance five minutes before arrival, on the likelihood that unfriendly elements were monitoring air traffic.

Carrie was gone with the Jeep by the time the plane landed. The aircraft was on the ground less than three minutes, and as it climbed above the clouds and the first hard beams of sunlight shone through the cabin, Paige said, “Tell me.”

Travis squinted in the glare. “In May of 1978 I was ten years old. Pretty big for my age. Stocky, probably four-nine.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“We know Ruben Ward leaves the hospital the night of May 7 by a north exit, carrying the notebook. We know the time to within a few hours. And we know he’s so weakened right then he can barely walk. Physically, between me and him it’s no contest. Snatch and run.”

“You lived in Minneapolis. How are you going to get halfway across the country by yourself at that age?”

“Steal my dad’s car and put the seat all the way forward. Minneapolis to Baltimore’s probably fifteen or sixteen hours if I obey the speed limit. Which I’d better, I guess.”

He watched her warm to the idea in spite of herself. But only to a point.

“You’ll have to make stops for gas,” she said, “and any station attendant is going to dial nine-one-one the minute you step out of the driver’s seat. That’s not to mention interference from other customers at the pumps. All of whom will be a lot older than ten, and not just emerging from a coma unit.”

“I won’t need gas stations at all. Five feet of plastic hose will do the trick.”

The biggest problem, Travis knew, would simply be other drivers on the road. Even at night he’d be visible at the wheel, at least in brightly lit areas like cities and busy stretches of the freeway. Though no one in 1978 would have a cell phone with which to call the cops, there was no question that people would take action at the sight of a kid driving a car. But after only a few seconds, Travis thought he had the answer to that problem too. He considered it a moment longer, felt certain of it, then pushed it away and turned to Paige.

“I’ve been trying to think of someone better suited to taking a shot at it,” Travis said, “but no one comes to mind. Outside Tangent, we might’ve trusted Carrie if we weren’t likely to kill her in the process. Or Garner, if he were alive—though I’d have worried about his age too. And inside Tangent there are—what—four people older than me?”

Paige nodded, her eyes suddenly far away as she consulted a mental roster of Border Town. Travis had already covered that ground in his own head. Tangent’s population was skewed pretty young these days, given the near total replacement of personnel three years earlier. The new recruits hadn’t come straight out of grad school, but nearly all of them were under forty. Academics with solid track records and sufficiently few ties to politics or industry, drawn from all the nations that’d jointly founded Tangent. Of the four people older than Travis, none were American. Two were just a year older and had grown up in France. Another was maybe three years older and Russian. The oldest, at fifty-one, would’ve been seventeen the night Ruben Ward made his escape from Johns Hopkins. Seventeen and living in a remote village in northern China.

Whatever resistance Paige had harbored for the idea was slipping fast. She looked at the time on her phone; she’d been doing that every few minutes since Carrie had spoken of the deadline. Travis had done the same. Even this flight back to Border Town, dead straight at five hundred fifty miles per hour, felt like a colossal hemorrhage of time.

“I can get to Baltimore,” Travis said. “I can get the book. It only costs us three minutes and sixteen seconds to try.”

“I guess your odds are better than mine,” Paige said. “I was negative two in 1978.”

They called Bethany and brought her up to speed, and by the time they’d landed, taken the Tap from the Primary Lab and returned to their residence on B16—at 8:25 in the morning—Bethany was waiting for them with all the useful information she’d unearthed. Which wasn’t a lot.

“Couldn’t nail down the exact timing of Ward’s exit,” she said. She adjusted her glasses, the same oversized pair she’d been wearing when Travis first met her last year in Atlanta. She looked young even for her age—could’ve passed for twenty without a hitch. When she really was twenty, she’d already been out of college and working for information-security firms, engineering the software that guarded the world’s secrets. In that field, the set of people on Earth with her skill level could’ve squeezed together into a good-sized elevator.

“I assume the Baltimore PD got involved,” Bethany said, “once the hospital realized Ward was missing, but any dispatch info from that time is long gone. The computerized records only go back to the late eighties. If there was more detailed paperwork filed, like a missing-persons report with witness statements, and maybe a description of the hospital’s camera feeds, I couldn’t find it. There might be a hard copy on a shelf somewhere, but there’s nothing I can read over broadband.”

“How about dated schematics of the hospital?” Paige said.

Bethany frowned. “I scored a hit on that one, but you’re not going to like it.”

She took a tablet computer from a big pocket on the side of her pants, switched it on and opened an image file. It was a huge high-resolution scan of a blueprint: an overhead view of part of the Johns Hopkins campus. She dragged it down so that only the top edge was visible: Monument Street running from Broadway to Wolfe—a distance of more than eight hundred feet.

“You’re going to stand outside the place on the north side and watch the exits there, right?” Bethany said. “Wait for Ruben Ward to come out?”

Travis nodded.

“The good news,” Bethany said, “is that you should be able to see them all at once. The north stretch was pretty much the same in 1978 as it is now: four separate exits onto Monument, all of them roughly visible from any point on the other side of the street. Given the coma unit’s location within the building, Ward could’ve used any one of the four just as easily as another.”

“Especially if he wandered at random for a while before he found one,” Travis said. “I won’t make any assumptions about where he might come out.”

“Well, see, that’s the bad news,” Bethany said. “You’re going to have to.”

She zoomed in until the middle third of the north stretch filled the screen. At that resolution, something became visible that hadn’t been before: a broad zone of Monument Street crossed out with diagonal lines. They extended right up onto the sidewalk to the building’s edge. All told, about fifty feet of the street’s length were marked out.

“What the hell is that?” Paige said.

“Construction. A service tunnel for the Baltimore Metro. The system didn’t go live until 1983, but they spent years building it before then. In the spring of seventy-eight they hadn’t yet started on the rail tunnel itself, the one that terminates at Broadway and Monument. Instead they were putting in a conduit for power and maintenance access four hundred feet east of that intersection, dead-centered on the hospital’s north side.” She dragged the image left and right and pointed out the exits Ward might use. “Two doors are west of the dig site, two are east. Whichever side you choose to wait on, you’re stuck with. I don’t think you’re going to get across the construction zone.”

“I might,” Travis said. “If it’s late at night, the work crew may have already gone home.”

“Can’t count on that,” Bethany said, “but even if they have, the dig itself is a major obstacle. This isn’t just some torn-up blacktop with plastic fencing stretched around it. I found an old Baltimore Sun article about the whole thing. The project ran from March to September of that year, and they installed the conduit thirty feet below street level. If they started in March, then the excavating would’ve been done by early May for sure. It’d be the Grand Canyon, cutting off the whole width of the street.”

“So if you guess wrong about which side he comes out on,” Paige said, “you’ll have to run around the block. How big is the one north of Monument? Is it square like the main hospital’s block, or is it shallower?”

“Normally, shallower,” Bethany said. “Madison Street is just a couple hundred feet north. But that’s dug up, too, so you’d have to go up to the next street, Ashland Avenue. I already did the math. No matter where you stand to watch for Ward, if you’re on the wrong side, you’ll have to run at least half a mile around. During which time he could wander off down a dozen possible alleys or even flag a cab—so what if he’d have to stiff the driver? He was desperate to get away from that place.”

Paige looked up from the computer at Travis. “I hope you were a fast ten-year-old.”

“Me too, because there’s no second shot at this. The memory’s burned whether I get the notebook or not.”

Chapter Fourteen

They planned what they could, as quickly as they could, devoting just under twenty minutes to it. They mapped the route—eleven hundred miles, about sixteen hours’ drive time with present speed limits.

“But not 1978 limits,” Travis said. “Fifty-five everywhere back then.”

“Even on the freeways?” Bethany said. She looked doubtful.

Travis nodded. “Sammy Hagar wasn’t kidding.”

He did the math in his head: at fifty-five the trip would take twenty hours.

Which was a problem.

Realistically, he’d have to steal the car late at night when both his parents were asleep. That would be well past midnight, probably closer to one or two. Twenty hours after two in the morning was ten the next night—in the central time zone. In Baltimore it would be an hour later. Factoring in stops for gas—which might take a while the way Travis was going to do it—could easily add another full hour. He’d be lucky to reach Johns Hopkins by midnight.

“Ward could already be gone by then,” Paige said. “All we know about the timing is that he leaves at some point after Nora does, and we don’t know when she leaves either. Could be nine o’clock the night of May 7—Sunday—or it could be three in the morning Monday. Getting there at midnight’s risky.”

“And I could be a lot later than that,” Travis said. “My dad might stay up until four instead of two. I might hit traffic jams.” He stared at Bethany’s computer, the highlighted route winding through seven states. “I’ll go a day earlier. Steal the car Friday night, get into town Saturday night.”

“You’ll have a lot of downtime in Baltimore,” Bethany said.

“Maybe I’ll head over to Camden Yards. Jesus, Ripken wasn’t even there yet.”

A minute later Travis was thinking about a different baseball player—one who’d done something newsworthy two days before Ruben Ward disappeared. Travis hadn’t remembered the event himself; it was just one of a dozen stories Bethany had pulled from a news archive to help him dial in on the date he needed. On his own he couldn’t recall a thing from within months of that day. Just random flashes of fifth grade, impossible to place in a timeline.

“The game happened on the Friday you’re shooting for,” Bethany said. “That’s May 5. The story would’ve been in Saturday’s paper, probably somewhere on the front page—even in Minneapolis. So you want to pinpoint Saturday and then rewind to Friday night before you drop fully into the memory.”

Travis nodded. He tried to focus on the news about the game. He’d been into baseball as much as any kid in the neighborhood, and would’ve definitely heard about this story when it happened. Almost certainly would’ve glanced at the headline sometime Saturday.

“If you had any real awareness of it at the time,” Paige said, “you’ll remember it when you’ve got the Tap in. Just picture the name in headline print. And that number.”

The Tap was sitting on the table in front of him. Staring at him, in its way.

No reason to wait any longer.

He snatched it up, pressed it against his temple and screwed his eyes shut. Already his pulse was accelerating, before the pain had even begun.

Ten seconds. Agony overwhelming all other feeling. The tendril snaking and darting across the top of his brain. Coiling, advancing, pressing.

Then it was fully in, and still. As the pain ebbed Travis became aware of Paige draped over his shoulders from behind, her cheek against his own.

He went to the couch and lay down. Paige and Bethany sank into chairs and watched him. Win or lose, the outcome was minutes away for them.

Travis closed his eyes. He heard Paige’s cell phone begin to ring just as the world dropped out from under him.

Formless dark. No body. No limbs. Thoughts and memories suspended in the void.

The name.

The number.

He’d barely begun to picture them when the image came up, clear and brilliant as a photo held in front of his face. It was a view of the dining-room table in his parents’ house. Yellow afternoon sunlight slanted in, swimming with dust motes. He saw it all from an oddly low angle, his eyes only a couple feet above the scattered mail at the table’s edge.

On top of the mail, like it’d been set there a minute before, lay a newspaper. Travis’s eyes went to a headline at the lower right corner, just peeking above the fold.

Rose hits 3,000.

The paper was dated Saturday, May 6, 1978.

Travis let the moment begin to slide backward in time. He watched the viewpoint drift away from the table, reversing along the path he must have just walked.

Out of the dining room. Down the hall toward his bedroom. The details were as strange as they were familiar—this was the old house. The little one they’d lived in before his parents’ illicit income sources began to blossom. The one place, at least in his childhood, that had really felt like a home to him. All at once he didn’t want to see its specifics.

He sped up the reverse until it was a blur, his viewpoint surging backward through a firehose stream of imagery he could hardly follow. Crazy bursts of walking movement that felt disturbingly like falling down a well. Jittery spells of holding still with his face over a magazine, or watching TV—he caught shutter-quick glimpses of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny and Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. There came a sudden rush of shower spray and soap and shampoo and then a split-second view of his own small face in a mirror, a toothbrush humming in and out of his mouth like a jigsaw blade. A glimpse of his pillow followed and then there was darkness, and the spooky tumble of dream visuals running backward through the night. These sights he could make no sense of at all—trees and fields and hallways and classrooms—and then he was awake again, propped up on his elbows in bed, staring at a book in the glow of his nightstand lamp. His hand flickered up and reverse-turned a page. Then again.

He slowed the memory stream down. All the way down. Froze it.

His field of view took in the book, the nightstand, and the alarm clock at the base of the lamp.

11:57 P.M.

Good enough.

Travis left the image still and waited. Two seconds passed. Three. Then, sensation. Not the soles of his feet but the entire front of his body: his legs and chest and elbows, all seeming to hover at static-spark distance above the bed.

He let himself drop.

The change was so jarring he flinched. On his previous use of the Tap he’d gone back only two years; his body had been indistinguishable from its forty-four-year-old state.

Ten was different—startlingly different—and his size and shape were the least of reasons.

The reasons were everything else.

His senses. The richness of the world came through them like a high. Had he really felt this way all through his childhood? This alive and feral? Had he lost it so gradually he’d never noticed it going away? He took a breath of the humidity coming in through the screen. He tasted cut grass and damp pavement and the pulp stock pages of the book lying open beneath him. A blue hardcover with no dust jacket. He flipped it shut. The Hardy Boys Number 2: The House on the Cliff. He set it beside the lamp and listened to the night. Crickets, katydids, distant tires hissing on asphalt. His hearing had to be half again better than what he was used to. His vision, too, though not in its clarity—at forty-four he still didn’t need glasses. It was more about the depth of colors. The saturation, maybe. Whatever it was, plastic lenses wouldn’t give it back to you once you’d outgrown it.

Beneath all the sensations lay something else, harder to name but more powerful. Some mix of hormones and oxygen-rich blood and uncluttered emotion. The simple, wild energy of being a child. It made him want to swing from the trees. If there’d been a drug to make a grownup feel this way, it would’ve put to shame all the shit his parents were probably already selling in 1978.

He looked through his doorway into the room across the hall, and saw his brother Jeff asleep in the blue-white glow of his Captain Kirk night-light. Jeff was seven and already a certified Trekkie. Travis resisted the urge to wake him and tell him the movie version was coming out next year.

Further away was the sound of the TV in the living room, cranked down almost to silence for a commercial break. His father had done that all his life, even before he had a remote control. Now the floor creaked and the volume rose. Trumpets swelled and cut out, and then Johnny Carson was talking.

Travis killed the light, rolled onto his back, and lay waiting.

His father went to bed at 1:07.

Started snoring at 1:12.

Travis waited five more minutes, then got up and dressed.

He’d expected walking to feel strange in this body, but it was fine—the same unconscious act it’d always been.

He took his dad’s keys from their hook in the kitchen, pocketing them so they wouldn’t jingle. He opened the silverware drawer, slid aside the compartmentalized tray and found the envelope that’d lain beneath it all through his childhood. Inside was a quarter-inch stack of tens and twenties. He took them all, then returned to his bedroom and eased the window screen from its frame.

The car was a 1971 Impala, shit brown and already rusting around the wheel wells. Travis had actually driven it lots of times—as late as 1984 it’d been pretty reliable. It was parked on the street; there was no garage. He slipped in and racked the seat forward and got his foot on the gas without a problem.

He hit Kmart and bought everything he needed. Bread, chips, cookies, crackers, peanut butter, a twelve-pack of Pepsi. It all looked absurd in its ancient packaging. He got a coil of clear plastic tubing from the hardware department, and a five-gallon drum with a pouring spout. The last two things he bought were a wire coat hanger and a slotted-head screwdriver.

The checkout girl gave him a look when he walked up alone.

He nodded toward the parking lot. “Mom’s feet are killing her.”

The girl shrugged and started keying the prices by hand.

He found what he wanted in the fourth nightclub parking lot he searched: a Chevelle, maybe five years old, lime green with a white racing stripe down the middle.

And heavily tinted windows—including the windshield.

It took thirty seconds to defeat the door lock with the coat hanger, and another thirty with the screwdriver to break open the ignition and hotwire it. Ten minutes later he was heading east on I–94, the needle dead on 55 and the night air rushing in through the windows.

Chapter Fifteen

The Grand Canyon, cutting off the whole width of the street, just like Bethany had said. The hole was three stories deep and stretched from one foundation wall to the other: the hospital on the south side, a seamless row of academic and research buildings on the north. There were sectional concrete barriers along each side of the chasm, plastered with orange warning signs for those who didn’t grasp the concept of gravity.

Traffic on Monument had been blocked at the cross streets—Broadway to the west and Wolfe to the east. There was a sporadic stream of pedestrians going in and out of the hospital and the academic buildings, but otherwise the street was bare.

Which was going to make it hard to stand around without drawing attention, especially for a ten-year-old. Especially as the night drew on.

It was six o’clock Sunday evening. The air was chilly and the long sunlight filtered through trees on the sidewalk. Travis was sitting on a bench near Monument and Broadway, far west of the construction zone. He could see the hospital’s nearer two exits, but not the other pair. He’d have to be two hundred feet closer to the gap for that, and standing—there were no benches farther along than this one.

As it was he’d already begun drawing looks, just sitting with a comic book in his lap, though he’d only been here for ten minutes.

Drawing looks had been the story of his weekend. Within the first hour of daylight on Saturday he’d realized the Chevelle’s tinted windows weren’t giving him perfect cover. For one thing, they naturally drew the focus of passengers in other cars. People saw tinting and instinctively wanted to see past it. And in glaring sunlight, maybe they could. They were seeing something, it seemed, if only his silhouette. Whatever the case, in the span of ten minutes two different cars going by in the passing lane had braked and run parallel to him for over a mile, then dropped back and veered hard for the first available exit, each no doubt bound for a pay phone to dial 911. Travis responded by ditching the freeway and taking to the back roads, crawling east on county two-lanes from Chicago to Cleveland before deciding he’d had enough. He hit another Kmart, bought a blanket to conceal himself in the backseat, and slept until nightfall.

Everything was easier in the dark. Even siphoning gas. All you needed was a big parking lot with a few cars clustered out near the edge. Duck out of sight among them, and the rest was simple.

He’d rolled into Baltimore this morning, half an hour past dawn, left the car at a meter three blocks west of the hospital—the closest space he could find—and set out on foot.

For much of the day he’d avoided attention easily enough. The trick was to move with purpose. If he stood still anywhere for even a minute, people stared. They saw him, looked around for a nearby parent, and failing to spot one approached him to ask if he was lost. But moving around had been easy, early on. Upon arriving he headed for Monument Street and checked out the dig site, then went into the hospital by the entry just west of the excavation. Though Bethany’s schematics had suggested otherwise, he’d held on to some hope that the building itself might provide a shortcut. A way to dart in on one side of the canyon and back out on the other, on the precise half chance that Ward would emerge where Travis didn’t want him to.

He saw right away that it was no good. All the north entrances opened at the ends of long, separate wings running up from central areas of the complex, and though there was a main east-west corridor tying them together deep inside the old building, the whole idea of cutting through this place in pursuit of Ward felt risky. It was understandable that Ward himself, shuffling along in street clothes, could make it past the staff without being stopped. A ten-year-old sprinting hell-bent through the corridors would be a different story.

For good measure Travis went up to the coma unit, on the fourth floor and dead centered in the hospital’s footprint. It was easy to see how Ward would get away unseen by the nurses: the nearest station was down the hall and around a corner from his room, and in the opposite direction was a bank of elevators. Travis spotted Ward’s room easily; it was the one with two guys in crew cuts and black suits flanking the door.

He walked by and tried to look casual while stealing a glance inside. Ward was right there, occupying the room’s only bed. His head was shaved smooth as Travis had expected, given the likelihood of EEG testing.

Nora was seated beside him. A beautiful woman with haunted features. She’d look worse by this time tomorrow, and stay that way for at least the next three months. Probably a lot longer.

The last thing Travis’s eyes picked out was the notebook. It lay on the deep windowsill behind Nora’s chair, a pen stuck into its spiral binding. Its black card-stock cover was already worn by weeks of use, and the word Scalar was just visible at the lower right corner. Travis had all of half a second to stare at it, and then he was past the door frame and moving on.

Now, some twelve hours later, he sat on the bench on the west end of Monument, trying to avoid the increasingly frequent stares. He turned a page of the comic book, for appearances. Star Wars #10: The Behemoth from Below. On the cover, Han and Chewie were blasting away at a giant green lizard. Travis wondered what a mint copy would be worth thirty-four years from now. Probably about five bucks. Not that he could bring it back with him anyway.

Neither could he bring back Ward’s notebook if he got his hands on it. The plan was simply to hole up somewhere and read the damn thing a hundred times. Read it until he could shut his eyes and recite it word for word. Then he’d snap out of the memory and transcribe the whole thing. Paige had already set up a laptop on the dining room table, the cursor ready and blinking in Microsoft Word.

Travis looked up at the hospital again. He watched people come and go from the two exits he could see.

The lack of a shortcut was trouble, but not disaster.

The lack of a stakeout position was.

It was the one problem he and Paige and Bethany hadn’t been able to plan around. No way to know exactly what he’d find on the north side of Monument Street, in terms of hiding places. In his most optimistic scenario there’d been a Dumpster sticking out of an alley, full to the brim with trash he could hide in and stare out through. No luck there—no Dumpsters or alleys along the north side of the street. Nothing but the unbroken row of buildings.

Travis had seen all of that this morning, then spent the day wandering the city trying to think his way through the problem. As an adult he could’ve solved it any number of ways. Buy a cheap harmonica and a little wooden box and stand there on the sidewalk busking. Wouldn’t matter that he sucked at playing harmonica—it would help push attention away from him, in fact. People would consciously not look.

But even the busking would’ve been unnecessary. A grown man could just walk up and down Monument, from the dig site to either intersection, back and forth all night long. Hours and hours, the same circuit, four hundred feet east and four hundred feet west. If anyone noticed the repetition and found it strange, would they even consider asking him about it? Not likely. People tended to see strangeness as trouble, which in turn they tended to avoid.

But none of those options existed for a ten-year-old.

Shit.

He turned another page of the comic book. Let his eyes drift over the images and words without processing them.

A shadow fell across his lap.

“Excuse me.”

Travis looked up and saw a woman in her thirties, a five-year-old girl in tow. The girl stared at Travis with big eyes and tried to hide behind her mother’s leg.

“Do you need help?” the woman said.

Travis offered a quick smile and shook his head. “I’m good. Thanks.”

Another trick—when you weren’t moving with purpose—was to be direct and certain. Let no ambiguity into your words or your tone.

He turned his eyes back to the comic book and ignored the woman.

The shadow stayed put.

“You’ve been alone here the whole time I’ve been waiting for the bus,” the woman said. “If you need to call someone, I have change. And we can wait here with you if you like—”

“Really, I’m fine,” Travis said, looking up at her again. “My dad always meets me here at six-fifteen sharp. He says it’s a safe spot ’cause it’s busy. I’m just early, that’s all.”

The woman frowned. Looked like she wanted to wait anyway, if only to have a word with his father about this arrangement.

“Seriously,” Travis said, “don’t miss your bus. I’d feel terrible.”

Another frown. The woman started to say something else, but didn’t. The little girl tugged on her hand, gesturing with her whole body back toward Broadway.

The woman exhaled deeply. “I don’t like it,” she said, and then she was gone, back to the knot of people at the intersection.

Her bus came two minutes later, and when it’d left, Travis stood and stuffed the comic book into his pocket. He stood there thinking, getting the mental equivalent of a test pattern. It could be nine hours before Ward staggered out of the hospital, and Travis couldn’t imagine how to stand watch for even thirty minutes.

He wandered toward the construction zone. The crew was still at it. From beyond the waist-high barrier and far below came the shouting of men and the rattle of air-driven tools. There was a stereo blasting Bob Seger’s “Hollywood Nights.” The glow of halogen worklamps shone upward onto the inside face of the far barrier, just beginning to compete with the dying sunlight.

Absent a Dumpster, the closest Travis had come to a plan had been a vague thought of hiding within the site itself. Slip over the barrier and stand on the edge of the chasm, and hope to find some kind of material scraps with which to conceal himself. Three or four wooden planks might’ve done—stand against a foundation wall on the north side of the street and lean the wood around himself in a jumble. In darkness it would’ve been hard for anyone to see him among the boards, and maybe he could’ve arranged them to create viewing angles on all four exits.

But there were no scraps of wood or anything else, and with the workers still on the job it was a moot point.

Travis stopped fifty feet shy of the concrete blockade. “Hollywood Nights” finished and “Still the Same” kicked in.

Travis ran his hands through his hair. How much longer could he loiter out here before somebody waved down a cop?

That thought had hardly formed when another shadow slid into view, paralleling his own as it stretched away down the pavement. Footsteps scuffed to a stop behind him, and a man softly cleared his throat.

Travis turned, half expecting a cop already.

Instead it was a guy in a dress shirt and khakis, fortyish and visibly awkward.

“Hey there,” the man said. The voice was gentle. He might have been addressing a stray kitten. Behind him there was nothing but wide-open street all the way back to the intersection. This guy had come a long way to say hello.

When Travis didn’t answer, the man stepped closer. Ten feet away now. “You look a bit lost. I couldn’t help noticing. I live right back there.” He nodded absently behind him, toward the block immediately beyond Broadway.

Travis shook his head and looked down at the roadbed, suddenly unable to stand the guy’s nervous expression.

“Just waiting for my dad,” Travis said. “I’m fine.”

The man advanced again. “You don’t look like you’re waiting. I saw you on the bench, and now you’re standing around down here. How would your dad find you if you’re all over the place?”

The voice was still soft, but under the awkwardness there was an edge of excitement.

“You need a place to sleep tonight?”

Jesus Christ. So there were two problems he and Paige and Bethany hadn’t planned around. He pictured them laughing their asses off when he told them about this one.

Another step. The man was close enough to touch him now, and when he spoke again he was almost whispering. “Nothing has to happen. Nothing you don’t want. I promise.”

Travis was still looking down. He fixed his eyes in the deadest glare prison had taught him, and raised them.

The man stepped back as if shoved.

“You better get the fuck out of here,” Travis said.

The guy nodded quickly and didn’t say another word. A second later he was gone, walking away down Monument at just less than a jog. He’d gone thirty yards when a fragment of his pick-up spiel came back to Travis.

I couldn’t help noticing. I live right back there.

Travis looked past the intersection of Monument and Broadway. The next stretch of Monument, west of Johns Hopkins, had a parking garage filling most of the south side and a row of town houses on the north. No doubt most of them had been converted to multiple units.

Any one of which would offer a perfect viewing angle on all four of the hospital’s north exits.

“Mister!” Travis yelled.

Chapter Sixteen

He introduced himself as Garret and led Travis up to his place on the third floor, four units west of Broadway. Garret’s every move was nervous and excited. He had a high, quick laugh with which he interrupted himself in almost every sentence.

He opened the door to his apartment and ushered Travis directly into the living room. The air smelled like a mix of candlewax and macaroni. Travis hardly noticed. His full attention had gone at once to the bay window overlooking Monument. Through the 45-degree pane on the left, facing Johns Hopkins, he would have a better vantage point than he could’ve dreamed of.

There would be a delay issue, of course. He’d be fifteen seconds getting down to the sidewalk from this place, and another ten or more sprinting to the intersection. But that was fine. He’d have plenty of time to catch Ward if he emerged from one of the nearer two exits, and if he came out beyond the Grand Canyon, well, that was always going to be a pain in the ass. Even starting at a Dumpster right across from the hospital, Travis would’ve been forced to backtrack a couple hundred feet before heading north on Broadway to circle the block. Garret’s bay window was as good a starting point as he could’ve hoped for.

Travis took in the living room’s details. The coffee table was littered with magazines and beer cans and used paper plates and three heavy ceramic mugs. Travis crossed to the room’s midpoint and came to a stop with his shin at the coffee table’s edge. He heard Garret stop a foot behind him. Felt him standing there, holding his breath.

Travis turned around and looked up into his eyes. Garret returned the stare, then glanced at the top of his head. Travis knew his hair was matted from sleeping in the car yesterday—he hadn’t been able to fix it since then.

“You can take a shower if you like,” Garret said. “Or I’ve got bubble-bath soap, if that’s better. It’s an oversized tub, if … you know …”

He left the sentence unfinished.

Travis didn’t respond. He waited until Garret was looking him in the eyes again, and then darted his own gaze just past the man’s shoulder and flinched hard.

It never failed. Few people could help but react to the sudden, primal belief that something dangerous was right behind them. Garret pivoted, and in the same instant Travis scooped one of the mugs from the coffee table and swung it as hard as he could into the back of the man’s head. It would’ve been bad enough for Garret even if the mug had broken, but it didn’t. All of the force of the impact went into his skull instead. He made a grunting sound—“Uhnn!”—and crumpled and then sprawled. Travis dropped onto him and arced the mug down on his head three more times, putting all his weight into each swing, then scrambled backward away from him. He held the mug ready and watched the man.

Garret didn’t move.

After a moment Travis heard him breathing, slow and ragged. Travis stood and circled wide around him. He went to the closet by the entry door and found a roll of duct tape, came back and used a third of it binding Garret’s limbs and covering his mouth.

It was 10:30. Monument Street lay in pools of sodium light and the apartment was pitch black away from the windows. Travis had stood watch for over four hours. Realistically it would be hours more before Ward would likely appear, but there was no reason to look away. Garret had stirred and moaned a few times in the darkness, but had mostly remained unconscious. In the minutes after binding him, Travis had made a quick survey of the apartment. Mainly he’d hoped to find a pair of binoculars. No luck. He found a stack of photos showing Garret rock climbing with a woman, presumably his girlfriend. She was taller than Garret and built like a pretty serious weight lifter. Travis thought a psychologist could make a whole career out of the guy’s libido.

He also found a loaded snub .38 in the nightstand drawer. He left it there. Couldn’t imagine having a use for it in the coming hours.

Foot traffic on Monument north of Johns Hopkins had dropped to practically nothing at nightfall. No one was coming or going from the academic buildings on the north side of the street, and only a few left or entered the hospital—at least from these four exits.

Binoculars would’ve helped with the more distant pair of doors. They were between seven and eight hundred feet away, about the limit of Travis’s ability to tell bald from blond. He hoped Ward’s posture and movement would simply make it obvious. Hoped he’d see him and have not the slightest doubt who it was. The nightmare possibility—clawing at Travis all these dark hours like some animal inside his chest—was someone emerging beyond the construction zone who only might be Ruben Ward. Anyone bald and stooped would fit the bill, and there had to be all kinds of men like that inside the place. If one stepped out, there’d be no time at all to make a decision. Travis would just have to run. Half a mile around the block, as fast as he could move. And if he got there and found some arthritic sixty-year-old, he’d have to make the same sprint right back here, hoping like hell he hadn’t missed Ward in all the lost minutes.

He tried not to think about it.

He watched the street.

He waited.

Ruben Ward stepped out of the nearest of the four exits at seven minutes past midnight. So close Travis could see the black notebook under his arm. Travis watched the man just long enough—maybe three seconds—to be alarmed at how quickly he was moving. Ward staggered, but not slowly. More like a drunk perpetually chasing his balance. He made three lurching steps along the sidewalk, braced a hand against the building, then withdrew it and lurched forward again. Fast. Way the hell too fast. Between lurches and pauses he probably matched the speed of a healthy person walking.

Travis turned and sprinted for the apartment’s entry, vaulting over Garret as he went.

He was almost to the door when he heard a key plunge into the lock from the other side.

Chapter Seventeen

It didn’t happen like it would’ve in a movie. There was no drawn-out moment in which the lock disengaged and the knob made a hellishly slow turn.

It happened in half a second, start to finish: click-turn-shove.

Travis checked his momentum just in time to keep from catching the door with his nose, and just like that he was face to face with the woman from the pictures. The rock climber. Taller and stronger than Garret.

She startled and fell back a step, dropping a bag of groceries she’d been holding. Something shattered. Something rolled.

The woman was wearing a uniform of some sort. In the split-second he had to think about it, Travis guessed she was a stewardess. Or a car rental clerk. Or one of a thousand other things.

Her panic disappeared in the next second—probably the time it took to realize she was staring at a ten-year-old—and anger took its place. She came forward, kicking aside the fallen groceries, and swatted the light switch upward.

Travis squinted, not quite blinded but sure as hell stung by the sudden brightness.

“What the fuck is this?” the woman said. Her volume suggested she wasn’t just talking to Travis. She wanted an answer from Garret, wherever he was.

Travis drew back from her advance, realizing even as he did so that he was clearing the way for her to see Garret.

She saw.

For the second time in as many breaths she flinched and recoiled. Her eyes registered the purest bafflement, and then regardless of the conclusion she’d drawn—if any—she simply reacted. She lunged at Travis, shoving the door fully aside as she came on.

There was no chance of getting past her and onto the landing. Even if he did, he wouldn’t get away. She’d be faster than him. Much faster.

Travis staggered back and hit the coffee table with his calves. He lost his balance and went down hard in front of the couch, the woman already descending on him, getting a fistful of his shirt. Half of Travis’s attention was on her, and the other half, like a mental split screen, was on Ruben Ward. Lurching and bracing. Lurching and bracing. Probably halfway to the intersection by now. Once he reached it, there was no telling which direction he’d go, but in any direction there were places he could duck into within the next hundred feet. Which he might well do, out of fear that hospital staffers were right behind him—he’d have no way to know they weren’t.

Ward could reach concealment in the next thirty or forty seconds. Could be gone in the next thirty or forty seconds.

Travis became aware of the woman screaming at him. Asking who he was. Grabbing for both of his arms and trying to pin them. She got one. Went for the other. Travis yanked it away and did the only thing he could think of: put his index and middle finger together into a fused, rigid spike, and stabbed her in the eye with it.

She cried out and let go of his other arm, both of her hands flying to her face to feel for damage.

Travis twisted beneath her, got hold of one of the couch’s legs and pulled himself free. He heard her cursing and shouting and felt a rush of air as her hand just missed his back.

Then he was on his feet, bounding over the coffee table and toward the doorway.

The bedroom doorway.

Behind him he heard the woman’s tone change from anger to fear. Maybe she understood what he had in mind. The table clattered as she shoved it away and came after him.

The doorway was just ahead now. He hooked the frame with one hand as he went through, swinging his body like a sideways pendulum toward the nightstand. He got his free hand on the drawer pull just as the woman crashed into him from behind.

The drawer came fully free of its seat. Its contents flew. Reading glasses. A little box of tissue. The snub .38. Travis’s hand closed around its grip as he went down, and then he tumbled, knees and elbows hitting the floor in random sequence.

He came to rest with his shoulder blades against the far wall, the pistol in his hand and leveled back toward the direction he’d come from. Toward the woman.

She pulled up short six feet away, frozen on all fours like a cat in the last instant before pouncing.

Her eyes were locked onto the pistol’s barrel.

“Take it easy,” she said.

“It’s only a memory,” Travis said, and pulled the trigger.

The bullet shattered her collarbone and she collapsed, screaming and holding the wound. Travis was already up and sprinting, ignoring her, going right over her and through the doorway.

Across the living room. Through the still-open entry door and onto the landing. He was two flights down before he realized he still had the gun. He stuffed it into his front pocket coming off the final step, hit the exterior door’s latch bar and burst out into the cool night.

He faced the intersection, and the north stretch of Johns Hopkins beyond it.

No sign of Ward at either one.

The man was already out of sight. He’d reached the crossroads and made a turn, one direction or another.

Travis broke into a sprint toward Broadway. He dissected the situation as he ran. Ward couldn’t have crossed Broadway and continued along Monument—Travis would’ve seen him already in that case. He also couldn’t have gone into the parking structure; there was no entry to it anywhere near this street corner. That left north or south on Broadway, and south would keep Ward right next to the hospital for another eight hundred feet. The place he was desperate to get away from.

North, then. Had to be.

Travis was already looking in that direction as he passed the last townhouse. The whole width of Broadway slid into his view.

Ward was nowhere on it.

Travis spun to look south. No Ward there, either.

He faced north again. Looked for places the man could’ve ducked into. Only two were close enough to be plausible options: an alley behind the row of academic buildings to the east, and another behind the row of town houses to the west.

Something metal crashed onto concrete. Maybe a trash-can lid. Definitely in one of the alleys—but which? The acoustics were tricky.

Travis sprinted again, covering the hundred feet north to the midpoint of the shallow block. Faced the left-side alley—behind the town houses—as he stopped hard.

The lid lay thirty feet away in the spill of amber light from the street. Five feet beyond it there was only darkness: a channel of fractured and cluttered space that separated the town houses on the south half of the block from those on the north. It stretched all the way to the west end, almost three hundred yards.

But there were lots of ways out of it, north and south. Mini-alleys that divided parallel homes here and there. Travis could see these only by the gaps in the rooflines three stories up. Down in the dark at ground level there was no detail at all. Ward could be slipping into one of these passageways right in front of him, right now, and he wouldn’t know. Travis threw himself forward into the channel.

Deep shadow. Random shit strewn everywhere. Hazy light from the occasional back room.

Travis found his eyes adjusting after the first ten seconds. Saw a child’s wagon and stepped over it quietly.

Something moved in the dimness fifty feet away. A clatter of wood and concrete and—what else? Human hands striking the ground, Travis thought.

A man cursed softly.

Travis advanced. One careful step at a time.

Faint sounds of movement ahead. Junk being shoved aside. Plastic bags rustling. Ward was struggling to get back on his feet.

Travis tried to fix his eyes on the sound source. No good. At any distance the darkness was still nearly perfect.

He took another slow step—and crushed an aluminum can that’d been lying on its side. In the stillness the sound might as well have been a car alarm.

A man’s voice called out, raspy and sore and full of fear: “Who’s there?”

Travis didn’t answer. He waited. Took soundless breaths with his mouth wide open.

Five seconds passed, and then the rustling noise came again. Ward was still trying to get up.

Was it really that difficult for him to do? That was hard to believe, given the agility he’d shown so far.

Bags slid on the alley floor. Something made of plastic flipped over and skittered.

Suddenly Travis understood.

These weren’t the sounds of a man laboring to right himself.

They were the sounds of a man searching for something.

Ward had lost the notebook when he’d fallen.

Travis advanced again, still trying for silence but not as carefully as before. His right hand went to his pocket and settled on the .38.

He was forty feet from the sifting sounds now, still trying to peg the location. The brick walls on either side played hell with his directional hearing.

Travis was keenly aware of the situation’s risk: Ward knew now that someone was here hunting him. The instant the man recovered the notebook, he’d go silent again, and the advantage would be all his. He could pick any narrow alley at random and disappear.

Travis continued forward. Thirty feet away.

The rustling stopped.

So did Travis.

He froze and held his breath and listened for movement.

Instead there came a shout: “Leave me alone!”

It echoed crazily along the rift between the townhouses, in staggered and distinct reverberations.

But Travis’s ears picked up something else. Some other sound, barely audible beneath the panicked words. He thought he knew what it was, though it made no sense: a zipper being undone.

What zipper could Ward have except the fly on his jeans? Had his pants snagged on something when he’d sprawled? Was he sliding out of them so he could get away?

The echoes of the shout faded and the alley dropped to absolute silence.

Five seconds.

Ten.

Travis felt panic begin to stir. Ward was leaving, and there was no way to stop him.

Fifteen seconds.

Not a sound anywhere.

Travis let go of the gun in his pocket, cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted.

“Ruben! I know about the VLIC! I know about the instructions!”

A foot scraped on concrete, maybe stopping fast and turning, far away in the dark. Fifty or sixty feet.

Silence.

“I’m supposed to help you!” Travis said.

For a moment nothing happened. Then Ward called out: “Who the hell are you?”

Travis thought about his reply. Saw no reason to be inventive.

“Travis Chase! Let me help!”

He heard a fast exhalation. It sounded like confusion, though it was hard to tell. More likely it was just a physical response to the past minute’s stress.

“You’re only a kid!” Ward yelled.

Travis started moving again. Homing in on the voice’s location: not just far ahead but all the way against the alley’s left side.

“I’m old enough to be useful,” Travis said, letting his own voice relax.

“The instructions didn’t say anything about this,” Ward said. Still unnerved. Still on the brink of fleeing.

“What, there’s a rule against someone giving you a hand?”

The points of the conversation didn’t matter. Keeping Ward talking mattered. And closing in on his voice.

But the seconds drew out, and Ward didn’t reply.

Travis continued moving forward. Slowly. Silently.

Then the man said, “Is it already happening?”

Travis started to ask what he meant, but stopped. Asking for clarification might clash with what he’d told Ward a moment earlier: that he knew what was going on. While Travis didn’t need to make sense, he did need to avoid scaring the guy away.

“The filter,” Ward said. “Is it starting now?”

The filter?

Travis hesitated, still advancing, then decided to wing it. “It’s possible,” he said.

Ward breathed out audibly again. Same location: ahead and to the left.

“It’s not supposed to happen yet,” Ward said. “Not for years and years.”

Travis kept moving. Forty feet to go. He’d have to speak more softly now to hide the fact that he was getting closer.

“Whoever it affects,” Ward said, “it’s not their fault. Not really. Under the wrong conditions, anyone could end up the worst person on Earth.”

Travis’s leading foot touched down and froze. So did the rest of his body.

Are you wondering if there’s a connection? Paige had said. Between whatever’s going on right now and … the thing about you?

Travis stared at the blackness where Ward had just spoken, and found his thoughts suddenly vacant. The question came out before he realized he was asking it: “What are you talking about?”

He noticed only halfway through—too late for it to matter—that he hadn’t tempered his voice at all.

There was another quick scuff of shoes on asphalt—Ward flinching, maybe—and then a sustained burst of movement as the man took off running through the cluttered dark. Crashing past whatever lay in his path. Stumbling and staggering, but moving fast.

Travis pushed away the confusion and sprinted after him. Following the sound. Gaining now.

All at once he caught a glimpse of Ward, in the vague pool of light below a curtained window. Bald head and T-shirt and jeans—he was still wearing them.

The man had almost passed beyond the light when he sprawled. Caught his foot on something and went all the way down. The notebook flew free again.

Travis doubled his speed and yanked the .38 from his pocket—enough fucking around.

He leveled it as Ward pushed up to a crouch.

But he didn’t fire.

He didn’t need to.

Ward made one desperate grab for the notebook, almost collapsing again as he did, then heard Travis’s running footsteps and threw himself sideways out of the light. The book stayed right where it’d fallen.

Travis pulled up short beneath the window. Stood there catching his breath and listening. He heard Ward staggering in the dark twenty feet off, and then silence again. Had he stopped? Was he weighing his chances of fighting for the notebook?

Travis kept the pistol leveled, aimed toward the last place he’d heard movement. He kept his eyes in that direction too, as he knelt and scooped up the book.

He stared another five seconds, the gun shaking in his small hand.

Then he tucked the notebook against himself like a football, turned back the way he’d come from, and ran.

Travis emerged into the light on Broadway. He heard sirens nearby in the night, coming from several directions and getting louder by the second. He remembered the gunshot inside Garret’s place. There’d be a dozen police cars on this block within minutes.

He sprinted across both wide sections of Broadway and went north toward Ashland, the first street free of construction.

He went east and north for two blocks, then turned west and made a wide swing around the hospital and the crime scene, coming at last to where he’d left the Chevelle. There was a serious-looking ticket stuck under the wiper. He discarded it, set the notebook on the passenger seat, started the car, and got the hell out of Baltimore.

Twenty miles south on I–95, he took an exit to a huge shopping mall. The parking lot was a ten-acre tundra of neat yellow lines and stark white cones of light. There wasn’t a single car in it but his own. He parked out in the center so he could see trouble coming a long way off. He turned on the dome light and opened the notebook.

The first page was blank.

So was the second.

And every other page in the book.

He flipped back to the beginning and saw what he’d missed at first glance: four or five ragged strips trapped inside the spiral binding, where pages had been torn out.

He understood what the zipper-like sound had been, and why Ward had shouted to obscure it.

He got out and stood beside the car and screamed loud enough to hurt his throat. An animal shriek that rolled away across the dark fields and half-built developments at the edge of suburbia.

He paced for a long time, wandering between the car and the nearest light post. Its base was bolted into a concrete cylinder covered with flaking yellow paint. He found himself kicking it every time he reached that end of his track, and wondered how much of his ten-year-old self he was experiencing, emotionally.

He realized he was putting off snapping out of the memory. Stalling. Had no idea how to break the news to Paige and Bethany. He could lie and put his performance in a better light—it wasn’t as if they could check—but had no intention of doing so. He’d tell them the whole thing. He just didn’t want to do it yet.

Reaching the car again, he leaned in and took the notebook off the seat. He stood with his back against the door and stared at the cover in the pale mercury light.

He flipped it open. An entirely idle move.

But he drew a quick breath at what he saw.

The angled light revealed indentations in the page. The ghosts of whatever had been written on the sheet above it, pressed deep by the tip of the pen.

He straightened and moved closer to the light post. Tilted the book and swiveled his body, seeking just the right glare.

The instant he found it his optimism faded. There were indentations, for sure, but they’d come from several pages above this one. A stacked mess of handwriting, so jumbled that he could make no sense of it.

Except for two lines.

Two places where, as it’d happened, there’d been no overlap.

He put his eyes three inches from the paper and scrutinized the words, feeling his skin prickle even before he’d begun to read. It struck him that this was an alien message. Spoken by a human and transcribed by a human, but an alien message all the same.

He let his eyes track over the two lines.

The first was impossible to draw meaning from—it was the end of one sentence and the beginning of another.

a passageway beneath the third notch.Look for

He considered it for a moment anyway. It seemed to be part of a detailed set of directions. A route to take and something to search for at some given location—a place with notches, whatever that meant in this context. A castle wall? A rock formation somewhere? There had to be a million places that fit the bill, and there was nothing in the line to narrow the field. Travis stared at it a second longer and then let it go.

The second line was farther down and more softly impressed—it must’ve come from an even earlier page. It was a perfect sentence. Travis read it and felt the blood retreat from his face.

Some of us are already among you.

Part II - The Stargazer

Chapter Eighteen

Paige and Bethany stared at the two lines Travis had typed on the laptop. For a long time they neither spoke nor blinked.

The Tap sat nearby on the table, cooling. Travis stepped to the kitchen counter, grabbed a napkin and wiped a thin trail of blood from his temple.

Already he could feel the strange effect of the burned memory: while the past two days in Baltimore were as fresh in his mind as if he’d just experienced them—as he had—they were also stitched into his distant past, foggy as a recollection of a school field trip he might have taken way back then, that spring when he was in fifth grade. The Baltimore memory had simply replaced whatever real memory he might’ve had of those two days, like an exotic film clip recorded over a section of home video. He let the sensation fade and tossed the bloody napkin into the trash. As he did, his eyes went to the microwave clock.

8:50 A.M.

Ten hours and fifty-five minutes to the end of the road.

He heard a group of people go by in the corridor outside the residence, talking. They sounded animated about something.

“This second line,” Paige said. “You’re certain the first letter was capitalized?”

Travis nodded, seeing where she was going. He’d gone there himself while still holding the notepad under the light post, exhausting every possible way the sentence could mean less than it appeared to. If the first letter were lowercase, then the unseen earlier portion of the sentence might change the meaning. Might contain a negative that reversed it entirely.

But all such possibilities could be discarded.

“The S filled the line, top to bottom,” Travis said. “Every other letter without an ascender was exactly half that height. Nora’s handwriting was perfect.”

Travis saw Bethany’s shoulders twitch as a shudder climbed her neck. She read the line again and exhaled softly. “Already among us. That makes it sound like they blended in.”

Paige seemed to react to that idea. She looked up at Travis. “Remember what you asked in Ouray? Who has the motive to undo what my father did?”

Travis’s mind called up images of full-floor penthouses eighty stories above Manhattan or Hong Kong, from which a few encrypted phone calls could launch private armies or sway governments—could direct arterial flows of cash to influential interests that didn’t care where the money came from, or why. The notion that such places existed was unnerving enough, even if their occupants were human.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Paige said. “If some of them were already here before the Breach opened, why bother sending instructions through it to make a pawn of one of us? Why would they need a pawn at all? They’re millions of years more advanced than we are. Maybe billions. Anything they wanted to do here, they could’ve done it themselves like you or I would get a glass of water. They wouldn’t need to sneak around and pull strings from behind the scenes.” A silence. “So why did they?”

Travis found only about half his attention going to the question. The other half kept going back to what Ruben Ward had said in the alley—the disconnected talk about the filter, whatever it was. Something that wasn’t supposed to become an issue for years and years—from the vantage point of 1978. Travis had said nothing of the filter since waking from the memory. Though it obviously tied into what was happening now—might simply be what was happening now—it just as obviously had a connection to Travis’s own future, and whatever was waiting for him there. It.

Which he’d never spoken about in front of Bethany, as much as he trusted her. He’d never told anyone but Paige.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Paige said again.

Travis could only shake his head. He stared at the laptop screen, the two short lines surrounded by vacant space. He thought of the blade-thin margin by which he’d lost the notebook—lost all the answers and come back with only these impossible questions.

“Does the first line give us anything actionable?” Paige said. “Is there more to it than we’re seeing?”

She leaned close and studied it.

“ ‘A passageway beneath the third notch,’ ” she said. “ ‘Look for …’ ”

For a long time no one spoke. Then Bethany shrugged. “It tells us Ruben Ward went somewhere that had notches and a passageway. I’m sure we’d hit some kind of jackpot if we could find the passageway now. But we can’t. Not with only this to go on.”

Paige straightened and paced away from the table, hands on her head.

More footsteps sounded in the hallway. More lively—if not quite happy—speech. Like something was going on. The moment triggered a memory for Travis—one that was minutes old for Paige and Bethany but more than two days old for him.

“Who was on the phone?” he said. “You got a call right before I went under.”

Paige looked at him. “One of President Holt’s aides. Air Force One is landing here within the next fifteen minutes.”

Chapter Nineteen

“Ostensibly, he’s only coming to tour the place,” Paige said. “Every new president does that, early on.”

“You believe him?” Travis said.

“Not for a second. You?”

Travis shook his head. He looked at the microwave clock again. 8:52.

“What are you thinking?” Paige said.

“It’s three hours since the trap in Ouray failed,” Travis said. “Which is about how long it takes a 747 to fly here from D.C. The timing just about works out—Holt learns it all went to hell down there, and he hops in his plane to pay us a visit. Like some kind of Plan B.”

Paige considered it. “It’s plausible. But whatever the case, he’s not coming in here with any kind of armed presence. Not even Secret Service; that’s been policy here forever. If he doesn’t accept that, we won’t even open the elevator.”

“Then Plan B is something more subtle than Plan A was,” Travis said. “Some spoken threat, thinly veiled, or maybe not veiled at all. Or else just a lie to throw us off track entirely. Remember, Holt doesn’t know we suspect his involvement.”

“And we want to keep it that way,” Paige said. “So we’ll give him the tour and not share anything we’ve learned, and assume every word he says is bullshit.”

Travis indicated the Tap, still sitting on the table.

“There’s one more place where I can intercept Ruben Ward,” he said. “That motel on Sunset Boulevard, August 12.”

“Probably fifteen minutes before he blows his brains out,” Paige said. “I doubt he’ll be in a talkative mood. And by then the notebook’s already gone.”

Travis recalled Ward’s fear in the alley behind the townhouses. He tried to imagine getting information out of him, in the last hour of his life. As a ten-year-old. He considered it for five seconds and dropped it.

“All right, we concentrate on the cheat sheet,” he said. “It’s everything we need to know, on a single piece of paper. We work the information we have, starting with your father’s meeting in 1987, right before he closed down Scalar. We find out who he met with—who he gave copies of that report to—and where they lived, and then I’ll use the Tap to drop into their lives again and again, in the months right after that. That part won’t be hard; I was nineteen years old by then. I’ll do whatever it takes to get that document. Break into houses—anything.”

“If we get Holt in and out of here fast enough,” Paige said, “say forty-five minutes, then we’ll have ten hours left to work with. In the first hour alone you could use the Tap a dozen times, if need be.” She winced at the thought of his actually making that many trips with it, but the power of the idea shone clearly in her eyes. “If we find out what’s actually going on, what’s happening right now, today, we’ll still have hours left to go on offense against it.”

“No kid gloves,” Travis said. “If it’s a matter of just finding certain people and killing them, we do it. We use any Breach technology necessary. We do it. Simple as that.”

Paige was nodding. So was Bethany. Both looked a little unnerved, but neither looked uncertain.

“So who did my father meet with?” Paige said. “Carrie called them a mixed bag of powerful people. Politics, intel, finance. How do we find them?”

“We need a starting point,” Bethany said. “Any little piece of information about your father’s meeting with them—location, date, someone’s flight number, anything at all. Just something I can get my nails into.”

“What about flights?” Travis said. “We know the meeting happened at the end of the Scalar investigation, which should be sometime near the final entry in the index downstairs—November 28, 1987. Assuming Peter flew there from here, could we find a record of his departure and destination? Does the airbase in Browning have traffic logs?”

Paige shook her head. “Not for us. We’ve never allowed any of our comings or goings to be documented. Anonymity’s a good line of defense.”

Bethany looked thoughtful. “There might be other records from that time, though.” She turned to Paige. “Do you have your father’s social security number somewhere?”

“It should be in the system,” Paige said. She minimized Word on the laptop and opened the personnel records. Ten seconds later she read the number to Bethany, who entered it into her tablet computer and got to work.

Paige’s cell rang. It was someone from Defense Control on level B4, which served as Border Town’s air traffic control center. Air Force One was five minutes out.

A minute later Bethany said, “Might have something.” She continued navigating on her computer as she spoke. “Do either of you remember the rough dates of the two index entries before the last one, on November 28? I can run down to the archives and check, if you don’t.”

Paige closed her eyes and concentrated. She opened them a few seconds later and said, “The second-to-last one was about a month earlier, at the end of October, and the one before that was six weeks earlier still—mid-September.”

“Definitely have something then,” Bethany said. “Take a look.”

Travis and Paige pressed in behind her and stared at her screen. Travis realized he was looking at a financial record of some kind, with credits and debits listed in columns, along with transaction labels.

“These are Peter Campbell’s credit-card statements beginning in September of 1987,” Bethany said.

If the invasion of privacy bothered Paige, she didn’t show it.

“He didn’t use the card a lot,” Bethany said. “Understandably. Living here, why would he? But in mid-September we’ve got four charges clustered over three days. A gas station and three restaurants, all located in a place called Rum Lake, California.” She looked at Paige. “Ever hear him mention it?”

“Never heard of it at all until just now.”

“Well he went there a few more times,” Bethany said. “Late October and late November, a couple days each trip, corresponding with the final two entries downstairs in the archives, and then one last trip that doesn’t match an entry. That was in mid-December. I’ve looked back through these statements to the beginning of 1984—that’s as far back as it goes—and there are no other Rum Lake charges. No more of them after these four trips either. So it wasn’t just some getaway he went to all the time, with the dates of his trips just happening to match the Scalar entries. This place was directly tied to Scalar, right at the end.”

“Carrie said he flew somewhere for the meeting,” Paige said. “But it was just one meeting—not four of them separated by weeks.”

“I’m thinking the meeting is just the final trip,” Bethany said, “in mid-December. It makes sense that there’s no index entry for that one downstairs, if he purged the files right when he got back from it. Why create a new file just before you get rid of them all?”

Paige nodded, following the logic.

Bethany minimized the window and opened another. “So for starters I’ll focus on the last trip, and see if I can identify anyone else who showed up in Rum Lake at the same time. I’ll get into the merchant accounts of these places where Peter ran his card, and pull up the rest of the transactions over those days. Maybe some other customer’s info will send up a flag—like if it’s someone who lives in D.C. or works in the intelligence business. Power players, right?”

“That sounds like a lot of digging,” Travis said. He thought of all the card charges that would’ve happened at those businesses during the days in question. Once she had that information, Bethany would need to access personal information on every one of those customers to see who stood out.

“It’ll take time,” Bethany said. “There’s not exactly an app for that. Not until I script one, at least. Give me a few minutes.”

Sixty seconds later the three of them were in the elevator, rising toward B4. Bethany held the tablet computer in one hand while the fingertips of the other flew over its touch-screen. She kept her focus on it even as the doors parted and the three of them stepped out. The open doorway to Defense Control was twenty feet ahead and to the left. Light from its numerous LCD screens bled into the corridor, along with the voices of half a dozen people inside. Paige led the way in.

Defense Control was about the same size as the conference room, though more spacious because its ceiling was twice as high. The flat wall that paralleled the corridor was lined with small equipment cabinets and much larger, semi-portable mainframe computers the size of industrial refrigerators. The far wall was a sweeping half circle, covered floor to ceiling with giant high-definition monitors. Each one carried a live video feed from one of nearly a hundred cameras embedded in the desert above.

Evelyn Rossi, Defense’s ranking officer, paced near the room’s central workstation and spoke into a wireless headset. “Air Force One, I have you at one-seven-zero knots, heading zero-eight-five. Maintain course and descent.”

Evelyn caught Paige’s eye and nodded hello.

“Pilot provided the verification code?” Paige said.

“Yeah.”

Travis let his eyes track over the room’s other workstations, set up to handle less-friendly situations. Technicians sat at or stood near these desks, idle but ready to engage in a hurry. Along with the network of cameras, the desert around Border Town hid one of the world’s most formidable defensive systems, designed to counter both ground and airbased attacks. The most critical ingredient, though, was simply the policy of not allowing unauthorized aircraft anywhere near the place. Even Air Force One had to forgo its usual complement of escort fighters when it visited.

Several of the screens on the curved wall had a visual of the giant aircraft, less than a mile out now, though its details were still vague. Every camera up top was either snug with the ground or raised above it by no more than a foot, which meant that when focused on a distant, nearly ground-level subject, they all looked through curtains of heat-ripples rising off the baked landscape. The effect was present now on every screen in the room, reducing the distant 747 to no more than a shimmering blob with wings.

Evelyn turned to Paige again as if to say something, but stopped herself. She’d noticed something on her desk display. She keyed her headset.

“Air Force One, I have you changing to heading zero-eight-seven. You are outside the glide path. Please acknowledge.”

Her eyes narrowed as she waited for a reply. She didn’t appear to get one.

“Air Force One, acknowledge change of heading. You are not on course for the runway.”

“He’s climbing,” one of the techs said. “And increasing airspeed. One-eight-zero knots. One-eight-five.”

“Air Force One,” Evelyn said, “if you are aborting approach please acknowledge. Say again, please acknowledge this transmission.” She looked around at the others. “Why the hell can’t he hear me?”

“One-nine-five knots,” the tech said. “Still climbing. If he’s aborting for a retry he should’ve turned by now. Still tracking dead straight on heading zero-eight-seven.”

Travis picked out the wall screen with the best image of the aircraft, and stepped closer to it. As it climbed and drew nearer, its shape began to resolve. So did its color.

Which was uniform gray, not blue and white.

Someone behind him said, “What the hell?”

At that moment the ripples diminished by a fraction, and the plane’s outline, even head-on, became clear. Not the massive bulk of a 747’s body with its wings tying in at the bottom. This was a narrower, sleeker form, and its wings met near the top of the fuselage.

Travis understood that he’d been wrong about Holt’s intentions: they weren’t subtle. They were as far from subtle as they could get.

“That’s not Air Force One,” Travis said. “That’s a B–52.”

Chapter Twenty

Colonel Dennis Pike hadn’t slept much during the night. Along with his wife and older daughter, he’d been up past midnight watching CNN’s coverage from D.C. Then he’d gotten a phone call—one he’d expected—and five minutes later he’d logged in at the front gate of his post: Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. In response to the attack on the White House, all branches of the armed forces were stepping up their levels of readiness. Pike had to oversee the status change for his own command, the 83rd Bomb Wing. It took about six hours, after which he’d gone home and caught ninety minutes’ sleep before another call came in. This one he hadn’t expected.

The man on the other end was the Air Force chief of staff, with orders coming directly from the new president. Strange orders. A wargame of some kind, to be conducted immediately by Pike himself. It would take place at a target range in eastern Wyoming—a location Pike had seen on maps throughout his career, though it had never been labeled as a practice area. It hadn’t been labeled as military property at all, but simply as Restricted Airspace—Undesignated. The president wanted Pike, without a copilot or navigator aboard, to fly a B–52 to the center of that place and test his ability to deploy a very unorthodox weapon, only two of which were even stored at Minot. Stranger still, Pike would relinquish control of his comm system for the entirety of the flight, setting it to a remote-access channel which would allow the Air Force chief and the president—or anyone they selected—to use his radio and do his talking for him.

“Don’t ask,” the chief of staff had said. “All that matters is that we’ll be evaluating your performance. Do this right and we’ve got something very special in mind for you.”

The target was in sight now, less than half a mile ahead: a seemingly arbitrary GPS point ten yards south of what looked like a pole barn, the only structure for miles around. The weapon was to impact that spot of empty ground precisely. Which it would, of course. Given the perfect visibility, low altitude and near-stalling speed, a trained chimp could’ve hit this target. It occurred to Pike, though only briefly, to wonder what the hell his superiors were evaluating. He’d performed the strange set of approach maneuvers exactly as ordered, but he could’ve done it drunk. So could every pilot in his command. There was no logic to it. Now, climbing and accelerating in the final seconds of the run, he realized this wouldn’t even make for a good story at the Officers Club. Whatever it was, no doubt it would be classified forever.

Well, strange was better than boring.

He reached for the weapons system panel.

Paige was already running, even as Travis got the last word out. Others in the room were scrambling for their desks, pulling up the defensive controls in seconds, as their training had taught them to do. But Paige’s solution would be faster. And simpler.

She all but crashed into the rack-mounted instrument cabinet she’d been aiming for, bolted to the wall near the entry. She pressed her palm to the scanner above the cabinet’s door, and with every tense muscle in her body she willed it to respond quickly.

A quarter-second later the cabinet clicked open.

Paige yanked the door aside to reveal a single, coaster-sized red button. It looked exactly like the kind Travis remembered from electrical shop in high school. There’d been one every six feet along the classroom wall, rigged to kill the power in case some freshman touched the wrong wire and started cooking.

The red button in Border Town had a different purpose.

Paige slammed it as hard as she could.

Pike felt a thud reverberate through the airframe as the bomb-bay doors locked open. Felt the sudden increase in drag as the slipstream passing under the plane churned and whirled through the complex interior geometry of the bay. He knew that in another second he’d feel the most dramatic change of all: the instant loss of nearly five thousand pounds of weight. The GBU–28 was a heavy son of a bitch, though only a small fraction of its mass was explosive. Well over four thousand of its pounds were just dumb, solid steel. For good reason.

Pike’s hand was already on the bomb release when everything changed. One instant the desert floor was bare and lifeless. The next, it burst open at half a dozen places, long, rectangular sections of ground being heaved aside from below. Pike had the crazed impression of casket lids coming up through the topsoil of a cemetery.

Half a second later he understood what he was seeing—a reality many times worse than a graveyard come to life.

Kill everything.

That was what the red button did. It deployed every weapon concealed in the desert and gave the system a universal, exceptionless command: target and engage any moving object within range.

Travis had already turned his eyes from Paige back to the wall screens. The bomber had come so much closer in the past five seconds it seemed surreal. Its apparent distance before must’ve been a trick of camera perspectives and shimmer.

Now, as the aircraft continued to swell on screen, Travis saw that its bomb doors were wide open. Even as he noticed, he felt the building shudder, and on every television in the room, multiple rocket-exhaust trails raced up out of the ground toward the plane.

Pike spent the last second of his life numb. He didn’t feel what his hand was doing on the bomb release, if anything. Didn’t bother to reach for the electronic countermeasures switch either—it probably wouldn’t have saved him even if there’d been time to use it.

He found his brain doing exactly two things at once—each half acting on its own, he imagined. The left half recognized the flight profile and outlines of the Patriot missiles that had come up out of the desert to meet him. His eyes went to the one that would reach him first, its RF seeker head having apparently locked onto the B–52’s nose. He tried to remember the trigger distance for a Patriot’s proximity fuze. Five meters? Ten? Did it matter? The thing was closing toward him at more than twice the speed of sound, and its warhead was a two-hundred-pound frag bomb. Like a hand grenade the size of a keg.

The right half of his brain was looking elsewhere, and more frantically. It was struggling to grab the last image he’d had of his daughter, as he’d left the house the night before. She’d been sitting in the leather recliner beside the couch, in a big purple T-shirt. Bangs in her eyes. She’d looked at him and said what she always said when he left for the base.

Careful.

It meant good-bye, but it meant a lot more the way she said it—high and soft, her eyebrows arched. It meant I love you. It also meant If anything happens to you, I’m always going to love you. He knew it meant all those things. He wasn’t imagining any of it.

Careful.

That word, in his daughter’s voice, was Dennis Pike’s last thought.

Travis saw the first distinct explosion maybe a fourth of a second before the next. The leading Patriot detonated almost nose-to-nose with the bomber, reducing everything forward of the wings to a particle cloud—which the plane instantly outran. The second Patriot, coming from the aircraft’s left, exploded just beneath the port-side wing, which at once became a sheet of flame. An instant later the starboard wing, the only intact lifting surface, pitched upward, hauling the entire plane high and left in a roll.

And revealing, like a curtain drawn aside with a flourish, a bomb that’d been freed from the bay less than a second earlier.

Travis heard sharp breaths sucked in around him.

The loosed weapon, so close now that it was visible from multiple camera angles, was long and sleek like a missile, but it didn’t fly like one. It had no propulsion of its own. It simply arced forward in a smooth line, gently falling away from the climbing trajectory the plane had held. The bomb’s tip dropped to level and then gradually angled downward. Travis could see that by the time it hit the surface, its nose would be pointing straight down, and though he’d never seen one before, he knew exactly what kind of bomb it was.

A bunker buster.

The majority of the thing’s weight, mostly up front, would just be dead metal, shaped to penetrate soil and concrete. The explosive portion would be rigged to blow only after the weapon had traveled some distance beneath the impact point. What that distance might be, Travis couldn’t guess, but without question the bomb would explode inside the complex, not above it. Whether anyone in the place survived was a dice roll now.

He turned and found Paige beside him, Bethany just beyond her, both of them thinking the same things he was. Their eyes were wide—they weren’t even trying to hide the fear. None of them said anything. They just waited. Whatever was coming was only seconds away.

In his peripheral vision Travis saw orange light flare across the wall of screens; the last Patriots had converged on the crippled bomber and brought it tumbling downward in a cartwheel of fire. Now the floor of the room began to vibrate with a high-frequency hum—the 30mm chain guns in the desert had opened up, though in all likelihood they were just shooting at the falling aircraft. Travis didn’t look to see if any of them were firing on the bunker buster. Even if they were, they probably couldn’t stop it.

An absurd thought struck Travis in the moment before impact: an image of the little vault built into their closet wall down on B16.

Where they’d left the Tap for safekeeping.

Chapter Twenty-One

The sound the bomb made when it punched through into the building was nothing like what Travis had expected, whatever he’d expected. It sounded like a machine gun. He realized immediately what he was hearing: the successive impacts as the thing slammed down through one concrete floor after another. It seemed to pass very close to Defense Control, maybe just a few feet beyond one of the walls, before thudding onward, deeper into the complex. Travis could no more count the floors it passed through than he could count autofire shots, but he guessed it’d gone at least as far down as B20.

Then it blew.

Every sensation came at once. The air pressure wave, like someone had clapped a pair of hands violently over Travis’s ears, nearly rupturing the drums. The ungodly jolt to the building’s structure, killing the power and dumping the room into pitch blackness. And then the kinetic shock of the explosion itself, heaving upward, certainly powdering the dozen floors above and below it, and pressing hard against those farther away. Travis felt the concrete beneath his feet arch up impossibly. Heard the reinforcing steel within it groan and crack, and knew without any doubt that when it sagged back a second later it would simply break. He and Paige and Bethany and everyone in the room would plunge with it, pressed to nothing as the interior of Border Town pancaked to a few stories of rubble down at B51.

The floor reached the top of its upward heave. It seemed to linger there for longer than should’ve been possible—time itself was hard to gauge just now—and then it fell back toward level, and right past it. The rebar crackled and strained again at the lowest extent.

But held.

The floor was rising once more—not quite to even, but close—when Travis heard the screams. They came from directly below: Security Control on level B5. With the screams came the sound Travis had expected to hear all around him—the avalanche roar of concrete falling apart. The floor on B5 had given.

A second later the screams were gone, washed out by the maelstrom noise of one story after another collapsing in sequence. A steel-and-concrete waterfall rushing down and away. It sucked the air out of Defense Control and Travis heard a high, surging whine somewhere close by. He realized it was an airstream being drawn down through the line of holes the bunker buster had made.

And then it was over. No more sound. No more air movement. Just the building’s remaining framework shuddering with latent energy from the blast and the collapse.

Emergency lighting kicked on within fifteen seconds. Wall-mounted bulbs that normally ran off the grid switched to batteries.

The air was choked with concrete dust. Everyone stood in a daze, looking for one another or for the exits, or doing nothing at all. Travis saw a tech stoop and straighten a keyboard that’d slid partway off a desk.

Bethany was crying. Paige’s eyes were red but nothing was spilling from them. Travis had no idea what his own eyes were doing.

He took a step and realized the floor was tilted to a greater degree than he’d first believed. He imagined the entire level, or at least a portion of it, sagging toward some lowest, weakest point.

He indicated the door they’d come in through earlier. “Come on.”

As soon as they stepped into the corridor they saw where the bomb had passed. Dead centered in the hall, halfway to the elevator, was a ragged hole two feet wide. There was another in the ceiling straight above it.

Travis turned the other way and studied the stretch of corridor leading out to this level’s perimeter. On a normal day he could’ve seen the hallway’s far end, some ninety feet away, where a T-junction led left and right at the outer rim of Border Town. He couldn’t see it now; the corridor dipped in a long, severe bow that cut off the sightline. The lowest point seemed to be perfectly centered between the elevator and the building’s south exterior wall.

Travis stared for another second, then turned away and moved toward the two-foot hole in the floor. He stopped just shy, knelt, and studied the edge. It looked strong enough. He eased forward on all fours and then lay flat on his chest, his head extended down into the opening.

What he saw, he would remember forever. Beneath him yawned nearly fifty stories of empty space, churning with concrete fog. Border Town, if it’d stood above ground like a regular building, would’ve been a cylindrical skyscraper with the rough proportions of a soda can. Through the dust, Travis saw that only the southern half of the structure had collapsed—as if the soda can had been cleaved vertically down the middle, and one of its sides had then been crushed flat while the other remained standing.

For all that, the collapse zone looked as big as the world. Stubs of broken floors lined its curved southern sweep like massive, fractured ribs. On the opposite side, the guillotined edges of the north half’s intact levels met the open space in a rough, upright plane. It looked strangely like a stack of balconies facing inward onto the atrium of a highrise hotel, seen from the top floor looking down. Only there were no balconies—just vivisected rooms and corridors and airducts and gushing pipes and sparking electrical conduits, all of it lit up from deep within by more backup lighting. Clothing from torn-open closets spiraled down into the heavy dust, out of sight. Travis saw a bed lying right along the cutoff, ten stories below, its topsheet held on by one corner and the rest fluttering like a streamer in the eddying air.

Two things came to him, so obvious they barely registered as isolated thoughts. First, his and Paige’s residence lay right along the cutoff. Through the dust he thought he could resolve which one was theirs, though it was hard to tell. Second, the Breach and its protective dome were probably unharmed. Level B51 was not a full floor, but simply a tunnel that extended straight north from the central elevator hub, before opening to the vast cavern housing the Breach and its fortifications.

Travis thought of the falling bomb—clear of the plane before the first Patriot hit. Not just clear. Dropped. The bomb had arced and landed precisely as the pilot wanted it to. Not straight into the elevator shaft—the logical bull’s-eye if the goal was to level the entire building—because dropping it there would’ve damaged the Breach’s chamber, or at least buried it.

Holt had deliberately avoided doing that. He’d settled for taking out half the complex and hoping the shockwave would kill everyone inside.

But he wouldn’t rest on that hope. Not for a minute. Which meant there was more trouble coming, and probably soon.

Travis considered that as he strained for the sound he knew he’d hear—would probably already hear if his ears weren’t ringing. He turned his head and held his breath, and finally picked it up: the crying and calling of survivors among the intact north-side floors. The sounds all came from the top five or six residence levels. It made sense: much deeper and the shockwave would’ve been unsurvivable. Even the backup lighting was sparser below that point—the air compression of the blast had destroyed most of the bulbs. Travis tried to gauge the number of voices he was hearing. Maybe a dozen. That too made sense, given that most of Border Town’s population would’ve been down in the labs at this hour. Only a few would’ve been up in the living quarters.

He twisted and looked at Paige, crouched just behind him. She could see past his head well enough to understand the situation. She could hear the cries too. So could Bethany and the half dozen others in the hall behind her—the whole crowd from Defense Control.

“Is the stairwell still there?” Paige said.

Travis nodded. He kept his eyes on hers and saw them narrow.

“There’ll be kill squads on their way here,” she said. “Won’t there?”

“Staged and ready to chopper in as soon as the bomb hit,” Travis said. “From just outside our radar field. Which is what—forty-five miles?”

“About that.”

“Figure Black Hawks. What’s their top speed?”

“About a hundred eighty miles per hour,” Paige said. “Three miles a minute. So fifteen minutes’ flight time. And the defenses up top are all dead—they run on building power.”

Travis withdrew from the hole and stood. He faced the small crowd.

Evelyn pawed tear-soaked concrete dust from beneath her eyes, her gaze sliding back and forth between Travis and Paige, the question too obvious to need voicing: Why the fuck is this happening?

Travis didn’t answer. His mind was running the crucial math. There were six electric Jeeps up in the pole barn, fully charged. Straight-line over the desert, they could reach Casper, and they could do sixty with no trouble. The Jeeps were sandy brown, the same color as the ground, and Travis had never seen them kick up dust on the hardpan around this place. They didn’t even leave tire tracks. All of which meant they could avoid being spotted by the arriving choppers—but only with a serious head start. Travis’s gut said ten miles was the minimum safe distance; his head could do no better.

Evelyn was still waiting for an answer. So were all the others.

Travis looked at Bethany and indicated the tablet computer she was still holding. He could see its connection icon in the lower corner, red with a diagonal slash through it—Border Town’s wireless system had died with the power grid.

“From up on the surface,” Travis said, “you can get a signal from cell towers on I–25, right?”

Bethany nodded.

“Can you find out if there are spy satellites in visual range of this place?”

She nodded. “It’s not likely. One in four chance, any given hour or so.”

“Can you go up right now and find out?” Travis said. “And while you’re there, move the Jeeps outside, then scatter random clutter over where they were parked.”

She nodded again and didn’t say another word. She stepped past the hole and ran for the stairwell.

Travis turned to the others. “Look at your watches or your phones. Fix on a point in time exactly five minutes from right now.” He continued speaking as they did it. “You’re going to save who you can downstairs, but at the five-minute mark, you’re going to be sitting in the Jeeps up top, ready to go. All six Jeeps are leaving at that moment, together. Even one straggler a few minutes behind would get everyone else killed. Be there or you’re staying here.”

He didn’t wait to see what they thought of that plan. It didn’t matter what they thought. It was simply the only plan that didn’t end with everyone in the building dead. He turned and ran for the stairwell, and heard their footsteps following right behind him.

When they were two levels down Travis slowed and pulled Paige aside on a landing. He let the crowd pass.

“I have to go back up to B4 and do something,” he said. “We can’t leave that level intact for Holt’s people to find. They’ll see Defense Control and realize that’s where we would’ve watched the plane coming in. With that room still in place—and empty—they’ll know there were survivors who made it out.”

Paige’s eyes narrowed as she took his point. “If Defense Control were destroyed … they’d think they got us all.”

“They’d be sure of it. It wouldn’t occur to them that we left in Jeeps—that we even had Jeeps, forty miles from the nearest road. The charging station in the pole barn, all by itself, won’t tip them off; it could be used for a hundred different kinds of equipment.”

Paige nodded. Then fear crept into her expression. She looked upward, as if through the wall of the stairwell, toward B4.

“What are you planning to do?” she said.

“Nothing just yet. I’ll need a few minutes to get it ready. Come up with the last of the crowd, and call out into B4 when everyone’s above that level.”

“Travis, what are you—”

“No time. I’ll be fine. I’ll be up top right behind you.” Before she could say more, he continued. “I need you to do something too.”

“I’m already on it,” she said. “I’ll do it and then help with the survivors.”

“I know what you’re planning,” he said. “What I need is for you to not do it, if it looks too risky.”

“I have to try—”

“No you don’t. Not if it jeopardizes your life. If it’s too dangerous, just skip it and go right to the wounded.”

She started to protest, but he spoke over her again. “Promise.”

A second passed. She looked frustrated—but understanding.

“I promise.”

Then she was gone, down the stairs after the others.

Travis turned and sprinted up the flight they’d just come down.

He passed the hole the bunker buster had punched in the floor, and entered Defense Control, its workstations and its wall of screens dark and dead. He turned to the flat wall, with its row of giant, semi-portable mainframe computers—eight in all.

They were on wheels. Big industrial swivel casters the diameter of salad plates, with brake levers that could be locked or unlocked by stepping on them. Travis saw to his relief that only the front casters of each mainframe had been locked. He ran along the row, slamming his heel down on each lever and freeing each wheel. When he’d finished he ran back to the first mainframe in the line, the one nearest the door. He got a hand on its back corner, braced the other against the wall, and pulled.

For a second the thing didn’t budge. It had to weigh five hundred pounds. Then one of its casters pivoted and the whole unit lurched outward, exposing its power cord and data cable. Travis ripped both from their sockets, got hold of the mainframe once more and heaved it farther out. It protested again, clinging to its inertia even on the room’s slanted floor, but once it’d traveled even a few inches, all four casters fell in line with its direction of travel. It rolled smoothly, gaining momentum as Travis pushed it toward the wide-open door.

He eased it into the hallway and slipped past it, positioning himself on its downhill side. For the moment the huge machine, its wheels still cocked sideways, held still where it’d come to rest. Travis, facing it, turned and looked over his shoulder at the hallway dipping sickeningly behind him. Forty feet away, the low point. The weak point.

How weak, exactly?

Travis doubted the sudden addition of five hundred pounds would make a difference.

Maybe four thousand would.

If it didn’t, he and all the others would probably be dead within a few hours, hunted down and captured after Holt’s people connected the dots here.

Travis stepped backward—down the slope—and pulled the mainframe gently toward him. The moment its wheels realigned, the thing came at him like a brawler. He dropped his shoulder against it and dug his shoes into the carpet and stopped it, then carefully walked it down the slope, one foot at a time. When he’d gone what he judged to be fifteen feet he stopped again, and keeping one heel braced on the floor, used the other to step on both caster brakes on the unit’s lower end.

He let go of it.

It stayed put.

He looked at his phone. Three and a half minutes left before the deadline he’d imposed.

He stepped around the mainframe and sprinted back to the door into Defense Control.

Paige’s first glance at the residence twisted her stomach. It’d been her home for over a decade. She’d shared it with Travis for more than a year now. The best year of her life, by an absurd margin, and almost everything that’d made it good had happened here on B16 in this little sanctuary.

Which had now been sliced in two.

She stood in the doorway for a moment, rocked by what lay beyond it. To her left was half of the living room. To her right was nothing at all. Just darkness and churning dust. The wall that’d held the LCD screen was gone, along with ten feet of floor space that’d extended from it. The couch was right on the brink, facing out into the void like some image out of a surreal magazine ad. Behind and to the couch’s left was the short hall that led to the bedroom, just out of sight from where she stood.

She stepped out of the doorway, crossed the room to the hall, and stopped at the bedroom’s threshold. The same ten feet had been lopped off here as in the living room. The bed was gone. The doorway to the closet was half gone—it’d perfectly straddled the cutoff. The closet itself lay mostly to one side, beyond the door, and had largely remained intact. Even from where she stood, Paige could see its back wall, and the built-in safe that now held the Tap.

She looked at the closet’s doorway again, and focused on the floor that passed through it—what little was left. While half the doorway itself remained, there was hardly anything to stand on beneath it. A two-inch ledge at one side. To get beyond, to the intact closet floor, would require holding onto the trim at the doorway’s remaining edge and swinging her body past it. Her center of gravity would be out over the emptiness during the bulk of that maneuver.

She moved forward across the room, slowing as she neared the closet’s doorway and the edge. There was no telling how strong the floor might be along the drop-off—or here where she was standing, for that matter. The carpet hid any cracks that might’ve been visible in the concrete beneath her, but she assumed they were there; the wall was spiderwebbed with them, surrounding the closet doorway and leading away from it in all directions.

The doorway’s trim was three feet from her outstretched hand now. She took another step. Leaned forward. Put her fingertips to the fluted wood and tested its strength by pushing outward on it, toward the chasm.

The cracked wall around the doorway disintegrated almost at a touch. The trim and three inches of concrete around it simply broke free and pitched out into the darkness and fell away.

Paige flinched and stumbled back, sprawling on her ass on the carpet. She stared at the ragged opening where the doorway had been.

She might still make it through into the closet. Where she’d planned to hold onto the trim, she could press the fractured wall between both hands and swing her body over the drop as planned.

Promise, Travis had said.

She stared at the opening and the wall safe ten feet beyond. Stared at the dust-filled abyss below.

From the levels above she heard the voices of the others, calling out and locating the injured.

She got to her feet, turned, crossed out of the bedroom, and sprinted for the corridor.

Travis pushed the last of the eight mainframes into the hallway and eased it into position with the others: they formed a single line extending down the slope, each butted up against the next, the whole mass held back by the first unit Travis had put in place. That one alone had its brakes on.

He watched the formation shudder and slip downward an inch as number eight settled into line.

Footsteps pounded past up the stairwell. Not the first he’d heard in the last minute. He looked at his phone again: thirty seconds left.

More footsteps, some running, some struggling. He turned toward the door and saw it draw open. Paige leaned through.

“Eleven survivors,” she said. “All but two can walk.” She frowned, her forehead creasing. “I couldn’t get it.”

“We’ll be okay,” Travis said.

Paige took in the mainframes for the first time. She saw the idea. Her eyes widened a little.

“Everyone’s above us?” Travis said.

Paige nodded slowly, most of her attention on the computers.

Travis ran to the low end of the line. He studied the two brakes, then stepped forward and jammed his foot hard onto the pedal nearest the wall. As it released the wheel, the entire formation groaned and moved six inches, then halted again.

Travis looked up at Paige in the doorway.

“Do I need to say it?” she said.

“Run your ass off?” He managed a smile. “No.”

Paige’s own smile was very weak, no match for the fear beneath it.

Travis stomped on the last brake lever and yanked his foot away, coming within a tenth of a second of having it crushed by the caster. He turned and sprinted up the slope, while the array of mainframes bumped and skittered and picked up momentum going the other way. He’d expected them to gather speed quickly, but he saw within the first second that he’d underestimated how quickly. Before he’d covered half the distance to the Defense Control doorway, and maybe a quarter of the distance to Paige at the stairwell door, all of the huge units had lumbered past him, thundering down toward the low point faster than a person could run. The whole corridor vibrated with their passage. It seemed to shudder and, though Travis hoped he was imagining it, to tilt even more steeply toward the low point far behind him.

He passed the Defense Control doorway, covered the short distance to the hole in the floor and vaulted right over it. Ten feet from Paige now. Maybe three steps to go. He’d taken only one of them when her body went rigid and her eyes widened all the way, looking past him now instead of at him.

Two steps remained, but in that instant Travis knew there was no time for them. His leading foot touched down. He let the leg bend more than usual, let his weight drop squarely onto it. Then he launched upward and forward, his momentum carrying him airborne toward the doorway.

He was five feet from it when the floor dropped out from beneath him. It ruptured along a line six inches shy of the stairwell, the concrete giving way like it was piecrust. Travis felt air rushing backward around him, pulled down through the stair shaft by the collapsing mass of B4. Paige threw herself aside, out of his way, and he passed across the threshold and crashed down on the landing. He stopped just short of toppling down the flight directly in front of him.

They missed the deadline by twenty seconds, but the Jeeps hadn’t left without them. There were still a few survivors making their way up the last ten feet to the pole barn: the hardest ten feet, since the stairwell didn’t go all the way to the surface. The final transit required a climb up the elevator shaft’s inset ladder. Travis and another man helped the two who couldn’t stand—they were at least able to grip the rungs.

“No satellites,” Bethany said. She was standing in the barn when Travis emerged with the last survivor. “We’re free and clear for the next hour and then some.”

Travis nodded and passed the victim off to a man standing near Bethany, then stepped back onto the ladder and descended again to B2. He closed the shaft doors there, returned to the surface, swung out and closed those doors as well. The barn was empty now; the others had all gone to the Jeeps. Travis looked at the random equipment Bethany had piled and leaned around the charging station. The stuff looked like it’d been there for years. Perfect. He turned and ran out after the others.

They were twelve miles out when they saw the choppers: tiny black dots coming in low over the desert far to the east. They made straight for Border Town, which Travis could still see by the black smoke from the wrecked bomber. A minute later the choppers reached it, formed a stationary cluster, and descended.

Paige, Travis, and Bethany had a Jeep to themselves. The other Jeeps held three or four occupants each, the groupings based on country of origin. Bethany was already contacting the proper authorities within each government, sending them cell phone numbers for the survivors. Their respective intelligence agencies would need to get involved, and help them stay hidden until they could be extracted. Certainly no authorities here—local, state or federal—would be of help. Holt ultimately held sway over all of those.

The Jeeps would split up once they reached Casper. None would have the power to continue on to a different town, but within Casper itself the survivors would be safe enough, even on their own. No one would be looking for them, after all.

Travis already knew where he and Paige and Bethany would go, within the city. What they would do at that point was still undetermined, though he had a solid guess about it.

He looked at his phone.

9:20 A.M.

Ten hours and twenty-five minutes to the end of the road. Without the Tap in their arsenal, that span of time seemed agonizingly shortened, like the moment required for a guillotine to drop.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Five minutes after breaking formation with the other vehicles, Travis and Paige and Bethany were parked outside a bowling alley three hundred yards from Casper/Natrona County International Airport. While all Tangent personnel carried backup identities, Bethany’s alter egos tended to be unusually wealthy. In the past, that’d come in handy for booking charter flights on short notice. It would work here too, once they knew where they were flying.

“I have three hits,” Bethany said.

She leaned forward from the backseat. “Three people from outside California who made card charges in the town of Rum Lake while Peter was there—those few days in mid-December 1987.”

“Only three out-of-state visitors in the whole town, those days?” Paige said.

“There were others. Most didn’t fit Carrie’s definition—powerful people. These three did: each at the time had a net worth of over twenty million.”

Paige’s eyebrows went up a little.

“That’s nothing compared to what they ended up with,” Bethany said. “In time all three of them made it into the nine figures. Well into them. They were appropriately paranoid about their data security, too—those card charges they made in Rum Lake were on dummy accounts detached from their real names. I only saw through them because the encryption is so old; at the time no one would’ve pegged them. Very careful guys.”

She ran through their bios quickly. The three men were Simon Parks, Keith Greene, and Allen Raines. All Americans, and all in their late thirties in 1987, when they’d presumably met with Peter in Rum Lake. Parks and Greene had both started their careers as corporate lawyers, one in New York and one in Houston. Then, in the late 1970s, each had begun to dabble in finance, making investments in tech firms and quickly working up to fronting serious venture capital. Each man had possessed an especially keen instinct for spotting winners, and spotting them early. By 1987 both were serious players who had ties not only to the tech sector but politics as well. The third man, Raines, had started out as a physicist with a promising academic career, but sometime around 1980 he’d changed course toward D.C. and become a respected scientific advisor to the powerful. Raines, like the other two, had made very smart investments in the eighties, compounding his sizable political income. But unlike the other two, he’d done more than just visit Rum Lake in December 1987.

He’d moved there.

Immediately.

The cash transfer with which he’d purchased his home there was dated December 23 of that year, not even two weeks after the meeting that effectively ended the Scalar investigation. As far as Bethany could tell, that home had been his only residence from that point forward, even as his investments continued to snowball over the following years.

“Where in California is Rum Lake?” Paige said. “Is it a resort? The kind of place you might fall for at first sight and decide to move to?”

By her tone she didn’t seem to have much faith in that theory; she was just exhausting a hypothetical.

“It’s in the mountains off the Coast Highway,” Bethany said, “about an hour north of San Francisco. I don’t think it’s any kind of resort. Definitely no skiing. Just a little town, about four thousand people, up in the redwoods.”

“And Allen Raines still lives there?” Travis said.

“Until recently,” Bethany said.

Travis turned in his seat and looked at her.

“All three of these names generated hits from news sites when I ran them,” she said. “Parks in D.C., Greene in Boston, and Raines in Rum Lake—each in the past twelve hours. All three men died last night, at more or less the same time as President Garner.”

The silence that followed felt like a physical thing. Like the oven wind that scoured the desert and the parking lot.

“There aren’t a lot of details yet,” Bethany said. “Just little capsule articles online. Parks was stabbed in the restroom of an upscale restaurant in Chicago, sometime just before nine, central time. With Greene it was some kind of carjacking near his home in Boston; his wife was killed too. Article says it happened shortly before ten, eastern time. Raines was a hit and run, right on Main Street in Rum Lake, at a quarter to seven in the evening, Pacific time. No one got a license-plate number off the vehicle.” She glanced up from the computer. “All three of those times are within minutes of one another, and of the attack on the White House.”

Another silence. Travis felt them all trying to line up the threads.

“These are just the three people we know about,” Paige said. “There were probably more who met with my father in that town, but didn’t use their credit cards while they were there. It’s likely those people died last night too.”

Travis shut his eyes and interlaced his fingers on top of his head. “From what Carrie told us,” he said, “it sounds like when Peter met with these guys in 1987, he handed them the responsibility for Scalar. He must’ve known by then that it would take people that powerful to oversee the problem. Maybe he even knew what we know: that whoever’s on the other side of the Breach has a presence established on this side already. A powerful presence, if they can control people like Holt. It makes sense that Peter recruited power players of his own. The meeting in Rum Lake was a changing of the guard.” He was quiet a few seconds. “But I don’t think that’s all it was. I think there’s a reason they met there, of all places. Maybe there was something there Peter needed to show them. I think Rum Lake is at the heart of everything. I think whatever Ruben Ward did in those three months before he killed himself, he did it there.”

“It fits with the rest of it,” Paige said. “The investigation sure as hell dialed in on that place at the end. My father was there three times before the meeting.”

“We also know that whatever the solution was, it wasn’t permanent,” Bethany said. “Peter was afraid it could be undone in a single day, even years later. That would explain why Allen Raines stayed in town for good. Because someone had to—to keep an eye on whatever’s there. To babysit it.”

Paige gazed away toward the airport. The runways and the white sides of the terminal gleamed in the hard light.

“Without the Tap we’re not going to get the cheat sheet,” she said. “Not in Rum Lake or any of these places. If we could’ve gone back a year, or a week, or even a full day, sure. But in the present, forget about it. Holt’s people will have raided the homes of everyone who died last night, looking for that document. They wouldn’t even need to sneak around; they could go in with authority. He’s the president.”

Her expression darkened and she shook her head. Travis knew her anger was aimed inward. Knew she was replaying her failure to recover the Tap.

“There was nothing you could do,” he said.

If it helped her to hear that, she didn’t show it.

“Look at the bright side,” Bethany said. “They tried to kill us.”

Both Travis and Paige turned to her.

“Think about it,” Bethany said. “They took out all these guys last night because they needed them out of the way—because if they’d lived, they might’ve stopped whatever’s unrolling right now. Holt’s decision to bomb Border Town is no different: he or whoever’s calling the shots had some reason to fear us. They set the trap at Carrie’s place to verify that Tangent didn’t know anything, but when you got away and took her with you, it was their worst-case scenario. They knew Tangent would know something after that. At least as much as Carrie knew. Which wasn’t everything, but apparently it was enough to spook them.” She paused. “They knew we didn’t have the cheat sheet, but they came after us anyway. That implies we’re a genuine threat to them. That there’s some Achilles’ heel we could find, even without the help of that report.” She looked back and forth from Travis to Paige. “We should be encouraged by that. If they consider us a threat, then we are one.”

“If there’s an Achilles’ heel, it’s at Rum Lake,” Travis said.

“And they’ll be protecting it with everything they’ve got,” Paige said, “even if they’ve eliminated all the threats they’re aware of. Today of all days, they’d err on the side of caution.” She looked at Bethany. “Can you try to get satellite coverage of that town?”

Bethany nodded and got working on it, but didn’t look hopeful. Travis recalled something she’d told him once about the likelihood of a place being visually covered. Spy satellites orbited pretty low, and their paths were set up to maximize the time they spent over places of interest. War zones, terrorist-friendly areas, sites of possible weapons programs. Other places in the world might end up having consistent coverage, but only if they happened to line up with one of those chosen regions. In most places and at most times, like Border Town in the past hour, it was more miss than hit. The globe was very big, and satellite tracks were very narrow.

A minute and a half later Bethany frowned. “One pass over Rum Lake, just under ninety minutes from now. I should be able to tap into it. We’ll get about sixty seconds of visual. That’s the only one to go over between now and the deadline tonight.”

“Ninety minutes isn’t bad,” Paige said. “Flight time to Northern California’s two hours anyway.” She nodded at the airport. “Let’s go.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Travis and Paige sat at a wall of windows overlooking the desert while Bethany spoke to a lone ticket clerk thirty feet away. Except for the four of them, the private terminal was empty.

Travis spoke quietly: “There’s something about the Baltimore memory I didn’t tell you.”

He relayed what Ruben Ward had said in the alley, word for word. When he’d finished, he watched Paige process it. Her eyes tracked over the desert, or maybe just the glass three feet in front of her.

“Filter,” she said. “What could it be? Something the Breach itself does? Something that triggers a change in a person, like the Breach Voices?”

“I wondered the same thing,” Travis said. “It’s all I can come up with, based on what little he said.”

Paige repeated Ward’s last line in a whisper: “Whoever it affects, it’s not their fault. Not really. Under the wrong conditions, anyone could end up the worst person on Earth.” She looked at Travis. “You think it’s going to be you. You think the filter is … it.”

Travis stared at a dry weed growing against the base of the window. The breeze batted it endlessly into the glass.

“I can’t imagine it’s not,” Travis said.

Paige was quiet a long time. Then she said, “Maybe it won’t happen at all now. The timeline we’re in is so different from the other one—the one you and I sent our messages back from. Everything’s changed. Tangent doesn’t even exist anymore, in this version of events. Maybe whatever was coming has already been cancelled out.”

“The Whisper gave me the impression it was inevitable—and the Whisper tended to be right about things.”

For a moment neither said anything more. They stared at the empty horizon. Behind them, Bethany was reciting a string of numbers: some kind of financial information related to her alternate identity.

“The instruction that came back from your future self,” Travis said. He looked at Paige before continuing. “Do you ever wonder if you should’ve followed it?”

She turned to face him, and when she replied her tone left no ambiguity. “Never.”

Travis saw hurt in her expression. She hated that he’d asked the question—probably hated that he’d even had it rattling around in his head.

“That part we do know something about,” she said. “We know the disagreement between us—in that future—comes from a misunderstanding. Whatever it is that you do, I interpret it the wrong way. I react on limited information—withheld information, from the sound of it. Something you’re not able to tell me, at the time.”

“That’s the part I understand least,” Travis said. “Something that important, you’re the first person I’d talk to. You might be the only person I’d talk to.”

He’d kept only one thing from her before: the note from her future self. Its arrival had caught him like a sucker punch, and he’d had only seconds to decide whether to show it to her or not. In that moment he’d simply panicked, but in time he’d told her everything; there wasn’t a single secret between them now.

“I really can’t get there,” he said. “Keeping you in the dark about anything at all—I can’t imagine it.”

He left his next thought unspoken: that unimaginable wasn’t the same thing as impossible.

They chartered a flight to Petaluma, California. Half an hour after wheels-up Travis felt himself begin to nod off. He realized he hadn’t slept all night—the sleep he’d gotten in 1978 didn’t count, as far as his body was concerned. He reclined his seat and shut his eyes and slipped almost at once into a dream. A strange one: Richard Garner was there with him, tied upright to a dolly—like Hannibal Lecter but without the face mask. President Holt was there, too, standing near an old man who looked like Wilford Brimley. Maybe it was Wilford Brimley. The room was small and had no windows. It spun and undulated, calling to mind acid trips Travis had taken in high school. George Washington, in a portrait on the wall, kept pursing his lips and narrowing his eyes, as if he were right on the fence between sharing and keeping some critical secret. The Wilford standin was repeating a line from a golden oldie, asking Travis what was behind the green door. But there was no green door in the dream. Just that drug-warped little room, beneath which Travis could hear the drone of jet engines. “We already know the combo,” the lookalike said. “Four-eight-eight-five-four. Save a world of trouble and tell us now. What’s behind it?” There was pain then. Serious pain. Throbbing in Travis’s left forearm. He noticed an empty syringe on a little tray along the wall. He also noticed, now that he was looking around, that he himself was tied upright to a dolly. The pain in his arm surged upward toward his heart, and when it reached it, it bloomed to every part of his body. It felt the worst in his head. He shut his eyes tight. “Now listen to me carefully,” the old man said in his ear, and his voice at that range made the headache step up tenfold.

Travis startled awake. Paige and Bethany glanced at him. He shook off the remnants of the dream, though he could still hear the steady droning—the business jet’s turbines, running smooth in the high desert air.

Bethany had the tablet computer on her lap. “It’s almost time,” she said. She held the computer out so that all three of them could see it. At the moment it showed only a dark blue field of view. Travis realized after a few seconds that it was the ocean, slowly drifting through the frame.

“The satellite’s camera covers an area much wider than Rum Lake, obviously,” Bethany said, “but this program lets you designate a specific patch of land, and it automatically enlarges that part of the image and tracks it for the whole time it’s in range. Should happen pretty soon.”

For another five seconds there was only blue water on the screen. Then, at the right edge, the coastline of Northern California appeared. It crept in at a few pixels per second. Travis guessed he was seeing ten or fifteen miles of shoreline from the top of the screen to the bottom. It was hard to make out much detail. Roads were impossible to resolve. Mostly what he could see were forests and mountains and lakes. And clouds—lots of clouds. He wondered if they’d block the view of the town.

“Don’t worry about the weather,” Bethany said. “The satellite can see in both visual and thermal—it’ll look right through the cloud cover. I also set up a roadmap overlay to help us make sense of the imagery.”

For a while longer the picture on her screen remained in its wide-angle perspective. The land continued pressing in from the right, the coast now a couple miles into the frame.

Then a little white box drew itself at the edge, defining a square maybe two miles by two, and an instant later it expanded, the land within it filling the entire program window. The view was almost entirely obscured by cloud. For a second that was it: just gray haze and a few inches of forest visible at the top of the screen. Then the thermal and roadmap layers appeared, and the image took on meaning at once.

At the westernmost edge was a major road, probably the Coast Highway. A narrower lane extended from it and wandered along what Travis guessed was a mountain valley: it skipped back and forth through switchbacks and then straightened in the last quarter mile before the town. It was the only road in and out of Rum Lake.

The town itself was more or less an elongated grid. It had a half-mile main drag running west to east, with six or seven cross streets branching off. At their southern ends the cross streets bent and arced around what must’ve been hills or depressions. At their northern ends they tied into a long, curved lane that hugged the lake—Rum Lake, cool blue in the thermal image and about twice the size of the town that shared its name.

Running vehicles stood out clearly: bright white rectangles against the gray background. A few moved along the streets here and there, but Travis ignored them—his attention went immediately to two places where multiple vehicles were clumped together, stationary. The first was along the valley road, just shy of town. Four were parked there, glowing not from engine heat but from bodies seated inside them. Two vehicles on each side of the road, angled at forty-five degrees. Big, boxy shapes, unusually wide.

“Humvees,” Travis said.

Paige nodded.

The second cluster was on the opposite side of town, near a house all by itself on the outskirts. Six more Humvees, these ones neither running nor occupied. They stood out only because of the greenhouse heating of their closed cabs, the effect minimized by the haze that filtered the sunlight.

The vehicles’ former occupants were moving like busy ants in and out of the residence.

“Probably private security contractors,” Paige said, “not soldiers. Maybe the same kind they used against us in Ouray.”

Bethany double-tapped the formation near the house, and the view centered and tightened on it dramatically.

“That’s gotta be Allen Raines’s place,” she said.

She minimized the satellite frame, opened a browser and clicked on Google Maps. Within seconds she’d isolated and zoomed on Rum Lake, and then she typed an address into the search field. The hourglass flickered. A red thumbtack appeared. Same house the Humvees were parked at. Bethany was reaching to open the satellite window again when Travis grabbed her wrist, the move startling her.

“Look,” he said.

He pointed with his other hand to the center of town. In the past half second, little icons and labels had popped up along Main Street, identifying certain businesses. Both Paige and Bethany inhaled audibly when they saw the one Travis had indicated:

Its symbol was made up of a tiny fork and a knife, and its label read, THIRD NOTCH BAR & GRILLE.

Chapter Twenty-Four

They rented a Chevy Tahoe in Petaluma and were on the Coast Highway by eleven on Travis’s phone—adjusted now to Pacific time. Seven hours and forty-five minutes left to work with.

Travis drove. The ocean lay to the left, at times obscured by trees but mostly wide open and endless and blue.

“The name of a restaurant in Northern California,” Paige said, “contained in a message transmitted through the Breach.” Her eyes registered the same vague bafflement all three of them had shared since seeing the labeled icon.

In one sense Travis found it plausible: if the instructions could send Ruben Ward to a specific town, then why not a specific location within that town? But for the most part it threw him. It was, in its way, the strangest detail they’d encountered so far. The exactness of it felt absurd. Ward had been directed to travel across the continent and find a passageway beneath a place that served burgers and chicken wings and beer.

Bethany had already verified that the restaurant had been there in 1978. It dated to the late fifties and had never changed its name. As far as she’d been able to tell, the place hadn’t shown up in any headlines during the summer in question. It’d been business as usual then, and ever since.

Far north along the coast, low clouds crept inland from the sea, pressing and writhing through gaps in the mountains. The same clouds they’d seen from orbit.

“There’s something that’s bothered me since that first phone call last night,” Travis said. “The first thing we knew about the Scalar investigation: its cost. Hundreds of millions of dollars. No matter how I look at it, I can’t get it to make sense.”

“I’ve been wondering about that too,” Bethany said. “The amount is ludicrous. Even if they were accessing the hardest-to-use databases at that time—the kind where paid workers did the searching instead of computers—or running satellite surveillance every day of the week, it wouldn’t come to that cost. Not even close. Throw in the use of FBI agents to check out certain leads, compensate the Bureau for their time, you still don’t even get into the ballpark.”

“The funny thing is,” Travis said, “neither we nor Carrie ever actually knew they used any of that stuff. Satellites, federal agents, any of it. We just made those assumptions based on the huge price tag—something had to cost that much. But none of those resources make sense, when you think about it. Satellites to investigate a guy who’d been dead for three years? Database searches? Ward wasn’t leaving a paper trail—he walked out of that hospital without a single piece of ID. No credit card, no checkbook; he wasn’t even wearing his own clothes. I don’t see how you’d track him three days later, much less three years. It’d be like reconstructing the itinerary of a bum.”

“Strange,” Paige said. “With all the other questions rattling around, we never asked the most obvious one: How did the Scalar investigation work at all? How could they have pieced together any of Ward’s moves?”

“We know they really spent hundreds of millions,” Bethany said. “Whatever they spent it on, it apparently worked.”

They said no more about it, but the question stayed with Travis as he drove.

They’d figured out their approach even before landing. The single road up to Rum Lake was obviously no good, but there were others that passed within half a mile of the town, through neighboring valleys separated from it by low, forested ridges. The nearest was called Veil Road, and in the satellite frame they’d seen that it was clear of checkpoints.

They slid under the low clouds just before the turnoff, and saw at once where the road had gotten its name. A two-way blacktop, it rose in steep pitches and bends along the valley’s ascending length, climbing right into the cloudbank within the first mile. Travis saw the clouds now for what they were: a marine fog layer that nourished the flora of this place—most notably the redwoods, which flanked the road like thirty-story highrises.

They pulled off where the map showed the ridgeline to be at its narrowest, and headed up the slope on foot.

They dropped out of the clouds twenty minutes later on the other side, and through the trees they saw the town, crisp and clear beneath its overcast lid. Well-kept storefronts with brick facades lined Main Street, probably dating back a century or more. Cottages and log cabins comprised the rest of the place, its southern half pitched upward on an incline against the foothills where the three of them now stood, its northern half ranged down to the lakefront. The town was a natural amphitheater with the lake for its stage; there couldn’t be a single building in it that lacked a million-dollar view.

The outline of streets perfectly matched Travis’s memory of the roadmap overlay. He picked out Allen Raines’s house, high on the northeast fringe of the basin, maybe a third of the way around the lake. It stood just below the fog, eye-level with their own position. The six Humvees were still there, their occupants still moving in and out of the place. No doubt they were gutting the home’s interior right to the studs, tearing out insulation batts, ripping up the carpeting and the subflooring. A single sheet of paper could hide in a lot of places. Now that he thought about it, Travis supposed it’d been stored in the most inaccessible place of all: its owner’s head. Raines had probably memorized the thing twenty-five years ago and destroyed it.

Travis lowered his eyes to the center of town and picked out the Third Notch. It had a two-story facade, green-painted wood with white trim, all of it getting on in years but well maintained. There were no Humvees parked around it. No contractors on foot, either. Through the big front windows Travis could see a few tables and booths, but all appeared to be empty. There was someone in an apron moving about, not doing a whole lot.

“Place looks a little dead,” Paige said.

“The restaurant?” Travis said.

She shook her head. “The whole town.”

Now that he looked for it, Travis saw what she meant. Rum Lake wasn’t deserted by any means, but it seemed to be at a near standstill. No kids out on bikes. No one walking dogs or just taking a stroll. A Jeep Cherokee with luggage tied to its racks pulled out of a driveway, rolled two blocks to Main and swung west. A moment later it’d crossed the outskirts and headed down the valley road toward the coast. Paige pointed out another house: its owners were hauling suitcases and bags out and stuffing them into a sedan’s trunk.

“They know something’s going on,” Travis said.

“Let’s find out what it is,” Bethany said.

They walked into the Third Notch ten minutes later. The person with the apron turned out to be a woman in her forties. Her name tag read JEANNIE. She was visibly stressed, which might’ve made sense if the place had been bustling and understaffed. But it wasn’t. It was empty except for Jeannie and two kids—a boy and a girl, maybe six and ten respectively, clearly hers. The two of them were playing handheld video games at one of the tables and looked thoroughly bored.

Jeannie was on a cell phone when they walked in. She gave them a small wave and made a face: right with you. Into the phone she said, “Well we’re waiting. Get everything locked up and come and get us.” She hung up without saying good-bye, and turned to the three of them. “Kitchen staff’s gone home. I have pizza slices I can warm up, and drinks.”

Travis considered his reply. The approach he had in mind wouldn’t work well if he jumped right into it.

“Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi,” he said. “Either one’s fine.”

Paige and Bethany both asked for the same. Jeannie stepped into the back room, and the three of them sat at the bar. Travis saw a stack of menus to his left. The cover showed a Paul Bunyan type character wearing a huge belt with three notches carved into it. Travis couldn’t imagine being any less interested in hearing a backstory.

Jeannie returned with the drinks and the check, set them down and got to work squaring things away around the register. Her movements were hurried, anxious.

“I heard of this place a while back,” Travis said.

Jeannie didn’t look up from her work. “Yeah?”

“Guy I used to know told me I should stop by, if I was ever in the area.”

Jeannie said nothing.

Outside, the sedan with the stuffed trunk went past.

“He said he left something of mine in the basement,” Travis continued. “Said someone here would know what I was talking about.”

At last Jeannie glanced up at him.

Travis studied her face for any sign of suspicion. Any hint that she understood the significance of this place’s basement, and that a stranger requesting access to it was probably tied to that significance in some way.

But all she did was knit her eyebrows together. “I think it’s pretty empty down there,” she said. “How long ago was this?”

“Few years,” Travis said.

Jeannie shrugged, thought about it another second and then went back to her straightening, as if that concluded the discussion.

“Can I take a look anyway?” Travis said.

She seemed amused at the request, for some reason. She shrugged again and said, “Knock yourself out,” then reached under the bar out of sight. Travis heard a coffee can slide on wood, and objects clinking against one another. After a moment Jeannie brought out two keys, each on its own ring. The rings had plastic tabs attached to them, labeled simply #1 and #2. She pushed them across to Travis. “Entrance is outside, around the back.”

With that she returned to the register and ignored them.

Travis traded looks with Paige and Bethany, and then the three of them stood, leaving their drinks. They were almost to the door when Travis stopped and turned back toward Jeannie.

“You ever heard of a man named Ruben Ward?” he said.

She met his gaze.

Travis had seen lots of people play dumb before. They almost always overdid it. Their faces scrunched up. They registered too much confusion. Really, any confusion was too much; it wasn’t confusing to simply hear an unfamiliar name.

Jeannie didn’t look confused. She looked puzzled, which was stranger yet. Travis got the impression that she knew nothing about Ward, but that she’d heard the name. Maybe recently.

After a moment she shook her head. “Can’t help you.”

Travis considered pressing her on the subject, but held back. He turned and led the others out.

They were halfway along the building’s left side, moving down an alley floored with cracked pavement and a few lonely tufts of grass, when it happened.

It started as a sound—or what seemed like a sound. Maybe the frenetic hum of an electrical transformer about to fail, or the snapping, static-like buzz you sometimes heard over a field of grasshoppers on a dry summer day. It rose over the span of a second, seemingly from a source very close to Travis—behind him, he thought at first. He spun to look for it but saw nothing there, and noticed as he moved that the sound’s direction didn’t change at all. It had no direction. It was just everywhere, as if he were hearing it through a set of headphones. He saw Paige and Bethany reacting the same way. They were hearing it too. They looked at him and each other, their eyes narrowing in concern—and then widening.

Because they’d just realized the same thing Travis had.

That it wasn’t a sound, exactly. It wasn’t anything they were picking up with their ears. It was closer than that, somehow—already inside their heads.

It was a thought.

They were hearing it the way they heard their own internal monologue.

All three of them came to a stop, facing one another. None of them spoke. Second by second the sensation intensified, its apparent volume and clarity mounting. Travis felt it becoming almost a physical presence, its insectile quality growing sharper. It felt like bugs swarming inside his skull. The effect began to push him toward nausea. He saw it doing the same to Paige and Bethany. Saw them taking careful breaths to keep their stomachs under control.

And then it was over. The sound was gone as if someone had thrown a switch, and there was only the hush of the town again.

The three of them stood there for a long moment, still not speaking. Just breathing, getting their bearings.

“What the hell’s happening in this place?” Bethany said. It came out as hardly more than a whisper.

Travis thought of the sea withdrawing before the arrival of a tsunami. Of people’s hair standing on end before a lightning strike. Of the supposed panicked behavior of animals in the hours before a major earthquake.

“No idea,” he said, his own voice quieter than he’d intended. He nodded to the back of the building. “Come on.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

A passageway beneath the Third Notch.

They didn’t even have to enter the basement to see it. It was there in plain view to any stray dog that wandered through the rear lot. Centered on the back wall, one story below the main level, was the arched entry to a corridor beneath the building. A set of concrete stairs descended to it, hugging the cinderblock foundation. A stamped metal sign was bolted to the bricks just shy of the opening:

720 Main St.

Apt. 1

Apt. 2

An orange security light glowed softly, somewhere in the gloom beyond the arch. The floor down there was more concrete, probably from the same pour that’d laid the stairs.

Travis understood Jeannie’s amusement now. He also knew what they would find beneath the restaurant.

Nothing.

Both apartments were long deserted. They’d probably been declared illegal for residential use: each had only a tiny window, tucked up near the ceiling, all but impossible to crawl out through during an emergency.

Each unit’s layout was a mirror image of the other: kitchen and bathroom on one end, balanced by undefined space that served as living, dining, and sleeping quarters. Like a slightly oversized hotel room minus carpeting and a view. Both apartments were empty. Not even boxes of random junk had accumulated—just a few cracked laundry baskets in unit two, nested together and forgotten in a corner.

There was nothing else that could’ve been called a passageway. No hidden tunnel behind either derelict refrigerator—they checked. No mirror on any wall that could swing out on concealed hinges. The corridor itself was the only thing the notebook could’ve been referring to.

“A passageway beneath the third notch,” Bethany said. “And the next sentence started with Look for.” She thought about it. “Look for one of these apartments? It wouldn’t make sense to word it like that. You don’t have to look very hard to find these doors, once you’re in the hallway.”

“Look for John Doe in Apartment One,” Travis said. That sounded better. He couldn’t think of anything else that sounded right at all. “Maybe Ward met someone here. Was instructed to meet someone here—someone who lived in one of these units back then.”

Before he could say more they heard Jeannie’s voice through the ceiling straight above them, yelling at someone. They were standing in the second apartment, roughly beneath the seats they’d taken at the bar. Travis couldn’t quite make out Jeannie’s words, but her angry tone was clear enough. It went quiet for three seconds, then started again. There’d been no one else speaking in between. She was on the phone—probably with whoever she’d talked to earlier, reiterating her demand: get your ass over here and get us out of this town. Her second spiel ended on a note of finality. Silence followed.

Paige turned to Travis. “Who could they have told Ward to meet here?” Her lower eyelids edged upward. “One of their own?”

Travis weighed the idea. He turned and studied the dark recesses of the apartment. It didn’t exactly fit the image that’d come to him earlier: the sprawling penthouses above the nerve centers of the world. But that’d been a snap impression at best. A guess based on nothing at all, because they knew nothing at all about who they were up against. Power took other forms, he knew. Like anonymity.

He turned to Bethany. “Can you check records for who lived here in 1978?”

She winced. “I can try. Tax records might turn up something—assuming whoever lived here even filed.”

“Maybe there’s paperwork on old tenants upstairs,” Paige said. “I think our approach needs to lose its subtlety.”

They pushed back in through the front door and Travis asked about the paperwork.

Jeannie stared at him. The anger she’d put into the phone call was still on her face.

Then she said, “I didn’t think you’d stick with the ‘good cop’ thing much longer.”

“Excuse me?” Travis said.

The two kids were watching now, their video games forgotten.

“In back, both of you,” Jeannie said.

The kids complied, disappearing into the kitchen.

“Ma’am,” Travis said, “whatever you think—”

“That’s the idea, right?” Jeannie said. “All morning we get the bad cops—all these hard-asses in their Humvees scaring the shit out of everyone who catches a look at them. Coming into all the shops and grilling us about Ruben Ward, Allen Raines—What do we remember? What have we seen?”

“Raines,” Travis said. He’d always intended to ask her about the man, but only after checking the basement. It would’ve been one thing too many to stuff into the first conversation.

“Yeah, I knew him,” Jeannie said. “Everyone knows everyone here. You people, we don’t know, which is why we’re not talking to you about him. And putting on street clothes and acting casual isn’t going to change that.”

“We’re not with the others,” Travis said. “We came over the ridge on foot to avoid them.”

She didn’t buy it.

“Get out,” she said. “And if your friends are supposed to be fixing whatever’s wrong inside that mine, tell them to stop screwing around and do it.”

“Mine?” Paige said. She looked at Travis, then Bethany. Each shared her bafflement.

For the first time since they’d come back in, Jeannie’s anger slipped. She glanced from one of them to the next, reading their reactions.

Travis advanced and rested his hands on the back of the stool he’d sat on earlier. He met Jeannie’s eyes and didn’t blink.

“We’re not playing good cop,” he said. “Please listen to me. What’s happening around here is only the ramp-up to what’s really coming. Do you remember what time Allen Raines was killed last night?”

She thought for a second. “About a quarter to seven.”

“And what time was President Garner killed?”

She started to answer, then cut herself off, thinking about the correlation.

“This is not just something that’s happening in Rum Lake,” Travis said. “The problem is a lot bigger than that, and as far as we know, everyone who’s supposed to be stopping it is dead. Please—anything you can tell us will help. Start with the mine.”

For a while Jeannie didn’t reply. Maybe she was considering where to begin. Maybe she was debating whether to begin at all.

Travis saw movement at the edge of his vision. The two kids had come to the kitchen doorway, watching with wide eyes. The girl kept her little brother behind her, as if to protect him.

Jeannie exhaled deeply. “It’s probably been shut down for most of a century. I don’t know anyone who remembers it being open. I moved here in the nineties, a few years after everything happened up there. I only know about it through the stories I’ve heard, but I’ve always believed them. They’ve never changed over time, the way stories do when they’re made up.”

“Tell them about the ghost,” the little girl said.

Jeannie waved her off.

“You told us it was real,” the girl said. “You said you and Dad heard it talk.”

Jeannie looked annoyed at the girl’s insistence, maybe a little embarrassed. But there was something else in her expression, Travis saw. Some inability to refute what the kid had said, because no doubt Jeannie really had told her children those things.

“I don’t know what’s up there,” she said at last, keeping her focus on Travis and Paige and Bethany. “There’s … something.” She was silent a bit longer, then just shook her head. “The stories all go like this: the mine was nothing special until 1987—kids might go up there to drink or make out, but nothing strange ever happened. Then, that year, the government came in and fenced it all off. The nearest shaft entrance is actually on Forest Service land, outside the town limits.” She nodded out the front windows. “You probably saw the house up at the treeline with all the Humvees in front.”

“Raines’s house,” Travis said.

She nodded. “His property butts up against federal land. The mine access is two hundred yards straight uphill from that house, deep in the woods. They say the government took over the site and … did something up there. Built something, maybe. Down inside the shaft.”

Travis looked at Paige. He saw her processing the information and drawing the same conclusion as he was: Jeannie had it wrong. The stories had it wrong. The government—working with Tangent—had only found something in the mine shaft. The Scalar investigation’s long search for answers had led to this town in the end, and in turn had led to the mine. Whatever was in there, Ruben Ward had created it. Maybe with help.

“They say most of the government’s comings and goings were at a different entrance,” Jeannie said, “over the ridge to the north. That opening is a lot lower down, accessible by old logging roads. I guess some teenagers from here in town got pretty close to it a few times, when everything was going on. Close enough to overhear workers talking about what was in the mine.” A shiver seemed to pass through her. She shook it off. “The workers called it the Stargazer. They were scared of it. They hated being down inside with it, whatever it was—whatever it is. They said it had to be kept under control, but they were still working out how to do that. And then Mr. Raines bought that house up on the slope—he paid twice what it was worth to speed up the deal. He moved in, and around that time all the government activity just went away. It was pretty clear Raines was involved somehow. I don’t think anyone trusted him, at first. But after a while something became obvious: the man never left this town. And I mean never. I’ve seen that for myself, living here almost twenty years now. In all that time, Raines never took so much as a drive down to the ocean, three miles away. He’d come down to Main Street for groceries, or to have a sandwich in here. Then right back up to that house. The way people eventually saw it, he was the one keeping the Stargazer under control, whatever the hell that entailed. He got stuck with that job, and he did it. He kept us safe from it, all those years. And if we weren’t sure of it before, we are now. It was about six hours after he died that we got the first … hum.”

Travis had been staring down into the bar. Now he looked up. “Like the one five minutes ago. Feels like bugs in your head.”

Jeannie nodded. “Second one was about four hours after the first, then less than two hours, and they’ve been coming faster and faster ever since.”

No wonder the town was emptying out. Twenty-five years of these stories, and now physical evidence that they weren’t bullshit. That there really was something bad up in the mine.

Travis considered the word: Stargazer. A uniquely strange name for something that was deep underground.

Much of what they’d learned was strange—both here and before they’d arrived in Rum Lake. There were giant gaps in the puzzle, and Travis couldn’t picture what would fill them. The Stargazer itself was one: it had to have been in that mine since the summer of 1978, some nine years before the Scalar investigators found it, but in all that time it must’ve been effectively dormant. If it’d been generating these hums back then, this place would’ve become a ghost town. Yet when Allen Raines had taken watch over the thing, he’d had to stay on top of it day and night, right from the beginning. Those two facts were hard to reconcile. As was a third: even if he and Paige and Bethany could reach the Stargazer, it was unlikely they could do much more than Raines had. Which was to keep the thing in check, assuming they’d see how that was done. But what sort of Achilles’ heel was that? If all they could do was babysit the thing, how long could they stay on it before someone interfered with them? Like these guys in the Humvees. A few hours, at best?

He knew he was thinking in circles, and that doing so wouldn’t help until they’d seen the Stargazer for themselves. For better or worse, they’d have the whole picture then. He drew hope only from what Bethany had said back in Casper: If they consider us a threat, then we are.

The little girl stepped out of the doorway and tugged on Jeannie’s arm.

“The ghost,” the girl said. “Tell them.”

Jeannie’s forehead furrowed. She seemed stretched between frustration and sober gravity, as if she believed the story herself but would never expect others to.

“Try us,” Travis said.

Jeannie frowned and let out a long breath, giving in. “They say it always happens around the two entrances to the mine. They say anyone who goes near starts to hear voices, whispering right behind them in the trees. Pine boughs around you start to move like the wind’s blowing, even when it isn’t. My husband and I … we like to think now we might’ve imagined what we heard. The wind really was blowing that day. Maybe that’s all it was. I don’t know.”

Travis tried to picture the mine entrance relative to Raines’s place, on the satellite image they’d seen. The moment he did, something occurred to him. He turned to Bethany.

“That satellite was looking almost straight down, right?”

She nodded. “Perfectly straight down. Default angle unless you command it to do otherwise.”

“From that perspective,” Travis said, “even redwoods would have lots of gaps between them. Plenty of open ground visible in the image.”

Bethany shrugged. “I guess. Probably quite a bit.”

“We didn’t see any heat signature uphill from Raines’s house,” Travis said. “No bodies moving through those woods. Not even one.” He thought about it a second longer. “I don’t think these guys are going near the mine shaft.”

“I’m certain they’re not,” Jeannie said. “I’ve been watching all morning, waiting for them to head up into the trees and get in there—get working on the problem. I’ve assumed that’s what they were sent here to do. But all they’re focused on so far is that house. In and out, hours on end now.”

The more Travis considered it, the more that made sense, and not because of any strange phenomenon that could be mistaken for a ghost. Simple priorities were enough: these men had been sent to find and destroy the cheat sheet, and failing that, they would at least prevent anyone else from getting into that house and obtaining it—if it still existed at all. And while those who’d sent them probably wanted some muscle close at hand to protect the mine if the need arose, Travis wasn’t surprised these guys were staying back. Being kept back, more likely, by strict orders. They were almost certainly nothing more than hired guns; why let them sniff around the mine at all? Whatever the Stargazer was doing in there, it was doing without anybody’s help. All it needed was for Allen Raines to stay dead, and none of his powerful friends to show up in his place.

“Two hundred yards isn’t much,” Travis said, “even with tree cover. But maybe it’s enough. Maybe we can get in there from the uphill side without them seeing us.”

The sound of a loud engine faded in. A second later an old pickup went by, heading out of town, its bed loaded with boxes and bags.

Travis put aside the mine for the moment, his thoughts going back to earlier questions. He turned to Jeannie. “What about the man I mentioned before? Ruben Ward.”

“I never heard that name until today,” Jeannie said, “when the others came in and asked about it.”

“And none of these old stories talk about the summer of 1978?” Paige said.

Jeannie shook her head.

“Do you have paperwork for who lived here back then?” Travis said. “I know it’s a long shot—”

“It’s possible,” Jeannie said. “There are old file boxes in the office—”

She stopped and cocked her head.

Travis listened too, and heard another engine rumbling. Another loud one, though it sounded different from the truck. Jeannie appeared to recognize its tone.

“Shit,” she whispered. “I only meant to complain.”

“What are you talking about?” Travis said.

“When you went downstairs I called the number they gave me earlier. I yelled at them for sending in the good cops.”

The engine grew louder, drawing very near now. Its growl spoke more of power than age. A second later it cut out and brakes whined, somewhere just out of view past the edge of the glass front wall.

“That’s one of the Humvees,” Jeannie said. “They know you’re here.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

“Storage room, back right,” Jeannie said. Her hand shot out toward the corner of the building opposite where the Humvee had stopped. “No screen in the window.”

Paige and Bethany were already moving. Travis took a step after them, then pulled up short. He looked at Jeannie and the two kids.

Jeannie shook her head. “We’re fine if you’re gone. You left three minutes ago.”

Travis nodded, spun and ran after the others. He’d almost cleared the room when Jeannie called after him. He stopped again and faced her.

“Cell phone number,” she said. “I’ll find the old paperwork.”

From outside came footsteps and men’s voices.

Travis said the number aloud once. Didn’t wait to see if she’d caught it all. He sprinted for the back room, and in the same second that he slipped into it, he heard the front door open.

Paige already had the window up: an old single-pane affair with about ten layers of paint on its frame. It was on the side wall, leading out to the back stretch of the alley they’d walked down earlier. Bethany slipped through; the alley’s pavement was only a couple feet lower than the floor. Travis motioned for Paige to go ahead of him, and took hold of the raised sash as she let go of it. He went through after her, got his feet on the concrete and stood upright, his hand still holding the sash in place.

He considered just leaving it up—an open window in a back room shouldn’t stand out as unusual, if any of the men from the Humvee came to check this part of the building. Travis relaxed his hand on the bottom of the sash.

It immediately slipped downward a quarter inch, its sides lightly shuddering against the frame. If he let go entirely it might stay where it was, or it might hold for five seconds and then drop, making all the sound in the world as it went.

He heard Jeannie’s voice, through the doorway and down the hall. “Is ‘Go to hell’ too subtle for you people to grasp?”

A man replied, his tone coming from a deep, broad chest cavity. “Where are they?”

“Probably bullshitting the shop owner next door. They’re your people, why don’t you call them?”

No reply. Just boots thudding around on the ancient wood floor.

Travis leaned back inside and looked around for something with which to brace the window.

There was nothing.

He’d have to shut it, and not quickly—he couldn’t trust it to stay quiet at any real speed. There were long vertical abrasions where it’d rubbed against its frame over the decades, probably on humid days when the wood had expanded. Days like this one.

He began to ease it downward, making about an inch per second.

“You saw which way they went?” the deep voice said, still somewhere up front by the bar.

There was no audible reply. Travis pictured Jeannie just pointing, too pissed to speak. She would send them along Main Street back in the direction of their Humvee, to keep them from walking past this alley.

He had the window half shut now. Twelve inches left.

Paige and Bethany were right beside him, watching the progress with gritted teeth.

Nine inches. Eight.

“Sorry to bother you when you’re this busy,” the deep voice said. The boots clumped away toward the front door.

Six inches.

Then a bird started screaming, somewhere above Travis. He looked up sharply at the sound.

A blue jay. Right on the cornice ten feet overhead. It scolded in loud, double squawks. It probably had a nest up there. The cries went on for four seconds and then the bird flitted out of sight onto the roof.

Silence followed, outside and inside. The boot steps toward the front door had halted.

Then they began again—thumping quickly over the hardwood toward the back room.

“Shit,” Travis whispered.

He lowered the window the last six inches in the next second, risking the sound. It made none.

Paige and Bethany had already covered the distance to the back corner of the building across the alley—ten or twelve diagonal feet. Travis followed, got past the edge and stopped alongside them, his back against the old cedar siding. They listened.

At first there was only silence.

Then came the scrape and whine of the window going up. The sill creaked as heavy weight leaned onto it. Travis waited for the clamber of a body coming through, and the scuff of soles on pavement, but all he heard was a fingertip drumming idly on wood. After a moment it stopped. There was a click and a wash of static, and then silence again.

“Anyone copy at the Raines house?”

Static as the man waited.

Then a tinny voice: “Go ahead.”

“Leave three men up there, send the rest down here for a coordinated search. Bring every Humvee.”

“Got it.”

“Put the three that stay behind on lookout. Eyes on the slopes below the treeline. These people didn’t come in a vehicle.”

“You want to take Holt up on his offer? Grab law enforcement from nearby jurisdictions? We could have an army in here pretty soon, taking orders from us.”

The fingertip drummed again. Less than a second.

“Make the call.”

A click ended the static and then the window came down hard, and muffled steps faded away behind it.

The three of them ran along the row of back lots until they’d passed four more alleys. They stopped behind a building that nestled against a side street, and listened.

Far away, across and above town, the Humvees at Raines’s house fired up one by one and began to move. Then their sound was lost to the roar of the one near the Third Notch.

Travis nodded quickly and they sprinted across the street to the next block. They continued into it past the first building, then turned down an alley and moved farther away from Main Street, at last coming out between a little art gallery and the town’s post office. The street they now faced ran parallel to Main. Across it were small homes tucked close to one another, and beyond lay three more blocks of the same, the whole spread rising toward the exposed hills. Those hills could be easily climbed—the three of them had come down them fifteen minutes ago—but it would take a good sixty seconds to reach the redwoods from the concealment of the highest backyards. That hadn’t been a problem when nobody was watching. Now that at least three sets of eyes would be, an undetected crossing was pointless to even think about.

Travis thought about it anyway. If they could get up into the trees and hide, they could circle around to the mine, probably a mile away through unbroken forest.

Paige gazed up at the woods too, and the open ground beneath, clearly running all the same calculations.

“We’ve probably got three minutes before the first highway patrol units roll in here,” Paige said. “It’ll be a steady stream after that; anything we try to do will just get harder and harder.” She paused. “Three minutes. That’s not enough time to think of even a bad plan.”

Travis stared at the empty hillsides a moment longer, then dropped his gaze to the residential blocks nearer by. Dozens of homes, most of them probably empty by now. A natural gas explosion might make a nice diversion; five or six at once might even generate a smokescreen behind which they could climb. Or maybe he could hotwire a car, douse its interior with gasoline, and send it rolling down to the lake in flames. It would probably crash into something before it got there, but that in itself would be a fine distraction. It might buy them a fifty-fifty chance of gaining the trees unseen, provided they were way up at the edge of town and ready to run at the moment of impact.

But none of those things could be done in three minutes. Not even close.

“You’re right,” he said. “We don’t have time to plan anything.”

“So what do we do?” Paige said.

All Travis could think of was a panic option. It was the furthest thing from a plan. He couldn’t even properly envision how it would play out—he had yet to actually see the nearby Humvee and the number of men inside it. Probably more than one. Probably fewer than five.

He could hear it now, grumbling along in low gear, hunting the alleys that branched off of Main Street. It would pass this alley in another twenty seconds or so.

It hardly mattered that these guys had no description of their prey. The fact that the three of them were on foot would be enough. None of Rum Lake’s few remaining occupants were out for a stroll just now.

“Stay close to me,” Travis said, “but stay in the alley. And be ready to run if this doesn’t work.”

He said no more. He turned back toward Main, two hundred feet away along the alley’s length. Stared at the gap where the Humvee would soon appear. He was pretty sure he could get there first.

He ran. As fast as he could. Heard Paige and Bethany following behind, and the heavy diesel engine somewhere ahead and to the side.

One hundred feet from the alley’s mouth now. Fifty. Ten.

He burst right through it without slowing, and saw the huge vehicle in his peripheral vision. Twenty-five feet away. Matte black. Soaking up the overcast glare and reflecting away almost none of it.

Travis kicked the sidewalk with the front of his foot, and sprawled. He hit the concrete with his hands and tumbled once, scraping every part of his body that struck. He heard the Humvee’s engine throttle down hard. Heard the faint whine of shocks as the driver hit the brakes and the thing’s five thousand pounds rocked forward onto its front suspension.

Travis got up without coming to a stop. He snapped his gaze toward the Humvee and reacted to it. He went for a mix of surprise and relief, but didn’t let it linger more than half a second. Instead he advanced on the vehicle, his legs shaky, his hands waving frantically overhead as if to flag it down—as if he were too brain-addled to see it’d already stopped for him. He was fifteen feet away when the driver opened his door and got out. The guy with the deep voice. Had to be. Six-three and easily two hundred fifty pounds. MP5 submachine gun slung over his shoulder, right hand on its grip, finger outside the trigger well. Travis could see the weapon’s left side, and its three-setting fire selector switch, just like the ones he’d seen on the force two decades earlier. The settings were labeled S, E, and F, for German words that meant “safe,” “single-shot,” and “autofire.” This one was set to “safe”—for the moment. Travis glanced through the Humvee’s windshield and took in the other occupants. One more up front. Two in the back.

He took another visibly awkward step. Ten feet from the driver now. The guy was just drawing a breath to speak.

Travis recalled something else from his time as a cop—a training exercise called cone versus gun. The setup was simple. One man would play the cop and stand with an unloaded pistol holstered on his hip—safety on, holster strap in place. Another man would be the assailant, facing the cop from twenty feet away, an ice-cream cone in his hand to represent a knife.

From a standing start, the assailant would charge the cop. How close would he get before dying?

Most of the trainees had guessed ten feet: the guy would cover half the distance by the time the gun was leveled at him and clicking. Travis had felt generous and said he’d get within five.

Then the assailant had burst forward, and an instant later the room was full of low, surprised whistles.

The ice cream was mashed against the cop’s neck before he could pull the trigger even once.

Same result on the second run. And the third, and the tenth. Didn’t matter who played which part. Didn’t matter if one was a trainee and the other a hardened veteran. After a few iterations, certain truths became evident. First, twenty feet wasn’t that damn far, and the last third could be covered in a single, diving lunge, the body tipping forward and the arm shooting out in a movement that erased several feet at blink-speed. Second, there was a concentration issue. It took focus to snap loose a holster strap, draw a pistol, thumb off its safety, raise it, aim it, and fire. It took lots of focus, in fact, and focus was in short supply when someone was charging toward you like a runaway log truck. Your body was preconditioned to tense under those circumstances. Your hands wanted to go up in front of your face, not to your hip. You had to work against those instincts every time, even after you’d trained yourself to expect them. Even when the attacker was a friend with an ice-cream cone.

“No closer,” the driver said. His thumb went unconsciously to the selector switch.

Travis didn’t have a knife. Didn’t even have an ice-cream cone. He also didn’t have twenty feet to cross.

He charged.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

It happened in less than three seconds, and it felt like less than three seconds. At no point did it seem to slow down. At times in Travis’s life, eruptions of violence had sometimes taken on special clarity. A simplicity made of goals and obstacles and means, playing out in a few beats of his pulse. He’d heard Paige put it in similar terms.

None of that happened here.

It was all motion and panic; flinching bodies and jerking limbs and the startled beginnings of shouts. Travis crossed the distance in a burst of momentum, got his left hand on the MP5’s barrel guard, balled up his right and slammed it into the big guy’s Adam’s apple with all his forward speed. The man’s free hand went to his throat, and his gun hand loosened, and Travis took his attention off the guy completely. Arms were moving inside the vehicle. Reaching for door handles. Reaching for weapons Travis couldn’t see. He knocked the driver’s hand away from the MP5, gripped the gun with both of his own, thumbed its selector to full-auto, and yanked it down away from the huge torso. The strap pulled tight, but there was enough play for what Travis had to do. He put the weapon’s barrel into the gap between the open driver’s door and its frame. Right at the front, above the hinge, head-level with all three men inside. Like an archer pointing a drawn arrow through a loophole in a fortress wall.

He aimed for the front passenger and pulled the trigger. Felt the cyclic, full-auto recoil as the thing roared. Saw the guy’s head come apart, and shoved the stock hard clockwise to spray the backseat, hitting both heads there probably five times each. He let go of the trigger and hauled the gun back out of the gap, its strap still tight around the big man—who’d recovered enough to reach for the weapon again. Travis pointed it straight at him and fired, and its last four rounds entered right below his jaw. The guy went limp and dropped where he stood, his weight on the strap tugging the gun out of Travis’s hands.

Silence, except the vehicle’s idling engine.

Travis looked up the length of Main Street. No sign of the other Humvees just yet.

He raised his eyes to the distant Raines house, just visible over the nearest shopfronts, and saw the three spotters up there going apeshit. Grabbing one another’s arms and pointing down toward the action. Drawing two-way radios and shouting into them.

Time to get going.

Travis turned and saw Paige and Bethany at the mouth of the alley. Paige looked only a little shaken. Bethany more so.

“Seconds are going to count,” Travis said.

Paige nodded, shoved Bethany forward and ran after her.

Travis opened the back door on the driver’s side and Bethany got in first, heedless of the bodies—all the blood was farther back, covering the rear windows and the storage area behind the seats. Paige climbed in after her, and by then Travis was at the wheel, slamming his own door and shoving the vehicle into drive. For half a second he considered reversing instead, backing up and taking the nearby cross street. Then he thought of the spotters up high again, on their radios, and knew it was pointless. There would be no hiding from the other Humvees. He floored the accelerator and the vehicle shot forward along Main, toward the street at the far end that led to Raines’s house.

“Get the guns off those guys in back,” Travis said.

“Already on it,” Paige said.

Travis reached with his right and unslung the front passenger’s MP5 from his shoulder. He set the weapon in his own lap and patted the guy’s pockets for extra magazines. He found two in a big pouch on his pant leg.

Three blocks from the end of Main now, doing sixty. A second later the first of the other Humvees appeared ahead. It rounded the corner Travis meant to take, at the end. Another followed half a vehicle length behind it. Then came four more. The whole procession advanced, roughly single-file, accelerating to meet him.

If these guys had had time to form a plan, they might’ve spread out like horsemen riding abreast. No way could Travis have rammed through that barrier; his vehicle weighed exactly as much as any one of theirs. But in the few seconds available, as the closing distance shrank toward zero, the column simply stayed in a straight line, bearing toward Travis in an impromptu game of chicken.

At least maybe it looked like that from their point of view.

Travis jerked the wheel to the right at the last possible instant, veering past the leader. As he did, he saw the rest of the line begin to destabilize, the Humvees braking or jogging to one side or another—little movements that betrayed their drivers’ confusion. But Travis was passing the formation almost too quickly to notice those things—or to care. Sixty miles per hour, he’d read somewhere, was just under ninety feet per second. With these vehicles moving the other way at the same speed, he was passing them at closer to one hundred eighty feet per second. In hardly more than a second they were all behind him, just shapes in his side mirror, stopping and turning and trying not to slam into each other like cops in an old movie.

Travis braked hard and took the turn at the end of Main doing thirty, then gunned it again along the secondary street. He could already see the curve ahead that would take them uphill toward Raines’s. No doubt the three men still up there had their guns in hand by now. Travis guessed this vehicle’s shell could withstand 9mm fire, but he wasn’t certain of it.

He took the curve and saw the incline rising above him, steep as any street in San Francisco. There were houses to his left and right, but just ahead the way opened up on both sides to a broad, empty grassland. Raines’s house was three hundred feet above that point, the redwoods almost at its back wall.

Travis saw the three spotters. They had their guns. They were positioned way up next to the house itself, maybe ready to duck inside it if they needed cover.

They wouldn’t. Travis didn’t give them a second glance. He pulled hard right on the wheel and left the road altogether, angling up across the slope to miss the house by two hundred feet. As the redwoods drew nearer, he sized up the gaps among them. At a distance, the trees had been just a visual screen, but at this range he could see several openings that would admit the Humvee. They probably wouldn’t get far into the woods, but any distance was better than none.

They were still a hundred feet from the trees when the spotters at the house opened up. A burst of a dozen shots hit the window right next to Travis; the pane bulged inward as the glass sandwiched between the lexan layers shattered. Other salvos pattered against the vehicle’s metal sides. Travis aimed for the biggest opening in the trees, and a second later they were through it, deep in the shadows and the green-filtered light beneath the boughs. He angled back to the left; Jeannie had said the mine access was straight uphill from the house. He dodged a trunk that loomed out of the dimness, and saw a gap between two others, just ahead, that for half a second looked wide enough to pass through. Then it didn’t. He stood on the brake and felt the huge tires slide in the sandy soil. He cranked the wheel right, felt the vehicle rotate without actually changing course, and a moment later, sliding almost sideways along its path, it rocked to a halt.

Travis shoved open his door, heard Paige and Bethany scrambling out of theirs. Far away down the slope, men were shouting and heavy engines were racing; the Humvee column was less than thirty seconds behind.

The three of them ran. Clambered up the needle-carpeted slope. Scanned the way ahead for any sign of the shaft’s opening. It occurred to Travis for the first time that the thing might be difficult to spot. It might be choked with ferns and low scrub; it might look like nothing but a patch of undergrowth at any distance beyond ten feet—it might be impossible to see that it was an opening at all. He worried about that for five seconds and then Bethany screamed “There!” and shot her arm out ahead, and Travis saw that his concerns had been groundless. The shaft access was an upright opening, like a garage door but a third smaller. It formed the end of a rough, squared concrete tube that jutted straight out from the hillside, its end cracked and worn and showing rebar.

They sprinted for it as the engines roared behind them. Tires skidded and metal thumped hard against wood, and then doors were opening and voices were shouting again, no more than a few dozen yards back. Beneath all those sounds Travis suddenly heard his cell phone ringing. Jeannie, calling with the information from the old files. He ignored it, pointed his MP5 behind him and fired a quick burst. He heard feet slip and men curse as they went for cover. The access was right ahead now, fifteen feet away, pitch black beyond the tunnel’s mouth.

“Watch out for a drop-off,” Travis said, and then they were inside, blind for a second as their eyes tried to adjust.

An instant later Paige sucked in a hard breath and stopped—she threw both arms out to block the others.

There was a drop-off.

Ten feet in, the concrete floor ended as neatly as a high-dive platform, empty space beyond the left half, black metal stairs descending beyond the right half. Paige led the way down. Ten steps, then a landing made of the same metal gridwork, and another flight. And another. At the bottom of the fourth they touched down on concrete again—another horizontal tunnel. It stretched twenty feet and terminated against a slab of solid metal, eight feet square, visible in the pale glow of an overhead mercury lamp.

There were giant hinges on the slab’s left side, and there was a keypad on its right.

Travis stared.

He felt his thoughts begin to go blank.

High above, sounds reverberated through the stair shaft. The sliding of feet and hands on loose soil outside. Then the scrape of boots skidding to a halt on concrete.

Paige and Bethany ran forward, getting clear of the shaft. Travis followed, but at a walk; he’d barely noticed the sounds. All his attention was on the giant door.

Which was green.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“What the hell do we do?” Bethany whispered.

Paige could only shake her head.

There was a handhold inset in the steel just below the keypad. Her sense of futility manifesting in her body language, Paige took hold of it and pulled. The door didn’t so much as rattle in its frame.

Behind and above, in the shaft, more footsteps thudded into the concrete tunnel. Voices spoke in low, soft tones, some of which carried unusually well in the strange acoustics.

“We called it in,” someone said. “They want them alive, whoever they are.”

Someone else cursed softly, then said, “Okay.”

Paige turned from the door and faced Travis, and seemed thrown by the look in his eyes. He imagined he appeared numb. He sure as hell felt that way.

“What is it?” Paige said.

Travis took a deep breath. He steeled himself for the likelihood—it should’ve been a certainty—that the dream had been only a dream. That this was the mother of all coincidences, and a cruel one at that.

Up in the shaft, something like a backpack dropped to the concrete. Tough fabric with metal objects clattering inside. A zipper came open.

“Travis?” Paige said.

He stepped past her to the keypad. Above the buttons was a simple readout, like a VCR’s clock. There were glowing blue dashes where digits could be entered. Five of them.

“There’s a dozen masks in one of the back storage holds,” someone up above said. “Go get them all.”

Then came a faint but sharp sound from atop the stairwell. Some tiny metallic thing being pulled free of something else. Like a key drawn from a lock, but not quite.

Travis blocked it all out and thought of the dream. The old man—the Wilford Brimley lookalike—staring at him from a few inches away. Asking over and over what was behind the green door. We already know the combo, the old man had said.

And then what?

What exactly had come after that?

High up in the vertical shaft, something bounced hard against the wall—by its sound Travis pictured a can of shaving cream, though he was pretty damn certain it wasn’t. The thing ricocheted again and again, hitting the stairs, the walls, the landings, making its way down. Travis turned with Paige and Bethany and watched it hit the bottom, less than twenty feet from where they stood. They could barely see it in the vague light there, but there was no real mystery as to what it was. It came to rest and did nothing for two seconds. Then it jumped and skittered and started blasting thick gas into the air. Tear gas or pepper gas or some variant. Another canister came rattling down after it. Then another.

“Shit …” Bethany whispered. Her voice gave away a tremor.

The gas churned and curled toward them in delicate wisps.

We already know the combo.

Travis closed his eyes.

A second passed.

He opened them again and turned back to the keypad.

At the corners of his vision he saw Paige and Bethany watching him, confused.

He entered the numbers carefully but quickly: 4–8–8–5–4.

The instant he punched the last one the keypad flared with green backlight. Something very heavy thudded inside the door, and with a hiss of air pressure the huge slab kicked open an inch.

Both Paige and Bethany flinched. They looked back and forth between Travis and the keypad. Then Paige stowed her bafflement and grabbed the door’s handhold again. Travis gripped it too, and they pulled it outward more easily than he’d imagined was possible. There had to be an unseen counterweight somewhere beyond the hinges, balancing the whole thing so that it pivoted smoothly.

In a few seconds they had it open a foot and a half. Travis saw darkness beyond, tempered by another mercury light somewhere above. He also saw the thickness of the door itself: at least five inches of steel. He stood aside and ushered Paige and Bethany through first, then glanced back along the short corridor behind them.

The ragged front of the gas cloud was three feet away.

Someone up in the higher chamber said, “Did you hear something?”

“I don’t know,” came the reply.

Travis followed the others through the opening, turned and took hold of an identical grip on the door’s far side.

“How about this?” he shouted, and leaned back and dragged the door shut with a booming clang.

A second later the heavy mechanism inside the door thudded again, and when Travis tested the slab by shoving his shoulder against it, it felt as though he were pushing on the base of a cliff.

It crossed his mind that the guys upstairs probably knew the combination too—if not, their superiors could sure as hell give it to them—but almost before the thought had formed, he saw that it didn’t matter.

Waist high on this side of the door was a sliding bolt latch, similar in shape to the little ones you could get in a hardware store for three or four bucks. This one had probably cost more—its bolt was thicker than a baseball bat. Travis grabbed its handle, rotated it upward out of the notch it rested in, and rammed the bolt sideways into its seat in the frame.

For a few seconds none of them spoke or moved. Travis stood there with his hand still resting on the bolt, Paige and Bethany close by and staring at him, waiting for him to explain.

By the echoes of their breathing, Travis sensed they were in a much wider space than the corridor they’d just come from. The tiny light above this side of the door shone mostly straight down, casting a glow over the three of them, but leaving deep darkness everywhere else.

Travis turned from the latch and met their stares.

He described the dream in every detail he could recall. The strange little room swimming and warping, as if he’d been drugged even before the dream began. Richard Garner tied upright to a dolly. He himself bound in the same way. The old man asking what was behind the green door, and saying the combination aloud. The empty syringe on the tray. And right at the end, the drug’s harsher effects kicking in, spreading pain up to his heart and then everywhere else.

That was it. He couldn’t remember any more. He was pretty sure there hadn’t been any more.

As he finished telling the story, a series of indistinct thumps began to transmit through the steel door. Travis pictured men in gas masks on the other side, pounding and kicking the slab. After a moment he heard what might’ve been shouts, but they were so faint he could’ve been imagining them. He put it all out of his mind.

Paige turned and paced at the edge of the light pool, hands in her hair.

“Eliminate what it wasn’t,” she said. “It wasn’t an ordinary dream that happened to contain the code for this door. Not a chance.” She shut her eyes. “So what the hell was it?”

“I don’t think it was a dream at all,” Travis said. “I think what I saw and heard was really happening—to someone else. I think Richard Garner is still alive, tied up in that little room, wherever it is. And there’s somebody tied up there with him, being drugged and interrogated. I think I was seeing through that person’s eyes.”

He knew how that sounded to both Paige and Bethany. It sounded the same to him.

“The part about Garner being alive is plausible, anyway,” Bethany said. “I’ve heard from more than one person that there’s a mock-up of the Oval Office somewhere else in the White House—a mock-up of the part you see on TV, anyway. They say there’s even a defocused projection to simulate the background behind the windows. If Garner anticipated any threat last night, he could’ve broadcast from there; the missile would’ve probably still knocked out the TV signal.”

“I can accept that he survived,” Paige said. “I can even accept that there was some kind of internal action against him right after that, with Holt in charge of it. But the dream—”

“I don’t understand it either,” Travis said. “Is there a Breach entity that could account for it? Something that ties you into someone else’s senses for a little while?”

“I’ve never heard of one that could do that,” Paige said. “What are you thinking—that if something like that existed, someone could’ve used it on you? That someone wanted you to hear the combination?”

“I don’t know,” Travis said. “I don’t see how that would work, it’s just … it did work. Whatever it was, it worked. The door combination was right.”

“There are entities that interact with the brain across distances,” Bethany said. “Blue flares, for example.”

Paige nodded absently, but didn’t look swayed. Blue flares were a fairly common entity type; a couple hundred had emerged from the Breach since the beginning. As with nearly all entities, no one knew what their creators had used them for, but their defining characteristic was that you could make them heat up just by thinking about them—if you focused hard enough and consistently enough. In tests people had gotten them up to over eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit in less than a minute, from distances as great as one hundred feet, and with walls in the way. But heating up was all they did. They didn’t connect one person’s eyes and ears to someone else’s mind.

“If there were an entity like that,” Paige said, “how would someone outside Tangent have control of it? Why wouldn’t I have heard of it?”

Even as she asked the question, her expression changed. Travis saw her feeling the edges of the same possibility he’d begun to consider.

“Your father recruited a group of powerful people in 1987,” Travis said, “to act against what Ruben Ward set in motion. Would it be surprising to learn Peter supplied them with Breach technology, if he thought it would help them? Maybe even things he kept off the books in Border Town?”

Paige bit her lip. The idea didn’t sit well with her, but she couldn’t dismiss it either.

“I know I’m reaching,” Travis said. “I don’t know what else to do. I saw a five-digit number in a dream, and it opened a door in the real world. Something made that possible.”

Paige nodded, still looking uneasy. “I’m sure we’ll find out what it is. One way or another.”

For a while no one else spoke.

The vague thumps against the steel door had ceased.

Bethany frowned. “The dream itself—or whatever it was—doesn’t make sense to me. The old guy was asking what was behind the green door, but he already had the combination. Couldn’t he just come and see for himself? More to the point, wouldn’t he already know what was here? Wouldn’t these people know about the Stargazer? Holt sure as hell should know; he’s working with them—the ones who sent Ruben Ward here to create the damn thing.”

On that point Travis couldn’t even reach. She was exactly right: Holt should know. It made no sense at all for him and his associates to be out of the loop.

“So why didn’t they use the combo?” Paige said. “They had it, and it definitely works—we just proved that. Why not send these contractors in here hours ago to take a look around? They were two hundred yards away at the house. Or if Holt didn’t trust them enough, he could’ve come here himself. None of it adds up.”

Travis nodded slowly. More gaps in the puzzle. The whole middle of the image was nothing but a void.

Every instinct told him that was about to change.

He wasn’t half as sure they’d like what it changed to.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

They found a long switchplate on the wall, just visible in the gloom three feet from the door. Five switches, all down. Travis flipped them up one by one, and the chamber lit up in discrete zones until the whole thing was blazing.

It was bigger than he’d expected—a nearly perfect cube of space, forty feet in each dimension—but its size lost hold of his attention almost at once.

What grabbed it was the layout.

The place looked like a loft apartment cut out of solid stone. There was a kitchen area in the far right corner, complete with cabinets, a range, a deep sink, and a huge refrigerator. A few recent issues of Newsweek lay on the counter. Ten feet away was a couch facing a flat-panel television on the wall, and beyond that, filling the nearer corner, was a bedroom suite. It included a bathroom of sorts—not really a separate room but just a vanity butted up against a glass-block shower enclosure, and a walled-off area containing a toilet. A stacked washer and dryer stood nearby. The wiring for all of it—switches and outlets and overhead lights hanging out of the dimness high above—ran in black conduits fixed to the stone walls. The conduits converged on a breaker box near the kitchen, from which a much thicker conduit plunged through the chamber’s floor.

That was the right side of the room. The left side had a computer desk at the far end, its data cable climbing the wall and disappearing through the ceiling. Travis hardly noticed it. His eyes had been drawn to the rest of that wall—and the array of additional flat-panel monitors that covered it, three screens high and ten wide. They were each the same size as the television in the living room, but while that one remained dormant, all thirty of these had come on when Travis flipped the light switches.

They carried video feeds from the forested slope surrounding the mine access, a strange equivalent to Defense Control in Border Town, with its dozens of angles on the empty desert. In some of these shots of the redwoods, the access itself was visible, with contractors milling around looking pissed. On closer inspection Travis saw that the rough opening appeared vacant in some of the images. After a second he realized what he was really seeing: the other access Jeannie had told them about, across the ridge and lower down.

Travis looked at the screens a few seconds longer, then turned his focus to the room’s most commanding feature.

The pit.

It was exactly centered, measuring maybe fifteen by fifteen feet—a square donut hole, in proportion to the chamber’s floorspace. A steel-tube handrail boxed in its entire perimeter except for a three-foot gap where a flight of stairs descended. The same kind of stairs they’d come down a few minutes before. From where he stood, Travis could see only a few feet of the hole’s depth, but he knew it went a long way down. This was the actual mine shaft. The concrete floor around it bore the scars of its long-abandoned function: corrosion-stained outlines, dotted with masonry bolt holes, where the footings of heavy equipment had rested. Twin grooves worn faintly into the surface, three feet apart and parallel to each other, extended from the pit back to the green door and right under it. There’d been a rail track here at one time, for heavy-duty carts and maybe a gantry crane.

The last thing Travis took in was a red metal locker fixed to the wall at the near end of the bank of monitors. It was shaped more or less like the one he’d had in high school, but was half the height and positioned at chest level. It had a standard drop-latch with a hole for a padlock, but no lock had been put into it. On impulse Travis went to it, lifted the latch and opened the door. Nothing inside. He closed it and turned back to Paige and Bethany.

“He lived here,” Paige said. “Allen Raines. He had the house down at the edge of the woods, but this was his home.”

Travis nodded. The illusion would’ve been perfect. From town, people would’ve only seen Raines park his vehicle at the house and walk in the front door. They wouldn’t have seen him continue right through the place, out the back and up into the trees; from a flat viewing angle the undergrowth and low boughs would’ve hidden him completely.

“It must’ve mattered,” Bethany said. “Being right inside here almost all the time, instead of down at the house. It must’ve made a difference, in terms of his handling of the Stargazer.”

On the last word her eyes went unconsciously to the pit.

Travis nodded again, and started toward the railing.

He was halfway there when the snapping buzz started back up, the same as it’d been in the alley. The field-of-grasshoppers sound, deep inside his head. The only difference was that it was stronger now—a lot stronger—this close to its source. It brought Travis to a halt, and after a few seconds he found his balance deserting him. He saw Paige and Bethany swaying on their feet too. He put his hands forward and let himself lean in the same direction, ready to control the fall if it came. As before, the sound—the thought—intensified until it felt almost physical. Like there were things moving inside his head. Skittering little legs and wings and mandibles, descending the brainstem now, boring toward his throat. Bethany shut her eyes and gritted her teeth and sucked in a deep breath, and Travis was sure she was about to scream at the top of her lungs—

And then it was gone again. A perfect cutoff, like before. Paige put a hand to her stomach, eyes widening for a second. Bethany released the pent-up breath. She looked rattled all to hell. Looked like she might scream anyway, but didn’t.

Travis dropped his arms to his sides and steadied his breathing—he realized only now that it’d gone shallow.

He went to the rail.

Paige and Bethany stepped up to it beside him.

They stared down and said nothing for probably half a minute.

The pit had to be six hundred feet deep. Maybe deeper. Mercury lights every thirty feet or so lit up the descent. The stairs wound down in a squared spiral, following the shaft walls and leaving a wide-open drop in the middle. Seen from up here, that open space shrank to a tiny square by the time it reached the bottom. There was no way to discern the structure of what was down there—to know whether the shaft accessed a horizontal run, or did something else altogether.

The only visible detail was a soft red glow that shone onto the lowest flights of stairs, its source apparently somewhere off to the side. Its brightness waxed and waned in random patterns, and even its color seemed to vary within a narrow range: deep red for the most part, but for fleeting instants it seemed closer to neon pink.

Travis looked at the stair treads just beneath him. He followed them down and around through half a dozen flights. Each step had a layer of dust covering its ends, left and right, but was clear in the middle. They’d seen regular use.

“These stairs weren’t part of the mine’s original architecture,” Travis said. “Workers weren’t lugging tons of ore up sixty flights back in the day. The stairs were built later on, for Raines’s use. Power consumption and maintenance probably ruled out a lift, but a person could go up and down these all the time, with the right pacing. Take it slow, don’t kill yourself.” He paused. “Whatever Raines was doing to keep the Stargazer in check, it required him to go down there and deal with it directly.”

He didn’t need to finish the point aloud: the three of them would have to deal with it directly too.

“When we see it,” Paige said, “do you think it’ll be obvious what we’re supposed to do? Do you think we’ll just know?”

“Only one way to find out,” Bethany said.

But they didn’t go that minute. They did three things first, none of them difficult.

They searched the chamber for any kind of paperwork that might help. Maybe, by a long shot, the cheat sheet would turn up.

It didn’t. They checked the kitchen cabinets, the desk drawers, the space beneath the mattress, the vanity, even the couch cushions. Nothing.

Next they switched on the computer and Bethany scoured Raines’s files. There were hundreds of songs and audiobooks and movies and television shows that’d been downloaded from iTunes. The web browser’s history showed lots of visits to mainstream news sites, YouTube, and a scattering of blogs. There were very few document files on the computer—just instructions for various programs that’d probably come with the system. There was nothing about Tangent or Scalar or the Stargazer. Nothing useful at all.

The third thing they tried came to Travis as Bethany was reaching to shut off the computer.

“Hold up,” he said.

He followed the data cable with his eyes, up to where it punched through the ceiling.

“How does the system get online?” he said. “Cell transceiver, right?”

Bethany nodded. “It must be hidden up in the trees, like the surveillance cameras.”

Travis took his phone from his pocket and switched it on. As expected, there was no signal at all.

“Jeannie called me right before we came in off the slope,” he said. “She must’ve found out who lived downstairs in 1978.” He indicated the data line. “Is there any way to plug that into my phone? She might’ve left a voicemail.”

Bethany thought about it. She slid the computer’s case out from under the desk, pulled two thumb tabs and removed its side panel. She leaned close and scrutinized a card attached to the motherboard.

“No problem,” she said.

While she rigged the connection, Travis gazed at the wall of monitors. The contractors were still gathered near the squared tunnel that led into the hillside. Still pissed. One of them was on a phone, yelling at someone.

Travis noticed a few angles he’d overlooked before. They were interior shots of the tunnel right outside the green door, just resolvable through the gas cloud from the canisters. Other images showed an identical door that must be built into the second access—it was clear of gas, and no one stood outside it yet. Now as he watched, two men in ventilator masks made their way to the first door. Each had something in his hand, but through the haze the objects were impossible to identify at first. Then the men used them. The first held a tape measure. He pressed its tab into the gap on the hinged side, and walked the tape sideways until it stretched across the width of the door. The second man turned out to have a hammer, a standard-sized claw type. He rested an ear against the door and used the hammer to tap very lightly on the steel. Travis heard the tapping on this side, but only faintly. A few seconds later both men retreated back toward the stairs.

“We’re in business,” Bethany said.

She held his phone out to him, the computer’s cable attached to an exposed board within it.

Jeannie had left a voice mail. In 1978 only one person had lived in either of the apartments beneath the Third Notch. A woman named Loraine Cotton. She’d moved in during the fall of the previous year and stayed through all of 1978.

Bethany patched the data line into her tablet computer and quickly pulled up Loraine Cotton’s history. She seemed, by every measure, to be an actual person. She’d been born in 1955, which made her 23 when she lived beneath the restaurant. At that time she’d just gotten a biology degree from Oregon State, specializing in forest ecosystems, and had apparently come to Rum Lake on a grant to study the redwoods. Her choice of such a dismal apartment made more sense in that light; she’d probably only gone inside the place to sleep, if even then—maybe she’d tented in the woods part of the time.

Loraine’s career path had changed pretty dramatically in March of the following year, 1979. She’d moved up to Bellevue, Washington, and taken an entry-level job at a small company that’d just moved its operations there: Microsoft. By the turn of the millennium she’d been worth over half a billion dollars.

“She’s on Twitter,” Bethany said. She pulled up the site and navigated to Loraine’s profile. “Doesn’t tweet much. Once every few days. Last one’s the day before yesterday: says she’s on vacation—Kings Canyon in the Australian Outback.”

Travis paced, rubbing his forehead.

“A passageway beneath the Third Notch,” he said. “Look for Loraine Cotton in apartment whichever. The message from the Breach sent Ruben Ward to meet her. It’s like she was intended to be another pawn. One that was going to last a lot longer than three months.”

“And have massive financial resources at her disposal after a while,” Paige said. “If whoever’s on the other side of the Breach had a presence on our side by that time, maybe they recognized the potential of a company like Microsoft—even back then.”

“Plenty of regular humans recognized it,” Travis said. “They all own islands now.”

He stopped pacing. He stared at the floor for a second, thinking hard. Something in what they’d just learned about Loraine Cotton had set off a ping, but he couldn’t get his mind around it. He gave it another ten seconds’ thought but got nowhere. He let it fade. Maybe it would come to him on its own.

He looked at a clock above Raines’s refrigerator. Twelve thirty. Six hours and fifteen minutes left before Peter Campbell’s estimated deadline. All at once it seemed like all the time in the world, but Travis took no relief from that fact. If things went well down in the shaft—if they saw what they had to do, and were able to do it—then he imagined it would all unfold pretty quickly. And if things didn’t go well—if they went bad in ways he couldn’t guess at the moment—then that would probably unfold pretty damn quickly, too.

They went.

The going was easy on the stairs. They were well constructed and solid and the mercury lamps put out plenty of light. Travis led the way. Every few flights he leaned over the handrail as he descended, and got a slightly closer look at the deep floor of the pit. Still no details. Just the slowly pulsing red-and-pink light.

They were some two hundred feet down when Travis noticed a break in the pattern of stairs far below—maybe two hundred feet lower still. It was as if the squared spiral had been compressed by ten feet at a single point. Like an accordion held open vertically, with just one pleat of its bellows pinched shut in the middle. He stopped for a moment and stared at it, and realized what it was: a horizontal walkway where a flight of stairs would’ve otherwise been. A single stretch that went sideways instead of down. From this high angle he couldn’t see the shaft wall at that spot—the flights above it blocked it from view—but he knew what was there.

The three of them stopped again when they were only fifty feet above the level walkway, facing it from the opposite wall. From this vantage they could easily see the opening there, where a side tunnel branched off the shaft into pitch darkness.

They stared at it a few seconds and then continued downward, but Travis kept his eyes fixed on it as they made their way around. He couldn’t admit it out loud, but something about the opening unnerved him. Some ancient fear coded right into his DNA was setting off an internal klaxon, telling him it was a bad idea to walk past a dark cavity in a rock face. He had his MP5 slung on its shoulder strap, the same as Paige and Bethany, and was on the verge of taking hold of its grip as they came down the last flight before the tunnel. Only logic kept him from doing so. This was an abandoned mine in the present, not Olduvai Gorge a million years ago. Nothing with claws was going to erupt from the darkness and try to have them for lunch. That’s what he was thinking when he was two treads above the walkway, and then a man’s voice out of the blackness said, “Stop right there.”

Chapter Thirty

There was no sound of a gun being cocked. Just a tone confident enough to imply one.

Travis stopped.

Paige and Bethany stopped behind him—he heard their breathing cut out at the same time.

“Keep your hands away from the weapons,” the man said.

“We’re not going to drop them,” Travis said. There was caution and then there was stupidity.

“I’m not going to ask you to,” the man said.

A moment later there came the soft crunch of a careful step, followed by another. Travis saw a hint of movement in the darkness, clothing catching the indirect spill of mercury light ten feet back in the tunnel.

Then the man said, “You’re Travis Chase.”

The unreal quality of the moment passed quickly. The analytical part of Travis’s mind kicked in, firing off questions. Who was still alive who could both recognize him and be inside this place? Had the voice sounded familiar? He had no immediate answer for either one.

“Who are you?” Travis said.

“I think you’ll remember me. I’m coming out now. My weapon’s holstered.”

More footsteps. Then a shape materialized out of the gloom, and a second later the man was standing right at the tunnel’s opening, hands out at his sides in a nonthreatening stance. He glanced up the flight at each of them in turn, then looked at Travis and waited for him to speak.

Travis knew him. He’d met him just over a year ago under very tense circumstances, and spent a few hours in his general vicinity. He couldn’t remember if they’d spoken directly—if so, it would’ve been just a few words. Paige and Bethany wouldn’t recognize him at all; they’d been in the same room with him for ten seconds back then, but their faces had been pressed to the floor, and there’d been a lot of shooting going on.

“Rudy Dyer,” Travis said. “Secret Service for Richard Garner.”

Travis introduced Paige and Bethany. The three of them filed down onto the walkway and into the open space at the tunnel’s mouth. Between themselves and Dyer they formed a rough square a few feet apart from one another, in which everyone could see everyone else. Travis had his back diagonal to the walkway’s railing. He turned and looked over the edge at the bottom of the shaft, now just two hundred feet below. From here he could resolve the lowest flight in the spiral. It didn’t terminate against a solid floor, but instead tied into a flat walkway like this one, which led out of sight to one side. Though he couldn’t be sure, Travis had the impression there was no floor at the bottom of the shaft. That instead the vertical channel punched down into some broader chamber beneath it, whose bottom might be dozens of feet further below, and whose width and length he couldn’t determine.

He stared a moment longer, the red glow almost hypnotizing at this range. It saturated the bottom walkway and the steps there, and every visible inch of whatever lay beneath it all.

Travis looked up and saw Dyer gazing down at it too. Then the man trailed his eyes upward until he was craning his neck to stare at the top two thirds of the shaft, rearing above them like a chimney seen from deep inside. Travis got the impression that Dyer was looking at it all for the first time.

“You came in through the other access,” Travis said.

Dyer nodded, at last leveling his gaze and turning to face the group. “I only got here half an hour ago. I was in Barbados with my wife and daughter when I got the news last night.”

“How did you know the door combination?” Paige said.

“Garner gave it to me, just after he took office again last year. He told me—” He cut himself off, looking puzzled about something. Travis realized the same puzzlement had been there, under the surface, from the moment Dyer had stepped out of the dark. The man looked from one of them to the other. At last he said, “Are you guys it? None of the others made it?”

“Others?” Travis said.

Dyer nodded. “This mine is the rally point. Everyone still alive is supposed to show up here.”

Travis thought of the people who’d been killed in unison with Garner, all over the country. The power players Peter had met with, all those years ago.

Still looking confused, Dyer said, “No offense, but I didn’t think you guys were part of the group. You’d be just about the last people I’d expect to meet in this place. How did you get the combination?”

Travis met Paige’s and Bethany’s eyes. Their bafflement matched his own. Clearly Dyer knew a lot more than the three of them did—he’d learned it directly from Garner.

Travis looked at Dyer again. The man stared and waited for the answer.

“We’re honestly not sure how we got the combo,” Travis said. “We think Breach technology was involved, but if so, it was a kind we’ve never heard of.” He shook his head. “Look, you seem to have the whole picture of this thing. We’ve been piecing it together slapshot since last night, and we’re missing big chunks of it. If you know it all, please tell us.”

Dyer frowned. He seemed to struggle with some deep indecision. “This is all happening wrong,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”

“Tell us what it is supposed to be like,” Paige said.

For a moment Dyer just stood there. He looked troubled by the idea he needed to express. Then he said, “The whole point is not to tell you. That’s what it’s supposed to be like. No current member of Tangent is supposed to know anything. Not for a few years yet.”

Travis found himself getting tired of the confusion. “You’re right,” he said. “It is all happening wrong—the people you expected aren’t here. But we are. I assume your purpose is the same as ours.” He nodded over the rail behind him. “To do whatever can be done about the Stargazer.”

Dyer looked more thrown by that than anything so far. “That must be an old nickname for it. Whatever you want to call it, I don’t think much can be done. Just management, like Allen Raines was doing.”

“You’re not here to stop it?” Paige said.

Dyer shook his head.

“What about the deadline?” Bethany said. “A little over six hours from now.”

“That’s the deadline,” Dyer said, “but it has nothing to do with what’s in this mine.”

Paige looked frustrated. “Just tell us everything. We already know the basics. We know Ruben Ward got instructions from the Breach in 1978. We know he spent that summer carrying them out. We know my father picked up on it later, and the Scalar investigation spent six years following Ward’s trail. Which led here, to whatever Ward created in this mine. So tell us the rest. Tell us what needs to be done, and we’ll help you do it.”

Dyer stared at her. His expression went almost blank, as if his thoughts had turned inward to process what he’d just heard.

“You’ve got the first few points right,” he said. “The rest is way off. Ward didn’t create anything in this place, and the Scalar investigation never picked up his trail. For all practical purposes, he didn’t leave one.”

Travis remembered their conversation on the Coast Highway. Their uncertainty as to how the investigation could’ve accomplished anything at all.

“But they spent hundreds of millions doing something,” Bethany said.

“Probably more like billions,” Dyer said. “Most of the cost was likely hidden one way or another.”

“The cost of what?” Bethany said. “What the hell did they do?”

Suddenly Travis knew. He realized he might’ve known hours ago, if he’d given it more thought. Might’ve guessed, anyway; he couldn’t have known for sure until they reached this place.

“Holy shit,” he whispered.

Dyer nodded, seeing his understanding.

“They did the only thing they could do,” Dyer said. “They knew from the beginning that Ward’s trail was long gone, and so was the notebook with the instructions written in it. Trashed or burned before he killed himself. They were never going to see it again.”

“They needed a do-over,” Travis said.

Dyer nodded again. “They needed another Ruben Ward. And this is the place where they tried to get one. At the bottom of this mineshaft they created the second Breach.”

Part III - The Tumbler

Chapter Thirty-One

Paige started to speak, then stopped. Her mouth opened and closed a second and third time, but nothing came out. At last she just stepped to the rail beside Travis and stared down into the pit. Bethany did the same. They watched the light playing—slowly flaring and receding.

When Paige’s voice finally came, it was softened almost to a breath. “The colors are different.”

“Almost everything about it’s different,” Dyer said, “hard as they tried to duplicate the original.”

“Do entities emerge?” Travis said.

“No. But other things do.”

Every head turned to Dyer. Every eye widened a little.

“Understand,” Dyer said, “everything I know comes from Garner. I’ve obviously never been in Border Town. I’ve never seen the first Breach—or this one. Garner said the one you oversee is an opening to something like a wormhole, however loosely that term is defined.”

Paige nodded.

“He also said it’s a wormhole being used for a specific purpose,” Dyer said. “Someone out there, or something out there, either designed it or harnessed it for transporting the objects you call entities.”

“Something like that,” Travis said.

“Well the second Breach tapped into a very different kind of wormhole,” Dyer said. “Maybe a more common kind, according to some of the scientists who worked on it. The term they used for it was primordial. A natural wormhole that could’ve formed out of the energy of the big bang itself. They say the universe might be riddled with them. And this one, at least, has no physical objects moving through it.”

“So what comes out?” Bethany said.

“Transmissions,” Dyer said. “Garner called them parasite signals.”

Travis’s eyes snapped to Paige’s, then Bethany’s.

Dyer saw the looks. “You felt them too.”

All three nodded.

“No one knows exactly what they are,” Dyer said. “They figure the other end of this wormhole is bonded to someplace where there’s life. Some equivalent to bugs, maybe. The way I heard it, things like that would evolve to make use of the tunnel, if they could. Like things here evolved eyes to exploit sunlight, and ears to take advantage of soundwaves in the air. These things, even if they couldn’t physically pass through the channel, could transmit natural signals into it. There are any number of ways they’d benefit by doing that, and—”

He stopped. Frowned. “Look, this Breach is dangerous as hell, and it gets more dangerous if it’s not managed, but I can take care of that later. None of this is the reason Garner brought me into the loop. It’s not why I’m here. For now, it’s enough to know that this second one didn’t do what everybody hoped it would. There were no Breach Voices, and there was no effect up front like the one that hit Ruben Ward. That stuff just didn’t happen the second time around. Different tunnel. But in a way—I guess indirectly—opening this thing got them the answers they were looking for. They learned what was really going on.”

He went quiet again, shut his eyes hard and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’m going to tell you everything I know. I don’t see any choice at this point. If I’d gotten here and found any of the others alive, they would’ve been in charge, and my orders would’ve been to help them. But Garner gave me different orders to follow if none of them made it. The only real priority now—”

A sound cut him off: a violent, concussive bass wave, like a shotgun blast amplified many times over. It came from the chamber four hundred feet above, and echoed down the shaft in strange harmonics that set the metal stairs vibrating. Everyone looked up. They listened as the reverberations faded.

Only silence followed.

Travis thought of the men with the tape measure and the hammer, getting a sense of the steel’s bulk.

“They’re trying to blow the door,” he said.

“Who are they?” Dyer said. “Private sector guys?”

Travis nodded. It occurred to him that, until now, Dyer had been entirely unaware of any hostile presence outside the mine. Having come in the back entrance, he’d encountered none of them.

Now as Dyer took the information into account, his gaze seemed to dart back and forth over nothingness in front of him. The look of someone considering a large number of variables and making a fast decision. He jerked his head to indicate the tunnel leading away off the drop shaft, back in the direction he’d come from.

“This way,” he said. “Right now.”

The tunnel wasn’t as dark as it’d seemed at first glance, against the brighter mercury lamps in the vertical run. There were dim orange lights here, widely spaced, and after a few seconds Travis found his eyes adjusting. In the same short time, Dyer picked up the pace to just under a sprint, cursing softly under his breath.

“This was supposed to be the one place they wouldn’t know about,” he said. “That’s why it was the rendezvous point.”

“They knew about it hours ago,” Travis said. “They even had the door combo.”

He described the dream, leaving nothing out. He included their own speculation that Garner was still alive, and that the dream had been real—seen through the eyes of someone held captive with him, and sent to Travis by way of an unknown entity.

If any of it threw Dyer, he didn’t show it. He seemed about to reply when another thudding blast made them all flinch and stutter-step.

It hadn’t come from the upright shaft behind them.

It’d come from the darkness far ahead.

Chapter Thirty-Two

They came to a stop just inside one of the orange pools of light. Travis studied Dyer’s face and was surprised by the stress it showed, even taking the circumstances into account. Dyer didn’t strike him as a man prone to fearing for his own safety, yet at the moment he looked deeply afraid.

It crossed Travis’s mind that he himself had given no thought to escaping this place, until they’d set off a minute ago. All his focus, at first, had been on getting inside, and then it’d shifted to reaching the bottom of the mine and figuring out what to do there. He supposed that on some level he hadn’t really expected to make it back out.

But Dyer wanted out. That much was obvious. And it really didn’t look as though he was afraid for himself. There was more to it. A lot more, Travis thought. A missile commander in some bunker under South Dakota, with a launch order in hand, might look as tense as Dyer did right now.

The man turned back and forth, staring in both of the tunnel’s directions, as if willing either unseen exit to become viable again.

“Christ,” he whispered.

“They’re not inside yet,” Travis said. “The explosives they’ve used so far are nowhere near big enough to get through those doors.”

He imagined the men outside were using whatever small-scale stuff they’d already had with them, stored in one of the vehicles like the gas masks had been.

“They’ve got Holt on speed dial,” Dyer said. “They can chopper in whatever they need, from wherever’s closest. They’ll have the doors down in half an hour.”

His eyes tracked over their three MP5s but dismissed them in about a second. He paced to the wall and leaned his forehead into it, thinking hard but getting nowhere.

“I was told there’s a residence at the top of the shaft,” he said.

“There is,” Travis said.

“Anything in there we can use to set a trap? Gas lines to the stove or dryer?”

“Both electric.”

Dyer went back to thinking.

“What’s in the Breach’s chamber?” Travis said. “Other than the Breach. Is there any equipment? Anything big? Anything useful as a weapon?”

“Wouldn’t think so,” Dyer said, “given what Garner told me.”

“Let’s see for ourselves,” Travis said.

They were three flights from the bottom when Travis saw that he’d been wrong about something: the shaft wasn’t exactly open to the broad chamber below it. Just beneath the lowest step, and the catwalk that extended from it, a heavy barrier of glass or clear plastic had been bolted in place like a floor, separating the vertical stretch from the space that yawned underneath. All around its edges, the barrier had been sealed to the stone walls with some heavy duty compound that looked like tar.

Travis could see now where the catwalk led—what it disappeared into, anyway: a channel about the height and width of a standard doorway, bored through the shaft wall a foot above the bottom, and six inches above the clear barricade. By the time they were descending the last steps before the walk, Travis could see deep into the narrow tunnel. It extended some fifteen feet through darkness, then opened up broadly on its right side. Through the opening streamed the same intense red-and-pink light that shone over everything beneath the stair shaft.

Travis, leading the way, came to a stop at the foot of the stairs. He looked straight down through the transparent floor just under his feet. Even from here he couldn’t see the sides of the chasm below it. Its bottom was maybe thirty feet down, and covered with a dark gray layer of something granular and crumbled. Like ground-up asphalt, but not quite.

Travis refocused on the barrier. He could see its thickness under the sealant along the walls. Three inches at least. A person could walk on it without risk. It looked like someone had: the whole surface was scratched and scuffed—it must be dura-plastic instead of glass. Had the installers made those marks? Travis took a step sideways while keeping his eyes on the damage, and by the movement of vague reflections on the surface he realized he had it wrong again: the scratches were on the underside of the barrier.

He stared at them a moment longer and then continued into the tunnel. His footsteps and the others’ echoed everywhere in the pressing space.

They came abreast of the opening at the end.

They stopped.

They said nothing.

Hanging off the side of the corridor, into emptiness, was an elevator-sized enclosure made of the same plastic as the barrier in the shaft. Rectangular panels of it were bolted into a steel framework. Even the floor was clear.

The structure offered a perfect view of what lay beyond: a vast biscuit of space blasted and carved out of the mountain’s core. Thirty feet from top to bottom, at least a hundred feet in diameter. The viewing booth looked out over it from up near the plane of the ceiling.

This had been the original ore deposit, Travis was sure. Miners had cleared this cavity with dynamite and pickaxes in the early twentieth century. The notion registered and faded in the same instant. Two other things filled all his awareness.

One was the second Breach. Its familiarity and exoticness overlapped, each inescapable. Positioned straight out ahead of the viewing structure, near the furthest point of the cavern’s arc, the thing had the same size and shape and texture as its counterpart in Wyoming. A ragged oval torn open across thin air, ten feet wide and three high, forming the flared mouth of a tunnel that plunged away to a vanishing point beyond. The tunnel itself was perfectly round, its height matching the opening’s three feet but drawn far inward from its sides. Mouth and tunnel alike were made of something like plasma—like flame rippling and playing along the underside of a board.

Only its colors set this Breach apart, but they were enough to make the difference jarring. Travis stared and didn’t blink. The tunnel was a deep bloody red, with strands of ethereal pink twisting and writhing along its length every few seconds. Those colors spread out across the flared mouth, flowing against its edge: a five-inch border that shone brilliantly white.

All of it combined to illuminate the second thing that had Travis’s attention.

The cavern’s floor.

Which was carpeted with dead insects the size of human hands.

He’d seen them from the lowest flight of stairs, but hadn’t realized it. The details were only obvious where the light was brightest—in the thirty or forty feet around the Breach. Fractured carapaces and cracked wings and segmented, chitinous bodies—the chamber could be waist deep in them for all Travis knew.

He noticed something else: the plastic shielding here was scratched like the panel below the stairs—and again only on the opposite side.

He became aware of Bethany’s breathing, off to his left. Intensifying and speeding up. Travis recalled her telling him once that she hated bugs. Deeply, irrationally hated them—a serious phobia she had no intention of coming to grips with. Now she stepped into his peripheral vision and pointed to a spot halfway between their position and the Breach. He followed. And saw.

One of the bugs was alive. It lay atop the detritus, fanning its wings in slow, delicate beats. It was visually similar to a hornet. Needle-thin waist, compound wing-structures, bristled thorax with some kind of stinger at the tip. Head to tail it was maybe six inches long.

Travis saw another just like it ten yards to the left—also alive. He picked out three more in the next few seconds.

Bethany steadied her breathing and spoke. “I thought they couldn’t come through.”

“They can’t, exactly,” Dyer said. “How they get here is tricky. That’s where the parasite signals come in. Bugs just like these ones transmit them from the other end of the tunnel. The way Garner described it, the signals can seek out conscious targets on this end. Living brains—the bigger the better. They get in your head and use it as a kind of relay, probably amplifying the signals, which are … kinetic. Telekinetic. They can trigger complex reactions in certain materials. Can rearrange them, at least on a tiny scale. Down at the level of molecules.”

“You mean the movement we felt inside our heads?” Paige said. She sounded more than a little rattled by the idea.

“No,” Dyer said. “Supposedly that feeling is just your nerves going crazy. The rearranging happens somewhere else—some random spot outside your body, but not far away.”

“What do you mean?” Travis said. “What do they rearrange?”

“Simple elements. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, a few others. They assemble them to form a cell—basically an embryo. Like one of ours, but even smaller, and much less complex. The signals build it in about ten seconds, and then they cut out and the embryo is on its own, and the rest is straightforward biology.” He waved a hand at the mass of hard-shelled bodies beyond the glass. “Only takes the embryo a few weeks to develop into the full-sized form—probably a perfect copy of the transmitting parasite at the other end of the wormhole.”

Travis let the concept settle over him. He was struck not by how strange it was, but by how it paralleled much of what he’d read of biology in the past year. Propagation was life’s first objective. To spread. To be. It evolved stunningly elaborate ways of doing that, from the helicopter seeds of maple trees to the complex, two-stage life cycle of the Plasmodium parasite that carried malaria between mosquitoes and vertebrates—Travis had struggled to accept parts of that process as possible, even though it was hard science that’d been nailed down decades ago.

“Most of these things don’t live very long after they form,” Dyer said, “and a lot of the ones that do can barely move. It’s pretty clear they’re not built for this world. Wherever they’re from, maybe the gravity’s weaker and the air’s thicker. Who knows? But the thing is, some of them can move. And fly. Garner said there were serious injuries to the workers here in 1987. They set up these barricades as soon as they got a sense of what was happening, and pretty much by accident they figured out how to rein it all in.”

“Someone has to be a lightning rod,” Travis said.

Dyer nodded. “That’s close to how Garner described it. For whatever reason, if someone comes down here even a few times a day and makes a nice, easy target of himself, the signals never hunt any further. If they do have to look further, they eventually look much further, even through hundreds of feet of rock, somehow. And in that case they don’t stop at one target—they don’t seem to stop at all. The signals get stronger. The intervals between them get shorter. Peter Campbell and the others who were here at the beginning used equipment to work out the signal strength, and even some of the timing. There was some kind of reliable curve you could draw on a graph, showing how bad it would get if you left it untended too long. It would get out past Rum Lake after a while. It could extend for hundreds of miles.”

Travis stared over the tumble of insect debris and imagined Allen Raines’s life for the last twenty-five years, centered entirely on this place. Bound to it as if tethered to a stake.

A sound intruded on the thought: a high metallic whine from far above in the stair shaft. It lasted a few seconds, then stopped, then proceeded in starts and fits.

“They’re drilling the hinges,” Dyer said. “Probably planning to stuff shaped charges into them.”

Travis turned and surveyed the cramped space around them. Observation booth on one side, rock-lined tunnel on the other. No tools or equipment of any kind lying around. Nothing that could help them lay a trap.

“I don’t know what to do,” Dyer said. “I just don’t.”

The bigger-than-himself fear was back in his eyes. Travis let it go for the moment. He turned again to the plastic-built compartment and, for the first time, stepped into it. He stood right on the see-through floor, a quick thrill of vertigo spinning up through his nerves. He looked down and across the cavern floor, studying the bugs. Many more of the hornetlike things were visible now, lazily beating the air with their wings, drawing forelimbs over heads full of terrible composite eyes. Was he imagining it, or were there a lot more of them moving now than at first? In a glance he could see dozens, and that was only where the light was strong. How many more were beginning to stir in the darker regions?

All that could explain this sudden activity was the fact that the four of them had just arrived. Their voices, transferring through the plastic, however faintly, had roused these things from some lethargic state.

Travis looked at the trace scratches crisscrossing the window in front of him, and then without warning he raised his fist and pounded it hard and fast against the panel.

He heard the others startle behind him.

“What are you doing?” Bethany said.

Out in the chamber, every hornet shape jerked at the sudden racket. They didn’t cock their heads—probably didn’t have their ears there—but splayed their bodies out instead, wings going flat and rigid, all movement ceasing in a matter of seconds. To Travis, the posture looked like the embodiment of tension and alertness.

It looked like they were listening.

He kept pounding the panel. Another second. Two.

On three the first of the insects lifted off. It was one Travis hadn’t even seen—it came up out of the deep red, somewhere to the left. By the time Travis had swung his gaze toward it, there were others in the air. Lots of others. Dozens and then well over a hundred. Where they rose directly past the Breach, its glare shone right through their bodies, as if they were hollow shells made of thin paper. Light enough to fly—even on Earth.

They converged toward the booth before they’d ascended even a few feet, the whole mass of them moving as if guided by a single mind. Travis finally stopped pounding and stepped back, and an instant later the first of them hit the windows. They flew more like moths than hornets. They made great swooping circles and scraped the plastic in glancing blows. Within moments there were enough of them swarming the panels that it was hard to see out.

“Was there a reason you did that?” Bethany whispered.

“Yes,” Travis said, without looking back.

He dropped the magazine out of his MP5, drew it close to his eyes and studied the metal edges at the top where it socketed into the weapon. He found one that suited his purpose.

Then he stepped into the booth again, fit the chosen edge to the nearest of the screws holding a panel in place, and began to loosen it.

Chapter Thirty-Three

It wasn’t likely to work. He knew that. It was just all they had. If it failed they’d die—but if they did nothing they’d die anyway. Not much of a dilemma.

The idea was simple enough: prep the window to be removed with a good shove, wait for the contractors to enter the mine and reach the bottom of the stairs just outside this tunnel—and shove. The bugs would spill in. They would attack everyone. The four of them would expect it. The contractors wouldn’t. As a group, the contractors would present a much larger and louder target—as well as a fleeing one. It was hard to imagine the men wouldn’t reverse course in the mother of all hurries, all the way back to whichever access they’d come in through. With a decent amount of luck, the bulk of the swarm would go with them, and briefly scatter whoever was waiting outside the mine. Whatever portion of the bugs stayed down here in the tunnel might be manageable; Travis pictured their translucent, fragile bodies meeting violently swung MP5s. Maybe it would work. Maybe they’d get a few minutes’ opportunity to follow the contractors up into the woods and run for visual cover.

Maybe.

Travis didn’t pretend to be optimistic, either for the others’ benefit or his own.

He and Paige removed all but four screws, one at each corner, and loosened those as much as they dared. They left them holding on by no more than a few turns each. The panel, a little larger than a beach towel, rattled and swayed in place at the lightest touch.

On the other side, the hornets continued to loop and dive and scrape.

The four of them sat in the tunnel just shy of where it opened to the plastic enclosure. Bethany pressed her hands tightly between her knees and tried to keep them from shaking. She said little.

High above, the drilling continued. During pauses they could hear the same progress going on at the more distant access.

“All right,” Dyer said. “Here’s what I know.”

He was quiet for twenty seconds, lining it all up.

“You’ve been acting on limited information,” he said. “You knew that. You had no choice but to try connecting the dots anyway—the ones you had. Peter Campbell did the same thing, early in the Scalar investigation, and came to the same misunderstanding as you: that Ruben Ward did something bad.”

Paige looked at Travis and Bethany, then Dyer.

“He did do something bad,” she said. “My father was terrified about it.”

“In the beginning.”

Paige shook her head. “In the end, too, and long after. He was still scared of it five years ago.”

“He was scared five years ago, but not for any of the reasons you think.”

Paige started to reply, then just stopped and waited for him to go on.

Dyer shut his eyes for a few seconds. A last consideration of how to say it.

“The message Ward received had distinct halves. The first was a description of the place on the other side of the Breach, along with an explanation of why the message had been sent. None of which Garner shared with me. Those are the deepest parts of the secret. What he told me about was the second half: the instructions. They included a list of nine names, nine people who were alive in 1978, and directions for finding them.”

Travis looked at Paige and knew what she was thinking. Loraine Cotton.

“Ward’s task was straightforward,” Dyer said. “Take the message to each of these people and convince them it was for real. There were verifiers built into it, to help him do that. Specific predictions of things like aurora activity that summer, down to the minute. Things you couldn’t just guess about—things a human couldn’t just guess about anyway.”

“What were these people supposed to do with the message once they had it?” Travis said.

“Follow the instructions that were included for them. Which were more complicated than Ward’s. His part was done by early August.”

“Why did he kill himself?” Bethany said.

“For the reason everyone assumed, the day they heard about it. The Breach had fried him. Whatever gave him the means to translate the message—and dumped him into a near-coma for all those weeks—screwed him up in lots of other ways. Serious mood problems. Imbalances. It’s a wonder he lasted those three months. Did you know the message included an apology for that effect? Whoever sent it knew it would do that to a human brain. It couldn’t be avoided.”

The drilling atop the shaft suddenly changed tone. Became deeper, more guttural. The first bit had been swapped out for something bigger. Everyone listened for a moment and then tried to ignore it.

“So by August of 1978,” Dyer said, “the nine recipients had their orders in hand. These were nine pretty average people, but that was about to change. The instructions included ways for them to dramatically increase their financial and social status over the following years. The wording was pretty careful—the message’s senders may have anticipated that other people might see it along the way. It didn’t necessarily say ‘Invest in Apple on this exact date, or apply for this particular job,’ but it was in the ballpark. It read like a childishly simple riddle, if you knew to look past the surface, and for these nine people it was the recipe for becoming extremely rich, and politically connected, in just a matter of years.”

Travis thought of the three names Bethany’s data-mining had turned up. Three of the people Peter Campbell had met with here in Rum Lake, in December 1987. All three had been worth tens of millions by then, with ties to Washington.

And all three had begun amassing that wealth and power in the late seventies or very early eighties.

Suddenly Travis understood what the ping had been about, a while earlier when they’d learned about Loraine Cotton: they’d recognized that her steep financial climb started just after Ruben Ward met with her, and as a direct result of his doing so. But Travis hadn’t noticed the similarity with the other three. Hadn’t tied in the fact that their climbs had begun around the same time as hers. He’d overlooked it because those people were supposed to be Peter’s allies, whom he’d chosen in 1987. It hadn’t seemed to matter when and how they’d become powerful.

“Whoever’s on the other side seems to have at least some rudimentary knowledge of our future,” Dyer said. “They had it as of 1978, in any case. Some understanding of which technologies, even which companies, were about to break in a big way.”

“There are entities that can access the future,” Paige said. “With certain restrictions.”

“However it worked,” Dyer said, “the information was dead-on. These people were all major players by the mid eighties, which allowed them to begin following the next instruction: get close to the people who control the Breach. Stay informed on all that surrounds it, and gain as much influence over it as possible. That last part they were free to take their time with. They wouldn’t have to use the influence until quite a ways down the road.”

“How far down the road?” Travis said.

“Seven minutes past three P.M. mountain time, June 5, 2016.”

The three of them stared. None spoke.

Travis’s mind automatically sought a meaning for the date, but came up with nothing. It was a few months shy of four years from now. Beyond that, nothing about it stuck.

“What happens at that time?” Paige said.

“The Breach inside Border Town opens,” Dyer said. “Really opens, I mean. Becomes a two-way channel that a person can pass through from this end. But only one specific person, whom the instructions also name and describe. They made it very clear that no one else was to come through. Putting that person in front of the Breach at the right time falls to the other nine. That’s their entire purpose. It’s what all the power and influence are for.”

The notion of someone actually stepping into the Breach affected Travis to an extent that surprised him. Through the fabric of his shirt he could suddenly feel the stone wall at his back, radiating its chill.

“Who goes in?” he said.

Dyer looked at him. “You do, Mr. Chase.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

The tunnel seemed almost to move beneath him. To rock gently left and then right, like a boat in a passing wake.

“The message that came through the Breach was about you,” Dyer said. “It named you. It specified your time and place of birth.”

A memory came to Travis. An image of the dark alley near Johns Hopkins, between the town houses. Ruben Ward staggering somewhere ahead of him, aware that he was being followed.

The man had called out: Who the hell are you?

And he’d answered: Travis Chase. Let me help.

There’d been an audible response on Ward’s part. Some expulsion of breath Travis had pegged for confusion, and then dismissed.

You’re only a kid, Ward had said. And a moment later: The instructions didn’t say anything about this.

Travis looked around at the others—Dyer just watching him, reading his response, Paige and Bethany staring with blank faces, still processing the information.

Then Paige’s expression changed. She looked at Travis and mouthed a single word: it.

Travis acknowledged her with a nod neither Bethany nor Dyer saw.

It.

Jesus.

No doubting the connection now.

Was that what the filter was about, then? Was it some consequence of entering the Breach from this end? An unavoidable result, like the brain damage Ruben Ward had suffered when the thing opened?

Whoever it affects, it’s not their fault. Not really. Under the wrong conditions, anyone could end up the worst person on Earth.

Travis looked at Dyer. “Did Garner ever say anything about a filter? Did that word ever come up, regarding the message?”

Dyer thought about it, but seemed to draw a blank. He shook his head.

Travis considered the notion for another second and then let it fall away—for the moment. The present conversation drew his full attention again.

“I was a child when that message arrived,” Travis said. “How the hell could it be about me?”

“I’d tell you if I knew,” Dyer said.

“Does Garner know? Does he know what happens when I go through?”

“He knows something—whatever the first half of the message says.”

“We saw part of it,” Paige said. “I won’t go into the how, but we saw two separate lines from the notebook. One was about finding Loraine Cotton here in Rum Lake. The other was from earlier in the text. It said, ‘Some of us are already among you.’ ”

Dyer’s eyes tightened involuntarily. He’d clearly never heard that before.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “Like I told you, Garner kept all that to himself. All he said about it was that it mattered. Like the biggest things in history matter. Things we can’t afford to get wrong.” He paused. “They wouldn’t have gotten it wrong. Everything was on the right track, at the beginning. The nine knew all they were supposed to, and were gaining power. No one else knew a thing. By the end, right before 2016, they’d have been well positioned to get you into Tangent, Mr. Chase, under whatever necessary pretense. To give you an idea of how well positioned, consider that Garner himself was one of the nine. In 1978 he was a retired Navy SEAL thinking about putting his law degree to use. The instructions rerouted him into politics. Everything was rolling smoothly. And then it wasn’t.”

“Scalar,” Paige said. There was a note of pain in her voice.

Dyer nodded. “Your father’s learning about the notebook, from Ward’s wife, threw everything off. He launched the investigation, came up empty, and got started on the project to create this second Breach the following year. Before it was long under way, a few of the nine had already gotten wind of it. They knew why Peter was doing it, and couldn’t blame him. Of course he’d want to find out what the message had said. Given the secrecy, how could it sound anything but ominous to him? Garner and the others debated meeting with him and telling him everything, but held back. What if he didn’t agree with their goal? Their advantage would be lost, just like that. So they waited instead, and watched over this project as closely as they could. They weren’t sure what would result from it, but they were confident it wouldn’t generate another Ward.” He shrugged. “In the end they actually exerted some influence on the construction. Peter had a team building the new ion collider in a secure location a few hundred miles from here—it could be taken apart and moved once he found a place to set it up for good. Secrecy around the search for a final site was incredibly strict. No one in Washington was privy to the memos. The nine were worried they’d end up never knowing how all this turned out, so they used indirect methods to suggest this mine shaft, by way of one of the engineering firms involved. Loraine Cotton knew the mine from her time as a biologist here.”

Dyer nodded at the red light streaming in nearby. “They installed the collider in about three months in 1987, and switched it on. You know how that went. Garner and the others figured that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. Even while he was containing the mess here, Peter began preliminary steps toward trying again somewhere else. And again and again, if need be. He was that rattled by not knowing what Ward had done. He couldn’t justify ever giving up. So Garner and the rest finally rolled the dice. A few of them met with Peter and told him the whole story.”

“How did he take it?” Paige said.

Dyer rubbed his eyes and leaned his head back against the stone. “Like he’d accidentally released plague rats from a lab.” He exhaled slowly. “Peter agreed entirely with their aim, and that all of his work on Scalar had to stop. But by then it wasn’t as simple as that. Things were worse than Garner and the others realized. They’d been watching Tangent’s dealings for a few years by then, especially as Scalar began to ramp up. They never thought Peter knew about them—but he did. And he’d countered their moves with his own. He’d been watching them. Remember, he had Breach technology at his disposal. Serious advantages no one outside Border Town knew about. He’d also involved contacts he had within the FBI, for things like background checks and financial record searches.”

“Oh shit,” Travis said. He could see the rough shape of the problem.

Dyer nodded. “Peter did that stuff long before Garner and the others came to see him. Before he knew any better. By the time they did meet with him, there were a handful of people in the United States government who knew all nine of their names, and knew they’d taken an unusual interest in Scalar—which a select few also knew about. You see the danger, right? And you see how even stopping the investigation in its tracks, ceasing work on new Breaches, wouldn’t make that danger go away. There would always be those few people out there, along with whoever they’d talked to, who might put the pieces together. Rumors of an alien message, its instructions carried out on Earth in 1978. Nine powerful people deeply involved with it somehow, all of whom had radically improved their standing right after the message arrived. There would always be the risk of someone connecting the dots and reacting out of fear. Of huge-scale action being taken against Garner and the others, and maybe against Tangent itself. All of that could happen years before 2016. Years before the culmination of their work.”

Dyer waved a hand to indicate the unseen chamber six hundred feet above. “So they all met to talk about it. Peter and the other Scalar investigators, and Garner and the rest of those who’d received the message. They came here in mid-December 1987 to figure it all out. The location worked because it was still secret to anyone in D.C. Only the engineers knew where this place was, and they’d all signed nondisclosure forms that threatened capital punishment. Between that and how damned scared of the place they were, by that point, they weren’t likely to ever talk. So, good place for the meeting. Peter and the others brought a report with them. A plan for how to proceed.”

“The cheat sheet,” Paige said.

Dyer looked puzzled.

“That’s what others in Tangent called it,” she said.

“A one-page plan,” Travis said. “Jesus, now I know why. It could’ve probably been a one-line plan: Stop everything and cross our fingers.”

“More or less,” Dyer said. “In the end it was all they could do. Like submarine combat. Rig for quiet and go dead in the water. Hope like hell they just lose you after a while.”

He went silent, and for a moment the four of them listened to the drilling up top. Droning, patient, relentless.

“I guess they didn’t,” Travis said.

A second later the drilling stopped.

Chapter Thirty-Five

They listened. A minute passed. No sound anywhere, except the scrape and rattle of insect bodies against the viewing booth. The drilling at both accesses had finished.

“Not much longer now,” Paige said.

They waited. Time slipped by. Sometimes they heard a metallic tapping from one access or the other. Mostly they heard nothing at all.

“This dream you had,” Dyer said. “You actually think it was real?”

“The door combo was real,” Travis said. “That’s all I have to go on.”

Dyer looked thoughtful.

“What?” Travis said.

“The drug you described,” Dyer said. “That’s real too. It’s called phenyline dicyclomide. They use it for interrogations. It’s been around for about twenty years, but they perfected it in the last ten, in places like Gitmo. Intel guys call it hypnosis in a vial.”

“It makes you talk?” Travis said.

“It can. But its selling point is that it makes you act. It hits you in two stages. The first one lasts a couple minutes. Mild hallucinations, with an amnesia effect; you don’t remember much of anything from before the drug kicked in. Then comes the second stage, maybe five minutes long, during which your short-term memory is fractured down to a second or less. Someone can speak to you, and you can forget each word as it passes. Very disturbing effect—with two kickers. One, you can still follow commands. Even complex ones that are too long to remember. If I’ve got your laptop sitting there, I can tell you, ‘Log into your e-mail account and your banking site,’ and you’ll probably do it. Passwords and all. You’ll be forgetting the command even while I’m saying it, but you’ll follow it anyway. It’s a conditioning thing—it functions like a habit. They say you hear the command well enough to obey it, but don’t remember it well enough to resist.”

“Why am I not even vaguely surprised we develop shit like that?” Bethany said.

“The second kicker is even better,” Dyer said. “While your memory is crumbling by the moment during Stage Two, you can still remember Stage One. Stage One is really all you remember, during that time. Usually they’ll keep you in darkness, with no sound, so there’s not much to remember anyway. But if they want to, they can make use of the effect. They can feed you information in Stage One that you’ll use in Stage Two. They might say, ‘Your brother is flying into LAX tomorrow, United terminal, five thirty in the afternoon.’ Then when your memory starts to fracture and you’re open to commands, they give you a phone and say, ‘Call your brother’s usual driver and arrange to have him picked up.’ You’ll do it, because you remember hearing that he’s coming in. Just like that, they find out who his driver is.”

“Sounds useful,” Travis said.

Dyer nodded. “If they’re employing that drug on Garner and one of the others, I’m not surprised they know the door combo by now.”

“Couldn’t they just know everything?” Paige said. “Couldn’t they command Garner to start telling the whole story?”

“Getting directly into someone’s secrets is tricky,” Dyer said. “Like with real hypnosis—a person’s moral restraint weighs in. They say you can make someone in a trance state bark like a dog, since it’s no big deal, but you can’t make him kill his best friend. I think secrets are in the same vein—if it really matters to keep them, people do. So it’s one thing to type a password by habit; it’s something else to start spilling information you’ve protected for years.” He paused. “But they can use the drug over and over, and it can wear you down after a while. So yeah—in time they might know everything.” He looked at Travis. “If they learn your name, I think the game’s over. If not, there’s still a chance.”

Something seemed to occur to Dyer. His eyebrows drew toward each other. “This room you saw Garner in—was there light brown carpeting with gold stars in a wide-spaced pattern? A star the size of a cookie every couple feet?”

Travis visualized the little room again. He let the image form for a second or two. “That’s exactly what it had,” he said.

“And you heard jet engines running?”

“The three of us were on a jet at the time. That was just background noise … seeping into the dream.”

“I don’t think it was,” Dyer said. “That carpet is aboard Air Force One.”

For a moment Dyer’s expression flared with hope, but almost as quickly it lost its edge. Doubt faded in. His face became a tug-of-war between the two.

“Garner reassigned me to the Treasury branch of the Service after he brought me in on all this,” he said. “He needed me out of harm’s way if shit happened. But my BlackBerry still gets automatic updates of the plane’s flight plan. If we get back outside, I can find out where it is.” He frowned. “I just don’t think that’s going to make a difference.”

“Why wouldn’t it?” Travis said. “You could just call someone and tell them Garner’s being held aboard the plane. You’re in the Secret Service—contact someone at the top. Contact everyone at the top. They can’t all be aligned with Holt on this thing.”

“No one’s going to believe any of it,” Dyer said. “Think about it. Think how that phone call would sound.”

“Then make up something more credible. Say whatever it takes, just get them to raid the plane. Once they find Garner, it’ll all come undone.”

“There is no one on this planet with the authority to raid that plane. Stuart Holt is the president of the United States.” He pressed his hands to his temples. Shook his head. “What happened last night was the endpoint of years of planning. Nothing will have been left to chance. Six agents are listed as killed in the attack on the White House, but if Garner didn’t die in the explosion, I doubt those agents did either. I’m sure they were murdered because they weren’t part of the arrangement. Which means everyone else is part of it. Everyone who matters, anyway. Holt’s probably got a skeleton crew aboard Air Force One right now. A tiny circle of loyalists, seeing all of this through. No official outside that shell is going to break in through it.”

His eyes darkened then. Some kind of cold acceptance settled in. “We don’t have to worry much longer anyway, about Garner being interrogated. That’s where the deadline comes in.”

Travis shared a look with the others. “What do you mean?”

“They all agreed, back in 1987, on a panic option. They figured if the hammer came down, it’d be some huge simultaneous move against all of them. Their thinking was, if some of them survived, they might have time to call in hired muscle and try to free the others. So they agreed on a timeline. If any were taken alive, they’d endure torture for exactly twenty-four hours, and then kill themselves. They have hydrogen cyanide caplets sewn into their tongues.”

“Christ,” Bethany whispered.

“Six hours from now,” Dyer said, “Garner will bite out the caplet and swallow it. Whoever’s being held with him will do the same. That’ll be it.”

The metallic tapping stopped.

Nothing replaced it.

The minutes drew out.

Travis watched the others try to keep their nerves steady. Paige, sitting next to him, took his hand.

They waited.

He found himself going back to the message from the Breach. The understanding that it was about him, and always had been. Even when he was ten years old.

He couldn’t grasp the concept. Couldn’t get within a mile of it. After a while his mind settled on a more material problem. He understood he was only thinking about it for the distraction it offered. He thought of it anyway:

Even if everything went perfectly in the next few minutes, how would he get inside Border Town in 2016? It would be the best-defended military outpost in the world by then. He’d infiltrated the place once before while it was under someone else’s control, but only with the help of an entity—one of the most useful ever to emerge from the Breach.

His stream of thought came to a dead stop.

He stared at the tunnel wall straight across from him, and then at nothing.

“Holy shit,” he said softly.

The others looked at him, but he said no more. He just let go of Paige’s hand and scrambled to his feet and ran for the stairs.

Chapter Thirty-Six

“What are you doing?” Paige shouted.

Travis was two flights up already. Paige’s voice echoed crazily after him, rebounding off the walls.

Travis looked down as he climbed, sprinting, taking the treads three at a time. Paige was just emerging from the tunnel, Bethany and Dyer behind her.

“Follow me!” Travis yelled. “But not all the way. Stay a hundred feet below the top.”

“They’re going to blow the door anytime!” Dyer yelled.

“I know,” Travis said.

In rough shouts as he lunged upward, he explained the idea. The hope. He glanced down again as he finished, and saw that Paige’s eyes had gone wide. She thought it all through for another two seconds.

“Oh my God,” she said.

Travis turned his attention back to the stairs, and after a moment he heard the others’ footsteps following.

He passed the dark tunnel Dyer had emerged from. Two thirds of the shaft’s height still soared above him. The bright square of Raines’s residence chamber appeared very small yet. He kept running, climbing. His lungs already felt like they were submerged in acid. His thighs and ankles were going numb from the shock of repetitive impacts.

He lost his sense of time going by. Even his sense of steps and flights going by. There was only the top of the shaft, the open square full of halogen light, turning and turning above him, growing by imperceptible degrees.

He thought of the little girl at the Third Notch, insisting her mother tell the story of the ghost.

He thought of Jeannie’s inability to dismiss what the kid was saying. The woman had believed, against all her logic, that there really was something haunting the mine entrances.

They say anyone who goes near starts to hear voices, she’d said, whispering right behind them in the trees. Pine boughs around you start to move like the wind’s blowing, even when it isn’t.

He thought of his own words to Paige, regarding the power players her father had allied with. The notion that Peter might’ve given them Breach technology.

Maybe even things he kept off the books in Border Town.

Travis looked up. The top of the shaft was huge now, filling his vision. Three flights left. Two. One.

He vaulted up over the lip into the chamber without slowing, and crossed the room in a burst, blurring past the wall of monitors. He crashed to a stop against the red metal locker mounted waist high on the wall, lifted the drop-latch and tore open the door.

The locker looked empty.

He reached in at the bottom and found that it wasn’t.

There were very rare entities—kinds that’d shown up only two or three times in all the years the Breach had been open. A few had emerged only once. Travis had always believed—was sure every current member of Tangent had always believed—that the transparency suit was in the latter group.

The feel of nearly weightless fabric bunching in his fist, where only thin air was visible, told him otherwise.

He drew the suit from the locker, carefully getting hold of its two halves—top and bottom. It was like pulling clothes out of a hamper in pitch darkness.

Certain he had both components, he pressed them together under his arm and turned back for the stairwell. As he did, his eyes picked out images on the wall of screens. The first thing he saw was that four of the monitors had gone to blue—one for each of the dual cameras inside the two accesses, all of which had been knocked out by the initial explosions. Then he noticed movement in some of the still-active frames. Men were lugging yellow fifty-five gallon drums into the north access, where Dyer had come in. Travis stepped closer and saw boxy attachments stuck to each barrel’s top, wired in with thick red and black cords. He darted his gaze around to find a view of this access—the one that led to the far side of the blast door ten feet away from him.

He saw it: the squared concrete tunnel sticking out of the slope among the redwoods.

There was no one going in.

There was no one anywhere near it.

A second later he found a screen showing the Humvee he and Paige and Bethany had driven up into the trees. It was right where they’d left it, jammed sideways near a trunk. Other Humvees were visible in the frame with it.

There were men crouched on the downhill side of each vehicle.

They were all covering their ears.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Every inch of the sprint felt like too much to ask for. Each vaulting step seemed like it should be the last.

He went back over the lip at the top of the stairs. Jumped with no thought for which tread his foot would land on—the time required for that kind of thinking was also too much to ask for.

It turned out to be the fourth step above the landing. His arch came down right on the drop-off, and only his forward momentum kept him from dumping all his weight onto it and breaking his ankle. He threw his other foot down with more control, rammed it hard and flat onto the steel landing, and brought his forearm up to catch the wall before he shattered his face on it.

The arm took a lot of the blow, but not all. The rest of his body was hurtled against the stone an instant later, the impact wringing the air from his lungs. He sucked it back in and used it to scream for the others to cover their ears, then pivoted toward the next flight and jumped again. He was arcing through the air, aiming for the next landing and clamping his hands over the sides of his head, when it finally happened.

It felt like having a boxcar dropped on him.

The airspace around him seemed to solidify and compress inward in a single, monstrous clap. He saw the stairs beneath him jump and vibrate. Saw the effect race down the shaft, a shockwave trailing a vacuum in its wake. The bass followed, making an eardrum of his whole body. He heard it with his knees and his spine and his fillings.

He kept his feet under him as he plunged ahead toward the landing, and threw both hands forward from his ears to catch the wall. He became aware of the transparency suit falling away below his arm, and had just enough time to notice it’d dropped toward the sidewall, not the open center of the shaft.

Then he hit, and his arms folded, and his forehead slammed against his wrist on the wall and everything went black.

Hands, shaking him by the shoulder, frantic.

“Travis.”

Paige, whispering.

He opened his eyes. The shaft was swirling with gray-white concrete dust. Ten feet above him, a broad rectangular shape stuck out over the top of the shaft.

The green door. Bent and twisted at its edges. Hurled out of its frame into the room, lying with maybe a quarter of its mass over the shaft’s edge.

Travis looked at Paige. Her eyes were wet and her cheeks were smeared. Relief just outweighed fear in her expression.

Travis turned over and sat up. He looked at the flight he’d jumped down past. He got up on his knees and leaned forward and pawed at the landing and the lowest stair treads, and for a terrible few seconds believed the suit’s halves had missed them anyway. Maybe they’d caught the air and gone under the rail—or right between the treads—and slipped down into the depths of the shaft, where a painstaking week wouldn’t be enough to find the damn things.

Then he saw them: misshapen pockets of clear air amid the churning dust, clumped near each other halfway up the flight. He reached up and grabbed both, withdrew to the landing again and looked at Paige and the others.

“I’m going to engage them outside in the open,” Travis said. “That gives me the best advantage, especially with the dust down here.”

He turned and sat on the second step, felt for which half of the suit was the bottom, and began to pull it on. He heard Dyer take a quick breath at the sight of first one leg and then the other vanishing.

“The three of you should find shooting cover in the chamber up top,” Travis said. “Weapons trained on the doorway. It’s like the Thermopylae Pass. Anything comes through that you can see, kill it.”

He unslung his MP5 and handed it to Dyer.

Dyer looked puzzled. Then, assuming Travis was asking him to trade, he drew his own sidearm from his shoulder holster and held it out.

Travis shook his head. “I’m good.”

“What are you going to use?” Dyer said.

“Something quieter,” Travis said, and pulled on the suit’s top half.

He took the stairs quickly but carefully, no longer able to see his feet. He’d worn the suit before—its twin, anyway—but that had been more than three years ago, and the thing still held all its novelty for him. The material was comfortable and breathable, and there was no question it had some capacity to shape itself to its wearer. As Travis had been told, it generally kept the form of whoever had last worn it, then actively adjusted to anyone new. He felt it doing that now, as he ascended. Where it covered his face, it drew taut along his jawline and relaxed a bit over his nose. It sucked in around his shoes and ankles. It molded to the precise dimensions of his hands. He guessed it would’ve done the same for a hand with seven digits instead of five. Maybe even for a body with four arms, or some altogether different structure.

He stepped off the top stair into the chamber. The green door lay at his feet among the curling dust. Straight ahead, its frame had been torqued and blown half free of the stone that’d encased it. The giant bolt latch lay off to one side, bent like a pried-out roofing nail.

Travis turned from the opening and sprinted toward the back right corner of the room. The kitchen.

He found what he wanted in the third drawer he opened: a ten-inch chef’s knife right out of a horror film. He took it and ran for the blasted-out doorway.

He climbed the access stairs in perfect silence. By the third flight he was above the dust. He waved his free hand in front of his face and saw that none had stuck to the suit. He rounded the next landing and started up the topmost flight. The horizontal tunnel above was full of indirect daylight; it led directly out onto the forested slope.

He heard men talking just outside. Then the faint thud of boot treads stepping onto concrete. Once, then again and again in rapid succession. More than one person walking. Travis put the number at three.

He lifted the hem of the suit’s top and carefully raised the knife into the space behind it. This was one of the suit’s most useful tricks: its capacity to hide handheld objects. A silenced pistol would’ve been a godsend just now. Travis had seen for himself the brutal effectiveness of that combination. He’d come within half a second of taking a bullet to the head as a result.

He crept up the stairs and saw the men in the tunnel as soon as his eyes cleared floor level.

Three, as expected.

They stood at the midpoint between entry and stairwell, heads cocked, listening for any sign of movement down in the mine.

Travis stepped onto the concrete, the knife still hidden. The three men nearly blocked the tunnel ahead of him, but there was enough room on the left to slip by. Travis advanced, twisted sideways, eased past the formation.

He looked out through the tunnel’s mouth and saw no one else close by. The Humvees were forty yards away down the hillside, and every man Travis could see was among them, standing or crouching.

He turned back to face the three listeners. For a moment longer they just stood there, waiting. They were arranged in a rough triangle, two forward and one lagging back, all three staring ahead into the darkness at the top of the shaft. Travis took a position directly behind the loner. He brought the knife out from under the suit and raised it slowly until it was eight inches behind and to the left of the man’s neck—nowhere near the edge of his peripheral vision.

He held the blade level, with the cutting edge facing back toward himself.

With his other hand he pulled the suit’s hem outward once more, ready to hide the knife again in a hurry.

“I don’t hear anything,” one of the men up front said.

Travis slipped the knife beneath the loner’s jaw and yanked it straight back with all his force. It sliced through skin and cartilage and tough rubbery cords of muscle about as easily as it would’ve passed through ground beef. The man’s body spasmed hard and his hands jerked to his throat, and a ragged choking noise came from his mouth.

The other two men spun, raising their weapons instinctively.

Travis brought the knife down to his waist—blocked from view by the still-standing victim—and raised it back into concealment within the suit.

“Gordy,” one of the other two said, his eyes taking in the wound but unable to comprehend how the hell it’d gotten there.

Gordy dropped. One shoulder landed first and his head went back and to the side, and the awful gash drew open and began founting blood in thick pulses.

The man who’d said the name sank fast to his knees and reached for him. The other guy stood back, hyperventilating, looking around instinctively for a threat he couldn’t perceive.

He settled on the tunnel’s mouth, ten feet away. The only logical place the attack could have come from. He stared at it, eyes darting, MP5 held tense.

Travis sidestepped around him in a wide arc, got behind him and brought the knife back out, then sliced him carotid to carotid.

He didn’t rehide the knife. He simply stepped forward and slashed the third man’s throat before number two had hit the ground. Just like that, there were three bodies convulsing and dying on the concrete, one of them maybe five seconds further into the process than the other two. Nothing about the encounter had been loud enough to carry to the men downslope.

Travis scooped up one of the dead men’s MP5s, flicked the selector to full-auto and walked to the tunnel’s open end.

“Heads up!” he screamed, his voice high enough that it could’ve belonged to any man, and opened fire with the weapon. He raked the stream of bullets randomly across the Humvees far below, heard shouts of alarm and confusion and saw bodies dive out of sight. He didn’t bother aiming for them. He dinged up the sides of the vehicles until the machine gun ran dry, then dropped it in the dirt and sprinted away laterally across the slope. He knew his feet were kicking up sand and needles, but between the ground vegetation and the fact that no one was looking, he didn’t worry. He exerted only enough effort to keep his footfalls close to quiet, and the knife hidden up inside the suit.

Fifty yards from the access he stopped. He turned straight downhill and moved at a careful walk, entirely soundless now and kicking up nothing. He descended until he was level with the Humvees, and saw the men crouched behind them on the downhill side. Anxiety in every set of eyes. Universal confusion over the screamed warning, the gunfire, and now the silence.

Travis counted fourteen men. He also counted two fewer Humvees than had chased them up here earlier; the others must have gone to the north access.

Getting at these fourteen from behind would be a joke—they were all looking uphill, over the vehicles’ hoods or through their passenger compartments. The men were clustered in twos and threes, the Humvees spaced dozens of feet apart among the redwood trunks. One little group at a time, these people could be handled with no more difficulty than the first three.

Travis stared at them and wondered why he didn’t feel worse about this. Why he’d felt nothing for the guys he killed on Main Street earlier, or those in the tunnel. Maybe necessity just pushed remorse aside. Maybe that was an animal thing from way back. Maybe he had more of it than he should. He considered that idea for another second and then pushed it aside too, and started across the slope in a long arc that would put him below the Humvees.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

It took ninety seconds. When he’d finished, he dropped the knife and sprinted uphill to the access. He shouted the all-clear to the others, ran back to the Humvees and got one started.

They rolled down out of the trees and saw the town full of police vehicles far below. Crown Vics and SUVs and pickups, state and local, every flasher strobing blue and red in the overcast gloom. The big guy in the Humvee had ordered them in here earlier, to help search the town for the three of them.

Travis braked on the narrow road near Raines’s house and put the vehicle in park. He switched on the two-way radio mounted to the dash and heard a man’s voice in mid-sentence.

“—any assistance needed, please advise us on that, over.”

There was a long hiss of static and then the same man began speaking once more: “Say again, any civilian unit, this is CHP, please acknowledge. I see one of you just out of the woods now.”

“They heard the shooting,” Paige said.

Travis nodded. “And their signals must not be getting to anyone on the other side of the ridge.”

He grabbed the radio’s handset and depressed the talk switch. “CHP and local departments, stand by for now. No assistance required. Echo unit, meet us on the highway; we’re bringing out a subject for extraction, over.”

He let up on the switch and shut off the radio.

“Nice,” Dyer said.

Travis, sitting in the driver’s seat and still wearing the transparency suit, glanced around at Dyer and then Paige and Bethany.

“Take the wheel,” he said to Dyer. “You look exactly like someone who’d be driving this fucking thing.”

He clambered out of the seat and into the back, where Paige and Bethany had already taken the hint and ducked out of sight below the windows.

“Pull into the first good-sized parking lot we see,” Travis said.

It was five minutes later. They were back in bright sunlight, heading south on the Coast Highway. The Pacific lay to the right, low grassy hills to the left. Here and there the land dropped into flat stretches that might have been flood plains, or even extensions of the seafloor in ancient times. Farm buildings and other isolated structures dotted most of them, but Travis recalled seeing others developed into mid-sized towns on the drive up.

They needed to swap the Humvee for something else. There was no question it had a LoJack or some equivalent on board, and that someone would start tracking it at any time. The ruse back in town had bought only minutes, and probably not many.

Travis was in the passenger seat now. He’d pulled off the suit’s top and had it bunched in his lap. He looked at his phone. A quarter past one. Five and a half hours until Richard Garner killed himself.

Travis turned to Dyer. “Skeleton crew aboard Air Force One, you said.”

Dyer nodded. “If they’re torturing captives, I doubt they brought the press corps along. Doubt they brought anyone they don’t need.”

“If we can get within a mile of any airport where it lands,” Travis said, “getting aboard in this suit would be fishing with depth charges.”

Dyer said nothing. He simply drew his BlackBerry from his pocket and opened an application, his eyes darting between its display and the road. A few seconds later he said, “Two flight plans. One’s already expired: the plane landed at an undesignated site in eastern Wyoming, just over an hour ago.”

“Border Town,” Paige said.

“Holt’s touring his new property,” Travis said.

Dyer scrolled down through the text on his screen. “Second flight’s coming almost straight to us. Plane takes off from Border Town in half an hour, arrives at Oakland International in two and a half.”

“He’s visiting the points of conflict,” Bethany said. “Probably has people aboard the plane that he trusts to check out the aftermath and make assessments.”

Travis managed his first smile in some time. “They’re going to be busy today.”

Half a minute later they saw a supermarket with a sprawling lot a quarter mile off the highway. Beyond it lay suburbs and a few blocks of low-rise commercial buildings—the western sweep of some unseen city further inland.

Dyer swung off the highway, then into the market, and parked out at the edge of the lot. Something like half the spaces were occupied. There were probably two hundred cars to choose from.

Travis pulled the suit’s top back on. Then he opened the huge glove box in front of him and saw three different wrenches and half a dozen screwdrivers, both slotted and Phillips types. He grabbed the biggest slotted one.

“We’ll wait here until you get something hotwired,” Paige said.

He nodded and got out into the sharp wind coming off the ocean, and shut the door behind him. It would occur to him only later that she couldn’t have seen the nod—that from her point of view he’d simply left without acknowledging her words.

He stood surveying the nearest row of vehicles, and settled on the oldest thing in view: a mid-’90s Ford Taurus forty yards to the right, probably antique enough to lack any special security measures in its ignition. He sprinted for it.

Just inland from the lot, a train horn blared. Seconds later the rumble and clatter faded in, and he looked over his shoulder and saw it: a little six-car freight coming up from the south.

He reached the Taurus, gripped the screwdriver by the end of its shaft and swung it like a hammer. Its handle connected with the driver’s side window and burst it inward in a spill of crumbs. He unlocked the door, brushed most of the glass away and got in. Five seconds later he had the ignition smashed open and the starter wires isolated. He was about to touch their stripped ends together when something made him stop. Some sound right at the edge of his awareness. Something to do with the train, he thought. The racket of its wheels suddenly sounded wrong, though he couldn’t say how—or why it had struck him as important. Why it made the skin on his arms prickle. He listened for another second and then disregarded it. Whatever the hell was spooking him, sitting idle here wouldn’t help matters.

He sparked the wires and heard the starter motor kick over, and then the engine roared.

He opened the door and got back out. The train had already passed, churning away to the north, its clatter going with it. It’d faded for another second when Travis’s skin began to crawl again.

Now he knew why.

He could hear the sound even over the grumble of the Taurus’s engine. A sound that’d been perfectly masked by the passing freight.

Rotors.

He spun and looked around wildly, but for a few seconds he couldn’t pin the direction. The staccato hammering of the chopper’s blades seemed to come from everywhere, bouncing off the broad storefront and from the panels of every nearby vehicle.

Then he saw it. A quarter mile south. Coming in right out of the sun glare.

For a moment he thought it was a police chopper. It was black and there were bulky shapes hanging off the sides that might’ve been cameras or loudspeakers.

An instant later he saw he was wrong—he recognized the flattened, broad profile of a Black Hawk. But not the standard transport model; it was some special variant with stub wings jutting off the fuselage.

And missiles clustered beneath them.

Travis turned and sprinted for the Humvee, screaming Paige’s name. Screaming Get out, over and over. He could see her through the heavy glass, seated in back on the side facing him.

She couldn’t hear him.

He screamed louder, the soft tissue lining his throat going ragged.

In the direction of the chopper, high in his peripheral vision, white light erupted and something shrieked.

He was thirty yards from the vehicle now, moving as fast as he could move, screaming as loud as he could scream.

Paige turned toward the sound of his voice at last, centering her focus on it so perfectly that, for an instant, Travis forgot she couldn’t see him. She was looking right into his eyes when the missile hit the Humvee.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The vehicle simply vanished. One millisecond it was there, and the next it’d been replaced by a hurricane of flame and shrapnel and whipping soot. The air shattered and a superheated wind slammed into Travis. It picked him up and threw him backward eight feet. He landed off balance and tumbled and ended up lying on his chest, staring straight ahead at the roiling fire.

He was curled on the grass way off the edge of the lot. He couldn’t remember getting there. He was still in the suit. There were police and fire vehicles all around the blackened shell of the Humvee. The flames were gone and there was a thick gray column of smoke coming off the wreck, trailing almost sideways in the shore breeze.

He realized he was crying. Holding his knees against his ribs and saying No with every fractured breath. Some deep, barely flickering, analytical part of his brain understood that he was bargaining more than denying. He wasn’t just saying no; he was looking to actively undo what’d happened, as if the right thought—the right string of words or maybe the right mental image—could take it all back if he focused on it long enough. He couldn’t say why, but his mind stuck on that notion for a minute or more while he lay there, and while the clot of emergency vehicles grew and the traffic on the front street congested.

64˚.

2:18 P.M.

64˚.

2:18 P.M.

The sign at the edge of the little bank parking lot kept alternating, flashing its message at him. He stared at it from the bus-stop bench. He could recall walking to this spot, but only vaguely. He remembered the crowd of onlookers around the supermarket getting too thick. People edging in on the grass where he was lying. No choice but to move.

The bank was four blocks inland from the market. Sometimes the wind shifted just right and he caught the stink of diesel smoke and tire rubber from the Humvee.

64˚.

2:19 P.M.

He was no longer crying. He’d gone numb for a while, but he was no longer numb, either. Some other feeling was coming in, heavy and cold as a glacier. He hadn’t felt it in a very long time.

64˚.

2:20 P.M.

Oakland International Airport.

Air Force One would be there in about an hour and a half.

He could be there sooner.

In some fold of his thoughts, dulled almost mute, the idea of getting to Richard Garner still tolled.

Much closer, keening like a siren against his eardrum, was the idea of getting to Stuart Holt.

Chapter Forty

He got another screwdriver from a hardware store down the block, tucked it under the suit and walked out. He got a survival knife with a sheath from an outfitter across the street, hotwired a ’93 Blazer with tinted windows and headed south on the highway.

He saw from the long-term lot at Oakland exactly where Air Force One would situate itself. A cluster of CHP cruisers already half encircled the huge apron on the tarmac, behind the cargo terminal and far from any active runway. Patrol officers stood at their open doors. The crackle and hiss of their radios carried in the calm between takeoffs.

Travis had the sheathed knife clipped to his waistband under the suit. He walked right through the crescent of police units, close enough to hear one of their radiators ticking as it cooled. He found a spot in the shade under a FedEx plane seventy feet away, and sat waiting.

A C–5 Galaxy lumbered down out of the sky at around 3:20. It rolled onto a nearby apron and dropped its tail ramp, and its crew offloaded the large, boxy helicopter known as Marine One. Then they offloaded another, identical to it, rolled out a few specialized lift vehicles, and got to work setting up the rotors, which had been folded back for transport.

Travis could tell by the body language of the waiting police that Air Force One was inbound, even before he saw it. A quick burst of speech crackled over every radio, and every pair of eyes turned south and skyward.

For the first five minutes after the giant aircraft rolled to a stop on the apron, nothing happened. Then Air Force personnel in dress uniforms drove a motorized stairway to the plane’s door, and one ascended the steps and stood at attention just left of the access.

The door was sucked inward an inch and then swung fully out of sight into the shadowy interior.

Two men in suits and ties emerged and stood on the landing atop the staircase, their hair and clothing flapping in the wind as they talked. They watched the Marines working on the two choppers, still hard at it, and then stepped back inside the 747. No one else came to the door. The dress guard stayed rigidly in place.

Travis stood.

He left the shadow of the FedEx plane and crossed to the foot of Air Force One’s staircase. He saw no movement inside the doorway at the top.

He climbed just slowly enough to keep his footsteps silent.

Light brown carpeting. Cookie-sized gold stars a few feet apart.

He’d entered at a kind of chokepoint—a corridor just behind the cockpit leading aft to broader spaces. Dangerous to stay here; no way to dodge aside if someone came walking through. He risked a quick glance forward and saw two pilots at the controls, and a navigator just visible off to the right. Travis turned and made his way aft, out of the corridor.

Skeleton crew. Dyer had called it. The rest of the upper deck, behind the cockpit, was deserted. There was a short seating area and a suite of small offices at the back end, all doors open and secured to the walls. No one inside any of them.

Travis descended to the huge main cabin level. Something like a fourth of it stretched forward from where he stood at the interior stairway; the rest extended back toward the tail.

He went forward first. More empty offices and a large galley that called to mind a restaurant kitchen. All the pans and bowls and utensils were stowed and locked down, and the lights were off. Whoever cooked for the president wasn’t along on this trip.

He returned to the stairs and headed past them toward the back end, and encountered the first passengers he’d seen since stepping aboard. Beyond a short hallway a huge array of seats opened up, filling the cabin from side to side and running to maybe the midpoint of the plane, sixty feet behind the stairs. The seats were large and comfortable-looking; probably standard first-class issue for a 747. Travis guessed there were eighty to a hundred of them in all. On a normal trip they’d probably be filled with the press corps and any number of aides or even elected officials traveling with the commander in chief.

All but eight of the seats were empty now.

Two of the occupants were the guys who’d stepped outside earlier to look at the choppers. Both were currently seated at windows where they could watch the Marines’ progress. The other six had more or less the same appearance as the first two. All were men between forty and sixty. They struck Travis as hard-edged guys just starting to soften up. Like they’d been soldiers and field operatives for most of their adult lives and had only recently ended up in plusher work environments. Intelligence guys, maybe.

Travis walked down the aisle past all of them, entered a six-foot-wide corridor and looked in through a broad doorway on its left side. A conference room lay beyond. Long polished-wood table. Big leather chairs randomly strewn around it.

Past the table, a granite counter ran the length of the room’s back wall.

The counter was lined with Breach entities, and on a low-slung gurney in front of it lay a dead man.

Travis entered the room and crossed to the body. He recognized the man at once. His name was Curtis Moyer, and he’d been a technician in Border Town. His duties often kept him in the lowest levels of the complex, just above B51. He would’ve likely been down there this morning when the bunker buster hit.

Jesus, he’d survived the blast. He’d been as far beneath it as Travis and the others had been above it, and he must’ve been on the north side of the building, away from the collapse. His injuries had been severe, though. One leg was broken and torn in multiple places. His shoulder looked like it’d been dislocated, too. Internal damage had probably been what eventually got him—he was staring straight up now with glazed eyes.

But he’d still been alive when the squads from the helicopters found him—and they’d kept him that way for a while. An IV pole stuck up from the gurney’s side, with three drip bags of different chemicals hanging from it. One was morphine. Travis raised his eyes from Moyer to the row of entities—all that the intruders had recovered from the wreckage, at least up to the point when Air Force One had left to come here. Travis understood why they’d kept Moyer alive as long as possible: they’d questioned him on the entities they found, and written the key details on slips of paper that now lay in front of each one. Maybe they’d gotten his cooperation in exchange for the medical treatment. Maybe just for the morphine.

The entities were mostly common types; a group of three blue flares appeared to be the rarest of the bunch—until Travis’s gaze reached the end of the counter.

Where the Tap was sitting.

For a few seconds he couldn’t imagine how it’d gotten here. It’d been in the vault in the back wall of his and Paige’s closet, and Paige had been unable to reach it before they fled Border Town.

Then he considered the time scales involved, and began to understand. The guys in the choppers had made their way into Border Town around 9:20 in the morning, local time. That’d been hours before Air Force One even arrived there. Plenty of time for those men to notice a built-in safe in such a visible location—right at the drop-off to the abyss. With safety lines or other precautions they could’ve gotten to it easily, and among their military hardware there would’ve been things that could’ve compromised the safe’s lock or hinges.

Travis stepped closer to the Tap. He watched the room’s lighting scatter and reflect in its depths.

The sheet of paper in front of it contained all the main points of how to use the thing. Moyer had left nothing out.

Suddenly Travis heard footsteps coming from further aft—the small portion of the plane he hadn’t checked out yet. He turned just as two men entered the conference room.

One was the Wilford Brimley standin from the dream.

The other was President Holt.

Chapter Forty-One

Travis’s hand went to the knife’s grip just above his waist, and felt it through the material of the suit.

He could kill both men without any risk to himself—could do it right now, and by the time the eight in the seats came running, it’d be over. There’d be all the time in the world to swipe the blade clean and resheath it under the suit before any of them got here. No problem, after that, to pick them off one by one as he’d done among the redwoods. Them and anyone else he might come upon farther back toward the tail. Almost any way that it shook out, two or three minutes from now, everyone on the plane could be dead except the pilots, Garner, and whoever was being held with him. For a dramatic finish, Travis could then help Garner to the open doorway at the front of the aircraft, and several dozen California state cops would see a dead man step out into the sunlight.

That would sure as hell be the end of the cover-up.

But as a plan, Travis didn’t like it.

Even with the story broken wide open, Garner would be in serious danger. Federal authorities of one kind or another would descend on the scene and exert control, and there would be no telling whether they’d stood with Holt or not. Garner would be entering that situation from a position of uncertainty and weakness. He’d be at the mercy of others. Lots of others.

There was a better approach to take, and it would be just as brutally simple to execute. All it would require was a little patience.

Travis let his hand fall away from the knife.

The Brimley lookalike was holding a few sheets of yellow notepad paper and a red pen. He dropped the pen on the table and spread the sheets out side by side, and he and Holt stood looking down on them, saying nothing.

The pages were scrawled with red handwriting. Travis stepped close enough to discern the words while staying at a safe distance from either of the men. He began to read, and within seconds realized what he was looking at.

These were interrogation notes.

The scribbled lines comprised all the information that’d been drawn out of Garner and whoever else they had, in repeated drug sessions going back to probably late last night.

Travis scanned all the text in about sixty seconds.

These guys had learned almost everything—at least regarding the second half of Ruben Ward’s message. The instructions. They knew that the original nine recipients had gained financial and political power based on the instructions. That they’d been told to use that power to acquire knowledge of—and influence over—the Breach and whoever ended up overseeing it. The last note read:

Someone is designated to pass into the Breach in 2016. Name???

Travis looked up from the pages and realized that both Holt and the older man were focused on that final line.

The old man exhaled hard and paced away from the table. “Five hours on this last point and we’ve got nothing. He’s not going to give up the name. It’s the linchpin. He knows how important it is.”

“Let’s not write it off yet,” Holt said.

“I’ve done more interrogations with phen-d than anyone, and I promise you—”

“Porter—”

“I promise you, he’s not going to tell us. Worst of all is the longevity involved. Thirty-four years, this has been his deepest secret. Forget it.”

Holt started to respond, but a sound cut him off. Someone’s ringtone, out in the seating area ahead. Through the doorway and beyond the hall, Travis saw one of the men in the window seats take out his phone. He answered, listened for a long time, said a few words and then ended the call. He pocketed the phone, stood, and came and leaned in the doorway.

“Your contractors found a scrap from a wallet in the burned-out Humvee, with a Social Security number. Victim was a Secret Service agent named Rudy Dyer.” He looked at Holt. “You know him, sir?”

Holt nodded slowly, thinking. “Heard of him. Garner was close to him, as I recall.”

That piece of information hung in the air. All three men seemed to grasp its significance at the same time.

The older man—Porter—put it in words first: “If Dyer was involved in this thing, it’s because Garner wanted him to be. Which means Dyer was, what, a backup plan?”

“Something like that,” the guy from the window seat said.

“In that case he’d have to know as much as Garner knew,” Porter said. “He’d at least have to know who goes through the Breach in 2016—otherwise what good would he be?”

He looked thoughtful. He drummed his fingertips on the back of one of the leather chairs for a few seconds.

Then he turned and walked directly toward Travis. The movement was so unexpected and sudden that Travis dodged him by only the width of an arm. Porter stepped right into the space where he’d been standing and grabbed the Tap off the counter. He held it toward the others, and gestured at Moyer’s body.

“You believe him?” Porter said. “You believe this thing really does what he described?”

“It’s Breach technology,” Holt said. “Compared to whoever built it, we’re monkeys throwing shit.” He was quiet a moment. Then: “Yeah. I believe him.”

“Then let’s use it,” Porter said. “Any one of us can go back a few hours in our heads and order someone into that parking lot before the Humvee arrives. We can take Dyer alive and interrogate him.”

Holt seemed to get the point. “You think he’d give up the secret easier than Garner.”

“He’s newer to it,” Porter said. “In my experience, that matters. Sometimes a great deal.”

Holt looked at the Tap, Porter still holding it out. Holt’s expression faltered.

“Fucking thing goes inside your brain,” he said.

Porter shrugged, his face deadpan. It is what it is.

Holt considered it a moment longer, then turned to the man in the doorway. “Let’s see what you guys find in this mine shaft they’re talking about. If you come away from there with no new information, then we’ll use the Tap.”

The other two nodded. Porter turned and set the Tap back on the counter, then pulled out one of the chairs and sank into it.

Travis stood still for a moment, considering what he’d heard. Porter was clever, seeing the Tap’s potential so quickly. Maybe his idea about Dyer would even work—but it didn’t matter. None of these people would live to put it into action.

Travis crossed out of the room and continued aft. He turned a corner, came abreast of a darkened little space off the hall, leaned in and saw that it was a weapons cache. Heavy duty plastic-and-steel wall cases held Benelli M4 shotguns and Glock 19 pistols, with neatly arranged ammo stores beneath them. All the cases were closed tight, and each had a palm-scanner below its door handle.

Travis returned to the hall and followed it to its end: an open set of double doors into a private residence filling the aircraft’s tail. He stepped inside.

The space was beautiful. Its look matched that of the Oval Office and probably most of the White House’s interior. No doubt the same people maintained both. There was a broad, open kitchen to one side, a living area on the other, and a hallway leading back to unseen rooms. Travis crossed the entry and slipped into the hall. He passed a full bathroom, then a bedroom suite with a large walk-in closet. Only one door left. Travis stepped to it and saw exactly what he’d expected to see:

A windowless room. A portrait of George Washington on the wall. And Richard Garner tied upright to a dolly like Hannibal Lecter without the face mask. The top of the dolly was zip-tied into an exposed wall strut behind Garner; someone had roughly broken away part of the wall’s surface to expose it.

There was nobody else in the room.

No other victim.

Had that person been offloaded somewhere already?

It crossed Travis’s mind that Curtis Moyer might have been the second victim, but he discarded the idea: the timing didn’t work. Travis had experienced the dream well before Air Force One landed at Border Town, according to Dyer’s BlackBerry. Moyer couldn’t possibly have been in this room at the time.

There was a desk in the corner, which Travis hadn’t seen from his viewpoint in the dream—he’d been standing too close, directly beside it. Apparently this space was a study.

He focused on Garner. The man’s eyes were half open, staring downward at nothing. He wore a pair of dress pants and a dress shirt—probably the clothes he’d worn when he spoke to the nation last night. His coat and tie were gone, and both arms of the shirt had been cut away at the elbows. Needle marks dotted the exposed skin of his arms.

Garner blinked a few times. He opened his eyes a little wider, then let them relax again. He seemed to be getting past the lingering traces of the drug’s effect.

Travis stepped close to him and whispered, “Mr. President.”

Garner flinched and turned toward his voice. Looked right through him into the hallway five feet beyond.

“Who’s there?” Garner whispered.

Travis moved so that his voice would come from deeper within the room.

“Travis Chase,” he said.

It didn’t take long to explain. Garner already knew everything except the specifics of the past several hours. When Travis reached the end and told him what’d happened to Paige and Bethany and Dyer, the man shut his eyes tight and said nothing for a long time.

“I’m sorry,” Garner whispered at last. “For every part of this thing.”

“Holt’s going to be sorrier,” Travis said. He left it at that.

He was standing now roughly where he’d been in the dream. To see the room in real life, from this angle, felt surreal.

“Who did they have in here with you?” he asked. “Who else were they interrogating?”

Garner looked thrown by the question. “No one,” he said.

“There had to be,” Travis said. He hadn’t yet detailed the dream; now he did. He watched Garner for some spark of recognition, but none came. The man simply shook his head, as confused by the story as Travis himself had been when he opened the green door.

“We wondered if there was some entity that could’ve been responsible,” Travis said. “Something that would let a person transmit what they were seeing and hearing. Would let them send it to somebody else, if only for a few seconds.”

“I’ve never heard of an entity like that,” Garner said. “And there was nobody here with me at any point. I’d remember.”

For a long moment Travis stared into space and said nothing. He couldn’t recall ever being this lost for an explanation. The dream couldn’t have been just a dream. It’d really shown him this room, though he’d never set foot in it before. And the door combination had worked. How could any of that be reconciled with what Garner had just told him?

“You should get out of here,” Garner whispered. “You’ve got the suit; it’s all you need to get inside Border Town in 2016. Which is all that matters.”

“You know I’m not leaving you here,” Travis said.

Garner looked insistent. “It’s not worth the risk. You matter. I don’t.”

“Are the pilots aligned with Holt? Are they in the loop?”

Garner shook his head. “Holt ordered them to stay in the upper deck, and he brought me inside before they boarded.”

“All things being equal,” Travis said, “you’d be better off regaining control of this plane while it was airborne, wouldn’t you? You’d have more sway over how things unfolded from that point on. You’d dictate where it landed, and who’d be there to meet it. You could broadcast a video stream to television networks, from altitude, and explain what you needed to explain. Everything would happen on your terms. That would be better than if the whole thing broke open while you were sitting here on the tarmac.”

“Much better,” Garner said.

“Okay,” Travis said. “For now we sit tight. Let these people check out Rum Lake and then get back aboard. And at wheels-up I’m going to kill them all.”

Chapter Forty-Two

Travis didn’t leave the study from that point on. It made sense to stay close to Garner, and to be ready to change the plan in a hurry if there was any threat to the man’s life.

He watched the hallway most of the time, poised to move to one of the study’s corners if someone wandered in.

Other times, when he was sure no one was coming, he took stock of the room. He knelt and studied Garner’s restraints: heavy-duty plastic zip ties binding his wrists together behind him. Way too thick to be broken by just straining at them—they were probably rated for a thousand pounds. More of them held Garner’s shoulders and ankles to the dolly’s steel-tube frame.

Travis looked at the hole punched in the wall higher up, allowing the dolly to be zip-tied to the support strut behind it. The break revealed the wall’s surface to be standard plasterboard—strange for an airplane, but this one was obviously something of an exception. The strut the zip tie encircled was metal—probably aluminum—with crisp, machined edges. The material was strong as hell, of course. The plane was made of it.

“When you need to cut me loose, there are nail clippers in that desk,” Garner said. He nodded at it. “Tray drawer, top right. Ton of clutter, but they’re in there.”

From outside came the sound of the choppers’ turbines powering up, first one and then the other. A minute later their rotors began slapping the air in heavy thuds, and then they throttled to full power and lifted off.

For the next two hours nothing happened. The plane’s interior had gone dead silent, though Holt, at least, was probably still aboard. Probably Porter, too. Travis expected them to come back and have another go at Garner with the interrogation drug, but they didn’t. Maybe they really had written off their chances of learning more.

The rotors faded back in and then rose to a machine-gun rattle. The choppers landed outside and powered down. Soon afterward voices picked up again somewhere forward in the cabin. Two minutes after that, a series of hydraulic rumbles reverberated through the 747, and its engines began to whine. Travis drew the survival knife from its sheath, and hid it behind the suit’s top.

Holt and Porter were sitting in the conference room as the plane taxied. Outside the windows, hazy twilight had settled over the terminals and runways. Porter was reading the simple handwritten notes for the Tap—the Tap itself remained on the counter along the back wall. Travis moved past the room and into the seating area ahead. The other eight men were there, like any regular airline passengers about to accelerate to two hundred miles per hour in a big metal tube. They weren’t buckled in, but they sat face forward with their heads against the padding behind them.

Five had taken window seats, all on the port side. The other three had sat along the aisle, also to port. Each was in his own lateral row. Each could see only the men ahead of him, unless he turned around. The plane nosed to the starting line of its takeoff run and its massive engines built to a scream, rendering sound within the cabin pretty much meaningless for the next thirty seconds.

By the end of those thirty, before the plane had even tilted upward and begun to climb, all eight men were dead.

Travis didn’t bother wiping the blade clean or hiding the knife under the suit again.

He strode back to the conference room as the plane banked and climbed. He held the weapon out to his side, letting it drip. He went right through the doorway, making for Porter first. The man saw the hovering knife in his peripheral vision and turned fast to look at it. Confusion broke over his face and then fear, and then the blade went tip-first into his trachea all the way to the spine, and Travis twisted and flicked it sideways on the way out.

Holt looked up in time to see the man spasm and collapse. In time to see the knife withdraw and remain bobbing in the air, then circle the end of the table to his side and come floating toward him. He jerked backward, almost tipping his chair over, and scrambled out of it. He ended up in a kind of defensive crouch in the corner, his neck hunched behind a tight barrier he’d made with his hands.

Travis came on slowly. Patiently.

“What is this?” Holt said, getting barely above a whisper. “What is this?”

“I came to ID the other two victims in the Humvee,” Travis said.

Holt’s eyes left the knife and tried to pinpoint the location of Travis’s voice.

“Their names were Paige Campbell and Bethany Stewart. They were two of the best people I ever met. They passed up normal lives to make the world better, or at least to keep it from getting worse. They gave up a lot to do that. For the most part they even gave up sunlight.”

“Whatever you want, I can get it for you,” Holt said. “I’m the most powerful person in the world.”

“All appearances to the contrary,” Travis said.

“You need to think about this,” Holt said. His voice cracked. “You really do.”

“I really don’t,” Travis said, and he shoved the discarded chair aside, stepping past it toward where the man crouched.

Before he got there, his vision began to flash green and blue.

Chapter Forty-Three

Travis stopped mid-step. He swayed forward until he caught his balance. He looked around fast, as if his eyes could outrun the effect. They couldn’t.

Green. Blue. Green. Blue. The flashing saturated everything in his field of view, like intense stage lighting at a rock concert.

Green. Blue.

He knew what it meant—but it was impossible. How could he be catching up to the present from within a Tap memory if he hadn’t used the Tap?

Green. Blue.

The knife fell from his hand, bounced and spun on the carpet. Holt looked confused.

Travis staggered backward, stumbled against one of the chairs, turned and leaned down and steadied himself on the table.

Green. Blue.

He was about to be drawn out of this memory against his will. Any second. But drawn out to what? And to when? When and where had he put the Tap into his head?

Green. Blue.

Black.

He flinched and opened his eyes. He was back in the study, at the plane’s tail. Holt and Porter were standing in front of him, Richard Garner just beyond them and off to the side, still bound to the dolly. Travis looked down and saw that he himself was bound to a dolly now, right where he’d been in the dream.

Which hadn’t been a dream.

Neither had it been a projection sent to him by somebody else.

It hadn’t been either of those things.

He had less than a second to think about it, and then his memory simply wiped itself away. Vanished like a sand picture in the blast of a leaf blower.

Where was he?

How had he gotten here?

What the hell was he tied to?

An old man who looked like Wilford Brimley leaned into his viewpoint, scrutinizing his face.

“Can you understand me?” the old man said.

But before Travis could reply, his memory blew away again, no more than a second after it’d begun to form.

Where was he?

How had he gotten here?

Garner watched Travis struggle against the drug. As strange as it was to experience the effect yourself, it was almost more so to see someone else endure it.

He watched Travis’s eyes keep losing the room and finding it again. Rediscovering his surroundings every second or so as his memory fractured.

Porter was leaning in with his nose six inches from Travis’s.

“Tell us who goes through the Breach,” he said—framing it as a command, not a question.

Travis blinked, no doubt having lost the statement already. He stared at Porter and said nothing.

Porter repeated the instruction. And again. And again. Carefully and patiently. Working it into Travis’s subconscious like a dog trainer setting a patterned response. He’d been doing this for years.

“Tell us who goes through the Breach.”

Garner had undergone the questioning himself all night and all day. Sessions like this every hour or so, seventeen in all. The needle marks on his arms helped him keep count.

He’d given up a lot of information. He knew it. He also knew he’d held on to the only piece that would matter in the end. He knew by the frustration he’d seen in their eyes, each time the narcotic’s power dissipated and his memory stabilized. They hadn’t gotten it from him. He’d been protecting it too long to surrender it now, even under the drug.

It would be different with Travis. If he knew the answer, he’d learned it today.

Porter gave the command a sixth time: “Tell us who goes through the Breach.”

Travis’s eyelids drew close together. He seemed to grasp the instruction, even beneath the crumbling memory.

“Tell us who goes through the Breach.”

“I do,” Travis said.

Porter narrowed his eyes. He drew back a few inches.

“I go through,” Travis said. Something like amusement crossed his face. “Lucky me.”

“Is he playing with us?” Holt said. “Is the effect wearing off?”

Porter looked at his watch. “It’s probably starting to. We used up three sixteen while he was in the memory.”

“Get the Tap back out of him,” Holt said. “While you can still make him cooperate.”

Porter nodded. He leaned in again and said, “Think the Tap out of your head.” He repeated it, his speech precise and direct. He said it a third time and Travis shut his eyes and seemed to concentrate hard on something. A few seconds later he gasped. His face twisted in pain. Then the Tap began to emerge from the same pinprick hole it’d gone in through, a bright green tendril snaking and darting. Porter held up his hand and let it collect in a mass on his palm.

“Try again in an hour,” Holt said. “We’ll have the whole four or five minutes to question him then. We’ll get it.”

By the time they left with the Tap—reformed into its cube shape—Garner could tell Travis’s memory was solidifying. The drug’s influence tended to recede very rapidly, from full strength to no effect at all in about a minute. The clarity growing in Travis’s eyes showed he was well into that time.

Where was he?

Some little room.

He was tied to something—a dolly, it looked like.

He took a deep breath, and felt a fog clear from his mind as he did. Another breath—even clearer.

He looked up and saw that Richard Garner was with him, also tied to a dolly.

He thought the room was a study, though for the moment he wasn’t sure how he knew that.

There was a deep droning sound coming through the walls and floor. Jet engines.

This was Air Force One. This room was back in the tail. He was certain of that, though again he didn’t know how.

While he wondered, it occurred to him that someone had just left the room. Two men, he thought. And they’d taken something with them.

The Tap? Had that been it? He was all but sure of it, and a second later he was sure of something else:

The Tap had just come out of his head.

The headache said so, and the trickle of blood at his temple confirmed it.

His next breath pushed out the last of the haze, and the day’s memory came down on him in a single rush.

He and Paige and Bethany, flying to Rum Lake. Evading the contractors by entering the mine. Meeting Dyer. Seeing the second Breach. Using the transparency suit to get away. Then the supermarket. The missile. The mindless drive down to Oakland afterward, with little thought in his head but gutting Stuart Holt like a fucking pig. He recalled boarding the plane, scouting it out, finding Garner back here at the tail. Then killing the others, and—

And catching up to the present.

From within a Tap memory.

He thought about that. He stared into space and tried to put it together.

The Tap memory had ended in the conference room aboard this plane.

Where had it begun?

When had it begun?

He couldn’t recall any starting point.

Worse yet, the Tap had burned all his real memories of the time span in question. It always did that. He had no way to remember what had really happened during the period he’d just relived.

“Coming around?” Garner said.

Travis nodded.

“They used a drug on you,” Garner said.

Travis nodded again. “Phenyline dicyclomide.”

Garner looked surprised.

“Dyer told me about it,” Travis said.

“Do you understand what they did to you just now?”

“Not really. Parts of it, maybe.”

“The drug has two stages,” Garner said. “Mild amnesia for a couple minutes, then four or five minutes of total short-term memory fracturing.”

“Dyer said they can give you commands during Stage Two,” Travis said, “and sometimes they feed you information in Stage One that they want you to use—”

He cut himself off.

He thought he suddenly understood part of it.

Garner nodded, seeing his expression.

“You never made it inside the mine, in real life,” Garner said. “You and Paige and Bethany got as far as the blast door, and you were trapped there. You didn’t have the combo. They used gas grenades and captured you all.”

Travis had been looking at the floor. Now he looked up sharply at Garner. “Paige and Bethany are alive?”

Garner nodded. “Tied up just like us, in the closet of the bedroom suite. They’re fine.”

All the emotions that’d torn into Travis earlier like serrated blades now reversed themselves. They withdrew in a searing instant of release that seemed to hit him as hard as the missile’s shockwave had. His breathing spasmed and his eyes flooded. He couldn’t stop himself. Didn’t care to, either. The most he could do, after a moment, was quiet the shuddering breaths. He lowered his head and let the tears stream and made hardly any sound.

Garner stayed quiet a moment longer, then continued.

“Until they chased you three to the blast door, Holt’s people hadn’t even known the mine existed. Neither had Holt. Once they found it, they figured it mattered, and they located the other access and blew them both in. Inside they encountered Dyer, by himself. They traded gunfire with him—and killed him. When they realized who he was, and that he must’ve been working with me, they figured he’d probably had all the information they were after. Including the one thing they couldn’t get from me.”

“My name,” Travis said, his voice still cracking.

Garner nodded. “They were sure Dyer knew it, and they considered using the Tap on themselves to go back and interrogate him. They even got the door combo out of me so they could enter the mine quietly. That information was far less important to me than your identity—I’m sure I didn’t give them much of a fight.”

Travis looked up and blinked hard at the tears. Garner’s image swam and then resolved.

“Holt was afraid of the Tap,” Travis said. “He was hesitant to even let his subordinates use it.”

“That’s exactly right,” Garner said. He stared for a moment, visibly confused as to how Travis could know that detail. Then he set it aside and continued. “They realized they could use you instead, to spare themselves the risk. They gave you the drug, and in Stage One they fed you the door combo, and in Stage Two they put the Tap in your head and commanded you to relive the day. If it worked like they hoped it would, the memory fracturing would keep you from knowing you were in a Tap memory at all. You wouldn’t remember using the Tap—or living through the day the first time around. You’d drop into some point in time this morning and think it was this morning. You’d think it was real.”

The plane. En route to Rum Lake. Waking up aboard it—that was when the Tap memory had begun. The whole day after that had been fake.

“Later on you’d reach the blast door,” Garner said, “and this time you’d know the combo. You’d never know how you knew it—you’d remember Stage One like it was some strange vision you’d had—but under the circumstances you’d certainly try punching those numbers in.”

“And end up meeting Dyer,” Travis said.

Garner nodded. “In all likelihood learning what he knew, given that you served the same interests. And when you came back out of the Tap memory, they could interrogate you for that knowledge. You’d be less conditioned to protect it than I am. Far less, I’m afraid.”

“Jesus, did I give it up? Did I tell them I’m the one who goes through the Breach?”

“You did, but they thought it was sarcasm.” Garner frowned. “An hour from now they’ll figure out that it wasn’t. I’m sorry, but there’s almost no chance of your protecting that secret against someone as skilled as Porter.”

Garner sounded defeated. It was impossible to blame him. For a long moment Travis felt the same.

Then he thought of something he’d seen earlier, while wandering the plane in the transparency suit.

A second later he thought of something else he’d seen, and managed a smile.

Holt and his people couldn’t possibly know he’d gotten such a detailed look at the aircraft. They wouldn’t have guessed in a million years that, in the Tap memory they dumped him into, he would end up boarding the plane and scoping it out nose to tail. That lack of imagination on their part had been a mistake. A big one, potentially.

He flexed his wrists against the zip tie that bound them behind him, and put his knuckles to the plasterboard an inch away.

Then he shoved. Hard. Once, twice, three times. He heard the board flex and protest, and on the fourth push its gypsum core cracked softly in a fist-sized hole, the paper surface tearing with it.

“What are you doing?” Garner said.

“You’ll see.”

With his fingers he felt the edges of the hole, and snapped away piece after piece until he’d exposed several inches of the vertical aluminum support behind him. The one his own dolly must be secured to.

Then he contorted his wrists until he had the encircling zip tie stretched between them, and pressed it against one edge of the aluminum strut.

One crisp, machined edge.

It was as sharp as a blade.

He began sliding the zip tie up and down against it.

Garner finally understood, but still didn’t look hopeful.

“That won’t free your shoulders or your ankles,” he said.

“No,” Travis said. Then he nodded to the nearby desk. The one so close beside him he hadn’t noticed it in his first glimpse of this room. “But I’ll be able to reach the top right drawer there, and get ahold of the nail clippers inside.”

Garner’s eyes registered deepest confusion for three seconds. Then he smiled too.

“You found what Allen Raines had in his red locker,” he said.

“Found it and used it,” Travis said. “Tell me about the weapons cache in the hall. Will your palm print work on the scanners?”

“It will. But an alarm goes off as soon as you open a case. They’ll be on us before we can get anything loaded.”

Travis laughed softly. “I wouldn’t worry about that.”

Chapter Forty-Four

Holt was in the conference room, reading the interrogation notes again, when he felt the heat on the side of his face. For three or four seconds he ignored it, assuming the plane’s climate control system had begun venting warm air from the ceiling ducts.

Then it felt more than warm.

He turned in the direction it was coming from—the back wall—and his legs involuntarily kicked and shoved him away from the table.

Above the counter where the Breach entities were lined up, the plastic facing of the wall had begun to warp and melt in one area—a big half-circle blooming from the counter’s back edge.

Centered right beneath the melting place were three entities, all the same type. Holt had read the paper slip that detailed their function, but couldn’t remember it now. The objects were roughly cigar sized and made of something that looked like polished blue stone.

They’d been blue earlier, anyway.

Right now they were closer to pure white, incandescing like lightbulb filaments.

At that moment a line of flame erupted where the melting plastic had begun to pool atop the counter, the material breaking down into constituent oils. A tenth of a second later the entire melt zone was engulfed and sending noxious black smoke toward the ceiling.

Holt shoved himself up from the chair, turned, and began screaming at the others in the seating area ahead. He’d just gotten out the word fire when an alarm began shrieking, seeming to come from everywhere. He reached the doorway and saw the others already moving, running for the fire extinguishers positioned along the outer walls. The extinguishers’ mounts were strobing bright red—it was impossible to miss them.

Holt stepped aside as the first of the men sprinted past him into the room. One by one they went in, dodging around the chairs and one another, and blasting carbon dioxide at the flames. With their bodies in the way, Holt could no longer see the fire, but the men’s audible responses told him they were having trouble with it. They kept triggering the extinguishers, the sound not quite drowning out their curses and shouts.

Porter arrived at the rear of the pack, carrying two extinguishers. He shoved one into Holt’s hands and then ducked in past him. Holt followed. As he did, he heard another alarm begin blaring somewhere. Back toward the tail, maybe. God knew what it was; flames and smoke aboard an aircraft probably set off all kinds of emergency indicators.

He shouldered past the edge of the crowd and at last saw why the fire was proving difficult. The carbon dioxide was all but evaporating in the envelope of blazing air around the three entities. How hot were the damned things?

Even as he wondered, he saw one of them flicker. Then the other two. Within the following seconds all three began to dim visibly. The white-hot color was fading before his eyes.

Then the throat of the man next to him exploded out from under his head.

A gunshot.

From behind.

Holt spun—saw some of the others turning too, even as a storm of gunfire kicked up—and for maybe a quarter of a second he discerned the figures standing in the doorway. Garner. The other man. Both women. All leveling and firing Benellis from the aft arms locker.

Holt saw Garner’s weapon swing toward him. Saw its barrel aim straight into his viewpoint from ten feet away.

Holt shut his eyes.

It was over by the time Travis’s shotgun ran dry. He saw the last body drop, and as planned, the other three spun and trained their weapons on the seating area—reloading as they did—on the chance that some straggler might yet be coming in.

At the same time Travis lunged forward into the conference room. He dropped his own gun, grabbed one of the fallen extinguishers and began spraying down the remaining flames. The blue flares were already cool enough that they no longer got in the way.

Within a moment there was no fire at all. Just pooled bubbling plastic and a foot of gray vapor swirling under the ceiling. Travis gave the wall another long blast for good measure, then turned, ducked out of the room, and took his first breath since going in. As he emerged he heard a man shouting from somewhere forward of the bulk seating. Footsteps thudded on stairs, and then one of the flight crew came sprinting back.

“Where is it?” the man screamed. He started to repeat it, but the words caught in his throat. He’d seen the shotguns the other three were carrying, and for a second his expression flooded with fear.

Then it simply went blank.

He’d seen Garner.

After a long moment the man swallowed and said, “Sir.”

Garner accompanied the airman back upstairs to speak with the rest of the crew. Twenty seconds after they disappeared, all the alarms cut out.

Travis and Paige and Bethany sank into three of the row seats, side by side, and Travis leaned his head back and shut his eyes.

“Did they interrogate you?” Paige said.

He nodded.

“Are you okay?” she said.

He opened his eyes and looked at her. He took in every detail of her face: the strands of hair hanging past her forehead and in front of her ears, the subtle, rhythmic movements of her throat as she breathed.

“Yeah,” he said.

Garner came back down five minutes later. By then the twilight outside had deepened nearly to black, and the landscape below had lit up in soft blues and oranges: bright street grids and dotted parking lots.

Garner sat down just across the aisle from the three of them. He exhaled deeply and for a moment said nothing. Travis couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a person look so weary. He turned to Travis and said, “Tell me everything Dyer told you, so I know where to start.” He indicated Paige and Bethany. “They need to catch up on it too.”

Paige looked from Garner to Travis, confused. “Who’s Dyer?” she said.

Travis spent twenty minutes explaining it. By the time he’d finished, Paige and Bethany looked rattled, but both clearly understood it all.

“Dyer told you everything,” Garner said. “Everything I told him, at least.”

“The second half of Ruben Ward’s message,” Travis said.

Garner nodded. “I never would’ve told you any of this—either half of the message—until as late in the game as possible. I would’ve waited until days before you’re supposed to enter the Breach, if I could have. There was just nothing to be gained by telling you sooner, and plenty to lose. It adds unpredictability to bring anyone new into the fold. Even you.” He paused. “But I guess that horse is already out and galloping.”

For a long time, fifteen seconds at least, Garner said no more. He rested his hands on his knees and looked down at them.

“I’m sure all three of you have at least a grasp of the physics implied by the Breach,” he said. “The rough theories—guesses, if you like—as to how wormholes function. Maybe you’ve read Stephen Hawking, and know that space and time aren’t really separate things. A wormhole can cross both of them.”

Travis nodded, as did Paige and Bethany.

Garner looked up and met their gazes.

“On the other side of the Breach is a starship,” he said. “It’s orbiting the binary star 61 Cygni, a little over twelve hundred years in our future. The ship was designed and subassembled by General Dynamics in Coffeyville, Kansas, in the first half of the 2250s, and built in low orbit over the next twenty years. It was christened July 17, 2276, the EAS Deep Sky. It has a crew of eight hundred thirty-nine people, including an executive officer named Richard Garner, and a commander named Travis Chase.”

Chapter Forty-Five

Travis waited. He understood that Garner was neither lying nor joking.

“Ballpark figure,” Garner said. “When do you think the last veteran of the American Civil War died? Don’t crunch the numbers. Just take a shot from the hip, any of you.”

“The 1930s,” Travis said.

Paige nodded. “My guess too.”

“Around there,” Bethany said.

“There are disputed claims,” Garner said, “but the most agreed upon candidate is a Union veteran named Albert Woolson. He died in August of 1956.”

Travis traded looks with the others.

“It doesn’t sound right, does it?” Garner said. “The mind tends to chop off the tails of the bell curve when it makes an estimate. But do the math. Three million people fought in the Civil War, most of them very young, many young enough that they had to lie about their ages to serve. You could safely estimate a few tens of thousands of them were fifteen or sixteen when the war ended in 1865. Which means they were born around 1850. Out of that number of people, a handful could be expected to live to a hundred. A much smaller handful would make it a bit further, or would’ve been a little younger than fifteen when they served. Either way, the mid 1950s would be your best guess, even if you could never know for sure.” He offered a smile. “It is right—it just doesn’t seem right. It’s strange to consider that Civil War vets and atomic bombs overlapped each another in history by more than a decade.”

He looked forward again. “It’s stranger still to learn that the first humans to become effectively immortal—ageless, anyway—were born just before the Great Depression. You’re familiar with the Methuselah Project? You must have seen the political attack ads during the midterms.”

Travis and Paige and Bethany all nodded.

“Turns out it works,” Garner said. “It comes in about fifteen years ahead of schedule, in fact, according to the message from the Deep Sky. The first real stabilization and reversal of age symptoms is achieved around 2035. Which means a tiny scattering of people born in the late 1920s will live long enough to benefit from it—will live to see their biological age rolled back until they look and feel about twenty-five, indefinitely. Many more from the 1930s, forties, and fifties will make the cut, and damn near everyone born after that will. Most of the Deep Sky’s crew don’t yet exist in our time, but some do, and some were already adults in the year 1978—including all nine of the people Ruben Ward was instructed to take the message to that summer.”

Travis felt as if two halves of a drawbridge had just dropped together and locked with a heavy thud. He looked at Paige and Bethany and knew what they were thinking, to the last word:

Some of us are already among you.

“Who better to trust the message with,” Garner said, “than themselves?”

Paige started to respond, then stopped and frowned, as if something that’d been bothering her for the past couple minutes had finally surfaced. “It’s one thing to send us a message through the Breach, but why are they sending dangerous things like entities? If they created a wormhole to tell us something—”

“They didn’t,” Garner said. “They didn’t create the wormhole. Or the entities passing through it. That stuff is all archaic, even on the timescale of the universe. Whoever created it disappeared long ago. Probably a billion years back. These old transit tunnels full of relics are all that’s left of them. The Deep Sky’s original purpose was simply to study the tunnels—a whole network of them, discovered earlier by the first robotic probes that went out to neighboring stars. The Deep Sky was built from top to bottom as a dedicated research ship, with the means to investigate and even exert some control over wormholes. In the end, the crew used that capability to cause the Breach to open here on Earth, in our time. They rerouted a single tunnel to some degree—enough to make sure that the VLIC’s first shot in 1978 would connect with it, and not to a primordial one teeming with parasite signals. It took an ungodly amount of power to move the tunnel, and as soon as they’d done it, they had to begin generating and storing more power to move it again—this time so they could tap into it on their end. That process—repowering—would require a little over thirty-eight years, and be completed on June 5, 2016, by our calendar. During all the time in between, they had no way of stopping the flow of entities through the system. The most they could do was set up a kind of reverb effect in the tunnel, a very specific disturbance in which they could encode a message.”

“The Breach Voices,” Paige said.

Garner nodded. “Along with the initial impulse that would make a translator of whoever was standing closest when the Breach opened. That was some kind of neurotechnology that’s probably a few centuries ahead of ours—and obviously not perfected, given the damage it did to Ward.”

Travis let all the information settle in his mind, to the extent that it could.

“The tunnels are abandoned?” he said.

Garner nodded again. “Ancient ruins. Though many of the systems engineered into them are still running. Including defensive measures. Safeties.”

“Like what?” Paige said.

“The message covered it all pretty briefly. I got the sense that it would take a textbook to really explain it, but the basics were straightforward enough. One of the safeties is the resistance force inside the Breach, which doesn’t allow you to enter from our end. All the tunnels have that, to protect against the threat of outsiders—like us—tapping in at some random spot and immediately traveling throughout the network. Which makes sense, when you think about it. If you strung the universe with these tunnels, you’d never know when some hostile race might evolve somewhere, punch in and show up in your backyard.”

“So how do you go through it?” Bethany said.

“You need a tumbler,” Garner said.

Everyone waited for him to go on.

“That’s the best stab at translating the word from their language—whoever built the tunnels. Tumbler, as in the mechanism inside a lock. The way it works is, any two points connected by a tunnel need to be authorized before someone can travel between them. Think of it as unlocking them. And the only way to do that is for a single individual—a single conscious mind—to think the same complex thought outside both entry points first. You see how that works? It means at least one person has to make the trip the old-fashioned way—in a ship—before the tunnel lets anyone through. So you’d open one entrance, think a specific thought near it—an exchange from Twelfth Night, say—and then chug across space at ship speed to the other entrance, and think the exchange again. Same mind, same thought—that’s what the tunnel listens for. Until it hears that, it won’t open.”

Travis thought he understood the concept, and the reasoning behind it. “It means no new civilization can come out of the blue and expand their presence in space too quickly, right? They can’t push their boundaries any faster than ships can travel.”

Garner nodded. “And a person stuck with that job, unlocking a tunnel’s two ends, is the tumbler. In this case it’s you. I’m sure you can guess why.”

Travis considered it. He stared at the seatback in front of him, then turned to Garner. “Because I’ve already made the trip. There’s one of me on that end already, and one of me on this end.”

Another nod.

“Will that actually work?” Travis said.

“Same mind, same thought,” Garner said.

“So what is the thought? Did they put it in the message?”

Garner shook his head. “They’ll give it to you in person. After you go through to their end.”

He watched Travis for the confusion he obviously expected. Travis saw Paige’s and Bethany’s eyes narrow too.

“How will you go through the tunnel if you haven’t unlocked it yet?” Garner said. “That’s another safety—one for the tumbler’s own protection. The term for it translates to something like ‘scouting.’ You get to do it just once, back and forth—a single round-trip. The logic of it goes like this: a tumbler usually has to unlock a tunnel’s first end, then travel for a very long time across space to unlock the second end. But before he unlocks the second end, he can choose to enter the tunnel there, just once, and go through it to take a good look at the first end again. To scout it.”

Travis saw the point—was pretty certain he did, anyway. “After all that time had gone by, while you were crossing space in a ship, it’d be risky to reach the far end of the tunnel and just open it blindly. What if things back home had changed by then? What if there was something dangerous waiting to come through?”

Garner managed a smile. “Hell, you might open the tunnel and get a magma flow. Or seawater pressurized at a mile’s depth. A lot can change, given enough time, and it could take thousands of years for a ship to travel the distance required. It could take longer. The Deep Sky’s crew isn’t worried about that in this case, obviously. As far as I can tell, they just want to speak to you before you fully open the tunnel. About what, I have no idea.”

“So the other me,” Travis said, “the one aboard the Deep Sky, will unlock the far end of the tunnel first, and once that’s done, I can make a single trip to their side and back. A scouting trip.”

“That’s the plan, as I understand it.”

Travis stared at him, thinking it all through. Random questions remained. Trailing ends. One in particular.

“Tell us about the filter,” Travis said.

Garner looked surprised. “How can you know about that?”

“Beyond that word, we don’t know about it,” Travis said. “I’ll explain the how later.”

He held Garner’s gaze and waited for him to speak.

“I don’t know much more than you do, I’m afraid,” Garner said. “The filter was always the strangest part, to me. And the scariest, I suppose.”

“Why?” Paige said.

Travis noticed Bethany looking around at everyone like she’d missed something. Which she had; they’d never told her anything about this. Travis caught her glance and said, “I’ll tell you later.”

She nodded, but the confusion stayed in her expression.

“The filter was the one thing Ruben Ward chose to leave out of the written message,” Garner said. “He never dictated it to Nora during his stay at Johns Hopkins, and only spoke briefly of it to the nine of us, later that summer. He was afraid to share the details, he said. He worried that if we knew about that part, we’d back out. He said it was something absolutely necessary, but also terrible, and that it was best if no one but you, Travis, ever learned about it.”

“Do you think it’s something that happens to me when I go through the Breach?” Travis said. “Something that changes me? Am I what gets filtered?”

Again Garner looked surprised, but only mildly so this time. “That’s more or less what I’ve imagined all these years. But it’s no more than a guess—mine is as bad as yours.”

Travis nodded. As he had in the mine shaft, he let the subject slip from his thoughts. There were only so many ways he could hold it up to the light. He looked at Garner again.

“The nine of you were supposed to get me into Tangent,” Travis said. “Get me in and then, as you said, tell me everything at the last possible moment.”

Garner nodded.

“So what did you think,” Travis said, “when I ended up in Tangent without your help, in the summer of 2009?”

“That very strange things happen in connection with the Breach. And that it couldn’t be a coincidence.”

“It wasn’t. I’ll explain that later too.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

Travis considered something else. “You were prepared to hit Border Town with a nuke, back then, when Aaron Pilgrim took control of the place.”

“The Breach would’ve survived. You can’t imagine the forces that stabilize it. All that stopped me was that you wouldn’t leave the place. I had no choice but to go along with the approach you suggested.”

For a while after that, nobody spoke. The heavy engines droned and the lit-up nightscape slid by, far below.

“Why are they doing this at all?” Paige said. “The crew of that ship. Does the message say why they’re opening the tunnel in the first place?”

Garner nodded slowly, looking down at his hands again. “That part it explains in simple terms.” He grew quiet for a few seconds, then continued. “There was a war. It happened on Earth around 3100, right around the time the Deep Sky arrived at what turned out to be its last destination—61 Cygni. That star is just over eleven light-years from here, which means the ship’s crew, once they were on-site, got all their updates from home with more than a decade’s delay. Correspondence from loved ones, news stories, everything. When the war started, they had to watch their world come apart on that same delay, knowing that whatever they were seeing was already eleven years gone. The crew considered returning, trying to intervene somehow, but gave up the idea without much debate: the Deep Sky doesn’t exactly have a hyperdrive button on its bridge. Its top speed is around twenty percent of the speed of light. It’d taken fifty-five years to get out to that star system, and it would take fifty-five to get back. In any case, it wasn’t long before they saw the final headlines, announcing the all-but-certain deployment of weapon systems more or less guaranteed to end the world. The message doesn’t clarify what exactly those weapons were—only that they worked. All transmissions from Earth ended right after that, and never started up again.”

Garner shut his eyes. “They opened the Breach so they could come through and have a second chance at history. If you think about that, you might begin to appreciate our paranoia in keeping this secret. Think of the power structures in this world. All the horrible things people do just to keep control of their few bars of the jungle gym. Now imagine some of them learning that one day soon a door is going to open, and people will come through it who know the next thousand-plus years of our history. Everything we’re going to invent and discover. Everything we’re going to get right and wrong. People who, just by their arrival, will render all current political power on Earth obsolete. You know who’d be most threatened by that? All the people best positioned to stop it from happening in the first place.” His hands had become fists in his lap. He looked down, noticed, and slowly relaxed them. “To hell with all of them,” he said. “It is going to happen. For better or worse.”

Paige seemed to react to Garner’s final sentence. She turned to Travis, her expression haunted by a fear she didn’t need to voice.

Chapter Forty-Six

Travis took the elevator up to the surface and went running in the desert. The night was cool for early June, the breeze coming in from the Rockies fifty miles away. It was close to midnight, and the stars stood out in vivid contrast on the black sky.

He ran six miles in a loop and then slowed to a walk one mile shy of the elevator housing. He was barely winded. Not bad for forty-eight.

He’d covered half the remaining distance back when he stopped altogether. He turned to face north and tilted his head up and found the familiar shape of Cygnus, the swan, seemingly frozen in its slow rotation around the pole star. His eyes went automatically to the faint speck—nearly invisible to naked eyes—of 61 Cygni.

He stared at it until long after his neck had begun to cramp.

The bedroom was pitch-black except for the soft blue light from the nightstand clock. It showed 3:06 A.M. Travis lay on his side, his chest against Paige’s back. They were both staring at the digital display.

It switched to 3:07.

“Twelve hours,” Paige whispered.

Travis heard the edge of fear she couldn’t quite hide. He held her tighter and kissed the top of her head.

“Save tomorrow for tomorrow,” he said.

“This is tomorrow.”

He insisted on being alone in front of the Breach when it happened. There was no reason to expect any danger to bystanders, but no reason not to expect it either.

There was no formality to the event. No grand send-off before Travis stepped into the elevator to head for B51. The group that gathered to see him go consisted of Paige, Bethany, and Garner. They stood together in the corridor on B18, not far from the residence Travis and Paige had moved into when the complex re-opened. To a passerby—of which there weren’t many in Border Town these days—it would’ve looked like four friends standing there talking.

All three hugged Travis—Paige last, and longest. He held on to her and tried to think of nothing but what she felt like. He shut his eyes and let the moment last as long as he dared.

The elevator doors parted on the concrete hallway. The only hallway down here at the bottom, its far end open to the vast chamber that held the Breach’s protective dome. Travis walked the corridor’s length. He passed the heavy door to the bunker where, more than thirty-eight years earlier, Ruben Ward had lain in his half sleep, listening to the Breach Voices and understanding them.

He passed through the opening at the end. He stared at the dome’s colossal profile, barely a silhouette against the unlit ceiling and walls of the old VLIC shot chamber, which had been used for its intended purpose exactly once.

The dome’s small entry channel, like that of an igloo, lay to the right. Ten feet before it stood a table. Travis crossed to it, removed his phone from his pocket and set it there. He noted the time as he did.

3:06.

He went to the entrance and pushed in through the heavy glass door at its mouth, his eyes already losing everything but the Breach.

Like looking into a depth. Into a furnace.

Those had been his first impressions of the thing, almost seven years ago, echoing the sentiments of one of the first people to see it—and to die because of it.

Travis let the door fall shut behind him and stood staring. The Breach hovered, patient as ever, in its soundproof glass enclosure at the center of the dome. The tunnel and its flared opening looked the same as they always had. Blue and purple. Rippling. Flamelike substance the color of a bruise. Travis went to the glass cage’s door and pulled it open.

The Breach Voices sang. They raked his eardrums, seemingly capable of piercing them. He ignored the pain and stepped across the threshold and stood there, three feet from the opening. There was nothing in the way now except the low-profile receiving platform, like a heavy-duty trampoline that rose eighteen inches from the concrete floor beneath the Breach.

Travis waited.

The Voices keened and sighed, multiple tones rising and falling in what sounded like random pitch fluctuations. They were ascending in a harmonic trill when they simply stopped.

The silence made Travis flinch, but almost before he could react to it, other things began happening. The air pressure in the room changed. He heard the door six inches behind him buffet outward and then immediately suck shut again. The glass walls around him seemed to flex and draw in, the Breach’s reflection warping in every surface.

Then the Breach itself changed. Rapidly. The distinct streams of blue and violet collapsed into each other. The rippling shallowed, the tunnel’s inner surface pressing itself smooth and uniform. The transformation happened in something like ten seconds, and when it was done Travis might have been staring down the interior of a polished steel tube. Even the flared mouth seemed to have solidified.

He waited.

Nothing else happened.

He stepped closer, resting one foot on the receiving platform. He stared straight down the tunnel and suddenly noticed what else was different about it.

He could see the far end.

It might have been a thousand feet away. Distance was hard to judge. It opened into someplace a little brighter than the tunnel itself.

He leaned closer, extended his hand and passed it through the plane of the Breach’s opening. For maybe a quarter of a second he thought he felt it resist him, and then his hand simply went through unhindered.

Another step—both feet on the trampoline now. He leaned all the way forward, his shoulders and head crossing the plane and his hands falling to the tunnel’s surface just beyond the mouth. He found it to be as solid as it looked—and then found it didn’t matter. He tipped the rest of his upper body into the channel and realized he weighed nothing once inside it. For a few seconds he stayed on the margin, his legs and feet pulled down by gravity on the platform, the rest of him floating suspended in the first three feet of the tunnel. Then he pressed his hands to the sidewalls and shoved himself forward, and a second later he was gliding along the channel’s length, as frictionless as a puck on an air hockey table.

He shoved again, and then again. Each time his speed stepped up and stayed up; only air drag slowed him—and maybe something else. Something he couldn’t quite get a fix on. It felt like the hint of resistance his hand had met briefly at the tunnel’s mouth. He sensed it only occasionally—sliding past one shoulder or the other, or compressing strangely around his feet. That made sense in light of what Garner had described: the idea of a one-time-only scouting trip. The tunnel’s resistance force was still as powerful as ever; it was simply letting him pass now in some active, selective way. A little bubble of nonresistance, following him as he glided along.

He waited to feel something, as the tunnel walls continued slipping by. Something like a barrier, or a threshold. Something—anything—that could be called a filter.

But there was nothing.

Just the smooth interior of the channel streaming past.

Much closer now. Maybe a hundred yards from the tunnel’s end. Then fifty. Then ten.

He could see details of the space beyond. A brightly lit room of some kind. Metal flooring. An opposite wall, easily a hundred feet beyond the opening. The chamber outside the tunnel must be huge.

He put his hands out again and caught the channel’s sides repeatedly, shedding the momentum he’d built up earlier. He came to a complete stop with his head right at the tunnel’s threshold. He hovered, staring at the room that lay beyond.

It was massive, and exotically shaped. The floor was a sweeping downward curve, like the inner surface of a barrel laid on its side. The walls to the left and right rose and angled inward, as if toward the barrel’s center somewhere high above the ceiling—though the ceiling itself had to be forty feet up. The floor just in front of the tunnel was metal, as Travis had seen earlier, but everywhere else it was glass or some equivalent—it was simply an enormous, curved window, and after the first passing glance at the room itself, Travis found his gaze drawn down and outward to the view.

A planet. Right there. Suspended in deep black space and filling two thirds of the window. It was an amber-and-white version of Jupiter. Distinct bands of color met along ragged, swirled boundaries, and bent around cyclonic formations that were probably bigger than the Earth. Only a crescent edge of the giant world was lit up, catching the glow of a red-orange star that hung beyond it and far to the side. The star was visually the size of a quarter held at arm’s length.

A second star, the same color, hovered much further away—it shone as no more than a superbright point in the darkness. Travis knew these were the two suns that formed 61 Cygni, seen as a single dim speck from the desert in eastern Wyoming.

He stared for probably twenty seconds, his thoughts nearly blank. He noticed that the entire view outside was sliding steadily in one direction, and knew what that meant. Then he bent his legs and drew them forward and got his feet ahead of him in a seated position, and slid out of the tunnel.

Gravity exerted itself at once. A good standin for gravity, anyway—the centrifugal force of the rotating ship. He put his feet down on the metal and felt his weight transfer onto them—exactly as it would have on Earth.

“Jesus, it worked,” a man said.

Travis turned to see a doorway that’d been out of view from inside the tunnel. Standing in it was Richard Garner, looking about as old as a college kid.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Travis stared at him, and then past him, suddenly wondering who else might step into the frame.

Garner seemed to understand. “It’s probably best if you don’t meet yourself,” he said. “It’s not going to split the universe or anything, but I think it would be very distracting.”

He had an accent—one Travis was sure he’d never heard before. Nor had anybody else in 2016, he knew.

Garner stepped from the doorway and advanced. He smiled vaguely and shook his head. “I haven’t seen someone look this old in over a thousand years.”

They stood at the center of the gigantic floor pane and spoke at length. Travis told Garner, in broad strokes, the story of the Breach as it’d played out on Earth. All that had resulted from that day in March of 1978. All that this version of Garner couldn’t know about—the aftermath of the plan he and the others had conceived and launched from this ship. The man looked disturbed, even remorseful, by the time Travis reached the end. He stared away into the starfield below—the planet and twin suns were no longer in view—and exhaled slowly.

“We knew it would go bad in a lot of ways,” Garner said softly. “We debated whether to do it at all. But in the end the decision was unanimous. We had the chance to set things right. How could we pass it up?”

He stood staring into the depths a moment longer, and then he drew a folded black card from his pocket and handed it to Travis. “Don’t open that until you’re ready. Inside is a long string of random letters, which your counterpart here has already thought. Once you return to your end of the tunnel, the Breach will revert to the form you’ve seen all these years. The plasma channel with entities coming through. It’ll stay that way until you unlock the tunnel once and for all.”

“And to do that, I just think what’s on this card,” Travis said, more verifying than asking.

Garner nodded. “It’ll work best if you read it aloud—that should keep your stream of thought on track. Other than that, there’s nothing to it. You can do it from anywhere on Earth, anytime after you go back. You read those letters, and the tunnel opens for us to come through. Easy as that.”

Travis looked at the card. He thought of the disparity between its size and its power. Like a nuclear launch key. He slipped it into his pocket, then looked back up at Garner.

Garner was gazing down through the window again. Watching the edge where stars were continually sliding into view. Travis realized he was waiting for something.

At last the man pointed. “There.”

Travis followed his downstretched arm and fingertip and saw a medium-bright yellow star that’d just crept into the frame. At a glance there was nothing special about it. It was all but lost amid the scatter of other stars.

“Is that what I think it is?” Travis said.

Garner nodded and spoke just above a breath. “There’s not a day I don’t come to this room and look at it. I stare at that little speck, and I wonder if there’s anything left of the Ferris wheel on Navy Pier in Chicago, or the Ko¯toku-in temple in Tokyo, or Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. And I’ll never know.”

“Can you actually change things?” Travis said. “If all of you come through to 2016, do you really believe you can rewrite history? And if you can, how do you know you’ll make it better? Couldn’t the same kind of war still happen someday, for other reasons?”

It took a long time for Garner to answer. His eyes and his head slowly turned, tracking the distant pinpoint of light in the endless black. He was still watching it when he began to speak.

“I can tell you about dozens of close calls the world has scraped past, these last twelve hundred years. Any one of those could’ve ended it. Finally one did. It was a matter of time.” Far below the curved glass, the giant gas planet crept back into view. First came one horn of the lit crescent, and then the broad curve. The mostly dark mass of the thing blotted out the stars beyond it like an ink spill. “There are fundamental problems that never seem to go away,” Garner said, “no matter how advanced the world becomes. No matter what you invent. No matter what you cure. You never get rid of things like denial, in-group and out-group thinking, cognitive dissonance. The things that underlie every conflict and every war. There are always people who want to get rid of those things, and those people get smarter and more capable over the centuries—but so does everyone else: the people who don’t want those things to change. So the pattern holds.” Garner looked up at Travis. “Our arrival in your time would stand some chance of breaking the cycle. We have the interests of the whole world at heart—we know what it’s like to lose it—and we also have the knowledge and means to really change things for the better. We’re more than just well informed. We’re smarter, by a wide margin, than anyone on Earth in 2016. Our brains are physically different from yours, given what we’ve done to them. Any one of us could complete an IQ test from your side of the Breach perfectly, about as quickly as we could move the pencil.”

“But is that enough to change things forever? A few hundred of you, among a few billion?”

Travis watched Garner and saw something in his eyes, flickering beneath the conviction with which he’d just spoken. A vestige of his earlier remorse, maybe.

“No,” Garner said. “It takes more than that.”

Travis found himself speaking the word even as he thought it: “The filter.”

Garner nodded just perceptibly. “How much do you know about it?”

“Almost nothing,” Travis said.

Seconds passed. Garner looked away. “A few minutes ago you told me about a computer called the Blackbird. Alien technology that you repurposed in some other timeline. A machine that can make hyper-accurate predictions, even about random events that haven’t happened yet.”

Travis waited for him to go on.

“We found computers just like that,” Garner said, “governing the hubs of this tunnel network.” He indicated the massive planet, already slipping back out of view. “You can’t see it from here, but there’s an object the size of Long Island orbiting just above the cloud tops down there. An artificial satellite. We managed to board it soon after arriving in this system. The best we could tell, it’s a way station of some kind, connecting hundreds of these tunnels to one another. The place is filled with old electronics, some of it running down, most of it still working. There’s automated maintenance overseeing everything critical, and based on certain timers we were able to decipher, we figure the thing’s been abandoned for just over three billion years.”

Travis tried to get a sense of time on that scale, but gave it up after a few seconds.

“Huge areas of the satellite are just stores of backup supplies,” Garner said. “Including computers. We took one, brought it aboard this ship, and spent about fifty years learning everything we could about it. Learning that it does its computation by interacting with surrounding material. Large amounts of surrounding material.”

“A whole planet’s worth,” Travis said. “The Blackbird told me that at the end.”

Garner nodded. “Once we understood that part, we realized there was a certain function we could use this computer for, if we ever made it back to Earth through one of these tunnels—back to Earth during your time. This function was very difficult to set up; it’s nothing you could’ve done with the Blackbird. The programming alone took us two decades. Then we ran thousands of simulations of how it would play out in real life once we triggered it. How it would work on Earth.”

“How what would work? What function?”

“We called it the filter. I don’t remember who came up with that name, but it stuck. I guess it made the idea sound clean.”

“What does it do?”

Garner remained silent for a while. He didn’t look at Travis. Beneath him, the planet slipped away again, leaving only the tumble of stars.

“There’s a question philosophers used to ask,” Garner said. “Maybe you’ve heard some version of it. Suppose you suddenly found yourself on a street corner in Europe, in the year 1895, and encountered a six-year-old boy named Adolf Hitler. Could you kill him, right then and there?”

“You’re asking?” Travis said.

“Sure.”

Travis thought about it. “I really don’t know. I’d think I should, but that’s not to say I could.”

Garner nodded. “That’s a common answer. Let’s say you did kill him. Do you believe World War Two would be prevented as a result?”

Travis shrugged. “I’m sure there’d still be a fight about something around that time.”

Garner nodded again. “Same fight, for all the same reasons: broad political and religious ideologies grown out of centuries of ingrained hate; control of primary resources like territory, access to fossil fuel reserves, seaports. Somebody would’ve ended up banging the podiums over it. Different leaders might’ve been far less cruel, might’ve conducted the war in entirely different ways, but you could probably swap out the leadership of every country in the world at that time, and the middle of the twentieth century would’ve still been a nightmare. In which case you might ask yourself if it’d just be a mug’s game, trying to change things. Aboard this ship we asked ourselves that question, and not as some academic brain teaser. The answer meant a great deal to us.”

Suddenly Travis understood. Or thought he did.

“You and the others planned to bring that computer with you,” he said, “back to Earth in 2016. You could use it to identify people who’d eventually be responsible for wars, all kinds of atrocities, long before they took power. Then you could just … kill them?”

“We could. And after that we could use the computer again to find out who was now on course to fill their shoes. And if we killed those people, we could look for their historical replacements, and so on. Beyond a certain point, we’d be killing people who originally wouldn’t have done anything wrong. People who might’ve never ended up in positions of power at all, if we hadn’t already killed the first several layers of troublemakers. You can see how the morals of the thing get tangled.”

Whoever it affects, Ward had said, it’s not their fault. Not really. Under the wrong conditions, anyone could end up the worst person on Earth.

“I thought it was about me,” Travis said, almost to himself. “I thought I was on track to become … someone bad.”

“Not you,” Garner said. “Others. Many, many others.”

Travis looked up at him. “Twenty million.”

Garner’s mouth seemed to have gone dry. He swallowed with a little difficulty, then nodded. “That’s the rough number we came up with, every time we simulated it. If you chose them very precisely, the removal of some twenty million specific people from the world population would leave things unusually stable. Conflicts already under way in places like Congo and Sudan would suddenly lack not only leaders and instigators, but anyone able and willing to fill the vacuum left by them. All the suitable candidates would be dead. The same would be true of every saber-rattling regime in the world, including more than a few that don’t call themselves regimes. The result of all this would be something uncanny. To any observer who didn’t know better, for the next century the human race would seem, by sheer luck, to dodge every potential flashpoint that came along. Every dangerous stare-down between nations would happen to have a JFK or two in the right places to defuse it, instead of the various alphas who’d have normally held those positions. All those aggressive men—and a few women—would’ve been strained right out of history by then. Filtered.”

“Jesus Christ,” Travis said. He heard a tremor in his own voice.

“Every one of our simulations showed that a century like that would be enough—would let us get the world on the right track forever. Like a cast for a shattered bone.”

“Aren’t there easier ways?” Travis said. “If you’re taking that computer to Earth in 2016, can’t you just ask it, once you’re there, for a more benign approach? There has to be something else it could think of.”

“There’s no end to what it can think of, and many of the alternate ideas would work—but all of them carry even higher death tolls than this one. However you go about it, you’re talking about changing the world. It just doesn’t happen without conflict. Believe me, we’ve had time to consider every approach, and the filter is the benign one. We’re lucky the numbers aren’t worse.”

“Twenty million people,” Travis said. He went silent, listening to his pulse thudding in his ears. Then he said, “How is it even possible to kill them all?”

“That’s the function we developed for the computer, taking advantage of how it works: interaction with material at a distance—a whole planet’s worth.”

“Only at the smallest scale,” Travis said. “Elementary particles. Not even atoms. Quarks.”

“With the right programming it can do a bit more than that. I told you, it took us forever to set it up. We borrowed a few tricks from the evolution of parasite signals—ways of moving lots of particles all at once.”

“To do what?”

“Create simple vibration, mostly—to generate heat. A little point-source of it, about a thousand degrees Celsius, anywhere in the world we choose. Inside someone’s brainstem, for example.”

Garner saw Travis’s expression and continued quickly: “It’s painless. They don’t even know they’re dying. They just drop where they stand.”

“All twenty million,” Travis said.

“In perfect unison.”

A long silence drew out. Travis stared at Garner, then looked away at nothing. He could feel his heartbeat in his chest now. It sounded like drumming in some vast, empty place.

“You see now why your role is central to this thing,” Garner said. “It’s your decision whether we come through the channel at all. If you do let us through, we’re going to trigger the filter the moment we arrive. I tell you that for clarity’s sake.”

“You didn’t have to tell me at all,” Travis said. “You could’ve given me the card and sent me back unaware.”

“We debated that. Even voted on it. The outcome was pretty close to unanimous. The way we see it, the Earth at the far end of that tunnel isn’t strictly our world. We had ours, and we lost it. The world we’d be coming to is yours. We couldn’t ask you to let us in without knowing the consequences. We believed at least one of you should have the option to veto the idea. I’m sorry it falls to you, Travis. I really am.”

Travis thought to ask why it did fall to him. Of all the people on Earth in 2016 who had counterparts aboard this ship, there could hardly be a riskier bet to put all the chips on. A young adulthood spent among violent criminals. His own criminal actions and all their consequences. He’d been lucky to reach his forties at all.

But he didn’t ask the question. After a second’s thought he didn’t need to. He recalled the wooded slope outside the mine shaft. The contractors crouched behind their Humvees. The near-total lack of emotion he’d felt, approaching them with the chef’s knife.

Necessity pushing remorse aside.

An animal thing from way back.

Something he maybe had more of than he should.

Garner’s eyes took on understanding; he could see that Travis had made the connection for himself.

“You’re the guy if anyone is,” Garner said. He was quiet a beat. Then: “I’ve said all that it makes sense to say. Go back, and take all the time you need. If you never want this to happen, it never will.”

He held Travis’s gaze a few seconds longer, then gave him a last nod and walked away, back through the doorway he’d come from.

Travis stared after him, then looked down through the glass floor again. He watched until the yellow speck of Earth’s sun emerged once more into the frame.

I really can’t get there, he’d said to Paige. Keeping you in the dark about anything at all—I can’t imagine it.

He still couldn’t. Not in this or any timeline. He could imagine nothing other than going back and immediately telling Paige every detail. Garner and a few others, too, but Paige first. He would share everything with her except the weight of making the choice. That would be his alone. He could spare her even the stress of trying to sway him one way or the other, by simply leaving for a while. Going off by himself, maybe for weeks. Or months. Or years. Just thinking it all through, the card folded in his pocket at all times. He could use it from anywhere on Earth, as soon as he made up his mind.

He thought he knew which side of the choice he’d eventually come down on.

He imagined Paige would know too.

He thought about all that, and five seconds later he understood everything: all that’d transpired between the future versions of himself and Paige. Why she’d sent her message. Why he’d sent his. There’d been no misunderstanding at all.

He stared at the distant sun transiting the glass beneath his feet, and wondered if it was possible to feel emptier or more numb than this.

He patted the card, deep and secure in his pocket, and turned to the tunnel’s flared entry. He crossed to it and slipped inside, and began to push himself back toward home.

Acknowledgments

This last volume of the trilogy came to life with a lot of help from very smart and dedicated people. Great thanks to my editor, Gabe Robinson, along with many, many other people at HarperCollins, including Liate Stehlik, Seale Ballenger, Pamela Spengler-Jaffee, Megan Swartz, Adrienne Di Pietro, Kristine Macrides, and Danielle Bartlett. Thanks also to Ellen S. Leach, for catching a large number of mistakes that slipped past me but would not have slipped past readers.

And as always, thank you to Janet Reid, agent extraordinaire. Before writing books I knew there was more to this job than sitting down and typing, but I couldn’t have guessed how much more—and the incredible work you do is the reason I can do my part at all.

About the Author

PATRICK LEE lives in Michigan. He is the author of The Breach, Ghost Country, and Deep Sky.

To find out more, please visit www.patrickleefiction.com.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Table of Contents

THE BREACH

- Part I - BLACKBIRD

- CHAPTER ONE
- CHAPTER TWO
- CHAPTER THREE
- CHAPTER FOUR
- CHAPTER FIVE
- CHAPTER SIX
- CHAPTER SEVEN
- CHAPTER EIGHT
- CHAPTER NINE
- CHAPTER TEN
- CHAPTER ELEVEN
- CHAPTER TWELVE
- CHAPTER THIRTEEN
- CHAPTER FOURTEEN
- CHAPTER FIFTEEN
- CHAPTER SIXTEEN

- Part II - 7 THEATERSTRASSE

- CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
- CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
- CHAPTER NINETEEN
- CHAPTER TWENTY
- CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
- CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
- CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
- CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
- CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
- CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
- CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
- CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
- CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
- CHAPTER THIRTY

- Part III - ENTITY 0697

- CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
- CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
- CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
- CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
- CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
- CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
- CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
- CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
- CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
- CHAPTER FORTY
- CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
- CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
- CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
- CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
- CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Ghost Country

- Part I - Iris

- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Chapter Six
- Chapter Seven
- Chapter Eight
- Chapter Nine
- Chapter Ten
- Chapter Eleven
- Chapter Twelve
- Chapter Thirteen
- Chapter Fourteen
- Chapter Fifteen
- Chapter Sixteen
- Chapter Seventeen

- Part II - Umbra

- Chapter Eighteen
- Chapter Nineteen
- Chapter Twenty
- Chapter Twenty-One
- Chapter Twenty-Two
- Chapter Twenty-Three
- Chapter Twenty-Four
- Chapter Twenty-Five
- Chapter Twenty-Six
- Chapter Twenty-Seven
- Chapter Twenty-Eight
- Chapter Twenty-Nine
- Chapter Thirty
- Chapter Thirty-One
- Chapter Thirty-Two

- Part III - Arica

- Chapter Thirty-Three
- Chapter Thirty-Four
- Chapter Thirty-Five
- Chapter Thirty-Six
- Chapter Thirty-Seven
- Chapter Thirty-Eight
- Chapter Thirty-Nine
- Chapter Forty
- Chapter Forty-One
- Chapter Forty-Two
- Chapter Forty-Three
- Chapter Forty-Four
- Chapter Forty-Five
- Chapter Forty-Six
- Chapter Forty-Seven

Deep Sky

- Part I - Scalar

- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Chapter Six
- Chapter Seven
- Chapter Eight
- Chapter Nine
- Chapter Ten
- Chapter Eleven
- Chapter Twelve
- Chapter Thirteen
- Chapter Fourteen
- Chapter Fifteen
- Chapter Sixteen
- Chapter Seventeen

- Part II - The Stargazer

- Chapter Eighteen
- Chapter Nineteen
- Chapter Twenty
- Chapter Twenty-One
- Chapter Twenty-Two
- Chapter Twenty-Three
- Chapter Twenty-Four
- Chapter Twenty-Five
- Chapter Twenty-Six
- Chapter Twenty-Seven
- Chapter Twenty-Eight
- Chapter Twenty-Nine
- Chapter Thirty

- Part III - The Tumbler

- Chapter Thirty-One
- Chapter Thirty-Two
- Chapter Thirty-Three
- Chapter Thirty-Four
- Chapter Thirty-Five
- Chapter Thirty-Six
- Chapter Thirty-Seven
- Chapter Thirty-Eight
- Chapter Thirty-Nine
- Chapter Forty
- Chapter Forty-One
- Chapter Forty-Two
- Chapter Forty-Three
- Chapter Forty-Four
- Chapter Forty-Five
- Chapter Forty-Six
- Chapter Forty-Seven

- Acknowledgments

About the Author