by Patrick Lee
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. Eve
n 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.