by Patrick Lee
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, scratch
es 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.