by Patrick Lee
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 throu
gh 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?”