by Patrick Lee
“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 exact
ly 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 ju
st 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.