by Patrick Lee
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. T
hen 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 und
er 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.