by Patrick Lee
But he’d still been alive when the squads from the helicopters found him—and they’d kept him that way for a while. An IV pole stuck up from the gurney’s side, with three drip bags of different chemicals hanging from it. One was morphine. Travis raised his eyes from Moyer to the row of entities—all that the intruders had recovered from the wreckage, at least up to the point when Air Force One had left to come here. Travis understood why they’d kept Moyer alive as long as possible: they’d questioned him on the entities they found, and written the key details on slips of paper that now lay in front of each one. Maybe they’d gotten his cooperation in exchange for the medical treatment. Maybe just for the morphine.
The entities were mostly common types; a group of three blue flares appeared to be the rarest of the bunch—until Travis’s gaze reached the end of the counter.
Where the Tap was sitting.
For a few seconds he couldn’t imagine how it’d gotten here. It’d been in the vault in the back wall of his and Paige’s closet, and Paige had been unable to reach it before they fled Border Town.
Then he considered the time scales involved, and began to understand. The guys in the choppers had made their way into Border Town around 9:20 in the morning, local time. That’d been hours before Air Force One even arrived there. Plenty of time for those men to notice a built-in safe in such a visible location—right at the drop-off to the abyss. With safety lines or other precautions they could’ve gotten to it easily, and among their military hardware there would’ve been things that could’ve compromised the safe’s lock or hinges.
Travis stepped closer to the Tap. He watched the room’s lighting scatter and reflect in its depths.
The sheet of paper in front of it contained all the main points of how to use the thing. Moyer had left nothing out.
Suddenly Travis heard footsteps coming from further aft—the small portion of the plane he hadn’t checked out yet. He turned just as two men entered the conference room.
One was the Wilford Brimley standin from the dream.
The other was President Holt.
Chapter Forty-One
Travis’s hand went to the knife’s grip just above his waist, and felt it through the material of the suit.
He could kill both men without any risk to himself—could do it right now, and by the time the eight in the seats came running, it’d be over. There’d be all the time in the world to swipe the blade clean and resheath it under the suit before any of them got here. No problem, after that, to pick them off one by one as he’d done among the redwoods. Them and anyone else he might come upon farther back toward the tail. Almost any way that it shook out, two or three minutes from now, everyone on the plane could be dead except the pilots, Garner, and whoever was being held with him. For a dramatic finish, Travis could then help Garner to the open doorway at the front of the aircraft, and several dozen California state cops would see a dead man step out into the sunlight.
That would sure as hell be the end of the cover-up.
But as a plan, Travis didn’t like it.
Even with the story broken wide open, Garner would be in serious danger. Federal authorities of one kind or another would descend on the scene and exert control, and there would be no telling whether they’d stood with Holt or not. Garner would be entering that situation from a position of uncertainty and weakness. He’d be at the mercy of others. Lots of others.
There was a better approach to take, and it would be just as brutally simple to execute. All it would require was a little patience.
Travis let his hand fall away from the knife.
The Brimley lookalike was holding a few sheets of yellow notepad paper and a red pen. He dropped the pen on the table and spread the sheets out side by side, and he and Holt stood looking down on them, saying nothing.
The pages were scrawled with red handwriting. Travis stepped close enough to discern the words while staying at a safe distance from either of the men. He began to read, and within seconds realized what he was looking at.
These were interrogation notes.
The scribbled lines comprised all the information that’d been drawn out of Garner and whoever else they had, in repeated drug sessions going back to probably late last night.
Travis scanned all the text in about sixty seconds.
These guys had learned almost everything—at least regarding the second half of Ruben Ward’s message. The instructions. They knew that the original nine recipients had gained financial and political power based on the instructions. That they’d been told to use that power to acquire knowledge of—and influence over—the Breach and whoever ended up overseeing it. The last note read:
Someone is designated to pass into the Breach in 2016. Name???
Travis looked up from the pages and realized that both Holt and the older man were focused on that final line.
The old man exhaled hard and paced away from the table. “Five hours on this last point and we’ve got nothing. He’s not going to give up the name. It’s the linchpin. He knows how important it is.”
“Let’s not write it off yet,” Holt said.
“I’ve done more interrogations with phen-d than anyone, and I promise you—”
“Porter—”
“I promise you, he’s not going to tell us. Worst of all is the longevity involved. Thirty-four years, this has been his deepest secret. Forget it.”
Holt started to respond, but a sound cut him off. Someone’s ringtone, out in the seating area ahead. Through the doorway and beyond the hall, Travis saw one of the men in the window seats take out his phone. He answered, listened for a long time, said a few words and then ended the call. He pocketed the phone, stood, and came and leaned in the doorway.
“Your contractors found a scrap from a wallet in the burned-out Humvee, with a Social Security number. Victim was a Secret Service agent named Rudy Dyer.” He looked at Holt. “You know him, sir?”
Holt nodded slowly, thinking. “Heard of him. Garner was close to him, as I recall.”
That piece of information hung in the air. All three men seemed to grasp its significance at the same time.
The older man—Porter—put it in words first: “If Dyer was involved in this thing, it’s because Garner wanted him to be. Which means Dyer was, what, a backup plan?”
“Something like that,” the guy from the window seat said.
“In that case he’d have to know as much as Garner knew,” Porter said. “He’d at least have to know who goes through the Breach in 2016—otherwise what good would he be?”
He looked thoughtful. He drummed his fingertips on the back of one of the leather chairs for a few seconds.
Then he turned and walked directly toward Travis. The movement was so unexpected and sudden that Travis dodged him by only the width of an arm. Porter stepped right into the space where he’d been standing and grabbed the Tap off the counter. He held it toward the others, and gestured at Moyer’s body.
“You believe him?” Porter said. “You believe this thing really does what he described?”
“It’s Breach technology,” Holt said. “Compared to whoever built it, we’re monkeys throwing shit.” He was quiet a moment. Then: “Yeah. I believe him.”
“Then let’s use it,” Porter said. “Any one of us can go back a few hours in our heads and order someone into that parking lot before the Humvee arrives. We can take Dyer alive and interrogate him.”
Holt seemed to get the point. “You think he’d give up the secret easier than Garner.”
“He’s newer to it,” Porter said. “In my experience, that matters. Sometimes a great deal.”
Holt looked at the Tap, Porter still holding it out. Holt’s expression faltered.
“Fucking thing goes inside your brain,” he said.
Porter shrugged, his face deadpan. It is what it is.
Holt considered it a moment longer, then turned to the man in the doorway. “Let’s see what you guys find in this mine shaft they’re talking about. I
f you come away from there with no new information, then we’ll use the Tap.”
The other two nodded. Porter turned and set the Tap back on the counter, then pulled out one of the chairs and sank into it.
Travis stood still for a moment, considering what he’d heard. Porter was clever, seeing the Tap’s potential so quickly. Maybe his idea about Dyer would even work—but it didn’t matter. None of these people would live to put it into action.
Travis crossed out of the room and continued aft. He turned a corner, came abreast of a darkened little space off the hall, leaned in and saw that it was a weapons cache. Heavy duty plastic-and-steel wall cases held Benelli M4 shotguns and Glock 19 pistols, with neatly arranged ammo stores beneath them. All the cases were closed tight, and each had a palm-scanner below its door handle.
Travis returned to the hall and followed it to its end: an open set of double doors into a private residence filling the aircraft’s tail. He stepped inside.
The space was beautiful. Its look matched that of the Oval Office and probably most of the White House’s interior. No doubt the same people maintained both. There was a broad, open kitchen to one side, a living area on the other, and a hallway leading back to unseen rooms. Travis crossed the entry and slipped into the hall. He passed a full bathroom, then a bedroom suite with a large walk-in closet. Only one door left. Travis stepped to it and saw exactly what he’d expected to see:
A windowless room. A portrait of George Washington on the wall. And Richard Garner tied upright to a dolly like Hannibal Lecter without the face mask. The top of the dolly was zip-tied into an exposed wall strut behind Garner; someone had roughly broken away part of the wall’s surface to expose it.
There was nobody else in the room.
No other victim.
Had that person been offloaded somewhere already?
It crossed Travis’s mind that Curtis Moyer might have been the second victim, but he discarded the idea: the timing didn’t work. Travis had experienced the dream well before Air Force One landed at Border Town, according to Dyer’s BlackBerry. Moyer couldn’t possibly have been in this room at the time.
There was a desk in the corner, which Travis hadn’t seen from his viewpoint in the dream—he’d been standing too close, directly beside it. Apparently this space was a study.
He focused on Garner. The man’s eyes were half open, staring downward at nothing. He wore a pair of dress pants and a dress shirt—probably the clothes he’d worn when he spoke to the nation last night. His coat and tie were gone, and both arms of the shirt had been cut away at the elbows. Needle marks dotted the exposed skin of his arms.
Garner blinked a few times. He opened his eyes a little wider, then let them relax again. He seemed to be getting past the lingering traces of the drug’s effect.
Travis stepped close to him and whispered, “Mr. President.”
Garner flinched and turned toward his voice. Looked right through him into the hallway five feet beyond.
“Who’s there?” Garner whispered.
Travis moved so that his voice would come from deeper within the room.
“Travis Chase,” he said.
It didn’t take long to explain. Garner already knew everything except the specifics of the past several hours. When Travis reached the end and told him what’d happened to Paige and Bethany and Dyer, the man shut his eyes tight and said nothing for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” Garner whispered at last. “For every part of this thing.”
“Holt’s going to be sorrier,” Travis said. He left it at that.
He was standing now roughly where he’d been in the dream. To see the room in real life, from this angle, felt surreal.
“Who did they have in here with you?” he asked. “Who else were they interrogating?”
Garner looked thrown by the question. “No one,” he said.
“There had to be,” Travis said. He hadn’t yet detailed the dream; now he did. He watched Garner for some spark of recognition, but none came. The man simply shook his head, as confused by the story as Travis himself had been when he opened the green door.
“We wondered if there was some entity that could’ve been responsible,” Travis said. “Something that would let a person transmit what they were seeing and hearing. Would let them send it to somebody else, if only for a few seconds.”
“I’ve never heard of an entity like that,” Garner said. “And there was nobody here with me at any point. I’d remember.”
For a long moment Travis stared into space and said nothing. He couldn’t recall ever being this lost for an explanation. The dream couldn’t have been just a dream. It’d really shown him this room, though he’d never set foot in it before. And the door combination had worked. How could any of that be reconciled with what Garner had just told him?
“You should get out of here,” Garner whispered. “You’ve got the suit; it’s all you need to get inside Border Town in 2016. Which is all that matters.”
“You know I’m not leaving you here,” Travis said.
Garner looked insistent. “It’s not worth the risk. You matter. I don’t.”
“Are the pilots aligned with Holt? Are they in the loop?”
Garner shook his head. “Holt ordered them to stay in the upper deck, and he brought me inside before they boarded.”
“All things being equal,” Travis said, “you’d be better off regaining control of this plane while it was airborne, wouldn’t you? You’d have more sway over how things unfolded from that point on. You’d dictate where it landed, and who’d be there to meet it. You could broadcast a video stream to television networks, from altitude, and explain what you needed to explain. Everything would happen on your terms. That would be better than if the whole thing broke open while you were sitting here on the tarmac.”
“Much better,” Garner said.
“Okay,” Travis said. “For now we sit tight. Let these people check out Rum Lake and then get back aboard. And at wheels-up I’m going to kill them all.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Travis didn’t leave the study from that point on. It made sense to stay close to Garner, and to be ready to change the plan in a hurry if there was any threat to the man’s life.
He watched the hallway most of the time, poised to move to one of the study’s corners if someone wandered in.
Other times, when he was sure no one was coming, he took stock of the room. He knelt and studied Garner’s restraints: heavy-duty plastic zip ties binding his wrists together behind him. Way too thick to be broken by just straining at them—they were probably rated for a thousand pounds. More of them held Garner’s shoulders and ankles to the dolly’s steel-tube frame.
Travis looked at the hole punched in the wall higher up, allowing the dolly to be zip-tied to the support strut behind it. The break revealed the wall’s surface to be standard plasterboard—strange for an airplane, but this one was obviously something of an exception. The strut the zip tie encircled was metal—probably aluminum—with crisp, machined edges. The material was strong as hell, of course. The plane was made of it.
“When you need to cut me loose, there are nail clippers in that desk,” Garner said. He nodded at it. “Tray drawer, top right. Ton of clutter, but they’re in there.”
From outside came the sound of the choppers’ turbines powering up, first one and then the other. A minute later their rotors began slapping the air in heavy thuds, and then they throttled to full power and lifted off.
For the next two hours nothing happened. The plane’s interior had gone dead silent, though Holt, at least, was probably still aboard. Probably Porter, too. Travis expected them to come back and have another go at Garner with the interrogation drug, but they didn’t. Maybe they really had written off their chances of learning more.
The rotors faded back in and then rose to a machine-gun rattle. The choppers landed outside and powered down. Soon afterward voices picked up again somewhere forward in the cabin. Two minutes after that,
a series of hydraulic rumbles reverberated through the 747, and its engines began to whine. Travis drew the survival knife from its sheath, and hid it behind the suit’s top.
Holt and Porter were sitting in the conference room as the plane taxied. Outside the windows, hazy twilight had settled over the terminals and runways. Porter was reading the simple handwritten notes for the Tap—the Tap itself remained on the counter along the back wall. Travis moved past the room and into the seating area ahead. The other eight men were there, like any regular airline passengers about to accelerate to two hundred miles per hour in a big metal tube. They weren’t buckled in, but they sat face forward with their heads against the padding behind them.
Five had taken window seats, all on the port side. The other three had sat along the aisle, also to port. Each was in his own lateral row. Each could see only the men ahead of him, unless he turned around. The plane nosed to the starting line of its takeoff run and its massive engines built to a scream, rendering sound within the cabin pretty much meaningless for the next thirty seconds.
By the end of those thirty, before the plane had even tilted upward and begun to climb, all eight men were dead.
Travis didn’t bother wiping the blade clean or hiding the knife under the suit again.
He strode back to the conference room as the plane banked and climbed. He held the weapon out to his side, letting it drip. He went right through the doorway, making for Porter first. The man saw the hovering knife in his peripheral vision and turned fast to look at it. Confusion broke over his face and then fear, and then the blade went tip-first into his trachea all the way to the spine, and Travis twisted and flicked it sideways on the way out.
Holt looked up in time to see the man spasm and collapse. In time to see the knife withdraw and remain bobbing in the air, then circle the end of the table to his side and come floating toward him. He jerked backward, almost tipping his chair over, and scrambled out of it. He ended up in a kind of defensive crouch in the corner, his neck hunched behind a tight barrier he’d made with his hands.