by Patrick Lee
Somewhere over Greenland, Travis reclined his seat and tried to rest. He was asleep within minutes.
Paige watched him.
After a moment she felt self-conscious and looked away, even though there was no one else in the room to see her.
She didn’t trust what she felt about him. There was every reason not to; her feelings were exaggerated all to hell right now. The guy had saved her from the worst thing she’d ever endured—had literally come in with guns blazing—and then carried her over fifteen miles to safety. Her memories of the journey out of the mountains, early on before she’d gone completely comatose, comprised a vignette of little waking moments. Coming to in his arms, being carried like a child. A big part of her had hated that feeling: being unable to stand up for herself after years of training her body to military-specialist standards. But here was the thing, and there was no getting around it: being carried had also felt good. Irrationally good, on some primal level that was all about vulnerability and security. He’d simply made her feel safe.
And then she’d kissed him. Jesus, why had she done that? There’d been no real need for it; he’d already been faking it well enough, as far as the chopper was concerned. Looking back, she wished she could write the moment off to her delirium, but in fact she’d felt pretty damn awake at that time. Rotor wash made for an effective alarm clock.
She glanced at him again. Sound asleep, sunlight across his chest, the shadows of folds in his shirt sliding back and forth as he breathed.
No, she definitely didn’t trust her feelings. A few hours earlier, when she’d seen his life history on the screen of her PDA, she’d taken it like a kick to the stomach, and then had immediately found herself rationalizing, finding ways to cut him slack, to not blame him for what he’d done—for what he’d been—in his distant past. It was a wonder she hadn’t said it all out loud and made an ass of herself in front of her people.
All this, superimposed over the thing she wasn’t dealing with at all.
Her father.
Even now, she hadn’t cried. Not since her initial reaction in the clearing. She’d tried. Tried to get there, to at least accept that it had really happened, if nothing else. So far, it hadn’t worked. It was still too big, too close—she couldn’t get a sense of where its edges were.
It would happen in its time. It seemed there was no forcing it.
For now, she thought she could use some sleep of her own. She stood and left the room to find a place by herself.
Travis felt someone shake his shoulder. Had he even slept? It hardly felt like it. He opened his eyes to find Paige standing over him, haloed by the ceiling lights of the little room. Outside was darkness, broken every few seconds by the pulse of the aircraft’s starboard beacon.
“Wheels down in five,” Paige said.
Travis nodded. She left the room to speak to someone in the hallway.
The plane banked steeply, offering a view of its destination: Switzerland’s Meiringen Air Force Base, its runway threaded tightly between mountain ridges in a way that was uncomfortably familiar.
Ten minutes later Travis stepped out of the plane’s tarmac-level exit into crisp air, the stars hard and bright above the mountains.
A tandem-rotor helicopter—a Chinook, he thought it was called—waited with its turbines already whining at idle. The team transferred the gear, and within five minutes they were airborne again, moving north over the high country toward Zurich, and whatever waited at 7 Theaterstrasse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Zurich was close to what Travis had pictured. He sat beside Paige in the last SUV of the motorcade winding its way down into the heart of the city. Under the black sky, the clean lines of centuries-old architecture descended in fractured order to the river. Ahead and below, a fog bank had settled over the low-lying blocks that flanked the waterfront. Gray specters of mist drifted along the deepest streets of the city. The motorcade descended into the fog just before swinging left onto Theaterstrasse.
Ahead and to the right, rising straight from the water, was the only nine-story building for several blocks. Paige and the others in the vehicle reacted to the sight of it, if only in subtle ways. Hands unconsciously tightened the clasps of Kevlar armor. Gripped the stocks and barrel guards of rifles. Drummed on armrests.
The detachment operators had put on their gear aboard the Chinook. Travis hadn’t asked if they’d brought a set for him. They had. In addition to the Kevlar, he now wore a tiny comm unit in his ear: a microphone and receiver that were always on and linked to the rest of the team. They’d given him a gun, too. A rifle identical to theirs. Identical to the one he’d already killed with, while kneeling over a muddy hole in Alaska.
Paige called Border Town on her cell for an update. She’d done this every five minutes since they’d touched down at Meiringen. Right now there was an AWACS aircraft making broad circles thirty thousand feet above Zurich. Six attack helicopters were staged in parking lots along the ridges east and west of town. Farther out, F–18s orbited, ready to kill any unauthorized thing that came within fifty miles of the city on wings or rotors. Every traffic camera for miles had specially filtered lenses that reduced windshield glare and allowed high-res facial imaging of vehicle occupants at night. These cams were all networked to a system that could recognize Aaron Pilgrim and several of his known allies. If they did, three detachments from Tangent’s Berlin hub were standing by in the city, ready to move against them.
None of it reassured Paige, Travis saw. Rock, paper, scissors.
On the outside, the building was beautiful. Ancient stone facade rearing up to the sky. Cobblestone approach. Wrought-iron fence gleaming in the mist, its sheen catching the city lights through the fog.
On the inside, the place looked like the home of an obsessive-compulsive who couldn’t pass a used computer store without buying out its entire stock, and had done so on a few hundred occasions. Travis wasn’t up on computers—hadn’t owned one in the year since he’d rejoined the free world, and the last time he’d seen one before that, the term e-mail hadn’t yet made it into popular culture. He’d seen his brother’s impressive setup for the home business, and he’d gone online a few times at the library in Fairbanks in recent months. His experience ended there. But even a glance at the interior of 7 Theaterstrasse made it clear that no amount of familiarity would’ve helped. Supercomputer designers would’ve been stumped. Probably had been. No doubt Tangent had brought in the best people.
Beginning at the main-floor foyer, where six members of another Berlin detachment stood guard, the building’s space, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, was filled with wires, and computer boards, and cables, and pieces of equipment Travis didn’t recognize at all. A rain-forest overgrowth of circuitry, lit from within by its own galaxy of tiny LED indicator lights. Here and there, window fans were bolted to walls or the ceiling, aimed at particularly dense clusters of wiring and spinning at full speed, as they must have been for years and years. Elsewhere, air-conditioning units whirred softly, the radiant heat of their motors vented away through metal ductwork toward exterior walls.
“Power’s never been shut off since you took over the place?” Travis asked Paige.
“Oh no.” She said it like he’d asked if she’d ever juggled straight razors. There was more behind her answer than she was letting on. He had an idea he’d find out what it was soon enough, and didn’t ask.
“The building runs off the city grid, but there’s an uninterruptible backup, powerful enough for the whole place. It’s kicked on twice in these past four years, during outages. Thankfully.”
They moved through the foyer toward the stairs. In the recessed space beneath them, Travis saw something that was at odds with the rest of the place. It looked like a little painter’s studio: an easel tucked against the wall, a few spare canvases, and a scattering of oil-paint tubes covered in dust in the corner.
“What’s that about?” Travis said.
“Nothing, as far as we know,” Paige s
aid. “Maybe a remnant from whoever owned the place before Pilgrim.”
They went past it to the foot of the stairs. The circuit-board jungle flowed up the marble steps, woven through the spindles of the railing. The passage through it all was only wide enough for single-file movement. Paige took the lead, Travis just behind her.
On every floor, half a dozen more of the single-file rabbit tunnels branched out from the one that wound up the stairs. Whatever purpose these runs had served Pilgrim, they served Tangent now. Travis saw that most of the pathways led to the outer walls and then ran along them, allowing access to the windows, several of which had Tangent snipers and spotters in place.
On the third floor, Paige led the group away from the stairs. Down one of the tunnels. Past three sniper teams. The path turned back in toward the interior, the wilderness of cables and silicon and flickering LEDs. It ended at something like a clearing, a circular space twelve feet across. At its center was a steel box the size of a footlocker. A thick trunk of bound wires descended from the canopy above and fed into the box through a hole in its lid. The lid itself was welded shut.
Paige stepped aside at the mouth of the clearing, but only enough to let him see past her. She was still blocking him from actually moving out of the tunnel and approaching the steel box.
“We never go much closer than this,” she said. “Our first inspection of the place showed us the need for caution. There are five boxes like this in the building. We’ve never tried to open them.”
“Just ran out of curiosity, right?” Travis said.
Paige smiled dryly. “Yeah. Also, they’re resting on pressure pads that are sensitive enough to react to any change of weight distribution. Putting a hand on top of one of these boxes, or against its side, would result in something bad. The same something bad that would happen if the building’s power were cut.”
Again, Travis didn’t ask. His eyes picked out the thin black wafers of the pressure pads under the box’s corners, their fine wires snaking across the floor to join the tangle.
“Follow my lead,” Paige said. “Move like I move. Don’t get any closer to the box than I do.”
With that, she stepped into the clearing and began to circle it along its outer wall. A wall of wires. Travis followed. Twice Paige pointed to indicate the wires for the pressure pads. Travis didn’t need them pointed out, but he understood her need to do it.
A moment later they were on the far side of the box, and Travis saw what he’d expected to see. Covering the back side of the box, and the floor around it, just discernible in the shifting LED light, was a vast sprawl of the same writing he’d seen in the enlargement on Paige’s wall. In real life, the writing was newsprint-sized, and at a glance he thought it must be half an hour’s worth of reading material.
Within seconds he saw that he was wrong.
It was only a single phrase, written over and over, almost maniacally. There had to be a thousand variants of it, in all directions, but the words were the same everywhere. They read simply,
GRAVITY ABERRATION, INNER NEXUS.
He translated it for Paige and told her about the repetition. She reacted with a mixture of confusion and disquiet, the look of someone surprised and shoved off balance in the worst possible direction. For another moment she only stared at him.
“That’s it?” she said.
“That’s it.”
She looked from him to the others, still standing in the tunnel. One of the Tangent operatives, Haslett—probably the oldest of the unit at close to fifty—was already typing it into a PDA.
Travis watched Paige’s eyes as she pondered the line’s meaning. For four years Tangent had probably worked with the world’s best cryptanalysts, cycling fragments of this jumble through a million hours of computer time, in the hope of decoding a thousand-page text file of useful data. Instead they’d gotten four words. And nobody knew what the hell they meant.
“Four more of these boxes,” Paige said. “Let’s get to them.” If there was any hope in her voice, Travis missed it.
The other clearings were on Levels Four, Five, Six, and Eight. Same-sized boxes, same-sized clearings, and the same-sized sprawls of repetitive text. To the extent that it mattered—not a hell of a lot, apparently—the messages were different in each place.
They read, respectively:
OPTICAL UNIFICATION TENSOR, PARALLEL UNIFICATION TENSOR.
BROAD AXIS NULL DRIVER, WORKABLE INFLOW DETOURS TO HARMONIC.
SYSTEM LEVERAGE, ETHER WASTE, RIGHT ANGLE TRANSFER EGRESSION.
FREE ELEMENT EXPULSION, DIRECTED FLOW ONTO RADIANT WITH AXIAL RESISTANCE DETERMINED.
Long before they’d reached the last one, Travis could see the group’s reaction to the messages as a whole. And Paige’s. More despair and anxiety than he’d ever seen gathered in one place.
“You might as well see the last thing,” Paige said, and led him back to the stairway.
Halfway up the stairs to the ninth floor, the jumble of wires ended. The last steps were open and clear. At the top of the staircase was a ten-by-ten-foot landing, bound by walls on the left and right, with a set of double doors at the end providing the only access to the rest of the ninth floor. The doors were closed, and a big, unsightly thing stood before them like a sentry on duty.
From the floor beneath it, through tiny holes, emerged the fine wires Travis had seen connected to the pressure pads throughout the building. They all fed into the thing on the landing. Now Travis saw more pressure pads tucked into the seams around the double doors. These too were wired into the thing that stood before them.
Travis knew what the thing was, though he’d never seen one in person before, and didn’t suppose the ones he’d seen in movies were very authentic. They hadn’t been, but he knew it by sight anyway. It was cone-shaped, the height of a washing machine, drab green with a dark red star painted on it. One side of it was open, revealing complex circuitry, and admitting the wires that snaked in from every pressure pad in the building. Any disturbance to those pads would trigger this thing.
“Pilgrim has connections,” Travis said.
“Pilgrim has connections,” Paige said. Then: “The Russians never had the accuracy with their missiles that we did, so their philosophy leaned toward making the warheads more powerful. This one came from an SS–18. Enriched uranium primary. Tritium secondary. Yield is about five megatons. Enough to turn everything within twenty miles of this spot into vapor.”
“Now I know why this place unnerves you guys,” Travis said.
Paige looked at him, and instead of confirmation in her eyes, he saw only more desolation.
“No you don’t,” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ten minutes later Travis and Paige were standing at an open window on the eighth floor, one of the few unoccupied by snipers. The rest of the detachment had dispersed throughout the building to reinforce the defenses, either at other windows or at the ground-floor entrances.
Travis stared out, high above the city and the fog. Nearby building tops rose from the mist like ships in a marina. Deep beneath the surface, streetlights cast diffused circles of bluish light, and here and there, Travis saw the roaming glow of vehicle headlights, and heard the sharp echoes of footsteps or voices, some of them American. Drunken tourists, the only people awake in Zurich at a quarter past three in the morning. The only steady traffic was a modest flow along a primary street a few miles to the west, bisecting the river and climbing away toward the ridges to the north and south. It was the road Travis and the others had come in on, E41.
Beside him, Paige’s breathing betrayed her anxiety. It reminded him of the fear he’d seen within the first Tangent group in Alaska, when they’d noticed the footprints in the mud. Not cowardice. Real fear. Fear in someone who didn’t scare easily.
“I really thought we had a chance,” she said. “I thought those inscriptions would tell us what we needed to do, and then however hard it was, we’d do it. I didn’t think we’d get this far and
still be at zero.”
Her eyes roamed back and forth over the city. Like she expected hell to come rolling in at any second. Maybe it would.
“I don’t even know what to do now,” she said. “That was our only move. Now . . . we could leave if we wanted to, but it wouldn’t matter. It’s not like any place is safe, if Pilgrim achieves his goal. Staying feels better, like we’re doing something, right? But obviously we’re not. Forty-two snipers in this building, but we won’t slow him by a minute. Not when he has the Whisper. He’ll know what to do.”
For a long time, neither spoke. In the night around them, Zurich rumbled on idle.
“Tell me what’s worse than the nuke upstairs,” Travis said.
She looked at him, almost grateful for something to talk about besides the dead end they’d come to.
“We don’t think the nuke is the only defense system in this place,” she said. “We don’t even think it’s the main defense.”
Travis waited for her to explain.
“The bomb’s purpose is obvious,” she said.
“No opening the boxes,” Travis said. “No opening the ninth floor.”
She nodded. “There are even pressure pads embedded in the ceiling on Level Eight that prevent us from cutting through to the ninth floor that way. Same for the exterior walls. And the roof. And the windows on that level. Which are painted from inside. Obviously we’ll never figure out the purpose of this place until we can see into those boxes and that floor, and Pilgrim doesn’t want that, so . . . there you go. Simple, right?”
“Right,” Travis said. “But?”
“But it doesn’t work. The logic of it. It’s like the single hostage problem. If a captor has one hostage, his threats are automatically empty, because he knows that if he kills the hostage, he’ll be left with nothing. I know people take single hostages all the time, but those people are idiots. Pilgrim is as far from an idiot as you get. There’s no way he’d leave this building defended only by something he wouldn’t actually want to use. Something that would destroy the place, when all his ambitions depend on it. Don’t get me wrong. The bomb would go off, if we did any of the things that would trigger it. But Pilgrim would expect us to be careful. And there’s something else I think he’d expect. Something he’d have to expect, for the sake of caution.”