by Patrick Lee
He leaned on the windowsill. The grid immediately around 7 Theaterstrasse had gone out first, and within seconds others had followed in succession, plunging the city into blackness. Now as he watched, successive blocks, leading away up the valley and climbing the ridges on both sides, winked out one after another, until the only lights he could see were the headlights on E41, and a scattering of others on the streets of the darkened city. Almost immediately his eyes began to adjust, and he discerned the fog again, lit not from below but from above, by the half-moon. The whole bank of it, shrouding the city, caught and scattered the silver-blue light and set a contrast for the monolithic shapes of the buildings that rose from it, black and dormant in the night.
Paige was talking to someone at Border Town who had open lines to the three Berlin detachments stationed around Zurich. None of them were reporting any hostile contact. She finished the call and looked at Travis. The two of them were lit only by the screen of her PDA, which Travis still held, and by the vague glow of LEDs blinking like animal eyes in the jungle of wiring around them. The power to 7 Theaterstrasse hadn't so much as stuttered. An uninterruptible backup must be one of those rare things that actually lived up to its name.
"Whatever it is, it'll happen anytime now," Paige said. Trying to sound calm. Not succeeding very well.
Outside, dim lights began to appear in the windows of the few people awake at this hour. Candles or flashlights.
"You don't have to stay here, you know," Paige said. "You've done what we asked you to do. If you want to leave, you can."
Travis looked at her for a moment, then stared out over the city again.
"I know," he said, and made no move to take her advice.
At the edge of his vision, he thought he saw her smile. She leaned on the windowsill next to him.
"When it really gets hopeless," she said, "there's one move we can make that Pilgrim probably won't have anticipated. And even if the Whisper tips him off a few minutes early, there won't be anything he can do to stop it."
The tone of her voice and the deadness in her eyes told Travis what it was.
"We can set off the nuke," he said.
"We can set off the nuke."
"I don't think the locals will appreciate that."
"They'll get over it. In about a thousandth of a second. For the world's sake, it might be the prudent move."
"If Pilgrim's long-term agenda is bad enough."
She breathed a laugh, the sound empty as a waiting coffin. "I'm sure it's bad enough."
Travis thought about the situation. He could accept that she was right, that they were in deep shit, but the logic of it was hard to fit together. Didn't Pilgrim risk losing all the work he'd put into this building if he attacked it now? Any method of taking out the more than forty snipers stationed at these windows would involve some level of violence, and with it a high likelihood of triggering the pressure pads wired to the nuke.
But the Whisper would understand that. Would find a way around the problem. Any way. Maybe the attack would be a few canisters of VX gas, lobbed from a launcher two blocks away. Kill everyone in the building and not disturb a microchip. There had to be a thousand ways in, as clever as that, or more so. The Whisper would know them all.
Someone screamed outside. A man's voice. Travis saw Paige flinch, even as the scream turned into a drunken laugh, and someone else told the man to shut up, also laughing. The first man kept yelling, asking who'd turned off the fucking lights.
"It won't be much longer," Paige said. But it was. More than half an hour passed, and nothing happened. A few ambulances moved about the city, sirens quiet but flashers pulsing through the fog. Travis thought of home-care patients whose medical equipment had failed in the outage. Somewhere to the east, out of sight past the building's corner, was a bright light source. A building running on a generator. It had to be a hospital; the ambulances came and went from that direction.
Paige made more calls to Border Town. More calls to the Berlin detachments stationed around Zurich and to the AWACS aircraft circling high above. Four in the morning and all was well. The snipers downstairs continued to call in their status at close intervals. They'd put on FLIR goggles to let them see the shapes of human bodies through the fog, and in low tones they reported the movement of any pedestrian who strayed into the two-block radius around the building.
"I don't understand," Paige said. "What's Pilgrim waiting for?"
It was the slingshot feeling again. Each passing minute made it worse.
Mostly they watched the night, but at times either he, or she, or both of them stared at the lines on the PDA. The consensus from Border Town agreed with Travis: the sentences were gibberish, on the surface.
At a point when neither had spoken for over a minute, Travis said, "You must have a few guesses, at least."
She looked at him in the pale glow of the screen, and offered a smile. "I promise I don't."
"Sorry, not the lines," he said. "I meant the weapon. In four years, Tangent must've come up with a theory or two about what it does. If not by looking at all these wires, then by considering what Pilgrim would have to do to eliminate Tangent. He'd have to compromise the defenses at Border Town, right? Somehow he'd have to do that, from this place, five or six thousand miles away."
"We have a few guesses," she said. "They all hinge on the idea that this building is a transmitter antenna of some kind, possibly directional, that could target Border Town even at this distance. What it does could be any number of things. Maybe it kills people but leaves physical structures intact, like the effect of a neutron bomb. Or maybe it induces a reaction in specific materials, in a way that would kill Border Town's defenses for a period of time. That's one set of possibilities."
"Are there others?" Travis said.
"One other, in particular."
"Which is?"
"That the weapon has nothing to do with taking over Border Town. We only assume that's his plan because it's such a logical power grab. Border Town is the biggest asset in the world if he controls it, and the biggest liability in the world if he doesn't. Plus the Breach itself. Of course he'd want control of that. Logically, it all fits. But who the hell knows? Maybe logic isn't what's driving him. So maybe the weapon just does something catastrophic to the whole world. Maybe it kills ninety-nine percent of it, leaving a scattered remnant population that's easier for him to control."
"You sound like you're leaning toward door number two," Travis said.
She looked down into the fog shroud. "There's evidence for it."
He waited for her to go on.
"We know Pilgrim bought this place in 1995, just a few months after he left Border Town. Strange things started happening in Zurich in the following years, continuing to the present. Suicides have tripled. Domestic violence arrests are up by a factor of four. Certain rare forms of cancer have increased between five- and sevenfold. We only saw all this in retrospect, of course, after we found this place four years ago. It gets more compelling when you pin the locations of all these incidents on a map, and see the distribution around this building. You probably wouldn't see it if you weren't looking for it… but when you do see it, you know you're not imagining it. Seven Theaterstrasse is doing something already. Some little pilot-light version of what it'll do to the world if Pilgrim gets his way and throws the switch."
Travis held her stare a moment, then looked out into the darkness again. Another ambulance flickered silently through the fog on the far side of the river.
"Could you really bring yourself to trigger the nuke upstairs, if it comes to it?" he said.
For a long time she didn't answer, but when she spoke there was nothing hesitant in her tone. "Yes."
"In that case," he said, "I have an idea."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
"Tell me," she said.
"I need to know something first." He looked around at the mess of wires at their backs, filling the room except for this narrow passage by the window. "All this circuitr
y and equipment that's accessible, Tangent's studied every inch of it, right?"
"Every connection, every processor, every jumper setting. Everything."
"Any of the wires not plugged in?"
She didn't follow.
"I mean, was there some random corner on one of these floors where it looked like the work hadn't been finished? Wires hanging loose, circuit boards lying around, tools on the floor? Anything like that?"
She shook her head.
Travis thought for another moment and said, "He was three hours from activating this place when Tangent showed up in 2005."
She nodded.
"Three hours away because he was three hours from having it finished, right?"
"That's always been the assumption, yeah."
"The unfinished work wasn't anywhere in this tangle that we can see, and the five steel boxes were already welded shut, so he must have been done with whatever's in those. That leaves the ninth floor, behind the closed doors. Three hours' worth of work left to do, up there."
She was nodding again. Tangent had figured this part out long ago. Which he'd assumed.
"When you took over this building, where did you find the Whisper?"
"On the seventh floor, in a shielded box."
Travis thought it over, putting the sequence of events together in his mind. Trying to see it all from Pilgrim's point of view, that day when he'd been forced out of here. That thought process-mentally tracking someone's moves, getting inside a subject's head-was familiar, like putting his hand into a baseball glove he hadn't worn in almost two decades. The kind of thing he'd once been good at, in spite of his motivation.
"All right, it's May 17, 2005," he said. "Pilgrim is three hours from finishing the weapon. He's working on it. He knows Tangent is close, because you've nailed some of his people in recent weeks. He obviously doesn't know Tangent is literally moving in, or else he'd have left even earlier. Which means he's not using the Whisper at this moment, or else it would've warned him. And it's plausible enough that he wouldn't be. I mean, he's been building this place for ten years, this close to the end he probably knows all by himself what's left to be done."
"Okay," Paige said.
"So he's up there, working on the ninth floor. The Whisper is safe in its box on Level Seven. If he gets the two-minute warning that Tangent's coming down the street, what does he do?"
"Apparently he shuts the doors on Level Nine, shoves the pressure pads into the gaps, and flees the building."
"So he takes the time to do that," Travis said. "But he doesn't stop for a few seconds on the seventh floor, on his way down, to grab the Whisper? The thing that matters more to him than his own senses?"
"Yeah, we know that doesn't add up," Paige said. "Which is why we don't think he was on the ninth floor when the warning came. We think he was on the first floor, for any of several reasons. The kitchen is down there, along with the only working bathroom."
"That makes it even harder to believe," Travis said.
For the first time in this discussion, Paige looked uncertain. She waited for him to continue.
"He's down on the first floor. He gets the call. Shit, Tangent's coming. They're so close, even if he sprints out the door right now, he could still get caught. There's simply no time to run up seven flights for the Whisper. So he does the hardest thing he's ever had to do. He leaves the Whisper and he runs."
"Right."
"So how do the doors on the ninth floor get closed and pressure padded again?"
She shrugged. "He had to have done it before he came downstairs, as a standard procedure. Must have always done it. Sealed it up whenever he came down, unsealed it when he went back up. He would've known how to do that, how to switch off the pressure pads when he wanted to go back in. I'm sure we could figure it out ourselves, with a little trial and error-if 'error' didn't mean vaporizing a city."
"But that's the part that doesn't work," Travis said. "Pilgrim rigging the doors just to run downstairs for a minute. Think about it. Ten years of work. Work that's going to give him the world, or whatever he wants. He's three hours away from wrapping it up. He's probably done nothing but work on it for the final few days. Probably hasn't even slept. Let me guess, in the kitchen downstairs, every cup was coffee stained. Even the ones that weren't coffee cups."
She looked vaguely impressed at that.
"Amphetamines too, right?" he said. "Not meth. Maybe prescription stuff."
Paige nodded. "Dexedrine. Good guess."
"Not really. It's just nothing unusual. I spent three years working vice; it's not as long as most, but it's long enough. Long enough to see the same pattern, over and over. Pretty much identical, for all of them."
"All of who?"
"People doing things they're not supposed to. People whose lives would basically be over if they got caught. People who are in no position to fuck around. A guy like Pilgrim, those last days in this place, that close to getting away with what he was doing, I doubt he'd waste five minutes to go down and make a sandwich. He'd have someone bring it up to him, and he wouldn't stop working. Whatever he had to go downstairs for that day, it wasn't going to take long, and he sure as hell wasn't going to make it take longer by stopping to shut the door and arm the pads, then disarm them again when he came back. Not three hours from the finish line."
He could see in Paige's eyes that neither she nor anyone in Tangent had considered this angle before. Maybe they just hadn't been under the right pressure. Maybe they hadn't been in dire enough straits to consider the option Travis was considering right now.
"But the pads were in the doors," Paige said. "So what are you saying?"
"I'm saying he had it rigged so he could go in and out quickly, without having to stop every time. Minutes would've been precious at the end. I'm saying the pads on the doors upstairs are decoys. You could open those doors and walk through them, right now if you wanted to."
For a moment she said nothing. Just stared at him. Then: "The wires to the pads are live. We checked for current."
"Sure," Travis said. "He'd make it look real. He'd make it impossible to know, one way or the other."
More silence. More consideration. He watched her, aware that the idea didn't have to make perfect sense. It just had to be less batshit crazy than the other options they were stuck with, including sitting here like paper targets.
She seemed to agree. She took out her cell and dialed. He heard her address the same person at Border Town that she'd called earlier. She explained the idea. Travis couldn't tell, from Paige's half of the call, what the other party thought of it. A moment later Paige said, "Yeah, put them all on." Then she waited. And waited. And her eyebrows furrowed. The party on the other end said something-Travis couldn't make it out-and Paige took a hard breath. She lowered the phone an inch and met his eyes in the darkness.
"None of our three detachments in the city are responding."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Sixty seconds later they were standing at the double doors on the ninth-floor landing. The nuke filled up the space behind them, its paint gleaming like a cold smile. Over his headset, Travis could hear the snipers downstairs trading status updates, with a tension in their voices that hadn't been there earlier. They were up to speed on the plan.
"You want the honor?" Paige said, and indicated the ornate doorknobs.
He nodded. Why not? He put his hand on the left one. Then stopped. He breathed a laugh. "You know, he wouldn't have had to rig both doors with decoys."
In the vague light he saw her smile. Almost literally a gallows smile.
"If this works," he said, "then we'll find out pretty soon if you're right about the second defense system."
The way she was holding her rifle, she didn't look like she needed to be reminded of that. "If this works, and it's really this easy to get in," she said, "then I can't imagine there wouldn't be one."
He reached for the doorknob, but stopped again.
He looked down. In his other hand h
e was still holding the PDA. The five lines, black and white, shining in the darkness. Something about them struck him now. It was like the feeling he'd gotten outside the Black Hawk, staring at its tire but not consciously noticing the footprints beside it. There really was a meaning to the words. Not on the surface. Just beneath it.
"What?" Paige said.
For a few seconds he didn't answer. He thought if he even spoke, it'd break whatever thread of insight had formed.
Then he saw it, and it was so obvious he couldn't believe it'd taken this long.
"Look at the first letters of the words," he said. "In order."
He tilted the screen so she could see it better. He heard her exhale within less than a second.
The first line: GRAVITY ABERRATION, INNER NEXUS. GAIN.
The next four lines condensed into words as well: OUTPUT, BANDWIDTH, SLEW RATE, FEEDFORWARD.
"Amplifier," Paige said. "Those are all aspects of a signal amplifier."
They looked at each other in the glow of the screen. The next question was so obvious neither said it. The moment stretched. Travis saw in her eyes that the answer was as far out of her reach as his. What the hell was being amplified?
In his earpiece, one of the snipers downstairs spoke up. "Vehicle coming south on Falkenstrasse, pretty high rate of speed. I can take the driver from here."
Paige broke her stare with Travis, looked away at nothing, thinking hard.
"Permission to fire?" the sniper said.
Paige narrowed her eyes, thought for another half second. "No. Weapons tight."
Travis heard a hard breath over the comm unit. Then, from the bottom of the stairs, the eighth floor and its open windows, the sound of the vehicle's racing engine drifted up. Coming fast.
"Three blocks," the sniper said. "Two…"
By his tone, the man was asking Paige to reconsider the order. She closed her eyes.
Outside, the engine noise swelled. Then the pitch changed in an instant. Deepened. And began to fade. The vehicle had gone right past the building.