by Patrick Lee
Who had Paige wanted him to call?
He crouched over the backpack and took out her phone. The ninth number on the speed-dial list had no name beside it. Just the number. He selected it and pressed send.
A man answered on the first ring. "Go ahead, Miss Campbell."
"I'm calling on Miss Campbell's behalf," Travis said. "My name is Travis Chase. She instructed me to call this number."
The man on the other end hesitated. Then Travis heard someone talking in the background, and a sound like the phone changing hands.
Another man spoke. Travis recognized his voice. "Mr. Chase. This is Richard Garner. What's going on there?"
Richard Garner. The president of the United States.
CHAPTER FORTY
Garner had been briefed on all events surrounding Tangent in recent days. Travis filled in the last half hour. When he'd finished, a silence drew out on the line.
The darkness blanketing the desert had begun to lift. Far away to the southwest, sunlight touched the tips of the Rockies.
"You say the defenses are currently down?" Garner said.
"Yes," Travis said, "but how much longer is a guess. No more than twenty minutes, I'd say."
"It's not enough time to get troops on-site. Not enough by half. That option's off the table…"
Something in his tone gave Travis a bad feeling about what was on the table. If it was what he expected, he understood why Paige had really sent him up here to make this call.
Garner told him the option. Travis had been right.
"Mr. President," he said, "there are survivors inside this building."
"I realize that. We have to think about the world's interests right now."
"What about the entities inside? The dangerous ones? Do we know how those will react? How the Breach itself will react?"
"No," Garner said. "We don't. But scenarios like this one have long been considered from every angle, by people who understand the factors in play better than your or I. This is the only choice we have. The missile will come from a silo about two hundred miles away, which means it'll reach Border Town in less than five minutes from the time I give the order. I'm sure your own safety is not on your mind right now, but if you have access to a vehicle, you could probably get outside the kill radius during that time."
Travis was silent. No, he hadn't been thinking of his own safety. Still wasn't.
Instead, another thought had come to him. Or almost come to him. He remembered grappling for it during the night, when he'd woken with Paige in his arms. Some connection he'd made, some insight at the edge of sleep. It was close to the surface again.
"Mr. Chase?" the President said.
Travis didn't answer. If he spoke now, if he did anything but feel for this idea, he would lose it.
"Mr. Chase?"
Another several seconds passed. Close. Right at the boundary of his awareness.
"Travis," Garner said.
It bloomed. Clear as a captioned image on a screen. He saw its meaning.
And its significance.
He saw hope, too. Hope that the Whisper could be beaten, after all. Right now it was tucked away in its little box. Right now, everyone in Border Town, good and bad, thought he was dead. And right now, there was a chance to find the one thing on Earth that the Whisper seemed to fear. Why else would it have killed all those people working to create it? That was a lot of smoke for no fire.
"There's another option," Travis said.
This next part would require a lie. A half lie, anyway. Or else it would never work.
"I'm listening," Garner said.
Travis explained about Lauren. About the quantum computer. Then he said, "We know where it is." That was the half lie. There was no we. Just he. He knew where it was. Thought he knew, at least.
"Where?" Garner said.
Travis told him what he believed. Then the president grew silent again.
"The Tangent detachment is still on Grand Cayman," Garner said at last. "They could probably reach the house in about ten minutes. It'll take another ten for them to do what you've described. If we make this gamble, and come up empty, we'll have lost the nuclear option as well. Border Town's defenses, once they're back up and running, can kill an ICBM a long way off."
Travis thought about it. Turned the possible outcomes over in his mind.
Garner said, "I need a zero-bullshit answer from you, Mr. Chase. How high is Tangent's confidence on this idea?"
Travis got as close to zero-bullshit as he dared. "There's no better move to make, sir."
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Travis watched it all on Paige's cell phone screen, linked to the headset camera of the detachment leader on Grand Cayman. The man's last name, Keene, appeared in tiny letters in the lower left corner of the frame. The team reached the house in just under the ten minutes the president had guessed, speeding at eighty miles per hour along the coast road, the Caribbean bright blue in the sunlight there.
Eastern Wyoming was still mostly dark, a few minutes before full daybreak. Travis sat on the concrete beside the fifty-one-story-deep hole in the ground, and watched the team enter the estate two thousand miles away. They reached the mechanical shed beside the pool within half a minute.
"You expect this to work, huh?" Keene said. He had a Texas accent. One of those guys who'd grown up roping cattle and gone on to design guidance systems for cruise missiles. Probably still roped cattle for fun.
"We'll know in a minute," Travis said.
One of the operators found a heavy, two-foot-long steel tool on the wall, its business end shaped to pry something specific. The guy set his rifle aside, took off all electrical gear, and dove into the pool with the implement in hand. Through Keene's headset, Travis saw the man pry up a drain plate on the bottom of the pool, then swim to the side.
The pool took only a few minutes to empty. The outgoing pipes must be as oversized as the system built to fill the pool. A system five times faster and more powerful than what any homeowner would realistically install, regardless of personal net worth. Who the hell needed to fill his pool in an hour?
Someone who had something hidden beneath it.
Keene and the others descended the ladder to the wet stone bottom of the emptied pool. Travis watched Keene's viewpoint scan the flagstones, looking for a telltale sign of what had to be there. After a moment, the image stopped on one particular stone.
"Grout's different around this one," Keene said.
Even in the resolution of the cell phone's screen, Travis could see what he was talking about. Keene called for one of the others to bring the pry bar again. Its squared head worked well enough to gouge away the sanded grout around the slab. When the gap was deep enough for the tool to get a purchase, Keene wedged it in and pried. The stone resisted for only a second, then gave with a grind-and a hiss like a seal breaking. Hands reached into the frame and lifted it away to reveal a narrow shaft descending into darkness, with built-in rungs. A minute later the team was inside the chamber below. It was larger than Travis had expected: forty by forty feet at least, extending far beneath the house itself. Steel beams as solid as bridge supports crisscrossed the ceiling, braced by upright columns every fifteen feet or so.
It looked like what he'd expected. It looked like a computer lab. Workstations. Wiring schematics spread out on desks. Swivel chairs everywhere. Some kind of makeshift conference table: a line of smaller tables shoved together, surrounded by more chairs.
But no quantum computer.
Nothing even close. There were laptops on some of the desks. The Tangent operators turned each one on and saw the familiar onscreen brand logos before the password prompts came up.
Otherwise, the place was empty of equipment.
Travis felt as lost as he had at any time since his hike in the Brooks Range had been interrupted. How could it not be there? Why had the Whisper killed all of those people if they didn't have anything that could affect it?
Keene's viewpoint made a last sweep
of the room, as he turned to follow his men back up the ladder.
"Wait," Travis said.
The viewpoint halted.
"What is it?" Keene said.
"On the wall above the conference table. What is that?"
Keene looked at it. Moved closer. It was a huge oil painting, abstract, scratches of dark green on a white surface.
"It's nothing," Keene said.
"It's everything," Travis said.
He looked at the phone's onscreen menu buttons. One was labeled CAPTURE.
"Do me a favor," Travis said. He directed Keene to go closer, until the painting more than filled the phone's screen, and he captured freeze-frames of its four quadrants. At that resolution it became legible.
A message from the Whisper. Written in the scratch language. Travis switched back and forth through the screen captures, and read it:
HELLO, TRAVIS. RIGHT NOW YOU MUST BE SITTING NEAR THE OPEN ELEVATOR SHAFT ABOVE BORDER TOWN, ABOUT NINETY SECONDS BEFORE SUNRISE. I'VE SEEN TO IT THAT AARON PILGRIM DOES NOT REMEMBER PAINTING THIS PIECE, NOR DOES HE REMEMBER SELLING IT TO THE GALLERY THAT ELLIS COOK WOULD ONE DAY VISIT WHILE ON VACATION IN ZURICH WITH HIS DAUGHTER. I'M SORRY TO INFORM YOU THAT THERE IS NO PLUS-TEN-QUBIT QUANTUM COMPUTER INSIDE THIS HOUSE, OR ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, IN JUNE OF 2009. THE ORDER OF THE QUBIT WAS NEVER EVEN CLOSE TO REACHING ITS GOAL. YOU MAY FIND IT GROSSLY INEFFICIENT TO MURDER THIRTY-SEVEN PEOPLE OVER A DECADE AND A HALF, JUST TO GIVE YOU A REASON TO KEEP THE PRESIDENT FROM NUKING BORDER TOWN TWENTY MINUTES AGO, BUT REALLY, IT WAS A PRETTY SIMPLE MOVE FROM MY POINT OF VIEW. AS OF THE MOMENT YOU REACH THE PERIOD AT THE END OF THIS SENTENCE, BORDER TOWN'S SURFACE-TO-AIR DEFENSES WILL COME BACK ONLINE, ELIMINATING THE NUCLEAR OPTION. YOU NOW HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO FOLLOW YOUR FIRST INSTINCT: PUT ON THE TRANSPARENCY SUIT AND MAKE YOUR MOVE AGAINST PILGRIM AND HIS PEOPLE. I'LL MAKE YOU A PROMISE: IF YOU DO IT (YOU WILL) THEN PAIGE CAMPBELL WILL SURVIVE. IN ALL OTHER POSSIBLE FUTURES, SHE DIES JUST OVER ELEVEN MINUTES FROM NOW. I'LL SEE YOU SOON, OLD FRIEND, AND WHEN I DO, YOU'LL FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL REALLY ABOUT. HAVE FUN.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Climbing down the shaft ladder with the suit on was tricky. There was a difficulty to grabbing rungs with hands he couldn't see. He only had to go down two stories. From there he used an override switch to open the B2 elevator doors, and stepped out of the shaft into the hallway. He'd asked Keene for the locations of Defense Control, Security Control, and the Primary Lab. The places where Pilgrim and his men were clustered. Defense Control was on B4. He entered the stairwell and made his way down. Through the window in the door he saw four men, all in their twenties, watching a bank of high-definition monitors as if each were showing the last play of the Super Bowl. In fact they were showing the empty desert around the facility. It appeared to be a single large room. No internal hallways leading off out of sight. No blind corners. There was a bathroom, but its door hung open and Travis could see that it was empty. No one else in the room except the head-shot bodies of its original occupants: the woman Travis had heard over the speakerphone earlier, and five men.
Along the wall opposite the monitors, the drywall had been blown out by an explosion, and even the structural steel columns were warped and charred. Between two of the uprights, a spiderweb of delicate wiring and various computer cables-hundreds of each kind-had been attached to the damaged wiring with clamps and adapters. This was the half hour's work that'd brought Border Town's defenses back online.
Travis had the rifle slung on his shoulder. The only visible thing about him. He could go in and shoot these four guys in a matter of seconds, even without the suit; not one of them had a weapon within reach. But directly below this room was Security Control, where more of Pilgrim's people were probably stationed. The sound of shooting would carry at least that far, so these four kills would have to be quiet. Pretty quiet, anyway.
He unslung the rifle and leaned it against the wall next to the door. Then, keeping his eyes on the men through the glass, he turned the knob slowly and eased the door open. A moment later he eased it shut again, from the inside. All heads were still aimed at the monitors.
How to do this? There were options. Strewn across the floor below the repaired wiring were various tools, some with blades on them, though not especially large ones. There were screwdrivers that might serve as decent stabbing weapons, including an eight-inch Phillips head. Last, but not even close to least, was a tool that appealed to Travis's lack of subtlety. A two-foot-long crowbar. Travis picked it up with both hands, to prevent it from scraping on the tile and giving him away. He turned to the four men, their backs to him, and gripped the weapon like a baseball bat. He looked at the executed bodies on the floor, their open eyes still registering the panic in which they'd died.
He didn't feel at all bad for what he was about to do.
The four men were seated only feet apart from one another. A nice easy row of targets. Travis decided to start on the right end and work his way left, to give his swing plenty of room.
The first impact sounded like a wet branch breaking. Travis caught the man just above the ear and crushed the sidewall of his skull inward by at least an inch. The body pitched sideways into the second man, who turned his head just in time to take his own hit straight to the forehead. His eyes snapped shut and he fell from his chair also. The third man had another second to react. He had no idea what the hell was happening, but his arms had enough sense to cross in front of his face as he screamed. Not a useful strategy. Travis stepped toward him and brought the crowbar down on top of his scalp the way he would sink an axe into a log. The result was much the same.
Only the fourth man fully grasped what was happening. He threw himself from his chair, landed on his ass and skittered backward, ending up with his back in the corner and his arms up defensively. He watched the crowbar bob toward him.
"Wait, wait!" the guy said. He looked about twenty-five. Still had some acne left over from his teens. Had to be wondering who the fuck was wearing his boss's old transparency suit. He seemed to be working out what he might say, here and now, to save his ass. In a way, it was fun to watch. Because nothing in the English language would suffice.
"You can just tie me up," he said at last.
Travis thought that sounded like an especially lame effort. He kept the crowbar up high, commanding the guy's attention, and kicked him just below the ribs as hard as he could. The guy's lungs collapsed from the blow and he caved into a sitting fetal position, crying. Travis brought the crowbar down on the back of his head, full force, and the crying stopped.
Silence in the room. These four were definitely dead. Travis gave each man another two solid bashes to be sure. Then he took a pair of wire cutters from the floor, pocketed them, and returned to the corridor.
He took the rifle from where he'd leaned it, but kept the crowbar. Went to the stairwell and descended one floor to B5. Security Control. Pilgrim's nearest people, after this floor, should be five levels down in the conference room, watching Paige and the others. Still too close to risk gunshots. Sound might carry that far through the vents.
Security Control had the same kind of door as Defense Control. Same room layout too. But only one of Pilgrim's men was on duty.
Travis went in and beat him to death. In a way, the past half hour had been worse than the time Paige had spent under torture in Alaska. If not physically, then in every other sense.
All that she had devoted her life to was about to end. Worse: it would be inverted to its malicious opposite. What Tangent had watched over and shepherded with the best interests of the world in mind, Pilgrim would sic on humanity to serve himself. Or if the Whisper's own plan really did take precedence, maybe something worse was coming. Something beyond the limits of what she could dread.
She'd spent these thirty minutes thinking of the most dangerous things locked up in the steel catacombs below her, and the harm they could sow.
Then there was Travis's corpse. Still lying right in front of her. She'd woken up nak
ed in his arms forty-five minutes ago, about as happy as she'd ever been since restricting her life to Border Town. Now he was gone. Because of what she'd asked him to do. It didn't help to remind herself there'd been no other option. Nothing helped.
She looked at the guards. Three of them now. All of them watching, not even glancing away. No chance to make any move. Except to make them kill her.
Which wasn't entirely crazy.
She knew what it felt like to wish for death as an escape. Whatever the hell Pilgrim was keeping her and the others alive for, it was likely to put her back in those straits. Very likely.
Fuck it, then.
The nearest guard was five feet away from her. Offering no warning about her intentions, she pitched her body forward into a somersault-tricky with her hands bound behind her-and came upright again with her right leg drawn against her chest, a foot away from the man. He drew back reflexively, one leg going back, the other staying in place, the knee locking straight. Beautiful.
Paige pistoned her foot into his knee as hard as she could. Heard it crack. Saw the leg bend exactly backward from the way nature had designed it to. He screamed and collapsed, keeping hold of his rifle, and centering it on her face now.
She closed her eyes, and a second later the room exploded with automatic rifle fire.
Whatever dying was supposed to feel like, this wasn't it. She heard bodies falling. Wondered how the hell she was capable of hearing anything. Or even thinking, given that her head should have been shattered by now.
The shooting stopped.
She opened her eyes.
The three guards were dead. And there was a rifle floating in the air.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Travis couldn't tell if there was more happiness or anger in her embrace. Either one might account for the fierceness of it. Over her shoulder, he saw the others passing the wire cutters along one by one, each freed person flexing circulation back into near-dead hands.