Ghost Country

by Patrick Lee

  And then he withdrew it. Something obvious had occurred to him.

  “Shut the drapes,” he said. “And kill the lights.”

  Travis waited. The rain had soaked through his shirt. The night was probably sixty degrees, but the dampness made it feel a lot colder.

  He continued to sweep his eyes across the darkness. It was hard to say how long he’d been kneeling here. Three or four minutes, at least. Paige and Bethany should be most of the way down the building by now.

  Travis cocked his head. He’d heard something. The sound was distant, keening, rising and falling. Just discernible in the rain. It reminded him of the wolves in the ruins of D.C., but the pitch was higher. Coyotes, maybe. Or simply the wind playing through the girders.

  Paige kept count of the floors as she and Bethany descended. Garner’s suite had been on the thirtieth. They’d come down twenty-three flights from there.

  The going was harder than she’d imagined. The metal treads were slick in the rain, and on some flights the handrail was missing. She tried to remember what the stairwell had looked like in daylight on their way up. Tried to recall any places where the landing was buckled or compromised in any way. She didn’t think she’d seen anything like that—it should have stuck with her if she had—but she couldn’t shake the sense that there was something. Something she’d noticed on the ascent. Something that hadn’t mattered then, but might matter now, in the dark.

  Travis had discounted the keening sound—what little of it he could hear—even though something about it troubled him.

  Now he heard something else. Very faint, at first. A kind of drumming. It might have been only the rain intensifying—but he felt no change in it on his skin.

  Then the sound swelled by a tiny degree, and he recognized it.

  And he understood that he was in trouble.

  Paige was stepping onto the fifth floor when it happened. The moment her foot came down, she remembered exactly what she’d been trying to think of, and why it did matter—not because of the darkness, but because of the rain.

  It was a clump of maple leaves, still attached by their stems to a narrow twig. Lying there curled and damp in the afternoon light, they’d been harmless. Something to step over and forget within a few seconds.

  Plastered flat now against the smooth bars of the gridwork, the clump might as well have been an oil slick.

  Paige’s leading foot hit it, coming down hard off the bottom step, all of her weight on it in the instant before it went out from under her.

  Her arms shot down to break her fall against the steel treads—it was that or break her skull—and she was on her ass before she realized what she’d done.

  “Paige?” Bethany said.

  “Fuck!” she hissed—she just managed to keep it from being a scream.

  She threw herself forward, away from the stairs and out across the blind void of the fifth floor, following the sound of rolling metal on metal.

  The cylinder.

  Rolling away from her, fast as hell.

  Toward the edge.

  The drumming was the sound of helicopter rotors. And the high, rising-falling tones were police sirens.

  Still down on one knee, Travis spun hard toward the sound-source, swinging the Remington around with him. Too late. A hand gripped the weapon’s barrel in the darkness and shoved it upward, and then something else—probably a silencer—slammed into his temple. He dropped. Landed facedown on the grid flooring. Just holding on to consciousness.

  Paige scrambled forward on all fours—there wasn’t time to get up on her feet. All visual reference was gone. There was only the steel grid beneath her, and the rolling sound, somewhere in the blackness ahead of her.

  She was plunging blindly toward it.

  And catching up.

  That was all that mattered.

  Very close now—it couldn’t be more than a foot or two ahead.

  And then the sound simply vanished.

  Like someone had neatly lifted the needle from a record.

  Paige understood. Panic flared across her nervous system. Her hands grabbed for purchase on the grid—anywhere they could—to arrest her forward motion.

  The hand that was further ahead came down onto nothing—it plunged into vacant space beyond the building’s edge, five stories above the ground.

  Her breath rushed out and for a second she was aware of nothing but her body’s momentum, unstoppable, taking her over the drop-off.

  Then her trailing hand closed around a bar of the gridwork, and she gripped it tightly, and her shoulder damn near came out of her socket as she wrenched to a stop. Her legs kicked out from behind her, sliding around and forward on the wet steel.

  And then she was still. Her hand gripping the bar. Her body lying sideways along the edge. She could feel the girder’s outer margin pressed firmly against the center of her chest.

  A second later the cylinder exploded, fifty feet below.

  A burst of blue-white light. Like a collapsing star. Blinding, painful to her dark-adapted eyes. It lit up the pines and hardwoods that crowded the base of the building, and the broken and canted slabs of Central Park West lying across exposed roots. She saw the cylinder’s casing shatter. Saw its internal structure burst, fragile wafers of alien technology scattering over the wet ground. Strange, spherical pockets of light flickered and popped from a few components. In the larger spheres Paige saw a fish-eye view of the present-day street. Warped, distorted police cruisers with their flashers on. The intact front of the building, blazing with internal light from dozens of windows. The images lingered for less than a second and then vanished. A moment later there was nothing to see but the fragments of the cylinder’s casing, their concave inner surfaces glowing deep blue in the night, haloed by the rainfall. And then they went dark too.

  Travis saw it. Saw the eruption of light thirty stories below, with his face pressed to the grid, and understood. It was the last thing he saw before the toe of someone’s boot connected with his head and shut everything off.

  Chapter Forty

  He faded in and out. More out than in. His head hurt like hell.

  He was lying on thin, bristled carpeting. There was something rumbling beneath it. His thinking cleared a bit, and he understood that the rumbling came from a spinning axle.

  He opened his eyes. He was lying bound on the floor of an SUV. He was in the back. The rear seat had been removed to make a flat storage bay. The vehicle was still in the city. The high steel and stone and brick faces of buildings slid by overhead.

  He heard Finn and at least two other men talking up front. He heard a wash of static and then he heard Finn tell someone in another vehicle—or a number of vehicles—to take 495. A minute later the roof of a tunnel drew across the view, and the city was gone. The hum of the tires echoed in the enclosed space.

  Travis took in fragments of the conversation between Finn and the others. Pieced together what’d happened. They’d hauled his unconscious body down through the ruin of Garner’s building and carried it two blocks to where it was safe for them to come back through the iris—inside a private garage. They didn’t have Paige and Bethany. The two of them had been long gone by the time Finn’s men had reached the bottom of Garner’s building.

  The procession of SUVs traveled for a long time on the freeway. Travis didn’t bother keeping track.

  Finn made a phone call. It wasn’t on speaker, but over the drone of the vehicle’s engine, Travis heard it ring four times before voice mail answered.

  “Audra, it’s me,” Finn said. “Everything’s tied off here, at least as well as it can be. I should be on-site about eight hours from now. I’ll call you again from the air.”

  He hung up.

  Travis considered what he’d heard. Audra. Alive. It wasn’t all that surprising. He might have guessed it if he’d thought about it, given what he’d realized at Garner’s place.

  A few minutes later the motorcade pulled off the freeway. It took a series of turns and short
jogs, and finally stopped. One of the front doors of the vehicle Travis was in opened and shut. The driver kept the engine running. Footsteps came around the back of the vehicle and then the rear window popped open. Travis heard the whine of jet engines powering up nearby.

  Finn leaned in and stared down on him. He had the surviving cylinder tucked under his arm. In the dome light, the man’s eyes looked deeply troubled.

  “What’s going to happen to you about an hour from now,” Finn said, “I despise more than anything there is. I wish to hell it could be avoided. But it can’t be, this time. There’s too much at stake. I need to know what you know, and who else you’ve spoken to. So please just cooperate with the interrogators. They’ll know if you’re being truthful. And it’ll be over sooner.”

  His eyes stayed on Travis a moment longer.

  “I’m sorry,” Finn said. He looked like he meant it. Then he closed the window again, pounded twice on the roof, and walked away.

  Travis saw the glow of headlights swing through the side windows as two other vehicles backed out of nearby spaces and took the lead. His own pulled out and followed, and a few minutes later they were on the freeway again.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Fifty seconds before the first shots hit the motorcade, Travis was thinking about Paige and Bethany. They were all he’d thought of for the past hour. He imagined them trying to find shelter in the unbroken darkness of the ruins. Imagined their uncertainty and confusion when they hadn’t heard any shooting from the top of the building. Imagined their fear now, all this time later, the reality of their situation sinking in as deeply as the cold and the dampness of the October night.

  The vehicle slowed and came to a stop. The procession had left the freeway a while earlier. It was traveling through dark countryside now, halting occasionally at what Travis guessed were stop signs at remote intersections. There was no sky glow to indicate a populated area nearby.

  The vehicle accelerated again.

  Travis thought of Paige touching his face, feeling it. Worried for him. He wondered what she thought of him right now.

  Half a minute later—no doubt precisely a half mile on the regimented grid of roads out here—the vehicle slowed again. Travis imagined they were getting close to their destination.

  The moment the SUV came to a complete stop, Travis heard something, somewhere ahead in the dark.

  It sounded like a playing card in bicycle spokes.

  Garner watched it unfold. It took fifteen seconds from start to finish, by which time he was convinced that every man on his Secret Service detail would’ve done just fine in the SEALs.

  The six of them advanced on the vehicles, silenced M4 carbines trained on the shattered windows up front. The lead SUV, suddenly absent its driver’s foot on the brake, had coasted across the intersection and veered off the corner into a shallow ditch.

  The team took another fifteen seconds to confirm that every hostile was dead—with the help of an extra bullet or two, in some cases.

  One of the men, Dyer, called out to Garner. “Clear, sir.”

  Garner came forward from the tree cover edging the road. He had his own silenced M4 in hand—a precaution in case things had gone badly, though his men had been adamant that he stay out of the initial attack. Given all he’d asked of them, he’d felt the point was worth conceding.

  Two of the men had the big rear door of the last SUV open. They waved Garner over. He arrived to find Travis Chase lying bound on the floor. At the same time he heard the others calling out to report no captives in the remaining vehicles.

  One of the agents leaned in with a knife to cut the heavy zip-ties binding Chase’s wrists and ankles.

  Garner stood back and stared north along the dark two-lane. He could see the lights of the front gate at Rockport, a mile away. The sentries there couldn’t have heard the suppressed gunshots, but it still wouldn’t be smart to stay here any longer than necessary. The two cars Garner and his men had brought were parked on the shoulder, a hundred yards down the cross street.

  Chase sat up in the back of the SUV.

  “Paige and Bethany are dead?” Garner said.

  Chase shook his head. “Not if we can help it.”

  Travis gave Garner the basics as they ran to the cars. Garner cursed softly when he heard Paige and Bethany’s situation.

  They reached the vehicles, two black Crown Victorias. Garner pointed Travis to a rear door of the lead car, then rounded the back and climbed in on the opposite side, next to him.

  “How’d you convince your guys to go along with this?” Travis said.

  “I told them the truth.”

  “And they believed it?”

  Garner nodded. “Two of them served with Tangent hubs, earlier in their careers. Besides, it was easier for them to swallow than the idea of half a dozen armed men walking into my place without their knowing it.”

  Ten seconds later they were cruising away from the attack site at exactly the speed limit.

  “Where’s Finn now?” Garner said.

  “On a plane. Going somewhere that takes eight hours to get to.”

  “Lots of places are eight hours’ flight time from New York,” Garner said. “Central Europe, north Africa, Brazil—”

  “He’s not going to any of those,” Travis said. “He’s going to where the flights out of Yuma were going.”

  “The Erica flights.”

  “You’re saying it right,” Travis said, “but you’re spelling it wrong in your head. Like the rest of us were.”

  Travis nodded at the cell phone clipped to Garner’s waist. “Bring up any mapping website. Look at northern Chile.”

  Garner drew the phone, switched it on, and pulled up a Mercator map of the world. He zoomed in until the northern portion of Chile filled the little screen. The most prominent city in view was a place on the coast called Arica. It had the Pacific Ocean to its west, and the Atacama Desert to its east.

  “Arica flights,” Garner said.

  Travis nodded. “We never saw it written down in Yuma. We only heard it in the recording.”

  “So the panic move when everything went wrong,” Garner said, “was to gather everyone in Yuma, and then airlift a select few to Arica, Chile?”

  “Part of that’s correct,” Travis said. “The gathering and the airlift happened. Hard to say how many they transported to Arica. A hundred flights, stretched out over something like a week, could’ve moved tens of thousands. Maybe they flew more than that. Or less. Those details we can only guess about.”

  “So what am I getting wrong?”

  “The same thing we all got wrong, from the very start.”

  Garner waited.

  “We asked ourselves, from the moment we saw the ruins in D.C., what kind of accident could’ve caused the collapse of the world. And when we saw Yuma, we wondered what sort of crisis could’ve compelled people—millions of them—to leave their homes and gather in a place that couldn’t possibly support them all.”

  “I’m still asking myself those questions,” Garner said.

  “And you’d be asking them for a long time,” Travis said, “because there aren’t any answers to them. They’re the wrong questions.”

  “What are the right ones?”

  For a moment Travis said nothing. He stared out at the dark woods going by. A few miles ahead he saw the spread-out sodium glow of a subdivision.

  “Think of what we know about Isaac Finn,” Travis said. “We know that at one time he was practically a saint. From the moment he was an adult he was putting himself in danger and probably every kind of misery, trying to reduce suffering in the world. We know he thinks way the hell outside the box. He left the Peace Corps and formed his own group, and brought into the fight every resource he could line up. Even things like psych profiling of populations, in an attempt to weed out the worst people and draw together the best. Those with attributes like kindness, concern for others, aversion to violence. We know it turned out to be a lost cause, and by the tim
e Rwanda was in full swing, he’d had enough. He walked away from the whole game. Or seemed to.”

  “None of which contradicts the theory we all agreed on earlier,” Garner said. “That Finn and his wife proposed using ELF-based systems to pacify conflict zones—at least long enough for peacekeepers to stabilize them. And that Finn is still working to realize that goal. And I agree, it’s pretty damn far outside the box.”

  “It is,” Travis said, “but I think his real goal is a lot farther out than that, and has been for a very long time. And he’s not doing it alone. They’re still working on it together.”

  “They?”

  Travis nodded. “Audra faked her death. I heard Finn leave her a voice mail before he caught his flight.”

  For the first time Garner looked genuinely surprised. And more open to considering whatever Travis was leading up to.

  “You said yourself, sir, the theory of a satellite malfunction doesn’t work. We’d shut them off or shoot them down. There’s no chance at all that they’d be out of control and harming people for a solid month.”

  “Right,” Garner said. “So have you figured out what goes wrong?”

  “Nothing goes wrong,” Travis said. “We’ve been off track from the beginning, looking for a mistake that doesn’t exist.”

  “I’m not following you,” Garner said.

  Travis looked at him. “When Finn switched on the cylinder inside his office yesterday, I was standing on the other side of the opening it projected. Just out of his view, but close enough to hear him speak. He stood at the iris, and he looked at the ruins of Washington, D.C., and he said, ‘Jesus, it works.’ ”

  “Meaning the cylinder,” Garner said.

  “That was what I thought. But I was wrong. I should have known by the way he said it. It wasn’t just surprise in his voice. It was more like reverence. Pride, even. It was the sort of tone you’d hear from Orville Wright if you took him out to LaGuardia on a busy afternoon.”

  Travis broke his stare with Garner and looked at the soft lights of the suburb coming up.