by Patrick Lee
Finn released her arm.
A second later she heard the Beretta's slide being racked behind her. F inn stepped away from the projected hole and gave Boyce a clear line of sight to make the kill. Boyce paused just outside the light cone, hesitant to let it touch him. Then he shrugged, stepped into the light and faced the hole.
Finn watched him assess his prey. Watched his expression take on the fake, wired kind of calm that spoke more of testosterone than real composure.
"She's cute," Boyce said. "Sure we have to rush this? It's not like anyone's gonna find the body and swab it for DNA."
Finn took a step closer to him and spoke evenly. "If I ever hear you advocate unnecessary suffering again, you'll be the one standing out there. Do you believe me?"
Boyce looked at him. The bullshit calm receded from his eyes. "Yes, sir."
"Make it painless. Shoot her in the back of the head, centered in a line between the ears. Don't miss."
"Yes, sir."
Boyce raised his Beretta.
He extended it a foot through the opening.
He thumbed off the safety.
And then a hand came out of nowhere, from outside the opening on the right edge. It locked onto Boyce's wrist and yanked it downward. Boyce had just begun to flinch when a second hand came through, this one holding a SIG-Sauer P220. It jammed the barrel into Boyce's eye and fired, blowing his head apart. A fragment of skull hit Finn in the face. He staggered back from the opening. In his peripheral vision he saw Kaglan, still in position at the door, reaching for his own weapon-but the SIG was already coming up to level on him. A tenth of a second later it fired again, three shots in a tight pattern. Kaglan screamed and went down. He managed to return fire, but his aim was all over the place, most of his shots missing the opening and cratering the windows beyond it. The SIG shooter stepped away from the opening on the far side until Kaglan ran dry, and then the weapon came back through the hole and began rapid-firing blindly into the room.
Finn threw himself flat and crawled behind the couch, for whatever cover it could provide. He heard the SIG fire dry, and it crossed his mind to get up and hit the off button on the cylinder, but already he heard the metallic scrape of the SIG's magazine dropping out, and almost on top of it came the smack of a fresh one being rammed home. Half a breath after that the shooting started again, fast and wild, hitting everything. Finn counted seven shots. Then silence. Which was strange: a SIG 220's clip held eight rounds. He glanced up and saw Kaglan struggling to move, blood seeping heavily from a wound in his side. And then the eighth shot hit Kaglan in the temple and took the top half of his head off.
Finn vaulted to his feet and threw himself toward the walnut table and the black cylinder. The reload would have to be slower this time-the shooter would have to fish in his pockets for another magazine, if he had one. In the split-second before he slammed his thumb down onto the off button, Finn raised his eyes and caught a glimpse of the opening. The shooter had stepped aside again, but the woman, Paige Campbell, was just visible, crouching low on the narrow beam. Her eyes found Finn's at the exact instant he hit the button, and as the circle shrank to nothing, the last thing he saw through it was her hand coming up-and giving him the finger.
Chapter Twenty
They ran until they reached the skeleton of the Ritz-Carlton. They stopped then, and turned, and the three of them watched the avenue to the south. Watched the framework of the high-rise, what they could see of it past the birches. Watched for the telltale burst of sunlight that would give away the opening of the other iris-from the cylinder Finn still possessed. It never came.
They climbed the oak to the Ritz's third floor girders. Bethany switched on their own cylinder, and thirty seconds later they were inside the hotel room, in the present, standing at the windows and looking south at the high-rise in the summer sun.
No unusual activity there. No one rushing in or out. No police response. Travis wasn't surprised-dialing 9-1-1 was probably not the standard procedure for emergencies in that building.
He saw Paige turn toward him. He looked at her. They were both still catching their breath from the run. Travis saw some kind of conflict in her expression. Like part of her couldn't believe what'd just happened, and another part wasn't surprised at all. After a second she just shook her head. She put one arm over Bethany's shoulder, the other over Travis's, dragged them together and squeezed them tightly. They stood that way, saying nothing, for over a minute. P aige used Bethany's phone, encrypted against a physical trace, to call Border Town. She set it to speaker mode. A woman answered on the second ring.
"Bethany?"
"It's Paige, Evelyn."
Travis heard a sharp exhalation on the other end, a mix of surprise and relief. Then a silence.
"Are the others with you?" Evelyn said.
Paige closed her eyes. "No. They're gone."
The line stayed quiet for several seconds.
"Bethany told me there's a blockade in effect around Border Town," Paige said.
"Yes. Fighter jets. So far they're staying outside the boundary."
"Has there been any contact from the president?"
"No. No contact from anyone."
Paige thought about it. Nodded to herself. "All right."
"What's happening, Paige? What's all this about?"
"I wish I had time to explain it, but I just don't. I need to go somewhere. When this is over with, I'll tell you everything."
"One question, then," Evelyn said.
"Sure."
"If there's a move against us by the military, and we can't stop it… do you want us to use the fallback option?"
Paige breathed out slowly. She paced a few steps.
Travis looked at Bethany and spoke quietly. "Fallback option?"
Bethany could only shrug.
Paige stopped pacing. "No," she said. "Not if it's the U.S. military. Do not use the fallback option."
"I understand," Evelyn said. Travis thought he heard another note of relief in her voice.
"Tell everyone to sit tight," Paige said. "We'll talk soon."
She ended the call. Turned to Travis and Bethany. "We need to get moving, fast."
"Where to?" Travis said.
"Yuma, Arizona. I'll explain at the airport." T hey packed in less than three minutes. Travis broke down the shotgun just enough to fit it back into the duffel bag, along with the manila rope. They stowed the cylinder in Bethany's backpack and left the hotel without bothering to check out.
They hit a shop on 14th Street, where Paige bought a pair of jeans and a T-shirt to replace her outfit, which still smelled like gasoline from the motorcade attack. She changed in the restroom. Travis had a cab waiting when she came outside.
"Reagan or Dulles," Travis said.
"Baltimore International, in case they're watching both of those. We need to be paranoid at every step from now on."
She ducked into the backseat, followed by Bethany and then Travis. N one of them spoke during the forty-minute cab ride. Travis glanced across Bethany at Paige a few times. The hug in the hotel room had been a nice enough icebreaker, but there was still a tension that couldn't be helped-and wouldn't be. He had no plan to bring up anything that'd happened between them, including his departure. Neither did she, in all likelihood. And that would be fine. When this was over, he'd go back to sitting on loading docks at two in the morning and trying not to remember her. He'd just be starting from scratch, that was all.
They got out of the cab in front of the private terminal in Baltimore. They headed for the building, set back thirty yards from the drop-off lane.
"We're done with Renee Turner," Bethany said. "After what just happened in the green building, her travel pattern is too easy to zero. These people have Homeland resources at their fingertips. They can look at the timing of our attack on them, then pull up travel and lodging patterns in a radius and interval around it. They'll see Renee's check-in at the Ritz, and they'll see that she flew from Rapid City last night, jus
t over the state line from Border Town. Taken all together, it's enough to smoke us. Renee shows ID here, the ticket agent gets a red pop-up window on her screen. We get a polite smile, and thirty seconds later we get arrested."
She thought about it as they walked. Glanced at Travis.
"Rob Pullman's a different story," she said. "They have no travel or lodging records for him. They have nothing that ties him to Renee, either. Her stopover in Atlanta can't link the two of them. Rob Pullman didn't show ID to board the flight. The only thing his name is on is a credit-card transaction: he bought a shotgun and some climbing rope in Virginia. But so what? That's a single purchase out of 10 million that happened around D.C. this morning. It's one point in the cloud. It's nothing." She looked at Paige. "Can our friends in the office building guess we're going to Yuma?"
"They can assume it."
Bethany thought it over. "Okay. If Rob Pullman flies from Baltimore to Yuma, it's almost unthinkable that their algorithms will flag it. And if he flies into the next town over from Yuma, there's not a chance." She took out her phone. "Rob's gonna need a membership with Falcon Jet."
Paige glanced at Travis. She managed a passing smile. "He'll need a better job to swing it."
"I get double time on Sundays," Travis said.
"I'll give him an oil tycoon uncle whose cholesterol intake caught up with him last spring," Bethany said.
"While you're at it," Travis said, "give him an encounter with Renee on a park bench." R ob Pullman booked a private flight to Imperial, California, fifty miles west of Yuma. The ticket agent smiled politely, but nobody showed up to arrest them. The agent said the plane would be ready in forty-five minutes. They found an outdoor food court that was all but deserted, and ordered lunch.
Paige ate two huge slices of pizza in a few minutes. She hadn't eaten since early the night before. She washed them down with most of a large Pepsi.
The food court looked straight down the airport's busiest runway, eighty yards from its approach lights. Airliners passing overhead in the last seconds of their descent made the glass tabletop rattle.
Paige waited silently for one-a DC-10, Travis thought-to land, and then she said, "Most of what I know you've already figured out for yourselves. I'll tell you the rest. Then at least we'll have the same gaps."
She spent a few seconds considering how to begin.
"We started testing the two cylinders Monday morning, in the labs. The first time we turned one of them on, it didn't project the opening right away. Instead it made a sound. A sequence of high-pitched tones, like some kind of start-up process. We realized after a few seconds that both cylinders were making the sounds, in perfect unison, even though we'd only switched on one of them."
"Were they synchronizing with each other?" Bethany said. "Matching up so they'd open onto the same point in the future?"
"They might have been doing that," Paige said. "But there's something else they were definitely doing, which we didn't figure out until later. I'll explain it when I get to that part." She took a sip of her Pepsi. "The tone sequence lasted a little over three minutes. Then it stopped, and immediately after that, the projection appeared, from the one cylinder we'd switched on. Through the opening, all we could see was darkness. And then the smell hit us. Stale, dead air, like what it might smell like in a disused mine. We all put on ventilators. It helped a little. Then we shone flashlights into the darkness, and it didn't take us long to realize what we were looking at." Her eyes went back and forth between Travis and Bethany. "You know how it works, and you know we eventually determined that it was safe to go through, so I can skip to the relevant stuff. For starters, Border Town is empty in the future. The equipment is gone. The computers and paper records are gone." She paused. "All the entities are gone."
Travis felt the wind shift around. Felt it blow cool across the back of his neck.
"We checked out the whole place," Paige said. "We spent the better part of Monday down there, walking the empty rooms and hallways of the complex. There are no bodies. No signs of any struggle. Basic furniture is still there. Some of the beds are made, some aren't. It looks the way it would on any random afternoon, if everyone just left and shut off the power on their way out. That's how it was in every lab, every residence, every common area. And then we went to look at the thing we were most anxious to see."
"The Breach," Travis said.
Paige nodded.
"We couldn't get to it," she said. "We climbed down the elevator shaft, and three stories from the bottom we saw that it was a lost cause. Starting at Level 48 the shaft was filled in, and there was no way in the world to excavate it. It'd be impossible, even if you could move heavy equipment into the future through the projected opening, bit by bit."
"Why?" Travis said. "What's filling it?"
"Do you remember Heavy Rags?"
He nodded. Heavy Rags were the most common type of entity to emerge from the Breach. They'd been coming through almost daily since 1978. Each one was dark green, about the size of a washcloth, and weighed over 2,800 pounds. The nature of the material had eluded all attempts at understanding, even after three decades of study by physicists within Tangent. The most they could say was that Heavy Rags weren't made of atoms. They were dense sheets of some smaller kind of particle-maybe quarks, but that was a guess at best-that were somehow stabilized in that arrangement. Handling them was a logistical chore. There was a wheeled chainfall down on Level 51 with a specially made titanium claw, there for the sole purpose of moving the rags around. They couldn't be stored anywhere in the complex but the bottom floor, and most of them weren't even kept there. Over the years, Tangent personnel had bored dozens of foot-wide shafts into the concrete floor of Level 51, all the way to the granite bedrock that lay beneath Border Town. These shafts were the final resting place for nearly all of the roughly ten thousand Heavy Rags that'd come through the Breach over the years.
"And you remember the Doubler," Paige said, not asking.
Travis nodded again. The Doubler had figured centrally in his dreams, at least one night in three, over the past two years. He often woke from those dreams pounding his knuckles bloody on the headboard, with fog-amplified voices still screaming in his head.
"Heavy Rags are one of the very few entities that can be doubled," Paige said. "In the future, the bottom three floors of Border Town have been filled solid with them, mixed with concrete to form a kind of mache, though by volume it's probably ninety-nine percent rags. We calculated that a cubic foot of the mache would weigh about 250,000 pounds-almost twice as much as an M1 Abrams tank."
Travis pictured three stories of the stuff, compressed into every possible crevice, filling even the dome that surrounded the Breach. The ungodly weight of the substance pushing some distance into the Breach itself, bulging in against the resistance force that made the tunnel a one-way passage. Paige had told him once that in the first year of the Breach's existence, some people had suggested filling the elevator shaft with concrete and leaving the Breach's chamber sealed off. That would've been a bad idea: in the time since then, entities had emerged that would've done very bad things to the world had they been left alone-even in a sealed cavern five hundred feet underground. But what Paige was describing now was a much more aggressive move. It amounted to shoving a million-ton cork into the mouth of the Breach itself, maybe preventing anything from truly emerging from it afterward. What would happen to the entities that were trying to come through? Would they just clot in the tunnel? Would they back up like a reservoir behind a dam?
He saw in Paige's expression that all the same questions had been troubling her for days, and that she had no answers.
"So at some point," Travis said, "probably before the collapse of the world a few months from now, someone uses the Doubler to fill the bottom of the complex with that stuff?"
Paige nodded. "It would go pretty quickly, once you had a big enough mass to double from. The Doubler could generate about a cubic yard every few seconds."
"But
why the hell would someone do that?" Travis said.
Paige was silent for a moment. "Because under bad enough circumstances it would make sense," she said. "Which is why I thought of it."
Travis glanced at Bethany. She looked as uncertain as he felt. Then he understood.
"The fallback option," Travis said.
Paige nodded again. "The Heavy Rag mache idea is my own. I dreamed it up six months ago. One more dividend of the paranoia I've felt since everything came to a head with Pilgrim. I just imagined a scenario in which we were certain someone bad was about to get control of Border Town, and that our defenses would only buy us hours. I tried to think of what we'd do with those hours. How could we secure the most dangerous entities, and the Breach itself?" She shrugged. "The fallback option was all I could come up with. Put everything down on fifty-one, and flood the bottom three floors with that stuff. No one would ever get through it. You could chip at it for a month with an industrial steam shovel and not make a dent. I think you could even detonate an H-bomb down there and all you'd do is compress the stuff a little more. The density is just unimaginable. You can calculate it on paper, but you still can't get your mind around it. Anyway, I wrote that up in a report, told a handful of people about it. Consensus was that it was risky as hell. No way to be sure it would work as intended, and no way to undo it if something went wrong. As a general means of just eliminating the Breach, nobody liked it. Neither did I. But everyone I talked to was in favor of doing it if desperate enough times came along someday." She thought about it for a moment, then spoke softly. "I guess the end of the world would suffice."
The whine of another airliner filtered in from behind them. The sound rose to a scream and then a 747 slid overhead, big as the world, its jetwash ruffling the umbrellas over the tables.
"That's a hell of a thing to have learned," Travis said. "That it actually works, I mean. That you can seal off the Breach, and that the seal would hold for several decades, at least. If we figure out what happens to the world a few months from now… if we learn how to prevent it… then you could choose to leave the Breach open, or go ahead and seal it anyway, just to get rid of it. It's something to consider."