by Patrick Lee
Almost at once the rain provided a form of guidance. They could hear it hissing where it passed through the rusted bars of the steel grid, but somewhere close by it was making another sound. A hard pinging against something solid, resonant.
The stairs.
Just as in the office building in D.C., the heavy treads of the stairs in this structure had survived the decades of neglect. The three of them had climbed the full thirty flights earlier in the day.
Travis stood. "Let's go."
They made their way across the gridwork, stopping a few times to reassess the direction of the pinging. They took careful steps, placing each one tentatively before shifting any weight forward. There were other things than the stairwell that they might encounter. The elevator shaft, for one.
Travis swept an arm low in front of him. After a moment it hit something rigid. A structural upright. He felt down its length and found the top of the still-sturdy handrail.
Thirty seconds later they were two floors down. Travis stepped off of the landing and navigated by memory to where he'd left the twelve-gauge, a few yards away. It was still dry, leaning under the intact metal panel. He carried it back to the stairs.
"Hand me the backpack," he said.
He heard it shift in the darkness and then Bethany pushed it into his hands. It contained nothing but shotgun shells now. Bethany was still holding the SIG, and Paige had the cylinder.
"What are you doing?" Paige said.
"I'm going back up," Travis said. "You're going to keep heading down."
"The hell we are. You're coming with us, or we're coming with you."
"Finn and his people have the other cylinder," Travis said, "and it's their only way out of the building. The ground floor probably slammed shut like a bear trap half a second after you smacked Garner. Even the upper stairwells could have building security in them by now. Finn has to assume they do, either way. So his only exit is through the iris, on the top floor. Think of that, along with the fact that he still wants to capture or kill us. What's his best strategy?"
Paige was quiet a few seconds. Then she said, "He'll give us a few minutes to flee, and then come through the iris. That way we're not right there, shooting at his guys on their way through the bottleneck."
"Exactly," Travis said. "Once they're past that point, the advantage is all theirs. You saw the goggles around their necks. They can see in the dark and we can't. If they come through the iris in the next couple minutes, while we're groping our way down the stairs, they'll overtake us long before we reach the ground. And they know we can't use our own cylinder to go back through the iris on some lower floor-not with the building locked down. We'd be taken into custody, and we'd be under President Currey's discretion within hours. We're dead either way. The only real chance we've got is to stay here in the ruins until we're well away from this building. But that only works if someone stays up here and covers the retreat. And I'm sorry to be a dick, but it's gonna be me, and that's it."
He slung the pack on his shoulder. The weight of the shells inside felt reassuring.
"On the bright side," he said, "this is a chance to end this right here."
"Then we should all stay," Bethany said.
"No," Travis said. "We can't risk the cylinder. What Currey said on the phone is right. No one's going to believe any of this if they don't look through the iris for themselves. Garner needs it. It's more important than any of our lives."
Neither of them replied right away. In the whisper of the rain, Travis could sense them accepting the idea. Hating it, but accepting it.
"Where do we meet you?" Paige said.
"Just get down onto Central Park West and head south. Get as much distance as you can. It'll be hard in the dark, but do your best. You'll hear the shooting. Hopefully sometime later you'll hear me calling out behind you."
The seconds drew out again. Then he felt one of Paige's hands on his face. Her fingers tracing its contours. The closest she could get to a last look at him.
"Be there," she said, and then her hand fell away, and Travis heard both sets of footsteps moving off down the next flight. He listened for a few seconds, then started back up.
He reached the head of the top flight and dropped to a knee. It was as good a spot as any, and it had at least some strategic value: he could descend a few treads if he needed to dodge return-fire.
The more he thought about his odds, the more he liked them. At any distance over a dozen yards, the shotgun's spread would be at least as wide as the iris. Anyone coming through it was going to get cut to pieces.
Finn and his men had numbered seven originally. Two were dead now. Maybe more.
Travis dropped the backpack off his shoulder. He set it right in front of himself and unzipped it. Pulled it wide open so there'd be no fumbling later.
The Remington was already good for five shots-four in the magazine and one in the chamber. He felt for the loading port and mentally rehearsed sliding shells into it by feel alone. It wouldn't be difficult. He probably did it mostly by feel even in daylight.
He surveyed the darkness all around him in long, rapid sweeps. He would see the iris the moment it opened, even at the extent of his peripheral vision. He could no more miss it than he could miss a searchlight being switched on.
He pulled the shotgun's stock hard against his shoulder.
He was ready. F inn stood at the open entry to the suite, listening to the larger corridor beyond. The stairwell was twenty feet away. No doubt Garner's security detail had opted for that route when they'd left, rather than wait for an elevator.
Finn listened now for other footsteps echoing on the stairs-approaching, not retreating.
He heard nothing.
But he couldn't expect to, he realized. The Secret Service might've made all the racket in the world on the way down, but other security personnel coming up to hold the stairwells would probably be quiet as cats.
He returned to the suite's living room. He had five men left. One with a broken nose and probably a facial fracture. The man was still on his feet, but he looked like he could barely see through the swelling under his eyes.
Outside, police had begun converging on the building. Their sirens sounded faint from thirty stories up. Finn noticed the winking lights of an incoming helicopter, far away across the city.
He stooped and picked up the cylinder from where it'd rolled to a stop, at the corner where the windows met the wall.
He considered the logistics of the situation.
On the other side, Miss Campbell and her friends would be making their way down the stairs by now, at whatever speed they could manage.
Unless they'd decided to stay and fight it out.
Finn turned in a slow circle. He let his eyes roam. He imagined the suite in its ruined state, pitch-black and skeletal and cold and wet. And devoid of cover. If the others really were waiting for them over there, where would they position themselves?
He continued his slow turn. And then he stopped. He was looking down the entry hall toward the outer corridor-and the unseen stairwell beyond.
He thought about it. It made sense. It was all that made sense, really.
He turned again and studied the suite, no longer envisioning its alternate form. He looked across the living room, through the doorways on the far wall, toward the distant end of the residence.
The point furthest from the stairwell.
He headed for it, waving his men to him as he went. They fell in behind him, weapons ready. Fifteen seconds later they reached the place-a sitting room with wicker furniture and bright yellow paint. It had thick canvas drapes-pulled back at the moment.
Finn pulled his FLIR headset up and secured it over his eyes. His men did the same. He raised the cylinder. He put his finger to the on button.
And then he withdrew it. Something obvious had occurred to him.
"Shut the drapes," he said. "And kill the lights." T ravis waited. The rain had soaked through his shirt. The night was probably sixty degr
ees, 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. P aige 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. T ravis 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. P aige 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. T he 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. P aige 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. T ravis 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. G arner 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.