The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

  It never failed. Few people could help but react to the sudden, primal belief that something dangerous was right behind them. Garret pivoted, and in the same instant Travis scooped one of the mugs from the coffee table and swung it as hard as he could into the back of the man’s head. It would’ve been bad enough for Garret even if the mug had broken, but it didn’t. All of the force of the impact went into his skull instead. He made a grunting sound—“Uhnn!”—and crumpled and then sprawled. Travis dropped onto him and arced the mug down on his head three more times, putting all his weight into each swing, then scrambled backward away from him. He held the mug ready and watched the man.

  Garret didn’t move.

  After a moment Travis heard him breathing, slow and ragged. Travis stood and circled wide around him. He went to the closet by the entry door and found a roll of duct tape, came back and used a third of it binding Garret’s limbs and covering his mouth.

  It was 10:30. Monument Street lay in pools of sodium light and the apartment was pitch black away from the windows. Travis had stood watch for over four hours. Realistically it would be hours more before Ward would likely appear, but there was no reason to look away. Garret had stirred and moaned a few times in the darkness, but had mostly remained unconscious. In the minutes after binding him, Travis had made a quick survey of the apartment. Mainly he’d hoped to find a pair of binoculars. No luck. He found a stack of photos showing Garret rock climbing with a woman, presumably his girlfriend. She was taller than Garret and built like a pretty serious weight lifter. Travis thought a psychologist could make a whole career out of the guy’s libido.

  He also found a loaded snub .38 in the nightstand drawer. He left it there. Couldn’t imagine having a use for it in the coming hours.

  Foot traffic on Monument north of Johns Hopkins had dropped to practically nothing at nightfall. No one was coming or going from the academic buildings on the north side of the street, and only a few left or entered the hospital—at least from these four exits.

  Binoculars would’ve helped with the more distant pair of doors. They were between seven and eight hundred feet away, about the limit of Travis’s ability to tell bald from blond. He hoped Ward’s posture and movement would simply make it obvious. Hoped he’d see him and have not the slightest doubt who it was. The nightmare possibility—clawing at Travis all these dark hours like some animal inside his chest—was someone emerging beyond the construction zone who only might be Ruben Ward. Anyone bald and stooped would fit the bill, and there had to be all kinds of men like that inside the place. If one stepped out, there’d be no time at all to make a decision. Travis would just have to run. Half a mile around the block, as fast as he could move. And if he got there and found some arthritic sixty-year-old, he’d have to make the same sprint right back here, hoping like hell he hadn’t missed Ward in all the lost minutes.

  He tried not to think about it.

  He watched the street.

  He waited.

  Ruben Ward stepped out of the nearest of the four exits at seven minutes past midnight. So close Travis could see the black notebook under his arm. Travis watched the man just long enough—maybe three seconds—to be alarmed at how quickly he was moving. Ward staggered, but not slowly. More like a drunk perpetually chasing his balance. He made three lurching steps along the sidewalk, braced a hand against the building, then withdrew it and lurched forward again. Fast. Way the hell too fast. Between lurches and pauses he probably matched the speed of a healthy person walking.

  Travis turned and sprinted for the apartment’s entry, vaulting over Garret as he went.

  He was almost to the door when he heard a key plunge into the lock from the other side.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It didn’t happen like it would’ve in a movie. There was no drawn-out moment in which the lock disengaged and the knob made a hellishly slow turn.

  It happened in half a second, start to finish: click-turn-shove.

  Travis checked his momentum just in time to keep from catching the door with his nose, and just like that he was face to face with the woman from the pictures. The rock climber. Taller and stronger than Garret.

  She startled and fell back a step, dropping a bag of groceries she’d been holding. Something shattered. Something rolled.

  The woman was wearing a uniform of some sort. In the split-second he had to think about it, Travis guessed she was a stewardess. Or a car rental clerk. Or one of a thousand other things.

  Her panic disappeared in the next second—probably the time it took to realize she was staring at a ten-year-old—and anger took its place. She came forward, kicking aside the fallen groceries, and swatted the light switch upward.

  Travis squinted, not quite blinded but sure as hell stung by the sudden brightness.

  “What the fuck is this?” the woman said. Her volume suggested she wasn’t just talking to Travis. She wanted an answer from Garret, wherever he was.

  Travis drew back from her advance, realizing even as he did so that he was clearing the way for her to see Garret.

  She saw.

  For the second time in as many breaths she flinched and recoiled. Her eyes registered the purest bafflement, and then regardless of the conclusion she’d drawn—if any—she simply reacted. She lunged at Travis, shoving the door fully aside as she came on.

  There was no chance of getting past her and onto the landing. Even if he did, he wouldn’t get away. She’d be faster than him. Much faster.

  Travis staggered back and hit the coffee table with his calves. He lost his balance and went down hard in front of the couch, the woman already descending on him, getting a fistful of his shirt. Half of Travis’s attention was on her, and the other half, like a mental split screen, was on Ruben Ward. Lurching and bracing. Lurching and bracing. Probably halfway to the intersection by now. Once he reached it, there was no telling which direction he’d go, but in any direction there were places he could duck into within the next hundred feet. Which he might well do, out of fear that hospital staffers were right behind him—he’d have no way to know they weren’t.

  Ward could reach concealment in the next thirty or forty seconds. Could be gone in the next thirty or forty seconds.

  Travis became aware of the woman screaming at him. Asking who he was. Grabbing for both of his arms and trying to pin them. She got one. Went for the other. Travis yanked it away and did the only thing he could think of: put his index and middle finger together into a fused, rigid spike, and stabbed her in the eye with it.

  She cried out and let go of his other arm, both of her hands flying to her face to feel for damage.

  Travis twisted beneath her, got hold of one of the couch’s legs and pulled himself free. He heard her cursing and shouting and felt a rush of air as her hand just missed his back.

  Then he was on his feet, bounding over the coffee table and toward the doorway.

  The bedroom doorway.

  Behind him he heard the woman’s tone change from anger to fear. Maybe she understood what he had in mind. The table clattered as she shoved it away and came after him.

  The doorway was just ahead now. He hooked the frame with one hand as he went through, swinging his body like a sideways pendulum toward the nightstand. He got his free hand on the drawer pull just as the woman crashed into him from behind.

  The drawer came fully free of its seat. Its contents flew. Reading glasses. A little box of tissue. The snub .38. Travis’s hand closed around its grip as he went down, and then he tumbled, knees and elbows hitting the floor in random sequence.

  He came to rest with his shoulder blades against the far wall, the pistol in his hand and leveled back toward the direction he’d come from. Toward the woman.

  She pulled up short six feet away, frozen on all fours like a cat in the last instant before pouncing.

  Her eyes were locked onto the pistol’s barrel.

  “Take it easy,” she said.

  “It’s only a memory,” Travis said, and pulled the trig
ger.

  The bullet shattered her collarbone and she collapsed, screaming and holding the wound. Travis was already up and sprinting, ignoring her, going right over her and through the doorway.

  Across the living room. Through the still-open entry door and onto the landing. He was two flights down before he realized he still had the gun. He stuffed it into his front pocket coming off the final step, hit the exterior door’s latch bar and burst out into the cool night.

  He faced the intersection, and the north stretch of Johns Hopkins beyond it.

  No sign of Ward at either one.

  The man was already out of sight. He’d reached the crossroads and made a turn, one direction or another.

  Travis broke into a sprint toward Broadway. He dissected the situation as he ran. Ward couldn’t have crossed Broadway and continued along Monument—Travis would’ve seen him already in that case. He also couldn’t have gone into the parking structure; there was no entry to it anywhere near this street corner. That left north or south on Broadway, and south would keep Ward right next to the hospital for another eight hundred feet. The place he was desperate to get away from.

  North, then. Had to be.

  Travis was already looking in that direction as he passed the last townhouse. The whole width of Broadway slid into his view.

  Ward was nowhere on it.

  Travis spun to look south. No Ward there, either.

  He faced north again. Looked for places the man could’ve ducked into. Only two were close enough to be plausible options: an alley behind the row of academic buildings to the east, and another behind the row of town houses to the west.

  Something metal crashed onto concrete. Maybe a trash-can lid. Definitely in one of the alleys—but which? The acoustics were tricky.

  Travis sprinted again, covering the hundred feet north to the midpoint of the shallow block. Faced the left-side alley—behind the town houses—as he stopped hard.

  The lid lay thirty feet away in the spill of amber light from the street. Five feet beyond it there was only darkness: a channel of fractured and cluttered space that separated the town houses on the south half of the block from those on the north. It stretched all the way to the west end, almost three hundred yards.

  But there were lots of ways out of it, north and south. Mini-alleys that divided parallel homes here and there. Travis could see these only by the gaps in the rooflines three stories up. Down in the dark at ground level there was no detail at all. Ward could be slipping into one of these passageways right in front of him, right now, and he wouldn’t know. Travis threw himself forward into the channel.

  Deep shadow. Random shit strewn everywhere. Hazy light from the occasional back room.

  Travis found his eyes adjusting after the first ten seconds. Saw a child’s wagon and stepped over it quietly.

  Something moved in the dimness fifty feet away. A clatter of wood and concrete and—what else? Human hands striking the ground, Travis thought.

  A man cursed softly.

  Travis advanced. One careful step at a time.

  Faint sounds of movement ahead. Junk being shoved aside. Plastic bags rustling. Ward was struggling to get back on his feet.

  Travis tried to fix his eyes on the sound source. No good. At any distance the darkness was still nearly perfect.

  He took another slow step—and crushed an aluminum can that’d been lying on its side. In the stillness the sound might as well have been a car alarm.

  A man’s voice called out, raspy and sore and full of fear: “Who’s there?”

  Travis didn’t answer. He waited. Took soundless breaths with his mouth wide open.

  Five seconds passed, and then the rustling noise came again. Ward was still trying to get up.

  Was it really that difficult for him to do? That was hard to believe, given the agility he’d shown so far.

  Bags slid on the alley floor. Something made of plastic flipped over and skittered.

  Suddenly Travis understood.

  These weren’t the sounds of a man laboring to right himself.

  They were the sounds of a man searching for something.

  Ward had lost the notebook when he’d fallen.

  Travis advanced again, still trying for silence but not as carefully as before. His right hand went to his pocket and settled on the .38.

  He was forty feet from the sifting sounds now, still trying to peg the location. The brick walls on either side played hell with his directional hearing.

  Travis was keenly aware of the situation’s risk: Ward knew now that someone was here hunting him. The instant the man recovered the notebook, he’d go silent again, and the advantage would be all his. He could pick any narrow alley at random and disappear.

  Travis continued forward. Thirty feet away.

  The rustling stopped.

  So did Travis.

  He froze and held his breath and listened for movement.

  Instead there came a shout: “Leave me alone!”

  It echoed crazily along the rift between the townhouses, in staggered and distinct reverberations.

  But Travis’s ears picked up something else. Some other sound, barely audible beneath the panicked words. He thought he knew what it was, though it made no sense: a zipper being undone.

  What zipper could Ward have except the fly on his jeans? Had his pants snagged on something when he’d sprawled? Was he sliding out of them so he could get away?

  The echoes of the shout faded and the alley dropped to absolute silence.

  Five seconds.

  Ten.

  Travis felt panic begin to stir. Ward was leaving, and there was no way to stop him.

  Fifteen seconds.

  Not a sound anywhere.

  Travis let go of the gun in his pocket, cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted.

  “Ruben! I know about the VLIC! I know about the instructions!”

  A foot scraped on concrete, maybe stopping fast and turning, far away in the dark. Fifty or sixty feet.

  Silence.

  “I’m supposed to help you!” Travis said.

  For a moment nothing happened. Then Ward called out: “Who the hell are you?”

  Travis thought about his reply. Saw no reason to be inventive.

  “Travis Chase! Let me help!”

  He heard a fast exhalation. It sounded like confusion, though it was hard to tell. More likely it was just a physical response to the past minute’s stress.

  “You’re only a kid!” Ward yelled.

  Travis started moving again. Homing in on the voice’s location: not just far ahead but all the way against the alley’s left side.

  “I’m old enough to be useful,” Travis said, letting his own voice relax.

  “The instructions didn’t say anything about this,” Ward said. Still unnerved. Still on the brink of fleeing.

  “What, there’s a rule against someone giving you a hand?”

  The points of the conversation didn’t matter. Keeping Ward talking mattered. And closing in on his voice.

  But the seconds drew out, and Ward didn’t reply.

  Travis continued moving forward. Slowly. Silently.

  Then the man said, “Is it already happening?”

  Travis started to ask what he meant, but stopped. Asking for clarification might clash with what he’d told Ward a moment earlier: that he knew what was going on. While Travis didn’t need to make sense, he did need to avoid scaring the guy away.

  “The filter,” Ward said. “Is it starting now?”

  The filter?

  Travis hesitated, still advancing, then decided to wing it. “It’s possible,” he said.

  Ward breathed out audibly again. Same location: ahead and to the left.

  “It’s not supposed to happen yet,” Ward said. “Not for years and years.”

  Travis kept moving. Forty feet to go. He’d have to speak more softly now to hide the fact that he was getting closer.

  “Whoever it affects,” Ward said, “it’s not
their fault. Not really. Under the wrong conditions, anyone could end up the worst person on Earth.”

  Travis’s leading foot touched down and froze. So did the rest of his body.

  Are you wondering if there’s a connection? Paige had said. Between whatever’s going on right now and … the thing about you?

  Travis stared at the blackness where Ward had just spoken, and found his thoughts suddenly vacant. The question came out before he realized he was asking it: “What are you talking about?”

  He noticed only halfway through—too late for it to matter—that he hadn’t tempered his voice at all.

  There was another quick scuff of shoes on asphalt—Ward flinching, maybe—and then a sustained burst of movement as the man took off running through the cluttered dark. Crashing past whatever lay in his path. Stumbling and staggering, but moving fast.

  Travis pushed away the confusion and sprinted after him. Following the sound. Gaining now.

  All at once he caught a glimpse of Ward, in the vague pool of light below a curtained window. Bald head and T-shirt and jeans—he was still wearing them.

  The man had almost passed beyond the light when he sprawled. Caught his foot on something and went all the way down. The notebook flew free again.

  Travis doubled his speed and yanked the .38 from his pocket—enough fucking around.

  He leveled it as Ward pushed up to a crouch.

  But he didn’t fire.

  He didn’t need to.

  Ward made one desperate grab for the notebook, almost collapsing again as he did, then heard Travis’s running footsteps and threw himself sideways out of the light. The book stayed right where it’d fallen.

  Travis pulled up short beneath the window. Stood there catching his breath and listening. He heard Ward staggering in the dark twenty feet off, and then silence again. Had he stopped? Was he weighing his chances of fighting for the notebook?

  Travis kept the pistol leveled, aimed toward the last place he’d heard movement. He kept his eyes in that direction too, as he knelt and scooped up the book.