A few seconds later they were pressed like insect specimens to the floor, faces down. Travis considered the options. He really didn’t want to shoot. No telling how far away the nearest hostile was, or how far the sound would carry.
He set the Medic down, picked up one of their rifles, and crossed the space toward them, still moving silently to keep them unaware of his position. He stopped just shy of standing between them, reversed his hold on the rifle, and rammed it down onto each man’s head, the second guy reacting and turning just enough to take the blow on his temple instead of behind the ear.
Both of them out cold.
Not good enough.
Travis saw a jackknife clipped to the second man’s belt. It offered a quicker solution than physically breaking their heads apart, as much as he might have enjoyed the catharsis of doing that. He took the knife, opened it, and cut each gunman’s throat, carotid to carotid.
Still holding it, he turned to the others. He saw more relief than revulsion in their eyes. He tested the knife’s blade on the bind that still hung from his left wrist. It did nothing. It would take heavy-duty cutters to free Paige and the rest. He searched the guards’ bodies for a pair of them, but came up empty. And just as he finished, the first guard’s cell phone rang.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
And rang. And rang. Travis looked at Paige. She looked back, eyes wide, unsure for a second. Then very sure.
“There’s no time to free us,” she said. “Take my backpack and get to the surface through the elevator shaft. Use my phone to call for—”
He shook his head, moving toward her and the others, the guard’s phone still ringing behind him. “There’s gotta be a way to get you guys free—”
“Listen to me,” she said. “They’ll be here in sixty seconds. Take the pack. Go to the elevator, press the call button three times, then hold it for a five-count. The doors will open on the empty shaft.”
“Ten of us against them, he said, we can double the guards’ rifles and ammo—”
“And Pilgrim will turn on the gas again,” she said.
He had no counter for that.
She was right.
Shit.
He felt every good option break off and fall away, like pieces of blacktop over a washed-out cavity in the soil.
“They blew the roof off the elevator shaft when they came in,” Paige said. “You can get all the way out. You’ll see the inset ladder when you open the doors. When you reach the surface, call the ninth number on my phone’s list. By then, you’ll understand why.”
He stared at her. Stared at the others, too. They looked back at him, almost as lost as the dead that lined the wall.
He had to leave them. It wasn’t even a choice. That didn’t take away the guilt, though.
The crucial seconds were racing by. He shook the trance and looked down at his still bleeding right hand. The blood trail would give him away. He stooped and grabbed the Medic from where he’d dropped it. Held it in his left hand. Aimed it at his right, the way Paige had aimed it at the wounded man in Zurich.
He pulled the trigger, and found out he’d been wrong a few minutes earlier when carving his hand with the metal loop. That hadn’t been the limit to how bad pain could be. Not even close.
His breath rushed out. The edges of his vision darkened. He held on. Stayed on his feet. Looked down at his hand as the pain faded. The thing hadn’t fixed him perfectly—skin and muscle still hung in strips—but the wounds had hardened over, as if cauterized without any sign of being burned.
He grabbed the backpack, shouldered it and turned to the others.
“Ninth number on my phone,” Paige said again. “And don’t get killed.”
Travis managed a smile. No more seconds to burn. He burned one anyway. Knelt and kissed her. Soft, intense, fast. Then he stood, looked at her for another half second, and ran from the room, grabbing one of the guards’ rifles as he went.
As he reached the elevator doors, he saw the stairwell door next to them shudder. Some other door in the stairwell, high above or below, had just been opened. They were coming.
Three presses of the button, then hold for a five-count. He reached to do it, then stopped.
Fifty feet away, Paige’s office door stood open. On her desk, where he’d left it yesterday, was the black case containing the transparency suit.
Twenty seconds to reach it and come back to this spot. None to spare thinking about it. He sprinted for the office. Through the open door. Grabbed the case, turned, ran hell-bent for the elevators again. Three presses. Hold for five. Those five seconds felt like minutes.
The elevator doors parted on darkness, with faint light coming down from high above. He saw the elevator cab just a few stories below, its roof a mess of piled cable. Its brakes must have stopped it against the wall. To his left he saw the inset ladder. He wedged the black plastic case into his waistband and stepped to the rungs.
As he climbed, he saw that Paige had been right. The top of the shaft had been blown away, revealing a patch of deep violet sky with a few stars visible in it. That opening was ten stories above. Even as he considered the impossibility of reaching the top before Pilgrim’s people arrived and saw the elevator doors standing open, he felt the ladder rungs vibrate in his hands. A moment later he heard the deep clatter of their footsteps descending past him in the stairwell on the other side of the wall. Any second now—
With a muted ding the doors onto the shaft slid shut twenty feet below. The soft thump of their merging synched perfectly with the crash of the stairwell door being kicked open, and the riot of running footsteps in the corridor just outside.
Travis remained frozen on the ladder, the rifle in one hand, and sighted on the closed doors.
The footsteps faded.
But they’d be back soon. When they reached the conference room, how long would it take them to figure out where he’d gone? Where else was there?
Travis slung the rifle and climbed again, quickly. Seconds still counted.
Pilgrim wasn’t with the men who rushed into the conference room. Five of them. Armed. Pissed. They reacted to the two dead gunmen, then saw the blood trail leading from their corpses to the group of captives. The path Travis had taken. One or two of the men looked down, seeking a continuation of the trail out of the room and confused at not finding one.
“Where’s the hero?” the first gunman said.
Paige said nothing. She wondered if they’d start executing the survivors to make one of them talk.
Then the man who’d spoken seemed to figure it out—enough to make a decision, anyway. He turned and led his group out, leaving one behind to watch the room. Ten seconds later Paige heard them stop at the elevator shaft and begin straining to pry apart the doors manually.
She felt her stomach twist. It was happening too fast. Unless Travis had climbed very, very quickly, he couldn’t be out yet. She heard the straining voices suddenly pick up an echo: they’d opened the doors to the shaft. An instant later they were firing. Full auto. So many shooting at once, it was just a monotone roar. She could picture them, not even looking up the shaft as they reached in and fired. Not needing to, with that kind of firepower. Nothing up there could live.
She tried to make herself ready for the sound that was coming.
She heard it. She wasn’t ready.
A man’s scream, drenched with the kind of terror only something primal could induce. Like a long fall. The scream echoed down the shaft from somewhere high above. Then silence—even the guns had stopped. A full second later came the impact, something crashing down onto the roof of the elevator cab as loud as a grenade blast.
It might as well have been her own body hitting, for the effect the sound had on her. Tears again, hard and unbound. They did nothing for the pain.
Voices in the hall. The men coming back. Laughing about something. She wiped her eyes on the knees of her jeans, and looked up as they entered the room. They were lugging Travis’s body, one man to a limb. The
y dropped him right in front of Paige.
Travis’s eyes—not quite staring in the same direction as each other—were pointed more or less toward her, and the side of his head was caved in to the depth of a soup bowl.
She wanted to hold in the screams, both to save face in front of her people and to deny Pilgrim’s men the satisfaction.
Neither reason was enough.
When she finally got control—a little control, anyway—she found that Pilgrim’s men were still there. Staring at her, it seemed. No. At the space beside her. Where Travis had been bound earlier. They were looking at that space, and at his body lying on the ground.
They looked scared.
Like they’d just realized exactly who they’d killed. The man their boss specifically wanted alive, for whatever reason.
“What do we tell Pilgrim?” one of them said.
The largest of them shook his head. “Nothing. Hour from now, he’ll have the Primary Lab open. That’ll make him happy, maybe enough not to fucking kill us for this.”
They left the room, leaving three behind on guard.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
There was nothing left of the pole barn on the surface. The walls and roof had been blown away by the same blast that had ripped open the top of the elevator shaft. Probably a football-sized lump of C4 dropped from high above by one of Pilgrim’s men, on the way down.
Travis stood next to the gaping hole in the concrete, surrounded by open desert, cool in the predawn twilight. To his left, the pile of old cars that had leaned against the back wall of the building had been sent sprawling. All that had withstood the explosion had been a heavy-duty charging station for the all-terrain electric carts. Two of the three carts were wrecked, but one of them, plugged in and charging on the far side of the station, had been sheltered from the blast wave and remained intact.
After all the strange things he’d experienced in recent days, he’d just set the bar a few clicks higher. Somehow the word replica didn’t quite capture the feeling of looking down at a perfect copy of your own body. Because, in a real sense, it hadn’t been a replica. It’d been him. Him, to the last atom.
Only dead.
There was a vague silver lining: once you’d stomached the surreality of looking into your own corpse’s glassy eyes, it didn’t take much more grit to shove it over the edge of an elevator shaft.
He put the Doubler back into the backpack, then set the pack aside and opened the black plastic case. He felt for the suit and found it.
He smiled.
This was going to be fun. Forget whoever Paige had wanted him to call for help. He had all the help he needed, right here in his hands. Just put on the suit, head back down the ladder, and kill Pilgrim and every last one of his people.
He had the suit halfway onto his shoulders when a thought stopped him.
Was this the Whisper’s intention?
Was this the plan?
Was he still on the horse, heading for Samarra?
For five seconds he stood there, the cadence of night insects filtering in from the desert.
This move made sense.
But maybe that was the problem. Maybe that made it predictable. Fuck, everything was predictable to the Whisper. Like Paige had said, even trying to be unpredictable was probably predictable, to that thing. The zigzag logic made his head hurt. He dropped the suit’s upper half back into the case and cursed quietly.
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.