Ghost Country

  “But everything else fits,” Paige said. “The child’s notebook we told you about, in the desert near Yuma. If you saw it for yourself . . . if you saw what this kid drew . . . it was just page after page of misery, with no visible cause—”

  “I agree it fits,” Garner said. “I’m sure these satellites are at the heart of this thing. And clearly someone makes a colossal fuckup somewhere along the line. But I can’t for the life of me see what it is.”

  “Do we even need to know?” Travis said. “We know enough right now to make a move against them. With your connections, sir, there must be channels we can go through.”

  Garner nodded. “Absolutely. From this point forward we take it slow and deliberate. Start with outsiders Finn would have no reason to be tied to. Figure out who we can trust, from there. Build our support until it’s overwhelming and then, yes, we move. It’ll work if we’re careful. Hell, we’ve got a few months to play with.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Rudy Dyer was the newest man on the protective detail. He’d been on board only three weeks. By no stretch was he green—he’d served four years with the Foreign Missions Branch and two with the Naval Observatory—but there were aspects of this new role that he was still getting used to. As Secret Service work went, protecting a former president was maybe a tick more relaxed than protecting a sitting one. The job was more relaxed, anyway—the agents weren’t.

  What Dyer had the hardest time adjusting to was the added familiarity here, between the agents and the focus of their work—Richard Garner. The poker games seemed a little out of line. No protocols were broken, of course—the agents playing the game were always off duty at the time, while the standard minimum of six on-duty agents remained in the watch-room. Still, it wasn’t the sort of thing that would’ve happened in the White House, off-duty or otherwise.

  Dyer was getting a feel for it, though. It was just a different fit, that was all. These were still the most professional and disciplined security personnel in the world, and he got on well with them. He got on well with Garner, too. He just didn’t plan to sit in on the poker games anytime soon.

  It was 6:44 in the evening. Sunlight shone through the west-side windows in long, tinted shafts. The watch-room—actually a good-sized suite of rooms—occupied the southwest quadrant of the building’s floor, including the stairs and elevator accesses. From the terminal at his desk, Dyer could cycle through the feeds from every security camera in and around Garner’s residence. Protocol allowed for respecting the man’s privacy, however, which meant that the residence’s interior feeds were set aside in a separate batch and ignored under normal circumstances.

  Every fifteen minutes Dyer clicked through all of the other feeds: those covering the corridors, elevators, stairwells, and even a few angles looking across the outer face of the building at this height—even the remote possibility of someone rappelling down from the rooftop had to be allowed for.

  Dyer’s watched ticked to 6:45.

  He opened the camera feeds. Skipped through them with precise keystrokes. Studied each one for exactly three seconds. Corridors clear. Elevators clear. Stairwells clear.

  On the third exterior feed, which looked across the east side of the building past the windows of Garner’s den, he stopped.

  There was a young woman sitting in a chair a few feet in from the windows. Dark hair and eyes. Maybe thirty. Very attractive. Garner himself was just visible at the edge of the frame, sitting at his desk chair. Looking casual. Staring off through the window at nothing.

  Who was the woman?

  Dyer minimized the feed and clicked open the logbook for the security checkpoint. No one could enter or exit the residence—not even Garner himself—without passing through it and being logged with a time stamp.

  There was no entry in the file for anyone coming or going today.

  Or yesterday.

  The day before that, Garner had logged out to have lunch with the governor in Midtown, and logged back in three hours later, alone.

  Dyer quickly skipped through the past five days’ entries. Nothing but Garner coming and going by himself.

  He minimized the logbook and opened the exterior feed again. The woman was still sitting there.

  How the hell had she gotten in without it being noted?

  Dyer could think of only one explanation. He hated to believe it. But what else was there?

  He looked around. One other agent had a desk in this room. The other four were stationed elsewhere in the suite, the better to rush Garner’s residence from multiple angles if the need arose.

  The other agent in the room wasn’t looking Dyer’s way.

  Dyer took out his cell phone, set it in its dock next to the terminal and waited for it to sync up. When it did, he captured a single frame of the video feed, clearly showing the woman’s face, and sent it to the phone. He took it back out of the dock, then stood and left the room.

  He stepped into the bathroom across the hall, turned on the vent fan and the water for masking noise, and dialed a number on his phone. It was answered on the second ring.

  “Greer.”

  “It’s Dyer. Do you have a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  Dyer explained about the woman, and sent the image to Greer’s phone. He also relayed his hunch. Greer didn’t like it any more than he did.

  “I find that very, very hard to believe,” Greer said.

  “I’d prefer another theory myself,” Dyer said. “Got one?”

  The line was silent for a moment.

  “I don’t get the motive,” Greer said. “Garner’s a single man. If he wants to entertain a guest, it’s his business. Why would he feel the need to hide it?”

  “Maybe she wants to hide it. Maybe she’s somebody. Or somebody’s wife.”

  Another silence on the line.

  Then Greer said, “If Garner’s asking these guys to keep someone out of the logbook, and they’re actually doing it, their balls are gonna be hanging from the director’s trailer hitch before the week’s out.”

  “Which is why I called you,” Dyer said. “I’d rather keep mine hanging where they are.”

  Greer was quiet again. Dyer could hear a pen or pencil tapping on his desk. A fast, tense rhythm.

  “Fuck,” Greer said. “All right. Let me run it up to a few guys at the top, and a couple friends at Justice. See if there’s a precedent for handling something like this. And I’ll see if anyone recognizes her. I’ll get back to you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Garner spent the rest of the evening compiling a list of names, drawn from records on his computer as well as paper documents. He came up with close to a hundred, and then began going through them systematically, using his computer to pull up detailed information on each of them. To Travis they appeared to be mostly military and FBI personnel. Garner made shorthand marks next to some of the names. Others he simply crossed out.

  Bethany offered to help. Garner looked puzzled as to what she could do. She rattled off her credentials in about thirty seconds, and he told her to pull up a chair.

  Night settled on the city. The skyline lit up in random bits and fragments until the whole thing was blazing. Travis stood at the living-room windows and looked down over the park. From beneath the forested expanses, warm light from footpaths streamed up into the darkness.

  Paige came up beside him. They stood there for a while, silent.

  “Never been here before,” Travis said.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  He nodded.

  “My mom lived here for a long time when I was a kid,” Paige said. “That building right over there. The brick one with the blue light on the roof.” She pointed across the park. Leaned against him so he could sight down her arm.

  He felt her skin against his. After a second she seemed to notice it too. Seemed to notice that he noticed. She didn’t say anything, just shifted back to her own balance, putting a few inches between them.

  It occurred to
him that they hadn’t been alone with each other at any point since she’d stepped through the iris from Finn’s office yesterday. It’d been the three of them, hardly more than an arm’s length from one another, every minute of the way. Until now.

  The silence was suddenly harder to take.

  “So you spent a lot of time here?” he said.

  “Yeah. Every summer. And Thanksgiving or Christmas, every other year, that kind of thing.”

  “That must’ve been fun. Hanging out here as a kid.”

  She shrugged. “I liked it. Plenty to do.”

  It felt like talking to someone’s sister-in-law at a graduation party. Like he didn’t know that she liked to sleep on her side, naked, and that she preferred someone’s shoulder to a pillow. Like he didn’t know what her earlobes tasted like, among other things. Like none of it had ever happened.

  It would’ve been better if it hadn’t. The past two years would’ve been easier. He would’ve gotten more sleep.

  She turned from the window. Met his eyes. Looked away again.

  “Obviously, this won’t take anything like four months to resolve,” she said.

  Travis nodded.

  “A few weeks at most,” Paige said. “Finn might have a lot of the top people, but Garner will get everyone else. However it shakes out after that, whatever it looks like on the news, that’ll be the end of it. I’m sure Tangent will be involved, but as far as the three of us shouldering the whole thing . . . I guess that’s over with, now.”

  “My part is, for sure,” Travis said.

  She looked at him again. “If you want, we can set you up with another identity, wherever you want to live, whoever you want to be.”

  “Anything like the last one will do,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  Neither spoke for a while. They watched the city. Far below on the opposite sidewalk, a college-aged couple went by. The girl turned to face the guy, grabbed each of his hands in hers and drew his arms up overhead, bouncing up and down on her feet. Happy as hell about something.

  “You could come back,” Paige said. “You know that.”

  For a moment Travis didn’t answer. He turned and found her staring at him. Saw in her eyes everything she wasn’t saying. Saw an invitation back to more than just Border Town.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She held the stare a second longer. Whatever hurt she felt, it was buried deep.

  “Okay,” she said.

  She turned from the window. Went to a big leather chair and sat. She leaned back and closed her eyes.

  “If I could explain it, I would,” Travis said.

  “I didn’t ask you to.”

  “I would anyway.”

  She said nothing more.

  Travis crossed to the couch. He set Bethany’s backpack on the floor. Heard the clink of the SIG 220 inside, among all the shotgun shells. He’d left the shotgun itself on the other side of the iris, a couple stories down in the skeleton of the building. He’d leaned it out of the rain under an intact metal panel a few yards from the stairwell. It hadn’t seemed like a good idea to step into the president’s living room with a twelve-gauge in his hands.

  He lay on his back on the couch. Sank into it. Shut his eyes. Listened to the keystrokes of the computer in the next room, and the murmur of the city.

  He wondered what it would be like to just tell her. He could do it right now. He even had the note folded up in his wallet. A message from some future version of Paige, which she’d bounced in and out of the Breach so that it would emerge in the past—Tangent didn’t know how to do that yet, but clearly they would, someday. Paige’s message to herself had arrived two summers ago, with a specific instruction: kill Travis Chase.

  Some future Travis had countered that move. Had created the Whisper—that wasn’t its real name, of course—using Breach technology, and bounced it much further back: to 1989. The Whisper had then gone to work rearranging everything, stacking the deck to put Travis—his present self—in place to intercept Paige’s message when it emerged.

  Even now Travis could only make passing sense of it. It was like watching a snake eat its own tail. Why hadn’t there been a counter-counter-move from the future Paige? And then the future Travis? Could those versions of themselves even exist anymore? Wasn’t everything on a different track now? He didn’t expect to ever understand it.

  But he could tell her.

  He could sit up right now and look her in the eyes and say it all. He could show her the note.

  He’d feel better then, though it wouldn’t mean he could accept her invitation. However she responded, he was never returning to Tangent. It simply wasn’t an option, so long as he remained in the dark about what had corrupted the other Travis there, along the track of that original future.

  And he would always be in the dark about that.

  He didn’t sit up.

  He lay there and listened to her breathing. Remembered what it’d sounded like from an inch away.

  “You want to know the real reason I’m against sealing the Breach?” Paige said.

  Travis opened his eyes and looked at her. Hers were still closed.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It’s that every morning I wake up and wonder if, that day, something good will finally come through. Something really good, that we could use to help the whole world. Why shouldn’t that happen? We’ve seen all kinds of things that could’ve hurt the whole world. And we’ve seen small-scale good things. Like the Medic. Any emergency room could do miracles with it, but you could only give it to one of them. And how would you explain where it came from? It’s always like that with the good ones. Did you ever hear of an entity called a Poker Chip?”

  “No.”

  “It’s bright red, about the size of a quarter. Not quite unique but very rare—only five of them have egressed over the years. You pick one up and it attaches itself to your skin by tendril extensions you can barely see. Scary at first, so we tested them on animals. It took a while to realize that their function is to slow down aging. They cut the speed to about one third, and they work on everything—bugs, mice, rats. So I guess if any five people really wanted to, they could wear them twenty-four/seven and outlive all their friends. Nice, right?”

  She opened her eyes and met his.

  “I have to believe,” she said, “that someday, something will come through that’s good on the scale of the world. Something we’d pop the champagne corks and break into tears over. Something history would pivot on. That thought gets me through all the rest of it.”

  A silence passed. Not quite as awkward as before.

  Paige looked down at her hands in her lap.

  “I understand that there’s something you really, really cannot tell me,” she said. “And I understand that it has nothing to do with how you feel about me. Because I know how you feel about me. Yesterday morning, when I stepped out of Finn’s office onto that girder and saw you standing five feet away, it didn’t surprise me in the least. I hadn’t expected it—but when I saw you, it seemed like the most normal thing in the world that you’d be standing there. That you’d be there for me. So I know. And I understand . . . even if I don’t understand. That’s an ability the Breach trained into me a long time ago. Getting it without getting it. I get that whatever this is, it just is, and that you wish like hell it wasn’t.”

  She looked at him again, and he held her stare.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  She managed something like a smile. He tried to return it. Then he sank into the couch again, eyes on the ceiling.

  He heard her stand, and then she was there, climbing onto the couch, squeezing into the space between him and the backrest. Neither of them spoke. A second later they were pressed together as tightly as they could get, his mouth on her forehead, kissing it. Everything about her filling up his world, warm and soft and vulnerable and alive, her breath against his throat, her arms tense as she held on.
r />   His sense of time was gone. This close to her, he could lose hours and not notice. That in itself was excruciating, because this little time was all they were ever going to get. He could already feel it going away.

  He thought of what she’d said earlier, about seeing him on top of the office building in D.C. He thought of how close he’d come to not being there. A minute’s delay would’ve done it. The timing had actually been closer than that, even. He and Bethany had been maybe ten seconds from opening their own iris when Finn opened his. The gunfight—if it could be called that—wouldn’t have played out half as favorably without that turn of events. Without the element of surprise, there would’ve been real crossfire, and Paige would have been stuck without cover at the center of it. Her chances would’ve been close to zero.

  He kissed her hairline. Held her tighter. Tried not to think of how it might’ve gone. Shit happened, that was all. Some of it had to be good.

  He shut his eyes and breathed in the smell of her hair.

  Five seconds later he opened them again.

  A thought had come to him. A memory. Sharp and insistent. Something that’d happened just after Finn opened the iris from his office. Paige had come out, but not right away. First Finn himself had come to the opening and stared out through it—Travis had stayed beyond his peripheral vision. Then the guy had ordered Paige out onto the beam. That part Travis remembered clearly. But there was something else. Something before that. Something Finn had whispered right at the beginning, seconds after stepping up to the iris. Travis had been just close enough to hear it. It’d escaped his notice at the time—there’d been more pressing things to focus on—and it hadn’t sounded like anything important.

  Now he tried to call it back, because something told him it was important, after all.