Ghost Country

  “Maybe this was the CEO’s office,” Bethany said. It sounded like the kind of thing a person only said to drown out the internal scream of tension. “Someone important, anyway. We didn’t see any other desks bolted to the concrete.”

  “Maybe the concrete pads with bolt holes in them all cracked through and fell a long time ago. Maybe this is the last holdout, just waiting for a dry leaf to land on it and send it crashing down.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  Travis put one foot on the concrete. He shifted a fourth of his weight onto it. The pad didn’t budge. Maybe it was stronger than it looked. He transferred another fourth of his weight. Still solid. He took a breath and stepped completely onto the thing. It felt fine. He looked at Bethany. She didn’t look the least bit relieved.

  “I know,” Travis said. “The edge would be the strong part anyway.”

  “Don’t die.”

  “Okay.”

  He took a second step. Then another.

  On his fourth step something shifted. It was barely perceptible. A settling movement of the pad, probably no more than an eighth of an inch. He heard Bethany take a sharp breath behind him, but she said nothing.

  Three more steps would put him right at the front of the desk, centered where its owner had once sat.

  He set a foot forward and eased onto it. He felt no response from the pad.

  Two steps to go.

  He took the next one. Nothing.

  Maybe he was flattering himself to think his presence mattered to this five-ton chunk of material that’d weathered a couple thousand blizzards with a two-hundred-pound desk on its back. Maybe he could do jumping jacks on it for an hour and not impress it.

  He eased his weight off his back foot. Guided it forward and touched it to the concrete six inches from the desk. He took a breath, let it out slowly, and let his center of gravity slide forward until it was positioned evenly above both feet.

  Then a piece of rebar snapped like bone and the middle of the pad plunged six inches, throwing Travis forward against the desk.

  Bethany screamed.

  It was all Travis could do to keep his body from pitching right over the desktop and slamming down like a dropped anvil onto the concrete behind it. Bethany was yelling something at him, but the bloodflow ringing in his ears made it hard to tell what it was. He checked his forward momentum, both hands pressing hard onto the smooth desktop, and suddenly the world went still and silent. He heard his own breathing. He heard Bethany’s breathing too.

  He turned and looked at her. The word pale didn’t quite do the job. Her breath went in and out in little jerks. Her eyes stayed with his for a few seconds, and then they dropped and went to the right. He followed her stare.

  The largest of the lateral cracks had opened up all the way to the girder on one side, and the concrete had sagged free of its seat against the beam there, its hold having crumbled completely except for a single, fist-sized formation. That piece, clinging to the steel by an inch, was all that had stopped the pad’s total failure. It was all that was preventing it now.

  Bethany found her voice again. “Off.” Her hands made little circular gestures, calling him back to the beam.

  Travis still had both his hands on the desk, most of his weight distributed to its footings. He looked at the drawers. He could probably open all four from here without shifting his mass around very much.

  “Travis,” Bethany said.

  He looked at her again.

  Her eyes: don’t.

  “It’s okay,” he said. What else was he going to say?

  He turned to the tray drawer on the top left. He raised one hand from the desk. Felt the weight that’d been on it transfer to the other hand. No real change to the pressure the desk was putting on the pad.

  He pressed four fingers behind the rounded top of the drawer’s face panel and put his thumb against the edge of the desktop just above it. He pushed with his thumb and pulled with his fingers. There was a moment of resistance. Then he heard the lock mechanism crumble like a pretzel, and the drawer opened smoothly on plastic rollers.

  The drawer’s sides and bottom were made of the same material as the rest of the desk. They’d held up perfectly. The contents of the drawer hadn’t. There were three metal paperclips that’d rusted to what looked like orange chalk drawings of themselves. Travis blew on them and they vanished in a little cloud. There was a stapler that had corroded to a solid lump. Right beside it was a perfect little rectangle-shaped piece of rust that Travis couldn’t identify at first. Then he understood: a box of staples, the cardboard long since eaten away by mildew and the tightly arranged staples inside fused together by oxidation. There were three nickels and a quarter. There was a pile of rubber bands that’d broken down to dried crumbs. There was a layer of dead mold coating everything. Once upon a time it’d been paper: memos, Post-its, business cards, maybe check stubs.

  And that was it. There was nothing else in the drawer. Nothing with a name on it.

  Travis considered the larger one below it. A file drawer. Was it even worth bothering with? What could have been in it but paper? What could be in it now but an inch-deep layer of mold dust?

  He opened it.

  It contained an inch-deep layer of mold dust.

  He lowered his hand carefully to the mold and sifted through it. It came up in ragged tufts. They caught the wind as they cleared the top of the drawer and were scurried away. There was nothing lying concealed beneath the mold layer.

  Travis pivoted carefully on his feet, trying not to move them or change the amount of weight on them. He put his free hand back on the desk, and slowly raised the other, letting the pressure transfer. He faced the other two drawers.

  He tried the file drawer first. An inch of mold. Nothing under it.

  He opened the tray drawer.

  Empty.

  Not even a dusting of long-gone paper.

  He exhaled. Closed his eyes. Opened them again and began to stand upright.

  And then he stopped.

  Because there was something in the drawer.

  Something narrow and black, lying against the back end. It blended with the dark cherrywood color and all but escaped notice. It was a pen. It looked expensive. He picked it up and drew it into the light. The metal parts—the clip and the point—were rusted dark, but the body looked fine. It was made of something that felt harder than ordinary plastic. Something that wasn’t cheap. Its grip was ornate but not fancy. It looked serious. Like something a high-powered executive would whip out on special occasions—maybe the signing of final contracts for a hostile takeover. Travis rolled it between his fingers.

  There was a name engraved on it: eldred warren.

  Travis turned and held the pen up so Bethany could see the engraving.

  “Very good,” she said. “Now can you get the hell off there so I can start breathing again?”

  Travis pocketed the pen and for a moment rested both hands on the desk. He looked at the fragment of concrete that was keeping him alive. He looked at the distance back to the girder.

  Then he stood up straight and crossed the pad in five steps, ready to jump and grab for the beam if necessary. It wasn’t necessary. If the concrete moved at all beneath him he didn’t feel it. He saw Bethany exhale hard as soon as he was fully onto the girder, but he didn’t pause to share the sentiment. They had information now. Something they could work on. Just like that, his urgency had fuel to burn. He turned atop the beam and made for the stairwell at close to a sprint.

  They were six flights down when they heard the concrete fragment snap high above them. They turned in time to see the massive slab, desk and all, plunge through the channel of space defined by the girders. It blasted through the intact pad on level twelve without slowing, and the entire mass fell a hundred feet further to the foundation pit. The impact kicked up a halo of ash and dead leaves.

  They stared for less than a second, then continued down the stairs as fast as they could move.

&
nbsp; Chapter Fifteen

  Three minutes later they were on top of the pile of girders at the southwest corner of the Ritz-Carlton. The rope hung from the iris above, exactly as they’d left it. Bethany went up first, and Travis followed a few feet below. By the time he’d climbed through the iris she was standing at the window with her phone in hand, already going to work.

  Travis stared south at the green-tinted high-rise while Bethany worked on the name. He looked at the top floor and visualized the desk there in the present, bolted to the concrete through some expensive carpeting or hardwood. Maybe Eldred Warren was sitting there right now, with the same pen in his drawer that Travis now had in his pocket. Literally the same pen. That was a hard concept to get a grasp on.

  “He’s not in the federal tax records,” Bethany said. “Not too surprising, someone way up in a company like that. We already know they’re big on secrecy. I’ll try corporate registration in the Caymans.”

  Thirty seconds later she came up empty there, too.

  “There are lots of other tax shelters to try,” she said, “but before I start on those I’ll pull his social security file. That’ll give us at least some basic info on the guy.”

  She navigated for twenty seconds. She pressed a last button and waited for something. She smiled.

  Then she frowned.

  “What?” Travis said.

  “Got it. Only one Eldred Warren with a social security number in the United States.”

  “Must be our man, then.”

  “Yes and no.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Give me a minute.”

  It turned out to be ninety seconds. She spent them navigating to some other information on her phone, and reading it. Her frown deepened as she did.

  “It’s the right guy,” she said, “but he’s not going to be any help to us.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he doesn’t work in that building yet. I’m looking at his blog right now. He graduated number two in his class from Harvard Law School . . . three months ago. He hasn’t taken a job anywhere yet.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” Travis said. “Wouldn’t someone like that have offers waiting for him before he bought his cap and gown?”

  “Tons of them, but a guy like that knows he can pick and choose. It’s not unthinkable that he’d take his time. I had a dozen offers myself, and spent two months making up my mind. And this guy’s degree is more versatile than mine was. He’ll have everyone from movie studios to lobbying firms filling up his voice mail these days.”

  “All right, so maybe he doesn’t work for this company yet,” Travis said. “But he’s probably in talks with them. We could go have a chat with him, shove a gun in his face if we have to.”

  “Not anytime soon, we can’t. According to his last blog post, a few hours ago, he’s on vacation in Japan with his girlfriend.”

  Travis sat on the couch and leaned back. He pressed his hands to his eyes. He was tired as hell.

  They were at square zero. They had nothing at all to work with. The barrier of open space around the oubliette was as vast as it’d been when they’d first spoken of it.

  He looked at his watch. Nine thirty in the morning. Paige had been captive for just shy of ten hours.

  Bethany was pacing now. Holding her phone but unable to think of anything to do with it.

  Travis closed his eyes again.

  Paige wanted them to move on. Wanted them to leave her behind and finish what she’d meant to do herself. She’d said it in almost those words, in her phone call to Bethany. And she’d meant it. That was the way she thought. She had the ability to see the big picture. Six and a half billion lives versus her own. She was lying in that room down the street right now hoping like hell that they wouldn’t risk trying to save her. Hoping they would forget about her and just get to work. And they could do that. They could climb back down the rope right now, into the ruined D.C. They could walk back down Vermont, ignore the remains of the high-rise and go another mile to the White House. They could spend days digging in the wreckage there for some kind of clue. And if that search turned up nothing, they could go across the river to the Pentagon and spend weeks. And after a while they wouldn’t have to think about Paige lying in that room, because by then she’d be long gone. She’d be gone by tonight.

  The people who’d hit the motorcade had taken her alive because it made sense at the time. They’d been acting on a snap decision, operating with more questions than answers. But that was probably no longer the case. Ten hours was plenty of time to take stock. Plenty of time for them to realize they didn’t need her.

  No doubt Paige was thinking the same thing right now. Lying bound, waiting for her captors to settle on the decision. Waiting for it to happen. When it did, she would try not to cry about it. She’d still be holding on to the logic of it all, telling herself that her life was just part of what it cost to get the job done. She would be thinking that very thing when she felt the silencer touch her temple.

  “You love her.”

  Travis opened his eyes.

  Bethany had stopped pacing. She was looking at him.

  “You love her,” she said again. “Paige.”

  “I knew her for less than a week.”

  “That’s long enough.”

  “Why do you think I love her?”

  “Because you stayed on that concrete pad. Stepping onto it was one thing. But staying on it, after what happened . . . that was another thing entirely. To do something that insane, you have to care about someone more than you care about your own life. A lot more.”

  Travis didn’t reply. He stared ahead at nothing. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I can’t leave her in there.”

  “I don’t want to leave her, either. I just don’t know what the next move is.”

  Neither of them spoke for the next minute. Travis’s eyes fixed on a spot on the carpet. He stared at it and hardly blinked. He let the edges of his vision blur.

  Then he turned and looked at Bethany.

  “What was the last thing Paige said to you in that phone call?”

  “That you can go through and come back,” she said. “She was just saying it’s safe to go through the opening.”

  Travis thought about it. “No, that’s not what she said. Not exactly what she said anyway. Play the recording again.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  She played it. They listened. They heard the frantic rush of Paige’s voice telling Bethany to go to her residence, to get the entity and get out of Border Town. To use it. To go public with whatever she learned. To get Travis Chase’s help if necessary. Then she said, “Shit, what else . . . ?” and went silent for a few seconds. Travis caught the sound he remembered from the first time he’d heard the recording: running footsteps, men coming to get her. That sound was all he’d heard on the first listen, at that part of the clip. This time he focused on the other sound, right there beside it in the audio. The more important sound, by far. Paige’s breathing in the absence of her voice. Two breaths, deep and fast. They didn’t shudder on the way out. They seethed. Travis got the sense that however scared Paige was, she was frustrated even more. She was struggling to remember something critical, some detail she needed to tell Bethany in the few seconds she had left. Which was strange, in retrospect: if all Paige needed to say was that a person could step through the projected opening, would that have been hard to remember? Would it have even been necessary? Wouldn’t Paige expect them to figure that out for themselves?

  A second later they heard Bethany’s voice on the recording: “What’s happening? Where are you?”

  Paige’s voice came back in, louder and more intense than before. “You can take it through and still come back! You can take it through!”

  Then it was over.

  In the silence Travis looked at Bethany.

  They both looked at the black cylinder, still lying in the armchair, still switched on. The iris stood open to the forest and the overcast sky abo
ve it. The manila rope lay in tangles on the carpet where they’d left it after pulling it up.

  “Take it through,” Bethany said, turning the phrase over like a found artifact. “Does she mean the cylinder? Take the cylinder through the iris?”

  Travis stared at the thing. It was hard to imagine what else Paige could have meant.

  “It would be easy to do,” he said. “Switch it off with the delay, and then carry the cylinder through the iris during the minute and a half it stays open.”

  “You’d have to be out of your mind,” Bethany said. “What happens when the iris shuts behind you? Now you’re stuck seventy years in the future, with a machine that can only take you seventy years further into the future. You’d never get home.”

  “What if it doesn’t work like that? What if turning it on in the future just opens the iris back to the present time? Like a toggle. Back and forth.”

  “How would it know to do that?” Bethany said. “How would it know it was in the future?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s something simple. Maybe it senses when it’s taken through the iris, and switches itself into reverse. We’ll never know how it works, but think of what we just heard. Paige said you can take it through and come back. She knew a lot more about this thing than we do.”

  He watched Bethany mull it over. Watched her warm to it.

  “The logic adds up,” she said. “Someone built this thing for a purpose. I can’t see the use of something that just leapfrogs you further and further ahead in time, and never lets you come back. Forward and back makes more sense.”

  “It also explains why the cylinders came as a pair,” Travis said. “Think about it. Who knows what this kind of machine was meant for, but we can imagine any number of things. It could be some military scouting tool. Use it to survey the aftermath of a war you haven’t even fought yet. Hell, it could be farm equipment. Say there’s some high-value crop that takes seven decades to mature. Sow the seeds, step through the iris and reap the rewards right away. But whatever the use, its makers had a reason to allow the delayed shutoff. That way you can take the cylinder with you when you go through the iris. Not hard to imagine why they’d want to. Leaving it behind, switched on, is a major vulnerability. Look at the precautions we had to take, setting it up so nothing could get at it from the other side. But here’s the thing: taking it with you would be risky too. Extremely risky, in fact. Picture yourself putting this thing to casual use. Like it’s a socket wrench or a screwdriver. You’re using it all day long, going back and forth between two points in time, hauling food supplies or weapons or whatever. Can you think of the mistake you might make? It would be the easiest thing to do, and if you did it you’d be in a world of trouble.”