by Patrick Lee
The girl glanced at Travis. He shrugged.
“We’re fine with what’s aboard,” she said. “We’ll be arriving shortly.”
“Very good.”
She ended the call and set the phone on the console. She still looked anxious. She hugged the backpack against herself. It flattened out. There wasn’t much in it.
“Renee,” Travis said. “Nice to meet you.”
For a second she looked confused. “Oh, sorry, no. I’m Bethany. Bethany Stewart.”
She stuck out a tiny hand. Travis shook it.
“Renee’s a cover,” she said. “She doesn’t really exist.”
“She sounds well off for someone who doesn’t exist.”
“I’ll tell you all about her sometime.”
“All right.”
“I’m with Tangent. I guess you assumed that.”
Travis nodded.
“I would have called ahead,” she said. “I was just afraid you’d hear the first five words and hang up, and you’d be long gone by the time I got here.”
“Why didn’t Paige call? She wouldn’t expect me to hang up on her.”
Bethany was quiet for a few seconds. “Paige is the reason I’m here. She didn’t have time to call anyone but me. She barely had time for that.”
Travis waited for her to say more, but instead she picked up her phone again. She switched on the display and brought up what looked like a file directory.
“This phone records every call by default,” she said. She selected a file and clicked on it. An audio clip began to play.
Travis heard Bethany’s voice first. She started to say hello and then Paige spoke over her, her own speech fast and panicked, struggling for clarity through hyperventilation: “Bethany. Go to my residence. Override for the door is 48481. Open the hard storage in the back wall of the closet, star–7833. The thing inside is one of the entities I was testing, the same as the one I brought to D.C. Take it and get out of Border Town right now. Don’t tell anyone anything. Get somewhere safe and then use the entity. You’ll see what it does, and what you need to do. Whatever you learn from it, just make it public yourself, make it huge, do notgo to authorities. Not the president. Not anybody. If you need help, find Travis Chase in Atlanta. Three seventeen Fenlow, apartment five, the name Rob Pullman. Shit, what else… ?” Paige stopped to take a deep breath. Then another. In the background Travis heard a sound: running footsteps on pavement.
Bethany’s voice came in on the recording: “What’s happening? Where are you?”
Then Paige cut her off again, shouting. “You can take it through and still come back! You can take it through!”
On the last word something changed. Some expulsion of her breath, as though her body had suddenly moved. Or been moved. Then the recording ended as abruptly as if she’d turned off the phone, though Travis pictured something more severe than that.
The on-ramp to 285 came up on his right. He took the turn going too fast. His concentration wasn’t on the driving.
He looked at Bethany. He waited for her to explain what the hell he’d just heard.
She went back to the directory on her phone and navigated to a new file. Its icon was a symbol of a filmstrip frame. A video clip.
“It was nine minutes after midnight, East Coast time, when Paige called me,” she said. “And I captured this from CNN about an hour later, when I was already on my way here to find you.”
She double-clicked the file, then handed Travis the phone. He propped it on the steering wheel as the video started to play.
News chopper footage. A row of vehicles crippled and burning in the street. Four SUVs jammed together like derailed train cars. The last of them was flipped over on its roof. The caption at the bottom of the screen read: motorcade attacked in washington, d.c.
The shot pushed in tight on one of the vehicles and Travis saw damage that couldn’t be attributed to the flames alone. Massive holes in the metal panels. They could only have been caused by high-powered gunfire. It’d even cut through some of the structural members. Maybe shotgun slugs at close range could do that, but the sheer number of holes ruled that out. Someone had used a heavy automatic weapon on the convoy, probably a .50 caliber. Serious hardware to be lugging around within a few miles of where the president and his family slept.
“I’ve watched the coverage for a few hours now,” Bethany said. “Until I got off the plane here in Atlanta. They’re saying the victims in the motorcade were a mid-level CIA executive and his staff, and that the names may not be released. After a while they started reporting the exact time it happened. A few minutes after midnight. So the times match. And it’s exactly where Paige and the others would’ve been after leaving the meeting, right between the White House and Andrews—”
She cut herself off and looked at him. “I’m sorry, you’re hearing this all out of sequence. I’m not making any sense.”
“You’re fine. Just take it in order. Start at the beginning and tell me what you know.”
She made a sound that was halfway between a sigh and a laugh. Equal parts weariness and frayed nerves.
“What I know won’t take long,” she said.
Chapter Three
Bethany unzipped her backpack and opened it. Travis felt a pocket of dry heat roll out, like she’d opened the door of a toaster oven.
There was a single item in the pack. In the glow of passing streetlights Travis got a sense of the thing. A dark metal cylinder. It was the size and shape of a rolling pin without the handles. There were three buttons running down its length, with symbols engraved into them. Something like hieroglyphs, though not in any human language, Travis was sure.
Next to each of the buttons someone had taped a handwritten label. The three of them read:ONOFFOFF (DETACH/DELAY—93 SEC.)
“This is the entity Paige was talking about in the call,” Bethany said. “The one she had locked in her closet. There’s another one identical to it, which she took to D.C. The two of them came out of the Breach together, like matching handsets for a cordless phone.”
She lifted the entity free of the bag. It didn’t look like it weighed much, by the way she held it.
“Whatever’s going on,” she said, “it all centers around the two entities.”
“What do they do?” Travis said.
“I have no idea.”
“All right.”
“Only the top four people in Tangent know that. Paige being one of them. They’re the same four people who went to D.C. They were the only ones involved in experimenting with these entities, figuring out their function. That work began this past Monday, not quite three days ago now. Paige and the others restricted the research to closed labs, and kept all their notes and video on secure servers. They must have figured out right away that these things did something big.”
“Is that normal?” Travis said. “Secrecy within Tangent itself?” It didn’t sound like any policy he remembered, but then he hadn’t been in Border Town for very long. His entire involvement with Tangent—and with Paige—had lasted less than a week, two years ago. He hadn’t wanted to leave, but in the end he’d learned something that made it unthinkable to stay. And what he’d learned, he’d kept to himself.
“The secrecy is a temporary policy,” Bethany said. “Paige feels bad about it, but she and the others at the top think it’s necessary for now. So much of the population there is new these days. They’ve had to refill the ranks almost completely in the past two years.” She glanced at him. “I guess you know about that.”
Travis nodded. “I know about that.”
“Well, it’s put a strain on the recruiting process. Tangent used to spend months vetting a single candidate, but lately they just haven’t had that luxury. They needed so many people, so fast, that the process had to be truncated for most of them. It’s just going to be a while before they can all be trusted like the former staff. Paige apologizes for it all the time. People understand, though. They’re well aware of the risk of another Aaron Pilgri
m coming along. So, yeah, when an entity shows up that’s serious business, generally just the top few people are allowed to work with it. That’s how it went with these two.”
She set the cylinder back in her lap, half in and half out of the open backpack.
“So, Monday,” she said. “The closed labs. I know Paige and the others did a safety assessment first, because they took test organisms in with them. Fruit flies. Nematode worms. Half a dozen mice. I guess the entities checked out fine, because they returned all the animals to containment by that night, and nothing was wrong with them. Then on Tuesday morning they took both entities up into the desert and did more work there. A lot of it. They stayed up there all that day and right through the night. I doubt they even slept, unless it was on the ground. They kept coming back down, one or two of them at a time, and taking communications gear up to the surface. Long-range radio equipment, every kind of frequency. Satellite stuff too. Big transmitting and receiving dishes, and the tools to take them apart and put them back together. I have no idea why. Then early Wednesday, a little less than twenty-four hours ago, they brought it all back down, and the entities too, and told us they were leaving for a while. Maybe for weeks. Maybe longer than that. Some kind of exploratory trip involving the two entities, putting them to use somehow. They wouldn’t say more than that, except that their first stop was Washington, D.C.”
“What were they going to do there?”
“Meet with the president.”
“Did they say why?”
“Not really. I got the impression they wanted his help with what they were doing. Like going to him was the logical first step in the process.”
“On the phone Paige told you not to trust the president,” Travis said.
Bethany nodded. “Something changed her mind about him.” She went quiet for a few seconds. She stared ahead at the pressing darkness over the freeway. “I think the president was behind the attack on the motorcade. I think he had to be.”
Travis thought about the damage to the vehicles again. The kind of weapon that could do that wasn’t handheld. It needed a heavy tripod. It needed setup time too. A couple minutes, at least. You could ready one inside a van, but then your firing positions would be limited to where you could park, and you’d be a lot less agile once the shooting started. You’d need to put yourself in just the right spot, well ahead of time, and to do that you’d need to know the target’s exact route and schedule.
Only the president and a few aides would’ve had that information.
Travis thought about President Garner, a man he’d spoken to on the phone once, briefly. Like the five presidents before him, Garner had enjoyed close ties with Tangent while never making a move against its autonomy.
But Garner wasn’t the president anymore. He’d resigned from office two years ago, after losing his wife to what the world believed was a heart attack. His replacement, Walter Currey, had carried on the former administration’s policies to the letter, and already made it clear he had no ambition to run for another term in 2012. Currey had been a friend of Garner’s for over twenty years. He’d made a speech at the First Lady’s funeral and had to stop twice to keep his composure. By almost anyone’s measure he was a good man.
Maybe he was just good at looking like a good man.
“Anyway, that was it,” Bethany said. “They left for D.C. yesterday afternoon. And late last night I got the call you heard. I tried calling Paige back after it cut out. Nothing. Right to voice mail. So then I just did what she told me to do. I got the entity from her residence and I got the hell out of Border Town. I guess I understand the point of not telling anyone there. If she wants me to go underground and use this thing—whatever it does—then the fewer who know about it the better. And it was faster that way, without notifying anyone. No group decisions, no proper channels. I just called in one of the Gulfstreams we keep at Browning Air National Guard Base in Casper. Did it on Paige’s authority. This was less than five minutes after the call. No one had learned of the motorcade attack yet. It took the plane ten minutes to reach Border Town, and another ten to fly me to Rapid City in South Dakota. And then Renee Turner chartered a private jet, and Bethany Stewart vanished off the grid. As far as anyone knows, I’m hitchhiking on Interstate 90. And now I’m here, and you know as much as I know.”
Travis said nothing for a long moment. He considered all that she’d told him. He let the pieces fall together where they seemed ready to.
“Learn from it,” Travis said. “That’s how Paige phrased it in the call. Whatever you learn from the entity, make it public.”
Bethany nodded.
Travis looked at the cylinder sticking half out of the backpack.
“Paige and the others learned something from it,” he said. “Something big and important that the world would want to know about—something that should be made public. But there must have been even more they wanted to learn. That’s what the exploratory trip was about. Like they’d found one piece of some puzzle, and they were going off to find the rest of it, using the entity. But before that, they went to see the president, to show him the one puzzle piece they already had. Maybe they thought he could help them make sense of it. But that plan backfired. Whatever they’d uncovered, the president didn’t want it made public. Didn’t want them digging up the rest of the pieces. Maybe Paige and the others didn’t realize what they’d stumbled onto. And obviously the president did.”
“They touched a nerve of some kind,” Bethany said.
Travis nodded. He thought of the burning vehicles in the street.
“A big damn nerve,” he said.
“Hence the instruction to go underground. Figure it out for ourselves and trust no authorities.”
Travis looked at her. “But you’re not going underground. You’re going right to where she was attacked. Something she’d probably tell you not to do.”
Bethany returned his gaze. “You don’t sound like you disapprove.”
“I don’t.”
He saw the hint of a smile in her eyes, buried under a ton of stress.
“Do you have some way of finding her?” he said. “If she’s still alive?”
“I have a way of trying. It’s hard to explain how it works. Easier if I just show you once we’re on the plane. But I can only locate her. After that, I don’t know what to do. She’ll be somewhere secure.” She looked down at the black cylinder. “I guess I’m hoping that whatever else this thing does, it can help us with that part, somehow. No reason to expect that, I know. It’s just all I’ve got. After we get Paige’s position, we can find someplace safe and switch this thing on, and then I guess we’ll find out.”
She went silent again. She watched a sign with directions to the airport slide by. Then she looked at him. “You don’t have to help me, you know. You don’t have to get involved in this at all, if you don’t want to.”
Travis watched the road. He thought of Paige, bound somewhere, her life in the hands of whoever had hit the motorcade. Just ahead, I–285 swung broadly to the east, toward the blood-red promise of dawn at the horizon.
“Yes I do,” he said.
Chapter Four
Travis parked in the long-term lot, a quarter mile from the private hangars.
“Do they search your bags before you board a private flight?” he said.
Bethany shook her head.
Travis turned and took hold of the upholstery of the passenger seatback just behind Bethany’s left shoulder. The narrow panel of cloth that covered the side facing inward was loose at the top, a half-inch flap that would look to any observer like a sign of wear and tear. It wasn’t. Travis pulled down hard on it, and the few threads binding the cloth to the seatback broke easily. The move exposed the seat’s interior, a cage of spring steel and foam. He reached inside and felt his hand close around the grip of the SIG-Sauer P220 he’d hidden there two years before. He took it out and set it in Bethany’s backpack alongside the black cylinder. Then he reached back in for the three spar
e magazines he’d stashed with it—a fourth was already loaded into the gun—and put them in the pack too.
If the sight of the weapon made Bethany more nervous than she already was, Travis couldn’t tell.
They were in the air fifteen minutes later. The little business jet banked into its climb and gave Travis a last look at the spiderweb of highways crisscrossing Atlanta. He was sure he would never come back, unless he happened to be passing through. Rob Pullman wasn’t going to show up for work tomorrow. Wasn’t going to answer his door when the landlord came to ask about the rent next week. It occurred to him with a kind of sad amusement that Pullman would probably never be reported missing. Just fired and evicted in absentia. No great loss to anyone.
He and Bethany were sitting at the back of the plane, ten feet from the pilots. The engine sound was more than enough to mask their conversation if they spoke softly.
Bethany took out her phone and plugged it into a data port on her armrest.
“The plane has satellite capability that my phone doesn’t have by itself,” she said. She pulled up a screen that reminded Travis of computer programs from the eighties and early nineties: a black background with a simple text prompt, like an old DOS system. He was sure the program wasn’t actually old; Bethany was just navigating the no-frills backwaters that ordinary users never saw.
“Will the pilots see this on their screens?” Travis said.
“Nobody will see. Not even the satellite vendors.”
She typed a command string that looked like random letters and numbers to Travis, and executed it. An hourglass icon appeared for a second, and then the little screen filled with a street map of the United States, overlaid on a satellite image. The satellite layer was fractured into several distorted squares, overlapping one another to make a composite. Travis realized what he was looking at: not the static view of the world that was available on any number of websites, but a realtime image composed of multiple live satellite feeds. Most of the visible United States was still deep in the shadow of night.
