by Patrick Lee
The response would come down on this place like a hammer. No question of it. But it would come too late. And those who responded would never guess his final intention. Not until they saw it for themselves.
He inserted the lead into a port on his PDA and switched it on. The screen lit up, the required program already running. It was one Pruitt had written himself, tailored for this purpose. The hourglass icon flickered, and then a password prompt appeared. He entered the code—a very long one—waited through another two seconds of the hourglass, and then saw the screen he’d expected. There was an input field for GPS coordinates. He pasted them in, having typed and copied them in advance, and pressed ENTER.
A second later the house shuddered. A heavy, continuous vibration set the floor and the desk humming.
Pruitt turned to the wall. He pressed his hands and then the side of his face against the concrete. Felt the animal waking up in its den.
Fifty-eight years ago the missile bay had contained a Korean-War-era Nike-Ajax. Pretty funny to picture it now, a weapon so simple and limited being trusted to defend the nation’s capital against Russian bombers and ICBMs. The Ajax fleet had been swapped out for the Hercules in the early sixties. Definitely an improvement, though still probably not up to the task. Only in the late eighties, under Pruitt’s tenure, had this program become viable—in his opinion—with the adoption of the Patriot system. A hell of a missile. But that wasn’t what was on the other side of the wall now.
Pruitt absorbed the vibration for another second, then pushed off of the wall and stood upright. He took a slip of paper from his pocket and set it on the desk beside the PDA.
The paper had a single short sentence written on it:
See Scalar.
The intended recipients would know what it meant. Pruitt himself didn’t even know. Or care.
He exited the room, leaving the PDA plugged in behind him. He returned down the corridor; where it met the entry, Adler’s blood had formed a common pool with Lamb’s, cherry red on the white tiles and nearly black where it’d saturated the grout.
Five seconds later he was out on the flagstones again, in the moist wind that smelled like leaves and pumpkins and smoke. He left his car in the driveway; already he could see the headlights of first responders, four blocks away and coming fast. He ducked around the side of the house and moved toward the backyard.
He could hear the missile from out here now. Louder every second. He heard dull thuds as heavy stabilizer arms retracted against the bay wall, and by the time he rounded the back corner of the house, the small basement windows at the rear had blown out and were venting steam into the night.
Pruitt crossed the shallow yard to the pines on the far end and stopped there, just inside them. He turned back and watched. He had to see it.
The house stood haloed by the headlights of the incoming vehicles. Tires skidded in the cul-de-sac and car doors opened and men’s voices shouted. Fast reaction. Almost fast enough.
The roof blew. The whole middle span of it. Wood splinters and asphalt shingles scattered upward like confetti, and in almost the same instant a shape knifed up through the opening.
An AMRM Sparrowhawk. Advanced multi-role missile. In keeping with the military’s crescent-wrench philosophy in recent years, the Sparrowhawk was a single tool with multiple uses. Specifically, surface-to-air and surface-to-surface. This one, stationed at this house, had only ever been meant for the defensive role, surface-to-air.
That wasn’t the role it would play tonight.
The missile, as wide as a telephone pole and almost as long, surged upward through the open roof, driven by a primary charge from the launcher below. Its momentum carried it above the treetops, maybe sixty feet higher than the roof’s peak, and just as it slowed and nearly stopped, the missile’s own engine engaged. For a third of a second it hovered almost still, like a Roman candle held upside-down. Then the flame beneath it went pure white, and the rocket screamed in a way that sounded eerily human—at a hundred times the volume—and a fast heartbeat later the thing was only a streak of light, climbing toward the speed of sound above Georgetown.
Pruitt watched it through the pine boughs. At two thousand feet its trajectory went flat. Its path defined a neat little semicircle in the sky as it hunted, and then it was gone, screaming southeast toward the ground coordinates he’d fed the PDA thirty seconds ago. The coordinates the Sparrowhawk would reach about ten seconds from now.
Movement at ground level caught Pruitt’s eye. The couple at the house next door had come out onto their rear patio, scared as hell and looking for the commotion. It was funny, in a way. Had they known, they could’ve stayed right on their couch, watching the live feed from the Oval Office.
That was where the show was going to be.
Chapter Two
Every night Travis Chase took the elevator up to the surface and went running in the desert. It was usually cool, and always clear. Tonight was no exception. He could see the machine gun flashes of a thunderstorm in the Rockies, fifty miles southwest, but above him the stars were hard and sharp in the twilight. The scrubland was solid as asphalt and took no footprints. It crunched lightly under the treads of his running shoes, his footfalls setting the cadence for his breathing. He could do six miles now without getting winded. Not bad. Forty-four years old and he was in the best shape of his life. When he’d started running in the desert, more than a year ago, two miles had been pushing it.
His circuit brought him around toward where he’d started. The loop was seven miles total, so he could walk the last one. His cell phone had built-in GPS that could plot his path and tell him when he’d covered six miles, but in recent months he’d found he didn’t need it. Habit and intuition were enough.
He slowed to a walk. His heart rate fell toward normal, and the pulse against his eardrums faded to the quiet of the desert night. This late in the year, whatever insects were native to Wyoming were long dead or dormant; there was no sound but the wind moving over the sand and dry brush, and the occasional, distant calling of coyotes.
In the trace moonlight Travis could see the low shape of the elevator housing a mile ahead. It wasn’t much to look at, even in daylight: a decrepit pole barn surrounded by the remnants of a split-rail fence. Someone could walk right by it and have no desire to investigate—if someone could get within thirty miles of it without being stopped.
This empty landscape was the most secure piece of real estate on the planet. There were no roads within a forty-mile radius. No overflights by either military or civilian aircraft. Intrusions by off-road vehicles, which were rare, were swiftly turned away by people who looked like pissed-off ranchers. They weren’t ranchers. They were something closer to soldiers, though not American soldiers. Strictly speaking, this featureless patch of eastern Wyoming was not American soil, and hadn’t been since 1978.
Travis slowed further until his footsteps became silent. Now and then, when the wind faded, he could hear the distant rumbling of the storm. He was half a mile from the elevator when his phone beeped with a text message. He took it out, switched it on and narrowed his eyes at the bright display.
NEWS. COME BACK FAST. CONFERENCE ROOM.
—PAIGE
An intense chain of lightning unwound itself sideways over the mountains, illuminating the front range. Travis switched off the phone and picked up his speed to a sprint.
Two and a half minutes later, in the deep shadows of the pole barn, he caught his breath—a full-out run could still wind him. He faced the elevator doors, opened his eyes wide and waited for the biometric camera to find one of his irises. A quick flash of red skipped across the left half of his vision, and then the doors parted in front of him, throwing hard light out onto the concrete barn floor.
He stepped inside and faced the array of buttons. All fifty-one of them. Though he only rarely had reason to press the button for the deepest level, his eyes always went to it, drawn by his awareness of what was down there. Sometimes, especially in the elevat
or, he could swear he felt the Breach somehow. Maybe in his bones. A rhythmic bass wave, like an alien heartbeat, five hundred feet below in its fortified cocoon.
He pressed the button for B12, and the doors closed on the desert breeze and the darkness. The cab descended.
What was the news?
Not a new arrival out of the Breach. If that’d been the case, Paige would have directed him to the Primary Lab, where newly arrived objects—entities—were always taken. Not a new discovery about an old entity, either. That, too, would’ve probably taken place in the Primary Lab, or some other testing area.
The doors opened on twelve, and Travis stepped into the hallway. Like almost any corridor in the building, at any given time, this one was deserted. Border Town was enormous relative to its population: about a hundred full-time personnel. Spread over fifty-one floors, they didn’t often bump elbows.
Travis turned the corner that led to the conference room, and saw Paige standing outside the open double doors, waiting. She had most of her attention turned inward on the room—Travis saw the glow of a television monitor reflected in her eyes—but she turned toward him as he approached. By now he could hear the ambience of a large number of people inside the room. Maybe everyone in the building.
When he reached Paige, she put her hand on his arm and left it there for a second.
“It’s bad,” she said, and led him through the doorway.
It was everyone. Standing room only. All eyes on the three large LCD panels on the right-side wall. Live news feeds: CNN, MSNBC, Fox. All three had aerial coverage of some structure on fire, surrounded by emergency crews. Travis looked from one screen to the next, seeking the clearest angle on the event, and after a few seconds the middle image pulled back and there it was.
The White House.
Burning.
More specifically, one of its wings was burning; the central portion of the house looked fine. Travis couldn’t tell whether it was the east or west wing that was on fire without knowing which way the aerial shots were pointing. He finally let his eyes drop to the captions at the bottom of each screen, and understood. An explosion, very near the Oval Office, possibly inside it. He studied the image again. Only a gutted cavity remained of the president’s office, all of it aflame despite two streams of water going into it from fire trucks on the scene.
“He was in there,” Paige said. “He was on TV, live, and then it just went to black. About a minute later they started reporting on it.”
The story resolved over the next two hours. Details came in, sketchy and then solid. The three networks must’ve had nearly identical sources—with each new piece of information, their chyrons updated almost in unison.
Twenty minutes into the coverage the secretary of state confirmed that President Garner had been killed. Vice President Stuart Holt, in Los Angeles for an environmental summit, was already in the air on his way back to Washington. He would be sworn in aboard the plane.
Travis found it hard to see Garner’s death in its proper light—its global and historical significance. Garner had been a friend, and now he was gone. That was the only way Travis could feel it, for the moment.
He tried to stay focused on the coverage. The details of the blast had already begun to crystallize. There were dozens of witnesses who’d seen a contrail in the air at the time of the explosion, though it was unclear, at first, whether it’d belonged to an aircraft or a missile.
Then, five minutes after the official announcement about President Garner, all three networks cut away from the White House to a new feed—still an aerial shot, but at a different location. A residential street somewhere. A cul-de-sac full of more emergency vehicles, mostly police cruisers but also an ambulance and a single fire truck. The house at the end of the cul-de-sac was heavily damaged in some way that was hard to make sense of. Most of its roof had been blown off, and the debris lay scattered around it, but the walls and even most of the windows appeared intact. Nothing was burning.
Around him in the conference room, Travis saw sudden looks exchanged. He glanced at Paige and saw her focusing hard on the televised images. The house. The missing roof.
A man to Travis’s left said, “Archer.”
A few others nodded, Paige among them. After a moment she seemed to feel Travis’s stare, and turned to him.
“Archer is an old Air Force program,” she said. “Goes back to the fifties. Defensive missiles concealed in civilian areas. Supposed to be a last line against a nuclear strike.”
Travis watched the implication spread across the room. President Garner had just been killed by someone in his own military.
It took less than an hour for rumors of the Archer program to filter into the broadcast coverage. Travis wasn’t surprised. Secret as the program was, it had to require hundreds of people to operate it. Maybe thousands. Impossible to keep them all quiet in the aftermath of something like this.
By two in the morning there was official confirmation that Archer existed, and that it had been used against the White House. CNN got an Air Force general on the phone who addressed those two points and then spent the next five minutes saying nothing at all in a dozen different ways. No word of a suspect. No word of a motive.
The helicopter footage remained the backdrop throughout, mostly covering the White House but occasionally returning to the cratered home on the cul-de-sac.
Travis had an idea that no further news was coming tonight, though the investigation had probably made serious headway already. No doubt there was an official suspect, dead or in custody. Those working the case probably knew most of what they would ever know. But they would be very careful parceling out that information to the public. The process would take weeks, not hours.
By 3 A.M. the crowd in the conference room on level B12 had begun to thin. Paige looked at Travis and communicated her thoughts without a spoken word.
Five minutes later they were in their residence on B16, under the covers, holding each other close in the dark. Travis could think of nothing to say. He thought about Garner. Knew Paige was thinking about him too. Only platitudes came to Travis’s mind. Garner had lived a long and dignified life. He would be remembered forever. His death had almost certainly come without pain. Maybe without awareness, even—the blast had probably killed him before he could see or hear it.
All of it true.
None of it helpful.
He kissed Paige’s forehead. Pulled her closer. Felt her body relax as sleep came on. Felt himself begin fading too.
Paige’s phone rang on the nightstand. She rolled, picked it up, squinted at the display. Travis saw by her reaction that the number was unfamiliar.
She pressed the button. “Hello?”
The caller spoke for a few seconds. Travis could discern only enough to tell that it was a man’s voice. He couldn’t make out the words.
“Yes, I’m in charge here,” Paige said. “Who is this?”
The conversation lasted five minutes. Paige hardly spoke. Just quick affirmatives to let the man know she was still listening.
When the caller finally stopped speaking, Travis glanced at Paige. In the diffuse glow from her phone, he saw her staring at empty space, her forehead knitted.
Two more syllables from the caller. It sounded like, Still there?
“Yeah,” Paige said. She shook off whatever she was trying to think of. “What you’re describing doesn’t sound familiar to me. I’ll look into it here, but you should probably assume this is a dead lead.” The man spoke briefly again, and then Paige said, “Thanks, I’ll let you know.”
She ended the call. Her eyes narrowed as if she was reviewing what she’d heard, committing relevant details to memory.
“That was the FBI,” she said.
“About Garner?”
Paige nodded.
“Do they have a suspect?”
“Yeah. Commanding officer of the crew on duty at the Archer site—a man and woman, both murdered. Cameras inside the house caught it all; the officer di
dn’t even try to hide his face. They’re into his financials now, and it looks like he got a giant payoff weeks ago, and spent all the time since making it liquid. Getting ready to disappear. Which he’s now done.”
“They don’t know where the money came from?”
“No, and they probably never will. They called here because the assassin left a note behind. The FBI seems to think it was addressed to us.”
“But you think they’re wrong?”
“No, I’m almost certain they’re right.”
Chapter Three
Paige pulled the covers aside, arched her body across Travis’s, and stood from the bed.
“Come with me,” she said.
She crossed the room, naked, to the desk chair where she’d left her clothes. Travis stared at her body in the soft light. Some sights were just never going to get old. Then he stood and went to his own clothes, clumped against the wall, and began pulling them on.
“The guy on the phone was Dale Nellis,” Paige said, “chief of staff to the FBI director. He read me the note—it didn’t take very long.”
She opened a drawer in the desk and tore a blank page from a notepad. Then she took out a pencil and wrote a single line:
See Scalar.
“That’s all,” she said.
Travis stared at it. He knew the word scalar as a mathematical term, but couldn’t see what meaning it might hold in the context of the attack.
“The FBI ran the word through their computers to see if anything interesting turned up,” Paige said. “A last name, an organization title, something like that. But they came up empty. A few small businesses have used that title over the years. A computer repair company, some kind of school supply maker, nothing much bigger than that.”
“Not exactly the usual suspects,” Travis said.
Paige shook her head, then nodded toward the door to the hallway. A moment later they were outside the residence, moving along the corridor toward the elevator.
Nearly every level of Border Town had the same basic layout, its hallways in the shape of a big wagon wheel. One giant ring corridor at the outside, a dozen spokes reaching inward to the central hub that housed the elevator and the stairwell.
