The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

by Patrick Lee

  “It’s an unnecessary risk anyway,” Travis said. “I have an idea. Let me think about it for a few minutes.”

  For a while no one said anything more. The bullet hole whistled and the wind moaned at the open back window.

  Paige looked at Carrie. “You can still come back to Border Town with us. Probably the safest place for you.”

  Carrie thought about it, then shook her head. “If you don’t need me, I’d rather stay as far from Tangent as possible. I can take care of myself. In my less trusting days I hid stashes of money, and made a few useful contacts. Leave me the Jeep and I’ll be fine.” She was quiet a long moment, staring out the side window into the darkness. “I need to tell you one last thing, for what it’s worth. Something I overheard about a year after Scalar ended. I was heading toward the conference room, and I heard Peter inside, speaking to one of the others. They were alone. Something in their tone made me stop before going in, and before I could leave to give them privacy, I heard the end of the conversation. Peter said something like, ‘It’s clumsy as hell, the way we wrapped it up. If it goes bad now, it’ll happen fast. We won’t have much time to stop it.’ ‘How much time?’ the other man asked, and Peter said, ‘The first sign of trouble would be something big, and from that moment we’d have just about exactly twenty-four hours.’ I remember he paused for about ten seconds then, and when he spoke again he sounded more scared than I’d ever heard him. He said, ‘Yeah, twenty-four hours to the end of the road.’ ”

  Travis glanced at Paige and then, in unison with her, looked at the Jeep’s console clock.

  6:05 A.M.

  Garner had been killed at a quarter to ten the night before, in the eastern time zone—7:45 here in mountain time. Therefore the end of the road—whatever that implied—would be 7:45 tonight. Thirteen hours and forty minutes from right now.

  Paige called Border Town and arranged for a jet to meet them at a regional airstrip near Cimarron. No flight plan; the pilots radioed for clearance five minutes before arrival, on the likelihood that unfriendly elements were monitoring air traffic.

  Carrie was gone with the Jeep by the time the plane landed. The aircraft was on the ground less than three minutes, and as it climbed above the clouds and the first hard beams of sunlight shone through the cabin, Paige said, “Tell me.”

  Travis squinted in the glare. “In May of 1978 I was ten years old. Pretty big for my age. Stocky, probably four-nine.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “We know Ruben Ward leaves the hospital the night of May 7 by a north exit, carrying the notebook. We know the time to within a few hours. And we know he’s so weakened right then he can barely walk. Physically, between me and him it’s no contest. Snatch and run.”

  “You lived in Minneapolis. How are you going to get halfway across the country by yourself at that age?”

  “Steal my dad’s car and put the seat all the way forward. Minneapolis to Baltimore’s probably fifteen or sixteen hours if I obey the speed limit. Which I’d better, I guess.”

  He watched her warm to the idea in spite of herself. But only to a point.

  “You’ll have to make stops for gas,” she said, “and any station attendant is going to dial nine-one-one the minute you step out of the driver’s seat. That’s not to mention interference from other customers at the pumps. All of whom will be a lot older than ten, and not just emerging from a coma unit.”

  “I won’t need gas stations at all. Five feet of plastic hose will do the trick.”

  The biggest problem, Travis knew, would simply be other drivers on the road. Even at night he’d be visible at the wheel, at least in brightly lit areas like cities and busy stretches of the freeway. Though no one in 1978 would have a cell phone with which to call the cops, there was no question that people would take action at the sight of a kid driving a car. But after only a few seconds, Travis thought he had the answer to that problem too. He considered it a moment longer, felt certain of it, then pushed it away and turned to Paige.

  “I’ve been trying to think of someone better suited to taking a shot at it,” Travis said, “but no one comes to mind. Outside Tangent, we might’ve trusted Carrie if we weren’t likely to kill her in the process. Or Garner, if he were alive—though I’d have worried about his age too. And inside Tangent there are—what—four people older than me?”

  Paige nodded, her eyes suddenly far away as she consulted a mental roster of Border Town. Travis had already covered that ground in his own head. Tangent’s population was skewed pretty young these days, given the near total replacement of personnel three years earlier. The new recruits hadn’t come straight out of grad school, but nearly all of them were under forty. Academics with solid track records and sufficiently few ties to politics or industry, drawn from all the nations that’d jointly founded Tangent. Of the four people older than Travis, none were American. Two were just a year older and had grown up in France. Another was maybe three years older and Russian. The oldest, at fifty-one, would’ve been seventeen the night Ruben Ward made his escape from Johns Hopkins. Seventeen and living in a remote village in northern China.

  Whatever resistance Paige had harbored for the idea was slipping fast. She looked at the time on her phone; she’d been doing that every few minutes since Carrie had spoken of the deadline. Travis had done the same. Even this flight back to Border Town, dead straight at five hundred fifty miles per hour, felt like a colossal hemorrhage of time.

  “I can get to Baltimore,” Travis said. “I can get the book. It only costs us three minutes and sixteen seconds to try.”

  “I guess your odds are better than mine,” Paige said. “I was negative two in 1978.”

  They called Bethany and brought her up to speed, and by the time they’d landed, taken the Tap from the Primary Lab and returned to their residence on B16—at 8:25 in the morning—Bethany was waiting for them with all the useful information she’d unearthed. Which wasn’t a lot.

  “Couldn’t nail down the exact timing of Ward’s exit,” she said. She adjusted her glasses, the same oversized pair she’d been wearing when Travis first met her last year in Atlanta. She looked young even for her age—could’ve passed for twenty without a hitch. When she really was twenty, she’d already been out of college and working for information-security firms, engineering the software that guarded the world’s secrets. In that field, the set of people on Earth with her skill level could’ve squeezed together into a good-sized elevator.

  “I assume the Baltimore PD got involved,” Bethany said, “once the hospital realized Ward was missing, but any dispatch info from that time is long gone. The computerized records only go back to the late eighties. If there was more detailed paperwork filed, like a missing-persons report with witness statements, and maybe a description of the hospital’s camera feeds, I couldn’t find it. There might be a hard copy on a shelf somewhere, but there’s nothing I can read over broadband.”

  “How about dated schematics of the hospital?” Paige said.

  Bethany frowned. “I scored a hit on that one, but you’re not going to like it.”

  She took a tablet computer from a big pocket on the side of her pants, switched it on and opened an image file. It was a huge high-resolution scan of a blueprint: an overhead view of part of the Johns Hopkins campus. She dragged it down so that only the top edge was visible: Monument Street running from Broadway to Wolfe—a distance of more than eight hundred feet.

  “You’re going to stand outside the place on the north side and watch the exits there, right?” Bethany said. “Wait for Ruben Ward to come out?”

  Travis nodded.

  “The good news,” Bethany said, “is that you should be able to see them all at once. The north stretch was pretty much the same in 1978 as it is now: four separate exits onto Monument, all of them roughly visible from any point on the other side of the street. Given the coma unit’s location within the building, Ward could’ve used any one of the four just as easily as another.”

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p; “Especially if he wandered at random for a while before he found one,” Travis said. “I won’t make any assumptions about where he might come out.”

  “Well, see, that’s the bad news,” Bethany said. “You’re going to have to.”

  She zoomed in until the middle third of the north stretch filled the screen. At that resolution, something became visible that hadn’t been before: a broad zone of Monument Street crossed out with diagonal lines. They extended right up onto the sidewalk to the building’s edge. All told, about fifty feet of the street’s length were marked out.

  “What the hell is that?” Paige said.

  “Construction. A service tunnel for the Baltimore Metro. The system didn’t go live until 1983, but they spent years building it before then. In the spring of seventy-eight they hadn’t yet started on the rail tunnel itself, the one that terminates at Broadway and Monument. Instead they were putting in a conduit for power and maintenance access four hundred feet east of that intersection, dead-centered on the hospital’s north side.” She dragged the image left and right and pointed out the exits Ward might use. “Two doors are west of the dig site, two are east. Whichever side you choose to wait on, you’re stuck with. I don’t think you’re going to get across the construction zone.”

  “I might,” Travis said. “If it’s late at night, the work crew may have already gone home.”

  “Can’t count on that,” Bethany said, “but even if they have, the dig itself is a major obstacle. This isn’t just some torn-up blacktop with plastic fencing stretched around it. I found an old Baltimore Sun article about the whole thing. The project ran from March to September of that year, and they installed the conduit thirty feet below street level. If they started in March, then the excavating would’ve been done by early May for sure. It’d be the Grand Canyon, cutting off the whole width of the street.”

  “So if you guess wrong about which side he comes out on,” Paige said, “you’ll have to run around the block. How big is the one north of Monument? Is it square like the main hospital’s block, or is it shallower?”

  “Normally, shallower,” Bethany said. “Madison Street is just a couple hundred feet north. But that’s dug up, too, so you’d have to go up to the next street, Ashland Avenue. I already did the math. No matter where you stand to watch for Ward, if you’re on the wrong side, you’ll have to run at least half a mile around. During which time he could wander off down a dozen possible alleys or even flag a cab—so what if he’d have to stiff the driver? He was desperate to get away from that place.”

  Paige looked up from the computer at Travis. “I hope you were a fast ten-year-old.”

  “Me too, because there’s no second shot at this. The memory’s burned whether I get the notebook or not.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  They planned what they could, as quickly as they could, devoting just under twenty minutes to it. They mapped the route—eleven hundred miles, about sixteen hours’ drive time with present speed limits.

  “But not 1978 limits,” Travis said. “Fifty-five everywhere back then.”

  “Even on the freeways?” Bethany said. She looked doubtful.

  Travis nodded. “Sammy Hagar wasn’t kidding.”

  He did the math in his head: at fifty-five the trip would take twenty hours.

  Which was a problem.

  Realistically, he’d have to steal the car late at night when both his parents were asleep. That would be well past midnight, probably closer to one or two. Twenty hours after two in the morning was ten the next night—in the central time zone. In Baltimore it would be an hour later. Factoring in stops for gas—which might take a while the way Travis was going to do it—could easily add another full hour. He’d be lucky to reach Johns Hopkins by midnight.

  “Ward could already be gone by then,” Paige said. “All we know about the timing is that he leaves at some point after Nora does, and we don’t know when she leaves either. Could be nine o’clock the night of May 7—Sunday—or it could be three in the morning Monday. Getting there at midnight’s risky.”

  “And I could be a lot later than that,” Travis said. “My dad might stay up until four instead of two. I might hit traffic jams.” He stared at Bethany’s computer, the highlighted route winding through seven states. “I’ll go a day earlier. Steal the car Friday night, get into town Saturday night.”

  “You’ll have a lot of downtime in Baltimore,” Bethany said.

  “Maybe I’ll head over to Camden Yards. Jesus, Ripken wasn’t even there yet.”

  A minute later Travis was thinking about a different baseball player—one who’d done something newsworthy two days before Ruben Ward disappeared. Travis hadn’t remembered the event himself; it was just one of a dozen stories Bethany had pulled from a news archive to help him dial in on the date he needed. On his own he couldn’t recall a thing from within months of that day. Just random flashes of fifth grade, impossible to place in a timeline.

  “The game happened on the Friday you’re shooting for,” Bethany said. “That’s May 5. The story would’ve been in Saturday’s paper, probably somewhere on the front page—even in Minneapolis. So you want to pinpoint Saturday and then rewind to Friday night before you drop fully into the memory.”

  Travis nodded. He tried to focus on the news about the game. He’d been into baseball as much as any kid in the neighborhood, and would’ve definitely heard about this story when it happened. Almost certainly would’ve glanced at the headline sometime Saturday.

  “If you had any real awareness of it at the time,” Paige said, “you’ll remember it when you’ve got the Tap in. Just picture the name in headline print. And that number.”

  The Tap was sitting on the table in front of him. Staring at him, in its way.

  No reason to wait any longer.

  He snatched it up, pressed it against his temple and screwed his eyes shut. Already his pulse was accelerating, before the pain had even begun.

  Ten seconds. Agony overwhelming all other feeling. The tendril snaking and darting across the top of his brain. Coiling, advancing, pressing.

  Then it was fully in, and still. As the pain ebbed Travis became aware of Paige draped over his shoulders from behind, her cheek against his own.

  He went to the couch and lay down. Paige and Bethany sank into chairs and watched him. Win or lose, the outcome was minutes away for them.

  Travis closed his eyes. He heard Paige’s cell phone begin to ring just as the world dropped out from under him.

  Formless dark. No body. No limbs. Thoughts and memories suspended in the void.

  The name.

  The number.

  He’d barely begun to picture them when the image came up, clear and brilliant as a photo held in front of his face. It was a view of the dining-room table in his parents’ house. Yellow afternoon sunlight slanted in, swimming with dust motes. He saw it all from an oddly low angle, his eyes only a couple feet above the scattered mail at the table’s edge.

  On top of the mail, like it’d been set there a minute before, lay a newspaper. Travis’s eyes went to a headline at the lower right corner, just peeking above the fold.

  Rose hits 3,000.

  The paper was dated Saturday, May 6, 1978.

  Travis let the moment begin to slide backward in time. He watched the viewpoint drift away from the table, reversing along the path he must have just walked.

  Out of the dining room. Down the hall toward his bedroom. The details were as strange as they were familiar—this was the old house. The little one they’d lived in before his parents’ illicit income sources began to blossom. The one place, at least in his childhood, that had really felt like a home to him. All at once he didn’t want to see its specifics.

  He sped up the reverse until it was a blur, his viewpoint surging backward through a firehose stream of imagery he could hardly follow. Crazy bursts of walking movement that felt disturbingly like falling down a well. Jittery spells of holding still with his face over a magazine, or watchin
g TV—he caught shutter-quick glimpses of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny and Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. There came a sudden rush of shower spray and soap and shampoo and then a split-second view of his own small face in a mirror, a toothbrush humming in and out of his mouth like a jigsaw blade. A glimpse of his pillow followed and then there was darkness, and the spooky tumble of dream visuals running backward through the night. These sights he could make no sense of at all—trees and fields and hallways and classrooms—and then he was awake again, propped up on his elbows in bed, staring at a book in the glow of his nightstand lamp. His hand flickered up and reverse-turned a page. Then again.

  He slowed the memory stream down. All the way down. Froze it.

  His field of view took in the book, the nightstand, and the alarm clock at the base of the lamp.

  11:57 P.M.

  Good enough.

  Travis left the image still and waited. Two seconds passed. Three. Then, sensation. Not the soles of his feet but the entire front of his body: his legs and chest and elbows, all seeming to hover at static-spark distance above the bed.

  He let himself drop.

  The change was so jarring he flinched. On his previous use of the Tap he’d gone back only two years; his body had been indistinguishable from its forty-four-year-old state.

  Ten was different—startlingly different—and his size and shape were the least of reasons.

  The reasons were everything else.

  His senses. The richness of the world came through them like a high. Had he really felt this way all through his childhood? This alive and feral? Had he lost it so gradually he’d never noticed it going away? He took a breath of the humidity coming in through the screen. He tasted cut grass and damp pavement and the pulp stock pages of the book lying open beneath him. A blue hardcover with no dust jacket. He flipped it shut. The Hardy Boys Number 2: The House on the Cliff. He set it beside the lamp and listened to the night. Crickets, katydids, distant tires hissing on asphalt. His hearing had to be half again better than what he was used to. His vision, too, though not in its clarity—at forty-four he still didn’t need glasses. It was more about the depth of colors. The saturation, maybe. Whatever it was, plastic lenses wouldn’t give it back to you once you’d outgrown it.