by Patrick Lee
Travis came on slowly. Patiently.
“What is this?” Holt said, getting barely above a whisper. “What is this?”
“I came to ID the other two victims in the Humvee,” Travis said.
Holt’s eyes left the knife and tried to pinpoint the location of Travis’s voice.
“Their names were Paige Campbell and Bethany Stewart. They were two of the best people I ever met. They passed up normal lives to make the world better, or at least to keep it from getting worse. They gave up a lot to do that. For the most part they even gave up sunlight.”
“Whatever you want, I can get it for you,” Holt said. “I’m the most powerful person in the world.”
“All appearances to the contrary,” Travis said.
“You need to think about this,” Holt said. His voice cracked. “You really do.”
“I really don’t,” Travis said, and he shoved the discarded chair aside, stepping past it toward where the man crouched.
Before he got there, his vision began to flash green and blue.
Chapter Forty-Three
Travis stopped mid-step. He swayed forward until he caught his balance. He looked around fast, as if his eyes could outrun the effect. They couldn’t.
Green. Blue. Green. Blue. The flashing saturated everything in his field of view, like intense stage lighting at a rock concert.
Green. Blue.
He knew what it meant—but it was impossible. How could he be catching up to the present from within a Tap memory if he hadn’t used the Tap?
Green. Blue.
The knife fell from his hand, bounced and spun on the carpet. Holt looked confused.
Travis staggered backward, stumbled against one of the chairs, turned and leaned down and steadied himself on the table.
Green. Blue.
He was about to be drawn out of this memory against his will. Any second. But drawn out to what? And to when? When and where had he put the Tap into his head?
Green. Blue.
Black.
He flinched and opened his eyes. He was back in the study, at the plane’s tail. Holt and Porter were standing in front of him, Richard Garner just beyond them and off to the side, still bound to the dolly. Travis looked down and saw that he himself was bound to a dolly now, right where he’d been in the dream.
Which hadn’t been a dream.
Neither had it been a projection sent to him by somebody else.
It hadn’t been either of those things.
He had less than a second to think about it, and then his memory simply wiped itself away. Vanished like a sand picture in the blast of a leaf blower.
Where was he?
How had he gotten here?
What the hell was he tied to?
An old man who looked like Wilford Brimley leaned into his viewpoint, scrutinizing his face.
“Can you understand me?” the old man said.
But before Travis could reply, his memory blew away again, no more than a second after it’d begun to form.
Where was he?
How had he gotten here?
Garner watched Travis struggle against the drug. As strange as it was to experience the effect yourself, it was almost more so to see someone else endure it.
He watched Travis’s eyes keep losing the room and finding it again. Rediscovering his surroundings every second or so as his memory fractured.
Porter was leaning in with his nose six inches from Travis’s.
“Tell us who goes through the Breach,” he said—framing it as a command, not a question.
Travis blinked, no doubt having lost the statement already. He stared at Porter and said nothing.
Porter repeated the instruction. And again. And again. Carefully and patiently. Working it into Travis’s subconscious like a dog trainer setting a patterned response. He’d been doing this for years.
“Tell us who goes through the Breach.”
Garner had undergone the questioning himself all night and all day. Sessions like this every hour or so, seventeen in all. The needle marks on his arms helped him keep count.
He’d given up a lot of information. He knew it. He also knew he’d held on to the only piece that would matter in the end. He knew by the frustration he’d seen in their eyes, each time the narcotic’s power dissipated and his memory stabilized. They hadn’t gotten it from him. He’d been protecting it too long to surrender it now, even under the drug.
It would be different with Travis. If he knew the answer, he’d learned it today.
Porter gave the command a sixth time: “Tell us who goes through the Breach.”
Travis’s eyelids drew close together. He seemed to grasp the instruction, even beneath the crumbling memory.
“Tell us who goes through the Breach.”
“I do,” Travis said.
Porter narrowed his eyes. He drew back a few inches.
“I go through,” Travis said. Something like amusement crossed his face. “Lucky me.”
“Is he playing with us?” Holt said. “Is the effect wearing off?”
Porter looked at his watch. “It’s probably starting to. We used up three sixteen while he was in the memory.”
“Get the Tap back out of him,” Holt said. “While you can still make him cooperate.”
Porter nodded. He leaned in again and said, “Think the Tap out of your head.” He repeated it, his speech precise and direct. He said it a third time and Travis shut his eyes and seemed to concentrate hard on something. A few seconds later he gasped. His face twisted in pain. Then the Tap began to emerge from the same pinprick hole it’d gone in through, a bright green tendril snaking and darting. Porter held up his hand and let it collect in a mass on his palm.
“Try again in an hour,” Holt said. “We’ll have the whole four or five minutes to question him then. We’ll get it.”
By the time they left with the Tap—reformed into its cube shape—Garner could tell Travis’s memory was solidifying. The drug’s influence tended to recede very rapidly, from full strength to no effect at all in about a minute. The clarity growing in Travis’s eyes showed he was well into that time.
Where was he?
Some little room.
He was tied to something—a dolly, it looked like.
He took a deep breath, and felt a fog clear from his mind as he did. Another breath—even clearer.
He looked up and saw that Richard Garner was with him, also tied to a dolly.
He thought the room was a study, though for the moment he wasn’t sure how he knew that.
There was a deep droning sound coming through the walls and floor. Jet engines.
This was Air Force One. This room was back in the tail. He was certain of that, though again he didn’t know how.
While he wondered, it occurred to him that someone had just left the room. Two men, he thought. And they’d taken something with them.
The Tap? Had that been it? He was all but sure of it, and a second later he was sure of something else:
The Tap had just come out of his head.
The headache said so, and the trickle of blood at his temple confirmed it.
His next breath pushed out the last of the haze, and the day’s memory came down on him in a single rush.
He and Paige and Bethany, flying to Rum Lake. Evading the contractors by entering the mine. Meeting Dyer. Seeing the second Breach. Using the transparency suit to get away. Then the supermarket. The missile. The mindless drive down to Oakland afterward, with little thought in his head but gutting Stuart Holt like a fucking pig. He recalled boarding the plane, scouting it out, finding Garner back here at the tail. Then killing the others, and—
And catching up to the present.
From within a Tap memory.
He thought about that. He stared into space and tried to put it together.
The Tap memory had ended in the conference room aboard this plane.
Where had it begun?
When had it begun?
He couldn’t recall any starting point.
Worse yet, the Tap had burned all his real memories of the time span in question. It always did that. He had no way to remember what had really happened during the period he’d just relived.
“Coming around?” Garner said.
Travis nodded.
“They used a drug on you,” Garner said.
Travis nodded again. “Phenyline dicyclomide.”
Garner looked surprised.
“Dyer told me about it,” Travis said.
“Do you understand what they did to you just now?”
“Not really. Parts of it, maybe.”
“The drug has two stages,” Garner said. “Mild amnesia for a couple minutes, then four or five minutes of total short-term memory fracturing.”
“Dyer said they can give you commands during Stage Two,” Travis said, “and sometimes they feed you information in Stage One that they want you to use—”
He cut himself off.
He thought he suddenly understood part of it.
Garner nodded, seeing his expression.
“You never made it inside the mine, in real life,” Garner said. “You and Paige and Bethany got as far as the blast door, and you were trapped there. You didn’t have the combo. They used gas grenades and captured you all.”
Travis had been looking at the floor. Now he looked up sharply at Garner. “Paige and Bethany are alive?”
Garner nodded. “Tied up just like us, in the closet of the bedroom suite. They’re fine.”
All the emotions that’d torn into Travis earlier like serrated blades now reversed themselves. They withdrew in a searing instant of release that seemed to hit him as hard as the missile’s shockwave had. His breathing spasmed and his eyes flooded. He couldn’t stop himself. Didn’t care to, either. The most he could do, after a moment, was quiet the shuddering breaths. He lowered his head and let the tears stream and made hardly any sound.
Garner stayed quiet a moment longer, then continued.
“Until they chased you three to the blast door, Holt’s people hadn’t even known the mine existed. Neither had Holt. Once they found it, they figured it mattered, and they located the other access and blew them both in. Inside they encountered Dyer, by himself. They traded gunfire with him—and killed him. When they realized who he was, and that he must’ve been working with me, they figured he’d probably had all the information they were after. Including the one thing they couldn’t get from me.”
“My name,” Travis said, his voice still cracking.
Garner nodded. “They were sure Dyer knew it, and they considered using the Tap on themselves to go back and interrogate him. They even got the door combo out of me so they could enter the mine quietly. That information was far less important to me than your identity—I’m sure I didn’t give them much of a fight.”
Travis looked up and blinked hard at the tears. Garner’s image swam and then resolved.
“Holt was afraid of the Tap,” Travis said. “He was hesitant to even let his subordinates use it.”
“That’s exactly right,” Garner said. He stared for a moment, visibly confused as to how Travis could know that detail. Then he set it aside and continued. “They realized they could use you instead, to spare themselves the risk. They gave you the drug, and in Stage One they fed you the door combo, and in Stage Two they put the Tap in your head and commanded you to relive the day. If it worked like they hoped it would, the memory fracturing would keep you from knowing you were in a Tap memory at all. You wouldn’t remember using the Tap—or living through the day the first time around. You’d drop into some point in time this morning and think it was this morning. You’d think it was real.”
The plane. En route to Rum Lake. Waking up aboard it—that was when the Tap memory had begun. The whole day after that had been fake.
“Later on you’d reach the blast door,” Garner said, “and this time you’d know the combo. You’d never know how you knew it—you’d remember Stage One like it was some strange vision you’d had—but under the circumstances you’d certainly try punching those numbers in.”
“And end up meeting Dyer,” Travis said.
Garner nodded. “In all likelihood learning what he knew, given that you served the same interests. And when you came back out of the Tap memory, they could interrogate you for that knowledge. You’d be less conditioned to protect it than I am. Far less, I’m afraid.”
“Jesus, did I give it up? Did I tell them I’m the one who goes through the Breach?”
“You did, but they thought it was sarcasm.” Garner frowned. “An hour from now they’ll figure out that it wasn’t. I’m sorry, but there’s almost no chance of your protecting that secret against someone as skilled as Porter.”
Garner sounded defeated. It was impossible to blame him. For a long moment Travis felt the same.
Then he thought of something he’d seen earlier, while wandering the plane in the transparency suit.
A second later he thought of something else he’d seen, and managed a smile.
Holt and his people couldn’t possibly know he’d gotten such a detailed look at the aircraft. They wouldn’t have guessed in a million years that, in the Tap memory they dumped him into, he would end up boarding the plane and scoping it out nose to tail. That lack of imagination on their part had been a mistake. A big one, potentially.
He flexed his wrists against the zip tie that bound them behind him, and put his knuckles to the plasterboard an inch away.
Then he shoved. Hard. Once, twice, three times. He heard the board flex and protest, and on the fourth push its gypsum core cracked softly in a fist-sized hole, the paper surface tearing with it.
“What are you doing?” Garner said.
“You’ll see.”
With his fingers he felt the edges of the hole, and snapped away piece after piece until he’d exposed several inches of the vertical aluminum support behind him. The one his own dolly must be secured to.
Then he contorted his wrists until he had the encircling zip tie stretched between them, and pressed it against one edge of the aluminum strut.
One crisp, machined edge.
It was as sharp as a blade.
He began sliding the zip tie up and down against it.
Garner finally understood, but still didn’t look hopeful.
“That won’t free your shoulders or your ankles,” he said.
“No,” Travis said. Then he nodded to the nearby desk. The one so close beside him he hadn’t noticed it in his first glimpse of this room. “But I’ll be able to reach the top right drawer there, and get ahold of the nail clippers inside.”
Garner’s eyes registered deepest confusion for three seconds. Then he smiled too.
“You found what Allen Raines had in his red locker,” he said.
“Found it and used it,” Travis said. “Tell me about the weapons cache in the hall. Will your palm print work on the scanners?”
“It will. But an alarm goes off as soon as you open a case. They’ll be on us before we can get anything loaded.”
Travis laughed softly. “I wouldn’t worry about that.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Holt was in the conference room, reading the interrogation notes again, when he felt the heat on the side of his face. For three or four seconds he ignored it, assuming the plane’s climate control system had begun venting warm air from the ceiling ducts.
Then it felt more than warm.
He turned in the direction it was coming from—the back wall—and his legs involuntarily kicked and shoved him away from the table.
Above the counter where the Breach entities were lined up, the plastic facing of the wall had begun to warp and melt in one area—a big half-circle blooming from the counter’s back edge.
Centered right beneath the melting place were three entities, all the same type. Holt had read the paper slip that detailed their function, but couldn’t remember it now. The objects were roughly cigar sized and ma
de of something that looked like polished blue stone.
They’d been blue earlier, anyway.
Right now they were closer to pure white, incandescing like lightbulb filaments.
At that moment a line of flame erupted where the melting plastic had begun to pool atop the counter, the material breaking down into constituent oils. A tenth of a second later the entire melt zone was engulfed and sending noxious black smoke toward the ceiling.
Holt shoved himself up from the chair, turned, and began screaming at the others in the seating area ahead. He’d just gotten out the word fire when an alarm began shrieking, seeming to come from everywhere. He reached the doorway and saw the others already moving, running for the fire extinguishers positioned along the outer walls. The extinguishers’ mounts were strobing bright red—it was impossible to miss them.
Holt stepped aside as the first of the men sprinted past him into the room. One by one they went in, dodging around the chairs and one another, and blasting carbon dioxide at the flames. With their bodies in the way, Holt could no longer see the fire, but the men’s audible responses told him they were having trouble with it. They kept triggering the extinguishers, the sound not quite drowning out their curses and shouts.
Porter arrived at the rear of the pack, carrying two extinguishers. He shoved one into Holt’s hands and then ducked in past him. Holt followed. As he did, he heard another alarm begin blaring somewhere. Back toward the tail, maybe. God knew what it was; flames and smoke aboard an aircraft probably set off all kinds of emergency indicators.
He shouldered past the edge of the crowd and at last saw why the fire was proving difficult. The carbon dioxide was all but evaporating in the envelope of blazing air around the three entities. How hot were the damned things?
Even as he wondered, he saw one of them flicker. Then the other two. Within the following seconds all three began to dim visibly. The white-hot color was fading before his eyes.
Then the throat of the man next to him exploded out from under his head.
