by Patrick Lee
The tool snapped to life with its grating hum, and a second later its teeth closed around the exposed nerve, and the image of her father shattered like a reflection on broken water as she screamed.
Travis lay very still on the rock shelf and tried to recall the mind-set of a killer. It was far back along the corridor of years, where he’d meant to leave it forever.
Until now.
Through his binoculars he watched the little guy with the string mustache move the instrument back and forth inside the young woman’s arm. Even through the muffling attachment she had across her mouth, Travis could hear her screams. His perch was perhaps a hundred fifty yards from the encampment, and seventy feet above.
Seven hostiles. Two captives.
The surreal fabric of the situation still enveloped Travis, as it had since the moment he’d found Mrs. Garner. Who the hell were these people? What was all of this about?
Even when he focused past the disconnect, and forced himself to take stock of the circumstances he was up against, questions remained. Why had the hostiles chosen to remain here? How could they consider themselves safe less than three miles from the wreck of a 747 that had carried the First Lady of the United States? Not to mention whatever had been in the steel container. Why stay near the crash for even a single hour, much less three days? Mrs. Garner had said in her note that there was a reason for that, but hadn’t expanded upon it.
Well, the plane hadn’t been found by any of the authorities who must be looking for it, including, presumably, the president. Somehow these guys had pulled that off—their confidence in their safety must stem from that. They hadn’t even posted a lookout. For now, it was enough to know that Mrs. Garner had been right: these guys were not expecting trouble.
He could get them all from here. Easily. Skill was simply not a variable from this range and elevation, and with these weapons—he’d brought five M16s, their selectors set to full-auto. Anyone who could douse a flower bed with a garden hose could kill all nine people in that encampment from this spot, probably before firing the first two rifles dry. Certainly by the fifth.
Yes, he could do that. He could do that right now and have it done with.
But he wasn’t going to.
In truth, he hadn’t squared with that part of Ellen Garner’s message, whatever the unmentioned stakes might be, but if even a scrap of the idea had lingered in his mind, it had vanished the moment he’d trained his binoculars upon the young woman on the torture table.
He wasn’t going to kill her. He’d accrued enough of that brand of guilt for one lifetime.
But he was going to kill.
He continued watching String Mustache enjoy his work, while the young woman’s body spasmed in the binds, and he found the killer’s mind-set coming back to him easily.
He could do this.
He just needed to get closer.
VERSE I
AN OCTOBER NIGHT IN 1992
His footsteps are the only sound in the night, and they don’t carry far.
For this time of year in Minneapolis, the day has been warm and wet, but in the past hour—the hour before midnight—a chill has moved in on the city, stirring wraiths of fog into the graveyard quiet of Cedar Street.
This deep in the neighborhood, there are no streetlights. Some of those who carve out their lives here prefer it that way. Tonight, so does Travis Chase. It is dark enough that he presents neither shadow nor silhouette, and his shoes make only faint ticks on the broken pavement. The only things in the night sharp enough to sense his presence are those things wilder than himself—even as he thinks this, a dog chain rattles softly on a porch, somewhere in the fog to his left—but his business on Cedar Street at this hour doesn’t concern such things. His approach will not be detected by anyone that matters.
The .32 is in his pocket, loaded with hollowpoints.
Ahead of him the fog thins, and he sees the house. Emily Price’s house. The only light comes from the big living-room window, casting its shape out into the mist. He can picture the two of them inside, maybe sitting on the couch, holding each other close and saying little or nothing. When he thinks of that, Travis’s shame burns.
He has no idea what will happen when he knocks on the door.
CHAPTER SIX
Travis saw within minutes what it would take. A lot could go wrong, but he thought the advantage was his, even against these numbers.
On the far side of the encampment, fifty feet beyond, the pines were dense. More than heavy enough to conceal him. He could reach that spot undetected if he traveled far enough along the valley on this side, low among the rocks, before crossing over and coming back.
Fifty feet was close, and with surprise on his side he might do well to just start shooting. The first shot would be a free kill, maybe even the second. Then it’d be him against five, and confusion on their part might give him the edge for another kill or two, if he was fast enough.
But the ifs would stack up quickly then. Those left standing would reach cover. If even two of them found safe positions from which to return fire, he’d be in trouble. Most likely he’d be dead.
Surprise wouldn’t be enough. He needed misdirection. He needed them looking exactly away from where he’d be firing from. He needed them looking at the place where he lay right now.
The idea came to him quickly, probably because he had so little material to work with.
He leaned one of the M16s against a waist-high fallen rock, and took from his backpack one of the nylon bags that held a single change of his clothes. He dumped the clothes back into the pack, and hung the empty bag—nearly weightless now—by its drawstrings from the M16’s trigger.
Then he set a full water pouch atop the rock, and made a pinprick hole in it with his knife. What came out wasn’t even a fine stream, but just a ceaseless drip, which he positioned to fall directly into the nylon bag. Designed to keep water out, the bag would keep it in just as well. When it held enough, and weighed enough, this gun would fire its entire clip into the sky.
Peter Campbell was going to break.
He kept his eyes locked on Paige’s as she cried, while the stringy little shit with the whiskers continued probing inside her arm with the nerve actuator. From time to time she would narrow her eyes and manage the slightest shake of her head within the strap, her message unmistakable: don’t.
But he would. Had to. He’d been in denial about it for hours, though he’d only just now begun to recognize it.
These people had simply won. Help was not coming—would not be coming for days and days, if even then. Drummond had seen to that.
Drummond. He’d broken, hadn’t he? And under what pressure? Nothing like what these past three days had been. As Peter understood it, the man had gotten a call from his wife, crying somewhere with a gun to her head. Almost anyone in the world would have caved to that, but Tangent operators were supposed to be stronger. That was one of the key attributes they were selected for, and Peter would have bet his life on Stuart Drummond’s integrity. In fact, he had. And he’d lost.
It was little solace that everyone else had trusted Drummond too—trusted him supremely. Who else would have been tapped to fly a plane carrying some of Tangent’s highest-ranking people, along with the most dangerous object ever to come out of the Breach? But the flight—coming from Tokyo and bound for Wind Creek, in Wyoming, where the object would have been secured forever—had made an unscheduled course change somewhere over the Aleutians. Drummond had murdered the rest of the flight crew, then depressurized the plane without releasing the oxygen masks. Finally he’d taken the jumbo jet down to pelican height—somewhere in there, overriding the damn safeties to keep the interior pressure equivalent to high altitude—and gone north into Alaska below radar.
Peter and the others had revived to the metal screams of the aircraft coming to rest God knew where, rejuvenating air at last flooding the plane through the broken fuselage.
Even as they’d heard the ATV engines closing in from outs
ide, Drummond’s voice had come over the comm, so hysterical he could barely speak. Peter had made out fragments of the apology and the story of Drummond’s abducted wife, and then he’d caught one final phrase before the man killed himself.
The final phrase—Ink Burst—had unnerved him more than the gunshot that ended the transmission.
Just like that, he’d understood that hope was lost. Ink Burst—a technology derived from another Breach object, albeit a relatively benign and manageable one—was a defensive measure designed to hide a crashed aircraft from satellites. Even visual satellites. It pulled a variety of clever tricks to fool them; one involved broadcasting an omnidirectional signal that caused spy birds to ignore the live crash site and substitute their own archived shots. The effective radius was something like five miles from the crash site, to cover any possible debris field. Currently every satellite platform in the world was vulnerable to it, though DARPA had a system ready to launch in November that was immune—after all, you never knew when your own toys would be used against you.
That precaution would come a few months late, as it turned out.
The whiskered man made a sudden adjustment to the nerve actuator’s power, and Paige’s body convulsed, a new flood of tears brimming in her eyes. He did that every few minutes to break up the pattern, keep her from getting used to any one strain of agony. This round would go on for another hour and a half, and then they’d crank the table flat again and let her rest an hour, as the drug lost its edge. The resting hour had nothing to do with kindness; it was simply the whiskered man’s understanding of how far he could push her and still keep her alive. The drug must be one of a dozen shock-inhibiting agents Peter knew of.
It was time to break.
He no longer cared what consequences would befall the world as a result. His world had shrunk until it no longer contained even himself. There was only Paige.
He could end her pain right now; in twenty words he could tell them where the Whisper’s key was hidden on the plane. An inch-long strip of something like clear cellophane, the key was the easiest thing in the world to hide, and among all the components of a 747, even a team of Boeing engineers could spend months searching for it, if they didn’t know where to look. Peter could give these people its location, and once they’d found it and verified that it was valid, they’d put a bullet in Paige’s temple, and his own.
Chirping laughter broke from the group encircling the campfire. That the arrogant fuckers had built a fire at all had made it abundantly clear to him, three days earlier, that this place would not be found in time. For the first twelve hours he’d clung to the hope that Ellen had survived. He and the others in the equipment room had forced her to hide in a mainframe cabinet; she’d protested, unwilling to be spared the others’ fate, and had given in only as the ATVs had stopped outside the plane. If she’d lived, she could have waited until the attackers left and then called for help.
But the hostiles, after executing everyone but Paige and him, had fired magazine after magazine into the equipment room, shredding every piece of machinery. He’d watched four shots pierce the compartment where Ellen lay hidden. There was close to zero chance she’d survived.
By the end of the first day, when Paige had already endured eight cycles of the torture, Peter’s resolve had withered to a thread, and all that had kept it from breaking had been the angry insistence in his daughter’s eyes, promising to hate him if he gave in.
All these impossible hours later, her strength was still intact.
But his was dead and gone.
It was time.
In the pines at the edge of the campsite, Travis set two of the spare M16s on the ground. Another he kept slung on his shoulder, and the last he held in his hands.
Fifty feet away, String Mustache was still about his business. From this angle Travis could see the face of the other captive, an older man tied to a tree near the young woman. Travis wondered if a look of greater anguish had ever existed in the world.
Ten feet from String Mustache, four of the other men were gathered around a fire, carefully tended to burn clean without visible smoke. It was more or less a bed of embers that they continually fed sticks to. One of the men was cooking a lump of meat over it. These four seemed intent on keeping their attention off of the torture, their conversation—Travis couldn’t pin down the language—serving as their own white noise to mask the woman’s muffled screams.
The remaining two hostiles were seated facing the torture table as if it were a matinee screen.
Travis crouched, tensed to move. It would happen any time now. He’d made the trip from the overlook in twenty minutes, hoping like hell with every step that he hadn’t misjudged the speed of the water drip, or the resistance force of the rifle’s trigger.
Now it didn’t matter. He was ready.
He thought he’d take the four at the campfire first. He might get them in one burst, depending on how much they separated when they turned away. After that he’d switch from full-auto to single shot—his thumb already rested on the selector—and be more precise with the other three, who were closer to the captives. By that time his rush would put him inside the camp, firing almost point-blank.
Breathing steady. Hands dry. Any second now.
And then the older man tied to the tree said, “Stop.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
String Mustache switched off the thing in his hand, though he kept it inside the woman’s arm. With the buzzing stopped, the only sound in the clearing was her soft crying, and the occasional pop of something in the fire.
Travis couldn’t see her eyes, but the man facing her—it had to be her father—looked more wretched than ever. He whispered what looked like, “I’m sorry,” and then, “I love you,” repeating the latter at least three times as his eyes ran over.
Finally he turned to her tormentor.
“Tell,” String Mustache said.
The bound man spoke, his voice wasted and all but dead. “The forward-most lavatory—bathroom—right behind the cockpit. Remove the fan cover in the ceiling, reach above and to the right. It’s there.”
String Mustache had his back to Travis, but Travis could picture the man’s eyes narrowing, calculating. Then he turned and spoke in his own language to two of the men at the fire. They got to their feet and went quickly to the ATVs that were parked at the edge of the encampment. Their own rifles slung on their shoulders, they mounted two of the four machines and raced away along the valley floor, in the direction of the crash site.
String Mustache watched them go, then turned to the father, who was still whispering something to the young woman on the table.
“Hope what you told me is true,” String Mustache said in his rough English. “I keep going until I know.”
Then he switched the handheld device back on, and the woman and her father screamed at the same time.
The two remaining at the fire averted their eyes. The two that comprised the peanut gallery smiled. Travis was just processing his own reaction—rage, beyond what he’d already felt—when automatic rifle fire shredded the air above the camp.
String Mustache dropped his device and threw himself flat—no rifle anywhere near his reach. The other four did as Travis had hoped: they took cover, and they got it exactly backward. He broke from the pines as the masking roar of the staged M16 continued. Fifty feet from the encampment, now forty, thirty. The four armed hostiles crouched behind their trees, looking the other way, backs exposed to him like hay bale targets.
String Mustache was still on the ground, with neither cover nor weapon in hand—his hands, in fact, were covering his ears.
Twenty feet. Travis arrested his forward speed, his feet sliding on the loose soil, and shouldered his rifle. He thumbed the selector switch to single shot—the targets were too widely spaced for a sweep—and brought it up to sight on the leftmost of the armed men.
In that moment the staged gun on the ledge ran dry, the instant silence far more jarring than the gunfire itself
had been.
Travis pulled the trigger. His shot took the first hostile dead center in the back, and though he couldn’t see the exit wound in the man’s chest, the eruption of blood onto the tree was almost absurd. Like the guy had swallowed a grenade.
The others were already turning. Fast. Travis swung the barrel toward the second man and squeezed, the shot catching him through the side of the rib cage and propelling most of its contents out the far side. Following through on the gun’s sideways momentum, Travis fired again a quarter second later, the shot going wide of the third man and only slicing open his shoulder.
By now the last two armed hostiles were fully facing him, their weapons coming up smoothly.
What came next, Travis could only think of as autopilot. He’d felt it before, at times when his survival had balanced on a pivot-point made of seconds, or half seconds. His body just seemed to make its own call.
His knees bent. He dropped fast, just as both of the weapons facing him roared. In the same instant that he felt the baked-air trails of bullets passing his face, his thumb flicked the selector switch back to full auto, and then he was firing.
The autofire didn’t exactly knock the two men backward—that only seemed to happen in movies—but instead knocked the life from their bodies. Punctured across their upper torsos, they simply dropped, the left of the two crumpling so tidily in place that he cracked his head on his own knee before flopping sideways.
Travis felt the weapon fire empty even as he remembered String Mustache. Turning now, already letting go of the rifle and shrugging the second one from his shoulder, he saw him.
