The Breach

by Patrick Lee

  The man was no longer cowering. He was standing. Still not holding a rifle, but drawing a 9mm from inside his coat. He wasn’t even looking at Travis. His eyes were on the man tied to the tree, and his pistol was coming up.

  The young woman screamed, so much louder than before that the sound baffle strapped to her face seemed not to affect it.

  Travis got his left hand on the spare M16’s barrel guard. Twisting his body, swinging up the stock, his right hand finding the grip and the trigger well—

  String Mustache put his pistol to the bound man’s head and fired. The woman’s scream doubled.

  A half second later, as the man pivoted to execute the young woman as well, Travis’s M16 barked, already set to full auto. Three shots caught String Mustache across the face before the recoil pushed the weapon off target. Travis stopped firing, watched the torturer fall, his 9mm tumbling away over the dirt and pine needles.

  Travis swept his gaze across the bodies of the first four hostiles to be sure they were dead. They were dead.

  He slung the rifle and went to the woman on the table, taking his knife from his pocket as he went. She startled when she saw him, and he realized she had witnessed almost none of what had just happened—just her father’s death and then String Mustache’s.

  The mechanics of the crank table were obvious enough. Travis took hold of the metal handle and turned it until the surface lay flat. He carefully lifted the strap of the sound baffle, cut it, and pulled the thing away.

  She wasn’t screaming anymore. She lay there hyperventilating instead.

  The straps holding her body were sturdy, but his knife got through them without any trouble. Her hands went to her face; her legs folded up to her chest as she rolled on her side. She felt for something inside her mouth and pulled it out. A rubber clamp of some kind.

  Her upper right arm looked as bad as anything Travis had ever seen, but she paid no attention to it now.

  Thinking to give her some privacy, Travis turned and walked to the edge of the camp, cocking an ear to listen for the ATVs. He could hear the engines, very distant now and still receding; no way could the riders have heard the gunfire over the roar of those machines up close. They’d left maybe ninety seconds ago. They were probably halfway to the crash now.

  “Who are you?” The young woman’s voice was broken and faint.

  Travis turned, and was surprised to find her sitting up on the table. Her body still shuddered with sobs, but she showed remarkable control, all things considered. She looked to be in her late twenties. Dark hair. Large, dark eyes. He found himself thinking she must be beautiful on anything but the worst day of her life.

  “Travis,” he said, suddenly lacking a better answer. She seemed to be waiting for more. “I’m just a guy. I found the plane, found Mrs. Garner.”

  “She lived?”

  “Long enough to leave instructions.”

  Before she could ask about that, movement between them drew their attention sharply.

  String Mustache was alive, trying to turn himself over in the dirt. Though a good chunk of the man’s face had been cleaved away by one of the bullets, Travis now saw that the other two had glanced on the hard cheekbones and skull. He unslung the M16 and was an instant from finishing him when the woman spoke.

  “No.” The word came out rough, halfway between whisper and growl.

  Then she surprised Travis by pivoting and putting her feet on the ground, and standing—shaky for a moment, but standing all the same.

  With her undamaged left arm she took Travis’s knife from where he’d set it on the table, and dropped hard with one knee onto String Mustache’s back, pressing him flat to the ground. She put the blade, edge-up, under his armpit and pulled savagely. Travis heard a sound like heavy elastic parting, and the man screamed. The arm quivered, uncontrolled. She did the same to the other arm, then turned a hundred eighty degrees and slit both of his hamstrings behind the knees. His screams ebbed to a low moan, gurgling blood in his throat.

  The woman stood, put the knife aside, then stooped and gathered a fistful of String Mustache’s back collar.

  Had Travis actually wanted to stop her, he wasn’t sure he’d have had time. She lifted String Mustache’s upper body, dragged him ten feet across the needles and loose soil, and dropped him facedown into the white-hot embers of the campfire. He screamed and thrashed, but could only command his limbs to jerk about; all control had literally been severed. He managed to contract his back muscles and raise his face for a few seconds, but then the young woman put her foot on the back of his head and pressed him deep into the coals again. She kept the foot there until his hair caught fire. By that time he’d stopped moving and screaming. She watched him for another ten seconds; then she picked up a rifle dropped by one of the hostiles, thumbed it to auto without even looking at it, and fired a burst into the back of String Mustache’s head.

  She dropped the gun and turned back to Travis, and for a moment he wasn’t sure her eyes were even human. Then they fixed on her father, dead against the base of the tree, and all doubt about her humanity evaporated.

  She crossed to the pine and sank beside his bound corpse, pulling herself against him, her face pressed to his despite the blood. She cried again, silently.

  Travis went back to the edge of the camp and listened to the distant ATV engines. Thirty seconds later they stopped.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Travis expected to have to gently pry the young woman from her grieving. They needed to get out of the encampment and find positions from which to kill the other two hostiles when they returned.

  But she sat with her father only a few minutes before standing, taking Travis’s knife again and cutting the dead man free. She set him carefully flat on the ground, then looked around, troubled.

  Travis understood. “Where do you want to take him?”

  Her gaze settled on the dense stand of pines where he’d hidden earlier. “There.”

  Travis knelt and lifted the man, and carried him to the trees. He maneuvered the body among the boughs and laid it under the deepest cover, then waited silently as the woman stood looking down at it.

  “We need to get out of here fast,” she said after a moment. “As soon as we kill the two that left on the quads.”

  “There are more besides them?” Travis said.

  “A lot more.” She nodded toward the camp. “These guys were calling in on a satellite phone every hour. When their people don’t hear from them, they’ll know there was trouble. They’ll send reinforcements with a helicopter.”

  The woman took a hard breath, gave her father a last look, then turned away, back toward the encampment. As she did, Travis got another look at her right arm. The set of clamps the torturer had used to pry apart her triceps were still in place, keeping the skin and muscle wedged open at least an inch. Heavy black clots filled the cavity, along with what could only be infected tissue.

  Seeing him stare, Paige turned her arm and saw the opening herself. Travis knew by her reaction that she was looking at it for the first time. She took it well.

  “I wouldn’t pull those clamps out without a doctor close by,” Travis said. “You don’t want to trap those infections inside your arm, away from the air.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be in a doctor’s care anytime soon,” she said, but made no move to detach the clamps.

  She stepped out of the pines and moved into the camp. Travis followed.

  “Can you use their satellite phone to call for help?” he said. “Get the military in here, or whoever your people can send?”

  She shook her head. “These guys had to use a code to make outgoing calls. If I were more of a tech, maybe I could get around it, but I’m not. How far from a town are we?”

  “On foot, fifty miles.” He looked at the remaining two quads parked nearby. “We could cover two thirds of it on one of those, taking the long way around a few ridges. Then there’s a river, and no way across but log bridges and rocks. We’d have to ditch the qua
d and walk from there, maybe a full day to reach Coldfoot.”

  She considered that, looking more concerned than hopeful. Her eyes went past him to the open valley and the succession of mountain ridges beyond, as if the landscape were an executioner’s scaffold. Travis imagined a full day’s walk over the mostly exposed terrain, being hunted by armed pursuers in a helicopter. The young woman’s expression suggested similar thoughts.

  “This is going to get bad,” she said. She stared a moment longer, then looked at Travis. “My name’s Paige. Thank you for saving my life.”

  The riders were coming back. The engines had started up a minute earlier, and now the two ATVs were just visible past the curve of the valley, maybe a mile away yet.

  Travis kept his M16 steady against a pine trunk. Paige held her own rifle at the next tree over, left-handed—clearly not her natural choice—and braced across a branch. Her damaged arm hung at her side.

  In the silence of the clearing, the distant hum of the engines was no more than an insect buzz. The wind through the boughs was louder. So was Paige’s breathing, each intake more a gasp than a breath.

  Travis wondered at the kind of resolve someone would need to even be standing after all she’d just gone through. Then he wondered at the stakes required to fuel that resolve.

  “You’re worried about a lot more than just your own survival,” Travis said.

  “Yes,” Paige said, her eyes staying on the gun sights.

  “I want to know what all this is,” he said. “I saw the steel container on the plane. And there were details in the First Lady’s note, but not enough. I’m going to help you get to Coldfoot, regardless, but if I’m going to risk getting killed over something, I want to know what it is. I don’t think that’s asking too much.”

  She looked up, met his gaze evenly.

  “What’s Tangent?” Travis said. “What the hell is a Breach entity?”

  Her eyes stayed on his a moment longer, as the drone of the incoming engines rose. Then she lowered her face to the rifle stock again, eyes down the barrel. Travis looked down his own sights. The riders were still a thousand yards out, just now resolving into distinct shapes. There was no danger of them spotting Travis or Paige where they stood, against the darker backdrop of the camp and the tree cover.

  “Tangent is an organization,” Paige said. “Our entire purpose revolves around the Breach. Guarding it. Controlling it. And the Breach is . . . very hard to describe.”

  “I’m more open-minded today than I was yesterday,” Travis said.

  Several more seconds passed as Paige considered what to say next. Travis could see the gleam of sunlight off the chrome handlebars of the ATVs.

  “Have you ever heard something described as the strangest thing in the world?” Paige said. “A two-headed snake, a potato chip that looks like George Washington, something like that?”

  “Sure,” Travis said.

  “Even in strict scientific terms, with no hyperbole, the Breach is the strangest thing in the world.” She thought for a moment, then went on. “It’s a source. A technology source. We get things from it. I know that’s vague, but I can’t say it more clearly. Not just because it’d be an act of treason, but because you’d never believe me unless you were standing right in front of it, seeing it for yourself.”

  Travis saw her draw the rifle tightly into her shoulder, her left eye narrowing down the sight line. The riders were still well over five hundred yards out, too far for guaranteed kill shots. Travis was about to suggest that when they came into range, he take the left rider and Paige take the right, when her rifle cracked, a mini thunderclap in the stillness. The left rider jerked—Travis saw blood in the center of his chest—and pitched sideways, pulling the handlebars so tightly to the right that the machine jackknifed, flipped and threw him like a crash-test dummy. Which, by that point, he essentially was. Before he landed, Paige fired again, and the second rider’s head vanished above the jaw. He stayed on his quad for another five seconds, then tipped straight backward and fell off. The machine rolled thirty yards farther, throttling down to idle, and then just sat there growling.

  Travis turned to her, saw her staring at the kills, her eyes hard and—if he was reading them right—unsatisfied with her work.

  “I’m better with a scope,” she said.

  She leaned the rifle against the tree, turned, and went to a pile of the hostiles’ gear in the middle of the camp. Within a few seconds she’d pushed aside their belongings—among them a little dirt-crusted shovel—to reveal a steel plate on the ground, eighteen by eighteen inches and half an inch thick. She lifted it with her good arm and let it fall flat on its other side, exposing beneath it a leg-wide hole in the dirt. Its bottom was too deep for Travis to see from his angle.

  What caught his eye first was a disturbance to the plate’s underside: dark blue corrosion, and a just-visible bulge where the metal had spanned the hole in the ground. Exposure damage, caused by whatever lay unseen at the bottom.

  “Any piece of technology we get from the Breach is called an entity,” Paige said. “This one is designated Whisper, and it’s dangerous as hell. The man who sent these contractors wants control of it. If he succeeds . . .” She paused, looked at Travis, then shook off whatever she was thinking, and knelt over the hole. “He can’t succeed. It’s that simple.”

  She reached deep into the hole, almost to her shoulder, and lifted out a fist-sized object, perfectly round, its surface a dark, iridescent blue Travis was sure he’d never seen before.

  The object from the hinged steel cube aboard the 747.

  For a moment Paige gazed at it with a mix of revulsion and fear, as if it were a spent fuel rod saturating her bones with lethal rads. Then she narrowed her eyes and seemed to focus past the irrational feeling.

  Travis sensed that whatever danger this thing posed wasn’t as simple as any physical risk from holding it. Not directly, anyway.

  He lifted his gaze from the thing and met Paige’s eyes.

  “Are you saying the Breach is a lab?” he said. “Some place where we build things like this?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not a lab. And we didn’t build this thing.”

  “We as in Americans?” Travis said.

  “We as in people.”

  She held his stare a few seconds longer, then stooped and picked up the shovel from the hostiles’ gear.

  Travis continued staring at her, replaying her last sentence in all its gravity.

  Standing, Paige said, “Do me a favor. The thing the other two went to retrieve from the plane looks like an inch of clear tape. It’s very important. It’s the key that switches the Whisper on. They’ll have it with them now. Get it, while I bury this where their backup won’t find it.”

  “We’re not bringing it with us?” Travis said.

  “We’d never make it. The Whisper’s too dangerous without containment. But we can bring the key. All that matters now is keeping these people from recovering both, and contacting Tangent as soon as we can.”

  With that she turned away, Whisper and shovel in hand, and left the clearing through the trees on the far side.

  Travis watched after her a moment, listening to her footsteps recede across the forest floor. Then he headed toward the distant ATVs. He’d gone only a few paces from the camp when he heard the hostiles’ satellite phone begin ringing behind him.

  An hour later they were two valleys away, racing north through one leg of the long and snaking course he’d quickly mapped. Paige was seated in front of him on the quad, boxed in by his arms as he held the handlebars. She’d grown steadily weaker as they’d prepared to leave—the result, she said, of the interrogator’s drug wearing off. That and three days of zero sleep catching up. Travis couldn’t see her eyes now, but at times her body went slack and leaned back against him before she jostled awake again.

  However long it took the hostiles’ backup to reach the camp, it wouldn’t be long afterward before they noticed a quad missing. At that point, a
glance at a map would leave no doubt as to the direction their prey had gone. Coldfoot was the only way out, and there were only so many paths by which to reach it.

  Travis kept the ATV on hard ground that took no imprint from the tires, and did his best to avoid the snowfields.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Darkness over LaGuardia. Dawn at the horizon, cherry red like a heated wire. Karl watched the world come to life, the hotel room dark around him. His reflection in the windowpane, side lit by the bathroom light, stared back with its visible eye blue and cold.

  Twenty-five minutes to takeoff. He had all the time in the world. Nobody would make him wait in line.

  Not when he was wearing the suit.

  It lay in two halves on the chair beside him. He felt for the bottom half, found it, sat on the bed and pulled it over his jeans until he felt the built-in feet, like the feet of a child’s pajamas, snug tightly around his shoes. He found the shoulder straps and secured them. He reached for the chair again, felt for the suit’s top half, and slipped it on as he stood. He smoothed its long hem, which overlapped the waist of the bottom half by a foot or more. The material, so unlike anything else he’d ever worn, was hard to get used to, even after all his experience with it. It felt like spandex in a way, matching every dimension of his six-foot frame, but at the same time it seemed almost relaxed. At least, relaxed was the closest term he had for it. It was also breathable like the screen of a tent, and nearly weightless. On a previous occasion he’d worn it for more than forty-eight hours straight without any discomfort, even from the portions that covered his hands and head. Though he’d never asked his employers about it—not that they knew any better than him how the thing worked, considering where it had come from—he felt sure that the suit’s perfect fit resulted from some narrow intelligence of the material itself. Even now he felt the suit taking the shape of his body until he could hardly tell he was wearing it. It would not be surprising, of course, to learn that the suit had intelligence built into it. It would also not be its most impressive attribute. Not by a long shot.