by Patrick Lee
Travis thought about it, and understood. “He’d know there was at least a chance of Tangent finding a way around the bomb, using some Breach entity that showed up long after he left Border Town.”
“Exactly. Something that could have emerged yesterday. Or any day. He’d never know what we might suddenly have at our disposal. Something that lets us look through walls. Or walk through walls. Or turn enriched uranium into tin. Who knows, right?”
Travis didn’t bother asking if anything like that had actually come along. Obviously it hadn’t, but her point was still valid.
“If Pilgrim was cautious enough to rig the building with pressure pads and a nuke,” Travis said, “you’re saying he’d also be cautious enough to have a backup defense in place.”
“A spare hostage,” Paige said. “One he’s not afraid to pull the trigger on. And that’s what scares me. I think even if we were able to figure this place out, and make a move toward shutting it down, we’d run into that second defense, whatever it is.” She stared out over the fog. The river, visible only as a vague sheen against the lit backdrop of city streets, snaked away to the northwest. “But I guess we’re no closer to running into that problem than we ever have been.”
She turned from the window. Stared at him. Her eyes, as beautiful as they were haunted, reflected the glow from the fog.
In her hand, her PDA displayed typed copies of the five lines Travis had read from the boxes earlier. She’d spent most of the past ten minutes staring at them, willing them to mean something. Now she looked at them again.
He watched her. Watched her try to contain the frustration and succeed only by degrees. She looked like she wanted to tear out the wires that hung around her.
A question came to him. He wasn’t sure why it mattered, but had a sense that it did.
“If you guys got the Whisper back from Pilgrim four years ago, why was it on a 747 last week? Shouldn’t it have been locked up in Border Town?”
The frustration behind her eyes stepped up a notch. “It was. And we spent the four years trying to get answers from it. Trying to make it tell us about this place.” She shook her head, just perceptibly, her jaw tightening. “It’s so goddamned aggravating. You just can’t force it to help you if it doesn’t think you need it. And you only get those few seconds to try, before the light changes and it tries to take over. A few people suggested letting someone else master it, like Pilgrim had done. You can probably guess how the vote went on that brainstorm.”
Travis managed a smile.
Somewhere out in the city, a bottle shattered on concrete. In the fog, it might have been one block away or five. Men laughed, their voices ricocheting from every building, clarified in the mist.
“In Border Town we found an old pad of Pilgrim’s handwritten notes,” Paige said at last. “He’d taken care to destroy all his computer files, all his work on the Whisper, before he fled the place in 1995. But this notepad was one he must’ve left in the lab years earlier and lost track of. An attendant found it in a stack in the archives, in 1998. Most of the contents were useless. Lab tests that had failed, been crossed out, that kind of stuff. But one thing stood out. He’d made a note about a facility that was being built in Japan. Back then, in the nineties, it was only a proposal. Still ten, fifteen years from completion. The Large Hadron Accelerator. Keep in mind that particle accelerators are Aaron Pilgrim’s field of expertise. He stands with the best minds on Earth on the subject. Well, in that notepad he had five pages of math, written out longhand, supporting a conclusion he’d circled in red: when the LHA in Japan was completed, it’d be worth a try to set the Whisper right in its interacting point and hit it with a shot. His hunch was that it would act like the on/off key . . . but for the suicidal part of the Whisper, not the intelligence part. Meaning you could have all the good, and none of the bad.”
The regret that pulled at the edges of her expression was almost hard to look at.
“LHA went operational last month,” she said. “We had to try. If it worked, we’d have perfect knowledge of everything. How to cure every disease in the world. How to use all the Breach entities we’ve never been able to figure out. Most important: how to neutralize this building, destroy the weapon before Pilgrim could ever get a chance to use it. We had to try, and we had every reason to make our move as soon as possible. Four hundred thousand people live inside the kill radius of that nuke, and all it would take would be a lightning strike to zap the power for a few seconds, or a good-sized delivery truck crashing into the foundation to give the pressure pads a jolt. What were we supposed to do, tell everyone in Zurich to move?” The regret moistened her eyes now. Like acid. “All for nothing, anyway. We tried it at LHA just like he said. No result.”
“I guess he could’ve expected you to find his notes, and fly the Whisper there and back when that place got up and running,” Travis said.
Her eyebrows made a shrug, hard and bitter. “I guess.”
“He circled it in red, huh?”
She looked at him. Eyes narrowing now. “Yeah. So what?”
“Did he circle anything else in the book like that?”
“No. What’s your point? That he planned it? That far ahead? Circled it just to make us take the bait?”
“I don’t know,” Travis said. He didn’t.
“It’s not possible,” Paige said. “He wrote those notes a decade and a half ago, before he ever left Border Town. No one could plan that far out. And why? Why would he plan to lose the Whisper to us, hours before triggering this place, and then recover it four years later?”
“I don’t know,” Travis said again.
But something about what she’d told him didn’t fit. There was a problem there; he just couldn’t quite put a name tag on it.
Paige had lowered the PDA again. Travis indicated it with his eyes, the five lines still on its screen.
“Mind if I look at those?”
She handed it to him.
GRAVITY ABERRATION, INNER NEXUS.
OPTICAL UNIFICATION TENSOR, PARALLEL UNIFICATION TENSOR.
BROAD AXIS NULL DRIVER, WORKABLE INFLOW DETOURS TO HARMONIC.
SYSTEM LEVERAGE, ETHER WASTE, RIGHT ANGLE TRANSFER EGRESSION.
FREE ELEMENT EXPULSION, DIRECTED FLOW ONTO RADIANT WITH AXIAL RESISTANCE DETERMINED.
The words meant nothing to him. Or her. Or anyone else, apparently. At the time she’d typed them on the PDA, she’d forwarded the lines to Border Town, where a representative set of the world’s smartest people lived. Fifteen minutes now, and no answers on her phone.
“I might be the least qualified to say it,” Travis said, “but I think these lines are bullshit. I don’t care how brilliant the guy is, if he was writing Post-its to himself, they’d be clearer than this. If there’s a meaning to these sentences, it’s not literal. It’s something else.”
“I agree,” Paige said. “So what is it?”
He could only shrug, focusing on the tiny screen, his expression probably matching hers from a moment earlier.
And then the lights of Zurich went out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Paige was on her phone within seconds, asking someone what the hell was happening. Over the comm unit in his ear, Travis could hear sniper teams on the lower floors speaking to one another, reporting their status. Everyone fine, for now.
He leaned on the windowsill. The grid immediately around 7 Theaterstrasse had gone out first, and within seconds others had followed in succession, plunging the city into blackness. Now as he watched, successive blocks, leading away up the valley and climbing the ridges on both sides, winked out one after another, until the only lights he could see were the headlights on E41, and a scattering of others on the streets of the darkened city. Almost immediately his eyes began to adjust, and he discerned the fog again, lit not from below but from above, by the half-moon. The whole bank of it, shrouding the city, caught and scattered the silver-blue light and set a contrast for the monolithic shapes of the buildings that rose from
it, black and dormant in the night.
Paige was talking to someone at Border Town who had open lines to the three Berlin detachments stationed around Zurich. None of them were reporting any hostile contact. She finished the call and looked at Travis. The two of them were lit only by the screen of her PDA, which Travis still held, and by the vague glow of LEDs blinking like animal eyes in the jungle of wiring around them. The power to 7 Theaterstrasse hadn’t so much as stuttered. An uninterruptible backup must be one of those rare things that actually lived up to its name.
“Whatever it is, it’ll happen anytime now,” Paige said. Trying to sound calm. Not succeeding very well.
Outside, dim lights began to appear in the windows of the few people awake at this hour. Candles or flashlights.
“You don’t have to stay here, you know,” Paige said. “You’ve done what we asked you to do. If you want to leave, you can.”
Travis looked at her for a moment, then stared out over the city again.
“I know,” he said, and made no move to take her advice.
At the edge of his vision, he thought he saw her smile. She leaned on the windowsill next to him.
“When it really gets hopeless,” she said, “there’s one move we can make that Pilgrim probably won’t have anticipated. And even if the Whisper tips him off a few minutes early, there won’t be anything he can do to stop it.”
The tone of her voice and the deadness in her eyes told Travis what it was.
“We can set off the nuke,” he said.
“We can set off the nuke.”
“I don’t think the locals will appreciate that.”
“They’ll get over it. In about a thousandth of a second. For the world’s sake, it might be the prudent move.”
“If Pilgrim’s long-term agenda is bad enough.”
She breathed a laugh, the sound empty as a waiting coffin. “I’m sure it’s bad enough.”
Travis thought about the situation. He could accept that she was right, that they were in deep shit, but the logic of it was hard to fit together. Didn’t Pilgrim risk losing all the work he’d put into this building if he attacked it now? Any method of taking out the more than forty snipers stationed at these windows would involve some level of violence, and with it a high likelihood of triggering the pressure pads wired to the nuke.
But the Whisper would understand that. Would find a way around the problem. Any way. Maybe the attack would be a few canisters of VX gas, lobbed from a launcher two blocks away. Kill everyone in the building and not disturb a microchip. There had to be a thousand ways in, as clever as that, or more so. The Whisper would know them all.
Someone screamed outside. A man’s voice. Travis saw Paige flinch, even as the scream turned into a drunken laugh, and someone else told the man to shut up, also laughing. The first man kept yelling, asking who’d turned off the fucking lights.
“It won’t be much longer,” Paige said.
But it was. More than half an hour passed, and nothing happened. A few ambulances moved about the city, sirens quiet but flashers pulsing through the fog. Travis thought of home-care patients whose medical equipment had failed in the outage. Somewhere to the east, out of sight past the building’s corner, was a bright light source. A building running on a generator. It had to be a hospital; the ambulances came and went from that direction.
Paige made more calls to Border Town. More calls to the Berlin detachments stationed around Zurich and to the AWACS aircraft circling high above. Four in the morning and all was well. The snipers downstairs continued to call in their status at close intervals. They’d put on FLIR goggles to let them see the shapes of human bodies through the fog, and in low tones they reported the movement of any pedestrian who strayed into the two-block radius around the building.
“I don’t understand,” Paige said. “What’s Pilgrim waiting for?”
It was the slingshot feeling again. Each passing minute made it worse.
Mostly they watched the night, but at times either he, or she, or both of them stared at the lines on the PDA. The consensus from Border Town agreed with Travis: the sentences were gibberish, on the surface.
At a point when neither had spoken for over a minute, Travis said, “You must have a few guesses, at least.”
She looked at him in the pale glow of the screen, and offered a smile. “I promise I don’t.”
“Sorry, not the lines,” he said. “I meant the weapon. In four years, Tangent must’ve come up with a theory or two about what it does. If not by looking at all these wires, then by considering what Pilgrim would have to do to eliminate Tangent. He’d have to compromise the defenses at Border Town, right? Somehow he’d have to do that, from this place, five or six thousand miles away.”
“We have a few guesses,” she said. “They all hinge on the idea that this building is a transmitter antenna of some kind, possibly directional, that could target Border Town even at this distance. What it does could be any number of things. Maybe it kills people but leaves physical structures intact, like the effect of a neutron bomb. Or maybe it induces a reaction in specific materials, in a way that would kill Border Town’s defenses for a period of time. That’s one set of possibilities.”
“Are there others?” Travis said.
“One other, in particular.”
“Which is?”
“That the weapon has nothing to do with taking over Border Town. We only assume that’s his plan because it’s such a logical power grab. Border Town is the biggest asset in the world if he controls it, and the biggest liability in the world if he doesn’t. Plus the Breach itself. Of course he’d want control of that. Logically, it all fits. But who the hell knows? Maybe logic isn’t what’s driving him. So maybe the weapon just does something catastrophic to the whole world. Maybe it kills ninety-nine percent of it, leaving a scattered remnant population that’s easier for him to control.”
“You sound like you’re leaning toward door number two,” Travis said.
She looked down into the fog shroud. “There’s evidence for it.”
He waited for her to go on.
“We know Pilgrim bought this place in 1995, just a few months after he left Border Town. Strange things started happening in Zurich in the following years, continuing to the present. Suicides have tripled. Domestic violence arrests are up by a factor of four. Certain rare forms of cancer have increased between five- and sevenfold. We only saw all this in retrospect, of course, after we found this place four years ago. It gets more compelling when you pin the locations of all these incidents on a map, and see the distribution around this building. You probably wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking for it . . . but when you do see it, you know you’re not imagining it. Seven Theaterstrasse is doing something already. Some little pilot-light version of what it’ll do to the world if Pilgrim gets his way and throws the switch.”
Travis held her stare a moment, then looked out into the darkness again. Another ambulance flickered silently through the fog on the far side of the river.
“Could you really bring yourself to trigger the nuke upstairs, if it comes to it?” he said.
For a long time she didn’t answer, but when she spoke there was nothing hesitant in her tone. “Yes.”
“In that case,” he said, “I have an idea.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Tell me,” she said.
“I need to know something first.” He looked around at the mess of wires at their backs, filling the room except for this narrow passage by the window. “All this circuitry and equipment that’s accessible, Tangent’s studied every inch of it, right?”
“Every connection, every processor, every jumper setting. Everything.”
“Any of the wires not plugged in?”
She didn’t follow.
“I mean, was there some random corner on one of these floors where it looked like the work hadn’t been finished? Wires hanging loose, circuit boards lying around, tools on the floor? Anything like that?”
>
She shook her head.
Travis thought for another moment and said, “He was three hours from activating this place when Tangent showed up in 2005.”
She nodded.
“Three hours away because he was three hours from having it finished, right?”
“That’s always been the assumption, yeah.”
“The unfinished work wasn’t anywhere in this tangle that we can see, and the five steel boxes were already welded shut, so he must have been done with whatever’s in those. That leaves the ninth floor, behind the closed doors. Three hours’ worth of work left to do, up there.”
She was nodding again. Tangent had figured this part out long ago. Which he’d assumed.
“When you took over this building, where did you find the Whisper?”
“On the seventh floor, in a shielded box.”
Travis thought it over, putting the sequence of events together in his mind. Trying to see it all from Pilgrim’s point of view, that day when he’d been forced out of here. That thought process—mentally tracking someone’s moves, getting inside a subject’s head—was familiar, like putting his hand into a baseball glove he hadn’t worn in almost two decades. The kind of thing he’d once been good at, in spite of his motivation.
“All right, it’s May 17, 2005,” he said. “Pilgrim is three hours from finishing the weapon. He’s working on it. He knows Tangent is close, because you’ve nailed some of his people in recent weeks. He obviously doesn’t know Tangent is literally moving in, or else he’d have left even earlier. Which means he’s not using the Whisper at this moment, or else it would’ve warned him. And it’s plausible enough that he wouldn’t be. I mean, he’s been building this place for ten years, this close to the end he probably knows all by himself what’s left to be done.”
