by Patrick Lee
“Okay,” Paige said.
“So he’s up there, working on the ninth floor. The Whisper is safe in its box on Level Seven. If he gets the two-minute warning that Tangent’s coming down the street, what does he do?”
“Apparently he shuts the doors on Level Nine, shoves the pressure pads into the gaps, and flees the building.”
“So he takes the time to do that,” Travis said. “But he doesn’t stop for a few seconds on the seventh floor, on his way down, to grab the Whisper? The thing that matters more to him than his own senses?”
“Yeah, we know that doesn’t add up,” Paige said. “Which is why we don’t think he was on the ninth floor when the warning came. We think he was on the first floor, for any of several reasons. The kitchen is down there, along with the only working bathroom.”
“That makes it even harder to believe,” Travis said.
For the first time in this discussion, Paige looked uncertain. She waited for him to continue.
“He’s down on the first floor. He gets the call. Shit, Tangent’s coming. They’re so close, even if he sprints out the door right now, he could still get caught. There’s simply no time to run up seven flights for the Whisper. So he does the hardest thing he’s ever had to do. He leaves the Whisper and he runs.”
“Right.”
“So how do the doors on the ninth floor get closed and pressure padded again?”
She shrugged. “He had to have done it before he came downstairs, as a standard procedure. Must have always done it. Sealed it up whenever he came down, unsealed it when he went back up. He would’ve known how to do that, how to switch off the pressure pads when he wanted to go back in. I’m sure we could figure it out ourselves, with a little trial and error—if ‘error’ didn’t mean vaporizing a city.”
“But that’s the part that doesn’t work,” Travis said. “Pilgrim rigging the doors just to run downstairs for a minute. Think about it. Ten years of work. Work that’s going to give him the world, or whatever he wants. He’s three hours away from wrapping it up. He’s probably done nothing but work on it for the final few days. Probably hasn’t even slept. Let me guess, in the kitchen downstairs, every cup was coffee stained. Even the ones that weren’t coffee cups.”
She looked vaguely impressed at that.
“Amphetamines too, right?” he said. “Not meth. Maybe prescription stuff.”
Paige nodded. “Dexedrine. Good guess.”
“Not really. It’s just nothing unusual. I spent three years working vice; it’s not as long as most, but it’s long enough. Long enough to see the same pattern, over and over. Pretty much identical, for all of them.”
“All of who?”
“People doing things they’re not supposed to. People whose lives would basically be over if they got caught. People who are in no position to fuck around. A guy like Pilgrim, those last days in this place, that close to getting away with what he was doing, I doubt he’d waste five minutes to go down and make a sandwich. He’d have someone bring it up to him, and he wouldn’t stop working. Whatever he had to go downstairs for that day, it wasn’t going to take long, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to make it take longer by stopping to shut the door and arm the pads, then disarm them again when he came back. Not three hours from the finish line.”
He could see in Paige’s eyes that neither she nor anyone in Tangent had considered this angle before. Maybe they just hadn’t been under the right pressure. Maybe they hadn’t been in dire enough straits to consider the option Travis was considering right now.
“But the pads were in the doors,” Paige said. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying he had it rigged so he could go in and out quickly, without having to stop every time. Minutes would’ve been precious at the end. I’m saying the pads on the doors upstairs are decoys. You could open those doors and walk through them, right now if you wanted to.”
For a moment she said nothing. Just stared at him. Then: “The wires to the pads are live. We checked for current.”
“Sure,” Travis said. “He’d make it look real. He’d make it impossible to know, one way or the other.”
More silence. More consideration. He watched her, aware that the idea didn’t have to make perfect sense. It just had to be less batshit crazy than the other options they were stuck with, including sitting here like paper targets.
She seemed to agree. She took out her cell and dialed. He heard her address the same person at Border Town that she’d called earlier. She explained the idea. Travis couldn’t tell, from Paige’s half of the call, what the other party thought of it. A moment later Paige said, “Yeah, put them all on.” Then she waited. And waited. And her eyebrows furrowed. The party on the other end said something—Travis couldn’t make it out—and Paige took a hard breath. She lowered the phone an inch and met his eyes in the darkness.
“None of our three detachments in the city are responding.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Sixty seconds later they were standing at the double doors on the ninth-floor landing. The nuke filled up the space behind them, its paint gleaming like a cold smile. Over his headset, Travis could hear the snipers downstairs trading status updates, with a tension in their voices that hadn’t been there earlier. They were up to speed on the plan.
“You want the honor?” Paige said, and indicated the ornate doorknobs.
He nodded. Why not? He put his hand on the left one. Then stopped. He breathed a laugh. “You know, he wouldn’t have had to rig both doors with decoys.”
In the vague light he saw her smile. Almost literally a gallows smile.
“If this works,” he said, “then we’ll find out pretty soon if you’re right about the second defense system.”
The way she was holding her rifle, she didn’t look like she needed to be reminded of that. “If this works, and it’s really this easy to get in,” she said, “then I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be one.”
He reached for the doorknob, but stopped again.
He looked down. In his other hand he was still holding the PDA. The five lines, black and white, shining in the darkness. Something about them struck him now. It was like the feeling he’d gotten outside the Black Hawk, staring at its tire but not consciously noticing the footprints beside it. There really was a meaning to the words. Not on the surface. Just beneath it.
“What?” Paige said.
For a few seconds he didn’t answer. He thought if he even spoke, it’d break whatever thread of insight had formed.
Then he saw it, and it was so obvious he couldn’t believe it’d taken this long.
“Look at the first letters of the words,” he said. “In order.”
He tilted the screen so she could see it better. He heard her exhale within less than a second.
The first line: GRAVITY ABERRATION, INNER NEXUS.
GAIN.
The next four lines condensed into words as well: OUTPUT, BANDWIDTH, SLEW RATE, FEEDFORWARD.
“Amplifier,” Paige said. “Those are all aspects of a signal amplifier.”
They looked at each other in the glow of the screen. The next question was so obvious neither said it. The moment stretched. Travis saw in her eyes that the answer was as far out of her reach as his. What the hell was being amplified?
In his earpiece, one of the snipers downstairs spoke up. “Vehicle coming south on Falkenstrasse, pretty high rate of speed. I can take the driver from here.”
Paige broke her stare with Travis, looked away at nothing, thinking hard.
“Permission to fire?” the sniper said.
Paige narrowed her eyes, thought for another half second. “No. Weapons tight.”
Travis heard a hard breath over the comm unit. Then, from the bottom of the stairs, the eighth floor and its open windows, the sound of the vehicle’s racing engine drifted up. Coming fast.
“Three blocks,” the sniper said. “Two . . .”
By his tone, the man was asking Paige to reconsider the o
rder. She closed her eyes.
Outside, the engine noise swelled. Then the pitch changed in an instant. Deepened. And began to fade. The vehicle had gone right past the building.
Another sniper reported in. “Vehicle proceeding south. I see double doors on the back end. Ambulance with its flashers off.”
Paige exhaled slowly. She found Travis’s eyes again.
“We’re not going to get any more false alarms,” she said. She looked at the words on the PDA one last time. Just a glance. Then she disregarded it and focused on the doors in front of them.
Travis understood. Whatever was being amplified, they weren’t going to figure it out standing here. Regardless, they had to go through these doors and deal with what was on the other side. Figure out what the weapon was, and destroy it, even if that meant coming back out onto the landing and giving this pressure-sensitive warhead a swift kick like it was a Coke machine that’d stolen their last dollar. Whatever they were going to do, their time in which to do it was evaporating. Pilgrim probably knew they were opening the doors; if he was holding the Whisper right now, it was sure as hell telling him. Travis put his hand on the doorknob, then gave the warhead a last look.
“Sure you don’t want to take a crack at disarming it?” he said.
She glanced at it. “It’s not entirely impossible. Nukes aren’t like regular explosives. They’re complex machines. If you can disrupt that complexity without setting it off, you’re good to go.”
“Disrupt it?” Travis said. That word sounded like it was warming a seat for an uglier one.
Paige saw his expression and offered a smile. “Shove a grenade into it and pull the pin.”
“How likely is that to work?”
“A shitload less likely than what you’re about to do,” she said.
He returned her smile, faced the door, and gripped the knob—
“Wait,” Paige said.
He met her eyes, and found her looking back at him with a strange expression. A look that didn’t know what it wanted to be.
“I didn’t thank you enough,” she said. “Before, when you first got to Border Town. I know I said thanks, but I wanted to say more than that. I wanted—” She paused again. Frustrated about something. Then: “I just should have said more. What, I’m not sure. I’m sorry if this isn’t making sense.”
Travis watched her eyes; she was looking down now, looking everywhere but at him.
“You’re welcome,” he said, so quietly that for a moment he wondered if she’d heard it.
She looked up at him. There was something in her eyes he hadn’t seen there before. Something vulnerable. The last pair of eyes to look at him like that had been Emily Price’s.
Not a bad final moment, if this was it.
Holding Paige’s gaze, he turned the knob and shoved the door open hard.
They didn’t die.
In the darkness beyond the doorway, more wires and circuit boards hung like vines, though not as densely as they did throughout the lower floors. Only a few here. Travis could see them silhouetted against a dim orange glow from somewhere ahead. Like the light of embers, but constant.
A sound began to radiate from the room. A droning hum, so deep it was barely audible. He could feel it more than hear it.
He pocketed the PDA and unslung the rifle from his shoulder. He stepped through the opening, Paige just behind him. The way ahead was hard to see; the orange glow barely helped. He moved toward what he thought was its source, though he couldn’t actually see it yet. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the room around him was vast. It was all the remaining space of the ninth floor, wide open and uninterrupted.
The hum was coming from somewhere ahead, the same direction as the light source.
Twenty feet in from the doorway, Travis saw something on the floor ahead, maybe an obstacle to step over, maybe a strewn bunch of wire. A few steps later he saw that it was neither. It was another inscription written in the scratch language, carved right into the floorboards. This one had the note-to-self simplicity Travis had found lacking in the previous five.
It read, TAGS ARE ESTABLISHED WHEN THIS ROOM IS OPENED.
He translated it aloud for Paige. She stiffened.
“Tagging,” she said. “The Ares.”
Travis thought of the video she’d shown him. The orange cube tagging the man in the cage, making him the target for the rage it incited in those around him.
He looked at the orange light ahead; there was no question as to its source now, even if he couldn’t see it yet.
“It tagged us when we opened the door,” he said. “I thought you had to be within a couple feet of it.”
Understanding came to him even as he finished the line. He saw it come to Paige as well.
“Amplified,” she said. “The distances are amplified.”
Travis stared at the light source and guessed that they were at least fifty feet shy of it.
“If it can tag us this far away,” he said, “how far can it reach to turn people against us?”
He saw the implication saturate her expression, saw her whole body react to it as if a ghost had traced its fingers up her spine. They were standing atop a nine-story building filled with armed, trained killers. If even those on the nearest floor were affected—
“Oh my God,” she whispered. She steadied her microphone beside her mouth, caught her breath and said, “All teams, get out of the building, right now. Run.”
But even she had to know it was too late. In the darkness around them, the LED indicators on the hanging circuit boards began flashing a manic rhythm. The trap was already springing. A second later, the orange light ahead of them flared bright, just as it had done in the video. Then brighter. So much brighter it lit the room, revealed it as daylight would have. A basketball-court-sized space, mostly empty, strung with spiderwebs of circuitry here and there.
Travis grabbed her arm, spun her toward the double doors and the landing beyond, and sprinted, dragging her until she caught her balance and ran with him.
“Where are we going?” Paige said.
“The eighth floor windows over the river. I hope you can swim.”
“Are you fucking insane?”
“Insane problem, insane solution.”
They passed through the doorframe, sidestepped the nuke and took the stairs two at a time, slowing only as they reached the tangle of wires halfway down the flight.
Just below them, the stairwell thundered with running footsteps. But were the footsteps going down, or coming up? There wasn’t time to judge it.
Travis reached the bottom of the flight, Paige just a step behind him. Tunnels among the wiring branched in five directions; he didn’t know which one led to the river overlook. Paige did. She took the lead, and he followed, close, stooping in the low passageway. The pounding on the steps still gave no clue as to its direction.
They’d gone thirty feet through the tunnel when a voice spoke in their ears.
“This is Haslett. I just got outside the main exit. I think we better get everyone back to their positions.”
Paige stopped. Travis pulled up just short of crashing into her. Behind him, the clamor of footsteps on the stairs went silent.
Paige steadied herself and spoke. “Status, all report. Are you guys affected or not?”
A jumble of calm responses came back over the line, the comm system cutting out most of them. But Travis heard enough to know they were fine. Paige turned in the tunnel, faced him, looking as confused as he felt.
“Maybe it didn’t reach far enough,” she said.
Haslett responded. “No, I think it reached too far. I think it just tagged us as targets, the same as you.”
“What are you talking about?” Paige said.
“Look out the window,” Haslett said. “All teams back to positions, right now. Sorry to countermand you, Miss Campbell.”
The footsteps resumed on the stairs, definitely coming upward now.
Paige met Travis’s eyes a moment longe
r, then turned and covered the last forty feet to the nearest set of windows, at an open corner looking out over the river in one direction and the city in another. Over her shoulder, Travis saw what was happening even as he stopped.
Paige said nothing. There was no expression for it.
In every building they could see, the dim glow of flashlights had vanished from the windows. That was because the flashlights were coming out through the street-level exits now, their beams stabbing wildly through the fog as their owners ran. Ran toward 7 Theaterstrasse. Travis’s eyes trailed up along the river, and he saw the same thing happening, block after block, as far as he could see. All the way to E41, two miles away, where every pair of headlights had just swung off onto the surface streets, and were coming this way at full speed.
VERSE V
AN OCTOBER NIGHT IN 1992
Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Chase strains at the binds any longer. Both appear resigned to what is going to happen to them, and Travis hates them all the more for it. He wants them to be afraid, as he knows Emily must have been before she died.
The mad blue and red pulses of police flashers rim the plantation shutters. They’ve made no move to come in yet. A bullhorn has been chattering on and off for the past ten minutes, and three times the phone has rung for thirty seconds or more, but Travis has paid no attention.
Neither has he spoken to his parents.
It is this simple: he wants them to sit here waiting to die.
He wants them to feel what Emily felt, and he wants them to feel it for as long as possible before he kills them. The last thing they will ever hear will be the footsteps of the SWAT team on the stone floor of the hallway. It’s likely that this will also be the last thing Travis hears, and that’s fine. If he survives to spend the rest of his life in prison, that will also be fine, because he’s earned it. Either way, all the justice Emily can ever be given will be spun in this room in the next quarter of an hour.
