by Patrick Lee
He and the others were moving now. Backing up in stutter-steps so the crowd on the basement stairs didn’t surge. They reached the stairs to the second floor and made their way up, reloading and firing as they went, the throng matching their pace as they climbed.
Paige rounded the landing on Level Seven. Miller was still there, doubling ammo and spare rifles. Feeders were running armloads to the snipers.
“Get some down to ground level!” Paige yelled, and didn’t wait to see her nod. She continued on. Up to Level Eight, then Nine.
The warhead. The red star like an eye, watching her. Daring her.
This would either work or it wouldn’t. If it didn’t, well, there were worse ways to die than standing near the heart of a thermonuclear blast. Truth be told, there was probably no better way. It would reduce her to loose atoms about ten thousand times faster than her nerves could send the pain signals to her brain. Faster than her eyes could report the sudden light to her visual cortex a few inches behind them. It would literally feel like nothing at all.
Still, pretty goddamned scary.
She knelt before the thing. Considered the grenade and the available space inside the warhead. Right against the primary would be the best place to put it. This primary was an implosion type. A uranium sphere surrounded by shaped charges, precision wired to a detonator. Properly triggered, the shaped charges were designed to blow in millisecond unison, crushing the uranium to critical mass and setting off a fission reaction. That was the A-bomb aspect of the device. The A-bomb, in turn, would set off the H-bomb portion. But if the grenade went off right up against the shaped charges, and scattered their careful arrangement before any of them blew, then none of that would happen. The uranium crush would fail, and the whole sequence would stall.
That was the idea, anyway. It wasn’t the sort of thing anyone had tested.
She set the grenade in place, between the shell of charges and one of the aluminum struts that braced the primary. She held it in place with her left hand, and with her right she pulled the pin. The handle swung open, and she heard the fuse ignite with a pop.
Turning now. Running hard. Into the room full of blazing white-orange light and not much else, past the inscription in the floor, past the nest of wires and the Ares and the amplifier and the silvery bond between them. To the far side of the room, putting as much space as possible between herself and the grenade blast. Wondering if she’d hear just the first crack of it before her life ended mid-thought.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Travis brought up the rear, two steps below the other shooters, the advancing crowd just another six steps below him. Slowing them was a lot harder on these stairs; they were wider than those in the basement.
“Landing!” one of the snipers shouted at him, and his next step put him on the flat surface of the second floor. He pivoted around the banister and continued upward, the rifle running dry at that moment. He ejected the clip, took another from his pocket, and as he racked it in he felt the building shudder from the force of an explosion, high above.
Paige had closed her eyes and turned away just before the blast. Now she opened them and found the room choked with plaster and explosive residue. Most of the wall around the double doors had been blown out, leaving a huge cavity. The grenade must have triggered a few of the shaped charges. Not bad, though. It could have been about five megatons worse.
She turned her eyes on the Ares, still lying in the nest, bound to the amplifier by the strange channel of metallic light. The tangle of wiring was still encrusted with pressure pads, which now mattered about as much as Post-it notes. She closed in on the Ares at a full run, didn’t slow, and kicked it like she was back in high-school soccer practice, doing penalty drills. It shot from its resting place and went tumbling across the room, corners skittering on the wood—but its visible connection to the amplifier held. The silvery, plasma-like channel simply elongated and swung to maintain the connection, like a beam of light following a target. The Ares hit the wall beside the blast cavity, bounced back three feet, and settled in the swirling dust.
The orange-white light still filled the room. The gunfire downstairs went on unhindered.
Paige had never destroyed an entity before. Some of the strictest protocols forbade it. For obvious reasons. Who the hell knew what would result?
She’d know in a second.
She unslung her rifle, shouldered it, centered the sights and fired on auto.
The Ares made a sound like a human scream when it shattered. The room plunged into near darkness as the thing’s light vanished, and the plasma channel to the amplifier switched off. Where the Ares had been, wild orange arcs of electricity skittered like fingers over the surrounding floor space, grabbing for purchase. Then they weakened, flickered, and died away.
The change came over the crowd in an instant. Travis let go of the trigger, spun hard and shoved aside the barrel of the only gun near him still firing.
The people on the steps below fell back. Where there’d been rage, there was now only shock. And fear. More fear than he’d ever seen. They drew away from the shooters, eyes wide and heads shaking, pleading in at least three languages. No ignoring their faces now. Travis saw them—felt pretty damn sure he would always see them, the way they looked in this moment. Would never lose a detail of this image if he lived to a hundred and five.
Within a matter of seconds the stairs below him were clear, at least of the living. The crowd had turned, shrunk away around the banister and out of view down the next flight. A sound came to Travis now. Like rushing air channeled through some narrow space, keening and high and fierce. It came from every direction. He understood. It was the crowd outside. It was thousands of people suddenly finding themselves waist-deep in the bodies of their friends.
Paige’s voice came over the comm unit in his ear. “Weapons tight, but hold positions. Choppers are coming for evac, five minutes. Sit tight until then, in case this isn’t over.”
Five minutes later. Out through the front doors. Over the cobblestone approach. Past the wrought-iron fence. Dawn saturating everything pink, and the fog churning in compound dynamics: surging in toward the still-burning cars, curling violently in the rush of air from the Black Hawks. Four of them. Coming in low from the east, right along Theaterstrasse. Setting down in the street, their rotor wash at ground level pushing the fog back enough to reveal the mounds of bodies at the perimeter. Travis saw the nearest pilot and copilot survey the carnage, their mouths forming words he could lip-read pretty easily.
A moment later he was aboard the third chopper, with Paige beside him, along with a dozen of the others. Strapping in. Paige had the black cube from the ninth floor in her lap. The amplifier.
She cupped her mouth to his ear and shouted, “Take a look!”
She turned the cube over in all directions, showing him every side of it. All were smooth, featureless. No place for any wires or cables to connect. The damn thing had just been lying there, plugged into nothing. It alone was the amplifier; the nine stories of circuitry were all for show.
One more addition to the list of shit he couldn’t square with.
The rest of the team from the building had already piled into the remaining Black Hawks, and within seconds the formation was rising. The streets below were deserted of the living for as far as Travis could see. The choppers cleared the roof, pivoted, and headed south over the city in a tight line, black silhouettes against the dawn.
At Meiringen, the 747 was already staged at the end of the runway, engines powered and ready. They boarded at a sprint, and three minutes later the aircraft was climbing above Switzerland at the steepest angle its wings could bear, on the chance that someone with a Stinger missile was down there on the pine-covered slopes. When they leveled off at 45,000 feet, Travis saw three escort fighters settle into formation off the starboard wing. No doubt the same number graced the other side, along with others far ahead and behind.
Paige made an executive decision to put the co-pilot at the tail of the plane,
under guard, and then chose three operators at random to sit with the pilot in case he made any strange moves. When she returned to the seat she’d occupied on the flight over—next to the one Travis now sat in—she looked more exhausted than relieved.
The black amplifier cube sat on the floor nearby.
Paige ticked off the relevant bullet points on her fingers. “His building is gone; we’ll level it with an airstrike as soon as the wounded are pulled out. We have the amplifier. Of the three entities he controlled, we’ve recovered the transparency suit and destroyed the Ares. He still has the Whisper.” She looked at Travis, and he saw something that was almost—but not quite—optimism in her expression. “So what just happened in Zurich? Did we dodge whatever he was planning?”
“We’d have to know what he was planning,” Travis said.
“Everything he’s worked on for fourteen years is either destroyed or in our possession,” she said. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than him.
Travis nodded, accepting her point, but unsure all the same. There was just no way to know what the plan had been. What it might still be.
Paige’s cell rang. Crawford at Border Town. She put it on speaker again.
“We got something on that last name on Pilgrim’s list,” Crawford said. “Ellis Cook. Let me just make sure I understand what you told me. These names were carved into the floor inside the room on Level Nine?”
“Yes,” Paige said.
“Where nobody’s been for at least four years,” Crawford said.
“Right,” Paige said. She sounded impatient.
“Ellis Cook had a net worth of over one hundred million dollars. But he made it by winning a Powerball lotto three years ago. Four years ago, when his name was already scratched on that floor, Cook was managing a coffee shop in North Carolina.”
Paige looked like she was waiting for more. Or for a punch line, maybe. She stared at the phone, her eyes fixed, narrowed. Then she looked at Travis and said, “What?”
He had no answer for her.
“That’s what we know so far,” Crawford said. “All of these people were rich as hell when they died, though we’re still looking for a specific through line. But at the time Pilgrim carved Ellis Cook’s name into that floor, the guy was fielding complaints ten hours a day from people who wanted more foam on their cappuccinos. Your bafflement’s as good as ours.”
Paige ended the call and stared ahead at nothing for a moment. Finally she shook her head and said, “Look, I accept that the Whisper can know everything about the present. I don’t know how it knows that, but at least that information really exists in the world. But Jesus, I don’t care how advanced something is, how can it see the future? There’s too much randomness. It’s chaos.”
“You’d have to think it’d be pretty good at making educated guesses,” Travis said. “A hell of a lot more educated than ours.”
“Educated enough to guess the winning lotto numbers, and which person would pick those numbers, a year or more in advance? Is that even close to possible?”
He met her eyes; they were wide, locked onto his. “Sixty seconds ago I’d have said no,” he said. “Right now I’m leaning toward yes.”
She stared at him a moment longer. Blinked. Looked away over Switzerland falling behind them. “What the hell are we up against here?”
“I have a thought,” Travis said. “But I’m not sure you want to hear it.”
“Try me.”
“We’ve been operating under the premise that Pilgrim has total control of the Whisper. That he mastered it.”
She nodded. Waited for him to go on.
“What if we have it backwards?” he said. “What if it mastered him?”
VERSE VI
A MAY AFTERNOON IN 2001
The cell measures nine feet by seven. There are no bars. Instead there are four concrete walls painted the ugliest possible shade of blue, and a steel door with a two-inch vertical strip of security glass set into it. It is the only window in the cell. Encased in the ceiling is a fluorescent light, which is never turned off. Since last December it has been flickering in a way that gives Travis headaches right behind his eyes. For more than eight years he has spent twenty-three and a half hours of each day inside this room.
There is a letter taped to the wall above the bed. It arrived three months ago to inform him that his parents had been killed, shot while waiting at a stoplight in Minneapolis. Two detectives came to ask for his input on the matter. Travis enjoyed their undisguised apathy over Mr. and Mrs. Chase’s deaths.
The only other letters he’s received are from his brother, Jeff. These are not on the wall, but folded neatly beneath the bed, where he doesn’t have to look at them, or think about the survivor’s guilt that saturates the space between every line. Jeff is convinced that Travis’s actions, on that night in 1992, are the only reason he himself was spared being drawn into the family business.
Travis is lying on the bed now, eyes closed to take the edge off the flickering. It barely helps. Sometimes he manages to simply forget about the flickering, even while it’s happening, and sometimes that helps. Letting things slip from his mind is a skill he’s perfected in this place. Days. Months. Years. The time behind him. The time ahead of him. Letting it all slip away is how he keeps from going crazy.
He stands from the bed and paces the room. He is hardly aware of the decision to do this; it is an automatic action that he makes several dozen times a day. His pacing follows the same path as always: door to toilet, toilet to door, door to toilet.
At that moment the lock on his cell door disengages with a heavy click, and the guard pushes it in.
“Visitor,” the guard says, and Travis senses that the guard is nervous. Which is strange.
Then a man strides into the cell, dressed in an expensive suit, and the guard closes the door behind him. The man’s hair is graying at the temples, and he wears sunglasses even in this windowless room. He grimaces at the flickering light, and says, “Hello, Travis. My name is Aaron Pilgrim.”
He reaches for Travis as if to shake his hand, but instead Travis sees that he’s holding something out to him. It is a bright blue sphere, the size of a softball. The radiance of the thing swims. It is hypnotic, and Travis takes it into his own hand without even considering to refuse.
The moment it touches his skin, a voice speaks in his head. A voice he thought he would never hear again.
“Travis,” it says, and the strength departs his legs. He sits hard onto the bed.
Emily.
Beyond the blue light—beyond everything that matters to him now—he is vaguely aware that the visitor, Pilgrim, is smiling about something. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.
Travis says her name. The light flutters in response, then settles into the rhythm of his pulse.
“We won’t be talking for long,” Emily says. “Not this time. Not next time, either, years and years from now, when we meet again over that muddy hole in Alaska. But the third time . . . oh sweetie. The third time will most certainly be the charm.”
“Why can’t you stay with me now?” Travis says. He hears the longing and pain in his own voice. Missing her already, before she’s even gone.
“I have work to do,” Emily says. “Complicated work. I could never explain it to you, I’m afraid. Not here and now. Someday, I will. If it helps, just know this: you’re more important to me than anyone in the world. More than the grinning jackass standing in this cell with you. Out of six billion people, you’re the one whose involvement I need the most. You’re the irreplaceable component of my plan.”
Travis feels something wonderful swell in his chest, at her words. He matters to her. She has chosen him. In this moment, it is all he can do not to cry.
“Why me?” he whispers.
She giggles softly. “You’ll find out.” The light continues in step with his heartbeat for another few seconds. Then it changes. Darkens, in a way. “Now I’m going to give you what I came here to
give you,” Emily says. “It’s not much. Think of it as a nudge. A preference for where you’d like to live, when you leave this place.”
The moment she finishes saying that, Travis feels something inside his head. A tingling. It lasts perhaps a second, then vanishes.
“There,” Emily sighs. “You’re exactly on course now, my love. On course to meet me again.”
Against his will, tears sting the edges of his eyes. She’s going to leave now. He’ll be alone here again. Alone with the miserable fluorescent light, and the headaches, and the ugly blue walls. And nothing else. For years, and years, and years.
“Shhh,” she says. “It’ll all be fine. Someday we’ll laugh at this, I promise.”
But he’s so very far from laughing right now. This moment is wonderful beyond anything he’s ever known. It is also horrible, to the same degree, because it is ending.
“Hand me back to the grinning jackass now, Travis.”
He knows he cannot disobey her. Feels his body shifting forward already, as if of its own volition. Feels his leg muscles contracting to stand, and his arm stretching out to give her back.
“Please,” Travis whispers, as if he could possibly change her mind.
“Soon,” she says.
He wonders if he’ll think of anything but her, in all the years to come, and she pulses in his hand one last time.
“By tonight, you won’t think of me at all,” she says.
Then the man with the graying hair at his temples comes forward and closes his fingers over her. All that stops Travis from killing this man is Emily’s insistence. The man pulls her away. Travis’s breath rushes out. If he were holding a knife right now, he’d cut his own throat with it.
The man named Pilgrim raps on the door. It opens, and like that, he’s gone, and the wonderful blue light with him, and Travis falls onto his bed, and there is no stopping the tears now. Still wishing for a knife, or a nice .38, he considers the sharp metal corner of his bedframe instead. It won’t be anywhere near as quick and clean as a blade. But when the job is done, it will be just as done.
