by Patrick Lee
For a few minutes neither spoke. The jet’s turbofans throttled back an octave as the aircraft reached altitude and leveled off.
“You’re thinking about it,” Paige said.
She didn’t have to frame it as a question any more than she had to specify what it was.
It was almost all Travis thought about these days.
He nodded without meeting her eyes.
Fourteen months ago Travis had rejoined Tangent after two years of self-imposed exile. He’d spent the fourteen months doing the same kind of work as everyone else in Border Town—helping to study Breach entities, both new and old—while also cramming for hours a day to give himself the underpinning of scientific literacy that every other Tangent recruit had come prepackaged with. He’d taken to it surprisingly well. At ten months he’d passed the equivalent of MIT’s Calculus 4 exam, and had at least a solid undergrad-level hold on physics, chemistry, and biology. The joke was that none of it really mattered where entities were concerned: the smartest people in the world were probably about as qualified as sparrows to study the objects that emerged from the Breach. Still it was nice to speak the same technical language as everyone else, and Travis had found his awe of the Breach only deepening as his intellect grew. Like staring at the night sky through increasingly sharp eyes.
More to the point, his recent training meant he could do real scientific work at Border Town. He felt like he belonged there now—as a contributor, not just an outsider taking up space.
But that wasn’t why he’d come back.
That wasn’t it.
“Are you wondering if there’s a connection?” Paige said. “Between whatever’s going on right now and . . . the thing about you?”
“I’m always wondering that,” Travis said. “Every time something new comes along, I ask myself if it’s all starting. Sooner or later, the answer will be yes.”
The issue was complex, but Travis thought of it in simple terms. Like delineated notes in some PowerPoint presentation. Or individual black flies circling his head.
The first piece of it was certain: somewhere down the road, Tangent would learn to use the Breach to send messages to the past—propelling them into the tunnel from this end, against the resistance force at its mouth, in such a way that they would re-emerge before they were sent in. The reason Travis was certain of this was that two messages had come back already. Some future Paige, and some future Travis, had given their lives to send them—the physical process of doing so was unavoidably fatal.
There were lots of details, but they all shook out to this: something bad was coming. Something that would end about 20 million lives. Something Travis himself would be responsible for, and might have no choice but to do, because to not do it would be worse.
Paige’s future self, perhaps acting on limited information, had opposed the action—whatever it was. Her message to the past had been a retroactive order—to herself—to kill Travis, in the hope of preventing this thing from happening at all.
Travis had countered her move by sending his own message—a messenger, really: a radically advanced, self-aware handheld computer called Blackbird, though almost everyone knew it as the Whisper. The Whisper had emerged even further in the past than Paige’s message to herself, and had set about manipulating people and rewriting history in order to put Travis in front of the Breach when Paige’s message came through.
In doing so, it’d allowed him to intercept it.
In the present, Travis and Paige had only limited clues as to what the hell it all meant. Their future selves had sent perfectly contradicting pleas, each important enough to merit dying in the bargain. All that differentiated the sacrifices was that Travis’s had been sent after Paige’s—it must’ve, since it’d been a response to hers. Had he known something she didn’t?
The details ended there. That far-off Travis had withheld them, no doubt fearing they would turn his present self away completely. All Travis could do was wait for it. Wait for any sign that it’d begun. The first link in the chain that would pull him down into the dark.
Down toward it.
“Let’s not dwell on it too much,” Paige said. “Save tomorrow for tomorrow, right? With any luck we won’t live to see it anyway.”
The man in the white parka had a name—Dominic—but his employers didn’t know it. Maybe they had a nickname for him, or more likely a number, but if so they never addressed him by it. They didn’t address him at all. They just called and gave him instructions. They were the only ones who knew the number for the blue cell phone.
That phone had rung last night while Dominic was painting the den in his condo in Santa Fe. A nice rich green that contrasted well with the white trim and the walnut desk. Dominic set the roller in the tray and answered before the ringtone reached the first drumbeat of David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Dominic listened as the caller spoke, committing everything to memory, then hung up and went to his closet and opened the cavity behind the back wall. He selected a white parka with battery-powered heating good for twelve hours of lying still in the cold, and a matte-white Remington 700 with a four-power scope. Two minutes later he was in his car en route to the private terminal at Santa Fe County Municipal.
Now he was lying prone in the snow five hundred feet above and half a mile east of Ouray, Colorado. He lay at the pinched, far end of a valley that rose from the town’s outskirts. The town looked like a snow globe village, its streetlights casting cones in the big papery flakes that were coming down. A halo of light-bleed surrounded Ouray itself—a barrier of visual warmth against the dark.
Dominic lay far outside that warmth, out in the deep, empty night.
So did the cabin he was watching.
He put his eye to the scope and panned across the windows. A pale glow rimmed the blinds at one of them—maybe a fluorescent light in a laundry room left on all night. Every other window was dark. There was a mercury lamp on a post in the front yard, though its glow served only to make the cabin appear lonelier. Only two other structures stood in the valley: a low-slung ranch and a mobile home, both tucked in close to town. The cabin was on its own.
Dominic raised his eye from the scope and looked at his watch. Not quite five in the morning. He’d taken position just after midnight. Nothing about the cabin had changed since then. Daylight was two hours away, but it would present no problem when it came. Dominic would remain invisible, and so would the five-man team he knew was lying much closer to the place—probably within forty yards of the front door.
Chapter Seven
They landed at Telluride Regional and rented a Jeep using the perfect false identities that, in recent years, all Tangent personnel traveled under. Travis drove. They rolled into Ouray from the north at a quarter to six in the morning, the still-dark streets of the town all but empty.
Travis swung left off of Main Street onto the valley road that led to Rebecca Hunter’s address. He thought he could see the place already, high in the darkness above town. A cabin in a little pool of light, seeming almost to float in the void. The emptiness around the place disquieted him on some level. His hand went to the shape of the SIG Sauer P226 holstered beneath his jacket. In his peripheral vision he thought he saw Paige do the same.
There were entities they could’ve brought along to make this trip less dangerous, but Tangent rarely sanctioned taking Breach technology outside Border Town. The risk was obvious: if things went badly, the entities could end up in someone else’s hands. It’d happened before, with one of the most dangerous things ever to emerge from the Breach: a full-body suit that rendered its wearer perfectly transparent in every kind of light. The resulting misery and violence had plagued Tangent for years before they recovered the damned thing—no one wanted to go through it again.
“Wonder if she’s an early riser,” Paige said.
“She is today, like it or not.”
They pulled into the cabin’s drive sixty seconds later, the headlights sweeping over a landscape of low evergreen shrubs and
scattered pines, all shrouded by a four-inch layer of snow. Travis killed the lights and the engine and they got out. Their feet crunched on gravel beneath the powder.
The cabin was single-story, closer to small than big. Maybe two bedrooms in there, depending on their size. No sign of movement yet. There was a light at one window, but Travis had seen that long before they pulled in. If Rebecca—Carrie—had noticed their arrival, it wasn’t evident from out here.
There was an older model Ford F–150 nosed up against the place, matching the description in the DMV registration. Its tire tracks, all but erased by the night’s snowfall, led back out to the road.
A layer of rock salt had been scattered around the cabin’s entry to a radius of ten or twelve feet, reducing the ground there to moist gravel. Travis and Paige crossed it and went to the door, a heavy construction of knotted pine planks with no window. Its one notable feature was a peephole. Travis pressed the doorbell and heard the chime sound inside.
For five seconds nothing happened. He was reaching for the button again when a light came on at the far end of the house, to their left. Another ten seconds. Then footsteps, drawing close and stopping. Travis imagined Carrie Holden standing right there with her eye to the peephole, a foot and a half away from them. What could they look like to her? What could any two strangers look like at 5:50 in the morning? It occurred to him that she might simply refuse to open the door. He wondered what they would do in that case, but only for a second—the lock disengaged and the door swung inward eight inches, and Carrie Holden stared out at them through the gap, clad in a quilted robe.
She looked older than in the DMV picture, as Travis had expected; the license had been updated three years ago. Maybe sick with something, too—her features seemed drawn and pale—though she was perfectly alert. Her eyes went back and forth between the two of them.
“We’re with Tangent,” Paige said. “We need to speak to you—Ms. Holden.”
If any of that startled the woman, she didn’t show it. Her eyes stayed fixed on Paige’s. Then she exhaled softly and nodded, not upset but nowhere near happy, either. She pulled open the door and stepped back to admit them.
Inside, the cabin was close to what Travis had pictured: the cozy side of rustic. Timber walls, rough-hewn beams supporting the vaulted ceiling, potbellied woodstove on the hearth. The huge living room window was a living postcard of Ouray. Travis could think of worse places to hide out from the world.
Carrie didn’t offer them anything to drink. Just led them across the entryway into the living room, sat in a chair facing the couch and left them to conclude that they should sit too. They did.
“This is Travis Chase,” Paige said. “And my name is Paige Campbell.”
Carrie nodded, politely if not quite kindly.
“I’m not coming back to Border Town,” she said. “So if that’s what you came to ask about—”
Paige cut her off, shaking her head. “We’re just looking for information. We need to know about an old Tangent investigation called Scalar. Do you remember it?”
As before, the woman showed no trace of surprise.
“I remember it to the extent I knew about it,” she said.
“Can you tell us what you know?”
“Why would you need me to? You’re with Tangent, you should have better sources than me.”
“We don’t,” Paige said. “The reasons would take a while to go into, and they wouldn’t brighten your day. Can you just tell us? I’m sorry to be this blunt, but it’s important. Something’s happening, and it relates to Scalar, and we need to know as much as we can.”
Carrie nodded, but only vaguely. Her hands, as fragile looking as the rest of her, moved nervously on her knees.
Travis studied her face. The stretched skin. The withdrawn eyes.
The voice alone was strong. Surprisingly so, for someone apparently ill.
He glanced at the end table next to the couch. Its base had shelves for magazines, all of them cluttered with old issues of Newsweek, National Geographic, and some local paper.
There was also a notepad with a pen clipped to it, its front page covered with phone numbers and random pieces of scribbled info. No doubt the pad had been there for as long as the cordless phone cradled atop the end table.
Travis indicated the pad and met Carrie’s eyes.
“Mind if I take notes?” he said.
She nodded again.
Travis took the pad, unclipped the pen, and turned to a fresh page. He began writing something immediately, though Carrie hadn’t spoken yet.
“Please start with the basics if you can,” Paige said. “What was the investigation about? What were we looking for?”
For a long time the older woman said nothing. Then her hands went still and she looked up at Paige.
“I’m sorry,” Carrie said. “Before I say anything, I need to hear whatever you know about Scalar.”
“I just told you,” Paige said. “We don’t know anything. Just the name.”
“Here’s the problem,” Carrie said. “There are at least a few people outside of Tangent who know that investigation by name only. People in the government—people in several governments. Those people were kept from knowing more than just the name, and for good reason. It’s not unthinkable that such parties, should they manage to find me here, would pretend to be with Tangent and ask me for information.”
Paige was already shaking her head. “Ma’am, I can assure you—”
“There has to be something else you know about Scalar,” Carrie said. “Some detail to prove you’re not an outsider.”
Travis turned the page he’d written on and began writing on the next. After only a few seconds he turned that one too, and continued on a third.
For a moment, pondering Carrie’s demand, Paige appeared lost. She pulled her bangs back from her forehead and stared into empty space in front of herself. Then she looked at Carrie.
“In the archives index in Border Town,” Paige said, “on Level B48, there are seventeen entries devoted to Scalar. The first is dated June 4, 1981. The last is dated November 28, 1987. All seventeen of them are lined out in blue ink. Is that good enough?”
Carrie looked impressed. But still undecided. She took a breath to speak, but before she could, Travis finished writing and set the pen aside. He turned the pages back until his first was on top, then calmly handed the pad across to Carrie. The move surprised her, but she took it and read the few lines Travis had written:
Nod if the real Carrie Holden is still in this cabin.
If you make a sound I will kill you.
By the time the woman looked up from the pad, Travis had drawn his SIG Sauer and leveled it at her face.
Chapter Eight
She didn’t make a sound.
Her hands began to shake again, and she lowered the notepad to her lap.
Travis was too focused on the woman to see Paige’s expression, but whatever her reaction was, it didn’t freeze her. Or lead her to a different conclusion from his. She drew her own weapon and aimed it at the woman.
Travis raised his eyebrows and pointed at the pad with his free hand, prompting her for an answer.
The woman swallowed and seemed to consider her options. She didn’t have any.
She nodded forcefully. Yes, the real Carrie Holden was still here.
Paige began speaking, her tone as casual as Travis had ever heard it. Anyone listening to an audio feed of this room—as someone undoubtedly was—would’ve heard no hint of tension. “If you need me to, I can put you in touch with other Tangent personnel to confirm we’re who we say we are. We need your information, Ms. Holden.”
Travis gestured for the woman to turn the page. She did.
How many are watching this place?
Nod if they are inside.
She thought about it. Raised a hand and extended all four fingers and her thumb. Then she shrugged and added the index finger of the other hand. Five, maybe six.
She also shook her hea
d, slowly and deliberately. No, the watchers were not inside the cabin.
“Maybe you’ve guessed,” Paige said, “but the thing that’s going on right now is tied to Garner’s assassination last night. Which in turn is linked to Scalar. How, we don’t know.”
Nothing she was saying was especially sensitive—the people listening in almost certainly had that information already.
Travis gestured again: turn the page.
The woman complied.
Say you need to use the restroom.
Make no other sound.
Another swallow. A final moment of decision behind her eyes.
“I’m sorry, I need to use the powder room,” the woman said, and before the last word was out, Travis set his gun aside and lunged across the space between couch and chair. He got one hand over the woman’s mouth and nose before she could change her mind and scream, and looped the other arm around her neck, sliding right down onto the cushion beside her as he did it.
He left plenty of space between the crook of his elbow and her throat—he had no intention of strangling her. Instead he pressed his bicep to one side of her neck and his forearm to the other, in a sleeper hold—a blood choke, as they’d called it on the force in Minneapolis. Full compression of the carotid arteries on each side. You could kill someone if you weren’t careful with this move, though admittedly Travis wasn’t all that concerned for this subject.
She lasted seven seconds, then went limp against him.
On the possibility she was faking it, he took hold of her left index finger and pried it radically backward toward the top of her wrist, far beyond the ninety-degree limit it was built with.
She didn’t react.
She wasn’t faking.
He lowered her to the chair and stood. Paige, already on her feet, handed him back his gun. He holstered it, then crossed the room to the hallway and the half bath there, wide open and empty. He closed the door loudly for effect, then turned back to find Paige right beside him.
