by Patrick Lee
He raised his eyes to the distant Raines house, just visible over the nearest shopfronts, and saw the three spotters up there going apeshit. Grabbing one another’s arms and pointing down toward the action. Drawing two-way radios and shouting into them.
Time to get going.
Travis turned and saw Paige and Bethany at the mouth of the alley. Paige looked only a little shaken. Bethany more so.
“Seconds are going to count,” Travis said.
Paige nodded, shoved Bethany forward and ran after her.
Travis opened the back door on the driver’s side and Bethany got in first, heedless of the bodies—all the blood was farther back, covering the rear windows and the storage area behind the seats. Paige climbed in after her, and by then Travis was at the wheel, slamming his own door and shoving the vehicle into drive. For half a second he considered reversing instead, backing up and taking the nearby cross street. Then he thought of the spotters up high again, on their radios, and knew it was pointless. There would be no hiding from the other Humvees. He floored the accelerator and the vehicle shot forward along Main, toward the street at the far end that led to Raines’s house.
“Get the guns off those guys in back,” Travis said.
“Already on it,” Paige said.
Travis reached with his right and unslung the front passenger’s MP5 from his shoulder. He set the weapon in his own lap and patted the guy’s pockets for extra magazines. He found two in a big pouch on his pant leg.
Three blocks from the end of Main now, doing sixty. A second later the first of the other Humvees appeared ahead. It rounded the corner Travis meant to take, at the end. Another followed half a vehicle length behind it. Then came four more. The whole procession advanced, roughly single-file, accelerating to meet him.
If these guys had had time to form a plan, they might’ve spread out like horsemen riding abreast. No way could Travis have rammed through that barrier; his vehicle weighed exactly as much as any one of theirs. But in the few seconds available, as the closing distance shrank toward zero, the column simply stayed in a straight line, bearing toward Travis in an impromptu game of chicken.
At least maybe it looked like that from their point of view.
Travis jerked the wheel to the right at the last possible instant, veering past the leader. As he did, he saw the rest of the line begin to destabilize, the Humvees braking or jogging to one side or another—little movements that betrayed their drivers’ confusion. But Travis was passing the formation almost too quickly to notice those things—or to care. Sixty miles per hour, he’d read somewhere, was just under ninety feet per second. With these vehicles moving the other way at the same speed, he was passing them at closer to one hundred eighty feet per second. In hardly more than a second they were all behind him, just shapes in his side mirror, stopping and turning and trying not to slam into each other like cops in an old movie.
Travis braked hard and took the turn at the end of Main doing thirty, then gunned it again along the secondary street. He could already see the curve ahead that would take them uphill toward Raines’s. No doubt the three men still up there had their guns in hand by now. Travis guessed this vehicle’s shell could withstand 9mm fire, but he wasn’t certain of it.
He took the curve and saw the incline rising above him, steep as any street in San Francisco. There were houses to his left and right, but just ahead the way opened up on both sides to a broad, empty grassland. Raines’s house was three hundred feet above that point, the redwoods almost at its back wall.
Travis saw the three spotters. They had their guns. They were positioned way up next to the house itself, maybe ready to duck inside it if they needed cover.
They wouldn’t. Travis didn’t give them a second glance. He pulled hard right on the wheel and left the road altogether, angling up across the slope to miss the house by two hundred feet. As the redwoods drew nearer, he sized up the gaps among them. At a distance, the trees had been just a visual screen, but at this range he could see several openings that would admit the Humvee. They probably wouldn’t get far into the woods, but any distance was better than none.
They were still a hundred feet from the trees when the spotters at the house opened up. A burst of a dozen shots hit the window right next to Travis; the pane bulged inward as the glass sandwiched between the lexan layers shattered. Other salvos pattered against the vehicle’s metal sides. Travis aimed for the biggest opening in the trees, and a second later they were through it, deep in the shadows and the green-filtered light beneath the boughs. He angled back to the left; Jeannie had said the mine access was straight uphill from the house. He dodged a trunk that loomed out of the dimness, and saw a gap between two others, just ahead, that for half a second looked wide enough to pass through. Then it didn’t. He stood on the brake and felt the huge tires slide in the sandy soil. He cranked the wheel right, felt the vehicle rotate without actually changing course, and a moment later, sliding almost sideways along its path, it rocked to a halt.
Travis shoved open his door, heard Paige and Bethany scrambling out of theirs. Far away down the slope, men were shouting and heavy engines were racing; the Humvee column was less than thirty seconds behind.
The three of them ran. Clambered up the needle-carpeted slope. Scanned the way ahead for any sign of the shaft’s opening. It occurred to Travis for the first time that the thing might be difficult to spot. It might be choked with ferns and low scrub; it might look like nothing but a patch of undergrowth at any distance beyond ten feet—it might be impossible to see that it was an opening at all. He worried about that for five seconds and then Bethany screamed “There!” and shot her arm out ahead, and Travis saw that his concerns had been groundless. The shaft access was an upright opening, like a garage door but a third smaller. It formed the end of a rough, squared concrete tube that jutted straight out from the hillside, its end cracked and worn and showing rebar.
They sprinted for it as the engines roared behind them. Tires skidded and metal thumped hard against wood, and then doors were opening and voices were shouting again, no more than a few dozen yards back. Beneath all those sounds Travis suddenly heard his cell phone ringing. Jeannie, calling with the information from the old files. He ignored it, pointed his MP5 behind him and fired a quick burst. He heard feet slip and men curse as they went for cover. The access was right ahead now, fifteen feet away, pitch black beyond the tunnel’s mouth.
“Watch out for a drop-off,” Travis said, and then they were inside, blind for a second as their eyes tried to adjust.
An instant later Paige sucked in a hard breath and stopped—she threw both arms out to block the others.
There was a drop-off.
Ten feet in, the concrete floor ended as neatly as a high-dive platform, empty space beyond the left half, black metal stairs descending beyond the right half. Paige led the way down. Ten steps, then a landing made of the same metal gridwork, and another flight. And another. At the bottom of the fourth they touched down on concrete again—another horizontal tunnel. It stretched twenty feet and terminated against a slab of solid metal, eight feet square, visible in the pale glow of an overhead mercury lamp.
There were giant hinges on the slab’s left side, and there was a keypad on its right.
Travis stared.
He felt his thoughts begin to go blank.
High above, sounds reverberated through the stair shaft. The sliding of feet and hands on loose soil outside. Then the scrape of boots skidding to a halt on concrete.
Paige and Bethany ran forward, getting clear of the shaft. Travis followed, but at a walk; he’d barely noticed the sounds. All his attention was on the giant door.
Which was green.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“What the hell do we do?” Bethany whispered.
Paige could only shake her head.
There was a handhold inset in the steel just below the keypad. Her sense of futility manifesting in her body language, Paige took hold of it and pulled. Th
e door didn’t so much as rattle in its frame.
Behind and above, in the shaft, more footsteps thudded into the concrete tunnel. Voices spoke in low, soft tones, some of which carried unusually well in the strange acoustics.
“We called it in,” someone said. “They want them alive, whoever they are.”
Someone else cursed softly, then said, “Okay.”
Paige turned from the door and faced Travis, and seemed thrown by the look in his eyes. He imagined he appeared numb. He sure as hell felt that way.
“What is it?” Paige said.
Travis took a deep breath. He steeled himself for the likelihood—it should’ve been a certainty—that the dream had been only a dream. That this was the mother of all coincidences, and a cruel one at that.
Up in the shaft, something like a backpack dropped to the concrete. Tough fabric with metal objects clattering inside. A zipper came open.
“Travis?” Paige said.
He stepped past her to the keypad. Above the buttons was a simple readout, like a VCR’s clock. There were glowing blue dashes where digits could be entered. Five of them.
“There’s a dozen masks in one of the back storage holds,” someone up above said. “Go get them all.”
Then came a faint but sharp sound from atop the stairwell. Some tiny metallic thing being pulled free of something else. Like a key drawn from a lock, but not quite.
Travis blocked it all out and thought of the dream. The old man—the Wilford Brimley lookalike—staring at him from a few inches away. Asking over and over what was behind the green door. We already know the combo, the old man had said.
And then what?
What exactly had come after that?
High up in the vertical shaft, something bounced hard against the wall—by its sound Travis pictured a can of shaving cream, though he was pretty damn certain it wasn’t. The thing ricocheted again and again, hitting the stairs, the walls, the landings, making its way down. Travis turned with Paige and Bethany and watched it hit the bottom, less than twenty feet from where they stood. They could barely see it in the vague light there, but there was no real mystery as to what it was. It came to rest and did nothing for two seconds. Then it jumped and skittered and started blasting thick gas into the air. Tear gas or pepper gas or some variant. Another canister came rattling down after it. Then another.
“Shit . . .” Bethany whispered. Her voice gave away a tremor.
The gas churned and curled toward them in delicate wisps.
We already know the combo.
Travis closed his eyes.
A second passed.
He opened them again and turned back to the keypad.
At the corners of his vision he saw Paige and Bethany watching him, confused.
He entered the numbers carefully but quickly: 4–8–8–5–4.
The instant he punched the last one the keypad flared with green backlight. Something very heavy thudded inside the door, and with a hiss of air pressure the huge slab kicked open an inch.
Both Paige and Bethany flinched. They looked back and forth between Travis and the keypad. Then Paige stowed her bafflement and grabbed the door’s handhold again. Travis gripped it too, and they pulled it outward more easily than he’d imagined was possible. There had to be an unseen counterweight somewhere beyond the hinges, balancing the whole thing so that it pivoted smoothly.
In a few seconds they had it open a foot and a half. Travis saw darkness beyond, tempered by another mercury light somewhere above. He also saw the thickness of the door itself: at least five inches of steel. He stood aside and ushered Paige and Bethany through first, then glanced back along the short corridor behind them.
The ragged front of the gas cloud was three feet away.
Someone up in the higher chamber said, “Did you hear something?”
“I don’t know,” came the reply.
Travis followed the others through the opening, turned and took hold of an identical grip on the door’s far side.
“How about this?” he shouted, and leaned back and dragged the door shut with a booming clang.
A second later the heavy mechanism inside the door thudded again, and when Travis tested the slab by shoving his shoulder against it, it felt as though he were pushing on the base of a cliff.
It crossed his mind that the guys upstairs probably knew the combination too—if not, their superiors could sure as hell give it to them—but almost before the thought had formed, he saw that it didn’t matter.
Waist high on this side of the door was a sliding bolt latch, similar in shape to the little ones you could get in a hardware store for three or four bucks. This one had probably cost more—its bolt was thicker than a baseball bat. Travis grabbed its handle, rotated it upward out of the notch it rested in, and rammed the bolt sideways into its seat in the frame.
For a few seconds none of them spoke or moved. Travis stood there with his hand still resting on the bolt, Paige and Bethany close by and staring at him, waiting for him to explain.
By the echoes of their breathing, Travis sensed they were in a much wider space than the corridor they’d just come from. The tiny light above this side of the door shone mostly straight down, casting a glow over the three of them, but leaving deep darkness everywhere else.
Travis turned from the latch and met their stares.
He described the dream in every detail he could recall. The strange little room swimming and warping, as if he’d been drugged even before the dream began. Richard Garner tied upright to a dolly. He himself bound in the same way. The old man asking what was behind the green door, and saying the combination aloud. The empty syringe on the tray. And right at the end, the drug’s harsher effects kicking in, spreading pain up to his heart and then everywhere else.
That was it. He couldn’t remember any more. He was pretty sure there hadn’t been any more.
As he finished telling the story, a series of indistinct thumps began to transmit through the steel door. Travis pictured men in gas masks on the other side, pounding and kicking the slab. After a moment he heard what might’ve been shouts, but they were so faint he could’ve been imagining them. He put it all out of his mind.
Paige turned and paced at the edge of the light pool, hands in her hair.
“Eliminate what it wasn’t,” she said. “It wasn’t an ordinary dream that happened to contain the code for this door. Not a chance.” She shut her eyes. “So what the hell was it?”
“I don’t think it was a dream at all,” Travis said. “I think what I saw and heard was really happening—to someone else. I think Richard Garner is still alive, tied up in that little room, wherever it is. And there’s somebody tied up there with him, being drugged and interrogated. I think I was seeing through that person’s eyes.”
He knew how that sounded to both Paige and Bethany. It sounded the same to him.
“The part about Garner being alive is plausible, anyway,” Bethany said. “I’ve heard from more than one person that there’s a mock-up of the Oval Office somewhere else in the White House—a mock-up of the part you see on TV, anyway. They say there’s even a defocused projection to simulate the background behind the windows. If Garner anticipated any threat last night, he could’ve broadcast from there; the missile would’ve probably still knocked out the TV signal.”
“I can accept that he survived,” Paige said. “I can even accept that there was some kind of internal action against him right after that, with Holt in charge of it. But the dream—”
“I don’t understand it either,” Travis said. “Is there a Breach entity that could account for it? Something that ties you into someone else’s senses for a little while?”
“I’ve never heard of one that could do that,” Paige said. “What are you thinking—that if something like that existed, someone could’ve used it on you? That someone wanted you to hear the combination?”
“I don’t know,” Travis said. “I don’t see how that would work, it’s just . . . it did work
. Whatever it was, it worked. The door combination was right.”
“There are entities that interact with the brain across distances,” Bethany said. “Blue flares, for example.”
Paige nodded absently, but didn’t look swayed. Blue flares were a fairly common entity type; a couple hundred had emerged from the Breach since the beginning. As with nearly all entities, no one knew what their creators had used them for, but their defining characteristic was that you could make them heat up just by thinking about them—if you focused hard enough and consistently enough. In tests people had gotten them up to over eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit in less than a minute, from distances as great as one hundred feet, and with walls in the way. But heating up was all they did. They didn’t connect one person’s eyes and ears to someone else’s mind.
“If there were an entity like that,” Paige said, “how would someone outside Tangent have control of it? Why wouldn’t I have heard of it?”
Even as she asked the question, her expression changed. Travis saw her feeling the edges of the same possibility he’d begun to consider.
“Your father recruited a group of powerful people in 1987,” Travis said, “to act against what Ruben Ward set in motion. Would it be surprising to learn Peter supplied them with Breach technology, if he thought it would help them? Maybe even things he kept off the books in Border Town?”
Paige bit her lip. The idea didn’t sit well with her, but she couldn’t dismiss it either.
“I know I’m reaching,” Travis said. “I don’t know what else to do. I saw a five-digit number in a dream, and it opened a door in the real world. Something made that possible.”
Paige nodded, still looking uneasy. “I’m sure we’ll find out what it is. One way or another.”
For a while no one else spoke.
The vague thumps against the steel door had ceased.
Bethany frowned. “The dream itself—or whatever it was—doesn’t make sense to me. The old guy was asking what was behind the green door, but he already had the combination. Couldn’t he just come and see for himself? More to the point, wouldn’t he already know what was here? Wouldn’t these people know about the Stargazer? Holt sure as hell should know; he’s working with them—the ones who sent Ruben Ward here to create the damn thing.”
