by Patrick Lee
He sparked the wires and heard the starter motor kick over, and then the engine roared.
He opened the door and got back out. The train had already passed, churning away to the north, its clatter going with it. It’d faded for another second when Travis’s skin began to crawl again.
Now he knew why.
He could hear the sound even over the grumble of the Taurus’s engine. A sound that’d been perfectly masked by the passing freight.
Rotors.
He spun and looked around wildly, but for a few seconds he couldn’t pin the direction. The staccato hammering of the chopper’s blades seemed to come from everywhere, bouncing off the broad storefront and from the panels of every nearby vehicle.
Then he saw it. A quarter mile south. Coming in right out of the sun glare.
For a moment he thought it was a police chopper. It was black and there were bulky shapes hanging off the sides that might’ve been cameras or loudspeakers.
An instant later he saw he was wrong—he recognized the flattened, broad profile of a Black Hawk. But not the standard transport model; it was some special variant with stub wings jutting off the fuselage.
And missiles clustered beneath them.
Travis turned and sprinted for the Humvee, screaming Paige’s name. Screaming Get out, over and over. He could see her through the heavy glass, seated in back on the side facing him.
She couldn’t hear him.
He screamed louder, the soft tissue lining his throat going ragged.
In the direction of the chopper, high in his peripheral vision, white light erupted and something shrieked.
He was thirty yards from the vehicle now, moving as fast as he could move, screaming as loud as he could scream.
Paige turned toward the sound of his voice at last, centering her focus on it so perfectly that, for an instant, Travis forgot she couldn’t see him. She was looking right into his eyes when the missile hit the Humvee.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The vehicle simply vanished. One millisecond it was there, and the next it’d been replaced by a hurricane of flame and shrapnel and whipping soot. The air shattered and a superheated wind slammed into Travis. It picked him up and threw him backward eight feet. He landed off balance and tumbled and ended up lying on his chest, staring straight ahead at the roiling fire.
He was curled on the grass way off the edge of the lot. He couldn’t remember getting there. He was still in the suit. There were police and fire vehicles all around the blackened shell of the Humvee. The flames were gone and there was a thick gray column of smoke coming off the wreck, trailing almost sideways in the shore breeze.
He realized he was crying. Holding his knees against his ribs and saying No with every fractured breath. Some deep, barely flickering, analytical part of his brain understood that he was bargaining more than denying. He wasn’t just saying no; he was looking to actively undo what’d happened, as if the right thought—the right string of words or maybe the right mental image—could take it all back if he focused on it long enough. He couldn’t say why, but his mind stuck on that notion for a minute or more while he lay there, and while the clot of emergency vehicles grew and the traffic on the front street congested.
64˚.
2:18 P.M.
64˚.
2:18 P.M.
The sign at the edge of the little bank parking lot kept alternating, flashing its message at him. He stared at it from the bus-stop bench. He could recall walking to this spot, but only vaguely. He remembered the crowd of onlookers around the supermarket getting too thick. People edging in on the grass where he was lying. No choice but to move.
The bank was four blocks inland from the market. Sometimes the wind shifted just right and he caught the stink of diesel smoke and tire rubber from the Humvee.
64˚.
2:19 P.M.
He was no longer crying. He’d gone numb for a while, but he was no longer numb, either. Some other feeling was coming in, heavy and cold as a glacier. He hadn’t felt it in a very long time.
64˚.
2:20 P.M.
Oakland International Airport.
Air Force One would be there in about an hour and a half.
He could be there sooner.
In some fold of his thoughts, dulled almost mute, the idea of getting to Richard Garner still tolled.
Much closer, keening like a siren against his eardrum, was the idea of getting to Stuart Holt.
Chapter Forty
He got another screwdriver from a hardware store down the block, tucked it under the suit and walked out. He got a survival knife with a sheath from an outfitter across the street, hot-wired a ’93 Blazer with tinted windows and headed south on the highway.
He saw from the long-term lot at Oakland exactly where Air Force One would situate itself. A cluster of CHP cruisers already half encircled the huge apron on the tarmac, behind the cargo terminal and far from any active runway. Patrol officers stood at their open doors. The crackle and hiss of their radios carried in the calm between takeoffs.
Travis had the sheathed knife clipped to his waistband under the suit. He walked right through the crescent of police units, close enough to hear one of their radiators ticking as it cooled. He found a spot in the shade under a FedEx plane seventy feet away, and sat waiting.
A C–5 Galaxy lumbered down out of the sky at around 3:20. It rolled onto a nearby apron and dropped its tail ramp, and its crew offloaded the large, boxy helicopter known as Marine One. Then they offloaded another, identical to it, rolled out a few specialized lift vehicles, and got to work setting up the rotors, which had been folded back for transport.
Travis could tell by the body language of the waiting police that Air Force One was inbound, even before he saw it. A quick burst of speech crackled over every radio, and every pair of eyes turned south and skyward.
For the first five minutes after the giant aircraft rolled to a stop on the apron, nothing happened. Then Air Force personnel in dress uniforms drove a motorized stairway to the plane’s door, and one ascended the steps and stood at attention just left of the access.
The door was sucked inward an inch and then swung fully out of sight into the shadowy interior.
Two men in suits and ties emerged and stood on the landing atop the staircase, their hair and clothing flapping in the wind as they talked. They watched the Marines working on the two choppers, still hard at it, and then stepped back inside the 747. No one else came to the door. The dress guard stayed rigidly in place.
Travis stood.
He left the shadow of the FedEx plane and crossed to the foot of Air Force One’s staircase. He saw no movement inside the doorway at the top.
He climbed just slowly enough to keep his footsteps silent.
Light brown carpeting. Cookie-sized gold stars a few feet apart.
He’d entered at a kind of choke-point—a corridor just behind the cockpit leading aft to broader spaces. Dangerous to stay here; no way to dodge aside if someone came walking through. He risked a quick glance forward and saw two pilots at the controls, and a navigator just visible off to the right. Travis turned and made his way aft, out of the corridor.
Skeleton crew. Dyer had called it. The rest of the upper deck, behind the cockpit, was deserted. There was a short seating area and a suite of small offices at the back end, all doors open and secured to the walls. No one inside any of them.
Travis descended to the huge main cabin level. Something like a fourth of it stretched forward from where he stood at the interior stairway; the rest extended back toward the tail.
He went forward first. More empty offices and a large galley that called to mind a restaurant kitchen. All the pans and bowls and utensils were stowed and locked down, and the lights were off. Whoever cooked for the president wasn’t along on this trip.
He returned to the stairs and headed past them toward the back end, and encountered the first passengers he’d seen since stepping aboard. Beyond a short hallway a huge a
rray of seats opened up, filling the cabin from side to side and running to maybe the midpoint of the plane, sixty feet behind the stairs. The seats were large and comfortable-looking; probably standard first-class issue for a 747. Travis guessed there were eighty to a hundred of them in all. On a normal trip they’d probably be filled with the press corps and any number of aides or even elected officials traveling with the commander in chief.
All but eight of the seats were empty now.
Two of the occupants were the guys who’d stepped outside earlier to look at the choppers. Both were currently seated at windows where they could watch the Marines’ progress. The other six had more or less the same appearance as the first two. All were men between forty and sixty. They struck Travis as hard-edged guys just starting to soften up. Like they’d been soldiers and field operatives for most of their adult lives and had only recently ended up in plusher work environments. Intelligence guys, maybe.
Travis walked down the aisle past all of them, entered a six-foot-wide corridor and looked in through a broad doorway on its left side. A conference room lay beyond. Long polished-wood table. Big leather chairs randomly strewn around it.
Past the table, a granite counter ran the length of the room’s back wall.
The counter was lined with Breach entities, and on a low-slung gurney in front of it lay a dead man.
Travis entered the room and crossed to the body. He recognized the man at once. His name was Curtis Moyer, and he’d been a technician in Border Town. His duties often kept him in the lowest levels of the complex, just above B51. He would’ve likely been down there this morning when the bunker buster hit.
Jesus, he’d survived the blast. He’d been as far beneath it as Travis and the others had been above it, and he must’ve been on the north side of the building, away from the collapse. His injuries had been severe, though. One leg was broken and torn in multiple places. His shoulder looked like it’d been dislocated, too. Internal damage had probably been what eventually got him—he was staring straight up now with glazed eyes.
But he’d still been alive when the squads from the helicopters found him—and they’d kept him that way for a while. An IV pole stuck up from the gurney’s side, with three drip bags of different chemicals hanging from it. One was morphine. Travis raised his eyes from Moyer to the row of entities—all that the intruders had recovered from the wreckage, at least up to the point when Air Force One had left to come here. Travis understood why they’d kept Moyer alive as long as possible: they’d questioned him on the entities they found, and written the key details on slips of paper that now lay in front of each one. Maybe they’d gotten his cooperation in exchange for the medical treatment. Maybe just for the morphine.
The entities were mostly common types; a group of three blue flares appeared to be the rarest of the bunch—until Travis’s gaze reached the end of the counter.
Where the Tap was sitting.
For a few seconds he couldn’t imagine how it’d gotten here. It’d been in the vault in the back wall of his and Paige’s closet, and Paige had been unable to reach it before they fled Border Town.
Then he considered the time scales involved, and began to understand. The guys in the choppers had made their way into Border Town around 9:20 in the morning, local time. That’d been hours before Air Force One even arrived there. Plenty of time for those men to notice a built-in safe in such a visible location—right at the drop-off to the abyss. With safety lines or other precautions they could’ve gotten to it easily, and among their military hardware there would’ve been things that could’ve compromised the safe’s lock or hinges.
Travis stepped closer to the Tap. He watched the room’s lighting scatter and reflect in its depths.
The sheet of paper in front of it contained all the main points of how to use the thing. Moyer had left nothing out.
Suddenly Travis heard footsteps coming from further aft—the small portion of the plane he hadn’t checked out yet. He turned just as two men entered the conference room.
One was the Wilford Brimley stand-in from the dream.
The other was President Holt.
Chapter Forty-One
Travis’s hand went to the knife’s grip just above his waist, and felt it through the material of the suit.
He could kill both men without any risk to himself—could do it right now, and by the time the eight in the seats came running, it’d be over. There’d be all the time in the world to swipe the blade clean and resheath it under the suit before any of them got here. No problem, after that, to pick them off one by one as he’d done among the redwoods. Them and anyone else he might come upon farther back toward the tail. Almost any way that it shook out, two or three minutes from now, everyone on the plane could be dead except the pilots, Garner, and whoever was being held with him. For a dramatic finish, Travis could then help Garner to the open doorway at the front of the aircraft, and several dozen California state cops would see a dead man step out into the sunlight.
That would sure as hell be the end of the cover-up.
But as a plan, Travis didn’t like it.
Even with the story broken wide open, Garner would be in serious danger. Federal authorities of one kind or another would descend on the scene and exert control, and there would be no telling whether they’d stood with Holt or not. Garner would be entering that situation from a position of uncertainty and weakness. He’d be at the mercy of others. Lots of others.
There was a better approach to take, and it would be just as brutally simple to execute. All it would require was a little patience.
Travis let his hand fall away from the knife.
The Brimley look-alike was holding a few sheets of yellow notepad paper and a red pen. He dropped the pen on the table and spread the sheets out side by side, and he and Holt stood looking down on them, saying nothing.
The pages were scrawled with red handwriting. Travis stepped close enough to discern the words while staying at a safe distance from either of the men. He began to read, and within seconds realized what he was looking at.
These were interrogation notes.
The scribbled lines comprised all the information that’d been drawn out of Garner and whoever else they had, in repeated drug sessions going back to probably late last night.
Travis scanned all the text in about sixty seconds.
These guys had learned almost everything—at least regarding the second half of Ruben Ward’s message. The instructions. They knew that the original nine recipients had gained financial and political power based on the instructions. That they’d been told to use that power to acquire knowledge of—and influence over—the Breach and whoever ended up overseeing it. The last note read:
Someone is designated to pass into the Breach in 2016. Name???
Travis looked up from the pages and realized that both Holt and the older man were focused on that final line.
The old man exhaled hard and paced away from the table. “Five hours on this last point and we’ve got nothing. He’s not going to give up the name. It’s the linchpin. He knows how important it is.”
“Let’s not write it off yet,” Holt said.
“I’ve done more interrogations with phen-d than anyone, and I promise you—”
“Porter—”
“I promise you, he’s not going to tell us. Worst of all is the longevity involved. Thirty-four years, this has been his deepest secret. Forget it.”
Holt started to respond, but a sound cut him off. Someone’s ringtone, out in the seating area ahead. Through the doorway and beyond the hall, Travis saw one of the men in the window seats take out his phone. He answered, listened for a long time, said a few words and then ended the call. He pocketed the phone, stood, and came and leaned in the doorway.
“Your contractors found a scrap from a wallet in the burned-out Humvee, with a Social Security number. Victim was a Secret Service agent named Rudy Dyer.” He looked at Holt. “You know him, sir?”
Holt nodded s
lowly, thinking. “Heard of him. Garner was close to him, as I recall.”
That piece of information hung in the air. All three men seemed to grasp its significance at the same time.
The older man—Porter—put it in words first: “If Dyer was involved in this thing, it’s because Garner wanted him to be. Which means Dyer was, what, a backup plan?”
“Something like that,” the guy from the window seat said.
“In that case he’d have to know as much as Garner knew,” Porter said. “He’d at least have to know who goes through the Breach in 2016—otherwise what good would he be?”
He looked thoughtful. He drummed his fingertips on the back of one of the leather chairs for a few seconds.
Then he turned and walked directly toward Travis. The movement was so unexpected and sudden that Travis dodged him by only the width of an arm. Porter stepped right into the space where he’d been standing and grabbed the Tap off the counter. He held it toward the others, and gestured at Moyer’s body.
“You believe him?” Porter said. “You believe this thing really does what he described?”
“It’s Breach technology,” Holt said. “Compared to whoever built it, we’re monkeys throwing shit.” He was quiet a moment. Then: “Yeah. I believe him.”
“Then let’s use it,” Porter said. “Any one of us can go back a few hours in our heads and order someone into that parking lot before the Humvee arrives. We can take Dyer alive and interrogate him.”
Holt seemed to get the point. “You think he’d give up the secret easier than Garner.”
