by Patrick Lee
“He’s newer to it,” Porter said. “In my experience, that matters. Sometimes a great deal.”
Holt looked at the Tap, Porter still holding it out. Holt’s expression faltered.
“Fucking thing goes inside your brain,” he said.
Porter shrugged, his face deadpan. It is what it is.
Holt considered it a moment longer, then turned to the man in the doorway. “Let’s see what you guys find in this mine shaft they’re talking about. If you come away from there with no new information, then we’ll use the Tap.”
The other two nodded. Porter turned and set the Tap back on the counter, then pulled out one of the chairs and sank into it.
Travis stood still for a moment, considering what he’d heard. Porter was clever, seeing the Tap’s potential so quickly. Maybe his idea about Dyer would even work—but it didn’t matter. None of these people would live to put it into action.
Travis crossed out of the room and continued aft. He turned a corner, came abreast of a darkened little space off the hall, leaned in and saw that it was a weapons cache. Heavy duty plastic-and-steel wall cases held Benelli M4 shotguns and Glock 19 pistols, with neatly arranged ammo stores beneath them. All the cases were closed tight, and each had a palm-scanner below its door handle.
Travis returned to the hall and followed it to its end: an open set of double doors into a private residence filling the aircraft’s tail. He stepped inside.
The space was beautiful. Its look matched that of the Oval Office and probably most of the White House’s interior. No doubt the same people maintained both. There was a broad, open kitchen to one side, a living area on the other, and a hallway leading back to unseen rooms. Travis crossed the entry and slipped into the hall. He passed a full bathroom, then a bedroom suite with a large walk-in closet. Only one door left. Travis stepped to it and saw exactly what he’d expected to see:
A windowless room. A portrait of George Washington on the wall. And Richard Garner tied upright to a dolly like Hannibal Lecter without the face mask. The top of the dolly was zip-tied into an exposed wall strut behind Garner; someone had roughly broken away part of the wall’s surface to expose it.
There was nobody else in the room.
No other victim.
Had that person been offloaded somewhere already?
It crossed Travis’s mind that Curtis Moyer might have been the second victim, but he discarded the idea: the timing didn’t work. Travis had experienced the dream well before Air Force One landed at Border Town, according to Dyer’s BlackBerry. Moyer couldn’t possibly have been in this room at the time.
There was a desk in the corner, which Travis hadn’t seen from his viewpoint in the dream—he’d been standing too close, directly beside it. Apparently this space was a study.
He focused on Garner. The man’s eyes were half open, staring downward at nothing. He wore a pair of dress pants and a dress shirt—probably the clothes he’d worn when he spoke to the nation last night. His coat and tie were gone, and both arms of the shirt had been cut away at the elbows. Needle marks dotted the exposed skin of his arms.
Garner blinked a few times. He opened his eyes a little wider, then let them relax again. He seemed to be getting past the lingering traces of the drug’s effect.
Travis stepped close to him and whispered, “Mr. President.”
Garner flinched and turned toward his voice. Looked right through him into the hallway five feet beyond.
“Who’s there?” Garner whispered.
Travis moved so that his voice would come from deeper within the room.
“Travis Chase,” he said.
It didn’t take long to explain. Garner already knew everything except the specifics of the past several hours. When Travis reached the end and told him what’d happened to Paige and Bethany and Dyer, the man shut his eyes tight and said nothing for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” Garner whispered at last. “For every part of this thing.”
“Holt’s going to be sorrier,” Travis said. He left it at that.
He was standing now roughly where he’d been in the dream. To see the room in real life, from this angle, felt surreal.
“Who did they have in here with you?” he asked. “Who else were they interrogating?”
Garner looked thrown by the question. “No one,” he said.
“There had to be,” Travis said. He hadn’t yet detailed the dream; now he did. He watched Garner for some spark of recognition, but none came. The man simply shook his head, as confused by the story as Travis himself had been when he opened the green door.
“We wondered if there was some entity that could’ve been responsible,” Travis said. “Something that would let a person transmit what they were seeing and hearing. Would let them send it to somebody else, if only for a few seconds.”
“I’ve never heard of an entity like that,” Garner said. “And there was nobody here with me at any point. I’d remember.”
For a long moment Travis stared into space and said nothing. He couldn’t recall ever being this lost for an explanation. The dream couldn’t have been just a dream. It’d really shown him this room, though he’d never set foot in it before. And the door combination had worked. How could any of that be reconciled with what Garner had just told him?
“You should get out of here,” Garner whispered. “You’ve got the suit; it’s all you need to get inside Border Town in 2016. Which is all that matters.”
“You know I’m not leaving you here,” Travis said.
Garner looked insistent. “It’s not worth the risk. You matter. I don’t.”
“Are the pilots aligned with Holt? Are they in the loop?”
Garner shook his head. “Holt ordered them to stay in the upper deck, and he brought me inside before they boarded.”
“All things being equal,” Travis said, “you’d be better off regaining control of this plane while it was airborne, wouldn’t you? You’d have more sway over how things unfolded from that point on. You’d dictate where it landed, and who’d be there to meet it. You could broadcast a video stream to television networks, from altitude, and explain what you needed to explain. Everything would happen on your terms. That would be better than if the whole thing broke open while you were sitting here on the tarmac.”
“Much better,” Garner said.
“Okay,” Travis said. “For now we sit tight. Let these people check out Rum Lake and then get back aboard. And at wheels-up I’m going to kill them all.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Travis didn’t leave the study from that point on. It made sense to stay close to Garner, and to be ready to change the plan in a hurry if there was any threat to the man’s life.
He watched the hallway most of the time, poised to move to one of the study’s corners if someone wandered in.
Other times, when he was sure no one was coming, he took stock of the room. He knelt and studied Garner’s restraints: heavy-duty plastic zip ties binding his wrists together behind him. Way too thick to be broken by just straining at them—they were probably rated for a thousand pounds. More of them held Garner’s shoulders and ankles to the dolly’s steel-tube frame.
Travis looked at the hole punched in the wall higher up, allowing the dolly to be zip-tied to the support strut behind it. The break revealed the wall’s surface to be standard plasterboard—strange for an airplane, but this one was obviously something of an exception. The strut the zip tie encircled was metal—probably aluminum—with crisp, machined edges. The material was strong as hell, of course. The plane was made of it.
“When you need to cut me loose, there are nail clippers in that desk,” Garner said. He nodded at it. “Tray drawer, top right. Ton of clutter, but they’re in there.”
From outside came the sound of the choppers’ turbines powering up, first one and then the other. A minute later their rotors began slapping the air in heavy thuds, and then they throttled to full power and lifted off.
For the next two ho
urs nothing happened. The plane’s interior had gone dead silent, though Holt, at least, was probably still aboard. Probably Porter, too. Travis expected them to come back and have another go at Garner with the interrogation drug, but they didn’t. Maybe they really had written off their chances of learning more.
The rotors faded back in and then rose to a machine-gun rattle. The choppers landed outside and powered down. Soon afterward voices picked up again somewhere forward in the cabin. Two minutes after that, a series of hydraulic rumbles reverberated through the 747, and its engines began to whine. Travis drew the survival knife from its sheath, and hid it behind the suit’s top.
Holt and Porter were sitting in the conference room as the plane taxied. Outside the windows, hazy twilight had settled over the terminals and runways. Porter was reading the simple handwritten notes for the Tap—the Tap itself remained on the counter along the back wall. Travis moved past the room and into the seating area ahead. The other eight men were there, like any regular airline passengers about to accelerate to two hundred miles per hour in a big metal tube. They weren’t buckled in, but they sat face forward with their heads against the padding behind them.
Five had taken window seats, all on the port side. The other three had sat along the aisle, also to port. Each was in his own lateral row. Each could see only the men ahead of him, unless he turned around. The plane nosed to the starting line of its takeoff run and its massive engines built to a scream, rendering sound within the cabin pretty much meaningless for the next thirty seconds.
By the end of those thirty, before the plane had even tilted upward and begun to climb, all eight men were dead.
Travis didn’t bother wiping the blade clean or hiding the knife under the suit again.
He strode back to the conference room as the plane banked and climbed. He held the weapon out to his side, letting it drip. He went right through the doorway, making for Porter first. The man saw the hovering knife in his peripheral vision and turned fast to look at it. Confusion broke over his face and then fear, and then the blade went tip-first into his trachea all the way to the spine, and Travis twisted and flicked it sideways on the way out.
Holt looked up in time to see the man spasm and collapse. In time to see the knife withdraw and remain bobbing in the air, then circle the end of the table to his side and come floating toward him. He jerked backward, almost tipping his chair over, and scrambled out of it. He ended up in a kind of defensive crouch in the corner, his neck hunched behind a tight barrier he’d made with his hands.
Travis came on slowly. Patiently.
“What is this?” Holt said, getting barely above a whisper. “What is this?”
“I came to ID the other two victims in the Humvee,” Travis said.
Holt’s eyes left the knife and tried to pinpoint the location of Travis’s voice.
“Their names were Paige Campbell and Bethany Stewart. They were two of the best people I ever met. They passed up normal lives to make the world better, or at least to keep it from getting worse. They gave up a lot to do that. For the most part they even gave up sunlight.”
“Whatever you want, I can get it for you,” Holt said. “I’m the most powerful person in the world.”
“All appearances to the contrary,” Travis said.
“You need to think about this,” Holt said. His voice cracked. “You really do.”
“I really don’t,” Travis said, and he shoved the discarded chair aside, stepping past it toward where the man crouched.
Before he got there, his vision began to flash green and blue.
Chapter Forty-Three
Travis stopped mid-step. He swayed forward until he caught his balance. He looked around fast, as if his eyes could outrun the effect. They couldn’t.
Green. Blue. Green. Blue. The flashing saturated everything in his field of view, like intense stage lighting at a rock concert.
Green. Blue.
He knew what it meant—but it was impossible. How could he be catching up to the present from within a Tap memory if he hadn’t used the Tap?
Green. Blue.
The knife fell from his hand, bounced and spun on the carpet. Holt looked confused.
Travis staggered backward, stumbled against one of the chairs, turned and leaned down and steadied himself on the table.
Green. Blue.
He was about to be drawn out of this memory against his will. Any second. But drawn out to what? And to when? When and where had he put the Tap into his head?
Green. Blue.
Black.
He flinched and opened his eyes. He was back in the study, at the plane’s tail. Holt and Porter were standing in front of him, Richard Garner just beyond them and off to the side, still bound to the dolly. Travis looked down and saw that he himself was bound to a dolly now, right where he’d been in the dream.
Which hadn’t been a dream.
Neither had it been a projection sent to him by somebody else.
It hadn’t been either of those things.
He had less than a second to think about it, and then his memory simply wiped itself away. Vanished like a sand picture in the blast of a leaf blower.
Where was he?
How had he gotten here?
What the hell was he tied to?
An old man who looked like Wilford Brimley leaned into his viewpoint, scrutinizing his face.
“Can you understand me?” the old man said.
But before Travis could reply, his memory blew away again, no more than a second after it’d begun to form.
Where was he?
How had he gotten here?
Garner watched Travis struggle against the drug. As strange as it was to experience the effect yourself, it was almost more so to see someone else endure it.
He watched Travis’s eyes keep losing the room and finding it again. Rediscovering his surroundings every second or so as his memory fractured.
Porter was leaning in with his nose six inches from Travis’s.
“Tell us who goes through the Breach,” he said—framing it as a command, not a question.
Travis blinked, no doubt having lost the statement already. He stared at Porter and said nothing.
Porter repeated the instruction. And again. And again. Carefully and patiently. Working it into Travis’s subconscious like a dog trainer setting a patterned response. He’d been doing this for years.
“Tell us who goes through the Breach.”
Garner had undergone the questioning himself all night and all day. Sessions like this every hour or so, seventeen in all. The needle marks on his arms helped him keep count.
He’d given up a lot of information. He knew it. He also knew he’d held on to the only piece that would matter in the end. He knew by the frustration he’d seen in their eyes, each time the narcotic’s power dissipated and his memory stabilized. They hadn’t gotten it from him. He’d been protecting it too long to surrender it now, even under the drug.
It would be different with Travis. If he knew the answer, he’d learned it today.
Porter gave the command a sixth time: “Tell us who goes through the Breach.”
Travis’s eyelids drew close together. He seemed to grasp the instruction, even beneath the crumbling memory.
“Tell us who goes through the Breach.”
“I do,” Travis said.
Porter narrowed his eyes. He drew back a few inches.
“I go through,” Travis said. Something like amusement crossed his face. “Lucky me.”
“Is he playing with us?” Holt said. “Is the effect wearing off?”
Porter looked at his watch. “It’s probably starting to. We used up three sixteen while he was in the memory.”
“Get the Tap back out of him,” Holt said. “While you can still make him cooperate.”
Porter nodded. He leaned in again and said, “Think the Tap out of your head.” He repeated it, his speech precise and direct. He said it a third time and Travis shut his eyes and seeme
d to concentrate hard on something. A few seconds later he gasped. His face twisted in pain. Then the Tap began to emerge from the same pinprick hole it’d gone in through, a bright green tendril snaking and darting. Porter held up his hand and let it collect in a mass on his palm.
“Try again in an hour,” Holt said. “We’ll have the whole four or five minutes to question him then. We’ll get it.”
By the time they left with the Tap—re-formed into its cube shape—Garner could tell Travis’s memory was solidifying. The drug’s influence tended to recede very rapidly, from full strength to no effect at all in about a minute. The clarity growing in Travis’s eyes showed he was well into that time.
Where was he?
Some little room.
He was tied to something—a dolly, it looked like.
He took a deep breath, and felt a fog clear from his mind as he did. Another breath—even clearer.
He looked up and saw that Richard Garner was with him, also tied to a dolly.
He thought the room was a study, though for the moment he wasn’t sure how he knew that.
There was a deep droning sound coming through the walls and floor. Jet engines.
This was Air Force One. This room was back in the tail. He was certain of that, though again he didn’t know how.
While he wondered, it occurred to him that someone had just left the room. Two men, he thought. And they’d taken something with them.
The Tap? Had that been it? He was all but sure of it, and a second later he was sure of something else:
The Tap had just come out of his head.
The headache said so, and the trickle of blood at his temple confirmed it.
His next breath pushed out the last of the haze, and the day’s memory came down on him in a single rush.
He and Paige and Bethany, flying to Rum Lake. Evading the contractors by entering the mine. Meeting Dyer. Seeing the second Breach. Using the transparency suit to get away. Then the supermarket. The missile. The mindless drive down to Oakland afterward, with little thought in his head but gutting Stuart Holt like a fucking pig. He recalled boarding the plane, scouting it out, finding Garner back here at the tail. Then killing the others, and—
