by Patrick Lee
Travis saw all the pieces slotting together now.
"The place is covered with that writing," Paige said. "I could show you a few thousand images of it right now, but there'd be no rhyme or reason to it. It'll be better if you see it in person. See it the way he wrote it."
"You're hoping I can help you understand the thing," he said. "So you can shut it down."
"More like praying you can help us," she said. "But yeah."
"Can I ask something really obvious?" he said.
She smiled vaguely and preempted the question. "There's a reason we don't simply level the building. You'll see for yourself when we get there. And we can't protect it, either. Not now. It wouldn't matter if we parked an armored cav division outside of it. Pilgrim has the Whisper. It trumps everything. Even other entities, as you learned for yourself in Alaska."
He took her point.
"If there's any way whatsoever to achieve a given result-and there always is-then the Whisper will know how," she said. "Think of it as a game of rock, paper, scissors, and the Whisper is a diamond-blade rock cutter. It just beats everything. If Pilgrim wants to return to Seven Theaterstrasse and trigger the weapon-and let's go out on a limb and assume that's exactly what the fuck he wants-then he will. Unless we destroy it before then."
VERSE IV
AN OCTOBER NIGHT IN 1992
Travis discovers immediately that he's gotten a lucky break. His car, which has come to rest against the entertainment center at the back wall of the living room, has pinned the couch and its occupant against the big-screen TV. Manny Wright, six-foot-five and maybe four hundred pounds. The homeowners' bodyguard, and the only one who lives in the house with them. His back is broken. He's trying to move, trying to reach the.44 holstered at his waist. But he can't.
Travis wonders if Manny was the one who actually carried out Emily's murder, on orders from above. Then, because the answer is obvious, he stops wondering. He raises the.32 to Manny's face.
Manny can't get enough breath to say please, or no, but his eyes say both. Intensely. And in vain.
Travis puts the gun next to Manny's right eye, pointed sidelong across his face, and fires. The hollowpoint shreds both eyes and the bridge of the nose, leaving a ragged, bloody crater, and to Travis's deep satisfaction, Manny gets enough breath to make some noise after all. The man's scream is plaintive, full of self-pity, with the same stresses and tones he might use to scream "Why?" over and over. Travis wishes he could stand here for an hour and listen to it.
Instead he stoops, takes the.44 and leaves Manny to die like that, blind and screaming.
Manny isn't the reason Travis has come here tonight. The house's owners, the people who made the choice to kill Emily, are the primary targets.
Travis goes to the broad, stone-clad hallway that leads to the master bedroom, where his own mother and father are waiting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The day slipped by in a few hours over Canada and the North Atlantic, sped up by the plane's eastbound transit across the time zones.
Paige gave Travis two thin reports, one for each of the entities that they'd brought along on the trip. The objects in the black carrying cases.
QUICK REF REPORT-BREACH ENTITY 0118-"MEDIC"
BREACH EGRESS: 1981 July 15-07:31 UTC
PHYSICAL: Medic has a mass of 1.31 kg. Long dimension is 11.5 cm, height 8.1 cm, width 3.0 cm. It bears a strong superficial resemblance to a handgun. Its structure is simple: tube, grip, and trigger with guard. Black in color.
FUNCTION: Localized, massively accelerated healing of biological damage. Sends a surge of radiation from its barrel, covering an area 30 cm wide at a distance of approx. 15 cm. Radiation is a complex mixture of various particles, most not identifiable or known to present science. Result is instant death of most deleterious microorganisms, as well as clotting of all air-exposed blood within less than one second. Extremely useful for combating infections and treating serious wounds, to a degree.
Has been shown to work on humans, all tested mammals, and vertebrates in general. Has never worked on any tested invertebrate.
THEORIES ON HOW ENTITY FUNCTIONS: None.
LIMITATIONS OF USE: Many wounds are too severe for Medic's effect to be of use in time to prevent mortality.
QUICK REF REPORT-BREACH ENTITY 0353-"DOUBLER"
BREACH EGRESS: 1991 January 24-14:50 UTC
PHYSICAL: Doubler has a mass of 7.85 kg. Long dimension is 18.2 cm, height 5.1 cm, width 5.1 cm. It is black and yellow and resembles a large, square-shafted flashlight with two lenses, one on each end.
FUNCTION: When switched on, Doubler projects a discrete cone of light from each end. Yellow light from the yellow end, UV light from the black end. Each light cone flares outward from the lens and terminates sharply at a distance of just over 1.5 m.
Anything contained within the yellow light beam for more than 3.44 seconds is physically cloned, with the copy appearing inside the UV light beam. Creation of the copy is almost instantaneous, with time from start to finish not exceeding two frames of digital video, less than.066 seconds.
The fidelity of the clone to its master is physically perfect, presumably to atomic detail. This was demonstrated by the doubling of a laptop computer, the clone of which functioned properly and contained all the same code as its master. Chemical compounds and processes may also be copied. Cloned bullets fire as normal. Cloned food ingested by test animals produced no ill effect. A lit "Zippo" lighter was reproduced with its flame still burning.
THEORIES ON HOW ENTITY FUNCTIONS: None.
LIMITATIONS OF USE: (1) Does not work on most Breach entities. As of [November 16, 2008-latest update] only [5] entity types have been successfully doubled: Entity 0001 (Heavy Rag), Entity 0004 (Shard), Entity 0012 (Bottle Cap), Entity 0028 (Drift Wire), Entity 0051 (Inertia Plank).
(2) Living bodies may be cloned, but in all experiments so far, the clone has arrived dead. Autopsies have failed to reveal any specific cause of death. The master specimens (for ethical reasons, only mice and rats have been used) appear to suffer no harm. There is universal agreement within Tangent that no doubling of a human will ever be sanctioned.
When Travis finished reading the reports, he saw that Paige had opened a laptop. She turned it to face him.
"This is test footage of the last entity Pilgrim has," she said. "It's not quite unique. Four of them have come through over the years. He only has one. It's no Whisper, but it's powerful, in its way."
She opened a video frame on the screen and clicked PLAY. The video showed a stark white room containing a metal cage, no larger than a single-occupant drunk tank in some backwater police station. A man in his forties, balding, entered the frame holding an orange cube maybe four inches wide. There were markings on it, symbols etched in black, but they were too far from the camera to be discernible. It didn't matter: Travis could see that the writing was different from the strange jumble he'd read on Paige's wall. And it sure as hell wasn't English.
"October 4, 1986," the balding man said. "Video demonstration of Entity Zero Two Zero Five: Ares."
He entered the cage with the cube, closed the door and locked it from inside. Then he manipulated something on the cube, moving the symbols on its surface, arranging them. Here the camera reframed to a wider field of view, revealing a dozen people seated in chairs outside the cage, the nearest maybe ten feet away. Men and women, twenties to forties. Dressed casually. Nothing strange about them, except their anxiety. Something was about to happen, and they knew it.
The man in the cage finished whatever he was doing with the cube: the thing suddenly flared bright, throwing off the camera's white balance and making the room appear darker. In the same instant, all but three of the seated people turned sharply, regarding the man in the cage with something like surprise.
Then, as one, they came up out of their chairs and rushed him, like baseball players charging from the dugout to beat the shit out of some opposing player. They hit the cage en masse, trying with
all their force to get at the man inside. Arms reached in through the bars. Hands gripped the steel and shook it. A few of the attackers stepped back and aimed heavy kicks at the cage door's latch. Had they reached the balding man, they would have torn his limbs from his body. There was no question of it.
By their moves, it was clear that they weren't seeking the orange cube itself. They weren't looking to destroy it, or even take it away; they were only reacting to the man who held it. They crouched and reached for his legs. Climbed atop the cage and plunged their arms into it, going for his head. They wanted to kill him. It was that simple.
Yet beyond the rage, their actions were surprisingly normal. Nothing about them suggested that they were controlled like mindless puppets, or even reduced to some animalistic state of mind. Not even close. They were just extremely pissed-off people focused on a target. Their minds were, if anything, clearer for the adrenaline rush. As Travis watched, two of them conferred and then one took out a set of car keys and tried to pick the cage's lock with it.
The man in the cage only stared at the horde around him, rattled by the experience but not at all surprised. Like a marine biologist in a shark cage.
Travis's eyes went back to the seats and the three people who remained in them. They were the farthest three from the cage. The farthest from the orange cube. As if the thing had a radius of influence, and they were just outside of it. One of the three looked up, his eyes drawn to someone out of frame. He nodded in response to something he was told, then stood, and took a single step toward the cage. His eyes hardened. His jaw tightened. A second later he was sprinting toward it, crashing into it with the rest of the throng.
The video ended.
Travis stared at the blank screen a moment, then met Paige's eyes.
"What's the write-up on that one?" he said. "Pisses people off like nobody's business?"
"It does something to the R-complex," she said. "The reptile foundation of the human brain, where the fight-or-flight response comes from. Where rage comes from. The cube does two things. First, it tags anyone within a couple feet of itself as a target. Then it affects everyone within another twenty feet beyond that, maxing their aggression and turning them inward against the target."
"Bet someone at Border Town learned that the hard way," Travis said.
Paige nodded, looking away. Travis didn't bother her for the details.
"Anything nice ever come out of the Breach?" he said. "Instant puppy generator, something like that?"
Paige managed a smile. "It's not all bad. We survive the next thirty-six hours, I'll show you some of the good stuff." Somewhere over Greenland, Travis reclined his seat and tried to rest. He was asleep within minutes.
Paige watched him.
After a moment she felt self-conscious and looked away, even though there was no one else in the room to see her.
She didn't trust what she felt about him. There was every reason not to; her feelings were exaggerated all to hell right now. The guy had saved her from the worst thing she'd ever endured-had literally come in with guns blazing-and then carried her over fifteen miles to safety. Her memories of the journey out of the mountains, early on before she'd gone completely comatose, comprised a vignette of little waking moments. Coming to in his arms, being carried like a child. A big part of her had hated that feeling: being unable to stand up for herself after years of training her body to military-specialist standards. But here was the thing, and there was no getting around it: being carried had also felt good. Irrationally good, on some primal level that was all about vulnerability and security. He'd simply made her feel safe.
And then she'd kissed him. Jesus, why had she done that? There'd been no real need for it; he'd already been faking it well enough, as far as the chopper was concerned. Looking back, she wished she could write the moment off to her delirium, but in fact she'd felt pretty damn awake at that time. Rotor wash made for an effective alarm clock.
She glanced at him again. Sound asleep, sunlight across his chest, the shadows of folds in his shirt sliding back and forth as he breathed.
No, she definitely didn't trust her feelings. A few hours earlier, when she'd seen his life history on the screen of her PDA, she'd taken it like a kick to the stomach, and then had immediately found herself rationalizing, finding ways to cut him slack, to not blame him for what he'd done-for what he'd been-in his distant past. It was a wonder she hadn't said it all out loud and made an ass of herself in front of her people.
All this, superimposed over the thing she wasn't dealing with at all.
Her father.
Even now, she hadn't cried. Not since her initial reaction in the clearing. She'd tried. Tried to get there, to at least accept that it had really happened, if nothing else. So far, it hadn't worked. It was still too big, too close-she couldn't get a sense of where its edges were.
It would happen in its time. It seemed there was no forcing it.
For now, she thought she could use some sleep of her own. She stood and left the room to find a place by herself. Travis felt someone shake his shoulder. Had he even slept? It hardly felt like it. He opened his eyes to find Paige standing over him, haloed by the ceiling lights of the little room. Outside was darkness, broken every few seconds by the pulse of the aircraft's starboard beacon.
"Wheels down in five," Paige said.
Travis nodded. She left the room to speak to someone in the hallway.
The plane banked steeply, offering a view of its destination: Switzerland's Meiringen Air Force Base, its runway threaded tightly between mountain ridges in a way that was uncomfortably familiar.
Ten minutes later Travis stepped out of the plane's tarmac-level exit into crisp air, the stars hard and bright above the mountains.
A tandem-rotor helicopter-a Chinook, he thought it was called-waited with its turbines already whining at idle. The team transferred the gear, and within five minutes they were airborne again, moving north over the high country toward Zurich, and whatever waited at 7 Theaterstrasse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Zurich was close to what Travis had pictured. He sat beside Paige in the last SUV of the motorcade winding its way down into the heart of the city. Under the black sky, the clean lines of centuries-old architecture descended in fractured order to the river. Ahead and below, a fog bank had settled over the low-lying blocks that flanked the waterfront. Gray specters of mist drifted along the deepest streets of the city. The motorcade descended into the fog just before swinging left onto Theaterstrasse.
Ahead and to the right, rising straight from the water, was the only nine-story building for several blocks. Paige and the others in the vehicle reacted to the sight of it, if only in subtle ways. Hands unconsciously tightened the clasps of Kevlar armor. Gripped the stocks and barrel guards of rifles. Drummed on armrests.
The detachment operators had put on their gear aboard the Chinook. Travis hadn't asked if they'd brought a set for him. They had. In addition to the Kevlar, he now wore a tiny comm unit in his ear: a microphone and receiver that were always on and linked to the rest of the team. They'd given him a gun, too. A rifle identical to theirs. Identical to the one he'd already killed with, while kneeling over a muddy hole in Alaska.
Paige called Border Town on her cell for an update. She'd done this every five minutes since they'd touched down at Meiringen. Right now there was an AWACS aircraft making broad circles thirty thousand feet above Zurich. Six attack helicopters were staged in parking lots along the ridges east and west of town. Farther out, F-18s orbited, ready to kill any unauthorized thing that came within fifty miles of the city on wings or rotors. Every traffic camera for miles had specially filtered lenses that reduced windshield glare and allowed high-res facial imaging of vehicle occupants at night. These cams were all networked to a system that could recognize Aaron Pilgrim and several of his known allies. If they did, three detachments from Tangent's Berlin hub were standing by in the city, ready to move against them.
None of it reassured Paige,
Travis saw. Rock, paper, scissors. On the outside, the building was beautiful. Ancient stone facade rearing up to the sky. Cobblestone approach. Wrought-iron fence gleaming in the mist, its sheen catching the city lights through the fog.
On the inside, the place looked like the home of an obsessive-compulsive who couldn't pass a used computer store without buying out its entire stock, and had done so on a few hundred occasions. Travis wasn't up on computers-hadn't owned one in the year since he'd rejoined the free world, and the last time he'd seen one before that, the term e-mail hadn't yet made it into popular culture. He'd seen his brother's impressive setup for the home business, and he'd gone online a few times at the library in Fairbanks in recent months. His experience ended there. But even a glance at the interior of 7 Theaterstrasse made it clear that no amount of familiarity would've helped. Supercomputer designers would've been stumped. Probably had been. No doubt Tangent had brought in the best people.
Beginning at the main-floor foyer, where six members of another Berlin detachment stood guard, the building's space, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, was filled with wires, and computer boards, and cables, and pieces of equipment Travis didn't recognize at all. A rain-forest overgrowth of circuitry, lit from within by its own galaxy of tiny LED indicator lights. Here and there, window fans were bolted to walls or the ceiling, aimed at particularly dense clusters of wiring and spinning at full speed, as they must have been for years and years. Elsewhere, air-conditioning units whirred softly, the radiant heat of their motors vented away through metal ductwork toward exterior walls.
"Power's never been shut off since you took over the place?" Travis asked Paige.
