by Patrick Lee
Another sniper reported in. "Vehicle proceeding south. I see double doors on the back end. Ambulance with its flashers off."
Paige exhaled slowly. She found Travis's eyes again.
"We're not going to get any more false alarms," she said. She looked at the words on the PDA one last time. Just a glance. Then she disregarded it and focused on the doors in front of them.
Travis understood. Whatever was being amplified, they weren't going to figure it out standing here. Regardless, they had to go through these doors and deal with what was on the other side. Figure out what the weapon was, and destroy it, even if that meant coming back out onto the landing and giving this pressure-sensitive warhead a swift kick like it was a Coke machine that'd stolen their last dollar. Whatever they were going to do, their time in which to do it was evaporating. Pilgrim probably knew they were opening the doors; if he was holding the Whisper right now, it was sure as hell telling him. Travis put his hand on the doorknob, then gave the warhead a last look.
"Sure you don't want to take a crack at disarming it?" he said.
She glanced at it. "It's not entirely impossible. Nukes aren't like regular explosives. They're complex machines. If you can disrupt that complexity without setting it off, you're good to go."
"Disrupt it?" Travis said. That word sounded like it was warming a seat for an uglier one.
Paige saw his expression and offered a smile. "Shove a grenade into it and pull the pin."
"How likely is that to work?"
"A shitload less likely than what you're about to do," she said.
He returned her smile, faced the door, and gripped the knob "Wait," Paige said.
He met her eyes, and found her looking back at him with a strange expression. A look that didn't know what it wanted to be.
"I didn't thank you enough," she said. "Before, when you first got to Border Town. I know I said thanks, but I wanted to say more than that. I wanted-" She paused again. Frustrated about something. Then: "I just should have said more. What, I'm not sure. I'm sorry if this isn't making sense."
Travis watched her eyes; she was looking down now, looking everywhere but at him.
"You're welcome," he said, so quietly that for a moment he wondered if she'd heard it.
She looked up at him. There was something in her eyes he hadn't seen there before. Something vulnerable. The last pair of eyes to look at him like that had been Emily Price's.
Not a bad final moment, if this was it.
Holding Paige's gaze, he turned the knob and shoved the door open hard.
They didn't die.
In the darkness beyond the doorway, more wires and circuit boards hung like vines, though not as densely as they did throughout the lower floors. Only a few here. Travis could see them silhouetted against a dim orange glow from somewhere ahead. Like the light of embers, but constant.
A sound began to radiate from the room. A droning hum, so deep it was barely audible. He could feel it more than hear it.
He pocketed the PDA and unslung the rifle from his shoulder. He stepped through the opening, Paige just behind him. The way ahead was hard to see; the orange glow barely helped. He moved toward what he thought was its source, though he couldn't actually see it yet. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the room around him was vast. It was all the remaining space of the ninth floor, wide open and uninterrupted.
The hum was coming from somewhere ahead, the same direction as the light source.
Twenty feet in from the doorway, Travis saw something on the floor ahead, maybe an obstacle to step over, maybe a strewn bunch of wire. A few steps later he saw that it was neither. It was another inscription written in the scratch language, carved right into the floorboards. This one had the note-to-self simplicity Travis had found lacking in the previous five.
It read, TAGS ARE ESTABLISHED WHEN THIS ROOM IS OPENED.
He translated it aloud for Paige. She stiffened.
"Tagging," she said. "The Ares."
Travis thought of the video she'd shown him. The orange cube tagging the man in the cage, making him the target for the rage it incited in those around him.
He looked at the orange light ahead; there was no question as to its source now, even if he couldn't see it yet.
"It tagged us when we opened the door," he said. "I thought you had to be within a couple feet of it."
Understanding came to him even as he finished the line. He saw it come to Paige as well.
"Amplified," she said. "The distances are amplified."
Travis stared at the light source and guessed that they were at least fifty feet shy of it.
"If it can tag us this far away," he said, "how far can it reach to turn people against us?"
He saw the implication saturate her expression, saw her whole body react to it as if a ghost had traced its fingers up her spine. They were standing atop a nine-story building filled with armed, trained killers. If even those on the nearest floor were affected "Oh my God," she whispered. She steadied her microphone beside her mouth, caught her breath and said, "All teams, get out of the building, right now. Run."
But even she had to know it was too late. In the darkness around them, the LED indicators on the hanging circuit boards began flashing a manic rhythm. The trap was already springing. A second later, the orange light ahead of them flared bright, just as it had done in the video. Then brighter. So much brighter it lit the room, revealed it as daylight would have. A basketball-court-sized space, mostly empty, strung with spiderwebs of circuitry here and there.
Travis grabbed her arm, spun her toward the double doors and the landing beyond, and sprinted, dragging her until she caught her balance and ran with him.
"Where are we going?" Paige said.
"The eighth floor windows over the river. I hope you can swim."
"Are you fucking insane?"
"Insane problem, insane solution."
They passed through the doorframe, sidestepped the nuke and took the stairs two at a time, slowing only as they reached the tangle of wires halfway down the flight.
Just below them, the stairwell thundered with running footsteps. But were the footsteps going down, or coming up? There wasn't time to judge it.
Travis reached the bottom of the flight, Paige just a step behind him. Tunnels among the wiring branched in five directions; he didn't know which one led to the river overlook. Paige did. She took the lead, and he followed, close, stooping in the low passageway. The pounding on the steps still gave no clue as to its direction.
They'd gone thirty feet through the tunnel when a voice spoke in their ears.
"This is Haslett. I just got outside the main exit. I think we better get everyone back to their positions."
Paige stopped. Travis pulled up just short of crashing into her. Behind him, the clamor of footsteps on the stairs went silent.
Paige steadied herself and spoke. "Status, all report. Are you guys affected or not?"
A jumble of calm responses came back over the line, the comm system cutting out most of them. But Travis heard enough to know they were fine. Paige turned in the tunnel, faced him, looking as confused as he felt.
"Maybe it didn't reach far enough," she said.
Haslett responded. "No, I think it reached too far. I think it just tagged us as targets, the same as you."
"What are you talking about?" Paige said.
"Look out the window," Haslett said. "All teams back to positions, right now. Sorry to countermand you, Miss Campbell."
The footsteps resumed on the stairs, definitely coming upward now.
Paige met Travis's eyes a moment longer, then turned and covered the last forty feet to the nearest set of windows, at an open corner looking out over the river in one direction and the city in another. Over her shoulder, Travis saw what was happening even as he stopped.
Paige said nothing. There was no expression for it.
In every building they could see, the dim glow of flashlights had vanished from the windows. That was because
the flashlights were coming out through the street-level exits now, their beams stabbing wildly through the fog as their owners ran. Ran toward 7 Theaterstrasse. Travis's eyes trailed up along the river, and he saw the same thing happening, block after block, as far as he could see. All the way to E41, two miles away, where every pair of headlights had just swung off onto the surface streets, and were coming this way at full speed.
VERSE V
AN OCTOBER NIGHT IN 1992
Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Chase strains at the binds any longer. Both appear resigned to what is going to happen to them, and Travis hates them all the more for it. He wants them to be afraid, as he knows Emily must have been before she died.
The mad blue and red pulses of police flashers rim the plantation shutters. They've made no move to come in yet. A bullhorn has been chattering on and off for the past ten minutes, and three times the phone has rung for thirty seconds or more, but Travis has paid no attention.
Neither has he spoken to his parents.
It is this simple: he wants them to sit here waiting to die.
He wants them to feel what Emily felt, and he wants them to feel it for as long as possible before he kills them. The last thing they will ever hear will be the footsteps of the SWAT team on the stone floor of the hallway. It's likely that this will also be the last thing Travis hears, and that's fine. If he survives to spend the rest of his life in prison, that will also be fine, because he's earned it. Either way, all the justice Emily can ever be given will be spun in this room in the next quarter of an hour.
She deserves more, of course. She deserves to be alive, and lovely, twenty-four years old, with a future full of the simple things she wanted: a house, kids, a couple cats lying around in sunbeams on the living-room carpet. Revenge is a pale and sickly substitute for those things, but it's all Travis has left to give her, so he means to give it.
Down the hall in the living room, Manny's screams have ebbed to a whimper, and in the past minute he's begun choking on something-blood, no doubt. The sound of it has an effect on Travis's mother; her poker face slips. She is thinking about her own death now. Really thinking about it.
If he cared to speak to them, Travis would ask them how they could have expected any other outcome than this. They sculpted him to be what he is: a corrupted human being. A cop whose only real job has been to keep them pre-informed of police activity against them. A man whose moral compass points wherever the hell he wants it to point, at any given time. Didn't they know their animal would turn on them, after what they did?
Manny's choking climaxes in a series of convulsive heaves; he is trying with all his remaining air to purge the obstructing fluid from his windpipe. All his remaining air is not enough, and a moment later there is no more sound coming down the hall. Mrs. Chase begins to weep openly. Mr. Chase looks at her with disgust, and Travis suddenly understands the mini-plotline that has just reached the end of its reel and begun flapping against the projector arm. It is all he can do to keep from laughing at them both.
Then the window bursts and the shutters are knocked aside by a projectile that arcs across the room and ricochets off the dresser. Pepper gas, thick and orange-white, seethes into the air, and Mr. and Mrs. Chase begin to scream, because they know what's coming.
"We're your blood, goddammit!" Mr. Chase shouts.
"So was the kid she had on the way," Travis says.
He sees them react to that, and decides to let it be their final thought. He raises the.44 -and finds hesitation where only a second ago there was resolve.
Another second passes. The gas fills half the room now, its outermost tendrils stinging Travis's eyes. His next breath will fill his lungs with it, and there will be nothing in his world but pain. At the same time a window shatters somewhere in a nearby room, and bodies clamber through. If he doesn't do this now-right now-it will never happen.
He forces an image of Emily into his mind. Emily standing right here with him, deserving retribution in her name. But instead of willpower it brings him understanding: he knows now why he hasn't pulled the trigger. It's not pity. It's her. It's the thought of how she would feel about him, if she were here to see him doing this. Travis does not believe in the afterlife. Emily is gone, gone forever, but all the same, he knows what she would think of this. She would be fucking ashamed of him.
He feels the gun slipping from his hand even before the SWAT commander appears in the doorway and screams for him to drop it, and a moment later Travis is on the floor, deep in the gas, unable to hold his breath any longer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
"This can't be happening," Paige said.
They could hear the screams coming up out of the fog, from the leading edge of the incoming swarm, less than a block away now. The buildings directly around 7 Theaterstrasse were corporate and commercial structures, empty at this hour, so the crowd had originated from farther away. But not by much. The frenzied movement of the nearest flashlight beams drew closer with each second. Travis thought of the feral rage of the test subjects in the video, rushing inward toward the man in the cage. The scale of the situation had been amplified a thousandfold in this place. Seven Theaterstrasse was the cage now, and all of its occupants stood in the crosshairs of the effect, which extended at least as far as the edges of Zurich.
The forefront of the crowd was maybe fifty seconds away, surging between buildings to the west, and onto the two nearest bridges spanning the river just to the south.
Paige's cell rang. She answered. It was someone aboard the AWACS, circling high above. Travis could just discern the tinny voice over the phone, reporting a visual on something strange happening down in the city.
"We noticed," Paige said.
In Travis's ear, the sniper and spotter teams reported in, one by one, as they retook their window positions.
The reality of what was about to happen descended on Travis like a poison cloud. He saw it settling over Paige at the same time, as she watched the flashlights race in toward the building. The nearest were past the bridges now.
The last of the snipers reported in. Travis could picture their rifles silently tracking the advance of the crowd while they waited for the order.
"We should just let them in," Travis said.
"They'll kill every one of us," Paige said.
"Yeah."
He was surprised by how little fear he heard in his own voice. How little he felt, for that matter. Maybe there was just too much of it to process. What he had in place of it was logic.
"It's not their fault," he said. "A few of us dying, instead of hundreds of them, that's not a hard choice at all."
For a moment he saw agreement in Paige's eyes. What other option was there?
And then her eyes changed, and in the same instant Travis understood why. The wicked effectiveness of Pilgrim's trap became clear. There would be no simple way out of it. Not even by suicide.
"Christ," he whispered.
He saw in his mind what would happen in this building, less than a minute from right now, if they held their fire and let the crowd in. He saw the rush of bodies coming up the stairs like fluid under pressure. Saw them clambering over one another, tearing at the jungle of wiring that filled the space of every floor. Crashing through the clearings with the metal boxes, and the delicate wires for the pressure pads that were almost certainly not decoys.
"If the nuke goes off, the crowd dies anyway," Paige said. "The whole city dies."
Travis could hear it in her voice: confirmation of everything she'd feared about this building. Here at last was the spare hostage. The one Pilgrim wasn't afraid to pull the trigger on.
But she also looked confused. Damn confused. And even in the tension of the moment, Travis thought he knew why. Because the whole building seemed to have been devoted to creating this effect. The whole building was the second hostage. So where the hell was the weapon Pilgrim had spent a decade working on?
Travis's line of thought was broken by a singular cry from the mob, clearer tha
n the rest. It was furious, and wild, and so high-pitched that it could only belong to a very young girl, maybe younger than ten.
The crowd's leading edge was less than twenty seconds from the building.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck…" Paige breathed.
Travis wondered how many kids were among the crowd, but only for a moment, because he already knew how many. Every kid in Zurich would be out there, soon enough.
"Miss Campbell?" one of the snipers said over the comm unit, the voice tight like a wire.
The question was obvious.
So was the answer.
Paige swallowed hard, bit down on whatever she was feeling, and said, "Weapons free."
The night came alive with gunfire.
Travis saw the muzzle flashes from a dozen windows below him, across the face of the building. Saw the red paths of tracer rounds cutting through the fog, the snipers picking out individual targets for each shot. And though he couldn't see the victims at street level, as the snipers could with their FLIR goggles, he saw the results as clearly as he needed to. The flashlights at the forefront of the charge were suddenly kicked backward, their beams flipping end over end. The front ranks were cut down in rapid succession, and Travis heard screams of pain, mixed with surprise and fear. Men, women, children.
But the charge didn't stop. Didn't even slow. The rest of the surge, coming from behind the fallen, hardly faltered over the bodies. Travis saw the wave of incoming flashlights stutter-step where the first victims had gone down. The dead served only as speed bumps for the horde.
More flashlights were coming on in the windows of other buildings as the sleeping residents of the city woke, roused either by gunfire or by the effect the Ares had had on them. Beams flared behind panes for spare seconds, just long enough for their owners to take a look at 7 Theaterstrasse and know that the targets of their rage were somewhere inside. Then each light turned away quickly, as the people behind them ran for the stairs. Ran for the street. The whole city would be out there in a matter of minutes.
