by Patrick Lee
Down in the fog, the mob made forward progress in spite of the gunfire. Travis saw Paige's eyes, filled with hard tears, spilling now. She was tough as hell, he knew, but tough didn't cover this kind of thing. Nothing did, short of psychosis.
"It's not enough," she said, her voice cracking twice in those three words. "Single shots aren't going to keep them back."
She turned from the window and moved quickly into the tunnel of wires, toward the stairwell. Travis followed. Paige reached behind herself as she went, unzipped her backpack and plunged her hand into it. She came out with something that looked like a flashlight with lenses at both ends. The Doubler. It was more or less what Travis had pictured when he'd read the report, though its details drew his attention: the way its surface caught the light, the way its separate materials-whatever they were-met without seams. It was unlike anything he'd ever seen. A tool built by alien hands.
Paige reached the top of the stairs, and shouted, "Seventh floor, ranking operator to the stairwell!" She had to yell it again, waiting for a gap in the shooting, before one of the snipers, a woman in her thirties, appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Travis had seen her introduced earlier as Miller. She looked as shaken by the events of the preceding minutes, as Travis supposed all the snipers were, but she was steady on her feet.
Paige tossed her the Doubler and yelled, "They need to switch to autofire! Grab five magazines, double them compound until they're eighty, then use that group for a basis and start massing piles right where you're standing. I want one person acting as feeder for each floor, running clips to the snipers. Double some fresh rifles, too. They won't last long under the strain."
Miller nodded and disappeared with a purpose.
Travis and Paige returned to the window. Outside, the crowd had filled both bridges to the south, and all the streets between the buildings in every other direction. Gathered flashlights flickered around in the fog, like lighters above the crowd at some end-of-the-world rock show. At the mouths of each of these bottlenecks-bridges and streets alike-the amassed dead had finally begun to constitute a real obstacle for the incoming throng, and where the surge backed up, Travis suspected that even some of the living had stumbled and been trampled, and become a part of the barricade themselves.
The snipers were still firing single shots, picking their targets. As Travis watched, the nearest outriders of the mob were always the ones taking the hits. A flashlight bobbed over the pileup on the near end of the left-side bridge, and came hurtling toward the building at impossible speed. No fucking way could a human move like that A rifle cracked from the fifth floor, straight below Travis, and the fast-moving light in the fog clattered on the cobblestones as a man screamed. Under the scream, Travis heard the telltale racket of a bicycle wiping out.
The piles of bodies were only doing so much. The fifty-foot buffer zone around the building wouldn't last much longer if the autofire didn't start soon.
Travis heard someone crying in pain, somewhere in the dark below. The man who'd come in on the bike. Still alive. He sounded young, maybe just into his twenties. His cries were so full of suffering it turned Travis's stomach. Paige's eyes were still rimmed, catching the moonlight and the red tracer fire from below. She held on to just enough composure to keep her breathing steady. The dying man's cries escalated to screams. He was saying something in German. A single word over and over. "Bitte! Bitte!" Travis thought it meant "please." The tone sure as hell implied that it did. Paige reached into her vest, came out with a pair of FLIR goggles and strapped them over her eyes. She leaned through the window, shouldered her rifle and aimed it down. She fired a single shot, and the man's screams switched off instantly.
A few seconds later the autofire began, one sniper at a time, and after a moment the night was a roar Travis could barely think above. The impact against the advancing crowd was more dramatic than he'd imagined. The front lines were carved back in savage arcs, like weeds falling to scythe sweeps. Paige tore off her goggles, overwhelmed by the detail she must have seen through them, and finally lost control. She turned toward Travis, put her arms around him and held on fiercely. He held her in return, his own eyes flooding against his will, and hoped to hell Aaron Pilgrim ended up in his gun sights at some point.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Paige kept her face against his chest for only a moment. Then she drew back, wiped at her eyes, and looked out into the night again, like it was her obligation to do so. Like it was her penance.
"Maybe if we had tear gas…" she said. "Pepper grenades. Anything like that…"
Travis watched the chaotic movement of the flashlights below, the crowd flooding forward at some surge point, being cut back, flooding through somewhere else, being cut back there. Over and over.
"I doubt it would help," he said.
"There are entities that would've helped," Paige said. "If I'd been smart enough to see this coming, I could've brought them. There's one that's exactly like the Ares, only it's green, and it affects memory. We call it the Jump Cut. Everyone within its reach loses the last three days of their memory, instantly. From the target's point of view it feels as if, whatever they were doing three days ago, they skip instantly from that to the present moment. Massively confusing, and there's no way to think around it. Wears off later. It'd be a perfect crowd disperser. We could've set it up in the main entrance downstairs, and maybe-I don't know…"
She was reaching. Trying to take responsibility for things that couldn't possibly be her fault. It was the mark of a good leader. It was also not helping anyone right now. Least of all herself.
Travis set a hand on her shoulder and turned her away from the window.
"Let's go back up and see what we're dealing with," he said.
She nodded, getting control again, pawing at her eyes one last time. He turned and led the way through the tunnel, toward the stairs.
At the landing, he looked down and saw Miller and a few others operating the Doubler. In the darkness, lit by the strobing pulses of gunfire all around, he caught only glimpses of the thing in action. They'd piled about eighty ammo magazines in one spot, and Miller was holding the Doubler so that the cone of yellow light coming from one end fully enveloped the stack. The UV light from the other end of the tube was barely visible. It shone only where it touched the floor or the banister atop the stairs, turning flecks of dust bright white.
Every few seconds, a perfect duplicate of the stack of eighty clips appeared in the UV light. Though the fractured glare from the muzzle bursts made it hard to really see the process, Travis didn't think it would have looked any more normal to him even in clear sunlight. Each time a new stack of ammunition appeared, the operators around Miller would grab handfuls and disappear either into the tunnels beside her or down toward the lower levels.
Travis moved on, climbed the stairs to the ninth floor, Paige just behind him. They emerged from the tangle of wires, and a few seconds later they were on the highest landing again, passing the nuke and entering the room at the top of the building.
The room was as brightly lit as when they'd left it. The radiance from the Ares was so intense it was more or less white. Earlier, when they'd turned to run, there'd been no time to study the revealed details of this place. Now they did. At the center of the giant room was a cluster of wires and cables, all emerging from the floor at that spot, and tangled together to form something that looked like an eagle's nest. All of the light was coming from the depression at its center, into which Travis couldn't see until he was within ten feet of it, holding his hand up against the searing glare.
Inside the nest were two objects. One was the Ares. The other was a jet-black cube, a foot in each dimension. The top and sides of the cube were smooth, without any wires feeding in. They must all connect into the underside. This cube was the active element of the amplifier. A shaft of silvery light, like a taut rope made out of plasma, stretched between the amplifier and the Ares, binding them.
Woven delicately into the surrounding nest o
f wires were dozens of pressure pads, stuck to circuit boards and fat cable connectors. These pads, Travis had no doubt, were real. He had the sense that even a hard step on this floor would trigger them.
Downstairs, the gunfire went on endlessly. He could see it eating into Paige like acid. She narrowed her eyes, seeming to force her mind to stay in this room where it could accomplish something. She turned, surveyed the cavernous space.
"Okay, so where the hell is the weapon Pilgrim's people told us about?" she said. "What was he going to activate, three hours from the time we stopped him that day?" She nodded toward the Ares. "Not this goddamned thing. What good would that have done him? And the steel boxes downstairs are only there to serve this system, so forget those, too. There has to be something else. I mean, why the hell would he turn the whole building into a defense system that doesn't defend anything but itself? That's recursive. It's like one of those joke signs someone hangs in a doorway that says, 'Caution, don't hit your head on this sign.' "
Travis supposed that fad had come and gone while he was in prison.
He turned and surveyed the room with her, letting his eyes move slowly over every detail. A few wires hanging here and there, spilling from holes in the walls or snaking out of floor-level ductwork. Green circuit boards lying or hanging among them, LEDs blinking furiously, as they had ever since the amplifier had kicked on. But mostly there was nothing. Bare floor space. Bare stretches of wall. Outlets with nothing plugged into them.
"All the wiring is for the amplifier," Travis said. "In here, and in the rest of the building. And that's what took him most of the ten years, right? All the detailed work involved."
Paige nodded, waiting for the rest.
"So that makes the least sense of all," he said. "Why spend all that time on just the defense system, and why build that part first? If this place has some other purpose, some main purpose, it seems like he could've had that finished years earlier."
She could only stare. She could make no sense of it either.
Outside, an engine raced, and then the muffled concussion of a gasoline explosion put an end to it. The cars from E41 were starting to arrive.
Travis's eyes picked up something twenty feet behind Paige. A jumble of wire against the wall. There was something concealed beneath it. He'd taken only a few steps toward it when he saw what it was. More of the scratch writing, dug into the floor. He reached it, studied the wires to be sure they weren't bound by pressure pads, and eased them aside.
"What does it say?" Paige said.
"Names," Travis said. "It's a list of names."
Thirty-seven in all. People of varied nationalities. A few sounded Japanese, a few others Russian, German, Spanish, French. They weren't famous; Travis had never heard of any of them. He read a few of them to Paige and saw no recognition in her eyes, either.
She took out her cell and dialed. Border Town picked up. She set it to speakerphone so Travis could relay the names directly. The man on the phone identified himself as Crawford, and as Travis began giving him the names, someone began typing in the background. By the time Travis read the last name, the techs on the other end had pulled up info on the first ten.
All had been extremely wealthy. All had been politically connected, to some degree. All had committed suicide since 1995.
As those in the background at Border Town continued parsing the list, Travis looked at Paige.
"These people were threats to Pilgrim's plan, in some way," he said. "Find out why, and you'll have real information to work with."
Suddenly there was commotion on the other end of the line. Someone calling out to others, and then a few surprised sounds.
"What's going on there?" Paige said.
Crawford spoke up again. "The last name on the list. Ellis Cook. Suicide by gunshot to the head. Two days ago on Grand Cayman."
Paige looked at Travis and mouthed, Two days?
"This is all wrong," Travis said, the thought coming to him even as he voiced it. "Pilgrim was never planning to trigger anything in this place four years ago, when you guys thought you stopped him. Whatever his plan is, he's launching it tonight. It was always going to be tonight."
Before Paige could respond to that, Crawford spoke again.
"Second-to-last name on the list. Rudolph Hagen. Jumped to his death from a hotel balcony, twenty-eighth floor. Three months ago. He was alone in the room, door locked, no forced entry."
Paige kept her eyes on Travis, shaking her head, either not following his logic or not wanting to.
"There is no weapon," Travis said. "Pilgrim just needed Tangent to think there was. He wanted you to show up here four years ago. Wanted you to recover the Whisper."
"Why the hell would he want us to take the Whisper from him?" she said.
"Because it told him to," Travis said.
The concept cut the air like a blade. Even the typing on Crawford's end of the call went quiet; whoever was around the speakerphone on that end was listening, too.
"What?" Paige said.
"He mastered it, right?" Travis said. "Learned how to make it tell him anything he needed to know?"
"That's what the evidence supports," Paige said.
"So he asked it for a plan. A way to eliminate Tangent, get back into Border Town, something like that. Whatever it was, it was hard. Right on the brink of impossible. Any of the obvious ways to do it, you guys have long since thought of, and built defenses against. So whatever plan the Whisper came up with, you'd expect it to be pretty far from obvious. Like a chess move by a supercomputer, something even the best human players can't make sense of."
Her eyes changed. Began to accept the idea, almost unwillingly.
"I can't even guess what the plan is," Travis said. "But there has to be one. This has to be one. He let you guys drive him out of this place, that day in 2005. He let you take the Whisper, knowing he'd get it back. He knew LHA in Japan would go active in four years. Knew you'd found his old notebook, and would risk flying the Whisper there to test his old theory. Really, a human being could almost guess those things. So it'd be child's play for the Whisper. The real question is, what else could it have guessed? Could it have predicted that once Tangent lost the Whisper to him, you'd send a team here to try to contain this place tonight?"
Paige thought about it, nodded.
"Okay," Travis said. "So then what? Could it assume a desperation move on your part? You said yourself you thought of triggering the nuke, if it came to it. How were you planning to do that?"
He knew what she would say.
"I would've done exactly what we already did," Paige said. "I would've opened the doors into this room."
"Still a move the Whisper could expect. So far, it adds up."
"What adds up?"
"That Aaron Pilgrim meant for a Tangent team to be here tonight. Meant for them to open these doors and trigger the Ares, and end up fighting off a siege by the whole city."
"Why?"
Travis thought about it, but could only shake his head. "I don't know. Whatever it is, the dominoes are dropping exactly like he wants them to, so far. We're dead-centered in the trap."
He watched her consider it. Watched her hate it as much as she acknowledged it. It wasn't so much an assessment of their situation as a diagnosis.
"How the hell we're supposed to compete against this kind of thinking, I don't know," Travis said.
"I might," Paige said. She looked around the mostly empty room, then back at him. "We exploit the things the Whisper could've never predicted."
"Like what?"
"Like you. Four years ago, or fourteen years ago, whenever Pilgrim got this plan from the Whisper, there's no way it could've known a random hiker would show up at that crash site two days ago. That Ellen Garner would've survived and left a note for you to follow. That you'd end up holding the Whisper yourself, and that it would be compelled to tell you how to read this language."
He nodded. That much seemed safe enough to believe.
"Meaning we were never supposed to know these names," Travis said, indicating the list carved into the floor.
They were both silent a moment.
Then Crawford's voice came over the speaker. "We're on it. I'll put someone on each name, dig up everything there is, find whatever thread connects them all to Pilgrim."
His last word was cut off by a scream in Travis's ear, from one of the snipers over the comm system: "Gun!"
Half a second later, another of them cried out, and then there were two voices shouting that a man was down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Sprinting again. Past the nuke. Down the stairs to Level Eight.
Miller, on the landing farther down, saw Paige and shouted, "Sixth floor! Hill's been hit!"
Travis followed Paige down, past the piles of ammunition Miller continued to stockpile, through the tunnel of wires to the level below. Then more tunnels, across the sixth floor, toward the windows and the sound of screaming. They found two snipers kneeling over a third, who'd lost a good portion of his face and neck but was somehow still breathing. Wouldn't be for much longer.
Paige dropped her backpack from her shoulders, wrenched open the zipper and brought out something that looked a lot like a pistol, maybe a little Walther PPK, Travis thought. Then he saw it better, and realized the resemblance was only fleeting: the thing's shape was just stark and practical, a small black tube with a grip and a trigger. It was the Medic.
Paige aimed it at the dying man's wounds, her body language full of doubt, and pulled the trigger. The effect looked something like a camera flash going off, accompanied by a surge of heat that Travis felt two feet away. The man's body spasmed in response, and Travis saw the injuries change dramatically. The blood flow seemed to staunch itself in less than a second.
But the guy was still dying. Eyes still wild as he fought for breath. Paige gripped his hand, and her eyes pleaded with him to fight. But after a moment, his own eyes tilted away from hers, and he expelled a hard breath. He didn't take his next one.
