by Patrick Lee
"Right," Paige said. She sounded impatient.
"Ellis Cook had a net worth of over one hundred million dollars. But he made it by winning a Powerball lotto three years ago. Four years ago, when his name was already scratched on that floor, Cook was managing a coffee shop in North Carolina."
Paige looked like she was waiting for more. Or for a punch line, maybe. She stared at the phone, her eyes fixed, narrowed. Then she looked at Travis and said, "What?"
He had no answer for her.
"That's what we know so far," Crawford said. "All of these people were rich as hell when they died, though we're still looking for a specific through line. But at the time Pilgrim carved Ellis Cook's name into that floor, the guy was fielding complaints ten hours a day from people who wanted more foam on their cappuccinos. Your bafflement's as good as ours."
Paige ended the call and stared ahead at nothing for a moment. Finally she shook her head and said, "Look, I accept that the Whisper can know everything about the present. I don't know how it knows that, but at least that information really exists in the world. But Jesus, I don't care how advanced something is, how can it see the future? There's too much randomness. It's chaos."
"You'd have to think it'd be pretty good at making educated guesses," Travis said. "A hell of a lot more educated than ours."
"Educated enough to guess the winning lotto numbers, and which person would pick those numbers, a year or more in advance? Is that even close to possible?"
He met her eyes; they were wide, locked onto his. "Sixty seconds ago I'd have said no," he said. "Right now I'm leaning toward yes."
She stared at him a moment longer. Blinked. Looked away over Switzerland falling behind them. "What the hell are we up against here?"
"I have a thought," Travis said. "But I'm not sure you want to hear it."
"Try me."
"We've been operating under the premise that Pilgrim has total control of the Whisper. That he mastered it."
She nodded. Waited for him to go on.
"What if we have it backwards?" he said. "What if it mastered him?"
VERSE VI
A MAY AFTERNOON IN 2001
The cell measures nine feet by seven. There are no bars. Instead there are four concrete walls painted the ugliest possible shade of blue, and a steel door with a two-inch vertical strip of security glass set into it. It is the only window in the cell. Encased in the ceiling is a fluorescent light, which is never turned off. Since last December it has been flickering in a way that gives Travis headaches right behind his eyes. For more than eight years he has spent twenty-three and a half hours of each day inside this room.
There is a letter taped to the wall above the bed. It arrived three months ago to inform him that his parents had been killed, shot while waiting at a stoplight in Minneapolis. Two detectives came to ask for his input on the matter. Travis enjoyed their undisguised apathy over Mr. and Mrs. Chase's deaths.
The only other letters he's received are from his brother, Jeff. These are not on the wall, but folded neatly beneath the bed, where he doesn't have to look at them, or think about the survivor's guilt that saturates the space between every line. Jeff is convinced that Travis's actions, on that night in 1992, are the only reason he himself was spared being drawn into the family business.
Travis is lying on the bed now, eyes closed to take the edge off the flickering. It barely helps. Sometimes he manages to simply forget about the flickering, even while it's happening, and sometimes that helps. Letting things slip from his mind is a skill he's perfected in this place. Days. Months. Years. The time behind him. The time ahead of him. Letting it all slip away is how he keeps from going crazy.
He stands from the bed and paces the room. He is hardly aware of the decision to do this; it is an automatic action that he makes several dozen times a day. His pacing follows the same path as always: door to toilet, toilet to door, door to toilet.
At that moment the lock on his cell door disengages with a heavy click, and the guard pushes it in.
"Visitor," the guard says, and Travis senses that the guard is nervous. Which is strange.
Then a man strides into the cell, dressed in an expensive suit, and the guard closes the door behind him. The man's hair is graying at the temples, and he wears sunglasses even in this windowless room. He grimaces at the flickering light, and says, "Hello, Travis. My name is Aaron Pilgrim."
He reaches for Travis as if to shake his hand, but instead Travis sees that he's holding something out to him. It is a bright blue sphere, the size of a softball. The radiance of the thing swims. It is hypnotic, and Travis takes it into his own hand without even considering to refuse.
The moment it touches his skin, a voice speaks in his head. A voice he thought he would never hear again.
"Travis," it says, and the strength departs his legs. He sits hard onto the bed.
Emily.
Beyond the blue light-beyond everything that matters to him now-he is vaguely aware that the visitor, Pilgrim, is smiling about something. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters.
Travis says her name. The light flutters in response, then settles into the rhythm of his pulse.
"We won't be talking for long," Emily says. "Not this time. Not next time, either, years and years from now, when we meet again over that muddy hole in Alaska. But the third time… oh sweetie. The third time will most certainly be the charm."
"Why can't you stay with me now?" Travis says. He hears the longing and pain in his own voice. Missing her already, before she's even gone.
"I have work to do," Emily says. "Complicated work. I could never explain it to you, I'm afraid. Not here and now. Someday, I will. If it helps, just know this: you're more important to me than anyone in the world. More than the grinning jackass standing in this cell with you. Out of six billion people, you're the one whose involvement I need the most. You're the irreplaceable component of my plan."
Travis feels something wonderful swell in his chest, at her words. He matters to her. She has chosen him. In this moment, it is all he can do not to cry.
"Why me?" he whispers.
She giggles softly. "You'll find out." The light continues in step with his heartbeat for another few seconds. Then it changes. Darkens, in a way. "Now I'm going to give you what I came here to give you," Emily says. "It's not much. Think of it as a nudge. A preference for where you'd like to live, when you leave this place."
The moment she finishes saying that, Travis feels something inside his head. A tingling. It lasts perhaps a second, then vanishes.
"There," Emily sighs. "You're exactly on course now, my love. On course to meet me again."
Against his will, tears sting the edges of his eyes. She's going to leave now. He'll be alone here again. Alone with the miserable fluorescent light, and the headaches, and the ugly blue walls. And nothing else. For years, and years, and years.
"Shhh," she says. "It'll all be fine. Someday we'll laugh at this, I promise."
But he's so very far from laughing right now. This moment is wonderful beyond anything he's ever known. It is also horrible, to the same degree, because it is ending.
"Hand me back to the grinning jackass now, Travis."
He knows he cannot disobey her. Feels his body shifting forward already, as if of its own volition. Feels his leg muscles contracting to stand, and his arm stretching out to give her back.
"Please," Travis whispers, as if he could possibly change her mind.
"Soon," she says.
He wonders if he'll think of anything but her, in all the years to come, and she pulses in his hand one last time.
"By tonight, you won't think of me at all," she says.
Then the man with the graying hair at his temples comes forward and closes his fingers over her. All that stops Travis from killing this man is Emily's insistence. The man pulls her away. Travis's breath rushes out. If he were holding a knife right now, he'd cut his own throat with it.
The man named Pilgrim raps on the doo
r. It opens, and like that, he's gone, and the wonderful blue light with him, and Travis falls onto his bed, and there is no stopping the tears now. Still wishing for a knife, or a nice.38, he considers the sharp metal corner of his bedframe instead. It won't be anywhere near as quick and clean as a blade. But when the job is done, it will be just as done.
He lies there, considering it. Minutes pass. At some point it occurs to him that he's let the blue sphere slip from his mind for a few seconds. Maybe as many as ten. How is that possible? How could he have forgotten it-her, forgotten her-for even that long?
He realizes he's staring right into that fucking fluorescent light now, and rolls over onto his stomach, face into the pillow. He is very tired. Very worn by the jagged emotions. He finds his awareness drifting down toward sleep.
He wakes. His mouth is dry, like he's been eating cotton balls. He must have slept for hours. He stands, goes to the sink, splashes water on his face and drinks with his mouth to the spigot.
Something is troubling him. Some memory he can't quite get to. Something he dreamed, maybe. He tries to picture it, and for a moment he draws the image of a pulsing blue light, and for some reason he feels very good about it. Maybe it was a nice dream. But even as he dwells on it, it slides down into the darkness, out of his reach. Gone.
He straightens up, shuts off the faucet. Returns to the bed, but doesn't feel like lying down again, or even sitting. Without really deciding to do so, he begins to pace the room: door to toilet, toilet to door, door to toilet.
Part III
ENTITY 0697
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
They flew west in a kind of perpetual daybreak, crossing the pinched tops of the time zones at the same speed as the Earth's shadow.
Travis tried to sleep. He failed. In the calm hours after takeoff, as the night's adrenaline faded, the events in Zurich caught up with him in full. In the midst of the violence he'd thought he appreciated its scale, but he'd been wrong. With each new hour's hindsight his sense of it deepened, like the piles of bodies in the streets around 7 Theaterstrasse.
Twice during the flight he threw up, just reaching the lavatory both times. In each room he passed along the aircraft's corridor, the operators-still wearing every piece of equipment except their rifles-sat wide awake. Some rested their heads in their hands; others stared out the windows at the black ocean and pastel sky. The view was beautiful, and maybe they needed to look at something beautiful for a while, for whatever help it might offer.
Paige didn't sleep, either. She fell into a long silence over Europe and then the Atlantic. She didn't cry, but Travis saw her hands shaking at times. After a while he found himself following the operators' lead and staring out the window, letting his thoughts go silent. He was looking down at Greenland, the snow reflecting some of the faint pink of the sky, when Paige spoke.
"I was wrong, before." Her voice sounded as strained as if she'd cried, after all. "What I said about the Breach, that we're like Java man compared to whoever's on the other side." She paused again and chose her words carefully. "Really, we're like ants. Ants that accidentally tunneled into a holding tank full of chlorine underneath some chemical factory. That's how far out of our depth we are, dealing with this shit. That's how dangerous it is. And it's how little concern they have for us, whoever they are on the other side. As much concern as the owners of that factory would have for the ants. They probably don't even know about us. Probably wouldn't care if they did." They were over North Dakota now, the landscape shadowy under the same dawn they'd taken off into, in Switzerland. Neither Travis nor Paige had spoken in hours.
Paige's cell rang. It was Crawford. Tangent had located Ellis Cook's daughter, who'd been present at the time of his apparent suicide. The girl had been very close to her father. She might know something. She was on a flight to Border Town right now, landing an hour ahead of them.
Travis found himself thinking about the Whisper again. Unnerving as it was, it made a welcome distraction. Paige ended the call and glanced at him, and he thought he saw the same sentiment in her eyes.
She was quiet a moment, then said, "Have you ever heard of a story called 'The Appointment in Samarra'?" She still sounded worn, depleted.
"No," Travis said.
"I forget who wrote it. One of those things everyone reads in English 102. This servant goes to the marketplace, and he sees Death standing there, and Death makes a threatening face at him. The servant runs back to his master and says, 'Let me borrow your horse, I'll ride to Samarra so Death won't find me.' The master lets him go, then heads down to the market himself, sees Death and he says, 'What are you doing making a threatening face at my servant?'And Death says, 'Threatening? No, no, I was just surprised to see him here. I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.' "
She looked past him, out the window at the waking countryside.
"That's what this feels like," she said finally. "Like no matter what we do from this point on, no matter what path we take, the Whisper is waiting for us at the end of it. If it can guess lotto numbers, it can sure as hell guess our moves. Even if we say to ourselves, 'Well, it would guess this, so let's do the opposite,' we have to assume it could guess that, too."
Travis could only nod. Yeah. No reason to think otherwise.
"So what the hell are we supposed to do?" Paige said.
He thought for a moment. Only one avenue seemed to have any light shining onto it. The hit list carved into the floor at 7 Theaterstrasse.
"We need to know why Pilgrim had those thirty-seven people killed. Or why the Whisper had them killed. There has to be a reason, and it has to matter. And even if the damn thing expects us to find out, and expected it ten years ago, what else can we do? If there's a way out, it's by knowing what it's afraid of."
She nodded, more accepting than agreeing. Which was more or less how he felt himself.
He stared out at North Dakota. Little towns slid by far below, some of them not much more than a set of crossroads with a streetlight or two, still shining in the half-light.
A strange thought came to him. Actually, it wasn't the thought that was strange. The thought was normal. All that was strange was that he hadn't considered it until now.
His former life was over.
His apartment in Fairbanks. His job there. His pressing decision between staying or going home to Minneapolis, going to work with his brother. That life was gone, as if someone else had lived it. He was here now, part of Tangent whether he liked it or not. If he ever went home, there was no question that Pilgrim's people would be waiting there for him. And given all the sensitive things he knew about the Breach now, Tangent would probably want to keep him among their own ranks after this was over, if only for their own security reasons.
If either he or Tangent still existed when this was over.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Her name was Lauren. She was sitting in Paige's office, almost on the spot where Travis had been standing when his bonds were removed a day earlier. She was twenty-three, but looked a lot younger than that at the moment. She looked like a lost child.
Travis was standing with Paige. Crawford and a few others were in the room too. For half an hour they'd asked Lauren all the questions about her father that the computers hadn't answered for them. So far, nothing useful had emerged.
There was something in the girl's eyes that Travis recognized. He'd seen it in people before, during interrogations. An eagerness to reveal something, stifled by fear of doing so. Fear because she didn't trust them.
Travis leaned close to Paige and whispered a question in her ear. She looked at him, understood his idea, and nodded. She stepped out of the room, taking out her cell as she went. Lauren's dark eyes followed her out, then returned to Crawford as he asked her to clarify something she'd already clarified twice.
A few minutes later, Paige returned. She was carrying a black plastic case. An entity case.
Travis waited for another exchange between Crawford and Lauren to end, then said, "
Can I speak to her?"
Crawford nodded. Travis took a step toward Lauren, met her eyes, and spoke softly but directly.
"You don't believe your father killed himself, do you?"
She shook her head, her eyes never leaving his.
"There's no way," she said. She was quiet a moment. Then she looked at the floor, and continued. "Everyone's been telling me I need to accept what happened, or else I won't be able to deal with it. They said people always feel the way I do, when this happens. And they said it's normal for there to be… no warning. They told me they reviewed the security footage from all over the estate grounds, before and after it happened, and nobody came or went. But my father didn't kill himself. And I don't care whether you people believe me-"
"We know he didn't kill himself," Travis said.
Her eyes came up again. Stared at him. He turned to Paige, and she handed him the black case. He set it on the table next to the door and opened it. It looked empty. Travis reached in and took hold of what he knew was inside it. He couldn't be sure which part he was grabbing, but the effect was identical to picking up an article of clothing with his eyes closed. He felt something like a shirt sleeve at once, and a second later his hand found the hem at the shirt's bottom.
He turned back to Lauren.
"The man who murdered your father was wearing this," Travis said, and shoved his arm through the open bottom of the shirt, as far as it could go. He saw the arm and most of his shoulder vanish into nothingness.
Lauren's body jerked. She stared at the empty space where Travis's arm should have been, her eyes huge. Head shaking now, just noticeably. Her mouth formed a question, but it didn't come out. She only stared. Five seconds passed. Then ten.
When she did speak, her voice was barely audible. "Where is he now?"
She was looking at Travis again by the time she said it. He met her gaze without blinking.
