by Patrick Lee
"Dead," Travis said. "I killed him."
He watched her reaction, and saw what he'd hoped for. She knew he was telling the truth.
"We're not the bad guys, Lauren," he said. "Whatever it is you're afraid to talk about, you can tell us."
She looked at him a moment longer, then turned her eyes to Paige and the others, one by one. Each nodded.
Her attention came back to Travis, and after another moment she returned to staring at her own knees.
"My father belonged to a group of people you've never heard of. You won't find anything about them by looking at his tax records, or his phone logs. The other people who were killed, these past several years, were part of it too. I'll tell you as much as I know." As much as she knew wasn't a lot. Her father had sought to protect her from what he was involved in.
The group had no name, she told them. That was supposed to be a security measure. Among its members, it did have a nickname-something of a joke-which was never written down: The Order of the Qubit. Travis didn't know that word. Everyone else in the room did. Qubit stood for "quantum bit." A computing unit of a quantum computer. For the better part of the past decade, a few dozen governments and a few hundred companies had been trying like hell to develop quantum computers, which were expected to be dramatically more powerful than computers at present. But other than very limited proof-of-concept stuff in labs, no one had had any luck. It was one of those things everyone was sure would exist at some point. But whether that point was five years away, or fifty, was tough to pin down.
Lauren thought the Order of the Qubit dated to the early nineties. As she understood it, it was more or less a group of very rich people funding their own secret work toward building a viable quantum computer. Their motivation was simply fear: in the global race to make one of these machines, whoever crossed the finish line first would gain a great deal of power. As it happened, a lot of the institutions who were likely candidates to win the race couldn't be expected to use that power for the world's best interests. Many could be counted on to use it for nearly the opposite purpose. The Order of the Qubit wanted to win that race itself, then carefully select a few organizations that really did have the big human picture in mind, and simply give them the technology.
Good idea. Also a good way to get killed. Entrenched interests tended to dislike threats to their power, and to express that dislike violently.
As to whether the group had achieved its goal, or even gained any ground toward it, Lauren had no idea. She also had no idea where their work was conducted, where their meetings were held, or where Tangent could locate any other member of the organization.
She finished speaking, and looked at them each in turn again.
"Did I help?" she said.
Travis met Paige's eyes. Saw that she was thinking exactly what he was thinking. He looked at Lauren again.
"You helped," he said. "They have one," Travis said. "A working model."
He and Paige were standing in the open doorway of the pole barn on the surface, watching the jet-a Gulfstream this time-take off with Lauren in it. She'd asked to stay in Border Town. She'd said she'd feel safer there. She wouldn't have been. This was probably the least-safe place on Earth right now, lying in the Whisper's gun sights. Lauren herself should be under no real threat elsewhere; she'd already given them all the information she had.
"I think they must," Paige said.
Travis watched the plane diminish to a desktop model of itself. Then a speck. Then nothing.
"Is there any chance a computer like that could outthink the Whisper?" he said. "Is that why these people are a threat to it?"
"I only know a little about quantum computers. Stories about their potential show up in tech papers once in a while. I know their power grows exponentially the more qubits you add, but that in itself has been the trick. Adding more of them. There's some kind of engineering limit, ten or twelve qubits, something like that. Not enough to do very much. But if someone built a quantum computer with fifty qubits, or a hundred, it'd be off the charts. Way, way off the charts. I think there are still limits to their use, even then-limits on the kind of math they can do-but there'd be creative ways to get around that. There's no question it would be a big deal, if someone really had a scaled-up version working."
Travis thought it over, watching empty sky now. Even if they were right, it didn't fully make sense. If the thing was really a threat to the Whisper, then the Whisper should have seen that coming too. Should have directed Pilgrim to find and destroy the place where the thing would be built, long before it was completed.
That was just one of the things that made no sense to him. There were several others. He couldn't help thinking that the confusion was part of the Whisper's plan. Any good strategy should look like nonsense to those facing off against it.
What was the plan? What was the Whisper's final goal? It was hard enough to figure out what a human being wanted. What the hell did this thing want? On that point, he couldn't even form a guess.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
All day long, photos and video came in from a detachment scouring Ellis Cook's house on Grand Cayman. Nice place. There was nothing inside it that hinted about his involvement with any secret group. Air ducts were inspected. Carpets were torn up. A giant safe in the basement was drilled through and opened. A mechanical shed next to the pool was examined in detail. It contained an impressive pumping and filtering system, built to draw seawater in from the harbor at hundreds of gallons per minute, which would fill the pool in less than an hour. The kind of thing only someone with a hundred million dollars would think he needed. But no quantum computer.
The ATC logs for Owen Roberts International Airport on Grand Cayman turned up something interesting. A few times a year, an Airbus A318, big enough to hold over a hundred passengers but registered as a business jet, landed there. Each time, it departed again within eight hours. The jet's ownership was in Cook's name, but it was based at Dallas-Fort Worth, where he owned a permanent hangar for it. The plane didn't seem to be Cook's personal transport. For that, he had a Dassault Falcon that he kept right there on Grand Cayman. The Airbus, it seemed, didn't take Cook anywhere, but instead brought people to him. A lot of people, all at once. The implication was pretty obvious: that Cook's house on the island was the group's base of operations. Or one of its bases, anyway. But the search of the house revealed no evidence of that, and the data mining of real-estate records showed no other land or property on Grand Cayman with his name on it.
Travis saw the tension building on Paige's shoulders, as the day went on without any actionable information. She bore it as well as anyone could have, but he could tell this was hard on her, being amped up to do something-anything-and having nothing to direct that energy at. Like it would be hard on an engine to detach it from its working load, and rev it past the redline for hours.
More than once, Travis heard people comment that Paige's father would've been a godsend at a time like this, when answers were both critical and hard to come by. Each time, Paige's reactions were subdued, difficult to read. Late in the afternoon she left to be alone for a while, and returned looking emotionally drained.
By nine o'clock at night, the team at the Cayman house had finished. For the time being, there was no more evidence to look over. Nothing to work on at all.
Crawford gave Travis a keycard to a vacant residence on Level B12. He found his way to it, and entered to find a living space about twice the size of his apartment in Fairbanks. Granite counters in the kitchen. Eighty-inch LCD in the living room. The Sub-Zero refrigerator was well stocked, as were the cupboards. The master bathroom, decked out in natural stone, was a thing of beauty. The image in the mirror wasn't. Travis hadn't shaved in a week. Hadn't showered in several days, during which time he'd been active, to understate things a bit. He opened the medicine cabinet and found shaving cream, and razors still in the package. Shampoo and unused soap in the shower. Twenty minutes later he felt human again.
The ma
ster closet was filled with a wide array of clothing. He picked out some jeans and a T-shirt, and was in the kitchen thinking about a sandwich when he noticed the message button flashing on the wall phone. It hadn't been flashing earlier. He pressed the button and heard Crawford's voice, telling him that Tangent had retrieved two messages from his voice mail in Fairbanks, and routed them here.
"Obviously there are security measures we take with outgoing calls," Crawford's recorded voice said. "If you need to contact anyone, speak to me and we'll see what we can arrange."
The first message was a telemarketer's robo-call trying to sell him an extended warranty on his Explorer. The second was from his brother, Jeff.
"Hey, Travis. Give me a shout when you get this. Cool news. Whitebird's almost official. It just beat Level One in Fog of War without my help. It's still buggy, needs a shitload of work, but I'm geeked, man. You can still get in on this with me, if you want. Call me. Out."
Whitebird was a computer system, both hardware and software, that Jeff had been working on for years. It was a narrow form of artificial intelligence, meant to improve the performance of computer-driven enemies in video games. Jeff had been testing its capability by letting it take on the role of the human player in older, simpler games, mostly martial-arts stuff on 8-bit systems from the eighties and nineties. Now he was up to modern games like Fog of War. Pretty impressive. He probably stood to make millions selling the technology to a game developer, once he had all the wrinkles smoothed out. More to the point, though, he simply loved the work.
Travis's temptation to accept his offer, during the past year, had at times nearly swayed him all the way. Even now he felt some strain of remorse. Like he'd missed an exit from the freeway, one he'd been supposed to take, but that he'd never get back to now.
It struck him that, of the two of them, if someone had been asked to guess which brother would end up in a place like Border Town, the smart money-the only money-would've been on Jeff. Tangent probably had an army of computer techs designing and running customized systems for their research.
Travis turned away from the phone, and was heading for the refrigerator when someone knocked on the door.
He crossed the living room, opened it, and found Paige standing there, also having just showered. Still looking keyed up. Looking like she wished she could relax.
"Tell me you haven't eaten," she said.
"I haven't eaten." An hour later they were sitting cross-legged on her bed, facing each other. Sometimes she looked down at her hands fidgeting in her lap, and her hair fell across her face in a way that Travis couldn't stop staring at.
They talked about random things. Paige had finished high school at sixteen and gone to Texas A amp;M. She'd set out to become a historian, but four years later had found herself going for a master's in the new nanosystems engineering program there, working on the Model-T versions of what would someday, with any luck, be digital white blood cells, the cure for pretty much everything. When Travis asked her why she'd changed her major, she said she'd realized something: as much as she loved to understand where the human story had been, she was more interested in where it was going. Nothing excited her like the forward edge of technology, the best minds in the world building on one another's work at an ever-increasing speed. By twenty-one she knew she wanted to spend her life in that world. And then, in one very surprising weekend, her father-her only living relative-had brought her to this place and shown her what he really did for a living. Quite the revelation, it'd been. With it had come another: there were grave security risks attendant to the loved ones of Tangent operators like Peter Campbell. Paige was in danger, just by living her life, just by being who she was. She would be safer here at Border Town, so long as the threat persisted.
"Lived here ever since," she said, glancing around at her apartment. Two levels below Travis's, it was identical except for the touches her taste had brought to it.
Her hands found their way into his. He held them, his thumbs tracing back and forth across her palms.
She spoke softly. "Since prison, has there been anyone special?"
"No one," he said. A moment later he added, "No one special in prison, either."
Paige laughed, glancing up from their hands to meet his eyes.
"After I got out," he said, "part of me thought there was no point in trying. You can only get so far into a conversation before you run into the wall. 'You're from Minnesota? Oh, what did you do there?' "
She laughed again, quietly. "What did the rest of you think?"
He was silent a moment. "That this was my real punishment. The one I'd never get free of. And that I deserved it."
"For what happened to-" She paused, and Travis could see her parsing her memory of the police report she'd read. At last she said, "Emily. Emily Price."
Travis nodded. "She saved me from what I was. Saved my life, figuratively, even literally, I'm sure. And they killed her because of it. I should've known. I should've seen it coming, and I didn't."
"It's easy to underestimate the bad in people," Paige said. "I don't think it should carry a life sentence."
He managed something close to a smile, and held her hands a little tighter. In the darkness their clothes evaporated, and there was only her skin against his, so much warmer than he'd imagined, and her hair falling around him, scented sweet like apple trees in October. He tasted on her tongue the white wine they'd had with dinner. Tasted the soft skin below her jawline. Tasted everything. Later, holding her close, Travis felt the silence filling up with all the questions he knew they were both dwelling on. All the things that didn't add up, no matter which way they were arranged.
"Everything the Whisper's ever done," he said, "since the day it came out of the Breach in 1989, has been part of the act. Hasn't it?"
She nodded against his chest. "I think so."
"The notion that it's compelled to help you at first, and then it tries to take over your will after that, it's all bullshit. It can do anything it wants to do, anytime. Nothing compels it. Nothing limits it. All that stuff was just a smokescreen so it could control the way people handled it. Up in Alaska, when it used me to try setting off a nuclear war, it seemed to fail because Pilgrim's people in the helicopter showed up too soon. Are you buying that for a second? The thing can predict a mega lotto outcome years in advance, but not the arrival of a helicopter a few minutes out? Something a radar tech with a stopwatch could probably figure out in his head?"
"Strikes me as a little inconsistent," Paige whispered.
"It was keeping up appearances," he said. "Playing the role a little longer. Every move it's made, from the moment it arrived in this world, has been to steer things to exactly where they are right now. Do you see the problem with that?"
"That twenty years is a long damn time for something that powerful to spend reaching its goal?"
"Exactly," he said. "If all it wants is control of Border Town and the Breach, it could've gotten it almost on day one. It could've just played nice, right from the beginning, won everybody over, and then as soon as the right person was holding it, someone with access to any of the really destructive shit locked away in this building, it could've used that person as a puppet to kill everyone here. Just like that. So what the hell is it really after? What's far enough out of its reach, that it's taken all these years, and all this elaborate planning?"
For a moment she didn't reply. Then her forehead furrowed against his skin.
"What if it's after something that wasn't available until now?" she said.
Travis thought about that. It sounded right. A hell of a lot better than what he had, which was nothing.
"Like a new entity?" he said. "Something that would've just arrived?"
"I don't know. None of the recent unique arrivals has been especially powerful or dangerous, as far as we know."
They fell silent again. Travis heard the building's air exchange system kick on with a sigh. His face was resting against the top of Paige's head. Every breath was rich
with the scent of her hair.
After a moment he said, "There's something that bothers me more than all of this." He considered how to begin. "We agree that Pilgrim isn't really the enemy here, right? That's not to say he's blameless. The Whisper probably chose him because it knew the kind of things he was capable of. But whatever Pilgrim believes, the Whisper is the one calling the shots. So far, so good, right?"
"Right."
"But the Whisper is still a machine. It's a tool, and a tool doesn't choose its own purpose. Someone else would have done that."
Paige was silent a long while before speaking. "You mean someone on the other side of the Breach," she said.
"Yeah."
With his arm, he felt a shiver climb the muscles of her back.
"If that's the case," she said, "then we never had a prayer."
He tried to think of some reassuring reply to that, but came up empty. All he could do was pull her closer against himself. She responded, settling into him. He lay there listening to her breathing, feeling her limbs relax. Turning the questions over and over, and wondering who-or what-they were really up against, he faded out. Sometime later, he woke with the strangest feeling. Like he'd figured something out. Dreamed it, maybe. He tried to remember what it was, but could only push it away, like a child trying to palm a basketball. He relaxed and let it come back. For a moment, it seemed that it might. An impression of it swam into view: the video footage of the high-powered pump station at Cook's house on Grand Cayman. It had something to do with that. Something about Cook's need for it, in the first place. But that was all he could get. A moment later it was gone.
Paige murmured, rising halfway out of sleep beside him. He kissed her forehead and she rolled into him, softly kissing his neck before drifting away in his arms. Feeling her heartbeat against him, he closed his eyes and followed her down.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
A phone began to ring. Somewhere in the dark. Travis felt Paige stir. She rolled toward the nightstand-the clock read just past four in the morning-switched on the light, and pressed a button for the speakerphone. Even as she answered with her name, she slipped under the covers again and hugged her body to his.
