by Patrick Lee
He let go of it.
It stayed put.
He looked at his phone. Three and a half minutes left before the deadline he’d imposed.
He stepped around the mainframe and sprinted back to the door into Defense Control.
Paige’s first glance at the residence twisted her stomach. It’d been her home for over a decade. She’d shared it with Travis for more than a year now. The best year of her life, by an absurd margin, and almost everything that’d made it good had happened here on B16 in this little sanctuary.
Which had now been sliced in two.
She stood in the doorway for a moment, rocked by what lay beyond it. To her left was half of the living room. To her right was nothing at all. Just darkness and churning dust. The wall that’d held the LCD screen was gone, along with ten feet of floor space that’d extended from it. The couch was right on the brink, facing out into the void like some image out of a surreal magazine ad. Behind and to the couch’s left was the short hall that led to the bedroom, just out of sight from where she stood.
She stepped out of the doorway, crossed the room to the hall, and stopped at the bedroom’s threshold. The same ten feet had been lopped off here as in the living room. The bed was gone. The doorway to the closet was half gone—it’d perfectly straddled the cutoff. The closet itself lay mostly to one side, beyond the door, and had largely remained intact. Even from where she stood, Paige could see its back wall, and the built-in safe that now held the Tap.
She looked at the closet’s doorway again, and focused on the floor that passed through it—what little was left. While half the doorway itself remained, there was hardly anything to stand on beneath it. A two-inch ledge at one side. To get beyond, to the intact closet floor, would require holding onto the trim at the doorway’s remaining edge and swinging her body past it. Her center of gravity would be out over the emptiness during the bulk of that maneuver.
She moved forward across the room, slowing as she neared the closet’s doorway and the edge. There was no telling how strong the floor might be along the drop-off—or here where she was standing, for that matter. The carpet hid any cracks that might’ve been visible in the concrete beneath her, but she assumed they were there; the wall was spiderwebbed with them, surrounding the closet doorway and leading away from it in all directions.
The doorway’s trim was three feet from her outstretched hand now. She took another step. Leaned forward. Put her fingertips to the fluted wood and tested its strength by pushing outward on it, toward the chasm.
The cracked wall around the doorway disintegrated almost at a touch. The trim and three inches of concrete around it simply broke free and pitched out into the darkness and fell away.
Paige flinched and stumbled back, sprawling on her ass on the carpet. She stared at the ragged opening where the doorway had been.
She might still make it through into the closet. Where she’d planned to hold onto the trim, she could press the fractured wall between both hands and swing her body over the drop as planned.
Promise, Travis had said.
She stared at the opening and the wall safe ten feet beyond. Stared at the dust-filled abyss below.
From the levels above she heard the voices of the others, calling out and locating the injured.
She got to her feet, turned, crossed out of the bedroom, and sprinted for the corridor.
Travis pushed the last of the eight mainframes into the hallway and eased it into position with the others: they formed a single line extending down the slope, each butted up against the next, the whole mass held back by the first unit Travis had put in place. That one alone had its brakes on.
He watched the formation shudder and slip downward an inch as number eight settled into line.
Footsteps pounded past up the stairwell. Not the first he’d heard in the last minute. He looked at his phone again: thirty seconds left.
More footsteps, some running, some struggling. He turned toward the door and saw it draw open. Paige leaned through.
“Eleven survivors,” she said. “All but two can walk.” She frowned, her forehead creasing. “I couldn’t get it.”
“We’ll be okay,” Travis said.
Paige took in the mainframes for the first time. She saw the idea. Her eyes widened a little.
“Everyone’s above us?” Travis said.
Paige nodded slowly, most of her attention on the computers.
Travis ran to the low end of the line. He studied the two brakes, then stepped forward and jammed his foot hard onto the pedal nearest the wall. As it released the wheel, the entire formation groaned and moved six inches, then halted again.
Travis looked up at Paige in the doorway.
“Do I need to say it?” she said.
“Run your ass off?” He managed a smile. “No.”
Paige’s own smile was very weak, no match for the fear beneath it.
Travis stomped on the last brake lever and yanked his foot away, coming within a tenth of a second of having it crushed by the caster. He turned and sprinted up the slope, while the array of mainframes bumped and skittered and picked up momentum going the other way. He’d expected them to gather speed quickly, but he saw within the first second that he’d underestimated how quickly. Before he’d covered half the distance to the Defense Control doorway, and maybe a quarter of the distance to Paige at the stairwell door, all of the huge units had lumbered past him, thundering down toward the low point faster than a person could run. The whole corridor vibrated with their passage. It seemed to shudder and, though Travis hoped he was imagining it, to tilt even more steeply toward the low point far behind him.
He passed the Defense Control doorway, covered the short distance to the hole in the floor and vaulted right over it. Ten feet from Paige now. Maybe three steps to go. He’d taken only one of them when her body went rigid and her eyes widened all the way, looking past him now instead of at him.
Two steps remained, but in that instant Travis knew there was no time for them. His leading foot touched down. He let the leg bend more than usual, let his weight drop squarely onto it. Then he launched upward and forward, his momentum carrying him airborne toward the doorway.
He was five feet from it when the floor dropped out from beneath him. It ruptured along a line six inches shy of the stairwell, the concrete giving way like it was piecrust. Travis felt air rushing backward around him, pulled down through the stair shaft by the collapsing mass of B4. Paige threw herself aside, out of his way, and he passed across the threshold and crashed down on the landing. He stopped just short of toppling down the flight directly in front of him.
They missed the deadline by twenty seconds, but the Jeeps hadn’t left without them. There were still a few survivors making their way up the last ten feet to the pole barn: the hardest ten feet, since the stairwell didn’t go all the way to the surface. The final transit required a climb up the elevator shaft’s inset ladder. Travis and another man helped the two who couldn’t stand—they were at least able to grip the rungs.
“No satellites,” Bethany said. She was standing in the barn when Travis emerged with the last survivor. “We’re free and clear for the next hour and then some.”
Travis nodded and passed the victim off to a man standing near Bethany, then stepped back onto the ladder and descended again to B2. He closed the shaft doors there, returned to the surface, swung out and closed those doors as well. The barn was empty now; the others had all gone to the Jeeps. Travis looked at the random equipment Bethany had piled and leaned around the charging station. The stuff looked like it’d been there for years. Perfect. He turned and ran out after the others.
They were twelve miles out when they saw the choppers: tiny black dots coming in low over the desert far to the east. They made straight for Border Town, which Travis could still see by the black smoke from the wrecked bomber. A minute later the choppers reached it, formed a stationary cluster, and descended.
Paige, Travis, and Bethany had a Jeep to the
mselves. The other Jeeps held three or four occupants each, the groupings based on country of origin. Bethany was already contacting the proper authorities within each government, sending them cell phone numbers for the survivors. Their respective intelligence agencies would need to get involved, and help them stay hidden until they could be extracted. Certainly no authorities here—local, state or federal—would be of help. Holt ultimately held sway over all of those.
The Jeeps would split up once they reached Casper. None would have the power to continue on to a different town, but within Casper itself the survivors would be safe enough, even on their own. No one would be looking for them, after all.
Travis already knew where he and Paige and Bethany would go, within the city. What they would do at that point was still undetermined, though he had a solid guess about it.
He looked at his phone.
9:20 A.M.
Ten hours and twenty-five minutes to the end of the road. Without the Tap in their arsenal, that span of time seemed agonizingly shortened, like the moment required for a guillotine to drop.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Five minutes after breaking formation with the other vehicles, Travis and Paige and Bethany were parked outside a bowling alley three hundred yards from Casper/Natrona County International Airport. While all Tangent personnel carried backup identities, Bethany’s alter egos tended to be unusually wealthy. In the past, that’d come in handy for booking charter flights on short notice. It would work here too, once they knew where they were flying.
“I have three hits,” Bethany said.
She leaned forward from the backseat. “Three people from outside California who made card charges in the town of Rum Lake while Peter was there—those few days in mid-December 1987.”
“Only three out-of-state visitors in the whole town, those days?” Paige said.
“There were others. Most didn’t fit Carrie’s definition—powerful people. These three did: each at the time had a net worth of over twenty million.”
Paige’s eyebrows went up a little.
“That’s nothing compared to what they ended up with,” Bethany said. “In time all three of them made it into the nine figures. Well into them. They were appropriately paranoid about their data security, too—those card charges they made in Rum Lake were on dummy accounts detached from their real names. I only saw through them because the encryption is so old; at the time no one would’ve pegged them. Very careful guys.”
She ran through their bios quickly. The three men were Simon Parks, Keith Greene, and Allen Raines. All Americans, and all in their late thirties in 1987, when they’d presumably met with Peter in Rum Lake. Parks and Greene had both started their careers as corporate lawyers, one in New York and one in Houston. Then, in the late 1970s, each had begun to dabble in finance, making investments in tech firms and quickly working up to fronting serious venture capital. Each man had possessed an especially keen instinct for spotting winners, and spotting them early. By 1987 both were serious players who had ties not only to the tech sector but politics as well. The third man, Raines, had started out as a physicist with a promising academic career, but sometime around 1980 he’d changed course toward D.C. and become a respected scientific advisor to the powerful. Raines, like the other two, had made very smart investments in the eighties, compounding his sizable political income. But unlike the other two, he’d done more than just visit Rum Lake in December 1987.
He’d moved there.
Immediately.
The cash transfer with which he’d purchased his home there was dated December 23 of that year, not even two weeks after the meeting that effectively ended the Scalar investigation. As far as Bethany could tell, that home had been his only residence from that point forward, even as his investments continued to snowball over the following years.
“Where in California is Rum Lake?” Paige said. “Is it a resort? The kind of place you might fall for at first sight and decide to move to?”
By her tone she didn’t seem to have much faith in that theory; she was just exhausting a hypothetical.
“It’s in the mountains off the Coast Highway,” Bethany said, “about an hour north of San Francisco. I don’t think it’s any kind of resort. Definitely no skiing. Just a little town, about four thousand people, up in the redwoods.”
“And Allen Raines still lives there?” Travis said.
“Until recently,” Bethany said.
Travis turned in his seat and looked at her.
“All three of these names generated hits from news sites when I ran them,” she said. “Parks in D.C., Greene in Boston, and Raines in Rum Lake—each in the past twelve hours. All three men died last night, at more or less the same time as President Garner.”
The silence that followed felt like a physical thing. Like the oven wind that scoured the desert and the parking lot.
“There aren’t a lot of details yet,” Bethany said. “Just little capsule articles online. Parks was stabbed in the restroom of an upscale restaurant in Chicago, sometime just before nine, central time. With Greene it was some kind of carjacking near his home in Boston; his wife was killed too. Article says it happened shortly before ten, eastern time. Raines was a hit and run, right on Main Street in Rum Lake, at a quarter to seven in the evening, Pacific time. No one got a license-plate number off the vehicle.” She glanced up from the computer. “All three of those times are within minutes of one another, and of the attack on the White House.”
Another silence. Travis felt them all trying to line up the threads.
“These are just the three people we know about,” Paige said. “There were probably more who met with my father in that town, but didn’t use their credit cards while they were there. It’s likely those people died last night too.”
Travis shut his eyes and interlaced his fingers on top of his head. “From what Carrie told us,” he said, “it sounds like when Peter met with these guys in 1987, he handed them the responsibility for Scalar. He must’ve known by then that it would take people that powerful to oversee the problem. Maybe he even knew what we know: that whoever’s on the other side of the Breach has a presence established on this side already. A powerful presence, if they can control people like Holt. It makes sense that Peter recruited power players of his own. The meeting in Rum Lake was a changing of the guard.” He was quiet a few seconds. “But I don’t think that’s all it was. I think there’s a reason they met there, of all places. Maybe there was something there Peter needed to show them. I think Rum Lake is at the heart of everything. I think whatever Ruben Ward did in those three months before he killed himself, he did it there.”
“It fits with the rest of it,” Paige said. “The investigation sure as hell dialed in on that place at the end. My father was there three times before the meeting.”
“We also know that whatever the solution was, it wasn’t permanent,” Bethany said. “Peter was afraid it could be undone in a single day, even years later. That would explain why Allen Raines stayed in town for good. Because someone had to—to keep an eye on whatever’s there. To babysit it.”
Paige gazed away toward the airport. The runways and the white sides of the terminal gleamed in the hard light.
“Without the Tap we’re not going to get the cheat sheet,” she said. “Not in Rum Lake or any of these places. If we could’ve gone back a year, or a week, or even a full day, sure. But in the present, forget about it. Holt’s people will have raided the homes of everyone who died last night, looking for that document. They wouldn’t even need to sneak around; they could go in with authority. He’s the president.”
Her expression darkened and she shook her head. Travis knew her anger was aimed inward. Knew she was replaying her failure to recover the Tap.
“There was nothing you could do,” he said.
If it helped her to hear that, she didn’t show it.
“Look at the bright side,” Bethany said. “They tried to kill us.”
Both Travis and Paige tur
ned to her.
“Think about it,” Bethany said. “They took out all these guys last night because they needed them out of the way—because if they’d lived, they might’ve stopped whatever’s unrolling right now. Holt’s decision to bomb Border Town is no different: he or whoever’s calling the shots had some reason to fear us. They set the trap at Carrie’s place to verify that Tangent didn’t know anything, but when you got away and took her with you, it was their worst-case scenario. They knew Tangent would know something after that. At least as much as Carrie knew. Which wasn’t everything, but apparently it was enough to spook them.” She paused. “They knew we didn’t have the cheat sheet, but they came after us anyway. That implies we’re a genuine threat to them. That there’s some Achilles’ heel we could find, even without the help of that report.” She looked back and forth from Travis to Paige. “We should be encouraged by that. If they consider us a threat, then we are one.”
“If there’s an Achilles’ heel, it’s at Rum Lake,” Travis said.
“And they’ll be protecting it with everything they’ve got,” Paige said, “even if they’ve eliminated all the threats they’re aware of. Today of all days, they’d err on the side of caution.” She looked at Bethany. “Can you try to get satellite coverage of that town?”
Bethany nodded and got working on it, but didn’t look hopeful. Travis recalled something she’d told him once about the likelihood of a place being visually covered. Spy satellites orbited pretty low, and their paths were set up to maximize the time they spent over places of interest. War zones, terrorist-friendly areas, sites of possible weapons programs. Other places in the world might end up having consistent coverage, but only if they happened to line up with one of those chosen regions. In most places and at most times, like Border Town in the past hour, it was more miss than hit. The globe was very big, and satellite tracks were very narrow.
