by Patrick Lee
After a minute she looked up at him. “Signal strength is pretty weak now. Fall-off is consistent with a living body gradually flushing the iodine through the kidneys and passing it out as urine. And once it’s in the sewers it’s way too dispersed to read.” She frowned. “This signal is also consistent with just one body. Paige is the only survivor.”
Travis nodded. He stared at the corner of the ninth floor. No way to see in. No way to tell if Paige could see out. Maybe it wasn’t even a window. Maybe the glass exterior concealed a brick-walled holding cell on that floor.
“So what exactly are we up against, here?” Travis said. “What do we know, right now? We know Paige and the others came to D.C. to meet with the president, and show him the entity. We know they trusted him, at that point. And we know that once they were attacked, they realized they’d been wrong about him—and that he’s part of this thing, whatever it is. Whatever she and the others were trying to learn about. And obviously, lots of other people are involved too. Including whoever controls this building.”
Bethany continued gazing at the structure. Travis did the same. They’d seen no one enter on foot through the street entrance yet. A number of cars had pulled off of Vermont into the narrow drive that separated the building from the one next to it—a building that had its own garage entrance at the front. That meant the cars going into the drive were entering the green building by some entrance at the rear. Most of the vehicles were town cars or SUVs with tinted windows in the back, professional drivers alone up front.
“Let’s see who owns the place,” Bethany said.
She went to work on her phone again. Travis watched screens of data, reflected in her glasses, flashing and changing every few seconds.
After a minute she frowned.
“It’s not federal property,” she said. “It’s not listed that way, at least. The district records have it as a corporate office structure, privately held. Built in 2006. No entry for a company name, or any shareholder’s name. Maybe it’s a defense contractor, or a civil-engineering firm, something like that.”
She stared at the building for a long moment, eyes narrowed.
“Can you get anything more on it?” Travis said.
“I have to, if we’re going to help Paige.” She looked at him. “Here’s what I’m thinking. If we wanted to get some help, like official help, it would have to be the FBI. There’s really no one else who can touch something this scale. But we’d need to be careful as hell. Whatever Paige and the others stumbled onto, whatever it is that the president is protecting, we have to assume that everyone he’s appointed is on the same page as him. And since Currey’s taken office he’s replaced both the attorney general and the FBI director. And who knows who they’ve fired and replaced since then. They’ve probably got all kinds of loyalists in the ranks by now. If we go in blind, we stand a good chance of just touching the same nerve Paige touched.”
“How far from blind can we get?” Travis said.
Bethany looked at her phone. “It depends on the connections I can make. Names to bank accounts. Other kinds of holdings, like real estate. Connections from those back to other names. Like that. If I could get a clear enough picture of who’s involved in this thing, it might tell us who’s not involved. It would make our guess a hell of a lot more educated, anyway. The problem is that none of the names we know right now will help us. Not the president. Not anyone in his cabinet. Their names won’t be on anything damning, I promise.” She looked at the building again. “What I need are names from inside there. Owners. Executives. Almost anyone. It’d give me a loose end to start with.”
She looked thoughtful. But not optimistic. Her eyebrows made a little shrug, up and down, and then she turned back to her phone.
“We’ll see,” she said, and went to work on it.
Travis said nothing for the next ten minutes. He left her to it. He stared at the high-rise and thought of how it would work if they could get the FBI’s cooperation. The bulk of the Hostage Rescue Team was right across the river at Quantico. Between them and whatever local police they felt like coordinating with, there could be a sea of armed law enforcement around the green-tinted building within a few hours, like rabid fans waiting for a pop star to come out of a hotel.
At which point Paige’s survival should be assured. The people holding her were corrupt and violent, but they weren’t stupid. If the game was absolutely up, then their focus would shift to securing high-priced lawyers and cutting deals with authorities, turning against one another in the process. They would have nothing to gain by killing Paige at that point, and they would have plenty to lose.
But until that point, she might as well be kneeling in her own grave. Her captors’ reasons for keeping her alive could evaporate any time. It was hard to imagine she had more than a few hours left. Maybe not even that. Travis felt a tremor in his hands on the tabletop. He made them into fists.
Bethany finished with the phone and set it in front of her.
“Nothing,” she said. She didn’t sound surprised. “Every transaction is routed through some middle pathway with a gap in it. Everything from the original construction costs to last month’s electric bill. It’s strange how it works, but a relatively small enterprise can actually have much better protection than a big international bank or a federal system like Social Security. Giant trillion-dollar organizations like that have to be widely accessible. It’s the whole point of their existence. They can be secured, but they can’t be secret.” She nodded at the high-rise. “A place like that can be secret. It can do its business without anyone knowing its name, or the identity of its CEO. And it does. The place is an information black hole. Someone very smart worked very hard to get it that way. Probably someone I’ve played tennis with.”
“Can you run the license plates of these vehicles we see going in?”
She shook her head. “I’ll try it, but it won’t work. They’ll all be registered to some service that doesn’t have to keep client names on file, or something close to that. There’ll be a gap in the dominoes somewhere, I’m sure of it. We could even rent a car and try to tail someone home tonight, but I’ll bet you a shiny half-dollar that these drivers are trained to go through shakes along their routes.”
Travis knew the term. A shake was any wide-open space, like an empty stadium parking lot or a fairground, that a driver could pass through in order to reveal a tailing vehicle. In the movies a smart hero could glance in his rearview mirror and spot a tail five cars back amid rush-hour traffic, even though the law of averages pretty much guaranteed that a few vehicles in the pack were following the same route just by chance. In real life, professional drivers used shakes.
Bethany rubbed her temples. She looked very tired. “In my old line of work there’s a term for this kind of setup. Have you ever heard of an oubliette?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“It’s a kind of prison cell. Was a kind of prison cell. In the middle ages. A cell with no bars, no walls, no door and no lock. The simplest kind was just a platform sticking out of a smooth castle wall a hundred feet above the ground. They lower you onto it from above, and there you are. Imprisoned by nothing but open air.” She nodded at the building. “That place is a kind of oubliette for information. It’s not that there are firewalls protecting its identity, or powerful encryption algorithms. I’m sure it’s got all that too, but what really protects it is just open space. All the paper trails leading in have just the right breaks in them. It’s the sort of thing you can only pull off if you have the right kinds of connections and a lot of money. Enough to bend the rules around yourself.”
Travis watched another SUV pull into the place. The driver looked like an NFL linebacker with a Marine haircut. Maybe he’d been both of those at one time.
“It’s not gonna happen with the FBI,” Bethany said. “Not if we don’t know who we’re dealing with.”
Travis nodded, his eyes still locked on the building.
“What about Tangent’s hubs?
” he said. “Didn’t they have a couple dozen of those around the world? Secure sites staffed with their people, armed and trained to beat hell? Couldn’t we get help from one of those?”
Bethany was already shaking her head. “The hubs are gone. They only existed to deal with Aaron Pilgrim. Once that threat was eliminated, there was no more need for them. Hub staff were never really members of Tangent to begin with. They were elite military units from a number of countries, cleared for some minimal knowledge of Tangent and its operations. Over the past two years they’ve all been let go, with nice, thick nondisclosure documents to sign on their way out.”
She was looking down at her hands as she spoke. She looked about as lost as anyone Travis had ever seen.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “We’re not going to get any help, and we’re not getting in there by ourselves. You know that, don’t you?”
Travis stared at the place. If Paige’s room had a window, and if she could stand up and walk to it, she could see the two of them right now—even if she’d never recognize them at this range.
He looked away from the building. Met Bethany’s gaze.
“Yes,” he said. “I know. Every guard in the place will have an automatic weapon and a big red button that can lock the whole building down.”
“And we’re a kid armed with a slingshot.”
Travis’s eyes fell to Bethany’s backpack lying between them on the table, and the long cylindrical shape inside it.
“We don’t know what we’re armed with yet,” he said.
Bethany nodded. “Let’s find out.”
Chapter Six
Paige woke in the same place where she’d fallen asleep: a hardwood-floored office eight or ten stories up, overlooking D.C. through tinted windows. The room was bare. The windows stretched from floor to ceiling. She lay in the center of the open space, her wrists and ankles bound with heavy-duty zip ties.
It was morning now, but during the night she’d lain awake here for hours, listening to footsteps coming and going in the corridor. Overhearing conversations outside the door, hushed and tense, right at the brink of her discernment. One word had jumped out at her half a dozen times, maybe the working title of some project or operation. The closest thing to context she’d gotten was a single exchange, a few decibels higher than the rest of the talk:
“They sound rattled. They’re not thinking of shutting it down, are they?”
“Umbra? Not a chance.”
Umbra. Paige had fallen asleep replaying the word in her mind, along with the rest of the exchange. Now she was awake, still replaying it. Trying to fit it with the scattered knowledge she’d had before coming to D.C.
She lowered her head to the hardwood and stared out at the city in the soft yellow light.
These people were going to kill her. No doubt about that. The only question was when. Sometime today, for sure. As soon as they were certain she was of no value, it would happen. By now they’d probably spoken to the president, and figured out that she’d already told him everything she knew. She’d requested the meeting, after all; why wouldn’t she tell him everything?
She tried not to think about it. There wasn’t much point. She thought of Bethany instead. Wondered if she’d made it out of Border Town with the second cylinder.
It crossed her mind that she actually hadn’t told the president everything: she hadn’t said a word about the other cylinder. It simply hadn’t fit into the conversation. She’d left it behind in Border Town on only the most general principles of caution and pragmatism. “Shit happens” principles. It was depressing how often those proved their worth.
If Bethany had gotten out, then she’d probably already linked up with Travis. By now they might be just seeing what the cylinder did, somewhere in Atlanta. The thing’s basic function was easy enough to understand. But what about the rest of it? Would the two of them figure out what they needed to do—including the parts Paige herself hadn’t nailed down?
And would they understand how damn little time they had left to do it?
Chapter Seven
There was a Ritz-Carlton halfway up the block on Vermont. Travis and Bethany got the Presidential Suite on the tenth floor—Renee Turner was paying for it, and it would’ve been at odds with her pattern to rent anything cheaper. The suite was 1800 square feet with views to the south and west. They could see the green-tinted building without obstruction. They could see the ninth-floor corner overlooking the traffic circle. Past the building they could see all the way down Vermont to the White House. The flag on its roof was flying full and tense in the wind.
They sat on one of the leather couches, opened the backpack on the floor, and set the black cylinder on the empty cushion between them. It bled heat into the air like a cooling engine block.
It was Travis’s first good look at the thing in bright light. The object was heavily scuffed and scratched, like a power tool put to years of hard use by a carpenter. There was no way anyone at Tangent had abused it like that. Travis had seen the paranoid care they took with entities. The scuffs could’ve only been made by the object’s original owners on the other side of the Breach. Whoever—or whatever—they were, this thing meant nothing more to them than a cordless drill or a radial saw meant to humans.
Travis studied the labels Paige or one of the others had taped beside the three buttons. He’d seen them just briefly in the Explorer.
ON
OFF
OFF (DETACH/DELAY—93 SEC.)
He spent only a few seconds trying to imagine what detach/delay meant. There was no point in thinking about it until they knew what the entity did.
Aside from the buttons, and their engraved symbols, the cylinder’s only notable feature was a small lens inset in one end. It was about the size of a quarter, and deep black.
“You said this came out of the Breach along with one just like it,” Travis said.
Bethany nodded.
“And that was a few days ago?”
“Oh—no. They actually egressed years ago. Sometime in 1998, I think.”
He stared at her. Waited for the explanation.
“They were sealed,” she said. “Do you know about sealed entities?”
Travis nodded. Paige had given him a pretty thorough tour of the Primary Lab in Border Town. She’d told him about sealed entities, and shown him a few of them. They were rare. They tended to be the more powerful ones. They emerged from the Breach in their own secure packaging, maybe the alien equivalent of the hard plastic shells that retailers used to deter shoplifters. Each sealed entity was unique, not only in the seal’s color and size, but in terms of what it took to open it. Some were easy: they opened to an electric charge or a certain temperature, or even blunt impact force. Others were tricky. Lab techs might spend weeks or months running them through a battery of experiments, every one a shot in the dark. Exposure to random chemical compounds, wavelengths of light, air pressure settings in a vacuum chamber. Some of them simply never gave up their secrets. Paige had shown Travis a lemon yellow box about the size of a cinder block. Seamless. Featureless. Opaque. It’d come through the Breach on Christmas Day in 1979, and three decades later no one had a clue what the hell was inside it.
“I first came to Border Town this April,” Bethany said, “and I’ve been rotating through all the different jobs as part of the standard training. They like everyone to be good at everything. I started in the Primary Lab two weeks ago, and I spent a couple hours the first night looking at the sealed entities. I thought they were fascinating. They’re like solitaire games someone else got stumped by and left sitting out. You look at them and you think, ‘Maybe I’ll see something they missed.’ ”
Travis knew the feeling, though he hadn’t felt it in any lab in Border Town. He’d experienced it years before, walking through crime scenes in the quiet hours after all the prints had been lifted and the photos shot and the bodies taken away.
“There was one seal that got my attention,” Bethany said. She in
dicated the cylinder lying between them. “It was a little bigger than two of these side by side. A white casing shaped like a pill but flattened a little. There was a seam right around the middle, like a waistline. It looked like you could just hold the thing by each end and pull it open.”
She went quiet for a moment, like she didn’t know how to say the next part. Or didn’t expect him to believe her.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Travis said.
She shrugged. “It was such a stupid idea I was too embarrassed to try it, even if nobody was around. Obviously, it would’ve been the first thing someone tried back in 1998. And probably a hundred people had done the same thing since then. Like trying to twist a doorknob even when you’re sure it’s locked. You’re compelled to give it at least one go. So finally, this past Sunday night, I did it. I grabbed the two ends and pulled. And the damn thing came apart like a plastic Easter egg.”
Travis could only stare. It simply wasn’t possible that no one had thought to do that in thirteen years. He saw a trace of dry amusement in her eyes at his expression.
“We figured out the trick later,” she said. “After we took out the two cylinders, we put the halves of the seal back together and they automatically relocked. And everyone in the room tried pulling them apart, with no luck. Even I couldn’t do it again. It was like trying to pull apart a lump of steel. Paige figured it out, though, and it only took her an hour to prove her theory. She positioned two robotic arms to recreate the way a human would pull on the seal, and she went methodically through different levels of force. At exactly 12.4 newtons, the seal came apart.”
Travis thought he understood. “Any more or any less, and it wouldn’t open, right?”
She nodded. “You need to apply that exact force for just over a second. If the pressure wavers up or down by even a tenth of a newton during that second, it won’t open.”
“High-school physics was a long time ago,” Travis said. “I’m not even sure I took it. How small is a tenth of a newton?”
