Ghost Country tc-2

by Patrick Lee

  "Obviously, this won't take anything like four months to resolve," she said.

  Travis nodded.

  "A few weeks at most," Paige said. "Finn might have a lot of the top people, but Garner will get everyone else. However it shakes out after that, whatever it looks like on the news, that'll be the end of it. I'm sure Tangent will be involved, but as far as the three of us shouldering the whole thing… I guess that's over with, now."

  "My part is, for sure," Travis said.

  She looked at him again. "If you want, we can set you up with another identity, wherever you want to live, whoever you want to be."

  "Anything like the last one will do," he said.

  "Okay."

  Neither spoke for a while. They watched the city. Far below on the opposite sidewalk, a college-aged couple went by. The girl turned to face the guy, grabbed each of his hands in hers and drew his arms up overhead, bouncing up and down on her feet. Happy as hell about something.

  "You could come back," Paige said. "You know that."

  For a moment Travis didn't answer. He turned and found her staring at him. Saw in her eyes everything she wasn't saying. Saw an invitation back to more than just Border Town.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  She held the stare a second longer. Whatever hurt she felt, it was buried deep.

  "Okay," she said.

  She turned from the window. Went to a big leather chair and sat. She leaned back and closed her eyes.

  "If I could explain it, I would," Travis said.

  "I didn't ask you to."

  "I would anyway."

  She said nothing more.

  Travis crossed to the couch. He set Bethany's backpack on the floor. Heard the clink of the SIG 220 inside, among all the shotgun shells. He'd left the shotgun itself on the other side of the iris, a couple stories down in the skeleton of the building. He'd leaned it out of the rain under an intact metal panel a few yards from the stairwell. It hadn't seemed like a good idea to step into the president's living room with a twelve-gauge in his hands.

  He lay on his back on the couch. Sank into it. Shut his eyes. Listened to the keystrokes of the computer in the next room, and the murmur of the city.

  He wondered what it would be like to just tell her. He could do it right now. He even had the note folded up in his wallet. A message from some future version of Paige, which she'd bounced in and out of the Breach so that it would emerge in the past-Tangent didn't know how to do that yet, but clearly they would, someday. Paige's message to herself had arrived two summers ago, with a specific instruction: kill Travis Chase.

  Some future Travis had countered that move. Had created the Whisper-that wasn't its real name, of course-using Breach technology, and bounced it much further back: to 1989. The Whisper had then gone to work rearranging everything, stacking the deck to put Travis-his present self-in place to intercept Paige's message when it emerged.

  Even now Travis could only make passing sense of it. It was like watching a snake eat its own tail. Why hadn't there been a counter-counter-move from the future Paige? And then the future Travis? Could those versions of themselves even exist anymore? Wasn't everything on a different track now? He didn't expect to ever understand it.

  But he could tell her.

  He could sit up right now and look her in the eyes and say it all. He could show her the note.

  He'd feel better then, though it wouldn't mean he could accept her invitation. However she responded, he was never returning to Tangent. It simply wasn't an option, so long as he remained in the dark about what had corrupted the other Travis there, along the track of that original future.

  And he would always be in the dark about that.

  He didn't sit up.

  He lay there and listened to her breathing. Remembered what it'd sounded like from an inch away.

  "You want to know the real reason I'm against sealing the Breach?" Paige said.

  Travis opened his eyes and looked at her. Hers were still closed.

  "Yes," he said.

  "It's that every morning I wake up and wonder if, that day, something good will finally come through. Something really good, that we could use to help the whole world. Why shouldn't that happen? We've seen all kinds of things that could've hurt the whole world. And we've seen small-scale good things. Like the Medic. Any emergency room could do miracles with it, but you could only give it to one of them. And how would you explain where it came from? It's always like that with the good ones. Did you ever hear of an entity called a Poker Chip?"

  "No."

  "It's bright red, about the size of a quarter. Not quite unique but very rare-only five of them have egressed over the years. You pick one up and it attaches itself to your skin by tendril extensions you can barely see. Scary at first, so we tested them on animals. It took a while to realize that their function is to slow down aging. They cut the speed to about one third, and they work on everything-bugs, mice, rats. So I guess if any five people really wanted to, they could wear them twenty-four/seven and outlive all their friends. Nice, right?"

  She opened her eyes and met his.

  "I have to believe," she said, "that someday, something will come through that's good on the scale of the world. Something we'd pop the champagne corks and break into tears over. Something history would pivot on. That thought gets me through all the rest of it."

  A silence passed. Not quite as awkward as before.

  Paige looked down at her hands in her lap.

  "I understand that there's something you really, really cannot tell me," she said. "And I understand that it has nothing to do with how you feel about me. Because I know how you feel about me. Yesterday morning, when I stepped out of Finn's office onto that girder and saw you standing five feet away, it didn't surprise me in the least. I hadn't expected it-but when I saw you, it seemed like the most normal thing in the world that you'd be standing there. That you'd be there for me. So I know. And I understand… even if I don't understand. That's an ability the Breach trained into me a long time ago. Getting it without getting it. I get that whatever this is, it just is, and that you wish like hell it wasn't."

  She looked at him again, and he held her stare.

  "Thank you," he said.

  "You're welcome."

  She managed something like a smile. He tried to return it. Then he sank into the couch again, eyes on the ceiling.

  He heard her stand, and then she was there, climbing onto the couch, squeezing into the space between him and the backrest. Neither of them spoke. A second later they were pressed together as tightly as they could get, his mouth on her forehead, kissing it. Everything about her filling up his world, warm and soft and vulnerable and alive, her breath against his throat, her arms tense as she held on. H is sense of time was gone. This close to her, he could lose hours and not notice. That in itself was excruciating, because this little time was all they were ever going to get. He could already feel it going away.

  He thought of what she'd said earlier, about seeing him on top of the office building in D.C. He thought of how close he'd come to not being there. A minute's delay would've done it. The timing had actually been closer than that, even. He and Bethany had been maybe ten seconds from opening their own iris when Finn opened his. The gunfight-if it could be called that-wouldn't have played out half as favorably without that turn of events. Without the element of surprise, there would've been real crossfire, and Paige would have been stuck without cover at the center of it. Her chances would've been close to zero.

  He kissed her hairline. Held her tighter. Tried not to think of how it might've gone. Shit happened, that was all. Some of it had to be good.

  He shut his eyes and breathed in the smell of her hair.

  Five seconds later he opened them again.

  A thought had come to him. A memory. Sharp and insistent. Something that'd happened just after Finn opened the iris from his office. Paige had come out, but not right away. First Finn himself had come to the opening and stared out
through it-Travis had stayed beyond his peripheral vision. Then the guy had ordered Paige out onto the beam. That part Travis remembered clearly. But there was something else. Something before that. Something Finn had whispered right at the beginning, seconds after stepping up to the iris. Travis had been just close enough to hear it. It'd escaped his notice at the time-there'd been more pressing things to focus on-and it hadn't sounded like anything important.

  Now he tried to call it back, because something told him it was important, after all.

  What'd Finn said?

  He thought about it.

  Seconds passed.

  He remembered.

  "Holy shit," Travis said.

  Paige stirred in his arms, tilted her head back to meet his eyes.

  "What?" she said.

  For a long moment he couldn't answer. He was thinking back over every aspect of the past two days, seeing it all as it'd really been. Seeing what everything meant. It was like watching a film of a shattering wineglass being run in reverse. Every jagged piece of the thing twisting and tumbling, pulled inward toward its proper place by some logical gravity. From the first moment they'd looked through the iris, they'd been wrong about what they were seeing. Their biggest mistake had been right there at the outset, and every conclusion they'd built on it had been way off the mark.

  "Travis, what is it?"

  He blinked. Looked at her.

  "I'll show you," he said.

  And then against his every inclination, he let go of her and stood from the couch. He waited for her to get up, and they crossed the living room to the hallway and then the den.

  Loose paper files were stacked everywhere in the room-on the desk, the coffee table, the chairs, the floor-in some kind of improvised Dewey decimal system.

  "We've narrowed it to five people we're certain we trust," Garner said. "I've e-mailed them and set up a secure conference call-"

  He cut himself off, having glanced up and seen Travis's expression.

  Bethany looked up too.

  They stared. Waited for Travis to speak.

  But he didn't. Instead he made his way through the stacked files to the giant globe by the window. He knelt before it and rotated it until he was looking at the United States.

  "Where could they go?" he said, more to himself than the others. "Where's the best place for it?"

  At the edge of his vision he saw the others trading looks.

  He rolled the globe upward, pulling South America fully into view.

  "Anyone know a place almost as dry as Yuma?" he said. "Maybe in Central or South America?"

  Garner chuckled. "I know a place that makes Yuma look like Seattle. NASA uses it to test Mars rovers. Every year I was in office they wanted more money for research sites down there."

  Travis waited for him to go on.

  "The Atacama Desert," Garner said. "Northern stretch of Chile. Great big sweeps of it have had no observed rainfall in recorded history. Those parts are biologically sterile. No plants or animals. Not even bacteria."

  Travis leaned closer to the globe. Only three of Chile's cities were labeled on it. One was the capital, Santiago. He hardly noticed it. His gaze had already locked onto one of the other two.

  The last shard of the wineglass slipped into place.

  "Unbelievable," Travis said.

  But before he could say more, the stacked papers in the room began to scatter. A cold breeze had blown in from the hall.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  It was over before they could make any move. Just like that, there were men in the doorway-two standing and one crouched between them-with silencer-equipped pistols leveled. No one even spoke. There was no need.

  The gunmen motioned for them to exit the den, and pulled back from the doorway to make room. Garner led the way, and a moment later everyone was standing in the living room.

  There were six gunmen in all. Each had the same weapon: a Beretta 92F with a silencer that nearly doubled its length. There were narrow LED flashlights mounted atop each gun, switched off at the moment. Each of the men also wore a FLIR headset, identical to what they'd had in Yuma, though at the moment they hung from their necks on elongated straps.

  Finn was there too. Holding both cylinders. Behind him, the disconnected iris from his own cylinder was still open. Moist October wind blew in from the pitch-black New York on the other side. Then the iris closed and the air stabilized again.

  Bethany's backpack, with the SIG inside, still lay where Travis had set it near the couch. He didn't look at it. Just got a sense of it, and judged the distance to it. It wasn't an option at the moment. It would take an ice age to reach it, and another ice age to unzip the pack. Time enough for every weapon in the room to acquire him and hit him half a dozen times.

  Finn pointed to a bare stretch of wall. "There. All four of you."

  They hesitated, but only for a moment. There was no other move they could make. The geometry of the situation was what it was. They went to the wall. Stood there in a row, facing the room. The gunmen arranged themselves in a broad arc before the four of them, no shooter in any other's line of fire.

  "I need all of you to understand that the following isn't bluster," Finn said. "If you give us a reason to start shooting, we're just going to kill all four of you. We can do that and still get away, and each of you knows it. Clear so far?"

  None of them answered, even with a nod.

  Finn shrugged, took it as an affirmative. Then he set the cylinders in one of the big leather chairs, strode to the hall and disappeared into the den. Twenty seconds passed. They heard keystrokes and a few mouse clicks. Travis pictured the computer screen as it'd been when they left the room. Garner's e-mail program was open, all passwords already entered. Finn could access everything.

  They heard him curse softly, and a second later he came back out, holding the cordless phone from the cradle on the computer desk. He looked at Garner.

  "The e-mail you sent to coordinate the conference call mentions me by name."

  "Does it?" Garner said.

  Finn stared at him for a long time, then turned and looked at nothing, and Travis could see him putting together the implications. He didn't look happy about them. He glanced at his watch.

  "The call starts in six minutes," Finn said. He looked at Garner again. "When it does, you're going to join it and tell everyone to disregard the message you sent them. Tell them the situation is already being handled higher up, and not to worry about it."

  Garner didn't reply. Five seconds passed.

  "Do you understand?" Finn said.

  Garner exhaled, the sound almost a laugh. "If you think I'm going to do that just because you say so, you're high. Go ahead and shoot us. I'm sure the five people on that conference call, and all their secretaries and staffs, won't think it's the least bit suspicious when they read that I got killed a few minutes before it was scheduled to happen. I'm sure your name being in the e-mail won't bring any unwanted attention onto you, either."

  Finn didn't blink, but his eyes drew a third of the way closed. He was thinking again. Visualizing moves and countermoves on the chessboard.

  Then he nodded. "Fair enough."

  He looked at Garner's phone and punched in a number. Put it to his ear. Waited. When the other party answered, Finn said, "We're here," and described the situation regarding the conference call. He wandered away down the hall as he spoke. Travis heard him say, "No, the e-mail doesn't go into detail, but it names both you and me, which isn't helpful." The conversation continued in low tones Travis couldn't make out.

  The nearby wall clock showed four minutes left before the conference call.

  Finn came back into the room. He was holding the phone down away from his ear now. Its power light was still on. He looked at Garner.

  "It's on speaker," Finn said, and then spoke toward the phone's mouthpiece. "Go ahead."

  A man on the phone cleared his throat softly. Even by that sound Travis recognized his voice.

  "Preside
nt Garner," the man said.

  "President Currey," Garner said.

  Travis heard Currey exhale. He sounded tired. "Rich, what are you trying to do?"

  "I'd like to hear your own answer to that question."

  "That would take more time than we have. Why don't you take some advice from an old friend and fall in line here, all right? Get on the conference call and say you jumped the gun, and that it's all good. It's the only move you've got, anyway."

  "I don't know about that," Garner said. "I was thinking I might just stand here and watch the minute hand tick a few times. If I don't show up on the call, that in itself raises a few flags. I don't imagine you and your people want any flags going up, if you expect to keep whatever you're doing secret for another four months."

  Travis saw something flicker through Finn's expression at that line. Something like amusement. It vanished as quickly as it'd appeared.

  "Here's your problem," Currey said. "From this point forward, your goal is to build a base of support against us. To do that, you need to convince rational people of something no rational person can believe without proof. If you had one of the cylinders, it'd be easy for you. You could show people what's on the other side. But you've lost that advantage now. So who's going to believe you? It won't carry much weight that you're a former president, when the people contradicting your claim include the sitting president and his entire cabinet, among many others."

  Travis watched the resolve fade from Garner's eyes. Watched something darker take its place.

  "It's over, Rich," Currey said. "All that's left is to acknowledge it. And the sooner, the better-at least for you. We'd be happy to leave you alone, once you've cooperated. It's not in our interests to stir up any headlines just now."

  Garner looked at Paige, right beside him, then at Bethany and Travis.

  "What happens to the others?" Garner said. "And don't bullshit me, Walter. I'll be able to tell."

  "I know it," Currey said. There was a long pause, and then he said, "All right, fine. They die. They go to Rockport Army Depot on Long Island, they get interrogated by some friends of ours there, and then they get a bullet to the temple each. Sound like the truth? The thing is, that part happens regardless of the outcome. You can't help them. You need to take care of yourself, now. So do it. Get on the call and make it right. I'll get out of the way so you can."