The Breach (5 page)
Authors: Patrick Lee
Travis expected to have to gently pry the young woman from her grieving. They needed to get out of the encampment and find positions from which to kill the other two hostiles when they returned.
But she sat with her father only a few minutes before standing, taking Travis’s knife again and cutting the dead man free. She set him carefully flat on the ground, then looked around, troubled.
Travis understood. “Where do you want to take him?”
Her gaze settled on the dense stand of pines where he’d hidden earlier. “There.”
Travis knelt and lifted the man, and carried him to the trees. He maneuvered the body among the boughs and laid it under the deepest cover, then waited silently as the woman stood looking down at it.
“We need to get out of here fast,” she said after a moment. “As soon as we kill the two that left on the quads.”
“There are more besides them?” Travis said.
“A lot more.” She nodded toward the camp. “These guys were calling in on a satellite phone every hour. When their people don’t hear from them, they’ll know there was trouble. They’ll send reinforcements with a helicopter.”
The woman took a hard breath, gave her father a last look, then turned away, back toward the encampment. As she did, Travis got another look at her right arm. The set of clamps the torturer had used to pry apart her triceps were still in place, keeping the skin and muscle wedged open at least an inch. Heavy black clots filled the cavity, along with what could only be infected tissue.
Seeing him stare, Paige turned her arm and saw the opening herself. Travis knew by her reaction that she was looking at it for the first time. She took it well.
“I wouldn’t pull those clamps out without a doctor close by,” Travis said. “You don’t want to trap those infections inside your arm, away from the air.”
“I don’t think I’ll be in a doctor’s care anytime soon,” she said, but made no move to detach the clamps.
She stepped out of the pines and moved into the camp. Travis followed.
“Can you use their satellite phone to call for help?” he said. “Get the military in here, or whoever your people can send?”
She shook her head. “These guys had to use a code to make outgoing calls. If I were more of a tech, maybe I could get around it, but I’m not. How far from a town are we?”
“On foot, fifty miles.” He looked at the remaining two quads parked nearby. “We could cover two thirds of it on one of those, taking the long way around a few ridges. Then there’s a river, and no way across but log bridges and rocks. We’d have to ditch the quad and walk from there, maybe a full day to reach Coldfoot.”
She considered that, looking more concerned than hopeful. Her eyes went past him to the open valley and the succession of mountain ridges beyond, as if the landscape were an executioner’s scaffold. Travis imagined a full day’s walk over the mostly exposed terrain, being hunted by armed pursuers in a helicopter. The young woman’s expression suggested similar thoughts.
“This is going to get bad,” she said. She stared a moment longer, then looked at Travis. “My name’s Paige. Thank you for saving my life.”
The riders were coming back. The engines had started up a minute earlier, and now the two ATVs were just visible past the curve of the valley, maybe a mile away yet.
Travis kept his M16 steady against a pine trunk. Paige held her own rifle at the next tree over, left-handed—clearly not her natural choice—and braced across a branch. Her damaged arm hung at her side.
In the silence of the clearing, the distant hum of the engines was no more than an insect buzz. The wind through the boughs was louder. So was Paige’s breathing, each intake more a gasp than a breath.
Travis wondered at the kind of resolve someone would need to even be standing after all she’d just gone through. Then he wondered at the stakes required to fuel that resolve.
“You’re worried about a lot more than just your own survival,” Travis said.
“Yes,” Paige said, her eyes staying on the gun sights.
“I want to know what all this is,” he said. “I saw the steel container on the plane. And there were details in the First Lady’s note, but not enough. I’m going to help you get to Coldfoot, regardless, but if I’m going to risk getting killed over something, I want to know what it is. I don’t think that’s asking too much.”
She looked up, met his gaze evenly.
“What’s Tangent?” Travis said. “What the hell is a Breach entity?”
Her eyes stayed on his a moment longer, as the drone of the incoming engines rose. Then she lowered her face to the rifle stock again, eyes down the barrel. Travis looked down his own sights. The riders were still a thousand yards out, just now resolving into distinct shapes. There was no danger of them spotting Travis or Paige where they stood, against the darker backdrop of the camp and the tree cover.
“Tangent is an organization,” Paige said. “Our entire purpose revolves around the Breach. Guarding it. Controlling it. And the Breach is . . . very hard to describe.”
“I’m more open-minded today than I was yesterday,” Travis said.
Several more seconds passed as Paige considered what to say next. Travis could see the gleam of sunlight off the chrome handlebars of the ATVs.
“Have you ever heard something described as the strangest thing in the world?” Paige said. “A two-headed snake, a potato chip that looks like George Washington, something like that?”
“Sure,” Travis said.
“Even in strict scientific terms, with no hyperbole, the Breach is the strangest thing in the world.” She thought for a moment, then went on. “It’s a source. A technology source. We get things from it. I know that’s vague, but I can’t say it more clearly. Not just because it’d be an act of treason, but because you’d never believe me unless you were standing right in front of it, seeing it for yourself.”
Travis saw her draw the rifle tightly into her shoulder, her left eye narrowing down the sight line. The riders were still well over five hundred yards out, too far for guaranteed kill shots. Travis was about to suggest that when they came into range, he take the left rider and Paige take the right, when her rifle cracked, a mini thunderclap in the stillness. The left rider jerked—Travis saw blood in the center of his chest—and pitched sideways, pulling the handlebars so tightly to the right that the machine jackknifed, flipped and threw him like a crash-test dummy. Which, by that point, he essentially was. Before he landed, Paige fired again, and the second rider’s head vanished above the jaw. He stayed on his quad for another five seconds, then tipped straight backward and fell off. The machine rolled thirty yards farther, throttling down to idle, and then just sat there growling.
Travis turned to her, saw her staring at the kills, her eyes hard and—if he was reading them right—unsatisfied with her work.
“I’m better with a scope,” she said.
She leaned the rifle against the tree, turned, and went to a pile of the hostiles’ gear in the middle of the camp. Within a few seconds she’d pushed aside their belongings—among them a little dirt-crusted shovel—to reveal a steel plate on the ground, eighteen by eighteen inches and half an inch thick. She lifted it with her good arm and let it fall flat on its other side, exposing beneath it a leg-wide hole in the dirt. Its bottom was too deep for Travis to see from his angle.
What caught his eye first was a disturbance to the plate’s underside: dark blue corrosion, and a just-visible bulge where the metal had spanned the hole in the ground. Exposure damage, caused by whatever lay unseen at the bottom.
“Any piece of technology we get from the Breach is called an entity,” Paige said. “This one is designated Whisper, and it’s dangerous as hell. The man who sent these contractors wants control of it. If he succeeds . . .” She paused, looked at Travis, then shook off whatever she was thinking, and knelt over the hole. “He can’t succeed. It’s that simple.”
She reached deep into the hole, almost to her shoulder, and lifted out a fist-sized object, perfectly round, its surface a dark, iridescent blue Travis was sure he’d never seen before.
The object from the hinged steel cube aboard the 747.
For a moment Paige gazed at it with a mix of revulsion and fear, as if it were a spent fuel rod saturating her bones with lethal rads. Then she narrowed her eyes and seemed to focus past the irrational feeling.
Travis sensed that whatever danger this thing posed wasn’t as simple as any physical risk from holding it. Not directly, anyway.
He lifted his gaze from the thing and met Paige’s eyes.
“Are you saying the Breach is a lab?” he said. “Some place where we build things like this?”
She shook her head. “It’s not a lab. And we didn’t build this thing.”
“
We
as in Americans?” Travis said.
“
We
as in people.”
She held his stare a few seconds longer, then stooped and picked up the shovel from the hostiles’ gear.
Travis continued staring at her, replaying her last sentence in all its gravity.
Standing, Paige said, “Do me a favor. The thing the other two went to retrieve from the plane looks like an inch of clear tape. It’s very important. It’s the key that switches the Whisper on. They’ll have it with them now. Get it, while I bury this where their backup won’t find it.”
“We’re not bringing it with us?” Travis said.
“We’d never make it. The Whisper’s too dangerous without containment. But we can bring the key. All that matters now is keeping these people from recovering both, and contacting Tangent as soon as we can.”
With that she turned away, Whisper and shovel in hand, and left the clearing through the trees on the far side.
Travis watched after her a moment, listening to her footsteps recede across the forest floor. Then he headed toward the distant ATVs. He’d gone only a few paces from the camp when he heard the hostiles’ satellite phone begin ringing behind him.
An hour later they were two valleys away, racing north through one leg of the long and snaking course he’d quickly mapped. Paige was seated in front of him on the quad, boxed in by his arms as he held the handlebars. She’d grown steadily weaker as they’d prepared to leave—the result, she said, of the interrogator’s drug wearing off. That and three days of zero sleep catching up. Travis couldn’t see her eyes now, but at times her body went slack and leaned back against him before she jostled awake again.
However long it took the hostiles’ backup to reach the camp, it wouldn’t be long afterward before they noticed a quad missing. At that point, a glance at a map would leave no doubt as to the direction their prey had gone. Coldfoot was the only way out, and there were only so many paths by which to reach it.
Travis kept the ATV on hard ground that took no imprint from the tires, and did his best to avoid the snowfields.
Darkness over LaGuardia. Dawn at the horizon, cherry red like a heated wire. Karl watched the world come to life, the hotel room dark around him. His reflection in the windowpane, side lit by the bathroom light, stared back with its visible eye blue and cold.
Twenty-five minutes to takeoff. He had all the time in the world. Nobody would make him wait in line.
Not when he was wearing the suit.
It lay in two halves on the chair beside him. He felt for the bottom half, found it, sat on the bed and pulled it over his jeans until he felt the built-in feet, like the feet of a child’s pajamas, snug tightly around his shoes. He found the shoulder straps and secured them. He reached for the chair again, felt for the suit’s top half, and slipped it on as he stood. He smoothed its long hem, which overlapped the waist of the bottom half by a foot or more. The material, so unlike anything else he’d ever worn, was hard to get used to, even after all his experience with it. It felt like spandex in a way, matching every dimension of his six-foot frame, but at the same time it seemed almost relaxed. At least,
relaxed
was the closest term he had for it. It was also breathable like the screen of a tent, and nearly weightless. On a previous occasion he’d worn it for more than forty-eight hours straight without any discomfort, even from the portions that covered his hands and head. Though he’d never asked his employers about it—not that they knew any better than him how the thing worked, considering where it had come from—he felt sure that the suit’s perfect fit resulted from some narrow intelligence of the material itself. Even now he felt the suit taking the shape of his body until he could hardly tell he was wearing it. It would not be surprising, of course, to learn that the suit had intelligence built into it. It would also not be its most impressive attribute. Not by a long shot.
Karl checked the peephole, saw that the hallway was clear, and left the room. He passed by the elevator bank, opting for the stairwell—elevators were a no-no, of course. Five flights down, he put his face to the little window in the door that accessed the lobby. It was empty except for two girls at the front desk, thirty feet away.
Walking out in front of them was not ideal, but protocol allowed it given that there was no easier option. He pushed the door open and stepped out. As he had expected, both girls glanced up at the opening door, expressions casual and then perplexed, trading looks now. As Karl passed directly in front of them, their eyes stayed on the door, falling shut far behind him with a light thud.
“Um . . . okay,” the older girl said.
The other shook her head and went back to her half-finished sudoku puzzle.
Karl could leave by the main exit, right in front of them, but because he had another choice this time—it would take less than a minute to reach the back door, around the corner and down the hall—protocol demanded that he take it. Really, the rules governing the use of the suit boiled down to three words: don’t fuck around.
He reached the rear exit and, quite alone, shoved it open and strode into the chilly New York morning.
Traffic on the Grand Central Parkway was heavy enough to merit caution, even at this hour. He waited for his chance, then sprinted across all five eastbound lanes at once. A moment later he’d crossed the other half, scaled the fence, and was out on the open sweep of LaGuardia, the terminals and airliners silhouetted against the red eastern sky like an alien fortress.
He walked across Runway Four, two access roads, and rounded the Central Terminal Building to the nearest entrance to Concourse D.
Outside the sliding door, he waited; its electric eye could no more see him than could the sleepy rent-a-cop standing a few feet to the side. No matter—caution would have demanded that he wait for someone else to trigger the door anyway. Airports were no places to start getting overconfident. No places to fuck around.
He waited only thirty seconds before a weary-looking businessman got out of a cab and lumbered through the entrance. He followed the man inside, broke left and made his way past the sparse lines of early travelers at the baggage check. From here on in, everything was easy. The security checkpoint, a farce even without the suit, was reduced to something like a kindergarten obstacle course. He stepped onto the raised barrier that boxed in the metal detector lanes on the left, and simply walked past the entire charade, stepping back down to the floor twenty feet beyond.
The concourse itself would have presented a challenge had it been busier. Crowds, even moderate ones, were a logistical nightmare; people would walk right into him if he wasn’t careful. At this hour, however, the wide, open passageway was mostly empty, save for the clot around Gate D7 far ahead, his destination.
When he reached it, he paused for a long while, studying the layout of the crowd. Where to stand? Not here, certainly. People would be coming and going in both directions, and the movements of those already camped here would be unpredictable. Worse, two little kids were chasing each other around, their mother, absorbed in a paperback, giving them only an occasional half-assed admonition to sit down.
The prime spot was obvious: right beside the jetway door, beyond the attendant’s stand. Karl skirted the crowd at a comfortable distance, ducked the stanchion barrier, and took his place. It wouldn’t be long; the 737 was already docked outside. Beyond it, the city skyline jutted into the still dim morning like a row of teeth.
The attendant went to his microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, Cayman Airways flight 935, nonstop service to Georgetown on Grand Cayman, is now boarding rows one through five. Rows one through five.”
Another attendant opened the door, and the moment she stepped away from it, Karl moved past her and into the cool air of the jetway, moving fast now to stay well ahead of the first passengers. He paused briefly at the door to the plane, where a stewardess blocked the way. She glanced through him down the jetway, saw nobody coming just yet, and ducked back in to speak to one of her coworkers. Karl slid past her and went to the back of the plane.
On a 737, depending on its configuration, the best place to ride out the flight was almost always the aft concession storage. The tiny room was empty for much of the flight, and even when a crew member came in to take or return a cart, evasion was a simple matter of ducking into the nook beside the ice bin.
Getting off the plane, of course, would be even easier than getting on.
Karl sat at the edge of the shade, five feet from the naked girl sunning herself by the pool.
By far the most interesting aspect of wearing the suit was the ability to study people when they thought they were alone. Until the first time he’d found himself in that position, it had never occurred to him what a unique perspective it could be. Ordinarily, you could never be with someone who was alone, simply by definition. You could set up a hidden camera, but it wasn’t the same as being there.
Nobody ever showed outward signs of anxiety when by themselves. No one ever fidgeted, or blushed, or moved awkwardly. What a strange thing to find: everybody was cool when there was no one around to judge them.
The girl was twenty-three and heartbreakingly beautiful. Olive skin. No tan lines. Deep brown eyes and sun-faded hair. She was five-foot-two and probably not a hundred pounds soaking wet. Five minutes ago she had in fact been soaking wet. Karl had watched her remove her clothes and dive into the pool. Now the Caribbean sun had almost completely dried her. He watched the last little collection of moisture droplets evaporate from her skin in the dry heat.
Her name was Lauren Cook. Karl had learned that fact along with everything else he’d learned about her father, Ellis Cook.
Lauren had the house to herself at the moment, all fifteen thousand square feet of it, overlooking Bodden Bay and the wide, blue Caribbean to the south. There were security personnel, of course, manning the entrances and ready to storm the place at the first cry for help. They were American, and professional; Karl had taken a close look at each of them and concluded that they were ex-something impressive, a hell of a lot more impressive than cops. The house’s fortifications were rounded out with thermal cameras and motion detectors, all of which might as well have been hollow decoys where Karl was concerned.
A yellow cabbage butterfly landed on Lauren’s thigh. She flinched and waved her hand at it, then saw what it was and smiled, watching it corkscrew away. It flew behind Karl and, by chance, dragged Lauren’s line of sight directly to meet his eyes for just a heartbeat. He felt a chill pass through him, meeting her innocent gaze. Then she sank back into her lounger and closed her eyes again.
Beyond her, the two-story house more than filled Karl’s frame of vision, extending seventy feet both to his left and right. Several of the second floor windows were open above the balcony, which was easy to climb to. Karl had already done so, had already walked the rooms of the house, inspected cabinets and drawers in Ellis’s bedroom, and formed his plan. It was very straightforward, no room for mistakes. Don’t fuck around.
A few minutes later Lauren rose, gathered her clothes and went inside, locking the patio door behind her. Karl went to the poolside rail and gazed down at the manicured lawns, and the yachts riding at anchor in the harbor beyond. He felt bad for the girl; she didn’t deserve what was coming. Though he had yet to see her interact with another soul, she had kind features and was probably a nice kid.
Well, it wasn’t a nice world.
Twilight over the bay. Haze had rolled in during the afternoon, and now the horizon was a blur between pink water and purple sky. Only the brightest stars shone through.
Karl watched Ellis enter the bedroom. The man walked past all three sets of balcony doors, wide open to the sea, without shooting so much as a glance through them. Why live here, then, Karl wondered.
Ellis went to his computer, switched it on, and paced while it powered up.
At the back corner of the desk were two framed photos: Lauren, and Ellis’s wife. Karl had seen no evidence of the wife’s presence in this house. The information provided by his superiors had indicated trouble in the marriage.
Karl reached deep inside the overlap of the suit and took hold of what he’d found in Ellis’s nightstand.
Icons bloomed on the computer screen.
Ellis sat in his chair.
Karl drew the chrome-plated .45, put it to Ellis’s temple and fired.
Immediately came shouts from security outside the house. Screams, too, from Lauren’s room. Seconds left to finish the job.
Karl lifted Ellis’s hand, wrapped the man’s fingers around the pistol grip, and fired again, this time into the framed photo of Mrs. Cook. Powder burns now assured, he let both the hand and the pistol fall free. Not two seconds later the bedroom door broke in, almost off its hinges, and four security men were in the room, MP5s shouldered and covering all angles.
“Room clear.”
Two broke formation, one to the master bath and another to the enormous closet.
“Bathroom clear.”
“Closet clear.”
Karl chose the broadest stretch of the wall, far out of the way, and simply stood. Outside in the hallway, other security men were holding Lauren back as she screamed and demanded answers. The men in the room spoke over headsets with other teams outside, locking down the grounds, though a certain calm had descended in their eyes. They could see what had happened.
Watching from the perimeter of the chaos, Karl felt his cell phone vibrate. He was expected to answer under all but the most unforgiving circumstances. These qualified.
Ten minutes later, in the lull between the security response and the arrival of local police, Karl went to the balcony, slipped over the rail and dropped to the patio. He saw two security officers just inside the living room—one of them a woman—sitting with Lauren, holding on to her and speaking softly.
He went to the far end of the patio, where a six-foot drop put him on a gentle slope to the beach.
A quarter mile up the shore road he found an empty bench, and sat. He took out his cell phone and, as expected, found a text message.
RETURN TO AIRPORT, NUL CURRENT JOB IF NECESSARY. TAKE UNITED 820 TO CHICAGO, THEN UNITED 71 TO FAIRBANKS, AK. WEAPONS/INSTRUCTIONS WILL BE WAITING IN YELLOW LAND ROVER W/GREENPEACE STICKER, LONG-TERM PARKING D. THIS WILL BE DIRECT AGGRESSION AGAINST TANGENT PERSONNEL.