Ghost Country (6 page)

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

T
here 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 indicated 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?”

She thought about it for a second. “Say it took 12.4 newtons to lift a hardcover of
War and Peace
. Tear out twenty pages and it would take 12.3 to lift it. That’s the sensitivity involved.”

“Not very forgiving.”

“You have no idea. Even after we knew what it took, how much force and how long, none of us could get it to open again. It’s damn near impossible. And I opened it the first time
without
knowing. It was a one-in-a-hundred-thousand fluke.” Her expression changed. It took on the tired nervousness Travis had seen outside the door of his apartment building. “Which makes all of this my fault, if you think about it. The motorcade attack. Everything. If I hadn’t joined Tangent, none of this would be happening. This entity and its counterpart would’ve sat sealed on that shelf forever.”

Travis had been staring away at nothing while she spoke. He’d been thinking it was actually pretty damn unnerving that whoever built these entities put them in something so hard to open. He thought about childproof caps on bottles of chemical cleaners, and for a second he felt a chill because he could almost get a sense of their mindset, whoever they were on the other side of the Breach. These black cylinders might only be power tools to them, but they were dangerous as hell. Dangerous even to their makers.

Travis looked at the button labeled on. He glanced at Bethany and saw her looking down at it too.

The end of the cylinder with the inset lens was pointed outward, into the open space in front of the couch. That face of it cleared the cushion’s edge by an inch. There was nothing obstructing the lens.

“Let’s do it,” Travis said.

Bethany nodded. “Should we count to three?”

“No,” Travis said, and pushed the button.

Chapter Eight

W
hat it did, it did instantly. Travis felt the button click under his fingertip and a cone of light shot from the lens at the end of the cylinder. The cone was long and narrow, fanning out maybe one foot in width for every five feet in length. It had a dark blue cast to it. Almost violet.

Ten feet out from the lens, the light cone simply terminated in midair, as if there were a projector screen there. What it projected in the air was a flat disc, two feet across, perfectly black. The disc was centered at about chest level, due to a slight upward tilt of the cylinder on the couch.

Travis stared at it.

He lost track of seconds.

In his peripheral vision he saw Bethany glance at him, but only briefly. Then her gaze went right back to the disc and stayed there.

More time passed.

Nothing about the disc changed.

Travis wasn’t sure what he expected to happen. Maybe the projection would show them something. A video recorded on the other side of the Breach. That fit the scale of something Paige might have been compelled to show the president. Though how it could’ve touched a nerve with him, Travis couldn’t guess.

He watched. Bethany watched.

Nothing happened.

The black disc just hovered there at the end of the projected beam.

It wasn’t reflective, Travis noticed. The way they were sitting, with large windows full of daylight spanning half the room, a reflective surface would have bounced nothing but glare at their eyes. A glass-screened television, positioned like the disc, would’ve been impossible to watch.

But the disc bounced nothing. It was no more reflective than cloth. And even cloth would’ve picked up plenty of the room’s light and appeared much brighter than true black. It would’ve looked gray, no matter how dark it was colored.

The disc was simply and purely black.

Only one explanation came to Travis’s mind.

“Holy shit,” Bethany said.

Travis turned and saw that she’d drawn the same conclusion he had, and at the same moment.

For a few seconds neither spoke.

Then Travis stood from the couch. The move was almost involuntary. The couch cushion responded to the sudden loss of his weight on it, and as it rose, some of its movement transferred to the middle cushion, where the cylinder rested. Travis saw the black disc—or what looked like a disc—bob up and down a few inches as the light cone shifted and settled. It happened again a second later when Bethany stood.

Travis moved forward. He gave the cone of light a wide berth as he went. He saw Bethany do the same on her side. Then she drew a sharp breath and stopped. Travis looked at her.

Her hair was moving in a steady breeze, though none of the windows in the suite were open. She turned her face directly into the slipstream of air, which was at least as strong as a current driven by a table fan. The wind appeared to be coming from the disc itself. But that wasn’t exactly true.

Because it wasn’t a disc.