Ghost Country

Chapter Two

Travis Chase took his lunch break alone on Loading Dock Four. He sat with his feet hanging over the edge. Night fog drifted in across the parking lot, saturated with the smells of vehicle exhaust, wet pavement, fast food. Out past the edge of the lot, past the shallow embankment that bordered it, the sound of intermittent traffic on I-285 rose and fell like breaking waves. Beyond I-285 was Atlanta, broad and diffused in orange sodium light, the city humming at idle at two in the morning.

Behind Travis the warehouse was silent. The only sounds came from the break room at the far south end. Low voices, the microwave opening and closing, the occasional scrape of a chair. Travis only ever went in there to put his lunch in the refrigerator and to take it back out.

Something moved at the edge of the parking lot. Dark and low slung, almost flat to the ground. A cat, hunting. It slipped forward in starts and stops, then bolted for the foot of a dumpster. The kill reached Travis as no more than a squeal and a muffled struggle, a few thumps of soft limbs against steel. Then nothing but the swell and crest of the traffic again.

Travis finished his lunch, wadded the brown bag and arced it into the trash bin next to the box compactor.

He turned where he sat, brought his legs up and rested them sideways across the edge of the dock. He leaned back against the concrete-filled steel pole beside the doorway. He closed his eyes. Some nights he caught a few minutes' sleep like this, but most nights it was enough just to relax. To shut down for a while and try not to think. Try not to remember. H is shift ended at four thirty. The streets were empty in the last hour of the August night. He got his mail on the way into his apartment. Two credit-card offers, a gas bill, and a grocery flyer, all addressed to the name Rob Pullman. The sight of it no longer gave him any pause-the name was his as much as the address was his. He hadn't been called Travis Chase, aloud or in writing, in over two years.

He'd seen the name just once in that time. Not written. Carved. He'd driven fourteen hours up to Minneapolis on a Tuesday night, a year and a half ago, timing his arrival for the middle of the night, and stood on his own grave. The marker was more elaborate than he'd expected. A big marble pedestal on a base, the whole thing four feet tall. Below his name and the dates was an inscribed verse: Matthew 5:6. He wondered what the hell his brother had spent on all of it. He stared at it for five minutes and then he left, and an hour later he pulled off the freeway into a rest area and cried like a little kid. He'd hardly thought about it since.

He climbed the stairs to his apartment. He dropped the mail on the kitchen counter. He made a sandwich and got a Diet Coke from the refrigerator and stood at the sink eating. Ten minutes later he was in bed. He stared at the ceiling in the dark. His bedroom had windows on two walls. He had both of them open so the cross breeze would come through-it was hot air, but at least it was moving. The apartment had no air-conditioning. He closed his eyes and listened to the night sounds of the city filtering in with the humidity. He felt sleep begin to pull him down. He was almost out when he heard a car slow at the entrance to the front lot. Through his eyelids he saw headlights wash over his ceiling. The vehicle stopped in the lot but didn't kill its engine. It sat idling. He heard one of its doors open, and then light footsteps came running up the front walk.

His door buzzer sounded.

He opened his eyes.

He knew exactly who it was.

The guy in the apartment down the hall had an ex-girlfriend with a penchant for showing up drunk in the middle of the night, looking to discuss things. The last time, three weeks ago, the guy had tried to ignore her. She'd responded by hitting every button on the pad until someone else relented and buzzed her in, allowing her to come upstairs and pound on the guy's door directly. As a strategy it'd worked pretty well, so this time she'd skipped right to it. Nice of her.

The buzzer sounded again.

Travis closed his eyes and waited for it to stop.

When it sounded the third time he noticed something: he couldn't hear anyone else's buzzer going off before or after his own. He should have heard that easily. The tone was a heavy bass that transmitted well through walls. He'd heard it the last time this happened.

Someone was out there buzzing his apartment. His alone.

He pulled the sheet aside and stood. He went to the window and pressed his face against the screen to get an angle on the front door.

A girl was standing there. Not the neighbor's girlfriend. Not drunk, either. She was standing on the walk, a few feet away from the pad. She'd pressed the button and stepped back from it. She was staring up at the open window of Travis's bedroom-had been staring at it even before he appeared there-and now she flinched when she saw him. She looked nervous as hell. The vehicle idling thirty feet behind her was a taxicab.

The girl looked about twenty, but it was hard to say. She could've been younger than that. She had light brown hair to her shoulders. Big eyes behind a pair of glasses that covered about a quarter of her face-they were either five years behind the style or five years ahead of it.

Travis had never seen her before.

She'd seen him somewhere, though, if only in a picture. It was clear by her expression. She recognized him even by the glow of the lamppost in the parking lot.

She stepped off the concrete walkway into the grass. She took three steps toward the window. Her eyes never left his. She stopped. For another second she just stood there looking up at him.

Then she said, "Travis." I n the time it took him to pull on a T-shirt and jeans, he ran through the possible implications. There weren't many. He thought of Paige, two summers ago, setting up the Rob Pullman identity. He'd watched her insert it into every database that mattered-federal, state, local. Retroactive for four decades. Then she'd erased every digital footprint she'd left in the process, and scrubbed the information from even her own computer in Border Town. No records. No printouts. It was no more possible to tie his new name to his old one than it was to reverse-engineer an ice sculpture from a tray of water.

No one but Paige could have sent this girl.

Travis stepped into the hallway and descended the stairs. The girl was standing at the glass front door waiting for him. She'd already sent the cab away.

Travis pushed the door open and stepped out into the night.

"What is it?" he said. "What's going on?"

Up close her nervousness was more apparent. She had a backpack slung over her shoulder and she was fidgeting with the strap. There must have been something in his expression that put her even more on edge. She looked like she wanted to back away from him, but she didn't.

"You drive," she said. "I'll talk." " I-285. Hartsfield-Jackson Airport."

Travis took a right out of the complex.

The girl seemed about to speak again, and then her cell phone rang. She twisted in her seat and took it from her pocket. She pressed the talk button and rested the phone on her backpack, which was now in her lap.

"Hello?"

A man said, "Ms. Renee Turner?"

"Yes."

"Hi. This is Richard with Falcon Jet. I just wanted to let you know your aircraft is refueled and standing by, ready when you are. Flight time to Washington Dulles International will be an hour and fifteen. Does your guest have a preferred beverage?"

The girl glanced at Travis. He shrugged.

"We're fine with what's aboard," she said. "We'll be arriving shortly."

"Very good."

She ended the call and set the phone on the console. She still looked anxious. She hugged the backpack against herself. It flattened out. There wasn't much in it.

"Renee," Travis said. "Nice to meet you."

For a second she looked confused. "Oh, sorry, no. I'm Bethany. Bethany Stewart."

She stuck out a tiny hand. Travis shook it.

"Renee's a cover," she said. "She doesn't really exist."

"She sounds well off for someone who doesn't exist."

"I'll tell you all about her sometime."

"All right."

"I'm with Tangent. I guess you assumed that."

Travis nodded.

"I would have called ahead," she said. "I was just afraid you'd hear the first five words and hang up, and you'd be long gone by the time I got here."

"Why didn't Paige call? She wouldn't expect me to hang up on her."

Bethany was quiet for a few seconds. "Paige is the reason I'm here. She didn't have time to call anyone but me. She barely had time for that."

Travis waited for her to say more, but instead she picked up her phone again. She switched on the display and brought up what looked like a file directory.

"This phone records every call by default," she said. She selected a file and clicked on it. An audio clip began to play.

Travis heard Bethany's voice first. She started to say hello and then Paige spoke over her, her own speech fast and panicked, struggling for clarity through hyperventilation: " Bethany. Go to my residence. Override for the door is 48481. Open the hard storage in the back wall of the closet, star-7833. The thing inside is one of the entities I was testing, the same as the one I brought to D.C. Take it and get out of Border Town right now. Don't tell anyone anything. Get somewhere safe and then use the entity. You'll see what it does, and what you need to do. Whatever you learn from it, just make it public yourself, make it huge, do not go to authorities. Not the president. Not anybody. If you need help, find Travis Chase in Atlanta. Three seventeen Fenlow, apartment five, the name Rob Pullman. Shit, what else…? " Paige stopped to take a deep breath. Then another. In the background Travis heard a sound: running footsteps on pavement.

Bethany's voice came in on the recording: " What's happening? Where are you? "

Then Paige cut her off again, shouting. " You can take it through and still come back! You can take it through! "

On the last word something changed. Some expulsion of her breath, as though her body had suddenly moved. Or been moved. Then the recording ended as abruptly as if she'd turned off the phone, though Travis pictured something more severe than that.

The on-ramp to 285 came up on his right. He took the turn going too fast. His concentration wasn't on the driving.

He looked at Bethany. He waited for her to explain what the hell he'd just heard.

She went back to the directory on her phone and navigated to a new file. Its icon was a symbol of a filmstrip frame. A video clip.

"It was nine minutes after midnight, East Coast time, when Paige called me," she said. "And I captured this from CNN about an hour later, when I was already on my way here to find you."

She double-clicked the file, then handed Travis the phone. He propped it on the steering wheel as the video started to play.

News chopper footage. A row of vehicles crippled and burning in the street. Four SUVs jammed together like derailed train cars. The last of them was flipped over on its roof. The caption at the bottom of the screen read: motorcade attacked in washington, d.c.

The shot pushed in tight on one of the vehicles and Travis saw damage that couldn't be attributed to the flames alone. Massive holes in the metal panels. They could only have been caused by high-powered gunfire. It'd even cut through some of the structural members. Maybe shotgun slugs at close range could do that, but the sheer number of holes ruled that out. Someone had used a heavy automatic weapon on the convoy, probably a.50 caliber. Serious hardware to be lugging around within a few miles of where the president and his family slept.

"I've watched the coverage for a few hours now," Bethany said. "Until I got off the plane here in Atlanta. They're saying the victims in the motorcade were a mid-level CIA executive and his staff, and that the names may not be released. After a while they started reporting the exact time it happened. A few minutes after midnight. So the times match. And it's exactly where Paige and the others would've been after leaving the meeting, right between the White House and Andrews-"

She cut herself off and looked at him. "I'm sorry, you're hearing this all out of sequence. I'm not making any sense."

"You're fine. Just take it in order. Start at the beginning and tell me what you know."

She made a sound that was halfway between a sigh and a laugh. Equal parts weariness and frayed nerves.

"What I know won't take long," she said.