The Breach

Part II
7 THEATERSTRASSE
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Tangent personnel who arrived on the next Black Hawk were under stricter orders than the first group. They bound and hooded Travis, belted him aboard, and he heard nothing but the craft's engines whining at full power for the next two hours.

He thought of the Whisper. The euphoric-even erotic-sensation of holding it still weighed on him like a personal loss, in its absence.

Yet as strange and powerful as the experience had been, he was forgetting it. Rapidly. Even now, just this short time after the fact, his memory of the entire event had faded to something like a receding dream. He could recall how it'd started: picking the thing up, Emily Price's voice directing him to fire on the unseen killer. And he could recall how it'd ended: letting go of it inside the Black Hawk, after slamming his wrist on the bench seat, and becoming aware of what he'd done under its control. What he'd done with the satellite phone, and what was about to result from it, thousands of miles away.

But everything between those two points was now a bright blue haze. Like a drug high he couldn't remember, except for fading pieces. The thing's terrifying capability. Its impossible knowledge of everything-literally everything. It'd told him something about Paige. What, he couldn't remember. And it'd given him a street address, for reasons that now escaped him. Something that sounded German, he thought; he could resolve it no further than that. As the time stretched out aboard the Black Hawk, he found even these trace memories slipping deeper and deeper out of his reach.

The chopper landed. He had no idea where. The aircrew helped him outside onto pavement, and he heard the heavy turbofans of a large jet powering up. Someone guided him up a set of metal stairs, and then he was aboard the plane, his head still covered.

There were quite a few people on the jet, ten to fifteen voices, he thought. A set of hands led him to a seat at the back end. Outside, the engines rose in pitch, and the aircraft began to taxi.

He heard tension in the voices around him. Fear, too. Calls came and went, in a few different languages. From the context of those made in English, Travis gathered that the people on the other end were government officials in countries all over the world. For a moment he wondered if the Whisper's plan had been carried out anyway, and the ICBM launch against China had gone ahead. The man next to him assured him it hadn't; his screamed warning at the end of the call had been more than sufficient.

But something was going on. Something that concerned the whole world. Something that scared the shit out of these people.

A moment later the jet turned onto its runway. It stopped for a few seconds as its engines came up to full scream. Travis's interrogation started just as it lifted off.

Five times, for five different people, he told his account of what'd happened, starting with his discovery of the wrecked 747, Box Kite. The point of the repetition was obvious enough: to see if his story would break along the fault line of a lie. It didn't. All he kept from them was the part he'd lost: the now nearly impenetrable amnesia effect that hung over the minutes he'd spent with the Whisper.

He told them about the invisible attacker, dead on the bent pine bough in the valley. The questioners' reaction to that news was a few clicks above happy. They called ground teams that had secured the valley and directed them to the body. Travis thought of the first team's fear, in the last minute of their lives, and wondered how long Tangent had been dealing with that particular threat.

Then he told them about the street address. The one he couldn't quite remember. The one that sounded German.

"Seven Theaterstrasse," the first questioner said. Not even asking.

Travis nodded anyway. That was it.

He heard the phrase make its way up the plane like a passed note, and he marked its progress by the silence it left in its wake. They let him sleep after the fifth round of questioning. He woke to the bark of the wheels touching down. Then came a jeep ride over rough ground for a few hundred yards, through bright sunlight that warmed the black fabric of the hood still over his head. The baked air could only be that of a desert. Behind him he heard the jet already powering up to take off again. The jeep reached a smooth surface at the same time that it passed into shadow out of the sunlight. An elevator ride followed, lasting some ten seconds. Ten seconds moving down. "You can take that off him. Those, too." A woman's voice. Soft and raw, like she'd ruined it screaming at a rock concert the night before.

The binds at his wrists clicked open, and the hood came away to reveal a windowless office-and Paige Campbell standing in front of him. The veins in her right arm were still discolored, and her face remained drawn and pale, darkened beneath her eyes. But she was on her feet, as steady as a person could be. Her breathing was silent, normal. She'd come out of the Brooks Lodge on a stretcher, two thirds of the way dead, maybe ten hours ago, depending on how long Travis had slept on the plane.

The others left the room. He was alone with her.

She followed his eyes to her arm, the now-sutured incision across her triceps just peeking from her sleeve. Some compound the color and consistency of tar had been applied to the wound, probably deep inside it. The swelling around the injury had all but vanished.

"You'll see a lot of strange things around here," she said. Then, softer: "I saw a map of the distance you carried me. Thank you."

He didn't know what to say back to that. He nodded, and thought of what else she must have seen by now. His criminal record. Every detail of what he'd done. More than enough to counterbalance any merit he might have gained with her.

"Sorry for your treatment aboard the plane," she said. "We're methodical."

Her cell phone rang. She looked at the display, answered, and told the caller to give her a minute. In her voice was the same tension he'd heard among those on the plane.

She gave him a look that seemed to cut past any further polite conversation while at the same time apologizing for it. "Would you consent to a narcotic interrogation? It may help us recover more of what the Whisper told you."

He had a sense that she didn't expect that to work, but that she'd take what she could get. He also felt sure it would happen whether he consented or not. Nice of her to pretend to ask, though.

On the wall behind her was something that clashed with the professional look of the office. It looked like a promo poster for a rock band. It was a close-up of a steel surface, with the words ETHER WASTE carved roughly into it. Nothing else. No tour dates, no website address.

Paige waited for an answer. Probably wouldn't for much longer.

"Do what you have to," he said.

"Thank you." She indicated a door on his left. "There's a bathroom there if you'd like to clean up. I'll be back in a few minutes, and we'll get started."

He turned toward the closed bathroom door as she crossed the office to leave.

"I thought I was back up to speed on heavy metal groups," he said. "Guess I missed one."

Her footsteps halted at the threshold to the corridor. "What?"

He looked at her. Saw her looking back with blank eyes.

"Ether Waste," he said, nodding at the poster. "I've never heard of them."

She didn't move. Still staring at him from the doorway. She had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Maybe the drugs were still having some effect on her thinking, though nothing else about her behavior said so.

Then she reacted.

Her eyes narrowed and she took a step in from the doorway. Looked back and forth from him to the poster. "You can read that?"

He started to ask if she was okay, but the sentence died as a thought. He was looking at the poster again, which suddenly looked more like a blown-up forensic image than a promo. He looked at the text in particular. Really looked at it, instead of just reading it.

It wasn't English.

It wasn't even writing, by any definition he'd have assigned. There were no discrete rows or columns. No sense of order at all. The engraving on the steel was just a chaotic tangle of curves and lines, overlapping and pointing in all directions like a spill of needles and loose threads.

But he could read it.

He could read it without even thinking about it, as if it said STOP in white letters on a bright red octagon.