The Breach

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Paige was on her phone within seconds, asking someone what the hell was happening. Over the comm unit in his ear, Travis could hear sniper teams on the lower floors speaking to one another, reporting their status. Everyone fine, for now.

He leaned on the windowsill. The grid immediately around 7 Theaterstrasse had gone out first, and within seconds others had followed in succession, plunging the city into blackness. Now as he watched, successive blocks, leading away up the valley and climbing the ridges on both sides, winked out one after another, until the only lights he could see were the headlights on E41, and a scattering of others on the streets of the darkened city. Almost immediately his eyes began to adjust, and he discerned the fog again, lit not from below but from above, by the half-moon. The whole bank of it, shrouding the city, caught and scattered the silver-blue light and set a contrast for the monolithic shapes of the buildings that rose from it, black and dormant in the night.

Paige was talking to someone at Border Town who had open lines to the three Berlin detachments stationed around Zurich. None of them were reporting any hostile contact. She finished the call and looked at Travis. The two of them were lit only by the screen of her PDA, which Travis still held, and by the vague glow of LEDs blinking like animal eyes in the jungle of wiring around them. The power to 7 Theaterstrasse hadn't so much as stuttered. An uninterruptible backup must be one of those rare things that actually lived up to its name.

"Whatever it is, it'll happen anytime now," Paige said. Trying to sound calm. Not succeeding very well.

Outside, dim lights began to appear in the windows of the few people awake at this hour. Candles or flashlights.

"You don't have to stay here, you know," Paige said. "You've done what we asked you to do. If you want to leave, you can."

Travis looked at her for a moment, then stared out over the city again.

"I know," he said, and made no move to take her advice.

At the edge of his vision, he thought he saw her smile. She leaned on the windowsill next to him.

"When it really gets hopeless," she said, "there's one move we can make that Pilgrim probably won't have anticipated. And even if the Whisper tips him off a few minutes early, there won't be anything he can do to stop it."

The tone of her voice and the deadness in her eyes told Travis what it was.

"We can set off the nuke," he said.

"We can set off the nuke."

"I don't think the locals will appreciate that."

"They'll get over it. In about a thousandth of a second. For the world's sake, it might be the prudent move."

"If Pilgrim's long-term agenda is bad enough."

She breathed a laugh, the sound empty as a waiting coffin. "I'm sure it's bad enough."

Travis thought about the situation. He could accept that she was right, that they were in deep shit, but the logic of it was hard to fit together. Didn't Pilgrim risk losing all the work he'd put into this building if he attacked it now? Any method of taking out the more than forty snipers stationed at these windows would involve some level of violence, and with it a high likelihood of triggering the pressure pads wired to the nuke.

But the Whisper would understand that. Would find a way around the problem. Any way. Maybe the attack would be a few canisters of VX gas, lobbed from a launcher two blocks away. Kill everyone in the building and not disturb a microchip. There had to be a thousand ways in, as clever as that, or more so. The Whisper would know them all.

Someone screamed outside. A man's voice. Travis saw Paige flinch, even as the scream turned into a drunken laugh, and someone else told the man to shut up, also laughing. The first man kept yelling, asking who'd turned off the fucking lights.

"It won't be much longer," Paige said. But it was. More than half an hour passed, and nothing happened. A few ambulances moved about the city, sirens quiet but flashers pulsing through the fog. Travis thought of home-care patients whose medical equipment had failed in the outage. Somewhere to the east, out of sight past the building's corner, was a bright light source. A building running on a generator. It had to be a hospital; the ambulances came and went from that direction.

Paige made more calls to Border Town. More calls to the Berlin detachments stationed around Zurich and to the AWACS aircraft circling high above. Four in the morning and all was well. The snipers downstairs continued to call in their status at close intervals. They'd put on FLIR goggles to let them see the shapes of human bodies through the fog, and in low tones they reported the movement of any pedestrian who strayed into the two-block radius around the building.

"I don't understand," Paige said. "What's Pilgrim waiting for?"

It was the slingshot feeling again. Each passing minute made it worse.

Mostly they watched the night, but at times either he, or she, or both of them stared at the lines on the PDA. The consensus from Border Town agreed with Travis: the sentences were gibberish, on the surface.

At a point when neither had spoken for over a minute, Travis said, "You must have a few guesses, at least."

She looked at him in the pale glow of the screen, and offered a smile. "I promise I don't."

"Sorry, not the lines," he said. "I meant the weapon. In four years, Tangent must've come up with a theory or two about what it does. If not by looking at all these wires, then by considering what Pilgrim would have to do to eliminate Tangent. He'd have to compromise the defenses at Border Town, right? Somehow he'd have to do that, from this place, five or six thousand miles away."

"We have a few guesses," she said. "They all hinge on the idea that this building is a transmitter antenna of some kind, possibly directional, that could target Border Town even at this distance. What it does could be any number of things. Maybe it kills people but leaves physical structures intact, like the effect of a neutron bomb. Or maybe it induces a reaction in specific materials, in a way that would kill Border Town's defenses for a period of time. That's one set of possibilities."

"Are there others?" Travis said.

"One other, in particular."

"Which is?"

"That the weapon has nothing to do with taking over Border Town. We only assume that's his plan because it's such a logical power grab. Border Town is the biggest asset in the world if he controls it, and the biggest liability in the world if he doesn't. Plus the Breach itself. Of course he'd want control of that. Logically, it all fits. But who the hell knows? Maybe logic isn't what's driving him. So maybe the weapon just does something catastrophic to the whole world. Maybe it kills ninety-nine percent of it, leaving a scattered remnant population that's easier for him to control."

"You sound like you're leaning toward door number two," Travis said.

She looked down into the fog shroud. "There's evidence for it."

He waited for her to go on.

"We know Pilgrim bought this place in 1995, just a few months after he left Border Town. Strange things started happening in Zurich in the following years, continuing to the present. Suicides have tripled. Domestic violence arrests are up by a factor of four. Certain rare forms of cancer have increased between five- and sevenfold. We only saw all this in retrospect, of course, after we found this place four years ago. It gets more compelling when you pin the locations of all these incidents on a map, and see the distribution around this building. You probably wouldn't see it if you weren't looking for it… but when you do see it, you know you're not imagining it. Seven Theaterstrasse is doing something already. Some little pilot-light version of what it'll do to the world if Pilgrim gets his way and throws the switch."

Travis held her stare a moment, then looked out into the darkness again. Another ambulance flickered silently through the fog on the far side of the river.

"Could you really bring yourself to trigger the nuke upstairs, if it comes to it?" he said.

For a long time she didn't answer, but when she spoke there was nothing hesitant in her tone. "Yes."

"In that case," he said, "I have an idea."