The Breach

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

"Tell me," she said.

"I need to know something first." He looked around at the mess of wires at their backs, filling the room except for this narrow passage by the window. "All this circuitry and equipment that's accessible, Tangent's studied every inch of it, right?"

"Every connection, every processor, every jumper setting. Everything."

"Any of the wires not plugged in?"

She didn't follow.

"I mean, was there some random corner on one of these floors where it looked like the work hadn't been finished? Wires hanging loose, circuit boards lying around, tools on the floor? Anything like that?"

She shook her head.

Travis thought for another moment and said, "He was three hours from activating this place when Tangent showed up in 2005."

She nodded.

"Three hours away because he was three hours from having it finished, right?"

"That's always been the assumption, yeah."

"The unfinished work wasn't anywhere in this tangle that we can see, and the five steel boxes were already welded shut, so he must have been done with whatever's in those. That leaves the ninth floor, behind the closed doors. Three hours' worth of work left to do, up there."

She was nodding again. Tangent had figured this part out long ago. Which he'd assumed.

"When you took over this building, where did you find the Whisper?"

"On the seventh floor, in a shielded box."

Travis thought it over, putting the sequence of events together in his mind. Trying to see it all from Pilgrim's point of view, that day when he'd been forced out of here. That thought process-mentally tracking someone's moves, getting inside a subject's head-was familiar, like putting his hand into a baseball glove he hadn't worn in almost two decades. The kind of thing he'd once been good at, in spite of his motivation.

"All right, it's May 17, 2005," he said. "Pilgrim is three hours from finishing the weapon. He's working on it. He knows Tangent is close, because you've nailed some of his people in recent weeks. He obviously doesn't know Tangent is literally moving in, or else he'd have left even earlier. Which means he's not using the Whisper at this moment, or else it would've warned him. And it's plausible enough that he wouldn't be. I mean, he's been building this place for ten years, this close to the end he probably knows all by himself what's left to be done."

"Okay," Paige said.

"So he's up there, working on the ninth floor. The Whisper is safe in its box on Level Seven. If he gets the two-minute warning that Tangent's coming down the street, what does he do?"

"Apparently he shuts the doors on Level Nine, shoves the pressure pads into the gaps, and flees the building."

"So he takes the time to do that," Travis said. "But he doesn't stop for a few seconds on the seventh floor, on his way down, to grab the Whisper? The thing that matters more to him than his own senses?"

"Yeah, we know that doesn't add up," Paige said. "Which is why we don't think he was on the ninth floor when the warning came. We think he was on the first floor, for any of several reasons. The kitchen is down there, along with the only working bathroom."

"That makes it even harder to believe," Travis said.

For the first time in this discussion, Paige looked uncertain. She waited for him to continue.

"He's down on the first floor. He gets the call. Shit, Tangent's coming. They're so close, even if he sprints out the door right now, he could still get caught. There's simply no time to run up seven flights for the Whisper. So he does the hardest thing he's ever had to do. He leaves the Whisper and he runs."

"Right."

"So how do the doors on the ninth floor get closed and pressure padded again?"

She shrugged. "He had to have done it before he came downstairs, as a standard procedure. Must have always done it. Sealed it up whenever he came down, unsealed it when he went back up. He would've known how to do that, how to switch off the pressure pads when he wanted to go back in. I'm sure we could figure it out ourselves, with a little trial and error-if 'error' didn't mean vaporizing a city."

"But that's the part that doesn't work," Travis said. "Pilgrim rigging the doors just to run downstairs for a minute. Think about it. Ten years of work. Work that's going to give him the world, or whatever he wants. He's three hours away from wrapping it up. He's probably done nothing but work on it for the final few days. Probably hasn't even slept. Let me guess, in the kitchen downstairs, every cup was coffee stained. Even the ones that weren't coffee cups."

She looked vaguely impressed at that.

"Amphetamines too, right?" he said. "Not meth. Maybe prescription stuff."

Paige nodded. "Dexedrine. Good guess."

"Not really. It's just nothing unusual. I spent three years working vice; it's not as long as most, but it's long enough. Long enough to see the same pattern, over and over. Pretty much identical, for all of them."

"All of who?"

"People doing things they're not supposed to. People whose lives would basically be over if they got caught. People who are in no position to fuck around. A guy like Pilgrim, those last days in this place, that close to getting away with what he was doing, I doubt he'd waste five minutes to go down and make a sandwich. He'd have someone bring it up to him, and he wouldn't stop working. Whatever he had to go downstairs for that day, it wasn't going to take long, and he sure as hell wasn't going to make it take longer by stopping to shut the door and arm the pads, then disarm them again when he came back. Not three hours from the finish line."

He could see in Paige's eyes that neither she nor anyone in Tangent had considered this angle before. Maybe they just hadn't been under the right pressure. Maybe they hadn't been in dire enough straits to consider the option Travis was considering right now.

"But the pads were in the doors," Paige said. "So what are you saying?"

"I'm saying he had it rigged so he could go in and out quickly, without having to stop every time. Minutes would've been precious at the end. I'm saying the pads on the doors upstairs are decoys. You could open those doors and walk through them, right now if you wanted to."

For a moment she said nothing. Just stared at him. Then: "The wires to the pads are live. We checked for current."

"Sure," Travis said. "He'd make it look real. He'd make it impossible to know, one way or the other."

More silence. More consideration. He watched her, aware that the idea didn't have to make perfect sense. It just had to be less batshit crazy than the other options they were stuck with, including sitting here like paper targets.

She seemed to agree. She took out her cell and dialed. He heard her address the same person at Border Town that she'd called earlier. She explained the idea. Travis couldn't tell, from Paige's half of the call, what the other party thought of it. A moment later Paige said, "Yeah, put them all on." Then she waited. And waited. And her eyebrows furrowed. The party on the other end said something-Travis couldn't make it out-and Paige took a hard breath. She lowered the phone an inch and met his eyes in the darkness.

"None of our three detachments in the city are responding."