The Breach

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

"This can't be happening," Paige said.

They could hear the screams coming up out of the fog, from the leading edge of the incoming swarm, less than a block away now. The buildings directly around 7 Theaterstrasse were corporate and commercial structures, empty at this hour, so the crowd had originated from farther away. But not by much. The frenzied movement of the nearest flashlight beams drew closer with each second. Travis thought of the feral rage of the test subjects in the video, rushing inward toward the man in the cage. The scale of the situation had been amplified a thousandfold in this place. Seven Theaterstrasse was the cage now, and all of its occupants stood in the crosshairs of the effect, which extended at least as far as the edges of Zurich.

The forefront of the crowd was maybe fifty seconds away, surging between buildings to the west, and onto the two nearest bridges spanning the river just to the south.

Paige's cell rang. She answered. It was someone aboard the AWACS, circling high above. Travis could just discern the tinny voice over the phone, reporting a visual on something strange happening down in the city.

"We noticed," Paige said.

In Travis's ear, the sniper and spotter teams reported in, one by one, as they retook their window positions.

The reality of what was about to happen descended on Travis like a poison cloud. He saw it settling over Paige at the same time, as she watched the flashlights race in toward the building. The nearest were past the bridges now.

The last of the snipers reported in. Travis could picture their rifles silently tracking the advance of the crowd while they waited for the order.

"We should just let them in," Travis said.

"They'll kill every one of us," Paige said.

"Yeah."

He was surprised by how little fear he heard in his own voice. How little he felt, for that matter. Maybe there was just too much of it to process. What he had in place of it was logic.

"It's not their fault," he said. "A few of us dying, instead of hundreds of them, that's not a hard choice at all."

For a moment he saw agreement in Paige's eyes. What other option was there?

And then her eyes changed, and in the same instant Travis understood why. The wicked effectiveness of Pilgrim's trap became clear. There would be no simple way out of it. Not even by suicide.

"Christ," he whispered.

He saw in his mind what would happen in this building, less than a minute from right now, if they held their fire and let the crowd in. He saw the rush of bodies coming up the stairs like fluid under pressure. Saw them clambering over one another, tearing at the jungle of wiring that filled the space of every floor. Crashing through the clearings with the metal boxes, and the delicate wires for the pressure pads that were almost certainly not decoys.

"If the nuke goes off, the crowd dies anyway," Paige said. "The whole city dies."

Travis could hear it in her voice: confirmation of everything she'd feared about this building. Here at last was the spare hostage. The one Pilgrim wasn't afraid to pull the trigger on.

But she also looked confused. Damn confused. And even in the tension of the moment, Travis thought he knew why. Because the whole building seemed to have been devoted to creating this effect. The whole building was the second hostage. So where the hell was the weapon Pilgrim had spent a decade working on?

Travis's line of thought was broken by a singular cry from the mob, clearer than the rest. It was furious, and wild, and so high-pitched that it could only belong to a very young girl, maybe younger than ten.

The crowd's leading edge was less than twenty seconds from the building.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck…" Paige breathed.

Travis wondered how many kids were among the crowd, but only for a moment, because he already knew how many. Every kid in Zurich would be out there, soon enough.

"Miss Campbell?" one of the snipers said over the comm unit, the voice tight like a wire.

The question was obvious.

So was the answer.

Paige swallowed hard, bit down on whatever she was feeling, and said, "Weapons free."

The night came alive with gunfire.

Travis saw the muzzle flashes from a dozen windows below him, across the face of the building. Saw the red paths of tracer rounds cutting through the fog, the snipers picking out individual targets for each shot. And though he couldn't see the victims at street level, as the snipers could with their FLIR goggles, he saw the results as clearly as he needed to. The flashlights at the forefront of the charge were suddenly kicked backward, their beams flipping end over end. The front ranks were cut down in rapid succession, and Travis heard screams of pain, mixed with surprise and fear. Men, women, children.

But the charge didn't stop. Didn't even slow. The rest of the surge, coming from behind the fallen, hardly faltered over the bodies. Travis saw the wave of incoming flashlights stutter-step where the first victims had gone down. The dead served only as speed bumps for the horde.

More flashlights were coming on in the windows of other buildings as the sleeping residents of the city woke, roused either by gunfire or by the effect the Ares had had on them. Beams flared behind panes for spare seconds, just long enough for their owners to take a look at 7 Theaterstrasse and know that the targets of their rage were somewhere inside. Then each light turned away quickly, as the people behind them ran for the stairs. Ran for the street. The whole city would be out there in a matter of minutes.

Down in the fog, the mob made forward progress in spite of the gunfire. Travis saw Paige's eyes, filled with hard tears, spilling now. She was tough as hell, he knew, but tough didn't cover this kind of thing. Nothing did, short of psychosis.

"It's not enough," she said, her voice cracking twice in those three words. "Single shots aren't going to keep them back."

She turned from the window and moved quickly into the tunnel of wires, toward the stairwell. Travis followed. Paige reached behind herself as she went, unzipped her backpack and plunged her hand into it. She came out with something that looked like a flashlight with lenses at both ends. The Doubler. It was more or less what Travis had pictured when he'd read the report, though its details drew his attention: the way its surface caught the light, the way its separate materials-whatever they were-met without seams. It was unlike anything he'd ever seen. A tool built by alien hands.

Paige reached the top of the stairs, and shouted, "Seventh floor, ranking operator to the stairwell!" She had to yell it again, waiting for a gap in the shooting, before one of the snipers, a woman in her thirties, appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Travis had seen her introduced earlier as Miller. She looked as shaken by the events of the preceding minutes, as Travis supposed all the snipers were, but she was steady on her feet.

Paige tossed her the Doubler and yelled, "They need to switch to autofire! Grab five magazines, double them compound until they're eighty, then use that group for a basis and start massing piles right where you're standing. I want one person acting as feeder for each floor, running clips to the snipers. Double some fresh rifles, too. They won't last long under the strain."

Miller nodded and disappeared with a purpose.

Travis and Paige returned to the window. Outside, the crowd had filled both bridges to the south, and all the streets between the buildings in every other direction. Gathered flashlights flickered around in the fog, like lighters above the crowd at some end-of-the-world rock show. At the mouths of each of these bottlenecks-bridges and streets alike-the amassed dead had finally begun to constitute a real obstacle for the incoming throng, and where the surge backed up, Travis suspected that even some of the living had stumbled and been trampled, and become a part of the barricade themselves.

The snipers were still firing single shots, picking their targets. As Travis watched, the nearest outriders of the mob were always the ones taking the hits. A flashlight bobbed over the pileup on the near end of the left-side bridge, and came hurtling toward the building at impossible speed. No fucking way could a human move like that A rifle cracked from the fifth floor, straight below Travis, and the fast-moving light in the fog clattered on the cobblestones as a man screamed. Under the scream, Travis heard the telltale racket of a bicycle wiping out.

The piles of bodies were only doing so much. The fifty-foot buffer zone around the building wouldn't last much longer if the autofire didn't start soon.

Travis heard someone crying in pain, somewhere in the dark below. The man who'd come in on the bike. Still alive. He sounded young, maybe just into his twenties. His cries were so full of suffering it turned Travis's stomach. Paige's eyes were still rimmed, catching the moonlight and the red tracer fire from below. She held on to just enough composure to keep her breathing steady. The dying man's cries escalated to screams. He was saying something in German. A single word over and over. "Bitte! Bitte!" Travis thought it meant "please." The tone sure as hell implied that it did. Paige reached into her vest, came out with a pair of FLIR goggles and strapped them over her eyes. She leaned through the window, shouldered her rifle and aimed it down. She fired a single shot, and the man's screams switched off instantly.

A few seconds later the autofire began, one sniper at a time, and after a moment the night was a roar Travis could barely think above. The impact against the advancing crowd was more dramatic than he'd imagined. The front lines were carved back in savage arcs, like weeds falling to scythe sweeps. Paige tore off her goggles, overwhelmed by the detail she must have seen through them, and finally lost control. She turned toward Travis, put her arms around him and held on fiercely. He held her in return, his own eyes flooding against his will, and hoped to hell Aaron Pilgrim ended up in his gun sights at some point.