The Breach

CHAPTER THIRTY

Travis brought up the rear, two steps below the other shooters, the advancing crowd just another six steps below him. Slowing them was a lot harder on these stairs; they were wider than those in the basement.

"Landing!" one of the snipers shouted at him, and his next step put him on the flat surface of the second floor. He pivoted around the banister and continued upward, the rifle running dry at that moment. He ejected the clip, took another from his pocket, and as he racked it in he felt the building shudder from the force of an explosion, high above. Paige had closed her eyes and turned away just before the blast. Now she opened them and found the room choked with plaster and explosive residue. Most of the wall around the double doors had been blown out, leaving a huge cavity. The grenade must have triggered a few of the shaped charges. Not bad, though. It could have been about five megatons worse.

She turned her eyes on the Ares, still lying in the nest, bound to the amplifier by the strange channel of metallic light. The tangle of wiring was still encrusted with pressure pads, which now mattered about as much as Post-it notes. She closed in on the Ares at a full run, didn't slow, and kicked it like she was back in high-school soccer practice, doing penalty drills. It shot from its resting place and went tumbling across the room, corners skittering on the wood-but its visible connection to the amplifier held. The silvery, plasma-like channel simply elongated and swung to maintain the connection, like a beam of light following a target. The Ares hit the wall beside the blast cavity, bounced back three feet, and settled in the swirling dust.

The orange-white light still filled the room. The gunfire downstairs went on unhindered.

Paige had never destroyed an entity before. Some of the strictest protocols forbade it. For obvious reasons. Who the hell knew what would result?

She'd know in a second.

She unslung her rifle, shouldered it, centered the sights and fired on auto.

The Ares made a sound like a human scream when it shattered. The room plunged into near darkness as the thing's light vanished, and the plasma channel to the amplifier switched off. Where the Ares had been, wild orange arcs of electricity skittered like fingers over the surrounding floor space, grabbing for purchase. Then they weakened, flickered, and died away. The change came over the crowd in an instant. Travis let go of the trigger, spun hard and shoved aside the barrel of the only gun near him still firing.

The people on the steps below fell back. Where there'd been rage, there was now only shock. And fear. More fear than he'd ever seen. They drew away from the shooters, eyes wide and heads shaking, pleading in at least three languages. No ignoring their faces now. Travis saw them-felt pretty damn sure he would always see them, the way they looked in this moment. Would never lose a detail of this image if he lived to a hundred and five.

Within a matter of seconds the stairs below him were clear, at least of the living. The crowd had turned, shrunk away around the banister and out of view down the next flight. A sound came to Travis now. Like rushing air channeled through some narrow space, keening and high and fierce. It came from every direction. He understood. It was the crowd outside. It was thousands of people suddenly finding themselves waist-deep in the bodies of their friends.

Paige's voice came over the comm unit in his ear. "Weapons tight, but hold positions. Choppers are coming for evac, five minutes. Sit tight until then, in case this isn't over." Five minutes later. Out through the front doors. Over the cobblestone approach. Past the wrought-iron fence. Dawn saturating everything pink, and the fog churning in compound dynamics: surging in toward the still-burning cars, curling violently in the rush of air from the Black Hawks. Four of them. Coming in low from the east, right along Theaterstrasse. Setting down in the street, their rotor wash at ground level pushing the fog back enough to reveal the mounds of bodies at the perimeter. Travis saw the nearest pilot and copilot survey the carnage, their mouths forming words he could lip-read pretty easily.

A moment later he was aboard the third chopper, with Paige beside him, along with a dozen of the others. Strapping in. Paige had the black cube from the ninth floor in her lap. The amplifier.

She cupped her mouth to his ear and shouted, "Take a look!"

She turned the cube over in all directions, showing him every side of it. All were smooth, featureless. No place for any wires or cables to connect. The damn thing had just been lying there, plugged into nothing. It alone was the amplifier; the nine stories of circuitry were all for show.

One more addition to the list of shit he couldn't square with.

The rest of the team from the building had already piled into the remaining Black Hawks, and within seconds the formation was rising. The streets below were deserted of the living for as far as Travis could see. The choppers cleared the roof, pivoted, and headed south over the city in a tight line, black silhouettes against the dawn. At Meiringen, the 747 was already staged at the end of the runway, engines powered and ready. They boarded at a sprint, and three minutes later the aircraft was climbing above Switzerland at the steepest angle its wings could bear, on the chance that someone with a Stinger missile was down there on the pine-covered slopes. When they leveled off at 45,000 feet, Travis saw three escort fighters settle into formation off the starboard wing. No doubt the same number graced the other side, along with others far ahead and behind.

Paige made an executive decision to put the co-pilot at the tail of the plane, under guard, and then chose three operators at random to sit with the pilot in case he made any strange moves. When she returned to the seat she'd occupied on the flight over-next to the one Travis now sat in-she looked more exhausted than relieved.

The black amplifier cube sat on the floor nearby.

Paige ticked off the relevant bullet points on her fingers. "His building is gone; we'll level it with an airstrike as soon as the wounded are pulled out. We have the amplifier. Of the three entities he controlled, we've recovered the transparency suit and destroyed the Ares. He still has the Whisper." She looked at Travis, and he saw something that was almost-but not quite-optimism in her expression. "So what just happened in Zurich? Did we dodge whatever he was planning?"

"We'd have to know what he was planning," Travis said.

"Everything he's worked on for fourteen years is either destroyed or in our possession," she said. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than him.

Travis nodded, accepting her point, but unsure all the same. There was just no way to know what the plan had been. What it might still be.

Paige's cell rang. Crawford at Border Town. She put it on speaker again.

"We got something on that last name on Pilgrim's list," Crawford said. "Ellis Cook. Let me just make sure I understand what you told me. These names were carved into the floor inside the room on Level Nine?"

"Yes," Paige said.

"Where nobody's been for at least four years," Crawford said.

"Right," Paige said. She sounded impatient.

"Ellis Cook had a net worth of over one hundred million dollars. But he made it by winning a Powerball lotto three years ago. Four years ago, when his name was already scratched on that floor, Cook was managing a coffee shop in North Carolina."

Paige looked like she was waiting for more. Or for a punch line, maybe. She stared at the phone, her eyes fixed, narrowed. Then she looked at Travis and said, "What?"

He had no answer for her.

"That's what we know so far," Crawford said. "All of these people were rich as hell when they died, though we're still looking for a specific through line. But at the time Pilgrim carved Ellis Cook's name into that floor, the guy was fielding complaints ten hours a day from people who wanted more foam on their cappuccinos. Your bafflement's as good as ours."

Paige ended the call and stared ahead at nothing for a moment. Finally she shook her head and said, "Look, I accept that the Whisper can know everything about the present. I don't know how it knows that, but at least that information really exists in the world. But Jesus, I don't care how advanced something is, how can it see the future? There's too much randomness. It's chaos."

"You'd have to think it'd be pretty good at making educated guesses," Travis said. "A hell of a lot more educated than ours."

"Educated enough to guess the winning lotto numbers, and which person would pick those numbers, a year or more in advance? Is that even close to possible?"

He met her eyes; they were wide, locked onto his. "Sixty seconds ago I'd have said no," he said. "Right now I'm leaning toward yes."

She stared at him a moment longer. Blinked. Looked away over Switzerland falling behind them. "What the hell are we up against here?"

"I have a thought," Travis said. "But I'm not sure you want to hear it."

"Try me."

"We've been operating under the premise that Pilgrim has total control of the Whisper. That he mastered it."

She nodded. Waited for him to go on.

"What if we have it backwards?" he said. "What if it mastered him?"