The Breach

Part III
ENTITY 0697
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

They flew west in a kind of perpetual daybreak, crossing the pinched tops of the time zones at the same speed as the Earth's shadow.

Travis tried to sleep. He failed. In the calm hours after takeoff, as the night's adrenaline faded, the events in Zurich caught up with him in full. In the midst of the violence he'd thought he appreciated its scale, but he'd been wrong. With each new hour's hindsight his sense of it deepened, like the piles of bodies in the streets around 7 Theaterstrasse.

Twice during the flight he threw up, just reaching the lavatory both times. In each room he passed along the aircraft's corridor, the operators-still wearing every piece of equipment except their rifles-sat wide awake. Some rested their heads in their hands; others stared out the windows at the black ocean and pastel sky. The view was beautiful, and maybe they needed to look at something beautiful for a while, for whatever help it might offer.

Paige didn't sleep, either. She fell into a long silence over Europe and then the Atlantic. She didn't cry, but Travis saw her hands shaking at times. After a while he found himself following the operators' lead and staring out the window, letting his thoughts go silent. He was looking down at Greenland, the snow reflecting some of the faint pink of the sky, when Paige spoke.

"I was wrong, before." Her voice sounded as strained as if she'd cried, after all. "What I said about the Breach, that we're like Java man compared to whoever's on the other side." She paused again and chose her words carefully. "Really, we're like ants. Ants that accidentally tunneled into a holding tank full of chlorine underneath some chemical factory. That's how far out of our depth we are, dealing with this shit. That's how dangerous it is. And it's how little concern they have for us, whoever they are on the other side. As much concern as the owners of that factory would have for the ants. They probably don't even know about us. Probably wouldn't care if they did." They were over North Dakota now, the landscape shadowy under the same dawn they'd taken off into, in Switzerland. Neither Travis nor Paige had spoken in hours.

Paige's cell rang. It was Crawford. Tangent had located Ellis Cook's daughter, who'd been present at the time of his apparent suicide. The girl had been very close to her father. She might know something. She was on a flight to Border Town right now, landing an hour ahead of them.

Travis found himself thinking about the Whisper again. Unnerving as it was, it made a welcome distraction. Paige ended the call and glanced at him, and he thought he saw the same sentiment in her eyes.

She was quiet a moment, then said, "Have you ever heard of a story called 'The Appointment in Samarra'?" She still sounded worn, depleted.

"No," Travis said.

"I forget who wrote it. One of those things everyone reads in English 102. This servant goes to the marketplace, and he sees Death standing there, and Death makes a threatening face at him. The servant runs back to his master and says, 'Let me borrow your horse, I'll ride to Samarra so Death won't find me.' The master lets him go, then heads down to the market himself, sees Death and he says, 'What are you doing making a threatening face at my servant?'And Death says, 'Threatening? No, no, I was just surprised to see him here. I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.' "

She looked past him, out the window at the waking countryside.

"That's what this feels like," she said finally. "Like no matter what we do from this point on, no matter what path we take, the Whisper is waiting for us at the end of it. If it can guess lotto numbers, it can sure as hell guess our moves. Even if we say to ourselves, 'Well, it would guess this, so let's do the opposite,' we have to assume it could guess that, too."

Travis could only nod. Yeah. No reason to think otherwise.

"So what the hell are we supposed to do?" Paige said.

He thought for a moment. Only one avenue seemed to have any light shining onto it. The hit list carved into the floor at 7 Theaterstrasse.

"We need to know why Pilgrim had those thirty-seven people killed. Or why the Whisper had them killed. There has to be a reason, and it has to matter. And even if the damn thing expects us to find out, and expected it ten years ago, what else can we do? If there's a way out, it's by knowing what it's afraid of."

She nodded, more accepting than agreeing. Which was more or less how he felt himself.

He stared out at North Dakota. Little towns slid by far below, some of them not much more than a set of crossroads with a streetlight or two, still shining in the half-light.

A strange thought came to him. Actually, it wasn't the thought that was strange. The thought was normal. All that was strange was that he hadn't considered it until now.

His former life was over.

His apartment in Fairbanks. His job there. His pressing decision between staying or going home to Minneapolis, going to work with his brother. That life was gone, as if someone else had lived it. He was here now, part of Tangent whether he liked it or not. If he ever went home, there was no question that Pilgrim's people would be waiting there for him. And given all the sensitive things he knew about the Breach now, Tangent would probably want to keep him among their own ranks after this was over, if only for their own security reasons.

If either he or Tangent still existed when this was over.