The Breach

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Her name was Lauren. She was sitting in Paige's office, almost on the spot where Travis had been standing when his bonds were removed a day earlier. She was twenty-three, but looked a lot younger than that at the moment. She looked like a lost child.

Travis was standing with Paige. Crawford and a few others were in the room too. For half an hour they'd asked Lauren all the questions about her father that the computers hadn't answered for them. So far, nothing useful had emerged.

There was something in the girl's eyes that Travis recognized. He'd seen it in people before, during interrogations. An eagerness to reveal something, stifled by fear of doing so. Fear because she didn't trust them.

Travis leaned close to Paige and whispered a question in her ear. She looked at him, understood his idea, and nodded. She stepped out of the room, taking out her cell as she went. Lauren's dark eyes followed her out, then returned to Crawford as he asked her to clarify something she'd already clarified twice.

A few minutes later, Paige returned. She was carrying a black plastic case. An entity case.

Travis waited for another exchange between Crawford and Lauren to end, then said, "Can I speak to her?"

Crawford nodded. Travis took a step toward Lauren, met her eyes, and spoke softly but directly.

"You don't believe your father killed himself, do you?"

She shook her head, her eyes never leaving his.

"There's no way," she said. She was quiet a moment. Then she looked at the floor, and continued. "Everyone's been telling me I need to accept what happened, or else I won't be able to deal with it. They said people always feel the way I do, when this happens. And they said it's normal for there to be… no warning. They told me they reviewed the security footage from all over the estate grounds, before and after it happened, and nobody came or went. But my father didn't kill himself. And I don't care whether you people believe me-"

"We know he didn't kill himself," Travis said.

Her eyes came up again. Stared at him. He turned to Paige, and she handed him the black case. He set it on the table next to the door and opened it. It looked empty. Travis reached in and took hold of what he knew was inside it. He couldn't be sure which part he was grabbing, but the effect was identical to picking up an article of clothing with his eyes closed. He felt something like a shirt sleeve at once, and a second later his hand found the hem at the shirt's bottom.

He turned back to Lauren.

"The man who murdered your father was wearing this," Travis said, and shoved his arm through the open bottom of the shirt, as far as it could go. He saw the arm and most of his shoulder vanish into nothingness.

Lauren's body jerked. She stared at the empty space where Travis's arm should have been, her eyes huge. Head shaking now, just noticeably. Her mouth formed a question, but it didn't come out. She only stared. Five seconds passed. Then ten.

When she did speak, her voice was barely audible. "Where is he now?"

She was looking at Travis again by the time she said it. He met her gaze without blinking.

"Dead," Travis said. "I killed him."

He watched her reaction, and saw what he'd hoped for. She knew he was telling the truth.

"We're not the bad guys, Lauren," he said. "Whatever it is you're afraid to talk about, you can tell us."

She looked at him a moment longer, then turned her eyes to Paige and the others, one by one. Each nodded.

Her attention came back to Travis, and after another moment she returned to staring at her own knees.

"My father belonged to a group of people you've never heard of. You won't find anything about them by looking at his tax records, or his phone logs. The other people who were killed, these past several years, were part of it too. I'll tell you as much as I know." As much as she knew wasn't a lot. Her father had sought to protect her from what he was involved in.

The group had no name, she told them. That was supposed to be a security measure. Among its members, it did have a nickname-something of a joke-which was never written down: The Order of the Qubit. Travis didn't know that word. Everyone else in the room did. Qubit stood for "quantum bit." A computing unit of a quantum computer. For the better part of the past decade, a few dozen governments and a few hundred companies had been trying like hell to develop quantum computers, which were expected to be dramatically more powerful than computers at present. But other than very limited proof-of-concept stuff in labs, no one had had any luck. It was one of those things everyone was sure would exist at some point. But whether that point was five years away, or fifty, was tough to pin down.

Lauren thought the Order of the Qubit dated to the early nineties. As she understood it, it was more or less a group of very rich people funding their own secret work toward building a viable quantum computer. Their motivation was simply fear: in the global race to make one of these machines, whoever crossed the finish line first would gain a great deal of power. As it happened, a lot of the institutions who were likely candidates to win the race couldn't be expected to use that power for the world's best interests. Many could be counted on to use it for nearly the opposite purpose. The Order of the Qubit wanted to win that race itself, then carefully select a few organizations that really did have the big human picture in mind, and simply give them the technology.

Good idea. Also a good way to get killed. Entrenched interests tended to dislike threats to their power, and to express that dislike violently.

As to whether the group had achieved its goal, or even gained any ground toward it, Lauren had no idea. She also had no idea where their work was conducted, where their meetings were held, or where Tangent could locate any other member of the organization.

She finished speaking, and looked at them each in turn again.

"Did I help?" she said.

Travis met Paige's eyes. Saw that she was thinking exactly what he was thinking. He looked at Lauren again.

"You helped," he said. "They have one," Travis said. "A working model."

He and Paige were standing in the open doorway of the pole barn on the surface, watching the jet-a Gulfstream this time-take off with Lauren in it. She'd asked to stay in Border Town. She'd said she'd feel safer there. She wouldn't have been. This was probably the least-safe place on Earth right now, lying in the Whisper's gun sights. Lauren herself should be under no real threat elsewhere; she'd already given them all the information she had.

"I think they must," Paige said.

Travis watched the plane diminish to a desktop model of itself. Then a speck. Then nothing.

"Is there any chance a computer like that could outthink the Whisper?" he said. "Is that why these people are a threat to it?"

"I only know a little about quantum computers. Stories about their potential show up in tech papers once in a while. I know their power grows exponentially the more qubits you add, but that in itself has been the trick. Adding more of them. There's some kind of engineering limit, ten or twelve qubits, something like that. Not enough to do very much. But if someone built a quantum computer with fifty qubits, or a hundred, it'd be off the charts. Way, way off the charts. I think there are still limits to their use, even then-limits on the kind of math they can do-but there'd be creative ways to get around that. There's no question it would be a big deal, if someone really had a scaled-up version working."

Travis thought it over, watching empty sky now. Even if they were right, it didn't fully make sense. If the thing was really a threat to the Whisper, then the Whisper should have seen that coming too. Should have directed Pilgrim to find and destroy the place where the thing would be built, long before it was completed.

That was just one of the things that made no sense to him. There were several others. He couldn't help thinking that the confusion was part of the Whisper's plan. Any good strategy should look like nonsense to those facing off against it.

What was the plan? What was the Whisper's final goal? It was hard enough to figure out what a human being wanted. What the hell did this thing want? On that point, he couldn't even form a guess.