The Breach

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Pilgrim stood at the wedged-open shaft doors and stared down into the semi-darkness. Ten feet below, his fat-ass second in command, Jackley, with the help of three others, was making good progress on the blast doors. It was tedious work. The hanging platform-its suspension cables came up through the open doors to anchor blocks bolted into the corridor floor-made a terrible base from which to drill. The harder Jackley pushed the carbide bit against the steel, the more the platform itself moved. To cope with this long-foreseen problem, the others on the platform had two-by-fours that they propped against the shaft wall, opposite the drilling focus. The nearer end of each two-by-four had a flat board tacked onto it, and Jackley braced his back against these as he drilled. It was a tricky solution that required a lot of hands and attention, but it did the job.

Pilgrim wasn't stressed about it. In truth, he couldn't remember the last time he'd felt stress of any kind. How could he, with the Whisper in his service, leading him all these years to the goal he'd demanded of it?

Control of Border Town.

Control of all the powerful things that lay inside the Primary Lab, just beyond the blast doors below. So many of the wonders in there, Tangent had never fully understood. Entities that were obviously built for great and terrible purposes, but which the researchers had never learned how to operate. How to even switch on, in some cases.

The Whisper would know, though. Once he was in there, he'd have everything he needed.

Over the years, he'd learned not to question the snaking course it had charted for him. It was a great big thing that he'd asked of it. A thing he'd have never accomplished on his own. So of course the plan would be puzzling to him. Of course it would be elaborate and confusing. That was part of its power. And now it'd worked. He was here because he'd trusted the Whisper and followed its plotted track exactly.

Even keeping the survivors alive upstairs. Including Chase. Chase, whose importance the Whisper had emphasized above all others. Pilgrim had only vaguely wondered why. Maybe the guy would turn out to be an exceptionally useful subordinate for him, given time enough, and pressure. Who knew? Who cared? If the Whisper wanted him here, that was enough.

Below, Jackley was using the carbide bit as more of a blade than a drill, cutting a manhole-sized circle into the foot-thick blast door. Now he hooted excitedly, because he'd come back around to where he'd started. The drill bit met the beginning of its own circular track, and the excised plug of steel dropped an inch, settling on the bottom of the widened opening with a heavy thud.

"Magnet," Jackley said.

The man behind him lifted the battery-powered workhorse magnet from the platform and handed it to him. Jackley held the magnet's base against the steel plug, and switched it on. With a bass hum, it drew itself against the metal hard enough to pull Jackley off balance. Now each man on the platform took hold of the magnet's broad handle and leaned back, drawing on it.

"Careful now," Jackley said. "Closer she gets, the softer we pull."

The plug slid outward, two inches, then four, then six. At eight inches it began to tilt, and Jackley stopped the others with a gesture.

"Pull us away," he said.

The others gripped the beams on the shaft wall and pulled the hanging platform back from the blast door, allowing the plug plenty of room to fall without landing on the platform itself. Jackley leaned forward carefully, his stomach braced against the platform's safety rail, and gave the magnet one last tug.

The plug tipped out of the opening and tumbled away into the pitch blackness below. Silence as it plummeted nine stories. Then, impact. Like a battleship's deck gun going off. Pilgrim felt the reverb in his bones. He loved it. Loved everything about this moment. Jackley and the others looked up at him, grinning like idiot kids. It made him laugh.

Only one thing left. Jackley just had to wriggle his body through the hole in the blast door and hit the override, ten feet inside the lab. Then the doors would open wide. The men let go of the shaft wall, and the platform swung to the center again. Jackley grabbed hold of the opening, steadied his footing, and shoved his head and upper body through. In a few seconds he was halfway in, his legs kicking comically in space as the men laughed and pushed on his feet to help him.

Then came a scream from overhead, somewhere in the inky darkness of the shaft, high above. Not a human scream. A metal scream. Some mechanism protesting with a squeal of friction. And then surrendering. Silence.

The men stopped laughing, and looked up.

Jackley stopped kicking. "Fuck was that?" he said, his voice muffled through the opening, which was mostly filled with his ass now.

For another second, nothing happened. Then Pilgrim felt a breeze. Gentle as a sigh, it blew straight down the elevator shaft and through the open doorway around him. The men down on the platform reacted to it as well; it tousled their hair about in little whipping motions.

Then one of them flinched hard, and screamed like a ten-year-old girl. A second later the world in front of Pilgrim's face filled with blurring metal, there and gone in the same half second, and the support lines for the maintenance rig snapped with guitar-string twangs, just audible over the sickening crash from right below. Pilgrim staggered back from the open doors, and two seconds later, down at the bottom of the shaft, came an impact that dwarfed that of the steel plug a minute earlier.

The echoes took forever to fade. When they did, Pilgrim heard against the silence a high, keening cry. He returned to the open doors and gazed down on the blank darkness where, seconds before, the rig had hung. Now there was only empty space. It took him a moment longer to process what else he was staring at, and then he understood where the cry was coming from.

Jackley. Guillotined neatly through, where the elevator had scraped past the opening in the blast doors. Sliced like a cross-section in an anatomy textbook, right through his ass, blood pumping from his severed body like water from a compressed sponge. He was still alive. His upper half still hung there inside the lab, out of Pilgrim's sight. But not out of his hearing. The crying went on and on, high-pitched and incoherent.

This could not be part of the fucking plan. How the hell had the Whisper let it happen?

Pilgrim turned. His eyes went to the hinged steel box five feet away, blue light flaring from the seam.

But he didn't move toward it. His eyes locked onto something else, which stopped him in his tracks.

A.45. Hanging in thin air. Three feet away. Aimed at his face.

The hallway fell silent. Even Jackley's cries had stopped. The gun hovered, granite steady.

"But I did everything it told me to do," Pilgrim said at last, hearing a tremor in his speech. "Right to the end."

"And that's where you are," a man's voice said.

Pilgrim saw the gun's muzzle flash, but didn't live long enough to hear the shot.