The Breach

CHAPTER EIGHT

Travis expected to have to gently pry the young woman from her grieving. They needed to get out of the encampment and find positions from which to kill the other two hostiles when they returned.

But she sat with her father only a few minutes before standing, taking Travis's knife again and cutting the dead man free. She set him carefully flat on the ground, then looked around, troubled.

Travis understood. "Where do you want to take him?"

Her gaze settled on the dense stand of pines where he'd hidden earlier. "There."

Travis knelt and lifted the man, and carried him to the trees. He maneuvered the body among the boughs and laid it under the deepest cover, then waited silently as the woman stood looking down at it.

"We need to get out of here fast," she said after a moment. "As soon as we kill the two that left on the quads."

"There are more besides them?" Travis said.

"A lot more." She nodded toward the camp. "These guys were calling in on a satellite phone every hour. When their people don't hear from them, they'll know there was trouble. They'll send reinforcements with a helicopter."

The woman took a hard breath, gave her father a last look, then turned away, back toward the encampment. As she did, Travis got another look at her right arm. The set of clamps the torturer had used to pry apart her triceps were still in place, keeping the skin and muscle wedged open at least an inch. Heavy black clots filled the cavity, along with what could only be infected tissue.

Seeing him stare, Paige turned her arm and saw the opening herself. Travis knew by her reaction that she was looking at it for the first time. She took it well.

"I wouldn't pull those clamps out without a doctor close by," Travis said. "You don't want to trap those infections inside your arm, away from the air."

"I don't think I'll be in a doctor's care anytime soon," she said, but made no move to detach the clamps.

She stepped out of the pines and moved into the camp. Travis followed.

"Can you use their satellite phone to call for help?" he said. "Get the military in here, or whoever your people can send?"

She shook her head. "These guys had to use a code to make outgoing calls. If I were more of a tech, maybe I could get around it, but I'm not. How far from a town are we?"

"On foot, fifty miles." He looked at the remaining two quads parked nearby. "We could cover two thirds of it on one of those, taking the long way around a few ridges. Then there's a river, and no way across but log bridges and rocks. We'd have to ditch the quad and walk from there, maybe a full day to reach Coldfoot."

She considered that, looking more concerned than hopeful. Her eyes went past him to the open valley and the succession of mountain ridges beyond, as if the landscape were an executioner's scaffold. Travis imagined a full day's walk over the mostly exposed terrain, being hunted by armed pursuers in a helicopter. The young woman's expression suggested similar thoughts.

"This is going to get bad," she said. She stared a moment longer, then looked at Travis. "My name's Paige. Thank you for saving my life." The riders were coming back. The engines had started up a minute earlier, and now the two ATVs were just visible past the curve of the valley, maybe a mile away yet.

Travis kept his M16 steady against a pine trunk. Paige held her own rifle at the next tree over, left-handed-clearly not her natural choice-and braced across a branch. Her damaged arm hung at her side.

In the silence of the clearing, the distant hum of the engines was no more than an insect buzz. The wind through the boughs was louder. So was Paige's breathing, each intake more a gasp than a breath.

Travis wondered at the kind of resolve someone would need to even be standing after all she'd just gone through. Then he wondered at the stakes required to fuel that resolve.

"You're worried about a lot more than just your own survival," Travis said.

"Yes," Paige said, her eyes staying on the gun sights.

"I want to know what all this is," he said. "I saw the steel container on the plane. And there were details in the First Lady's note, but not enough. I'm going to help you get to Coldfoot, regardless, but if I'm going to risk getting killed over something, I want to know what it is. I don't think that's asking too much."

She looked up, met his gaze evenly.

"What's Tangent?" Travis said. "What the hell is a Breach entity?"

Her eyes stayed on his a moment longer, as the drone of the incoming engines rose. Then she lowered her face to the rifle stock again, eyes down the barrel. Travis looked down his own sights. The riders were still a thousand yards out, just now resolving into distinct shapes. There was no danger of them spotting Travis or Paige where they stood, against the darker backdrop of the camp and the tree cover.

"Tangent is an organization," Paige said. "Our entire purpose revolves around the Breach. Guarding it. Controlling it. And the Breach is… very hard to describe."

"I'm more open-minded today than I was yesterday," Travis said.

Several more seconds passed as Paige considered what to say next. Travis could see the gleam of sunlight off the chrome handlebars of the ATVs.

"Have you ever heard something described as the strangest thing in the world?" Paige said. "A two-headed snake, a potato chip that looks like George Washington, something like that?"

"Sure," Travis said.

"Even in strict scientific terms, with no hyperbole, the Breach is the strangest thing in the world." She thought for a moment, then went on. "It's a source. A technology source. We get things from it. I know that's vague, but I can't say it more clearly. Not just because it'd be an act of treason, but because you'd never believe me unless you were standing right in front of it, seeing it for yourself."

Travis saw her draw the rifle tightly into her shoulder, her left eye narrowing down the sight line. The riders were still well over five hundred yards out, too far for guaranteed kill shots. Travis was about to suggest that when they came into range, he take the left rider and Paige take the right, when her rifle cracked, a mini thunderclap in the stillness. The left rider jerked-Travis saw blood in the center of his chest-and pitched sideways, pulling the handlebars so tightly to the right that the machine jackknifed, flipped and threw him like a crash-test dummy. Which, by that point, he essentially was. Before he landed, Paige fired again, and the second rider's head vanished above the jaw. He stayed on his quad for another five seconds, then tipped straight backward and fell off. The machine rolled thirty yards farther, throttling down to idle, and then just sat there growling.

Travis turned to her, saw her staring at the kills, her eyes hard and-if he was reading them right-unsatisfied with her work.

"I'm better with a scope," she said.

She leaned the rifle against the tree, turned, and went to a pile of the hostiles' gear in the middle of the camp. Within a few seconds she'd pushed aside their belongings-among them a little dirt-crusted shovel-to reveal a steel plate on the ground, eighteen by eighteen inches and half an inch thick. She lifted it with her good arm and let it fall flat on its other side, exposing beneath it a leg-wide hole in the dirt. Its bottom was too deep for Travis to see from his angle.

What caught his eye first was a disturbance to the plate's underside: dark blue corrosion, and a just-visible bulge where the metal had spanned the hole in the ground. Exposure damage, caused by whatever lay unseen at the bottom.

"Any piece of technology we get from the Breach is called an entity," Paige said. "This one is designated Whisper, and it's dangerous as hell. The man who sent these contractors wants control of it. If he succeeds…" She paused, looked at Travis, then shook off whatever she was thinking, and knelt over the hole. "He can't succeed. It's that simple."

She reached deep into the hole, almost to her shoulder, and lifted out a fist-sized object, perfectly round, its surface a dark, iridescent blue Travis was sure he'd never seen before.

The object from the hinged steel cube aboard the 747.

For a moment Paige gazed at it with a mix of revulsion and fear, as if it were a spent fuel rod saturating her bones with lethal rads. Then she narrowed her eyes and seemed to focus past the irrational feeling.

Travis sensed that whatever danger this thing posed wasn't as simple as any physical risk from holding it. Not directly, anyway.

He lifted his gaze from the thing and met Paige's eyes.

"Are you saying the Breach is a lab?" he said. "Some place where we build things like this?"

She shook her head. "It's not a lab. And we didn't build this thing."

"We as in Americans?" Travis said.

"We as in people."

She held his stare a few seconds longer, then stooped and picked up the shovel from the hostiles' gear.

Travis continued staring at her, replaying her last sentence in all its gravity.

Standing, Paige said, "Do me a favor. The thing the other two went to retrieve from the plane looks like an inch of clear tape. It's very important. It's the key that switches the Whisper on. They'll have it with them now. Get it, while I bury this where their backup won't find it."

"We're not bringing it with us?" Travis said.

"We'd never make it. The Whisper's too dangerous without containment. But we can bring the key. All that matters now is keeping these people from recovering both, and contacting Tangent as soon as we can."

With that she turned away, Whisper and shovel in hand, and left the clearing through the trees on the far side.

Travis watched after her a moment, listening to her footsteps recede across the forest floor. Then he headed toward the distant ATVs. He'd gone only a few paces from the camp when he heard the hostiles' satellite phone begin ringing behind him. An hour later they were two valleys away, racing north through one leg of the long and snaking course he'd quickly mapped. Paige was seated in front of him on the quad, boxed in by his arms as he held the handlebars. She'd grown steadily weaker as they'd prepared to leave-the result, she said, of the interrogator's drug wearing off. That and three days of zero sleep catching up. Travis couldn't see her eyes now, but at times her body went slack and leaned back against him before she jostled awake again.

However long it took the hostiles' backup to reach the camp, it wouldn't be long afterward before they noticed a quad missing. At that point, a glance at a map would leave no doubt as to the direction their prey had gone. Coldfoot was the only way out, and there were only so many paths by which to reach it.

Travis kept the ATV on hard ground that took no imprint from the tires, and did his best to avoid the snowfields.