Patrick Lee - Deep Sky

“The door combo was real,” Travis said. “That’s all I have to go on.”

Dyer looked thoughtful.

“What?” Travis said.

“The drug you described,” Dyer said. “That’s real too. It’s called phenyline dicyclomide. They use it for interrogations. It’s been around for about twenty years, but they perfected it in the last ten, in places like Gitmo. Intel guys call it hypnosis in a vial.”

“It makes you talk?” Travis said.

“It can. But its selling point is that it makes you act . It hits you in two stages. The first one lasts a couple minutes. Mild hallucinations, with an amnesia effect; you don’t remember much of anything from before the drug kicked in. Then comes the second stage, maybe five minutes long, during which your short-term memory is fractured down to a second or less. Someone can speak to you, and you can forget each word as it passes. Very disturbing effect—with two kickers. One, you can still follow commands. Even complex ones that are too long to remember. If I’ve got your laptop sitting there, I can tell you, ‘Log into your e-mail account and your banking site,’ and you’ll probably do it. Passwords and all. You’ll be forgetting the command even while I’m saying it, but you’ll follow it anyway. It’s a conditioning thing—it functions like a habit. They say you hear the command well enough to obey it, but don’t remember it well enough to resist.”

“Why am I not even vaguely surprised we develop shit like that?” Bethany said.

“The second kicker is even better,” Dyer said. “While your memory is crumbling by the moment during Stage Two, you can still remember Stage One. Stage One is really all you remember, during that time. Usually they’ll keep you in darkness, with no sound, so there’s not much to remember anyway. But if they want to, they can make use of the effect. They can feed you information in Stage One that you’ll use in Stage Two. They might say, ‘Your brother is flying into LAX tomorrow, United terminal, five thirty in the afternoon.’ Then when your memory starts to fracture and you’re open to commands, they give you a phone and say, ‘Call your brother’s usual driver and arrange to have him picked up.’ You’ll do it, because you remember hearing that he’s coming in. Just like that, they find out who his driver is.”

“Sounds useful,” Travis said.

Dyer nodded. “If they’re employing that drug on Garner and one of the others, I’m not surprised they know the door combo by now.”

“Couldn’t they just know everything?” Paige said. “Couldn’t they command Garner to start telling the whole story?”

“Getting directly into someone’s secrets is tricky,” Dyer said. “Like with real hypnosis—a person’s moral restraint weighs in. They say you can make someone in a trance state bark like a dog, since it’s no big deal, but you can’t make him kill his best friend. I think secrets are in the same vein—if it really matters to keep them, people do. So it’s one thing to type a password by habit; it’s something else to start spilling information you’ve protected for years.” He paused. “But they can use the drug over and over, and it can wear you down after a while. So yeah—in time they might know everything.” He looked at Travis. “If they learn your name, I think the game’s over. If not, there’s still a chance.”

Something seemed to occur to Dyer. His eyebrows drew toward each other. “This room you saw Garner in—was there light brown carpeting with gold stars in a wide-spaced pattern? A star the size of a cookie every couple feet?”

Travis visualized the little room again. He let the image form for a second or two. “That’s exactly what it had,” he said.

“And you heard jet engines running?”

“The three of us were on a jet at the time. That was just background noise . . . seeping into the dream.”

“I don’t think it was,” Dyer said. “That carpet is aboard Air Force One .”

For a moment Dyer’s expression flared with hope, but almost as quickly it lost its edge. Doubt faded in. His face became a tug-of-war between the two.

“Garner reassigned me to the Treasury branch of the Service after he brought me in on all this,” he said. “He needed me out of harm’s way if shit happened. But my BlackBerry still gets automatic updates of the plane’s flight plan. If we get back outside, I can find out where it is.” He frowned. “I just don’t think that’s going to make a difference.”

“Why wouldn’t it?” Travis said. “You could just call someone and tell them Garner’s being held aboard the plane. You’re in the Secret Service—contact someone at the top. Contact everyone at the top. They can’t all be aligned with Holt on this thing.”

“No one’s going to believe any of it,” Dyer said. “Think about it. Think how that phone call would sound.”

“Then make up something more credible. Say whatever it takes, just get them to raid the plane. Once they find Garner, it’ll all come undone.”

“There is no one on this planet with the authority to raid that plane. Stuart Holt is the president of the United States.” He pressed his hands to his temples. Shook his head. “What happened last night was the endpoint of years of planning. Nothing will have been left to chance. Six agents are listed as killed in the attack on the White House, but if Garner didn’t die in the explosion, I doubt those agents did either. I’m sure they were murdered because they weren’t part of the arrangement. Which means everyone else is part of it. Everyone who matters, anyway. Holt’s probably got a skeleton crew aboard Air Force One right now. A tiny circle of loyalists, seeing all of this through. No official outside that shell is going to break in through it.”

His eyes darkened then. Some kind of cold acceptance settled in. “We don’t have to worry much longer anyway, about Garner being interrogated. That’s where the deadline comes in.”

Travis shared a look with the others. “What do you mean?”

“They all agreed, back in 1987, on a panic option. They figured if the hammer came down, it’d be some huge simultaneous move against all of them. Their thinking was, if some of them survived, they might have time to call in hired muscle and try to free the others. So they agreed on a timeline. If any were taken alive, they’d endure torture for exactly twenty-four hours, and then kill themselves. They have hydrogen cyanide caplets sewn into their tongues.”

“Christ,” Bethany whispered.

“Six hours from now,” Dyer said, “Garner will bite out the caplet and swallow it. Whoever’s being held with him will do the same. That’ll be it.”

The metallic tapping stopped.

Nothing replaced it.

The minutes drew out.

Travis watched the others try to keep their nerves steady. Paige, sitting next to him, took his hand.

They waited.

He found himself going back to the message from the Breach. The understanding that it was about him, and always had been. Even when he was ten years old.

He couldn’t grasp the concept. Couldn’t get within a mile of it. After a while his mind settled on a more material problem. He understood he was only thinking about it for the distraction it offered. He thought of it anyway:

Even if everything went perfectly in the next few minutes, how would he get inside Border Town in 2016? It would be the best-defended military outpost in the world by then. He’d infiltrated the place once before while it was under someone else’s control, but only with the help of an entity—one of the most useful ever to emerge from the Breach.

His stream of thought came to a dead stop.