Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

The door opened and a man in his fifties walked in. He was trim, six feet tall, with dark hair going a little gray. He was far from what Paige had pictured-whatever she'd pictured. He looked wrong for the office. His eyes, in particular, looked wrong. There was no arrogance in them. No presumption. Paige thought of one of her father's friends, a pediatric surgeon she'd met on several occasions. She'd always been struck by his eyes: weathered by the years of suffering they'd seen, but not beaten. Isaac Finn's eyes looked almost like that-they missed by some degree Paige couldn't account for.

None of which mattered, in any case. Kind-looking eyes could be a trick of genetics or an unconscious mimicry of some long-dead parent. There were better lights by which to judge a person, and Finn didn't look good in any of them.

He had a coffee cup in one hand. In the other he held the black cylinder Paige had shown the president last night. He crossed to his desk and set down the coffee. He turned and looked at Paige. He seemed to be appraising her in some way. Coming to a decision.

"Free her legs," Finn said.

The nearest of the two guards came over. He took a jackknife from a sheath on his belt, opened it, and cut the tie binding Paige's ankles. He backed away to his original position.

Finn stared at her a moment longer. Then he tapped the cylinder. "The president told me about your demonstration of this, in detail. You told him it's safe for a person to step through the projected opening."

Paige nodded.

"You didn't do that for him, though."

"It wasn't necessary. He saw that it worked."

"I want to see you do it. I want to see for myself that a person can go through."

He strode to the long walnut table that stood behind the couch. He set the cylinder on it, braced on either side with a pair of leather-bound books that'd been lying there. He aimed it toward the southern windows, just over ten feet away.

He put his finger to the on button, then looked at Paige and raised his eyebrows as if to verify that he was doing it right.

"I don't know how much simpler I could've labeled it," she said.

Finn pressed the button.

The light cone flared and projected the opening just shy of the windows.

Paige watched Finn's body language. It was immediately clear that he hadn't seen the cylinder in action until now. He stared at the opening. His face was perfectly blank. He stood there, not moving at all. Ten seconds passed. Then he stepped forward. He walked along the edge of the light cone, giving it space. Paige had done the same thing a few days ago, the first time she and the others switched it on.

Finn walked to within a foot of the opening, to its right. He stared through for a moment, and then abandoned his fear of the light and moved directly in front of the open circle. He gazed out at the ruins. Paige saw his head shake from side to side, just noticeably.

"Jesus, it works," he whispered, so softly that Paige almost missed it.

Then he turned to her. Waved her up off the couch.

"Do it," he said. "Step through."

She knew exactly what would happen if she did. She sat there for three seconds considering her options. She didn't have any. And it didn't matter what happened to her now. All that mattered was what Bethany was doing, if she'd gotten out of Border Town. Paige wished again that there were a way to know. It would be a comforting thought, and a comforting thought would be nice right now.

"Fine," she said.

She stood. She rounded the end of the couch and crossed to the opening. Finn moved aside for her. She rested her hands-still bound at the wrists-on the bottom of the circle, and stared out over the sprawling woodland. She could see the Washington Monument punching up from the canopy about a mile away. She couldn't identify much else. The White House was completely hidden by the trees. The Capitol Dome should've been visible, but it wasn't. Paige remembered taking a tour of the building in high school and learning that the dome was made of cast iron. She recalled hearing what it weighed, and not believing it at the time. Something like 11 million pounds. That much weight would've worked against the building's supports pretty quickly once corrosion set in.

Paige gripped the lower edge of the opening and leaned her upper body through. She looked down for a place to put her feet. The thick girder that formed the boundary of the top floor was right there, running side to side past the opening. The supports for the balcony extended outward from it, long since relieved of the concrete surface they'd once held up. They were just solitary beams now, each one about six inches wide, jutting out over the abyss like a pirate's plank. The nearest was right in front of the opening.

Paige let her eyes take in the rest of the structure beneath her, a latticework of steel plunging sixteen stories to the foundation pit. She'd never been a fan of heights. She looked left and right along the girder she was about to step onto. It took all of her control to keep from showing any reaction to what she could see.

She put one leg through the opening, and then the other. As her second foot touched the girder she felt Finn's hand close around her upper arm. He held on tightly, preventing her from making a run for it to the left or right.

"Straight ahead," he said, and shoved her by the arm.

To keep her balance against the push, she stepped forward onto the narrow balcony support.

Finn was still holding on. Through his grip Paige felt a sudden back-and-forth movement of his body. She pictured him waving with his other arm, silently calling one of the guards over. She imagined the man nodding, already briefed on this, crossing the room and drawing his Beretta as he came. Finn gave her arm another shove, forcing her to take a second step. She was three feet out on the narrow beam now, at the extent of Finn's reach. Nowhere at all for her to go.

Finn released her arm.

A second later she heard the Beretta's slide being racked behind her. F inn stepped away from the projected hole and gave Boyce a clear line of sight to make the kill. Boyce paused just outside the light cone, hesitant to let it touch him. Then he shrugged, stepped into the light and faced the hole.

Finn watched him assess his prey. Watched his expression take on the fake, wired kind of calm that spoke more of testosterone than real composure.

"She's cute," Boyce said. "Sure we have to rush this? It's not like anyone's gonna find the body and swab it for DNA."

Finn took a step closer to him and spoke evenly. "If I ever hear you advocate unnecessary suffering again, you'll be the one standing out there. Do you believe me?"

Boyce looked at him. The bullshit calm receded from his eyes. "Yes, sir."

"Make it painless. Shoot her in the back of the head, centered in a line between the ears. Don't miss."

"Yes, sir."

Boyce raised his Beretta.

He extended it a foot through the opening.

He thumbed off the safety.

And then a hand came out of nowhere, from outside the opening on the right edge. It locked onto Boyce's wrist and yanked it downward. Boyce had just begun to flinch when a second hand came through, this one holding a SIG-Sauer P220. It jammed the barrel into Boyce's eye and fired, blowing his head apart. A fragment of skull hit Finn in the face. He staggered back from the opening. In his peripheral vision he saw Kaglan, still in position at the door, reaching for his own weapon-but the SIG was already coming up to level on him. A tenth of a second later it fired again, three shots in a tight pattern. Kaglan screamed and went down. He managed to return fire, but his aim was all over the place, most of his shots missing the opening and cratering the windows beyond it. The SIG shooter stepped away from the opening on the far side until Kaglan ran dry, and then the weapon came back through the hole and began rapid-firing blindly into the room.