Patrick Lee: Ghost Country

She set the cylinder back in her lap, half in and half out of the open backpack.

"So, Monday," she said. "The closed labs. I know Paige and the others did a safety assessment first, because they took test organisms in with them. Fruit flies. Nematode worms. Half a dozen mice. I guess the entities checked out fine, because they returned all the animals to containment by that night, and nothing was wrong with them. Then on Tuesday morning they took both entities up into the desert and did more work there. A lot of it. They stayed up there all that day and right through the night. I doubt they even slept, unless it was on the ground. They kept coming back down, one or two of them at a time, and taking communications gear up to the surface. Long-range radio equipment, every kind of frequency. Satellite stuff too. Big transmitting and receiving dishes, and the tools to take them apart and put them back together. I have no idea why. Then early Wednesday, a little less than twenty-four hours ago, they brought it all back down, and the entities too, and told us they were leaving for a while. Maybe for weeks. Maybe longer than that. Some kind of exploratory trip involving the two entities, putting them to use somehow. They wouldn't say more than that, except that their first stop was Washington, D.C."

"What were they going to do there?"

"Meet with the president."

"Did they say why?"

"Not really. I got the impression they wanted his help with what they were doing. Like going to him was the logical first step in the process."

"On the phone Paige told you not to trust the president," Travis said.

Bethany nodded. "Something changed her mind about him." She went quiet for a few seconds. She stared ahead at the pressing darkness over the freeway. "I think the president was behind the attack on the motorcade. I think he had to be."

Travis thought about the damage to the vehicles again. The kind of weapon that could do that wasn't handheld. It needed a heavy tripod. It needed setup time too. A couple minutes, at least. You could ready one inside a van, but then your firing positions would be limited to where you could park, and you'd be a lot less agile once the shooting started. You'd need to put yourself in just the right spot, well ahead of time, and to do that you'd need to know the target's exact route and schedule.

Only the president and a few aides would've had that information.

Travis thought about President Garner, a man he'd spoken to on the phone once, briefly. Like the five presidents before him, Garner had enjoyed close ties with Tangent while never making a move against its autonomy.

But Garner wasn't the president anymore. He'd resigned from office two years ago, after losing his wife to what the world believed was a heart attack. His replacement, Walter Currey, had carried on the former administration's policies to the letter, and already made it clear he had no ambition to run for another term in 2012. Currey had been a friend of Garner's for over twenty years. He'd made a speech at the First Lady's funeral and had to stop twice to keep his composure. By almost anyone's measure he was a good man.

Maybe he was just good at looking like a good man.

"Anyway, that was it," Bethany said. "They left for D.C. yesterday afternoon. And late last night I got the call you heard. I tried calling Paige back after it cut out. Nothing. Right to voice mail. So then I just did what she told me to do. I got the entity from her residence and I got the hell out of Border Town. I guess I understand the point of not telling anyone there. If she wants me to go underground and use this thing-whatever it does-then the fewer who know about it the better. And it was faster that way, without notifying anyone. No group decisions, no proper channels. I just called in one of the Gulfstreams we keep at Browning Air National Guard Base in Casper. Did it on Paige's authority. This was less than five minutes after the call. No one had learned of the motorcade attack yet. It took the plane ten minutes to reach Border Town, and another ten to fly me to Rapid City in South Dakota. And then Renee Turner chartered a private jet, and Bethany Stewart vanished off the grid. As far as anyone knows, I'm hitchhiking on Interstate 90. And now I'm here, and you know as much as I know."

Travis said nothing for a long moment. He considered all that she'd told him. He let the pieces fall together where they seemed ready to.

"Learn from it," Travis said. "That's how Paige phrased it in the call. Whatever you learn from the entity, make it public."

Bethany nodded.

Travis looked at the cylinder sticking half out of the backpack.

"Paige and the others learned something from it," he said. "Something big and important that the world would want to know about-something that should be made public. But there must have been even more they wanted to learn. That's what the exploratory trip was about. Like they'd found one piece of some puzzle, and they were going off to find the rest of it, using the entity. But before that, they went to see the president, to show him the one puzzle piece they already had. Maybe they thought he could help them make sense of it. But that plan backfired. Whatever they'd uncovered, the president didn't want it made public. Didn't want them digging up the rest of the pieces. Maybe Paige and the others didn't realize what they'd stumbled onto. And obviously the president did."

"They touched a nerve of some kind," Bethany said.

Travis nodded. He thought of the burning vehicles in the street.

"A big damn nerve," he said.

"Hence the instruction to go underground. Figure it out for ourselves and trust no authorities."

Travis looked at her. "But you're not going underground. You're going right to where she was attacked. Something she'd probably tell you not to do."

Bethany returned his gaze. "You don't sound like you disapprove."

"I don't."

He saw the hint of a smile in her eyes, buried under a ton of stress.

"Do you have some way of finding her?" he said. "If she's still alive?"

"I have a way of trying. It's hard to explain how it works. Easier if I just show you once we're on the plane. But I can only locate her. After that, I don't know what to do. She'll be somewhere secure." She looked down at the black cylinder. "I guess I'm hoping that whatever else this thing does, it can help us with that part, somehow. No reason to expect that, I know. It's just all I've got. After we get Paige's position, we can find someplace safe and switch this thing on, and then I guess we'll find out."

She went silent again. She watched a sign with directions to the airport slide by. Then she looked at him. "You don't have to help me, you know. You don't have to get involved in this at all, if you don't want to."

Travis watched the road. He thought of Paige, bound somewhere, her life in the hands of whoever had hit the motorcade. Just ahead, I-285 swung broadly to the east, toward the blood-red promise of dawn at the horizon.

"Yes I do," he said.

Travis parked in the long-term lot, a quarter mile from the private hangars.

"Do they search your bags before you board a private flight?" he said.

Bethany shook her head.

Travis turned and took hold of the upholstery of the passenger seatback just behind Bethany's left shoulder. The narrow panel of cloth that covered the side facing inward was loose at the top, a half-inch flap that would look to any observer like a sign of wear and tear. It wasn't. Travis pulled down hard on it, and the few threads binding the cloth to the seatback broke easily. The move exposed the seat's interior, a cage of spring steel and foam. He reached inside and felt his hand close around the grip of the SIG-Sauer P220 he'd hidden there two years before. He took it out and set it in Bethany's backpack alongside the black cylinder. Then he reached back in for the three spare magazines he'd stashed with it-a fourth was already loaded into the gun-and put them in the pack too.