Patrick Lee: Ghost Country

If the sight of the weapon made Bethany more nervous than she already was, Travis couldn't tell. T hey were in the air fifteen minutes later. The little business jet banked into its climb and gave Travis a last look at the spiderweb of highways crisscrossing Atlanta. He was sure he would never come back, unless he happened to be passing through. Rob Pullman wasn't going to show up for work tomorrow. Wasn't going to answer his door when the landlord came to ask about the rent next week. It occurred to him with a kind of sad amusement that Pullman would probably never be reported missing. Just fired and evicted in absentia. No great loss to anyone.

He and Bethany were sitting at the back of the plane, ten feet from the pilots. The engine sound was more than enough to mask their conversation if they spoke softly.

Bethany took out her phone and plugged it into a data port on her armrest.

"The plane has satellite capability that my phone doesn't have by itself," she said. She pulled up a screen that reminded Travis of computer programs from the eighties and early nineties: a black background with a simple text prompt, like an old DOS system. He was sure the program wasn't actually old; Bethany was just navigating the no-frills backwaters that ordinary users never saw.

"Will the pilots see this on their screens?" Travis said.

"Nobody will see. Not even the satellite vendors."

She typed a command string that looked like random letters and numbers to Travis, and executed it. An hourglass icon appeared for a second, and then the little screen filled with a street map of the United States, overlaid on a satellite image. The satellite layer was fractured into several distorted squares, overlapping one another to make a composite. Travis realized what he was looking at: not the static view of the world that was available on any number of websites, but a realtime image composed of multiple live satellite feeds. Most of the visible United States was still deep in the shadow of night.

Bethany used the phone's arrow buttons to center the map on Washington, D.C., and zoomed in until the city filled the frame. Even in that narrow field of view Travis could see a margin where coverage from different satellites overlapped. The margin was moving, just perceptibly, a pixel's width every few seconds. He envisioned recon satellites skimming over the Earth in low orbit, their fields of view always moving relative to the ground.

Bethany zoomed in one step further. More detail of the city emerged. Travis saw the long green belt of the National Mall running left to right across the middle of the image. Just above it was the focal point that several major streets converged toward: the White House. A mile northeast of that, an area of about three by three blocks was highlighted in bright yellow. Bethany tapped that part of the screen.

"Still there," she said. "The survivors have been somewhere in that rectangle since I first checked around two in the morning. They must have been moved right after the attack, which would've happened further south, between the White House and Andrews. The fact that I'm getting a signal means at least one of them is still alive." She thought about it and added, "Or at least their blood hasn't congealed yet."

Travis waited for her to explain.

"They have a radioisotope in their bloodstreams," she said. "Iodine-124 doped with a signature molecule. Harmless levels of it are in the water supply in Border Town, and it stays in the body for about twenty-four hours after last ingestion. Certain satellites can pick it up, but only very, very faintly. The signal is far too weak for them to get a sharp focus on it." She touched the yellow rectangle on the map again. "What you're seeing there is the computer's best guess about where the target is. When we get on the ground in D.C. I can get the signal directly with my phone. That'll narrow it down to a building. Even a specific part of a building once we're close enough."

Travis recalled the mindset he'd adopted during his short time in Border Town. The logical flexibility that was such a necessary part of life there, like the native tongue of a foreign land. He found it coming back to him now. Radioisotopes in the water. Christ.

"I guess that's another trust thing," he said.

"The iodine? Sure. It's a precaution in case someone tries to leave Border Town with an entity, unauthorized. Other than me, the only people who know about it are inside that rectangle in D.C. right now."

"No offense," Travis said, "obviously Paige trusts you in a jam, but why would she have told you about the iodine before last night?"

"I'm sure she trusts me as much as any of the other new blood-maybe an inch more, since she recruited me herself-but she didn't tell me about the iodine. I told her."

Travis waited.

"It was Paige's idea to implement the technology," Bethany said. "But only after I told her how it works."

"I take it you didn't work at a petting zoo before she recruited you."

Bethany managed a smile. "Not exactly." She looked down at her phone. Stared at the map as if she could look right through it at Paige. "I'm twenty-four years old. I finished college at nineteen. I've spent the last five years working for a company that handles data security for the biggest clients in the world. International banks. Trading firms. The Department of Homeland Security. It's hard to overstate how sensitive a job like that is. It's kind of like the companies that make the lock mechanisms for bank vaults. You know how that works? Like, there are hundreds of companies that build vaults, and vault doors, but they never build the locks. There are only two or three companies in the whole world that make those. It's just one of those things you don't want a million people to be familiar with. Better for everyone if it's limited. Data security is the same way, at the high end. The systems that protect the largest corporations and government agencies are scripted and run by just a handful of people. And until this spring I was one of them."

She looked out the window. The whole sky was pink and the landscape below was coming to life in ripples of light and shadow.

"That's the story behind Renee Turner, by the way. I'm sorry if it's bragging, but there are maybe twenty people on the planet who know information security like I do. Paige has some skill in that department, but it's an entirely different thing if you've specialized in it for years. I created Renee tonight, based on an old college fake ID I had in my wallet. I sat down in a booth at Burger King in the Rapid City airport and I magicked her to life in twenty minutes using this phone. She has a social security number, DMV record including a DUI and two speeding tickets, bank accounts at First National and B of A totaling three million dollars, and a paid membership with Falcon Jet. I even gave her an arrest for having sex on a park bench in Miami when she was sixteen years old. I think that's a nice authentic touch, in case anyone looks up departures out of Rapid City and digs into her background. Who'd make up sex on a park bench?"

"Renee sounds fun."

Bethany shrugged. She looked down at the phone again. The diamond-shaped coverage zone of a new satellite drifted slowly into the frame. "Anyway, I'm sure Paige recruited me because I know how to code high-end security for data networks like the one in Border Town-and how to stay ahead of new technology that threatens it. But I guess it wouldn't surprise me if she had other reasons. Like maybe in some general way she could imagine a time like right now. Some rainy-day scenario when Tangent would be up against people with very serious resources on their side. Maybe she just wanted someone on her side who could counter that kind of thing."

Travis considered that. For the first time he saw the situation in its broad context, beyond the danger that Paige was in. The president of the United States had made a direct, aggressive move against Tangent. Had crossed a line that no one had crossed for the three decades that Tangent had existed.