Patrick Lee: Ghost Country

He stared at the light cone, shining intensely as it charged the projected opening.

The seconds drew out like exposed nerves.

Then the light cone vanished, and the timing light vanished, and if there was even a hundredth of a second between the two events, Travis couldn't tell.

He looked for the iris.

It was still there.

Still open.

Central Park waiting on the other side.

While he was looking at it he heard a hiss and felt the cylinder vibrate in his hands. He looked down and saw wispy tendrils of smoke issuing from inside the casing, coming out around the three buttons. The thing was dead.

Travis got to his feet and shouted for Paige and Bethany, loud enough that pain flared in his throat. P aige hadn't heard Travis in the past half minute. Now she heard him again, and at this range she caught in the sound what she'd missed earlier: panic.

He was screaming for them to move as fast as they could.

Paige had felt like she was moving her fastest, but hearing the tone of his voice, she found she could move a little faster. So could Bethany.

Travis kept shouting, providing a source for them to fix on. H e wasn't even looking at his watch now. It didn't matter. They'd make it or they wouldn't. It was hell not being able to run toward them and help close the distance. He could only stand there, shouting, unable to hear their approach. P aige saw him. Fifty yards ahead. Saw him react to the sight of them. Saw the iris hovering open just beside him as he waved them on.

She also saw the cylinder, lying discarded on the ground. She saw just the faintest trace of something coming off of it. Like smoke.

She got it without getting it.

Got it enough to understand it was time to move her ass a little faster still, and to urge Bethany ahead of her.

"Dive through it!" Paige shouted. "Don't slow down!"

She saw Bethany nod.

They covered the last distance, and Bethany went through the opening like a kid through an upheld hula hoop. Paige followed. She passed across the threshold into a world of filtered sunlight and the rumble of traffic and some kind of heavy turbine engine whine. She hit the ground at the base of a shrub, and looked up. She was just at the edge of tree cover, looking out at a broad, sunny expanse of the park that could only be Sheep Meadow. Hundreds of people ringed the space, and-pretty damned improbably-there was an Air Force-marked Sea Stallion parked out in the middle. Paige had just absorbed that fact when she felt Travis hit the ground next to her legs. She turned to look at him, but saw that he wasn't looking back at her. He was looking up toward the iris behind them.

But by the time Paige followed his gaze, no more than a second after Travis landed, there was nothing to see but shrub leaves and blue sky beyond. The iris had already disappeared.

Travis got his final update on the entire situation four days later. He got it by phone from Garner himself. Travis was seated near the back of a United Airlines 757 on approach to Kahului Airport on Maui.

Longbow Aerospace had been raided. The process had been well underway even by the time Travis landed with the dying cylinder in Central Park. The raids were authorized by the few mid-level Justice Department people that Garner explicitly trusted, and within hours the evidence had been exposed: control hardware and software for the strange and surprising instruments that were really in orbit aboard the Longbow satellites. By then the information was in too many uncorrupted hands for anyone to head it off. Not even President Currey could contain it.

The real story was never going to go public as anything more than a rumor. Travis had expected that. But the stand-in story was close enough: Longbow had knowingly put a weapons platform in orbit that violated several treaties and international laws. They'd done it without the government's permission or even its knowledge-though many individuals within the government were tied to the incident. People were talking. Turning on each other. Names were being named. Including that of Audra Finn. She'd been taken into custody during the initial raids, and had already become the face of the story in the media. The faked death was just too irresistible a detail. Authorities were eager to speak to Audra's husband, as well, but no one could seem to find him.

In strict legal terms, President Currey was well insulated from Longbow and the investigation surrounding it. But hundreds of powerful people in Washington who hadn't been in Finn's inner circle learned in detail what Currey had really been a part of. These men and women, at all levels of Justice and even the CIA, had no trouble grasping the severity of what had almost happened. Any one of them could stand in their children's doorways late at night and consider Currey a man who'd intended to kill them. It wasn't a good situation for the president. He knew it too.

He resigned from office three days into the investigation-yesterday. By that time, comparisons to Watergate had already fallen away. This was something much bigger. Essentially, the entire administration was stepping down. There'd been constitutional scholars on all the cable news nets talking about the event in terms of its logistics. Who the hell was in charge now? And how would that person be selected? Congress had managed to agree, pretty overwhelmingly, on at least a temporary solution: Richard Garner could come out of retirement. Maybe he could even finish out the term he'd been elected to, and 2012 could be another election year as scheduled. No one had offered much resistance to the idea, and Garner had been sworn in two hours before calling Travis on the plane.

All that remained to be squared away were the satellites themselves. They still had plenty of station-keeping propellant on board. Enough to boost them way out into what was called a disposal orbit, where they'd be harmless. But in the end, nearly everyone with any say in the matter had voted to go another route: push the damn things right down into the atmosphere and burn them to cinders.

"You should have a pretty good view of the show from Maui," Garner said. "First re-entry is a couple hours from now between Hawaii and the Marshall Islands. About half of them should burn up over that area, and they'll all be gone within the next twenty hours."

"I've got a place in mind," Travis said.

"Reservation for Rob Pullman?"

"His last."

"If you want my advice," Garner said, "try not to have the room to yourself all night." He managed a laugh. "But who the hell am I to tell people what to do?"

They said good-bye and ended the call. T ravis rented a car at Kahului, went west to Highway 30 and took it south. He followed it clockwise around the broad sweep of the island's western half, the Pacific at his left blazing with scattered evening sunlight. He passed upscale residential districts and clusters of hotels along the shore. Halfway up the west-side coast he took a left off the highway, and took another a quarter mile later. He pulled into the Hyatt Regency Maui, got out and followed a footpath to the beach. He stopped at the margin where the stone tiles met the sand.

He saw Paige after only a few seconds. She was sitting alone on a towel, staring at the sea. She hadn't seen him yet.

Travis took out his wallet, withdrew a folded paper he'd kept in it for over two years, and stepped onto the beach.