Patrick Lee: Ghost Country

"This could get a lot worse," Travis said.

"It already has," Bethany said.

She backed out the satellite image to a full view of the country, then dragged it sideways and zoomed in again, this time into the vast darkness that made up the American west. Only the digitally generated borders and roads gave any sense of scale as she zoomed. She pushed in tight on the emptiest part of eastern Wyoming, a hundred-mile-wide square bound by I-90 to the north and I-25 to the south and west. She zoomed in until the highways disappeared off the edges of the frame, leaving the screen entirely black. Border Town was somewhere in the middle of this area, Travis knew.

"In darkness these satellites use thermal imaging," Bethany said. "But Border Town's heat signature is carefully managed. Any heat output is first stored underground, and only released during daylight hours, specifically at times when the desert surface temperature exactly matches that of the exhaust ports. The compound is thermally invisible."

She pressed the button she'd used earlier to zoom, though it was impossible to see any result on the screen. There was only more darkness.

Then Travis saw something. A bright white speck moving rapidly across the top of the frame. It trailed a line behind itself, narrow at the front, fanning out and dimming toward its end. Bethany pushed in tighter. The speck resolved into two. Two specks, two trails. Moving side-by-side in formation. They were much faster in the smaller field of view. Bethany had to keep dragging it sideways to keep up. Travis noticed a distance scale at the bottom of the screen. A thumb's width was about half a mile. The two specks were covering that much distance every few seconds.

"Fighters," Travis said.

Bethany nodded. "I first noticed them during the flight to Atlanta. I spent about twenty minutes using specialized software to identify them by the heat plumes. They're Super Hornets. Dual role, able to engage both air and ground targets. There's another pair orbiting on the far side of the same big circle, about a forty-mile radius around Border Town."

"It's a blockade," Travis said. "No one's going in or out of there."

Bethany nodded again. "President Currey probably ordered it within an hour or so after the hit on the motorcade, once he decided to go all in. I must've gotten away by a margin of minutes." T hey fell into a silence for the next half hour. They listened to the whine of the engines and the soft tones of the avionics up front. Bethany stared out the window. Travis stared ahead at nothing and thought of the power that was arrayed against them.

Bethany turned to him. "Can I ask you something personal?"

"Sure."

"Why did you leave Tangent?"

Travis thought about it. He thought of how complicated the answer to a simple question could be.

"Things would've gone bad if I'd stayed," he said. "Somewhere down the road."

"What made you think that?"

"Something told me," he said. The statement was more literal than it sounded.

"If we get through all this, maybe you'll feel better. Maybe you'll feel like coming back."

"I'm never coming back. If we're alive when this is over, I'll set up another identity like Rob Pullman, and find another warehouse to work third shift in for the rest of my life."

"You do realize you could make it easier on yourself. As long as you're creating an ID from scratch, you could give yourself a few million dollars. You wouldn't have to work at all."

Travis shook his head. "Money is means. It's better if I don't have much. Better if I stay on the fringe. It's the one way I can be sure things will be okay."

She stared at him. It was clear she had no idea what he was talking about, but after a moment she let it go and looked out the window again.

They landed at Dulles and took a cab into the city. Half an hour later they had the location. The survivors of the motorcade attack-whichever ones they were-were in a sixteen-story office building overlooking the traffic circle at M Street and Vermont Avenue. The building had reflective green-tinted glass. It had no corporate logo visible. Just an address in large black letters on its concrete foundation, right next to the main entrance on the east side.

The signal was coming from the ninth floor at the northeast corner, directly facing the traffic circle.

Travis and Bethany were sitting on a cafe patio on the far side of the circle, one hundred yards from the building. It was 7:30 in the morning and the city was alive and busy in the early light. Every surface glittered. It looked like it'd rained all night and only cleared in the last couple hours. The story of the motorcade attack was everywhere. There was a big LCD screen inside the cafe playing the aftermath footage on a loop. The subject dominated every conversation Travis could hear at the tables around them.

Bethany had her phone low in her lap, out of sight to others nearby. Travis watched her mouthing commands she was entering into it. He couldn't make out any of them. Probably wouldn't have understood them any better if he could see them typed on the screen.

After a minute she looked up at him. "Signal strength is pretty weak now. Fall-off is consistent with a living body gradually flushing the iodine through the kidneys and passing it out as urine. And once it's in the sewers it's way too dispersed to read." She frowned. "This signal is also consistent with just one body. Paige is the only survivor."

Travis nodded. He stared at the corner of the ninth floor. No way to see in. No way to tell if Paige could see out. Maybe it wasn't even a window. Maybe the glass exterior concealed a brick-walled holding cell on that floor.

"So what exactly are we up against, here?" Travis said. "What do we know, right now? We know Paige and the others came to D.C. to meet with the president, and show him the entity. We know they trusted him, at that point. And we know that once they were attacked, they realized they'd been wrong about him-and that he's part of this thing, whatever it is. Whatever she and the others were trying to learn about. And obviously, lots of other people are involved too. Including whoever controls this building."

Bethany continued gazing at the structure. Travis did the same. They'd seen no one enter on foot through the street entrance yet. A number of cars had pulled off of Vermont into the narrow drive that separated the building from the one next to it-a building that had its own garage entrance at the front. That meant the cars going into the drive were entering the green building by some entrance at the rear. Most of the vehicles were town cars or SUVs with tinted windows in the back, professional drivers alone up front.

"Let's see who owns the place," Bethany said.

She went to work on her phone again. Travis watched screens of data, reflected in her glasses, flashing and changing every few seconds.

After a minute she frowned.

"It's not federal property," she said. "It's not listed that way, at least. The district records have it as a corporate office structure, privately held. Built in 2006. No entry for a company name, or any shareholder's name. Maybe it's a defense contractor, or a civil-engineering firm, something like that."

She stared at the building for a long moment, eyes narrowed.

"Can you get anything more on it?" Travis said.

"I have to, if we're going to help Paige." She looked at him. "Here's what I'm thinking. If we wanted to get some help, like official help, it would have to be the FBI. There's really no one else who can touch something this scale. But we'd need to be careful as hell. Whatever Paige and the others stumbled onto, whatever it is that the president is protecting, we have to assume that everyone he's appointed is on the same page as him. And since Currey's taken office he's replaced both the attorney general and the FBI director. And who knows who they've fired and replaced since then. They've probably got all kinds of loyalists in the ranks by now. If we go in blind, we stand a good chance of just touching the same nerve Paige touched."