Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

"How far from blind can we get?" Travis said.

Bethany looked at her phone. "It depends on the connections I can make. Names to bank accounts. Other kinds of holdings, like real estate. Connections from those back to other names. Like that. If I could get a clear enough picture of who's involved in this thing, it might tell us who's not involved. It would make our guess a hell of a lot more educated, anyway. The problem is that none of the names we know right now will help us. Not the president. Not anyone in his cabinet. Their names won't be on anything damning, I promise." She looked at the building again. "What I need are names from inside there. Owners. Executives. Almost anyone. It'd give me a loose end to start with."

She looked thoughtful. But not optimistic. Her eyebrows made a little shrug, up and down, and then she turned back to her phone.

"We'll see," she said, and went to work on it.

Travis said nothing for the next ten minutes. He left her to it. He stared at the high-rise and thought of how it would work if they could get the FBI's cooperation. The bulk of the Hostage Rescue Team was right across the river at Quantico. Between them and whatever local police they felt like coordinating with, there could be a sea of armed law enforcement around the green-tinted building within a few hours, like rabid fans waiting for a pop star to come out of a hotel.

At which point Paige's survival should be assured. The people holding her were corrupt and violent, but they weren't stupid. If the game was absolutely up, then their focus would shift to securing high-priced lawyers and cutting deals with authorities, turning against one another in the process. They would have nothing to gain by killing Paige at that point, and they would have plenty to lose.

But until that point, she might as well be kneeling in her own grave. Her captors' reasons for keeping her alive could evaporate any time. It was hard to imagine she had more than a few hours left. Maybe not even that. Travis felt a tremor in his hands on the tabletop. He made them into fists.

Bethany finished with the phone and set it in front of her.

"Nothing," she said. She didn't sound surprised. "Every transaction is routed through some middle pathway with a gap in it. Everything from the original construction costs to last month's electric bill. It's strange how it works, but a relatively small enterprise can actually have much better protection than a big international bank or a federal system like Social Security. Giant trillion-dollar organizations like that have to be widely accessible. It's the whole point of their existence. They can be secured, but they can't be secret." She nodded at the high-rise. "A place like that can be secret. It can do its business without anyone knowing its name, or the identity of its CEO. And it does. The place is an information black hole. Someone very smart worked very hard to get it that way. Probably someone I've played tennis with."

"Can you run the license plates of these vehicles we see going in?"

She shook her head. "I'll try it, but it won't work. They'll all be registered to some service that doesn't have to keep client names on file, or something close to that. There'll be a gap in the dominoes somewhere, I'm sure of it. We could even rent a car and try to tail someone home tonight, but I'll bet you a shiny half-dollar that these drivers are trained to go through shakes along their routes."

Travis knew the term. A shake was any wide-open space, like an empty stadium parking lot or a fairground, that a driver could pass through in order to reveal a tailing vehicle. In the movies a smart hero could glance in his rearview mirror and spot a tail five cars back amid rush-hour traffic, even though the law of averages pretty much guaranteed that a few vehicles in the pack were following the same route just by chance. In real life, professional drivers used shakes.

Bethany rubbed her temples. She looked very tired. "In my old line of work there's a term for this kind of setup. Have you ever heard of an oubliette?"

"Can't say I have."

"It's a kind of prison cell. Was a kind of prison cell. In the middle ages. A cell with no bars, no walls, no door and no lock. The simplest kind was just a platform sticking out of a smooth castle wall a hundred feet above the ground. They lower you onto it from above, and there you are. Imprisoned by nothing but open air." She nodded at the building. "That place is a kind of oubliette for information. It's not that there are firewalls protecting its identity, or powerful encryption algorithms. I'm sure it's got all that too, but what really protects it is just open space. All the paper trails leading in have just the right breaks in them. It's the sort of thing you can only pull off if you have the right kinds of connections and a lot of money. Enough to bend the rules around yourself."

Travis watched another SUV pull into the place. The driver looked like an NFL linebacker with a Marine haircut. Maybe he'd been both of those at one time.

"It's not gonna happen with the FBI," Bethany said. "Not if we don't know who we're dealing with."

Travis nodded, his eyes still locked on the building.

"What about Tangent's hubs?" he said. "Didn't they have a couple dozen of those around the world? Secure sites staffed with their people, armed and trained to beat hell? Couldn't we get help from one of those?"

Bethany was already shaking her head. "The hubs are gone. They only existed to deal with Aaron Pilgrim. Once that threat was eliminated, there was no more need for them. Hub staff were never really members of Tangent to begin with. They were elite military units from a number of countries, cleared for some minimal knowledge of Tangent and its operations. Over the past two years they've all been let go, with nice, thick nondisclosure documents to sign on their way out."

She was looking down at her hands as she spoke. She looked about as lost as anyone Travis had ever seen.

"I don't know what to do," she said. "We're not going to get any help, and we're not getting in there by ourselves. You know that, don't you?"

Travis stared at the place. If Paige's room had a window, and if she could stand up and walk to it, she could see the two of them right now-even if she'd never recognize them at this range.

He looked away from the building. Met Bethany's gaze.

"Yes," he said. "I know. Every guard in the place will have an automatic weapon and a big red button that can lock the whole building down."

"And we're a kid armed with a slingshot."

Travis's eyes fell to Bethany's backpack lying between them on the table, and the long cylindrical shape inside it.

"We don't know what we're armed with yet," he said.

Bethany nodded. "Let's find out."

Paige woke in the same place where she'd fallen asleep: a hardwood-floored office eight or ten stories up, overlooking D.C. through tinted windows. The room was bare. The windows stretched from floor to ceiling. She lay in the center of the open space, her wrists and ankles bound with heavy-duty zip ties.

It was morning now, but during the night she'd lain awake here for hours, listening to footsteps coming and going in the corridor. Overhearing conversations outside the door, hushed and tense, right at the brink of her discernment. One word had jumped out at her half a dozen times, maybe the working title of some project or operation. The closest thing to context she'd gotten was a single exchange, a few decibels higher than the rest of the talk:

"They sound rattled. They're not thinking of shutting it down, are they?"

"Umbra? Not a chance."

Umbra. Paige had fallen asleep replaying the word in her mind, along with the rest of the exchange. Now she was awake, still replaying it. Trying to fit it with the scattered knowledge she'd had before coming to D.C.