Patrick Lee - The Breach

Molly, waiting for the call to connect, shouldered the phone and scooped a key from a pegboard. She tossed it to the big guy and said, "Three's clean, he can set her in there."

The man led Travis through the back exit of the room, into a short hallway lined with doors.

Room Three was simple and clean, lateral sunlight casting a coppery glow on the bedspread. Travis set Paige carefully atop the cover, taking the most precaution with her arm; letting anything press against the wound might traumatize her. As it was, the change of position triggered another of the deep breaths that seemed to nearly choke her.

The guy in the hat stood just inside the door.

Travis watched Paige's breathing return to normal and then said quietly, "Do you have any weapons here?"

In the corner of his eye he saw the John Deere hat turn toward him.

"The camp I found her in," Travis said, keeping his eyes on Paige, "there were different kinds of boot prints, three at least, none of them hers. No telling where those people are now, but if they were to show up here…"

"Christ…" the man whispered.

"The cops are six hours away, like you said," Travis continued. "Anyone familiar with this area probably knows that too. If you've got a gun, be ready with it. You and anyone you trust, if you have more."

The guy nodded, then went to the window and stared out, the brim of his hat touching the glass as he scanned the ridges to the west.

Travis felt bad lying to him, but the truth was simply not workable, and it would have been far worse to stay silent, given the risk he'd just brought upon this place. That part, he felt the worst about. But what choice had there been?

The man in the hat turned back to him. "Yeah, let's not fuck around," he said, and made for the hallway.

"Can I call out on this?" Travis said.

The guy stopped in the doorway and looked at the phone on the nightstand Travis had indicated. "Dial nine first," he said, and left.

Travis pushed the door most of the way shut, took the First Lady's note from his pocket and began to punch in the number she'd provided. As he finished dialing, he heard the door creak, and saw it swing slowly open again under its own weight. The phone cord kept him from reaching it now; no matter.

The call rang once and then a lively recording began. "Thank you for calling Laketon Associates, your consulting solution for dynamic-"

He entered 4-2-5-5-1. The line clicked, and within less than a second a woman spoke.

"Key term," she said flatly, more a demand than a question.

Travis blanked. "I don't know it."

"Who is this?"

Matching her lack of banter, Travis said, "I'm a civilian. I found your plane. Everyone's dead except Paige Campbell."

Things happened very quickly then: a rapid exchange of voices somewhere, then muffled clicks as other extensions opened.

A man: "Where are you calling from?"

Travis thought they probably already knew that. "Coldfoot, Alaska," he said. "The crash site is thirty-six miles west of here-"

"Stop," the man said. "Your line's not secure. Give us direct answers and don't elaborate-"

"They're dead," Travis said. Exhaustion and stress had made it easy to get pissed. "You have one survivor, and if you want to keep her, you better send a goddamn cargo jet full of paratroopers up here, and make sure one of them's a surgeon. She might last another hour, and I could be really fucking wrong about that."

Silence for three seconds-either they weren't used to being spoken to that way, or they were writing it down. Then somewhere in the background of the call, he heard a woman say, "Move on it, go," and he felt better.

"Please answer this question with a yes or no only," the man said. "Are there hostile elements that can reach you within the next hour?"

"Yes."

"Again yes or no, can you estimate the number of possible aggressors?"

"No. But they have something you should know about."

"Go ahead."

"A helicopter. It's not an attack chopper, I doubt it's any threat to another aircraft, but whoever's coming here should be aware of it."

"Good," the man said. Sounding more human, he continued. "Don't say anything about your own defenses on this line. Be as prepared as you can manage, and wait for our people. I'm going to connect you to a surgeon who'll ask you to describe Miss Campbell's condition. Do that quickly and then set about your preparations."

The conversation with the doctor took three minutes. He didn't sound optimistic.

Travis finished, hung up, and pulled a chair from the corner to the bedside. He sat beside Paige and stared. She sounded terrible-worse now than when he'd stopped at the edge of the highway. Her good arm lay facing him; he took hold of her hand in both of his, and closed his eyes. Through the open door he could hear the baseball game on television.

The floor creaked in the hall. He opened his eyes and turned to the doorway. No one there. The creak came again, farther away now, moving toward the front of the lodge.

He'd just turned back to Paige when he heard a pneumatic snap, like a pellet gun firing, and a woman screamed in the front room. The snapping sound came in rapid succession then, and the front of the lodge filled with screams of fear-and pain, clearly. Travis rose fast from the chair, shoved it aside and spun to face the doorway, the 9mm out of his waistband, up to level.

In the instant it took him to do that, the screams from the restaurant were reduced to just one: a man crying and saying "Please," over and over. With a final snap, there was only the sound of the ball game.

Travis waited, the gun steady, keeping himself between Paige and the open door.

The hallway floor creaked again.

The strangest thing about wearing the suit was holding something. A silenced USP Mark 23, in this case. Its bobbing motion, hovering before Karl as he walked, seemed to him very much like the movement of a floating thing. Floating on nothing.

The open door was ten feet ahead on the left.

This would be tricky.

The woman-the only Tangent operator here, and maybe the only one who knew anything-was about a dozen breaths from the grave by the sound of her. He'd gotten a nice long gaze at her arm a few minutes earlier, inside the room while the guy-whoever he was-had called her people.

A random hiker, the man seemed to be.

Karl's orders had been clear but also flexible, given the number of unknown variables in the situation. His superiors had known that Paige Campbell was unaccounted for, would arrive in Coldfoot if she arrived anywhere at all, and that she had hidden the Whisper somewhere near the site of her torture. She could not have taken it with her; nobody on foot could carry a heavy enough containment system to protect against it. She could only have concealed it near the place where, by means entirely unknown, her seven captors had suddenly ended up dead and she'd ended up free.

That mystery wasn't Karl's concern. It was enough that she was here now. She and her new friend. The relevant question was whether, after enduring three days of torture without breaking, Paige had been willing to trust a stranger with her secrets. Did this man know where she'd hidden the Whisper? Equally important: did either of them have the key now?

He quietly raised the upper half of the suit and holstered the weapon, making it vanish. With nothing to give him away, he moved forward, shifting his weight carefully to minimize the floor's creaking. It creaked anyway. Well, better old wood than carpet. Technological marvel though the suit was, it couldn't hide the depressions his feet made in a soft surface He nearly gasped aloud, having come abreast of the doorway to find himself staring into the bore of a Beretta, not two feet away in the hiker's hand. He flinched and, recovering just enough to keep from taking a hard step, moved a foot to the side, out of the weapon's line of fire.