Patrick Lee - The Breach

Travis knew what the thing was, though he'd never seen one in person before, and didn't suppose the ones he'd seen in movies were very authentic. They hadn't been, but he knew it by sight anyway. It was cone-shaped, the height of a washing machine, drab green with a dark red star painted on it. One side of it was open, revealing complex circuitry, and admitting the wires that snaked in from every pressure pad in the building. Any disturbance to those pads would trigger this thing.

"Pilgrim has connections," Travis said.

"Pilgrim has connections," Paige said. Then: "The Russians never had the accuracy with their missiles that we did, so their philosophy leaned toward making the warheads more powerful. This one came from an SS-18. Enriched uranium primary. Tritium secondary. Yield is about five megatons. Enough to turn everything within twenty miles of this spot into vapor."

"Now I know why this place unnerves you guys," Travis said.

Paige looked at him, and instead of confirmation in her eyes, he saw only more desolation.

"No you don't," she said.

Ten minutes later Travis and Paige were standing at an open window on the eighth floor, one of the few unoccupied by snipers. The rest of the detachment had dispersed throughout the building to reinforce the defenses, either at other windows or at the ground-floor entrances.

Travis stared out, high above the city and the fog. Nearby building tops rose from the mist like ships in a marina. Deep beneath the surface, streetlights cast diffused circles of bluish light, and here and there, Travis saw the roaming glow of vehicle headlights, and heard the sharp echoes of footsteps or voices, some of them American. Drunken tourists, the only people awake in Zurich at a quarter past three in the morning. The only steady traffic was a modest flow along a primary street a few miles to the west, bisecting the river and climbing away toward the ridges to the north and south. It was the road Travis and the others had come in on, E41.

Beside him, Paige's breathing betrayed her anxiety. It reminded him of the fear he'd seen within the first Tangent group in Alaska, when they'd noticed the footprints in the mud. Not cowardice. Real fear. Fear in someone who didn't scare easily.

"I really thought we had a chance," she said. "I thought those inscriptions would tell us what we needed to do, and then however hard it was, we'd do it. I didn't think we'd get this far and still be at zero."

Her eyes roamed back and forth over the city. Like she expected hell to come rolling in at any second. Maybe it would.

"I don't even know what to do now," she said. "That was our only move. Now… we could leave if we wanted to, but it wouldn't matter. It's not like any place is safe, if Pilgrim achieves his goal. Staying feels better, like we're doing something, right? But obviously we're not. Forty-two snipers in this building, but we won't slow him by a minute. Not when he has the Whisper. He'll know what to do."

For a long time, neither spoke. In the night around them, Zurich rumbled on idle.

"Tell me what's worse than the nuke upstairs," Travis said.

She looked at him, almost grateful for something to talk about besides the dead end they'd come to.

"We don't think the nuke is the only defense system in this place," she said. "We don't even think it's the main defense."

Travis waited for her to explain.

"The bomb's purpose is obvious," she said.

"No opening the boxes," Travis said. "No opening the ninth floor."

She nodded. "There are even pressure pads embedded in the ceiling on Level Eight that prevent us from cutting through to the ninth floor that way. Same for the exterior walls. And the roof. And the windows on that level. Which are painted from inside. Obviously we'll never figure out the purpose of this place until we can see into those boxes and that floor, and Pilgrim doesn't want that, so… there you go. Simple, right?"

"Right," Travis said. "But?"

"But it doesn't work. The logic of it. It's like the single hostage problem. If a captor has one hostage, his threats are automatically empty, because he knows that if he kills the hostage, he'll be left with nothing. I know people take single hostages all the time, but those people are idiots. Pilgrim is as far from an idiot as you get. There's no way he'd leave this building defended only by something he wouldn't actually want to use. Something that would destroy the place, when all his ambitions depend on it. Don't get me wrong. The bomb would go off, if we did any of the things that would trigger it. But Pilgrim would expect us to be careful. And there's something else I think he'd expect. Something he'd have to expect, for the sake of caution."

Travis thought about it, and understood. "He'd know there was at least a chance of Tangent finding a way around the bomb, using some Breach entity that showed up long after he left Border Town."

"Exactly. Something that could have emerged yesterday. Or any day. He'd never know what we might suddenly have at our disposal. Something that lets us look through walls. Or walk through walls. Or turn enriched uranium into tin. Who knows, right?"

Travis didn't bother asking if anything like that had actually come along. Obviously it hadn't, but her point was still valid.

"If Pilgrim was cautious enough to rig the building with pressure pads and a nuke," Travis said, "you're saying he'd also be cautious enough to have a backup defense in place."

"A spare hostage," Paige said. "One he's not afraid to pull the trigger on. And that's what scares me. I think even if we were able to figure this place out, and make a move toward shutting it down, we'd run into that second defense, whatever it is." She stared out over the fog. The river, visible only as a vague sheen against the lit backdrop of city streets, snaked away to the northwest. "But I guess we're no closer to running into that problem than we ever have been."

She turned from the window. Stared at him. Her eyes, as beautiful as they were haunted, reflected the glow from the fog.

In her hand, her PDA displayed typed copies of the five lines Travis had read from the boxes earlier. She'd spent most of the past ten minutes staring at them, willing them to mean something. Now she looked at them again.

He watched her. Watched her try to contain the frustration and succeed only by degrees. She looked like she wanted to tear out the wires that hung around her.

A question came to him. He wasn't sure why it mattered, but had a sense that it did.

"If you guys got the Whisper back from Pilgrim four years ago, why was it on a 747 last week? Shouldn't it have been locked up in Border Town?"

The frustration behind her eyes stepped up a notch. "It was. And we spent the four years trying to get answers from it. Trying to make it tell us about this place." She shook her head, just perceptibly, her jaw tightening. "It's so goddamned aggravating. You just can't force it to help you if it doesn't think you need it. And you only get those few seconds to try, before the light changes and it tries to take over. A few people suggested letting someone else master it, like Pilgrim had done. You can probably guess how the vote went on that brainstorm."

Travis managed a smile.

Somewhere out in the city, a bottle shattered on concrete. In the fog, it might have been one block away or five. Men laughed, their voices ricocheting from every building, clarified in the mist.

"In Border Town we found an old pad of Pilgrim's handwritten notes," Paige said at last. "He'd taken care to destroy all his computer files, all his work on the Whisper, before he fled the place in 1995. But this notepad was one he must've left in the lab years earlier and lost track of. An attendant found it in a stack in the archives, in 1998. Most of the contents were useless. Lab tests that had failed, been crossed out, that kind of stuff. But one thing stood out. He'd made a note about a facility that was being built in Japan. Back then, in the nineties, it was only a proposal. Still ten, fifteen years from completion. The Large Hadron Accelerator. Keep in mind that particle accelerators are Aaron Pilgrim's field of expertise. He stands with the best minds on Earth on the subject. Well, in that notepad he had five pages of math, written out longhand, supporting a conclusion he'd circled in red: when the LHA in Japan was completed, it'd be worth a try to set the Whisper right in its interacting point and hit it with a shot. His hunch was that it would act like the on/off key… but for the suicidal part of the Whisper, not the intelligence part. Meaning you could have all the good, and none of the bad."