Patrick Lee - The Breach

The regret that pulled at the edges of her expression was almost hard to look at.

"LHA went operational last month," she said. "We had to try. If it worked, we'd have perfect knowledge of everything. How to cure every disease in the world. How to use all the Breach entities we've never been able to figure out. Most important: how to neutralize this building, destroy the weapon before Pilgrim could ever get a chance to use it. We had to try, and we had every reason to make our move as soon as possible. Four hundred thousand people live inside the kill radius of that nuke, and all it would take would be a lightning strike to zap the power for a few seconds, or a good-sized delivery truck crashing into the foundation to give the pressure pads a jolt. What were we supposed to do, tell everyone in Zurich to move?" The regret moistened her eyes now. Like acid. "All for nothing, anyway. We tried it at LHA just like he said. No result."

"I guess he could've expected you to find his notes, and fly the Whisper there and back when that place got up and running," Travis said.

Her eyebrows made a shrug, hard and bitter. "I guess."

"He circled it in red, huh?"

She looked at him. Eyes narrowing now. "Yeah. So what?"

"Did he circle anything else in the book like that?"

"No. What's your point? That he planned it? That far ahead? Circled it just to make us take the bait?"

"I don't know," Travis said. He didn't.

"It's not possible," Paige said. "He wrote those notes a decade and a half ago, before he ever left Border Town. No one could plan that far out. And why? Why would he plan to lose the Whisper to us, hours before triggering this place, and then recover it four years later?"

"I don't know," Travis said again.

But something about what she'd told him didn't fit. There was a problem there; he just couldn't quite put a name tag on it.

Paige had lowered the PDA again. Travis indicated it with his eyes, the five lines still on its screen.

"Mind if I look at those?"

She handed it to him.

GRAVITY ABERRATION, INNER NEXUS. OPTICAL UNIFICATION TENSOR, PARALLEL UNIFICATION TENSOR. BROAD AXIS NULL DRIVER, WORKABLE INFLOW DETOURS TO HARMONIC. SYSTEM LEVERAGE, ETHER WASTE, RIGHT ANGLE TRANSFER EGRESSION.

FREE ELEMENT EXPULSION, DIRECTED FLOW ONTO RADIANT WITH AXIAL RESISTANCE DETERMINED.

The words meant nothing to him. Or her. Or anyone else, apparently. At the time she'd typed them on the PDA, she'd forwarded the lines to Border Town, where a representative set of the world's smartest people lived. Fifteen minutes now, and no answers on her phone.

"I might be the least qualified to say it," Travis said, "but I think these lines are bullshit. I don't care how brilliant the guy is, if he was writing Post-its to himself, they'd be clearer than this. If there's a meaning to these sentences, it's not literal. It's something else."

"I agree," Paige said. "So what is it?"

He could only shrug, focusing on the tiny screen, his expression probably matching hers from a moment earlier.

And then the lights of Zurich went out.

Paige was on her phone within seconds, asking someone what the hell was happening. Over the comm unit in his ear, Travis could hear sniper teams on the lower floors speaking to one another, reporting their status. Everyone fine, for now.

He leaned on the windowsill. The grid immediately around 7 Theaterstrasse had gone out first, and within seconds others had followed in succession, plunging the city into blackness. Now as he watched, successive blocks, leading away up the valley and climbing the ridges on both sides, winked out one after another, until the only lights he could see were the headlights on E41, and a scattering of others on the streets of the darkened city. Almost immediately his eyes began to adjust, and he discerned the fog again, lit not from below but from above, by the half-moon. The whole bank of it, shrouding the city, caught and scattered the silver-blue light and set a contrast for the monolithic shapes of the buildings that rose from it, black and dormant in the night.

Paige was talking to someone at Border Town who had open lines to the three Berlin detachments stationed around Zurich. None of them were reporting any hostile contact. She finished the call and looked at Travis. The two of them were lit only by the screen of her PDA, which Travis still held, and by the vague glow of LEDs blinking like animal eyes in the jungle of wiring around them. The power to 7 Theaterstrasse hadn't so much as stuttered. An uninterruptible backup must be one of those rare things that actually lived up to its name.

"Whatever it is, it'll happen anytime now," Paige said. Trying to sound calm. Not succeeding very well.

Outside, dim lights began to appear in the windows of the few people awake at this hour. Candles or flashlights.

"You don't have to stay here, you know," Paige said. "You've done what we asked you to do. If you want to leave, you can."

Travis looked at her for a moment, then stared out over the city again.

"I know," he said, and made no move to take her advice.

At the edge of his vision, he thought he saw her smile. She leaned on the windowsill next to him.

"When it really gets hopeless," she said, "there's one move we can make that Pilgrim probably won't have anticipated. And even if the Whisper tips him off a few minutes early, there won't be anything he can do to stop it."

The tone of her voice and the deadness in her eyes told Travis what it was.

"We can set off the nuke," he said.

"We can set off the nuke."

"I don't think the locals will appreciate that."

"They'll get over it. In about a thousandth of a second. For the world's sake, it might be the prudent move."

"If Pilgrim's long-term agenda is bad enough."

She breathed a laugh, the sound empty as a waiting coffin. "I'm sure it's bad enough."

Travis thought about the situation. He could accept that she was right, that they were in deep shit, but the logic of it was hard to fit together. Didn't Pilgrim risk losing all the work he'd put into this building if he attacked it now? Any method of taking out the more than forty snipers stationed at these windows would involve some level of violence, and with it a high likelihood of triggering the pressure pads wired to the nuke.

But the Whisper would understand that. Would find a way around the problem. Any way. Maybe the attack would be a few canisters of VX gas, lobbed from a launcher two blocks away. Kill everyone in the building and not disturb a microchip. There had to be a thousand ways in, as clever as that, or more so. The Whisper would know them all.

Someone screamed outside. A man's voice. Travis saw Paige flinch, even as the scream turned into a drunken laugh, and someone else told the man to shut up, also laughing. The first man kept yelling, asking who'd turned off the fucking lights.

"It won't be much longer," Paige said. But it was. More than half an hour passed, and nothing happened. A few ambulances moved about the city, sirens quiet but flashers pulsing through the fog. Travis thought of home-care patients whose medical equipment had failed in the outage. Somewhere to the east, out of sight past the building's corner, was a bright light source. A building running on a generator. It had to be a hospital; the ambulances came and went from that direction.

Paige made more calls to Border Town. More calls to the Berlin detachments stationed around Zurich and to the AWACS aircraft circling high above. Four in the morning and all was well. The snipers downstairs continued to call in their status at close intervals. They'd put on FLIR goggles to let them see the shapes of human bodies through the fog, and in low tones they reported the movement of any pedestrian who strayed into the two-block radius around the building.