Patrick Lee - The Breach

"I don't understand," Paige said. "What's Pilgrim waiting for?"

It was the slingshot feeling again. Each passing minute made it worse.

Mostly they watched the night, but at times either he, or she, or both of them stared at the lines on the PDA. The consensus from Border Town agreed with Travis: the sentences were gibberish, on the surface.

At a point when neither had spoken for over a minute, Travis said, "You must have a few guesses, at least."

She looked at him in the pale glow of the screen, and offered a smile. "I promise I don't."

"Sorry, not the lines," he said. "I meant the weapon. In four years, Tangent must've come up with a theory or two about what it does. If not by looking at all these wires, then by considering what Pilgrim would have to do to eliminate Tangent. He'd have to compromise the defenses at Border Town, right? Somehow he'd have to do that, from this place, five or six thousand miles away."

"We have a few guesses," she said. "They all hinge on the idea that this building is a transmitter antenna of some kind, possibly directional, that could target Border Town even at this distance. What it does could be any number of things. Maybe it kills people but leaves physical structures intact, like the effect of a neutron bomb. Or maybe it induces a reaction in specific materials, in a way that would kill Border Town's defenses for a period of time. That's one set of possibilities."

"Are there others?" Travis said.

"One other, in particular."

"Which is?"

"That the weapon has nothing to do with taking over Border Town. We only assume that's his plan because it's such a logical power grab. Border Town is the biggest asset in the world if he controls it, and the biggest liability in the world if he doesn't. Plus the Breach itself. Of course he'd want control of that. Logically, it all fits. But who the hell knows? Maybe logic isn't what's driving him. So maybe the weapon just does something catastrophic to the whole world. Maybe it kills ninety-nine percent of it, leaving a scattered remnant population that's easier for him to control."

"You sound like you're leaning toward door number two," Travis said.

She looked down into the fog shroud. "There's evidence for it."

He waited for her to go on.

"We know Pilgrim bought this place in 1995, just a few months after he left Border Town. Strange things started happening in Zurich in the following years, continuing to the present. Suicides have tripled. Domestic violence arrests are up by a factor of four. Certain rare forms of cancer have increased between five- and sevenfold. We only saw all this in retrospect, of course, after we found this place four years ago. It gets more compelling when you pin the locations of all these incidents on a map, and see the distribution around this building. You probably wouldn't see it if you weren't looking for it… but when you do see it, you know you're not imagining it. Seven Theaterstrasse is doing something already. Some little pilot-light version of what it'll do to the world if Pilgrim gets his way and throws the switch."

Travis held her stare a moment, then looked out into the darkness again. Another ambulance flickered silently through the fog on the far side of the river.

"Could you really bring yourself to trigger the nuke upstairs, if it comes to it?" he said.

For a long time she didn't answer, but when she spoke there was nothing hesitant in her tone. "Yes."

"In that case," he said, "I have an idea."

"Tell me," she said.

"I need to know something first." He looked around at the mess of wires at their backs, filling the room except for this narrow passage by the window. "All this circuitry and equipment that's accessible, Tangent's studied every inch of it, right?"

"Every connection, every processor, every jumper setting. Everything."

"Any of the wires not plugged in?"

She didn't follow.

"I mean, was there some random corner on one of these floors where it looked like the work hadn't been finished? Wires hanging loose, circuit boards lying around, tools on the floor? Anything like that?"

She shook her head.

Travis thought for another moment and said, "He was three hours from activating this place when Tangent showed up in 2005."

She nodded.

"Three hours away because he was three hours from having it finished, right?"

"That's always been the assumption, yeah."

"The unfinished work wasn't anywhere in this tangle that we can see, and the five steel boxes were already welded shut, so he must have been done with whatever's in those. That leaves the ninth floor, behind the closed doors. Three hours' worth of work left to do, up there."

She was nodding again. Tangent had figured this part out long ago. Which he'd assumed.

"When you took over this building, where did you find the Whisper?"

"On the seventh floor, in a shielded box."

Travis thought it over, putting the sequence of events together in his mind. Trying to see it all from Pilgrim's point of view, that day when he'd been forced out of here. That thought process-mentally tracking someone's moves, getting inside a subject's head-was familiar, like putting his hand into a baseball glove he hadn't worn in almost two decades. The kind of thing he'd once been good at, in spite of his motivation.

"All right, it's May 17, 2005," he said. "Pilgrim is three hours from finishing the weapon. He's working on it. He knows Tangent is close, because you've nailed some of his people in recent weeks. He obviously doesn't know Tangent is literally moving in, or else he'd have left even earlier. Which means he's not using the Whisper at this moment, or else it would've warned him. And it's plausible enough that he wouldn't be. I mean, he's been building this place for ten years, this close to the end he probably knows all by himself what's left to be done."

"Okay," Paige said.

"So he's up there, working on the ninth floor. The Whisper is safe in its box on Level Seven. If he gets the two-minute warning that Tangent's coming down the street, what does he do?"

"Apparently he shuts the doors on Level Nine, shoves the pressure pads into the gaps, and flees the building."

"So he takes the time to do that," Travis said. "But he doesn't stop for a few seconds on the seventh floor, on his way down, to grab the Whisper? The thing that matters more to him than his own senses?"

"Yeah, we know that doesn't add up," Paige said. "Which is why we don't think he was on the ninth floor when the warning came. We think he was on the first floor, for any of several reasons. The kitchen is down there, along with the only working bathroom."

"That makes it even harder to believe," Travis said.

For the first time in this discussion, Paige looked uncertain. She waited for him to continue.

"He's down on the first floor. He gets the call. Shit, Tangent's coming. They're so close, even if he sprints out the door right now, he could still get caught. There's simply no time to run up seven flights for the Whisper. So he does the hardest thing he's ever had to do. He leaves the Whisper and he runs."

"Right."

"So how do the doors on the ninth floor get closed and pressure padded again?"

She shrugged. "He had to have done it before he came downstairs, as a standard procedure. Must have always done it. Sealed it up whenever he came down, unsealed it when he went back up. He would've known how to do that, how to switch off the pressure pads when he wanted to go back in. I'm sure we could figure it out ourselves, with a little trial and error-if 'error' didn't mean vaporizing a city."

"But that's the part that doesn't work," Travis said. "Pilgrim rigging the doors just to run downstairs for a minute. Think about it. Ten years of work. Work that's going to give him the world, or whatever he wants. He's three hours away from wrapping it up. He's probably done nothing but work on it for the final few days. Probably hasn't even slept. Let me guess, in the kitchen downstairs, every cup was coffee stained. Even the ones that weren't coffee cups."