Patrick Lee - The Breach

She looked vaguely impressed at that.

"Amphetamines too, right?" he said. "Not meth. Maybe prescription stuff."

Paige nodded. "Dexedrine. Good guess."

"Not really. It's just nothing unusual. I spent three years working vice; it's not as long as most, but it's long enough. Long enough to see the same pattern, over and over. Pretty much identical, for all of them."

"All of who?"

"People doing things they're not supposed to. People whose lives would basically be over if they got caught. People who are in no position to fuck around. A guy like Pilgrim, those last days in this place, that close to getting away with what he was doing, I doubt he'd waste five minutes to go down and make a sandwich. He'd have someone bring it up to him, and he wouldn't stop working. Whatever he had to go downstairs for that day, it wasn't going to take long, and he sure as hell wasn't going to make it take longer by stopping to shut the door and arm the pads, then disarm them again when he came back. Not three hours from the finish line."

He could see in Paige's eyes that neither she nor anyone in Tangent had considered this angle before. Maybe they just hadn't been under the right pressure. Maybe they hadn't been in dire enough straits to consider the option Travis was considering right now.

"But the pads were in the doors," Paige said. "So what are you saying?"

"I'm saying he had it rigged so he could go in and out quickly, without having to stop every time. Minutes would've been precious at the end. I'm saying the pads on the doors upstairs are decoys. You could open those doors and walk through them, right now if you wanted to."

For a moment she said nothing. Just stared at him. Then: "The wires to the pads are live. We checked for current."

"Sure," Travis said. "He'd make it look real. He'd make it impossible to know, one way or the other."

More silence. More consideration. He watched her, aware that the idea didn't have to make perfect sense. It just had to be less batshit crazy than the other options they were stuck with, including sitting here like paper targets.

She seemed to agree. She took out her cell and dialed. He heard her address the same person at Border Town that she'd called earlier. She explained the idea. Travis couldn't tell, from Paige's half of the call, what the other party thought of it. A moment later Paige said, "Yeah, put them all on." Then she waited. And waited. And her eyebrows furrowed. The party on the other end said something-Travis couldn't make it out-and Paige took a hard breath. She lowered the phone an inch and met his eyes in the darkness.

"None of our three detachments in the city are responding."

Sixty seconds later they were standing at the double doors on the ninth-floor landing. The nuke filled up the space behind them, its paint gleaming like a cold smile. Over his headset, Travis could hear the snipers downstairs trading status updates, with a tension in their voices that hadn't been there earlier. They were up to speed on the plan.

"You want the honor?" Paige said, and indicated the ornate doorknobs.

He nodded. Why not? He put his hand on the left one. Then stopped. He breathed a laugh. "You know, he wouldn't have had to rig both doors with decoys."

In the vague light he saw her smile. Almost literally a gallows smile.

"If this works," he said, "then we'll find out pretty soon if you're right about the second defense system."

The way she was holding her rifle, she didn't look like she needed to be reminded of that. "If this works, and it's really this easy to get in," she said, "then I can't imagine there wouldn't be one."

He reached for the doorknob, but stopped again.

He looked down. In his other hand he was still holding the PDA. The five lines, black and white, shining in the darkness. Something about them struck him now. It was like the feeling he'd gotten outside the Black Hawk, staring at its tire but not consciously noticing the footprints beside it. There really was a meaning to the words. Not on the surface. Just beneath it.

"What?" Paige said.

For a few seconds he didn't answer. He thought if he even spoke, it'd break whatever thread of insight had formed.

Then he saw it, and it was so obvious he couldn't believe it'd taken this long.

"Look at the first letters of the words," he said. "In order."

He tilted the screen so she could see it better. He heard her exhale within less than a second.

The first line: GRAVITY ABERRATION, INNER NEXUS. GAIN.

The next four lines condensed into words as well: OUTPUT, BANDWIDTH, SLEW RATE, FEEDFORWARD.

"Amplifier," Paige said. "Those are all aspects of a signal amplifier."

They looked at each other in the glow of the screen. The next question was so obvious neither said it. The moment stretched. Travis saw in her eyes that the answer was as far out of her reach as his. What the hell was being amplified?

In his earpiece, one of the snipers downstairs spoke up. "Vehicle coming south on Falkenstrasse, pretty high rate of speed. I can take the driver from here."

Paige broke her stare with Travis, looked away at nothing, thinking hard.

"Permission to fire?" the sniper said.

Paige narrowed her eyes, thought for another half second. "No. Weapons tight."

Travis heard a hard breath over the comm unit. Then, from the bottom of the stairs, the eighth floor and its open windows, the sound of the vehicle's racing engine drifted up. Coming fast.

"Three blocks," the sniper said. "Two…"

By his tone, the man was asking Paige to reconsider the order. She closed her eyes.

Outside, the engine noise swelled. Then the pitch changed in an instant. Deepened. And began to fade. The vehicle had gone right past the building.

Another sniper reported in. "Vehicle proceeding south. I see double doors on the back end. Ambulance with its flashers off."

Paige exhaled slowly. She found Travis's eyes again.

"We're not going to get any more false alarms," she said. She looked at the words on the PDA one last time. Just a glance. Then she disregarded it and focused on the doors in front of them.

Travis understood. Whatever was being amplified, they weren't going to figure it out standing here. Regardless, they had to go through these doors and deal with what was on the other side. Figure out what the weapon was, and destroy it, even if that meant coming back out onto the landing and giving this pressure-sensitive warhead a swift kick like it was a Coke machine that'd stolen their last dollar. Whatever they were going to do, their time in which to do it was evaporating. Pilgrim probably knew they were opening the doors; if he was holding the Whisper right now, it was sure as hell telling him. Travis put his hand on the doorknob, then gave the warhead a last look.

"Sure you don't want to take a crack at disarming it?" he said.

She glanced at it. "It's not entirely impossible. Nukes aren't like regular explosives. They're complex machines. If you can disrupt that complexity without setting it off, you're good to go."

"Disrupt it?" Travis said. That word sounded like it was warming a seat for an uglier one.

Paige saw his expression and offered a smile. "Shove a grenade into it and pull the pin."

"How likely is that to work?"

"A shitload less likely than what you're about to do," she said.

He returned her smile, faced the door, and gripped the knob "Wait," Paige said.

He met her eyes, and found her looking back at him with a strange expression. A look that didn't know what it wanted to be.

"I didn't thank you enough," she said. "Before, when you first got to Border Town. I know I said thanks, but I wanted to say more than that. I wanted-" She paused again. Frustrated about something. Then: "I just should have said more. What, I'm not sure. I'm sorry if this isn't making sense."