Patrick Lee - The Breach

Her eyes came up again. Stared at him. He turned to Paige, and she handed him the black case. He set it on the table next to the door and opened it. It looked empty. Travis reached in and took hold of what he knew was inside it. He couldn't be sure which part he was grabbing, but the effect was identical to picking up an article of clothing with his eyes closed. He felt something like a shirt sleeve at once, and a second later his hand found the hem at the shirt's bottom.

He turned back to Lauren.

"The man who murdered your father was wearing this," Travis said, and shoved his arm through the open bottom of the shirt, as far as it could go. He saw the arm and most of his shoulder vanish into nothingness.

Lauren's body jerked. She stared at the empty space where Travis's arm should have been, her eyes huge. Head shaking now, just noticeably. Her mouth formed a question, but it didn't come out. She only stared. Five seconds passed. Then ten.

When she did speak, her voice was barely audible. "Where is he now?"

She was looking at Travis again by the time she said it. He met her gaze without blinking.

"Dead," Travis said. "I killed him."

He watched her reaction, and saw what he'd hoped for. She knew he was telling the truth.

"We're not the bad guys, Lauren," he said. "Whatever it is you're afraid to talk about, you can tell us."

She looked at him a moment longer, then turned her eyes to Paige and the others, one by one. Each nodded.

Her attention came back to Travis, and after another moment she returned to staring at her own knees.

"My father belonged to a group of people you've never heard of. You won't find anything about them by looking at his tax records, or his phone logs. The other people who were killed, these past several years, were part of it too. I'll tell you as much as I know." As much as she knew wasn't a lot. Her father had sought to protect her from what he was involved in.

The group had no name, she told them. That was supposed to be a security measure. Among its members, it did have a nickname-something of a joke-which was never written down: The Order of the Qubit. Travis didn't know that word. Everyone else in the room did. Qubit stood for "quantum bit." A computing unit of a quantum computer. For the better part of the past decade, a few dozen governments and a few hundred companies had been trying like hell to develop quantum computers, which were expected to be dramatically more powerful than computers at present. But other than very limited proof-of-concept stuff in labs, no one had had any luck. It was one of those things everyone was sure would exist at some point. But whether that point was five years away, or fifty, was tough to pin down.

Lauren thought the Order of the Qubit dated to the early nineties. As she understood it, it was more or less a group of very rich people funding their own secret work toward building a viable quantum computer. Their motivation was simply fear: in the global race to make one of these machines, whoever crossed the finish line first would gain a great deal of power. As it happened, a lot of the institutions who were likely candidates to win the race couldn't be expected to use that power for the world's best interests. Many could be counted on to use it for nearly the opposite purpose. The Order of the Qubit wanted to win that race itself, then carefully select a few organizations that really did have the big human picture in mind, and simply give them the technology.

Good idea. Also a good way to get killed. Entrenched interests tended to dislike threats to their power, and to express that dislike violently.

As to whether the group had achieved its goal, or even gained any ground toward it, Lauren had no idea. She also had no idea where their work was conducted, where their meetings were held, or where Tangent could locate any other member of the organization.

She finished speaking, and looked at them each in turn again.

"Did I help?" she said.

Travis met Paige's eyes. Saw that she was thinking exactly what he was thinking. He looked at Lauren again.

"You helped," he said. "They have one," Travis said. "A working model."

He and Paige were standing in the open doorway of the pole barn on the surface, watching the jet-a Gulfstream this time-take off with Lauren in it. She'd asked to stay in Border Town. She'd said she'd feel safer there. She wouldn't have been. This was probably the least-safe place on Earth right now, lying in the Whisper's gun sights. Lauren herself should be under no real threat elsewhere; she'd already given them all the information she had.

"I think they must," Paige said.

Travis watched the plane diminish to a desktop model of itself. Then a speck. Then nothing.

"Is there any chance a computer like that could outthink the Whisper?" he said. "Is that why these people are a threat to it?"

"I only know a little about quantum computers. Stories about their potential show up in tech papers once in a while. I know their power grows exponentially the more qubits you add, but that in itself has been the trick. Adding more of them. There's some kind of engineering limit, ten or twelve qubits, something like that. Not enough to do very much. But if someone built a quantum computer with fifty qubits, or a hundred, it'd be off the charts. Way, way off the charts. I think there are still limits to their use, even then-limits on the kind of math they can do-but there'd be creative ways to get around that. There's no question it would be a big deal, if someone really had a scaled-up version working."

Travis thought it over, watching empty sky now. Even if they were right, it didn't fully make sense. If the thing was really a threat to the Whisper, then the Whisper should have seen that coming too. Should have directed Pilgrim to find and destroy the place where the thing would be built, long before it was completed.

That was just one of the things that made no sense to him. There were several others. He couldn't help thinking that the confusion was part of the Whisper's plan. Any good strategy should look like nonsense to those facing off against it.

What was the plan? What was the Whisper's final goal? It was hard enough to figure out what a human being wanted. What the hell did this thing want? On that point, he couldn't even form a guess.

All day long, photos and video came in from a detachment scouring Ellis Cook's house on Grand Cayman. Nice place. There was nothing inside it that hinted about his involvement with any secret group. Air ducts were inspected. Carpets were torn up. A giant safe in the basement was drilled through and opened. A mechanical shed next to the pool was examined in detail. It contained an impressive pumping and filtering system, built to draw seawater in from the harbor at hundreds of gallons per minute, which would fill the pool in less than an hour. The kind of thing only someone with a hundred million dollars would think he needed. But no quantum computer.

The ATC logs for Owen Roberts International Airport on Grand Cayman turned up something interesting. A few times a year, an Airbus A318, big enough to hold over a hundred passengers but registered as a business jet, landed there. Each time, it departed again within eight hours. The jet's ownership was in Cook's name, but it was based at Dallas-Fort Worth, where he owned a permanent hangar for it. The plane didn't seem to be Cook's personal transport. For that, he had a Dassault Falcon that he kept right there on Grand Cayman. The Airbus, it seemed, didn't take Cook anywhere, but instead brought people to him. A lot of people, all at once. The implication was pretty obvious: that Cook's house on the island was the group's base of operations. Or one of its bases, anyway. But the search of the house revealed no evidence of that, and the data mining of real-estate records showed no other land or property on Grand Cayman with his name on it.