She backed out the satellite image to a full view of the country, then dragged it sideways and zoomed in again, this time into the vast darkness that made up the American west. Only the digitally generated borders and roads gave any sense of scale as she zoomed. She pushed in tight on the emptiest part of eastern Wyoming, a hundred-mile-wide square bound by I–90 to the north and I–25 to the south and west. She zoomed in until the highways disappeared off the edges of the frame, leaving the screen entirely black. Border Town was somewhere in the middle of this area, Travis knew.
“In darkness these satellites use thermal imaging,” Bethany said. “But Border Town’s heat signature is carefully managed. Any heat output is first stored underground, and only released during daylight hours, specifically at times when the desert surface temperature exactly matches that of the exhaust ports. The compound is thermally invisible.”
She pressed the button she’d used earlier to zoom, though it was impossible to see any result on the screen. There was only more darkness.
Then Travis saw something. A bright white speck moving rapidly across the top of the frame. It trailed a line behind itself, narrow at the front, fanning out and dimming toward its end. Bethany pushed in tighter. The speck resolved into two. Two specks, two trails. Moving side-by-side in formation. They were much faster in the smaller field of view. Bethany had to keep dragging it sideways to keep up. Travis noticed a distance scale at the bottom of the screen. A thumb’s width was about half a mile. The two specks were covering that much distance every few seconds.
“Fighters,” Travis said.
Bethany nodded. “I first noticed them during the flight to Atlanta. I spent about twenty minutes using specialized software to identify them by the heat plumes. They’re Super Hornets. Dual role, able to engage both air and ground targets. There’s another pair orbiting on the far side of the same big circle, about a forty-mile radius around Border Town.”
“It’s a blockade,” Travis said. “No one’s going in or out of there.”
Bethany nodded again. “President Currey probably ordered it within an hour or so after the hit on the motorcade, once he decided to go all in. I must’ve gotten away by a margin of minutes.”
They fell into a silence for the next half hour. They listened to the whine of the engines and the soft tones of the avionics up front. Bethany stared out the window. Travis stared ahead at nothing and thought of the power that was arrayed against them.
Bethany turned to him. “Can I ask you something personal?”
“Sure.”
“Why did you leave Tangent?”
Travis thought about it. He thought of how complicated the answer to a simple question could be.
“Things would’ve gone bad if I’d stayed,” he said. “Somewhere down the road.”
“What made you think that?”
“Something told me,” he said. The statement was more literal than it sounded.
“If we get through all this, maybe you’ll feel better. Maybe you’ll feel like coming back.”
“I’m never coming back. If we’re alive when this is over, I’ll set up another identity like Rob Pullman, and find another warehouse to work third shift in for the rest of my life.”
“You do realize you could make it easier on yourself. As long as you’re creating an ID from scratch, you could give yourself a few million dollars. You wouldn’t have to work at all.”
Travis shook his head. “Money is means. It’s better if I don’t have much. Better if I stay on the fringe. It’s the one way I can be sure things will be okay.”
She stared at him. It was clear she had no idea what he was talking about, but after a moment she let it go and looked out the window again.
Chapter Five
They landed at Dulles and took a cab into the city. Half an hour later they had the location. The survivors of the motorcade attack—whichever ones they were—were in a sixteen-story office building overlooking the traffic circle at M Street and Vermont Avenue. The building had reflective green-tinted glass. It had no corporate logo visible. Just an address in large black letters on its concrete foundation, right next to the main entrance on the east side.
The signal was coming from the ninth floor at the northeast corner, directly facing the traffic circle.
Travis and Bethany were sitting on a cafe patio on the far side of the circle, one hundred yards from the building. It was 7:30 in the morning and the city was alive and busy in the early light. Every surface glittered. It looked like it’d rained all night and only cleared in the last couple hours. The story of the motorcade attack was everywhere. There was a big LCD screen inside the cafe playing the aftermath footage on a loop. The subject dominated every conversation Travis could hear at the tables around them.
Bethany had her phone low in her lap, out of sight to others nearby. Travis watched her mouthing commands she was entering into it. He couldn’t make out any of them. Probably wouldn’t have understood them any better if he could see them typed on the screen.