Chapter Six
Paige woke in the same place where she’d fallen asleep: a hardwood-floored office eight or ten stories up, overlooking D.C. through tinted windows. The room was bare. The windows stretched from floor to ceiling. She lay in the center of the open space, her wrists and ankles bound with heavy-duty zip ties.
It was morning now, but during the night she’d lain awake here for hours, listening to footsteps coming and going in the corridor. Overhearing conversations outside the door, hushed and tense, right at the brink of her discernment. One word had jumped out at her half a dozen times, maybe the working title of some project or operation. The closest thing to context she’d gotten was a single exchange, a few decibels higher than the rest of the talk: “They sound rattled. They’re not thinking of shutting it down, are they?”
“Umbra? Not a chance.”
Umbra. Paige had fallen asleep replaying the word in her mind, along with the rest of the exchange. Now she was awake, still replaying it. Trying to fit it with the scattered knowledge she’d had before coming to D.C.
She lowered her head to the hardwood and stared out at the city in the soft yellow light.
These people were going to kill her. No doubt about that. The only question was when. Sometime today, for sure. As soon as they were certain she was of no value, it would happen. By now they’d probably spoken to the president, and figured out that she’d already told him everything she knew. She’d requested the meeting, after all; why wouldn’t she tell him everything?
She tried not to think about it. There wasn’t much point. She thought of Bethany instead. Wondered if she’d made it out of Border Town with the second cylinder.
It crossed her mind that she actually hadn’t told the president everything: she hadn’t said a word about the other cylinder. It simply hadn’t fit into the conversation. She’d left it behind in Border Town on only the most general principles of caution and pragmatism. “Shit happens” principles. It was depressing how often those proved their worth.
If Bethany had gotten out, then she’d probably already linked up with Travis. By now they might be just seeing what the cylinder did, somewhere in Atlanta. The thing’s basic function was easy enough to understand. But what about the rest of it? Would the two of them figure out what they needed to do—including the parts Paige herself hadn’t nailed down?
And would they understand how damn little time they had left to do it?
Chapter Seven
There was a Ritz-Carlton halfway up the block on Vermont. Travis and Bethany got the Presidential Suite on the tenth floor—Renee Turner was paying for it, and it would’ve been at odds with her pattern to rent anything cheaper. The suite was 1800 square feet with views to the south and west. They could see the green-tinted building without obstruction. They could see the ninth-floor corner overlooking the traffic circle. Past the building they could see all the way down Vermont to the White House. The flag on its roof was flying full and tense in the wind.
They sat on one of the leather couches, opened the backpack on the floor, and set the black cylinder on the empty cushion between them. It bled heat into the air like a cooling engine block.
It was Travis’s first good look at the thing in bright light. The object was heavily scuffed and scratched, like a power tool put to years of hard use by a carpenter. There was no way anyone at Tangent had abused it like that. Travis had seen the paranoid care they took with entities. The scuffs could’ve only been made by the object’s original owners on the other side of the Breach. Whoever—or whatever—they were, this thing meant nothing more to them than a cordless drill or a radial saw meant to humans.
Travis studied the labels Paige or one of the others had taped beside the three buttons. He’d seen them just briefly in the Explorer.
ON
OFF
OFF (DETACH/DELAY—93 SEC.)
He spent only a few seconds trying to imagine what detach/delay meant. There was no point in thinking about it until they knew what the entity did.
Aside from the buttons, and their engraved symbols, the cylinder’s only notable feature was a small lens inset in one end. It was about the size of a quarter, and deep black.
“You said this came out of the Breach along with one just like it,” Travis said.
Bethany nodded.
“And that was a few days ago?”
“Oh—no. They actually egressed years ago. Sometime in 1998, I think.”
He stared at her. Waited for the explanation.