What the hell had happened? Not a nuclear war. D.C. would be an ash plain in that case. There might be trees there by now, grown up in the aftermath, but there sure as hell wouldn’t be girder frames left standing.
“Paige’s goal was the most obvious thing in the world,” Travis said. “She and the others were going to take the cylinder to some number of sites, go through to the future, and dig through the ruins for evidence. Figure out exactly how the world ends. Figure out how to prevent it. No doubt they explained all that to the president.” He leaned back into the suite and turned to Bethany. “So think about this. Suppose right now, the president is involved in something nobody’s supposed to know about. Something that’s happening, or maybe is about to happen. Paige and the others uncovered some little scrap of it in the future. Not enough that they could recognize its full meaning, but enough that the president could. And when he saw it, he understood the threat they posed to him. Because his secret is well protected in our time, but it’s vulnerable as hell in the future. Someone sifting through the rubble could eventually learn all about it.”
Travis went quiet. He stared at nothing. “What is he hiding?”
“Could it just be his own complicity in whatever happens to the world?” Bethany said. “Say the thing he’s involved in right now is going bad. Really bad. Say it’s big enough that it’s over even his head, and when it goes off the rails it’s going to take the world with it. Maybe Paige and the others could have found information in the future to help us turn it all around—something to give us a chance, anyway—but in the process they’d have discovered President Currey’s role in it. Jesus, could it be that simple? Would he rather let the world end than have people find out it’s his fault?”
Travis thought about it for a long time. “That should be harder to believe than it is.”
Bethany made a face that was a little too unnerved to register humor.
“We’re guessing until we know what Paige found,” Travis said.
He stepped away from the circular opening and returned to the suite’s south-facing windows. He stared down Vermont at the green-tinted high-rise in the present day.
Paige.
Lying there alone.
Waiting to die.
The cylinder, powerful as it was, seemed entirely useless as a means of getting her out of that place.
Travis leaned against the window, forearms crossed above his head. He shut his eyes and breathed out slowly.
And then it came to him.
Chapter Eleven
They worked out the logistics of the plan in a matter of minutes, and then Travis took a four-mile cab ride across the river, into Virginia, and found a sporting goods store. He used his credit card—Rob Pullman’s credit card—to buy a Remington 870 twelve-gauge and a hundred shells for it, along with fifty feet of inch-thick manila rope. He bought the largest duffel bag the store sold, which easily fit the rope and the disassembled shotgun. He took another cab back into D.C. and broke probably twenty laws by carrying a firearm and ammunition into the Ritz-Carlton. He took the elevator to the third floor, where Bethany—Renee, technically—had checked into a second room.
She had the cylinder resting in an armchair, the opening projected ten feet away at chest level, as it’d been upstairs.
Travis set the duffel bag down and walked to the opening. The view through it was different from this floor of the building. They were deep among the trees now, just twenty-five feet above the weed-laced concrete of the forest floor. Down here there was no hint of the wind they’d felt earlier, from their position above the canopy.
Travis leaned through and studied the immediate space around the hole. There were no girders close by. This room, like the presidential suite, occupied the building’s southwest corner, which in the future was reduced to a deadfall of rusted steel filling part of the foundation below. Travis saw plenty of sturdy branches all around, but the nearest of them were a good distance away—twenty feet, at least. The far side of the opening was surrounded by a margin of empty space in all directions.
Which was good. If lions were present in this wilderness—no doubt escaped from zoos when the world came apart—then there could be any number of other large predators here. Black bears, leopards, cougars. All of which could climb trees, and were probably curious enough to investigate a wide-open hole in midair with a hotel room on the other side. Travis was sure the Ritz’s staff had seen all kinds of crazy shit in their establishment over the years, but there was no reason to go for some kind of record.
Behind him, Bethany guessed what he was thinking. “I positioned the iris so nothing out there could reach it,” she said.
He leaned back in and turned to her. “Iris?”
She indicated the opening, and shrugged. “I gave it a name.”
“Why iris?”
“Watch what happens when you close it.”