Travis grabbed him by the back of the collar and propelled him forward, keeping him off balance. He shoved him to the corner, turned, dragged him downward and pushed him through the iris. His waist caught the bottom of the circle on the way through and he pitched forward, sprawling onto the concrete on the other side.
The man got himself upright, half sitting, and opened his eyes. Bethany had the shotgun on him. Travis was already through the iris behind him, covering him with the SIG.
The guy looked around at the forest and the ruins. His expression went dead slack. Disbelief at its most literal. His brain simply did not accept what his eyes were reporting.
“Wallet,” Travis said.
The guy stared at him. Blinked. Took out his wallet.
Travis pointed to the concrete at Bethany’s feet. “Toss it.”
The guy threw the wallet. It landed, tumbled three feet and stopped.
Travis gestured for the guy to stand up. The man nodded, and when he was halfway through the move, onto his feet but not yet balanced, Travis grabbed the back of his collar again and shoved him forward onto the girder that bound the north edge of the concrete. He pushed him onto it and then past it. The guy’s feet stayed on the lip of the beam but his upper body ended up two feet beyond, above nine stories of empty space.
The man’s breath caught in his throat. His body went rigid, his fear overwhelming every instinct to struggle. He took tiny breaths, in and out, as if he thought larger ones might imbalance him and send him over.
Travis stood with his own weight tilted inward from the edge to counterbalance the guy. His arm was fully extended. The guy was thirty degrees past his own natural tipping point.
“Where’s the woman?” Travis said.
It took the guy a second to answer. “Woman?”
“Don’t fuck with me. They brought her in last night, after they hit the motorcade.”
Another few seconds passed. The guy cocked his head. He knew the answer. If he didn’t, he’d be saying so already. He’d be screaming it.
Travis shifted his weight outward. He did it fast, letting his arm go slack and then snap tight again. The effect was that, for half a second, the guy believed he was falling. He didn’t scream—he didn’t have the breath for it—but he made a tight whimpering sound.
Then his words came out in a high monotone. “They took her to Mr. Finn’s office. Just now. Few minutes ago.”
“Where is that?”
“Top floor. Southwest corner.”
Travis let go of his collar.
The guy’s arms shot outward, spasming, his hands grabbing for anything. But there wasn’t anything. He sucked in a gasp and screamed like a high-school girl in a slasher flick and then he was gone, out into the emptiness.
Travis didn’t bother to watch him hit. He turned. Saw Bethany standing there, her hand to her mouth, eyes unblinking. The shotgun hung forgotten at her side.
“We didn’t ask to be part of this,” Travis said. “These people did.”
It was all he had.
He held her eyes a moment longer and then he crossed to the cylinder and shut it off. He picked it up and headed for the stairwell, crossing exposed beams. After a few steps he picked up the pace to a run. He glanced behind him and saw Bethany shouldering the backpack, pocketing the dropped wallet, and following.
Paige sat waiting for Isaac Finn to arrive. She knew his name only from the brass plate she’d seen on his door when the two large men had carried her through it.
Finn’s office was huge. Three times the size of the room they’d kept her in. There was a balcony along its southern expanse looking out on a view that could’ve been an educational poster of Washington, D.C. The kind of poster with tags and labels for every building that mattered. It was all there, from the White House to the Capitol to the Supreme Court, and a hundred other buildings that channeled power in ways most people would never care to know. Paige wondered how many of those buildings this high-rise outranked. Maybe all of them.
She was sitting on a leather couch. Her wrists and ankles were still zip-tied. The two large men were standing just inside the door, hands folded neatly in front of them. Each had a Beretta holstered under his suit coat—Paige had seen them there when they’d carried her from the other room.
The door opened and a man in his fifties walked in. He was trim, six feet tall, with dark hair going a little gray. He was far from what Paige had pictured—whatever she’d pictured. He looked wrong for the office. His eyes, in particular, looked wrong. There was no arrogance in them. No presumption. Paige thought of one of her father’s friends, a pediatric surgeon she’d met on several occasions. She’d always been struck by his eyes: weathered by the years of suffering they’d seen, but not beaten. Isaac Finn’s eyes looked almost like that—they missed by some degree Paige couldn’t account for.