Bethany shook her head.
Travis turned and took hold of the upholstery of the passenger seatback just behind Bethany’s left shoulder. The narrow panel of cloth that covered the side facing inward was loose at the top, a half-inch flap that would look to any observer like a sign of wear and tear. It wasn’t. Travis pulled down hard on it, and the few threads binding the cloth to the seatback broke easily. The move exposed the seat’s interior, a cage of spring steel and foam. He reached inside and felt his hand close around the grip of the SIG-Sauer P220 he’d hidden there two years before. He took it out and set it in Bethany’s backpack alongside the black cylinder. Then he reached back in for the three spare magazines he’d stashed with it—a fourth was already loaded into the gun—and put them in the pack too.
If the sight of the weapon made Bethany more nervous than she already was, Travis couldn’t tell.
They were in the air fifteen minutes later. The little business jet banked into its climb and gave Travis a last look at the spiderweb of highways crisscrossing Atlanta. He was sure he would never come back, unless he happened to be passing through. Rob Pullman wasn’t going to show up for work tomorrow. Wasn’t going to answer his door when the landlord came to ask about the rent next week. It occurred to him with a kind of sad amusement that Pullman would probably never be reported missing. Just fired and evicted in absentia. No great loss to anyone.
He and Bethany were sitting at the back of the plane, ten feet from the pilots. The engine sound was more than enough to mask their conversation if they spoke softly.
Bethany took out her phone and plugged it into a data port on her armrest.
“The plane has satellite capability that my phone doesn’t have by itself,” she said. She pulled up a screen that reminded Travis of computer programs from the eighties and early nineties: a black background with a simple text prompt, like an old DOS system. He was sure the program wasn’t actually old; Bethany was just navigating the no-frills backwaters that ordinary users never saw.
“Will the pilots see this on their screens?” Travis said.
“Nobody will see. Not even the satellite vendors.”
She typed a command string that looked like random letters and numbers to Travis, and executed it. An hourglass icon appeared for a second, and then the little screen filled with a street map of the United States, overlaid on a satellite image. The satellite layer was fractured into several distorted squares, overlapping one another to make a composite. Travis realized what he was looking at: not the static view of the world that was available on any number of websites, but a realtime image composed of multiple live satellite feeds. Most of the visible United States was still deep in the shadow of night.
Bethany used the phone’s arrow buttons to center the map on Washington, D.C., and zoomed in until the city filled the frame. Even in that narrow field of view Travis could see a margin where coverage from different satellites overlapped. The margin was moving, just perceptibly, a pixel’s width every few seconds. He envisioned recon satellites skimming over the Earth in low orbit, their fields of view always moving relative to the ground.
Bethany zoomed in one step further. More detail of the city emerged. Travis saw the long green belt of the National Mall running left to right across the middle of the image. Just above it was the focal point that several major streets converged toward: the White House. A mile northeast of that, an area of about three by three blocks was highlighted in bright yellow. Bethany tapped that part of the screen.
“Still there,” she said. “The survivors have been somewhere in that rectangle since I first checked around two in the morning. They must have been moved right after the attack, which would’ve happened further south, between the White House and Andrews. The fact that I’m getting a signal means at least one of them is still alive.” She thought about it and added, “Or at least their blood hasn’t congealed yet.”
Travis waited for her to explain.