Had that person been offloaded somewhere already?
It crossed Travis’s mind that Curtis Moyer might have been the second victim, but he discarded the idea: the timing didn’t work. Travis had experienced the dream well before Air Force One landed at Border Town, according to Dyer’s BlackBerry. Moyer couldn’t possibly have been in this room at the time.
There was a desk in the corner, which Travis hadn’t seen from his viewpoint in the dream—he’d been standing too close, directly beside it. Apparently this space was a study.
He focused on Garner. The man’s eyes were half open, staring downward at nothing. He wore a pair of dress pants and a dress shirt—probably the clothes he’d worn when he spoke to the nation last night. His coat and tie were gone, and both arms of the shirt had been cut away at the elbows. Needle marks dotted the exposed skin of his arms.
Garner blinked a few times. He opened his eyes a little wider, then let them relax again. He seemed to be getting past the lingering traces of the drug’s effect.
Travis stepped close to him and whispered, “Mr. President.”
Garner flinched and turned toward his voice. Looked right through him into the hallway five feet beyond.
“Who’s there?” Garner whispered.
Travis moved so that his voice would come from deeper within the room.
“Travis Chase,” he said.
It didn’t take long to explain. Garner already knew everything except the specifics of the past several hours. When Travis reached the end and told him what’d happened to Paige and Bethany and Dyer, the man shut his eyes tight and said nothing for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” Garner whispered at last. “For every part of this thing.”
“Holt’s going to be sorrier,” Travis said. He left it at that.
He was standing now roughly where he’d been in the dream. To see the room in real life, from this angle, felt surreal.
“Who did they have in here with you?” he asked. “Who else were they interrogating?”
Garner looked thrown by the question. “No one,” he said.
“There had to be,” Travis said. He hadn’t yet detailed the dream; now he did. He watched Garner for some spark of recognition, but none came. The man simply shook his head, as confused by the story as Travis himself had been when he opened the green door.
“We wondered if there was some entity that could’ve been responsible,” Travis said. “Something that would let a person transmit what they were seeing and hearing. Would let them send it to somebody else, if only for a few seconds.”
“I’ve never heard of an entity like that,” Garner said. “And there was nobody here with me at any point. I’d remember.”
For a long moment Travis stared into space and said nothing. He couldn’t recall ever being this lost for an explanation. The dream couldn’t have been just a dream. It’d really shown him this room, though he’d never set foot in it before. And the door combination had worked. How could any of that be reconciled with what Garner had just told him?
“You should get out of here,” Garner whispered. “You’ve got the suit; it’s all you need to get inside Border Town in 2016. Which is all that matters.”
“You know I’m not leaving you here,” Travis said.
Garner looked insistent. “It’s not worth the risk. You matter. I don’t.”
“Are the pilots aligned with Holt? Are they in the loop?”
Garner shook his head. “Holt ordered them to stay in the upper deck, and he brought me inside before they boarded.”
“All things being equal,” Travis said, “you’d be better off regaining control of this plane while it was airborne, wouldn’t you? You’d have more sway over how things unfolded from that point on. You’d dictate where it landed, and who’d be there to meet it. You could broadcast a video stream to television networks, from altitude, and explain what you needed to explain. Everything would happen on your terms. That would be better than if the whole thing broke open while you were sitting here on the tarmac.”
“Much better,” Garner said.
“Okay,” Travis said. “For now we sit tight. Let these people check out Rum Lake and then get back aboard. And at wheels-up I’m going to kill them all.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Travis didn’t leave the study from that point on. It made sense to stay close to Garner, and to be ready to change the plan in a hurry if there was any threat to the man’s life.
He watched the hallway most of the time, poised to move to one of the study’s corners if someone wandered in.