This was Air Force One. This room was back in the tail. He was certain of that, though again he didn’t know how.
While he wondered, it occurred to him that someone had just left the room. Two men, he thought. And they’d taken something with them.
The Tap? Had that been it? He was all but sure of it, and a second later he was sure of something else:
The Tap had just come out of his head.
The headache said so, and the trickle of blood at his temple confirmed it.
His next breath pushed out the last of the haze, and the day’s memory came down on him in a single rush.
He and Paige and Bethany, flying to Rum Lake. Evading the contractors by entering the mine. Meeting Dyer. Seeing the second Breach. Using the transparency suit to get away. Then the supermarket. The missile. The mindless drive down to Oakland afterward, with little thought in his head but gutting Stuart Holt like a fucking pig. He recalled boarding the plane, scouting it out, finding Garner back here at the tail. Then killing the others, and—
And catching up to the present.
From within a Tap memory.
He thought about that. He stared into space and tried to put it together.
The Tap memory had ended in the conference room aboard this plane.
Where had it begun?
When had it begun?
He couldn’t recall any starting point.
Worse yet, the Tap had burned all his real memories of the time span in question. It always did that. He had no way to remember what had really happened during the period he’d just relived.
“Coming around?” Garner said.
Travis nodded.
“They used a drug on you,” Garner said.
Travis nodded again. “Phenyline dicyclomide.”
Garner looked surprised.
“Dyer told me about it,” Travis said.
“Do you understand what they did to you just now?”
“Not really. Parts of it, maybe.”
“The drug has two stages,” Garner said. “Mild amnesia for a couple minutes, then four or five minutes of total short-term memory fracturing.”
“Dyer said they can give you commands during Stage Two,” Travis said, “and sometimes they feed you information in Stage One that they want you to use—”
He cut himself off.
He thought he suddenly understood part of it.
Garner nodded, seeing his expression.
“You never made it inside the mine, in real life,” Garner said. “You and Paige and Bethany got as far as the blast door, and you were trapped there. You didn’t have the combo. They used gas grenades and captured you all.”
Travis had been looking at the floor. Now he looked up sharply at Garner. “Paige and Bethany are alive?”
Garner nodded. “Tied up just like us, in the closet of the bedroom suite. They’re fine.”
All the emotions that’d torn into Travis earlier like serrated blades now reversed themselves. They withdrew in a searing instant of release that seemed to hit him as hard as the missile’s shockwave had. His breathing spasmed and his eyes flooded. He couldn’t stop himself. Didn’t care to, either. The most he could do, after a moment, was quiet the shuddering breaths. He lowered his head and let the tears stream and made hardly any sound.
Garner stayed quiet a moment longer, then continued.
“Until they chased you three to the blast door, Holt’s people hadn’t even known the mine existed. Neither had Holt. Once they found it, they figured it mattered, and they located the other access and blew them both in. Inside they encountered Dyer, by himself. They traded gunfire with him—and killed him. When they realized who he was, and that he must’ve been working with me, they figured he’d probably had all the information they were after. Including the one thing they couldn’t get from me.”
“My name,” Travis said, his voice still cracking.
Garner nodded. “They were sure Dyer knew it, and they considered using the Tap on themselves to go back and interrogate him. They even got the door combo out of me so they could enter the mine quietly. That information was far less important to me than your identity—I’m sure I didn’t give them much of a fight.”
Travis looked up and blinked hard at the tears. Garner’s image swam and then resolved.
“Holt was afraid of the Tap,” Travis said. “He was hesitant to even let his subordinates use it.”
“That’s exactly right,” Garner said. He stared for a moment, visibly confused as to how Travis could know that detail. Then he set it aside and continued. “They realized they could use you instead, to spare themselves the risk. They gave you the drug, and in Stage One they fed you the door combo, and in Stage Two they put the Tap in your head and commanded you to relive the day. If it worked like they hoped it would, the memory fracturing would keep you from knowing you were in a Tap memory at all. You wouldn’t remember using the Tap—or living through the day the first time around. You’d drop into some point in time this morning and think it was this morning. You’d think it was real.”