Authors: Patrick Lee
“Select option four, ‘Change ID Prefix.’ Answer all three questions with Yes, by pressing
1
. Then enter
77118-star–945
as the new prefix. Pound key to verify it. Faster, sweetie.
”
He shuddered in response to her rising excitement; his fingers trembled on the keys as he finished the sequence.
“Now exit the menu, just keep pressing
9
until it says, ‘Ready.’ Good, my love. We’re ready to call them. Pick up the handset and dial
82-star–375–121–9188
.
”
He dialed. It rang once, and a man answered. “CINC-Pacific forward hub, please authenticate.”
Travis opened his mouth to speak, and experienced bliss incarnate: the Whisper took control of his voice, bypassing his decision process. What came out sounded like him, though slower, and with the ghost of a drawl: “November, hotel, one, four, eight, juliet, echo, oscar. This is a priority card from Trap Door.”
The man on the other end took a quick breath, then spoke evenly. “Trap Door, I agree with authentication. Go ahead.”
Travis felt his mouth open to speak again—but stopped. He turned his ear to the open bay door behind him.
From far away came the sound of rotors. At the same time he felt the sphere in his hand tense somehow; the light flickered like a nervous twitch.
Then he was drawn back to the phone, and spoke rapidly: “Relay the following EAM to USS
Maryland
. By order of the president of the United States and the chief of staff, Navy, set condition four-alpha, immediate launch of two Trident ICBMs against Target Package 3261, Nanjing ballistic missile complex, East China, Jiangsu Province.”
The man on the phone didn’t reply right away, and Travis said sharply, “Commander.”
“Yes, sir.” Another pause, not even a second, and the man said: “In accordance with protocols governing the release of strategic weapons, the senior controller will ask you for the president’s and the Navy chief’s nuclear launch codes. Those are the final authorizations required.”
“Put him on,” Travis said.
“Go go go,
” Emily whispered in his mind. The light was strobing so quickly now it was almost smooth again, like a bad fluorescent bulb.
The rotors were getting loud; the echoes off the valley walls made it hard to guess the distance.
A soft-spoken man came on the line. “The president’s code first, please.”
“Six, one, nine, three, three, three, two, eight.”
“Now the Navy chief of staff’s.”
“Four, nine, six, eight, five—”
Suddenly the chopper sounded much closer; it must have just passed the last ridge and entered the airspace over the valley.
“Sir?” the soft-spoken man said.
“I’m sorry,” Travis said. “Starting over, four, nine, six, eight, five, seven, seven, one.”
“Thank you, sir, EAM is authorized and will transmit about thirty seconds from right—”
The man’s last word was cut off by a shriek of metal as autofire ripped through the Black Hawk. Instinct overrode Travis’s euphoria and he threw himself clear, toward the back of the troop bay. His wrist collided with the rear bench, and the Whisper broke from his grip. It hit the floor and rolled to the back corner.
Travis cried out, not from pain but from a swell of anguish. Losing hold of it—
her, losing hold of her
—felt like losing a loved one. Like losing his
only
loved one.
The chopper passed overhead with a turbine scream and a downrush of air that rocked the Black Hawk. The gunfire stopped and Travis saw the aircraft arc out over the valley, making a wide loop to come back.
He got up on his knees and reached for the Whisper—
Three inches shy, he stopped.
Clarity filtered back in, like blood to a deprived limb. He withdrew his hand as if from a serpent. What had he done? What had he
fucking done
?
A voice, tinny and just audible, issued from the phone unit behind him. “Sir? Are you still on?”
The preceding minutes came back to him now, laid bare to his logic. Outside, the helicopter had completed its semicircle and was returning, ten seconds out.
“Sir?”
Travis spun, dove for the handset and screamed into it, “Call it off! It’s bullshit! Call it off!”
“Excuse me?”
“Call someone and check on it, it’s all bullshit!”
“Who the
fuck
is this?”
Through the window he saw the gunner’s muzzle flash overhead. He vaulted backward and fell from the bay door into the dirt, as the Black Hawk was shredded by a much more sustained burst than before. He got to his feet and—catching a last glimpse of blue light under the bench seat—sprinted into the trees.
He was forty yards away when he realized the helicopter wasn’t following. The thunder of its rotors remained constant; it had gone into a hover, and now the turbine pitch dropped. Travis reached a grove dense enough to provide a screen and stopped. Looking back, he saw the chopper descend and set down beside the Black Hawk.
The men inside had the look of the hostiles who’d tortured Paige. One of them, wearing heavy gloves that went to his elbows, jumped from the chopper and ran to the Black Hawk’s bay door, his face momentarily bathed in the Whisper’s glow. He reached in and took hold of the sphere, and despite his protection, he swayed on his feet, his face relaxing and then his mouth turning up in a child’s smile. Behind him, two others hauled a heavy steel box from the chopper, roughly the size of the cobbled one inside the Black Hawk. They reached the man with the Whisper and had to shout and nudge him to get his attention. At last he seemed to notice them. Nodding, he opened the container and shut the sphere inside it.
Twenty seconds later, its cargo secured, the helicopter revved to a scream again and climbed away over the valley.
7 THEATERSTRASSE
The Tangent personnel who arrived on the next Black Hawk were under stricter orders than the first group. They bound and hooded Travis, belted him aboard, and he heard nothing but the craft’s engines whining at full power for the next two hours.
He thought of the Whisper. The euphoric—even erotic—sensation of holding it still weighed on him like a personal loss, in its absence.
Yet as strange and powerful as the experience had been, he was forgetting it. Rapidly. Even now, just this short time after the fact, his memory of the entire event had faded to something like a receding dream. He could recall how it’d started: picking the thing up, Emily Price’s voice directing him to fire on the unseen killer. And he could recall how it’d ended: letting go of it inside the Black Hawk, after slamming his wrist on the bench seat, and becoming aware of what he’d done under its control. What he’d done with the satellite phone, and what was about to result from it, thousands of miles away.
But everything between those two points was now a bright blue haze. Like a drug high he couldn’t remember, except for fading pieces. The thing’s terrifying capability. Its impossible knowledge of everything—literally everything. It’d told him something about Paige. What, he couldn’t remember. And it’d given him a street address, for reasons that now escaped him. Something that sounded German, he thought; he could resolve it no further than that. As the time stretched out aboard the Black Hawk, he found even these trace memories slipping deeper and deeper out of his reach.
The chopper landed. He had no idea where. The aircrew helped him outside onto pavement, and he heard the heavy turbofans of a large jet powering up. Someone guided him up a set of metal stairs, and then he was aboard the plane, his head still covered.
There were quite a few people on the jet, ten to fifteen voices, he thought. A set of hands led him to a seat at the back end. Outside, the engines rose in pitch, and the aircraft began to taxi.
He heard tension in the voices around him. Fear, too. Calls came and went, in a few different languages. From the context of those made in English, Travis gathered that the people on the other end were government officials in countries all over the world. For a moment he wondered if the Whisper’s plan had been carried out anyway, and the ICBM launch against China had gone ahead. The man next to him assured him it hadn’t; his screamed warning at the end of the call had been more than sufficient.
But something was going on. Something that concerned the whole world. Something that scared the shit out of these people.
A moment later the jet turned onto its runway. It stopped for a few seconds as its engines came up to full scream. Travis’s interrogation started just as it lifted off.
Five times, for five different people, he told his account of what’d happened, starting with his discovery of the wrecked 747, Box Kite. The point of the repetition was obvious enough: to see if his story would break along the fault line of a lie. It didn’t. All he kept from them was the part he’d lost: the now nearly impenetrable amnesia effect that hung over the minutes he’d spent with the Whisper.
He told them about the invisible attacker, dead on the bent pine bough in the valley. The questioners’ reaction to that news was a few clicks above happy. They called ground teams that had secured the valley and directed them to the body. Travis thought of the first team’s fear, in the last minute of their lives, and wondered how long Tangent had been dealing with that particular threat.
Then he told them about the street address. The one he couldn’t quite remember. The one that sounded German.
“Seven Theaterstrasse,” the first questioner said. Not even asking.
Travis nodded anyway. That was it.
He heard the phrase make its way up the plane like a passed note, and he marked its progress by the silence it left in its wake.
They let him sleep after the fifth round of questioning. He woke to the bark of the wheels touching down. Then came a jeep ride over rough ground for a few hundred yards, through bright sunlight that warmed the black fabric of the hood still over his head. The baked air could only be that of a desert. Behind him he heard the jet already powering up to take off again. The jeep reached a smooth surface at the same time that it passed into shadow out of the sunlight. An elevator ride followed, lasting some ten seconds. Ten seconds moving down.
“You can take that off him. Those, too.” A woman’s voice. Soft and raw, like she’d ruined it screaming at a rock concert the night before.
The binds at his wrists clicked open, and the hood came away to reveal a windowless office—and Paige Campbell standing in front of him. The veins in her right arm were still discolored, and her face remained drawn and pale, darkened beneath her eyes. But she was on her feet, as steady as a person could be. Her breathing was silent, normal. She’d come out of the Brooks Lodge on a stretcher, two thirds of the way dead, maybe ten hours ago, depending on how long Travis had slept on the plane.
The others left the room. He was alone with her.
She followed his eyes to her arm, the now-sutured incision across her triceps just peeking from her sleeve. Some compound the color and consistency of tar had been applied to the wound, probably deep inside it. The swelling around the injury had all but vanished.
“You’ll see a lot of strange things around here,” she said. Then, softer: “I saw a map of the distance you carried me. Thank you.”
He didn’t know what to say back to that. He nodded, and thought of what else she must have seen by now. His criminal record. Every detail of what he’d done. More than enough to counterbalance any merit he might have gained with her.
“Sorry for your treatment aboard the plane,” she said. “We’re methodical.”
Her cell phone rang. She looked at the display, answered, and told the caller to give her a minute. In her voice was the same tension he’d heard among those on the plane.
She gave him a look that seemed to cut past any further polite conversation while at the same time apologizing for it. “Would you consent to a narcotic interrogation? It may help us recover more of what the Whisper told you.”
He had a sense that she didn’t expect that to work, but that she’d take what she could get. He also felt sure it would happen whether he consented or not. Nice of her to pretend to ask, though.
On the wall behind her was something that clashed with the professional look of the office. It looked like a promo poster for a rock band. It was a close-up of a steel surface, with the words
ETHER WASTE
carved roughly into it. Nothing else. No tour dates, no website address.
Paige waited for an answer. Probably wouldn’t for much longer.
“Do what you have to,” he said.
“Thank you.” She indicated a door on his left. “There’s a bathroom there if you’d like to clean up. I’ll be back in a few minutes, and we’ll get started.”
He turned toward the closed bathroom door as she crossed the office to leave.
“I thought I was back up to speed on heavy metal groups,” he said. “Guess I missed one.”
Her footsteps halted at the threshold to the corridor. “What?”
He looked at her. Saw her looking back with blank eyes.
“Ether Waste,” he said, nodding at the poster. “I’ve never heard of them.”
She didn’t move. Still staring at him from the doorway. She had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Maybe the drugs were still having some effect on her thinking, though nothing else about her behavior said so.
Then she reacted.
Her eyes narrowed and she took a step in from the doorway. Looked back and forth from him to the poster. “You can read that?”
He started to ask if she was okay, but the sentence died as a thought. He was looking at the poster again, which suddenly looked more like a blown-up forensic image than a promo. He looked at the text in particular. Really looked at it, instead of just reading it.
It wasn’t English.
It wasn’t even writing, by any definition he’d have assigned. There were no discrete rows or columns. No sense of order at all. The engraving on the steel was just a chaotic tangle of curves and lines, overlapping and pointing in all directions like a spill of needles and loose threads.
But he could read it.
He could read it without even thinking about it, as if it said
STOP
in white letters on a bright red octagon.