Authors: Patrick Lee
Deep Sky (25 page)
T
ravis 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.
Other times, when he was sure no one was coming, he took stock of the room. He knelt and studied Garner’s restraints: heavy-duty plastic zip ties binding his wrists together behind him. Way too thick to be broken by just straining at them—they were probably rated for a thousand pounds. More of them held Garner’s shoulders and ankles to the dolly’s steel-tube frame.
Travis looked at the hole punched in the wall higher up, allowing the dolly to be zip-tied to the support strut behind it. The break revealed the wall’s surface to be standard plasterboard—strange for an airplane, but this one was obviously something of an exception. The strut the zip tie encircled was metal—probably aluminum—with crisp, machined edges. The material was strong as hell, of course. The plane was made of it.
“When you need to cut me loose, there are nail clippers in that desk,” Garner said. He nodded at it. “Tray drawer, top right. Ton of clutter, but they’re in there.”
F
rom outside came the sound of the choppers’ turbines powering up, first one and then the other. A minute later their rotors began slapping the air in heavy thuds, and then they throttled to full power and lifted off.
F
or the next two hours nothing happened. The plane’s interior had gone dead silent, though Holt, at least, was probably still aboard. Probably Porter, too. Travis expected them to come back and have another go at Garner with the interrogation drug, but they didn’t. Maybe they really had written off their chances of learning more.
T
he rotors faded back in and then rose to a machine-gun rattle. The choppers landed outside and powered down. Soon afterward voices picked up again somewhere forward in the cabin. Two minutes after that, a series of hydraulic rumbles reverberated through the 747, and its engines began to whine. Travis drew the survival knife from its sheath, and hid it behind the suit’s top.
H
olt and Porter were sitting in the conference room as the plane taxied. Outside the windows, hazy twilight had settled over the terminals and runways. Porter was reading the simple handwritten notes for the Tap—the Tap itself remained on the counter along the back wall. Travis moved past the room and into the seating area ahead. The other eight men were there, like any regular airline passengers about to accelerate to two hundred miles per hour in a big metal tube. They weren’t buckled in, but they sat face forward with their heads against the padding behind them.
Five had taken window seats, all on the port side. The other three had sat along the aisle, also to port. Each was in his own lateral row. Each could see only the men ahead of him, unless he turned around. The plane nosed to the starting line of its takeoff run and its massive engines built to a scream, rendering sound within the cabin pretty much meaningless for the next thirty seconds.
By the end of those thirty, before the plane had even tilted upward and begun to climb, all eight men were dead.
T
ravis didn’t bother wiping the blade clean or hiding the knife under the suit again.
He strode back to the conference room as the plane banked and climbed. He held the weapon out to his side, letting it drip. He went right through the doorway, making for Porter first. The man saw the hovering knife in his peripheral vision and turned fast to look at it. Confusion broke over his face and then fear, and then the blade went tip-first into his trachea all the way to the spine, and Travis twisted and flicked it sideways on the way out.
Holt looked up in time to see the man spasm and collapse. In time to see the knife withdraw and remain bobbing in the air, then circle the end of the table to his side and come floating toward him. He jerked backward, almost tipping his chair over, and scrambled out of it. He ended up in a kind of defensive crouch in the corner, his neck hunched behind a tight barrier he’d made with his hands.
Travis came on slowly. Patiently.
“What is this?” Holt said, getting barely above a whisper. “
What is this?
”
“I came to ID the other two victims in the Humvee,” Travis said.
Holt’s eyes left the knife and tried to pinpoint the location of Travis’s voice.
“Their names were Paige Campbell and Bethany Stewart. They were two of the best people I ever met. They passed up normal lives to make the world better, or at least to keep it from getting worse. They gave up a lot to do that. For the most part they even gave up sunlight.”
“Whatever you want, I can get it for you,” Holt said. “I’m the most powerful person in the world.”
“All appearances to the contrary,” Travis said.
“You need to think about this,” Holt said. His voice cracked. “You really do.”
“I really don’t,” Travis said, and he shoved the discarded chair aside, stepping past it toward where the man crouched.
Before he got there, his vision began to flash green and blue.
T
ravis stopped mid-step. He swayed forward until he caught his balance. He looked around fast, as if his eyes could outrun the effect. They couldn’t.
Green. Blue. Green. Blue. The flashing saturated everything in his field of view, like intense stage lighting at a rock concert.
Green. Blue.
He knew what it meant—but it was impossible. How could he be catching up to the present from within a Tap memory if he hadn’t
used
the Tap?
Green. Blue.
The knife fell from his hand, bounced and spun on the carpet. Holt looked confused.
Travis staggered backward, stumbled against one of the chairs, turned and leaned down and steadied himself on the table.
Green. Blue.
He was about to be drawn out of this memory against his will. Any second. But drawn out to
what
? And to
when
? When and where had he put the Tap into his head?
Green. Blue.
Black.
H
e flinched and opened his eyes. He was back in the study, at the plane’s tail. Holt and Porter were standing in front of him, Richard Garner just beyond them and off to the side, still bound to the dolly. Travis looked down and saw that he himself was bound to a dolly now, right where he’d been in the dream.
Which hadn’t been a dream.
Neither had it been a projection sent to him by somebody else.
It hadn’t been either of those things.
He had less than a second to think about it, and then his memory simply wiped itself away. Vanished like a sand picture in the blast of a leaf blower.
Where was he?
How had he gotten here?
What the hell was he tied to?
An old man who looked like Wilford Brimley leaned into his viewpoint, scrutinizing his face.
“Can you understand me?” the old man said.
But before Travis could reply, his memory blew away again, no more than a second after it’d begun to form.
Where was he?
How had he gotten here?
G
arner watched Travis struggle against the drug. As strange as it was to experience the effect yourself, it was almost more so to see someone else endure it.
He watched Travis’s eyes keep losing the room and finding it again. Rediscovering his surroundings every second or so as his memory fractured.
Porter was leaning in with his nose six inches from Travis’s.
“Tell us who goes through the Breach,” he said—framing it as a command, not a question.
Travis blinked, no doubt having lost the statement already. He stared at Porter and said nothing.
Porter repeated the instruction. And again. And again. Carefully and patiently. Working it into Travis’s subconscious like a dog trainer setting a patterned response. He’d been doing this for years.
“Tell us who goes through the Breach.”
Garner had undergone the questioning himself all night and all day. Sessions like this every hour or so, seventeen in all. The needle marks on his arms helped him keep count.
He’d given up a lot of information. He knew it. He also knew he’d held on to the only piece that would matter in the end. He knew by the frustration he’d seen in their eyes, each time the narcotic’s power dissipated and his memory stabilized. They hadn’t gotten it from him. He’d been protecting it too long to surrender it now, even under the drug.
It would be different with Travis. If he knew the answer, he’d learned it today.
Porter gave the command a sixth time: “Tell us who goes through the Breach.”
Travis’s eyelids drew close together. He seemed to grasp the instruction, even beneath the crumbling memory.
“Tell us who goes through the Breach.”
“I do,” Travis said.
Porter narrowed his eyes. He drew back a few inches.
“I go through,” Travis said. Something like amusement crossed his face. “Lucky me.”
“Is he playing with us?” Holt said. “Is the effect wearing off?”
Porter looked at his watch. “It’s probably starting to. We used up three sixteen while he was in the memory.”
“Get the Tap back out of him,” Holt said. “While you can still make him cooperate.”
Porter nodded. He leaned in again and said, “Think the Tap out of your head.” He repeated it, his speech precise and direct. He said it a third time and Travis shut his eyes and seemed to concentrate hard on something. A few seconds later he gasped. His face twisted in pain. Then the Tap began to emerge from the same pinprick hole it’d gone in through, a bright green tendril snaking and darting. Porter held up his hand and let it collect in a mass on his palm.
“Try again in an hour,” Holt said. “We’ll have the whole four or five minutes to question him then. We’ll get it.”
B
y the time they left with the Tap—re-formed into its cube shape—Garner could tell Travis’s memory was solidifying. The drug’s influence tended to recede very rapidly, from full strength to no effect at all in about a minute. The clarity growing in Travis’s eyes showed he was well into that time.
W
here was he?
Some little room.
He was tied to something—a dolly, it looked like.
He took a deep breath, and felt a fog clear from his mind as he did. Another breath—even clearer.
He looked up and saw that Richard Garner was with him, also tied to a dolly.
He thought the room was a study, though for the moment he wasn’t sure how he knew that.
There was a deep droning sound coming through the walls and floor. Jet engines.
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.”
The plane. En route to Rum Lake. Waking up aboard it—
that
was when the Tap memory had begun. The whole day after that had been fake.
“Later on you’d reach the blast door,” Garner said, “and this time you’d know the combo. You’d never know
how
you knew it—you’d remember Stage One like it was some strange vision you’d had—but under the circumstances you’d certainly try punching those numbers in.”
“And end up meeting Dyer,” Travis said.
Garner nodded. “In all likelihood learning what he knew, given that you served the same interests. And when you came back out of the Tap memory, they could interrogate you for that knowledge. You’d be less conditioned to protect it than I am. Far less, I’m afraid.”
“Jesus,
did
I give it up? Did I tell them I’m the one who goes through the Breach?”
“You did, but they thought it was sarcasm.” Garner frowned. “An hour from now they’ll figure out that it wasn’t. I’m sorry, but there’s almost no chance of your protecting that secret against someone as skilled as Porter.”
Garner sounded defeated. It was impossible to blame him. For a long moment Travis felt the same.
Then he thought of something he’d seen earlier, while wandering the plane in the transparency suit.
A second later he thought of something
else
he’d seen, and managed a smile.
Holt and his people couldn’t possibly know he’d gotten such a detailed look at the aircraft. They wouldn’t have guessed in a million years that, in the Tap memory they dumped him into, he would end up boarding the plane and scoping it out nose to tail. That lack of imagination on their part had been a mistake. A big one, potentially.
He flexed his wrists against the zip tie that bound them behind him, and put his knuckles to the plasterboard an inch away.
Then he shoved. Hard. Once, twice, three times. He heard the board flex and protest, and on the fourth push its gypsum core cracked softly in a fist-sized hole, the paper surface tearing with it.
