The Breach Read online

  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.

  VERSE III

  AN OCTOBER NIGHT IN 1992

  Though the fog is thinner here in the elevated district west of downtown, and the streets are brightly lit, Travis is driving faster than he should. He doesn’t slow, even after he’s entered the subdivision, Empire Oaks, with its smooth asphalt lanes winding among ten-thousand-square-foot homes. He doesn’t slow because he doesn’t care who or what hears him coming this time—because either way, he’s going to do what he came here to do.

  He thinks of Emily and wonders if she blamed him in her last minutes of life, when she knew it was over. She’d have been right to blame him, of course, but every instinct tells him she blamed herself instead, and the thought of that generates more hurt than Travis knows what to do with. He has already mentally added it to the debt he will settle in the next few minutes.

  He makes the turn onto Stonegate Court doing fifty, his back tires losing the wet street for a moment before they grip again, and the car surges forward.

  Emily Price.

  She is all that matters to him now, even though she’s gone.

  He thinks of all that she did for him. All that she saw in him, beneath all that he was.

  He thinks of her father, using the word Detective as a slur. It cuts because it’s true. Though that word has preceded Travis’s name on his paychecks for three years now, he’s been on someone else’s payroll much longer. In fact Travis’s sole reason for becoming a cop was to further serve the needs of his other employers. His first employers.

  He’d have spent the rest of his life as a rat, without Emily’s intercession. Without her light to lead him out of the maze.

  She did lead him out.

  And they killed her for it.

  He makes the next turn and sees the house at the end of the street, blazing with light from all twenty-six of its exquisitely furnished rooms. Drug money spends like any other kind.

  Travis is still doing fifty when he drives through the fence. He hits the brakes halfway up the yard, and when the needle drops below twenty-five, he shoves open the door and bails onto the lawn. He rolls and comes up just in time to see the car punch through the bay window and disappear completely into the house. Five seconds later he follows it in, gun in hand and eyes searching for targets.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Paige’s office came to life. People came and went with purpose. Where there’d been tension and fear before, now there was tension and fear and a little hope that no one wanted to voice. Paige sent someone to line up another transport, this time to Zurich. From the context of what followed, Travis gathered that 7 Theaterstrasse was a building located there, and that the metal engraving from the poster-sized photo was inside it, along with other writing of the same kind. Paige and the others seemed to believe that the Whisper had given him the capacity to read this text, though he couldn’t imagine how or why.

  Someone leaned in and told Paige the transport was thirty minutes out. She seemed to disconnect from all the talk at that point, thinking hard about something.

  “That’s enough time to show him,” she said, her eyes finding Travis.

  “Show him what?” a woman next to her said.

  Paige considered her decision a few seconds longer, then solidified it. “Everything.”

  A moment later he and Paige were in the corridor, moving away from the office while the others stayed behind. Travis heard them making calls, finalizing details of supplies and ground transportation in Zurich.

  The silent corridor was a welcome change. Dimly lit, mostly deserted. The place felt like a high school after hours.

  A red-haired woman, early fifties, hustled by toward the office behind them. She caught Paige’s eye as she passed, then stopped.

  “Is it true?” the woman said. “He can read it?”

  Paige nodded.

  The woman glanced at Travis, her expression mixed, as if he were either a B-list celebrity or an escaped specimen from a plague lab. Maybe both. Then she nodded, touched his shoulder, and continued on.

  Paige led him farther along the hall.

  “I know this all must feel like cleaning your contact lenses with a hose,” she said. “I’ll try to put it in order for you. A lot’s going to depend on your being up to speed.”

  She went quiet just long enough to assemble her thoughts. “Right now, the business of running the world is on hold. Right now, the most powerful people on Earth are sitting by their phones. Including the American president. Who just lost his wife. He can’t focus on that, any more than I can focus on what happened to my father, because right now the worst-case scenario we’ve ever imagined is threatening to come true. And until you read that text on my wall, I didn’t see any real way to stop it.”

  They came to an elevator. She pressed the call button pointing down.

  “This building is called Border Town. Tangent’s home. It’s in eastern Wyoming, seventy miles from the nearest anything.”

  The doors opened with a chime, and Travis followed her in. Turning, he saw a panel of floor buttons that started with B1 and descended all the way to B51. B10 was presently lit. He thought he knew which button she’d press, even before her hand went to the array. He was right. A few seconds later they were dropping toward the bottom of what was essentially a buried skyscraper.

  “What’s Border Town on the border of?” Travis said.

  As evenly as she might have said Nebraska or South Dakota, Paige said, “Another world.”

  B51 was nothing like the corridor they’d left above. Concrete floor, walls, ceiling. From the elevator it extended sixty feet and then opened up to an undefined space beyond, vast and pitch black. The tunnel might have led onto a darkened football field.

  Paige moved towa
rd the open end, but turned in at a doorway thirty feet shy of it. Travis followed her into a room that looked like a bunker that scientists would’ve sheltered in during atom-bomb tests in the fifties. Like the hallway, everything was concrete. Antiquated computer terminals hunkered at the far end of the room. Nearer to the door, current issues of Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal lay on some of the desks. Despite the place’s mausoleum atmosphere, it apparently saw some use.

  Paige opened a cabinet and withdrew a tan spiral notebook.

  “At one time, only this floor of the building existed. It was the site of a Department of Energy project, the Very Large Ion Collider. Sixty billion dollars and ten years to build. It went operational on March 7, 1978. It was used exactly once.”

  She handed him the notebook. Up close he saw rust-brown fingerprints on it that could only be blood. Similar stains had soaked deep into the pages at the book’s edge.

  “Read this,” she said. “It won’t take long, and it speaks for itself better than I can.”

  With that she took out her cell phone. Travis opened the notebook while she called upstairs to catch up with the preparations going on in her office.

  The blue lines on the paper had faded almost to nothing, but the text, handwritten in black ink, remained sharp and easily read:

  VLIC GENERAL COMMENTS LOG

  (SEE DATA LEDGERS FOR ALL SCIENTIFIC RESULTS)

  MARCH 7, 1978—14:33 UTC

  Well, it begins today. We’re all so excited we can’t put it into words.

  I’ll make this opening entry quick, since we have a lot going on. First, the point of this ledger: to record the human story of this place. Someday we may want to write a popular book about the VLIC, in the style of Feynman or Sagan. A log of people’s personal experiences here would be great for that. So no pressure, guys. Just jot down what you’re feeling. Anticipation, frustration, anything.

  Here’s today so far. Very, very exciting around here. Many of us have been on board this project for the entire decade that VLIC has been under construction, so to finally be just hours from the first shot is a kind of excitement I’ve never felt before. About twenty DOE people will be here for it, including Secretary Graham. He met with us earlier. Nice enough. He seems to have a good grasp of what this place means to physics and all science, in passing anyway, although after he stepped out someone said he probably would think an off-shell W boson was something at Taco Bell, haha. (No offense Mr. Secretary if you ever read this, we kid around a lot.)

  Predictions for the first shot? Ha, not on your life. Obviously there’s the expectation that we’ll raise the lower bound on the Higgs by another percent of the standard model’s prediction, but no one’s saying it’ll happen on the first shot! I would stick my neck out and say I hope, in time, we get an even more significant result than that, but I don’t want to look back on this entry and think I was an idiot, so I’ll just say I’m proud to be here, and to be part of this team trusted with something this special. We all are. This is Dave Bryce.

  MARCH 7, 1978—PROBABLY A QUARTER AFTER 18:00 UTC

  This is Dave Bryce again. This account of the shot is for investigators in case we all die down here before anyone gets to us. None of the machine-collected data survived, I’m sure, because of what happened with the metal. I don’t know how we lived through it, it seems like the iron in our blood or the trace copper in our neurons should have been affected, and killed us instantly. Maybe it did get affected, and we’re just not symptomatic yet. We’re all very upset and scared. Here is the record, what I know at least, so whoever finds this will have somewhere to begin.

  The shot happened at 17:40 UTC as scheduled. At the instant of collision, everything metal here in the bunker took on luminescence, different colors depending on the metal, but generally blues, greens. Something inside the wall phone was shining bright yellow, not sure what it was. The DOE undersecretary, Porter, collapsed, and there was no pulse at all, even right away. Two of the DOE people who knew him said he had a pacemaker. That seems pretty irresponsible to have him down here for this, even though we wouldn’t have guessed there was any danger, I think I would have advised against it if I’d known. Laid the body at back wall of bunker, does not seem very dignified but nothing else would be any better.

  Ruben Ward collapsed also, but for a different reason. He had both hands resting on the metal housing for the ring switches at the time of the shot. Don’t know if he got a jolt from it, or what it might have been, but he lost consciousness and fell. He’s still unconscious, we have him on the floor with a couple sweaters for a pillow.

  Luminescence faded after about thirty seconds. At that point we had no information to go on, all electrical systems were out, computers, temp gauges, everything. The lights in the bunker were out, too. The only way we could see anything was a bright light shining down the hallway from the shot chamber, right past the doorway. It’s very bright, and a lot of it comes in here, indirectly. Because of the angle, we can’t see far enough down the hall to see into the chamber. We don’t know what’s going on in there, or where the light is coming from. I know we don’t have anything that bright installed out there. It is still shining now, thirty or forty minutes after the shot.

  We took a vote and have decided to open the door, and send someone to check if the elevator is working. (I’ll go.) It’s a dozen yards or so farther from the chamber than this room, maybe there’s a chance it wasn’t affected. Scary to open the door, if it’s possible the air is bad outside the room, though I don’t know why that would have happened. (But who knows about anything down here now?)

  APPROX. HOUR AND A HALF AFTER LAST ENTRY

  It took us half an hour to get the door open. The metal had fused to the frame at several places like a weld. If it’d been a tighter fit to the frame, the whole thing would have fused, and we’d have been trapped. Sure as hell would not have broken through the 2-inch-thick polycarbonate window in the door.

  No use anyway. I went out to the elevator and it’s dead. Pulleys are probably welded solid even if the electrical was working.

  When I was in the hall, I could see into the chamber, but could make out no detail except the light, which I couldn’t look right at. In peripheral, it seems like a single point of light out in the middle somewhere, bright white. It felt like sunlight on my skin, maybe even a little warmer, which is scary. I came back in the room quickly.

  Also, some kind of sound is coming from the chamber, very faint, could almost be imagining it, but I don’t think so. Hard to describe it, sort of like a tuning fork. Back in the room with the door shut, I couldn’t hear it anymore.

  Someone will have to come for us soon. Ruben is still not responding. I keep thinking about all the precautions I might have recommended, all these years while this place was being built. Maybe a medical staffer down here, if nothing else. Just never thought for a second something like this (whatever this even is) would happen. I take responsibility for whatever happens to these people. This is still Dave by the way.

  FIVE TO SEVEN HOURS AFTER LAST ENTRY

  I dozed off. Secretary Graham woke me up and I saw that the light in the hall had changed. Much dimmer, and blue instead of white. Everyone’s nerves have had it, mine too. Why the hell isn’t someone down here to get us yet?

  Ruben still unconscious. Wonder if he is in a coma, but have no idea. Porter’s body bloating a little, smells terrible, really bothering us in this unvented space.

  I am pissed off, I’ll say that. Maybe unprofessional, and maybe I’ll tear out these pages later, but right now I’m pissed and want to say so. Ruben Ward is my best friend and one of the smartest men in the world, he has so much to offer science, and he might be experiencing brain damage by now because these fucking assholes are doing what up there? Having a luncheon and setting a date for a formal meeting about how to get us out of here? I know I’m being unfair and stupid, I’m sure they’re up there figuring it all out, but I’m stressed and really pissed. This room smells like roadkill
but we’re afraid to leave it. Wish I knew what the hell that light from the chamber was. Dave.

  TWELVE HOURS AFTER LAST ENTRY, GIVE OR TAKE

  Can no longer handle the smell. Graham and I have volunteered to take the body out into the hallway at least, maybe farther toward the chamber. Majority have voted to leave the door open for a while after that, let the room air out if that will even happen.

  Light is a bit dimmer now, and purple, projecting ripples in the hallway like you see on the bottom of a pool. Have to admit I’m afraid to go out into it, just don’t know what it is, what is out there in the chamber.

  But curious, too, no doubt about it. We’re going now. Dave.

  ONE HOUR AFTER LAST ENTRY

  The interacting point at the center of the chamber is gone. The whole assembly, and the magnets too, just gone like they were never there. Some amount of the floor they were sitting on is gone as well. There’s a kind of crater in the floor, not blasted there, but more like machined there, like a giant with a disc sander honed it out. It’s maybe a foot deep in the middle, shallowing out to the edge at a radius of, I don’t know, twenty feet.

  Above the crater, perfectly centered where the interacting point used to be, is what I can only call a rip in midair. The rip is an oval, some ten feet wide, maybe three feet tall in the middle, purple and blue light filling it and curling like flame at its edges. When you look into the rip and move back and forth sideways, you realize you’re looking into a depth, an opening. It’s like looking in through the hatch of a deep coal furnace.