An intense chain of lightning unwound itself sideways over the mountains, illuminating the front range. Travis switched off the phone and picked up his speed to a sprint.
Two and a half minutes later, in the deep shadows of the pole barn, he caught his breath—a full-out run could still wind him. He faced the elevator doors, opened his eyes wide and waited for the biometric camera to find one of his irises. A quick flash of red skipped across the left half of his vision, and then the doors parted in front of him, throwing hard light out onto the concrete barn floor.
He stepped inside and faced the array of buttons. All fifty-one of them. Though he only rarely had reason to press the button for the deepest level, his eyes always went to it, drawn by his awareness of what was down there. Sometimes, especially in the elevator, he could swear he felt the Breach somehow. Maybe in his bones. A rhythmic bass wave, like an alien heartbeat, five hundred feet below in its fortified cocoon.
He pressed the button for B12, and the doors closed on the desert breeze and the darkness. The cab descended.
What was the news?
Not a new arrival out of the Breach. If that’d been the case, Paige would have directed him to the Primary Lab, where newly arrived objects—
The doors opened on twelve, and Travis stepped into the hallway. Like almost any corridor in the building, at any given time, this one was deserted. Border Town was enormous relative to its population: about a hundred full- time personnel. Spread over fifty-one floors, they didn’t often bump elbows.
Travis turned the corner that led to the conference room, and saw Paige standing outside the open double doors, waiting. She had most of her attention turned inward on the room—Travis saw the glow of a television monitor reflected in her eyes—but she turned toward him as he approached. By now he could hear the ambience of a large number of people inside the room. Maybe everyone in the building.
When he reached Paige, she put her hand on his arm and left it there for a second.
“It’s bad,” she said, and led him through the doorway.
It was everyone. Standing room only. All eyes on the three large LCD panels on the right-side wall. Live news feeds: CNN, MSNBC, Fox. All three had aerial coverage of some structure on fire, surrounded by emergency crews. Travis looked from one screen to the next, seeking the clearest angle on the event, and after a few seconds the middle image pulled back and there it was.
The White House.
Burning.
More specifically, one of its wings was burning; the central portion of the house looked fine. Travis couldn’t tell whether it was the east or west wing that was on fire without knowing which way the aerial shots were pointing. He finally let his eyes drop to the captions at the bottom of each screen, and understood. An explosion, very near the Oval Office, possibly inside it. He studied the image again. Only a gutted cavity remained of the president’s office, all of it aflame despite two streams of water going into it from fire trucks on the scene.
“He was in there,” Paige said. “He was on TV, live, and then it just went to black. About a minute later they started reporting on it.”
The story resolved over the next two hours. Details came in, sketchy and then solid. The three networks must’ve had nearly identical sources—with each new piece of information, their chyrons updated almost in unison.
Twenty minutes into the coverage the secretary of state confirmed that President Garner had been killed. Vice President Stuart Holt, in Los Angeles for an environmental summit, was already in the air on his way back to Washington. He would be sworn in aboard the plane.
Travis found it hard to see Garner’s death in its proper light—its global and historical significance. Garner had been a friend, and now he was gone. That was the only way Travis could feel it, for the moment.
He tried to stay focused on the coverage. The details of the blast had already begun to crystallize. There were dozens of witnesses who’d seen a contrail in the air at the time of the explosion, though it was unclear, at first, whether it’d belonged to an aircraft or a missile.
Then, five minutes after the official announcement about President Garner, all three networks cut away from the White House to a new feed—still an aerial shot, but at a different location. A residential street somewhere. A cul-de-sac full of more emergency vehicles, mostly police cruisers but also an ambulance and a single fire truck. The house at the end of the cul-de-sac was heavily damaged in some way that was hard to make sense of. Most of its roof had been blown off, and the debris lay scattered around it, but the walls and even most of the windows appeared intact. Nothing was burning.
Around him in the conference room, Travis saw sudden looks exchanged. He glanced at Paige and saw her focusing hard on the televised images. The house. The missing roof.
A man to Travis’s left said, “Archer.”
A few others nodded, Paige among them. After a moment she seemed to feel Travis’s stare, and turned to him.
“Archer is an old Air Force program,” she said. “Goes back to the fifties. Defensive missiles concealed in civilian areas. Supposed to be a last line against a nuclear strike.”
Travis watched the implication spread across the room. President Garner had just been killed by someone in his own military.
It took less than an hour for rumors of the Archer program to filter into the broadcast coverage. Travis wasn’t surprised. Secret as the program was, it had to require hundreds of people to operate it. Maybe thousands. Impossible to keep them all quiet in the aftermath of something like this.
By two in the morning there was official confirmation that Archer existed, and that it had been used against the White House. CNN got an Air Force general on the phone who addressed those two points and then spent the next five minutes saying nothing at all in a dozen different ways. No word of a suspect. No word of a motive.
The helicopter footage remained the backdrop throughout, mostly covering the White House but occasionally returning to the cratered home on the cul-de-sac.
Travis had an idea that no further news was coming tonight, though the investigation had probably made serious headway already. No doubt there
By 3 A.M. the crowd in the conference room on level B12 had begun to thin. Paige looked at Travis and communicated her thoughts without a spoken word.
Five minutes later they were in their residence on B16, under the covers, holding each other close in the dark. Travis could think of nothing to say. He thought about Garner. Knew Paige was thinking about him too. Only platitudes came to Travis’s mind. Garner had lived a long and dignified life. He would be remembered forever. His death had almost certainly come without pain. Maybe without awareness, even—the blast had probably killed him before he could see or hear it.
All of it true.
None of it helpful.
He kissed Paige’s forehead. Pulled her closer. Felt her body relax as sleep came on. Felt himself begin fading too.
Paige’s phone rang on the nightstand. She rolled, picked it up, squinted at the display. Travis saw by her reaction that the number was unfamiliar.
She pressed the button. “Hello?”
The caller spoke for a few seconds. Travis could discern only enough to tell that it was a man’s voice. He couldn’t make out the words.
“Yes, I’m in charge here,” Paige said. “Who is this?”
The conversation lasted five minutes. Paige hardly spoke. Just quick affirmatives to let the man know she was still listening.
When the caller finally stopped speaking, Travis glanced at Paige. In the diffuse glow from her phone, he saw her staring at empty space, her forehead knitted.
Two more syllables from the caller. It sounded like,
