Deep Sky

“And have massive financial resources at her disposal after a while,” Paige said. “If whoever’s on the other side of the Breach had a presence on our side by that time, maybe they recognized the potential of a company like Microsoft—even back then.”

“Plenty of regular humans recognized it,” Travis said. “They all own islands now.”

He stopped pacing. He stared at the floor for a second, thinking hard. Something in what they’d just learned about Loraine Cotton had set off a ping, but he couldn’t get his mind around it. He gave it another ten seconds’ thought but got nowhere. He let it fade. Maybe it would come to him on its own.

He looked at a clock above Raines’s refrigerator. Twelve thirty. Six hours and fifteen minutes left before Peter Campbell’s estimated deadline. All at once it seemed like all the time in the world, but Travis took no relief from that fact. If things went well down in the shaft—if they saw what they had to do, and were able to do it—then he imagined it would all unfold pretty quickly. And if things didn’t go well—if they went bad in ways he couldn’t guess at the moment—then that would probably unfold pretty damn quickly, too.

They went.

The going was easy on the stairs. They were well constructed and solid and the mercury lamps put out plenty of light. Travis led the way. Every few flights he leaned over the handrail as he descended, and got a slightly closer look at the deep floor of the pit. Still no details. Just the slowly pulsing red-and-pink light.

They were some two hundred feet down when Travis noticed a break in the pattern of stairs far below— maybe two hundred feet lower still. It was as if the squared spiral had been compressed by ten feet at a single point. Like an accordion held open vertically, with just one pleat of its bellows pinched shut in the middle. He stopped for a moment and stared at it, and realized what it was: a horizontal walkway where a flight of stairs would’ve otherwise been. A single stretch that went sideways instead of down. From this high angle he couldn’t see the shaft wall at that spot—the flights above it blocked it from view—but he knew what was there.

The three of them stopped again when they were only fifty feet above the level walkway, facing it from the opposite wall. From this vantage they could easily see the opening there, where a side tunnel branched off the shaft into pitch darkness.

They stared at it a few seconds and then continued downward, but Travis kept his eyes fixed on it as they made their way around. He couldn’t admit it out loud, but something about the opening unnerved him. Some ancient fear coded right into his DNA was setting off an internal klaxon, telling him it was a bad idea to walk past a dark cavity in a rock face. He had his MP5 slung on its shoulder strap, the same as Paige and Bethany, and was on the verge of taking hold of its grip as they came down the last flight before the tunnel. Only logic kept him from doing so. This was an abandoned mine in the present, not Olduvai Gorge a million years ago. Nothing with claws was going to erupt from the darkness and try to have them for lunch. That’s what he was thinking when he was two treads above the walkway, and then a man’s voice out of the blackness said, “Stop right there.”

Chapter Thirty

There was no sound of a gun being cocked. Just a tone confident enough to imply one.

Travis stopped.

Paige and Bethany stopped behind him—he heard their breathing cut out at the same time.

“Keep your hands away from the weapons,” the man said.

“We’re not going to drop them,” Travis said. There was caution and then there was stupidity.

“I’m not going to ask you to,” the man said.

A moment later there came the soft crunch of a careful step, followed by another. Travis saw a hint of movement in the darkness, clothing catching the indirect spill of mercury light ten feet back in the tunnel.

Then the man said, “You’re Travis Chase.”

The unreal quality of the moment passed quickly. The analytical part of Travis’s mind kicked in, firing off questions. Who was still alive who could both recognize him and be inside this place? Had the voice sounded familiar? He had no immediate answer for either one.

“Who are you?” Travis said.

“I think you’ll remember me. I’m coming out now. My weapon’s holstered.”

More footsteps. Then a shape materialized out of the gloom, and a second later the man was standing right at the tunnel’s opening, hands out at his sides in a nonthreatening stance. He glanced up the flight at each of them in turn, then looked at Travis and waited for him to speak.

Travis knew him. He’d met him just over a year ago under very tense circumstances, and spent a few hours in his general vicinity. He couldn’t remember if they’d spoken directly—if so, it would’ve been just a few words. Paige and Bethany wouldn’t recognize him at all; they’d been in the same room with him for ten seconds back then, but their faces had been pressed to the floor, and there’d been a lot of shooting going on.

“Rudy Dyer,” Travis said. “Secret Service for Richard Garner.”

Travis introduced Paige and Bethany. The three of them filed down onto the walkway and into the open space at the tunnel’s mouth. Between themselves and Dyer they formed a rough square a few feet apart from one another, in which everyone could see everyone else. Travis had his back diagonal to the walkway’s railing. He turned and looked over the edge at the bottom of the shaft, now just two hundred feet below. From here he could resolve the lowest flight in the spiral. It didn’t terminate against a solid floor, but instead tied into a flat walkway like this one, which led out of sight to one side. Though he couldn’t be sure, Travis had the impression there was no floor at the bottom of the shaft. That instead the vertical channel punched down into some broader chamber beneath it, whose bottom might be dozens of feet further below, and whose width and length he couldn’t determine.

He stared a moment longer, the red glow almost hypnotizing at this range. It saturated the bottom walkway and the steps there, and every visible inch of whatever lay beneath it all.

Travis looked up and saw Dyer gazing down at it too. Then the man trailed his eyes upward until he was craning his neck to stare at the top two thirds of the shaft, rearing above them like a chimney seen from deep inside. Travis got the impression that Dyer was looking at it all for the first time.

“You came in through the other access,” Travis said.

Dyer nodded, at last leveling his gaze and turning to face the group. “I only got here half an hour ago. I was in Barbados with my wife and daughter when I got the news last night.”

“How did you know the door combination?” Paige said.

“Garner gave it to me, just after he took office again last year. He told me—” He cut himself off, looking puzzled about something. Travis realized the same puzzlement had been there, under the surface, from the moment Dyer had stepped out of the dark. The man looked from one of them to the other. At last he said, “Are you guys it? None of the others made it?”

“Others?” Travis said.

Dyer nodded. “This mine is the rally point. Everyone still alive is supposed to show up here.”

Travis thought of the people who’d been killed in unison with Garner, all over the country. The power players Peter had met with, all those years ago.

Still looking confused, Dyer said, “No offense, but I didn’t think you guys were part of the group. You’d be just about the last people I’d expect to meet in this place. How did you get the combination?”

Travis met Paige’s and Bethany’s eyes. Their bafflement matched his own. Clearly Dyer knew a lot more than the three of them did—he’d learned it directly from Garner.

Travis looked at Dyer again. The man stared and waited for the answer.

“We’re honestly not sure how we got the combo,” Travis said. “We think Breach technology was involved, but if so, it was a kind we’ve never heard of.” He shook his head. “Look, you seem to have the whole picture of this thing. We’ve been piecing it together slapshot since last night, and we’re missing big chunks of it. If you know it all, please tell us.”

Dyer frowned. He seemed to struggle with some deep indecision. “This is all happening wrong,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be like this.”