Deep Sky

Light brown carpeting. Cookie-sized gold stars a few feet apart.

He’d entered at a kind of choke-point—a corridor just behind the cockpit leading aft to broader spaces. Dangerous to stay here; no way to dodge aside if someone came walking through. He risked a quick glance forward and saw two pilots at the controls, and a navigator just visible off to the right. Travis turned and made his way aft, out of the corridor.

Skeleton crew. Dyer had called it. The rest of the upper deck, behind the cockpit, was deserted. There was a short seating area and a suite of small offices at the back end, all doors open and secured to the walls. No one inside any of them.

Travis descended to the huge main cabin level. Something like a fourth of it stretched forward from where he stood at the interior stairway; the rest extended back toward the tail.

He went forward first. More empty offices and a large galley that called to mind a restaurant kitchen. All the pans and bowls and utensils were stowed and locked down, and the lights were off. Whoever cooked for the president wasn’t along on this trip.

He returned to the stairs and headed past them toward the back end, and encountered the first passengers he’d seen since stepping aboard. Beyond a short hallway a huge array of seats opened up, filling the cabin from side to side and running to maybe the midpoint of the plane, sixty feet behind the stairs. The seats were large and comfortable-looking; probably standard first-class issue for a 747. Travis guessed there were eighty to a hundred of them in all. On a normal trip they’d probably be filled with the press corps and any number of aides or even elected officials traveling with the commander in chief.

All but eight of the seats were empty now.

Two of the occupants were the guys who’d stepped outside earlier to look at the choppers. Both were currently seated at windows where they could watch the Marines’ progress. The other six had more or less the same appearance as the first two. All were men between forty and sixty. They struck Travis as hard-edged guys just starting to soften up. Like they’d been soldiers and field operatives for most of their adult lives and had only recently ended up in plusher work environments. Intelligence guys, maybe.

Travis walked down the aisle past all of them, entered a six-foot-wide corridor and looked in through a broad doorway on its left side. A conference room lay beyond. Long polished-wood table. Big leather chairs randomly strewn around it.

Past the table, a granite counter ran the length of the room’s back wall.

The counter was lined with Breach entities, and on a low-slung gurney in front of it lay a dead man.

Travis entered the room and crossed to the body. He recognized the man at once. His name was Curtis Moyer, and he’d been a technician in Border Town. His duties often kept him in the lowest levels of the complex, just above B51. He would’ve likely been down there this morning when the bunker buster hit.

Jesus, he’d survived the blast. He’d been as far beneath it as Travis and the others had been above it, and he must’ve been on the north side of the building, away from the collapse. His injuries had been severe, though. One leg was broken and torn in multiple places. His shoulder looked like it’d been dislocated, too. Internal damage had probably been what eventually got him—he was staring straight up now with glazed eyes.

But he’d still been alive when the squads from the helicopters found him—and they’d kept him that way for a while. An IV pole stuck up from the gurney’s side, with three drip bags of different chemicals hanging from it. One was morphine. Travis raised his eyes from Moyer to the row of entities—all that the intruders had recovered from the wreckage, at least up to the point when Air Force One had left to come here. Travis understood why they’d kept Moyer alive as long as possible: they’d questioned him on the entities they found, and written the key details on slips of paper that now lay in front of each one. Maybe they’d gotten his cooperation in exchange for the medical treatment. Maybe just for the morphine.

The entities were mostly common types; a group of three blue flares appeared to be the rarest of the bunch—until Travis’s gaze reached the end of the counter.

Where the Tap was sitting.

For a few seconds he couldn’t imagine how it’d gotten here. It’d been in the vault in the back wall of his and Paige’s closet, and Paige had been unable to reach it before they fled Border Town.

Then he considered the time scales involved, and began to understand. The guys in the choppers had made their way into Border Town around 9:20 in the morning, local time. That’d been hours before Air Force One even arrived there. Plenty of time for those men to notice a built-in safe in such a visible location—right at the drop-off to the abyss. With safety lines or other precautions they could’ve gotten to it easily, and among their military hardware there would’ve been things that could’ve compromised the safe’s lock or hinges.

Travis stepped closer to the Tap. He watched the room’s lighting scatter and reflect in its depths.

The sheet of paper in front of it contained all the main points of how to use the thing. Moyer had left nothing out.

Suddenly Travis heard footsteps coming from further aft—the small portion of the plane he hadn’t checked out yet. He turned just as two men entered the conference room.

One was the Wilford Brimley stand-in from the dream.

The other was President Holt.

Chapter Forty-One

Travis’s hand went to the knife’s grip just above his waist, and felt it through the material of the suit.

He could kill both men without any risk to himself—could do it right now, and by the time the eight in the seats came running, it’d be over. There’d be all the time in the world to swipe the blade clean and resheath it under the suit before any of them got here. No problem, after that, to pick them off one by one as he’d done among the redwoods. Them and anyone else he might come upon farther back toward the tail. Almost any way that it shook out, two or three minutes from now, everyone on the plane could be dead except the pilots, Garner, and whoever was being held with him. For a dramatic finish, Travis could then help Garner to the open doorway at the front of the aircraft, and several dozen California state cops would see a dead man step out into the sunlight.

That would sure as hell be the end of the cover-up.

But as a plan, Travis didn’t like it.

Even with the story broken wide open, Garner would be in serious danger. Federal authorities of one kind or another would descend on the scene and exert control, and there would be no telling whether they’d stood with Holt or not. Garner would be entering that situation from a position of uncertainty and weakness. He’d be at the mercy of others. Lots of others.

There was a better approach to take, and it would be just as brutally simple to execute. All it would require was a little patience.

Travis let his hand fall away from the knife.

The Brimley look-alike was holding a few sheets of yellow notepad paper and a red pen. He dropped the pen on the table and spread the sheets out side by side, and he and Holt stood looking down on them, saying nothing.

The pages were scrawled with red handwriting. Travis stepped close enough to discern the words while staying at a safe distance from either of the men. He began to read, and within seconds realized what he was looking at.

These were interrogation notes.

The scribbled lines comprised all the information that’d been drawn out of Garner and whoever else they had, in repeated drug sessions going back to probably late last night.

Travis scanned all the text in about sixty seconds.

These guys had learned almost everything—at least regarding the second half of Ruben Ward’s message. The instructions. They knew that the original nine recipients had gained financial and political power based on the instructions. That they’d been told to use that power to acquire knowledge of—and influence over—the Breach and whoever ended up overseeing it. The last note read: