Travis looked up from the pages and realized that both Holt and the older man were focused on that final line.
The old man exhaled hard and paced away from the table. “Five hours on this last point and we’ve got nothing. He’s not going to give up the name. It’s the linchpin. He knows how important it is.”
“Let’s not write it off yet,” Holt said.
“I’ve done more interrogations with phen-d than anyone, and I promise you—”
“Porter—”
“I promise you, he’s not going to tell us. Worst of all is the longevity involved. Thirty-four years, this has been his deepest secret. Forget it.”
Holt started to respond, but a sound cut him off. Someone’s ringtone, out in the seating area ahead. Through the doorway and beyond the hall, Travis saw one of the men in the window seats take out his phone. He answered, listened for a long time, said a few words and then ended the call. He pocketed the phone, stood, and came and leaned in the doorway.
“Your contractors found a scrap from a wallet in the burned-out Humvee, with a Social Security number. Victim was a Secret Service agent named Rudy Dyer.” He looked at Holt. “You know him, sir?”
Holt nodded slowly, thinking. “Heard of him. Garner was close to him, as I recall.”
That piece of information hung in the air. All three men seemed to grasp its significance at the same time.
The older man—Porter—put it in words first: “If Dyer was involved in this thing, it’s because Garner wanted him to be. Which means Dyer was, what, a backup plan?”
“Something like that,” the guy from the window seat said.
“In that case he’d have to know as much as Garner knew,” Porter said. “He’d at
He looked thoughtful. He drummed his fingertips on the back of one of the leather chairs for a few seconds.
Then he turned and walked directly toward Travis. The movement was so unexpected and sudden that Travis dodged him by only the width of an arm. Porter stepped right into the space where he’d been standing and grabbed the Tap off the counter. He held it toward the others, and gestured at Moyer’s body.
“You believe him?” Porter said. “You believe this thing really does what he described?”
“It’s Breach technology,” Holt said. “Compared to whoever built it, we’re monkeys throwing shit.” He was quiet a moment. Then: “Yeah. I believe him.”
“Then let’s use it,” Porter said. “Any one of us can go back a few hours in our heads and order someone into that parking lot before the Humvee arrives. We can take Dyer alive and interrogate him.”
Holt seemed to get the point. “You think he’d give up the secret easier than Garner.”
“He’s newer to it,” Porter said. “In my experience, that matters. Sometimes a great deal.”
Holt looked at the Tap, Porter still holding it out. Holt’s expression faltered.
“Fucking thing goes inside your brain,” he said.
Porter shrugged, his face deadpan.
Holt considered it a moment longer, then turned to the man in the doorway. “Let’s see what you guys find in this mine shaft they’re talking about. If you come away from there with no new information, then we’ll use the Tap.”
The other two nodded. Porter turned and set the Tap back on the counter, then pulled out one of the chairs and sank into it.
Travis stood still for a moment, considering what he’d heard. Porter was clever, seeing the Tap’s potential so quickly. Maybe his idea about Dyer would even work—but it didn’t matter. None of these people would live to put it into action.
Travis crossed out of the room and continued aft. He turned a corner, came abreast of a darkened little space off the hall, leaned in and saw that it was a weapons cache. Heavy duty plastic-and-steel wall cases held Benelli M4 shotguns and Glock 19 pistols, with neatly arranged ammo stores beneath them. All the cases were closed tight, and each had a palm-scanner below its door handle.
Travis returned to the hall and followed it to its end: an open set of double doors into a private residence filling the aircraft’s tail. He stepped inside.
The space was beautiful. Its look matched that of the Oval Office and probably most of the White House’s interior. No doubt the same people maintained both. There was a broad, open kitchen to one side, a living area on the other, and a hallway leading back to unseen rooms. Travis crossed the entry and slipped into the hall. He passed a full bathroom, then a bedroom suite with a large walk-in closet. Only one door left. Travis stepped to it and saw exactly what he’d expected to see:
A windowless room. A portrait of George Washington on the wall. And Richard Garner tied upright to a dolly like Hannibal Lecter without the face mask. The top of the dolly was zip-tied into an exposed wall strut behind Garner; someone had roughly broken away part of the wall’s surface to expose it.
There was nobody else in the room.
No other victim.
Had that person been offloaded somewhere already?
It crossed Travis’s mind that Curtis Moyer might have been the second victim, but he discarded the idea: the timing didn’t work. Travis had experienced the dream well before
There was a desk in the corner, which Travis hadn’t seen from his viewpoint in the dream—he’d been standing too close, directly beside it. Apparently this space was a study.
He focused on Garner. The man’s eyes were half open, staring downward at nothing. He wore a pair of dress pants and a dress shirt—probably the clothes he’d worn when he spoke to the nation last night. His coat and tie were gone, and both arms of the shirt had been cut away at the elbows. Needle marks dotted the exposed skin of his arms.
Garner blinked a few times. He opened his eyes a little wider, then let them relax again. He seemed to be getting past the lingering traces of the drug’s effect.
Travis stepped close to him and whispered, “Mr. President.”
Garner flinched and turned toward his voice. Looked right through him into the hallway five feet beyond.
“Who’s there?” Garner whispered.
Travis moved so that his voice would come from deeper within the room.
“Travis Chase,” he said.
It didn’t take long to explain. Garner already knew everything except the specifics of the past several hours. When Travis reached the end and told him what’d happened to Paige and Bethany and Dyer, the man shut his eyes tight and said nothing for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” Garner whispered at last. “For every part of this thing.”
“Holt’s going to be sorrier,” Travis said. He left it at that.
He was standing now roughly where he’d been in the dream. To see the room in real life, from this angle, felt surreal.
“Who did they have in here with you?” he asked. “Who else were they interrogating?”
Garner looked thrown by the question. “No one,” he said.
“There had to be,” Travis said. He hadn’t yet detailed the dream; now he did. He watched Garner for some spark of recognition, but none came. The man simply shook his head, as confused by the story as Travis himself had been when he opened the green door.
“We wondered if there was some entity that could’ve been responsible,” Travis said. “Something that would let a person transmit what they were seeing and hearing. Would let them send it to somebody else, if only for a few seconds.”
“I’ve never heard of an entity like that,” Garner said. “And there was nobody here with me at any point. I’d remember.”
