Ghost Country by Patrick Lee
Part I
Iris
Chapter One
Fifty seconds before the first shots hit the motorcade, Paige Campbell was thinking about the fall of Rome. The city, not the empire. The empire had gone in stages, with any number of dates that historians could argue over and call endpoints, but there was no disagreement as to when the city itself had been sacked. August 24, 410. Sixteen hundred and one years ago to the week. Paige didn’t know the details beyond the date. Though she’d once planned to be an historian herself, before ending up in a very different line of work, she’d never studied that region or period in much depth. She only remembered the date from European history in high school. But she wondered. She wondered if the city’s inhabitants had known, even a few months before the fact, that they would see it all come to its end. She thought about that and then turned in her seat and watched Washington, D.C., slide away behind her into the night. She could see the Washington Monument and the Capitol Dome lit up in the darkness. The winking lights of an airliner coming up out of Reagan National. The headlamps of cars behind her and on surrounding streets. Billboards and storefronts and arc lights, the glow of it all cast up onto the low cloud cover that lay over the city like a blanket. The infrastructure of the modern world. It looked like it would stand forever.
She turned forward again. The motorcade was heading east on Suitland Parkway, back toward Andrews Air Force Base, where she and the others had landed only a few hours earlier. It was seven minutes past midnight. The road was wet from the rain that had been falling steadily since their arrival. The pavement caught and scattered the glow of taillights ahead. Paige was in the rear vehicle of the procession. Martin Crawford was sitting next to her.
Behind them on the back bench seat, locked in its carrying case, was the object that’d prompted this visit to Washington. The Breach entity they’d just demonstrated for an audience of one.
“He was calmer than I thought he’d be,” Paige said. “I thought he’d have a harder time believing it.”
“He saw it with his own eyes,” Crawford said. “Hard to dismiss that kind of evidence.”
“Still, he’s new on the job. He’s never seen an entity before, much less one like this.”
“He’s the president. He’s seen a lot of things.”
Paige watched the traffic skimming by across the median, tires spinning up long ragged clouds of moisture from the roadbed.
“I thought he’d be scared,” she said. “I thought, once we showed it to him, he’d be as scared as we are.”
“Maybe he hides it well.”
“Do you think he can help us figure this out?” Paige said. “How to stop whatever’s coming?”
“We don’t know what’s coming yet.”
“We know it’s nothing good. And that we don’t have a hell of a lot of time before it gets here.”
Crawford nodded, staring forward. He was seventy-four and looked it, except in his eyes, which probably hadn’t changed in decades. They looked troubled at the moment.
Paige glanced ahead and caught her own eyes in the rearview mirror up front. No lines around them yet—she was only thirty-one—but this job would put them there soon enough.
She turned and looked back at the entity’s case, just visible in the rain-refracted city light. She thought of what she’d said to the president: that this entity could be considered an investigative tool. It offered a unique way of seeing the world—and a way of looking for things that could be found by no other means.
They were on their way to look for things now: the answers to the questions that had plagued them for not quite two days. Paige thought of Yuma, Arizona, the first stage of the search. The first place they would put the entity to use. Maybe the evidence they needed would be right there, obvious enough to trip over.
And maybe it wouldn’t be. Maybe it wouldn’t be there at all. Or anywhere else.