In the trace moonlight Travis could see the low shape of the elevator housing a mile ahead. It wasn’t much to look at, even in daylight: a decrepit pole barn surrounded by the remnants of a split-rail fence. Someone could walk right by it and have no desire to investigate—if someone could get within thirty miles of it without being stopped.
This empty landscape was the most secure piece of real estate on the planet. There were no roads within a forty-mile radius. No overflights by either military or civilian aircraft. Intrusions by off-road vehicles, which were rare, were swiftly turned away by people who looked like pissed-off ranchers. They weren’t ranchers. They were something closer to soldiers, though not American soldiers. Strictly speaking, this featureless patch of eastern Wyoming was not American soil, and hadn’t been since 1978.
Travis slowed further until his footsteps became silent. Now and then, when the wind faded, he could hear the distant rumbling of the storm. He was half a mile from the elevator when his phone beeped with a text message. He took it out, switched it on and narrowed his eyes at the bright display.
NEWS. COME BACK FAST. CONFERENCE ROOM.
—PAIGE
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—entities—were always taken. Not a new discovery about an old entity, either. That, too, would’ve probably taken place in the Primary Lab, or some other testing area.
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.