The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

thought about it since.
    He climbed the stairs to his apartment. He dropped the mail on the kitchen counter. He made a sandwich and got a Diet Coke from the refrigerator and stood at the sink eating. Ten minutes later he was in bed. He stared at the ceiling in the dark. His bedroom had windows on two walls. He had both of them open so the cross breeze would come through—it was hot air, but at least it was moving. The apartment had no air-conditioning. He closed his eyes and listened to the night sounds of the city filtering in with the humidity. He felt sleep begin to pull him down. He was almost out when he heard a car slow at the entrance to the front lot. Through his eyelids he saw headlights wash over his ceiling. The vehicle stopped in the lot but didn’t kill its engine. It sat idling. He heard one of its doors open, and then light footsteps came running up the front walk.
    His door buzzer sounded.
    He opened his eyes.
    He knew exactly who it was.
    The guy in the apartment down the hall had an ex-girlfriend with a penchant for showing up drunk in the middle of the night, looking to discuss things. The last time, three weeks ago, the guy had tried to ignore her. She’d responded by hitting every button on the pad until someone else relented and buzzed her in, allowing her to come upstairs and pound on the guy’s door directly. As a strategy it’d worked pretty well, so this time she’d skipped right to it. Nice of her.
    The buzzer sounded again.
    Travis closed his eyes and waited for it to stop.
    When it sounded the third time he noticed something: he couldn’t hear anyone else’s buzzer going off before or after his own. He should have heard that easily. The tone was a heavy bass that transmitted well through walls. He’d heard it the last time this happened.
    Someone was out there buzzing his apartment. His alone.
    He pulled the sheet aside and stood. He went to the window and pressed his face against the screen to get an angle on the front door.
    A girl was standing there. Not the neighbor’s girlfriend. Not drunk, either. She was standing on the walk, a few feet away from the pad. She’d pressed the button and stepped back from it. She was staring up at the open window of Travis’s bedroom—had been staring at it even before he appeared there—and now she flinched when she saw him. She looked nervous as hell. The vehicle idling thirty feet behind her was a taxicab.
    The girl looked about twenty, but it was hard to say. She could’ve been younger than that. She had light brown hair to her shoulders. Big eyes behind a pair of glasses that covered about a quarter of her face—they were either five years behind the style or five years ahead of it.
    Travis had never seen her before.
    She’d seen him somewhere, though, if only in a picture. It was clear by her expression. She recognized him even by the glow of the lamppost in the parking lot.
    She stepped off the concrete walkway into the grass. She took three steps toward the window. Her eyes never left his. She stopped. For another second she just stood there looking up at him.
    Then she said, “Travis.”
    In the time it took him to pull on a T-shirt and jeans, he ran through the possible implications. There weren’t many. He thought of Paige, two summers ago, setting up the Rob Pullman identity. He’d watched her insert it into every database that mattered—federal, state, local. Retroactive for four decades. Then she’d erased every digital footprint she’d left in the process, and scrubbed the information from even her own computer in Border Town. No records. No printouts. It was no more possible to tie his new name to his old one than it was to reverse-engineer an ice sculpture from a tray of water.
    No one but Paige could have sent this girl.
    Travis stepped into the hallway and descended the stairs. The girl was standing at the glass front door waiting for him. She’d already sent the cab away.
    Travis pushed the door open and stepped out into the night.
    “What is it?” he said. “What’s going on?”
    Up close her nervousness was more apparent. She had a backpack slung over her shoulder and she was fidgeting with the strap. There must have been something in his expression that put her even more on edge. She looked like she wanted to back away from him, but she didn’t.
    “You drive,” she said. “I’ll talk.”
    “I–285. Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.”
    Travis took a right out of the complex.
    The girl seemed about to