The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

speak again, and then her cell phone rang. She twisted in her seat and took it from her pocket. She pressed the talk button and rested the phone on her backpack, which was now in her lap.
    “Hello?”
    A man said, “Ms. Renee Turner?”
    “Yes.”
    “Hi. This is Richard with Falcon Jet. I just wanted to let you know your aircraft is refueled and standing by, ready when you are. Flight time to Washington Dulles International will be an hour and fifteen. Does your guest have a preferred beverage?”
    The girl glanced at Travis. He shrugged.
    “We’re fine with what’s aboard,” she said. “We’ll be arriving shortly.”
    “Very good.”
    She ended the call and set the phone on the console. She still looked anxious. She hugged the backpack against herself. It flattened out. There wasn’t much in it.
    “Renee,” Travis said. “Nice to meet you.”
    For a second she looked confused. “Oh, sorry, no. I’m Bethany. Bethany Stewart.”
    She stuck out a tiny hand. Travis shook it.
    “Renee’s a cover,” she said. “She doesn’t really exist.”
    “She sounds well off for someone who doesn’t exist.”
    “I’ll tell you all about her sometime.”
    “All right.”
    “I’m with Tangent. I guess you assumed that.”
    Travis nodded.
    “I would have called ahead,” she said. “I was just afraid you’d hear the first five words and hang up, and you’d be long gone by the time I got here.”
    “Why didn’t Paige call? She wouldn’t expect me to hang up on her.”
    Bethany was quiet for a few seconds. “Paige is the reason I’m here. She didn’t have time to call anyone but me. She barely had time for that.”
    Travis waited for her to say more, but instead she picked up her phone again. She switched on the display and brought up what looked like a file directory.
    “This phone records every call by default,” she said. She selected a file and clicked on it. An audio clip began to play.
    Travis heard Bethany’s voice first. She started to say hello and then Paige spoke over her, her own speech fast and panicked, struggling for clarity through hyperventilation: “Bethany. Go to my residence. Override for the door is 48481. Open the hard storage in the back wall of the closet, star–7833. The thing inside is one of the entities I was testing, the same as the one I brought to D.C. Take it and get out of Border Town right now. Don’t tell anyone anything. Get somewhere safe and then use the entity. You’ll see what it does, and what you need to do. Whatever you learn from it, just make it public yourself, make it huge, do notgo to authorities. Not the president. Not anybody. If you need help, find Travis Chase in Atlanta. Three seventeen Fenlow, apartment five, the name Rob Pullman. Shit, what else… ?” Paige stopped to take a deep breath. Then another. In the background Travis heard a sound: running footsteps on pavement.
    Bethany’s voice came in on the recording: “What’s happening? Where are you?”
    Then Paige cut her off again, shouting. “You can take it through and still come back! You can take it through!”
    On the last word something changed. Some expulsion of her breath, as though her body had suddenly moved. Or been moved. Then the recording ended as abruptly as if she’d turned off the phone, though Travis pictured something more severe than that.
    The on-ramp to 285 came up on his right. He took the turn going too fast. His concentration wasn’t on the driving.
    He looked at Bethany. He waited for her to explain what the hell he’d just heard.
    She went back to the directory on her phone and navigated to a new file. Its icon was a symbol of a filmstrip frame. A video clip.
    “It was nine minutes after midnight, East Coast time, when Paige called me,” she said. “And I captured this from CNN about an hour later, when I was already on my way here to find you.”
    She double-clicked the file, then handed Travis the phone. He propped it on the steering wheel as the video started to play.
    News chopper footage. A row of vehicles crippled and burning in the street. Four SUVs jammed together like derailed train cars. The last of them was flipped over on its roof. The caption at the bottom of the screen read: motorcade attacked in washington, d.c.
    The shot pushed in tight on one of the vehicles and Travis saw damage that couldn’t be attributed to the flames alone. Massive holes in the metal panels. They could only have been caused by high-powered gunfire. It’d even