The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

cut through some of the structural members. Maybe shotgun slugs at close range could do that, but the sheer number of holes ruled that out. Someone had used a heavy automatic weapon on the convoy, probably a .50 caliber. Serious hardware to be lugging around within a few miles of where the president and his family slept.
    “I’ve watched the coverage for a few hours now,” Bethany said. “Until I got off the plane here in Atlanta. They’re saying the victims in the motorcade were a mid-level CIA executive and his staff, and that the names may not be released. After a while they started reporting the exact time it happened. A few minutes after midnight. So the times match. And it’s exactly where Paige and the others would’ve been after leaving the meeting, right between the White House and Andrews—”
    She cut herself off and looked at him. “I’m sorry, you’re hearing this all out of sequence. I’m not making any sense.”
    “You’re fine. Just take it in order. Start at the beginning and tell me what you know.”
    She made a sound that was halfway between a sigh and a laugh. Equal parts weariness and frayed nerves.
    “What I know won’t take long,” she said.

Chapter Three
    Bethany unzipped her backpack and opened it. Travis felt a pocket of dry heat roll out, like she’d opened the door of a toaster oven.
    There was a single item in the pack. In the glow of passing streetlights Travis got a sense of the thing. A dark metal cylinder. It was the size and shape of a rolling pin without the handles. There were three buttons running down its length, with symbols engraved into them. Something like hieroglyphs, though not in any human language, Travis was sure.
    Next to each of the buttons someone had taped a handwritten label. The three of them read:ONOFFOFF (DETACH/DELAY—93 SEC.)
    “This is the entity Paige was talking about in the call,” Bethany said. “The one she had locked in her closet. There’s another one identical to it, which she took to D.C. The two of them came out of the Breach together, like matching handsets for a cordless phone.”
    She lifted the entity free of the bag. It didn’t look like it weighed much, by the way she held it.
    “Whatever’s going on,” she said, “it all centers around the two entities.”
    “What do they do?” Travis said.
    “I have no idea.”
    “All right.”
    “Only the top four people in Tangent know that. Paige being one of them. They’re the same four people who went to D.C. They were the only ones involved in experimenting with these entities, figuring out their function. That work began this past Monday, not quite three days ago now. Paige and the others restricted the research to closed labs, and kept all their notes and video on secure servers. They must have figured out right away that these things did something big.”
    “Is that normal?” Travis said. “Secrecy within Tangent itself?” It didn’t sound like any policy he remembered, but then he hadn’t been in Border Town for very long. His entire involvement with Tangent—and with Paige—had lasted less than a week, two years ago. He hadn’t wanted to leave, but in the end he’d learned something that made it unthinkable to stay. And what he’d learned, he’d kept to himself.
    “The secrecy is a temporary policy,” Bethany said. “Paige feels bad about it, but she and the others at the top think it’s necessary for now. So much of the population there is new these days. They’ve had to refill the ranks almost completely in the past two years.” She glanced at him. “I guess you know about that.”
    Travis nodded. “I know about that.”
    “Well, it’s put a strain on the recruiting process. Tangent used to spend months vetting a single candidate, but lately they just haven’t had that luxury. They needed so many people, so fast, that the process had to be truncated for most of them. It’s just going to be a while before they can all be trusted like the former staff. Paige apologizes for it all the time. People understand, though. They’re well aware of the risk of another Aaron Pilgrim coming along. So, yeah, when an entity shows up that’s serious business, generally just the top few people are allowed to work with it. That’s how it went with these two.”
    She set the cylinder back in her lap, half in and half out of the open backpack.
    “So, Monday,” she said. “The closed labs. I know Paige and the others did a safety assessment first,