The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

public.”
    Bethany nodded.
    Travis looked at the cylinder sticking half out of the backpack.
    “Paige and the others learned something from it,” he said. “Something big and important that the world would want to know about—something that should be made public. But there must have been even more they wanted to learn. That’s what the exploratory trip was about. Like they’d found one piece of some puzzle, and they were going off to find the rest of it, using the entity. But before that, they went to see the president, to show him the one puzzle piece they already had. Maybe they thought he could help them make sense of it. But that plan backfired. Whatever they’d uncovered, the president didn’t want it made public. Didn’t want them digging up the rest of the pieces. Maybe Paige and the others didn’t realize what they’d stumbled onto. And obviously the president did.”
    “They touched a nerve of some kind,” Bethany said.
    Travis nodded. He thought of the burning vehicles in the street.
    “A big damn nerve,” he said.
    “Hence the instruction to go underground. Figure it out for ourselves and trust no authorities.”
    Travis looked at her. “But you’re not going underground. You’re going right to where she was attacked. Something she’d probably tell you not to do.”
    Bethany returned his gaze. “You don’t sound like you disapprove.”
    “I don’t.”
    He saw the hint of a smile in her eyes, buried under a ton of stress.
    “Do you have some way of finding her?” he said. “If she’s still alive?”
    “I have a way of trying. It’s hard to explain how it works. Easier if I just show you once we’re on the plane. But I can only locate her. After that, I don’t know what to do. She’ll be somewhere secure.” She looked down at the black cylinder. “I guess I’m hoping that whatever else this thing does, it can help us with that part, somehow. No reason to expect that, I know. It’s just all I’ve got. After we get Paige’s position, we can find someplace safe and switch this thing on, and then I guess we’ll find out.”
    She went silent again. She watched a sign with directions to the airport slide by. Then she looked at him. “You don’t have to help me, you know. You don’t have to get involved in this at all, if you don’t want to.”
    Travis watched the road. He thought of Paige, bound somewhere, her life in the hands of whoever had hit the motorcade. Just ahead, I–285 swung broadly to the east, toward the blood-red promise of dawn at the horizon.
    “Yes I do,” he said.

Chapter Four
    Travis parked in the long-term lot, a quarter mile from the private hangars.
    “Do they search your bags before you board a private flight?” he said.
    Bethany shook her head.
    Travis turned and took hold of the upholstery of the passenger seatback just behind Bethany’s left shoulder. The narrow panel of cloth that covered the side facing inward was loose at the top, a half-inch flap that would look to any observer like a sign of wear and tear. It wasn’t. Travis pulled down hard on it, and the few threads binding the cloth to the seatback broke easily. The move exposed the seat’s interior, a cage of spring steel and foam. He reached inside and felt his hand close around the grip of the SIG-Sauer P220 he’d hidden there two years before. He took it out and set it in Bethany’s backpack alongside the black cylinder. Then he reached back in for the three spare magazines he’d stashed with it—a fourth was already loaded into the gun—and put them in the pack too.
    If the sight of the weapon made Bethany more nervous than she already was, Travis couldn’t tell.
    They were in the air fifteen minutes later. The little business jet banked into its climb and gave Travis a last look at the spiderweb of highways crisscrossing Atlanta. He was sure he would never come back, unless he happened to be passing through. Rob Pullman wasn’t going to show up for work tomorrow. Wasn’t going to answer his door when the landlord came to ask about the rent next week. It occurred to him with a kind of sad amusement that Pullman would probably never be reported missing. Just fired and evicted in absentia. No great loss to anyone.
    He and Bethany were sitting at the back of the plane, ten feet from the pilots. The engine sound was more than enough to mask their conversation if they spoke softly.
    Bethany took out her phone and plugged it into a data port on her armrest.
    “The plane