The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

the screen. A thumb’s width was about half a mile. The two specks were covering that much distance every few seconds.
    “Fighters,” Travis said.
    Bethany nodded. “I first noticed them during the flight to Atlanta. I spent about twenty minutes using specialized software to identify them by the heat plumes. They’re Super Hornets. Dual role, able to engage both air and ground targets. There’s another pair orbiting on the far side of the same big circle, about a forty-mile radius around Border Town.”
    “It’s a blockade,” Travis said. “No one’s going in or out of there.”
    Bethany nodded again. “President Currey probably ordered it within an hour or so after the hit on the motorcade, once he decided to go all in. I must’ve gotten away by a margin of minutes.”
    They fell into a silence for the next half hour. They listened to the whine of the engines and the soft tones of the avionics up front. Bethany stared out the window. Travis stared ahead at nothing and thought of the power that was arrayed against them.
    Bethany turned to him. “Can I ask you something personal?”
    “Sure.”
    “Why did you leave Tangent?”
    Travis thought about it. He thought of how complicated the answer to a simple question could be.
    “Things would’ve gone bad if I’d stayed,” he said. “Somewhere down the road.”
    “What made you think that?”
    “Something told me,” he said. The statement was more literal than it sounded.
    “If we get through all this, maybe you’ll feel better. Maybe you’ll feel like coming back.”
    “I’m never coming back. If we’re alive when this is over, I’ll set up another identity like Rob Pullman, and find another warehouse to work third shift in for the rest of my life.”
    “You do realize you could make it easier on yourself. As long as you’re creating an ID from scratch, you could give yourself a few million dollars. You wouldn’t have to work at all.”
    Travis shook his head. “Money is means. It’s better if I don’t have much. Better if I stay on the fringe. It’s the one way I can be sure things will be okay.”
    She stared at him. It was clear she had no idea what he was talking about, but after a moment she let it go and looked out the window again.

Chapter Five
    They landed at Dulles and took a cab into the city. Half an hour later they had the location. The survivors of the motorcade attack—whichever ones they were—were in a sixteen-story office building overlooking the traffic circle at M Street and Vermont Avenue. The building had reflective green-tinted glass. It had no corporate logo visible. Just an address in large black letters on its concrete foundation, right next to the main entrance on the east side.
    The signal was coming from the ninth floor at the northeast corner, directly facing the traffic circle.
    Travis and Bethany were sitting on a cafe patio on the far side of the circle, one hundred yards from the building. It was 7:30 in the morning and the city was alive and busy in the early light. Every surface glittered. It looked like it’d rained all night and only cleared in the last couple hours. The story of the motorcade attack was everywhere. There was a big LCD screen inside the cafe playing the aftermath footage on a loop. The subject dominated every conversation Travis could hear at the tables around them.
    Bethany had her phone low in her lap, out of sight to others nearby. Travis watched her mouthing commands she was entering into it. He couldn’t make out any of them. Probably wouldn’t have understood them any better if he could see them typed on the screen.
    After a minute she looked up at him. “Signal strength is pretty weak now. Fall-off is consistent with a living body gradually flushing the iodine through the kidneys and passing it out as urine. And once it’s in the sewers it’s way too dispersed to read.” She frowned. “This signal is also consistent with just one body. Paige is the only survivor.”
    Travis nodded. He stared at the corner of the ninth floor. No way to see in. No way to tell if Paige could see out. Maybe it wasn’t even a window. Maybe the glass exterior concealed a brick-walled holding cell on that floor.
    “So what exactly are we up against, here?” Travis said. “What do we know, right now? We know Paige and the others came to D.C. to meet with the president, and show him the entity. We know they trusted him, at that point. And we know that once they were attacked, they