The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

cylinder and shut it off. He picked it up and headed for the stairwell, crossing exposed beams. After a few steps he picked up the pace to a run. He glanced behind him and saw Bethany shouldering the backpack, pocketing the dropped wallet, and following.
    Paige sat waiting for Isaac Finn to arrive. She knew his name only from the brass plate she’d seen on his door when the two large men had carried her through it.
    Finn’s office was huge. Three times the size of the room they’d kept her in. There was a balcony along its southern expanse looking out on a view that could’ve been an educational poster of Washington, D.C. The kind of poster with tags and labels for every building that mattered. It was all there, from the White House to the Capitol to the Supreme Court, and a hundred other buildings that channeled power in ways most people would never care to know. Paige wondered how many of those buildings this highrise outranked. Maybe all of them.
    She was sitting on a leather couch. Her wrists and ankles were still zip-tied. The two large men were standing just inside the door, hands folded neatly in front of them. Each had a Beretta holstered under his suit coat—Paige had seen them there when they’d carried her from the other room.
    The door opened and a man in his fifties walked in. He was trim, six feet tall, with dark hair going a little gray. He was far from what Paige had pictured—whatever she’d pictured. He looked wrong for the office. His eyes, in particular, looked wrong. There was no arrogance in them. No presumption. Paige thought of one of her father’s friends, a pediatric surgeon she’d met on several occasions. She’d always been struck by his eyes: weathered by the years of suffering they’d seen, but not beaten. Isaac Finn’s eyes looked almost like that—they missed by some degree Paige couldn’t account for.
    None of which mattered, in any case. Kind-looking eyes could be a trick of genetics or an unconscious mimicry of some long-dead parent. There were better lights by which to judge a person, and Finn didn’t look good in any of them.
    He had a coffee cup in one hand. In the other he held the black cylinder Paige had shown the president last night. He crossed to his desk and set down the coffee. He turned and looked at Paige. He seemed to be appraising her in some way. Coming to a decision.
    “Free her legs,” Finn said.
    The nearest of the two guards came over. He took a jackknife from a sheath on his belt, opened it, and cut the tie binding Paige’s ankles. He backed away to his original position.
    Finn stared at her a moment longer. Then he tapped the cylinder. “The president told me about your demonstration of this, in detail. You told him it’s safe for a person to step through the projected opening.”
    Paige nodded.
    “You didn’t do that for him, though.”
    “It wasn’t necessary. He saw that it worked.”
    “I want to see you do it. I want to see for myself that a person can go through.”
    He strode to the long walnut table that stood behind the couch. He set the cylinder on it, braced on either side with a pair of leather-bound books that’d been lying there. He aimed it toward the southern windows, just over ten feet away.
    He put his finger to the on button, then looked at Paige and raised his eyebrows as if to verify that he was doing it right.
    “I don’t know how much simpler I could’ve labeled it,” she said.
    Finn pressed the button.
    The light cone flared and projected the opening just shy of the windows.
    Paige watched Finn’s body language. It was immediately clear that he hadn’t seen the cylinder in action until now. He stared at the opening. His face was perfectly blank. He stood there, not moving at all. Ten seconds passed. Then he stepped forward. He walked along the edge of the light cone, giving it space. Paige had done the same thing a few days ago, the first time she and the others switched it on.
    Finn walked to within a foot of the opening, to its right. He stared through for a moment, and then abandoned his fear of the light and moved directly in front of the open circle. He gazed out at the ruins. Paige saw his head shake from side to side, just noticeably.
    “Jesus, it works,” he whispered, so softly that Paige almost missed it.
    Then he turned to her. Waved her up off the couch.
    “Do it,” he said. “Step through.”
    She knew exactly what would happen if she did. She sat there for three seconds considering her