The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

roughly beneath the seats they’d taken at the bar. Travis couldn’t quite make out Jeannie’s words, but her angry tone was clear enough. It went quiet for three seconds, then started again. There’d been no one else speaking in between. She was on the phone—probably with whoever she’d talked to earlier, reiterating her demand: get your ass over here and get us out of this town. Her second spiel ended on a note of finality. Silence followed.
    Paige turned to Travis. “Who could they have told Ward to meet here?” Her lower eyelids edged upward. “One of their own?”
    Travis weighed the idea. He turned and studied the dark recesses of the apartment. It didn’t exactly fit the image that’d come to him earlier: the sprawling penthouses above the nerve centers of the world. But that’d been a snap impression at best. A guess based on nothing at all, because they knew nothing at all about who they were up against. Power took other forms, he knew. Like anonymity.
    He turned to Bethany. “Can you check records for who lived here in 1978?”
    She winced. “I can try. Tax records might turn up something—assuming whoever lived here even filed.”
    “Maybe there’s paperwork on old tenants upstairs,” Paige said. “I think our approach needs to lose its subtlety.”
    They pushed back in through the front door and Travis asked about the paperwork.
    Jeannie stared at him. The anger she’d put into the phone call was still on her face.
    Then she said, “I didn’t think you’d stick with the ‘good cop’ thing much longer.”
    “Excuse me?” Travis said.
    The two kids were watching now, their video games forgotten.
    “In back, both of you,” Jeannie said.
    The kids complied, disappearing into the kitchen.
    “Ma’am,” Travis said, “whatever you think—”
    “That’s the idea, right?” Jeannie said. “All morning we get the bad cops—all these hard-asses in their Humvees scaring the shit out of everyone who catches a look at them. Coming into all the shops and grilling us about Ruben Ward, Allen Raines—What do we remember? What have we seen?”
    “Raines,” Travis said. He’d always intended to ask her about the man, but only after checking the basement. It would’ve been one thing too many to stuff into the first conversation.
    “Yeah, I knew him,” Jeannie said. “Everyone knows everyone here. You people, we don’t know, which is why we’re not talking to you about him. And putting on street clothes and acting casual isn’t going to change that.”
    “We’re not with the others,” Travis said. “We came over the ridge on foot to avoid them.”
    She didn’t buy it.
    “Get out,” she said. “And if your friends are supposed to be fixing whatever’s wrong inside that mine, tell them to stop screwing around and do it.”
    “Mine?” Paige said. She looked at Travis, then Bethany. Each shared her bafflement.
    For the first time since they’d come back in, Jeannie’s anger slipped. She glanced from one of them to the next, reading their reactions.
    Travis advanced and rested his hands on the back of the stool he’d sat on earlier. He met Jeannie’s eyes and didn’t blink.
    “We’re not playing good cop,” he said. “Please listen to me. What’s happening around here is only the ramp-up to what’s really coming. Do you remember what time Allen Raines was killed last night?”
    She thought for a second. “About a quarter to seven.”
    “And what time was President Garner killed?”
    She started to answer, then cut herself off, thinking about the correlation.
    “This is not just something that’s happening in Rum Lake,” Travis said. “The problem is a lot bigger than that, and as far as we know, everyone who’s supposed to be stopping it is dead. Please—anything you can tell us will help. Start with the mine.”
    For a while Jeannie didn’t reply. Maybe she was considering where to begin. Maybe she was debating whether to begin at all.
    Travis saw movement at the edge of his vision. The two kids had come to the kitchen doorway, watching with wide eyes. The girl kept her little brother behind her, as if to protect him.
    Jeannie exhaled deeply. “It’s probably been shut down for most of a century. I don’t know anyone who remembers it being open. I moved here in the nineties, a few years after everything happened up there. I only know about it through the stories I’ve heard, but I’ve always believed them. They’ve never changed over time, the