The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

swayed on his feet, his face relaxing and then his mouth turning up in a child’s smile. Behind him, two others hauled a heavy steel box from the chopper, roughly the size of the cobbled one inside the Black Hawk. They reached the man with the Whisper and had to shout and nudge him to get his attention. At last he seemed to notice them. Nodding, he opened the container and shut the sphere inside it.
    Twenty seconds later, its cargo secured, the helicopter revved to a scream again and climbed away over the valley.

Part II - 7 THEATERSTRASSE

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
    The Tangent personnel who arrived on the next Black Hawk were under stricter orders than the first group. They bound and hooded Travis, belted him aboard, and he heard nothing but the craft’s engines whining at full power for the next two hours.
    He thought of the Whisper. The euphoric—even erotic—sensation of holding it still weighed on him like a personal loss, in its absence.
    Yet as strange and powerful as the experience had been, he was forgetting it. Rapidly. Even now, just this short time after the fact, his memory of the entire event had faded to something like a receding dream. He could recall how it’d started: picking the thing up, Emily Price’s voice directing him to fire on the unseen killer. And he could recall how it’d ended: letting go of it inside the Black Hawk, after slamming his wrist on the bench seat, and becoming aware of what he’d done under its control. What he’d done with the satellite phone, and what was about to result from it, thousands of miles away.
    But everything between those two points was now a bright blue haze. Like a drug high he couldn’t remember, except for fading pieces. The thing’s terrifying capability. Its impossible knowledge of everything—literally everything. It’d told him something about Paige. What, he couldn’t remember. And it’d given him a street address, for reasons that now escaped him. Something that sounded German, he thought; he could resolve it no further than that. As the time stretched out aboard the Black Hawk, he found even these trace memories slipping deeper and deeper out of his reach.
    The chopper landed. He had no idea where. The aircrew helped him outside onto pavement, and he heard the heavy turbofans of a large jet powering up. Someone guided him up a set of metal stairs, and then he was aboard the plane, his head still covered.
    There were quite a few people on the jet, ten to fifteen voices, he thought. A set of hands led him to a seat at the back end. Outside, the engines rose in pitch, and the aircraft began to taxi.
    He heard tension in the voices around him. Fear, too. Calls came and went, in a few different languages. From the context of those made in English, Travis gathered that the people on the other end were government officials in countries all over the world. For a moment he wondered if the Whisper’s plan had been carried out anyway, and the ICBM launch against China had gone ahead. The man next to him assured him it hadn’t; his screamed warning at the end of the call had been more than sufficient.
    But something was going on. Something that concerned the whole world. Something that scared the shit out of these people.
    A moment later the jet turned onto its runway. It stopped for a few seconds as its engines came up to full scream. Travis’s interrogation started just as it lifted off.
    Five times, for five different people, he told his account of what’d happened, starting with his discovery of the wrecked 747, Box Kite. The point of the repetition was obvious enough: to see if his story would break along the fault line of a lie. It didn’t. All he kept from them was the part he’d lost: the now nearly impenetrable amnesia effect that hung over the minutes he’d spent with the Whisper.
    He told them about the invisible attacker, dead on the bent pine bough in the valley. The questioners’ reaction to that news was a few clicks above happy. They called ground teams that had secured the valley and directed them to the body. Travis thought of the first team’s fear, in the last minute of their lives, and wondered how long Tangent had been dealing with that particular threat.
    Then he told them about the street address. The one he couldn’t quite remember. The one that sounded German.
    “Seven Theaterstrasse,” the first questioner said. Not even asking.
    Travis nodded anyway. That was it.
    He heard the phrase make its way up the plane like