The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

Seven Theaterstrasse for the past four years,” Travis said. “I assume you’ve had people studying what Pilgrim built inside it.”
    “Twenty-four seven, since the day we occupied it.”
    “So what does the weapon do?”
    “That’s where you come in,” she said. “Because even Pilgrim’s own people didn’t have a clue. And neither do we.”
    Silence again. He had solid guesses for some of the questions in his head, but not all of them.
    “The reason we don’t know is obvious enough,” Paige said. “Pilgrim didn’t design the weapon himself. He made the Whisper design it for him, based on what he needs it for. Made it guide his work, for the ten years he spent building the thing, which occupies just about every cubic inch of the building, nine stories on the waterfront in Zurich. It’s alien technology, cobbled together from human-made components. Clever way to build something, using the Whisper like that, but there was a downside, too, from Pilgrim’s point of view.”
    “The memory effect,” Travis said.
    Paige nodded. “Impossible to remember, from one time to the next, what the Whisper has told you. That’d make it tricky as hell to follow its instructions consistently. So Pilgrim had to write things down. But that was a security risk, so the Whisper gave him a language no one else could read.”
    Travis saw all the pieces slotting together now.
    “The place is covered with that writing,” Paige said. “I could show you a few thousand images of it right now, but there’d be no rhyme or reason to it. It’ll be better if you see it in person. See it the way he wrote it.”
    “You’re hoping I can help you understand the thing,” he said. “So you can shut it down.”
    “More like praying you can help us,” she said. “But yeah.”
    “Can I ask something really obvious?” he said.
    She smiled vaguely and preempted the question. “There’s a reason we don’t simply level the building. You’ll see for yourself when we get there. And we can’t protect it, either. Not now. It wouldn’t matter if we parked an armored cav division outside of it. Pilgrim has the Whisper. It trumps everything. Even other entities, as you learned for yourself in Alaska.”
    He took her point.
    “If there’s any way whatsoever to achieve a given result—and there always is—then the Whisper will know how,” she said. “Think of it as a game of rock, paper, scissors, and the Whisper is a diamond-blade rock cutter. It just beats everything. If Pilgrim wants to return to Seven Theaterstrasse and trigger the weapon—and let’s go out on a limb and assume that’s exactly what the fuck he wants—then he will. Unless we destroy it before then.”
     
    VERSE IVAN OCTOBER NIGHT IN 1992
     
    Travis discovers immediately that he’s gotten a lucky break. His car, which has come to rest against the entertainment center at the back wall of the living room, has pinned the couch and its occupant against the big-screen TV. Manny Wright, six-foot-five and maybe four hundred pounds. The homeowners’ bodyguard, and the only one who lives in the house with them. His back is broken. He’s trying to move, trying to reach the .44 holstered at his waist. But he can’t.
    Travis wonders if Manny was the one who actually carried out Emily’s murder, on orders from above. Then, because the answer is obvious, he stops wondering. He raises the .32 to Manny’s face.
    Manny can’t get enough breath to say please, or no, but his eyes say both. Intensely. And in vain.
    Travis puts the gun next to Manny’s right eye, pointed sidelong across his face, and fires. The hollowpoint shreds both eyes and the bridge of the nose, leaving a ragged, bloody crater, and to Travis’s deep satisfaction, Manny gets enough breath to make some noise after all. The man’s scream is plaintive, full of self-pity, with the same stresses and tones he might use to scream “Why?” over and over. Travis wishes he could stand here for an hour and listen to it.
    Instead he stoops, takes the .44 and leaves Manny to die like that, blind and screaming.
    Manny isn’t the reason Travis has come here tonight. The house’s owners, the people who made the choice to kill Emily, are the primary targets.
    Travis goes to the broad, stone-clad hallway that leads to the master bedroom, where his own mother and father are waiting.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
    The day slipped by in a few hours over Canada and the North Atlantic, sped up by the plane’s eastbound