The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

vehicle occupants at night. These cams were all networked to a system that could recognize Aaron Pilgrim and several of his known allies. If they did, three detachments from Tangent’s Berlin hub were standing by in the city, ready to move against them.
    None of it reassured Paige, Travis saw. Rock, paper, scissors.
    On the outside, the building was beautiful. Ancient stone facade rearing up to the sky. Cobblestone approach. Wrought-iron fence gleaming in the mist, its sheen catching the city lights through the fog.
    On the inside, the place looked like the home of an obsessive-compulsive who couldn’t pass a used computer store without buying out its entire stock, and had done so on a few hundred occasions. Travis wasn’t up on computers—hadn’t owned one in the year since he’d rejoined the free world, and the last time he’d seen one before that, the term e-mail hadn’t yet made it into popular culture. He’d seen his brother’s impressive setup for the home business, and he’d gone online a few times at the library in Fairbanks in recent months. His experience ended there. But even a glance at the interior of 7 Theaterstrasse made it clear that no amount of familiarity would’ve helped. Supercomputer designers would’ve been stumped. Probably had been. No doubt Tangent had brought in the best people.
    Beginning at the main-floor foyer, where six members of another Berlin detachment stood guard, the building’s space, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, was filled with wires, and computer boards, and cables, and pieces of equipment Travis didn’t recognize at all. A rain-forest overgrowth of circuitry, lit from within by its own galaxy of tiny LED indicator lights. Here and there, window fans were bolted to walls or the ceiling, aimed at particularly dense clusters of wiring and spinning at full speed, as they must have been for years and years. Elsewhere, air-conditioning units whirred softly, the radiant heat of their motors vented away through metal ductwork toward exterior walls.
    “Power’s never been shut off since you took over the place?” Travis asked Paige.
    “Oh no.” She said it like he’d asked if she’d ever juggled straight razors. There was more behind her answer than she was letting on. He had an idea he’d find out what it was soon enough, and didn’t ask.
    “The building runs off the city grid, but there’s an uninterruptible backup, powerful enough for the whole place. It’s kicked on twice in these past four years, during outages. Thankfully.”
    They moved through the foyer toward the stairs. In the recessed space beneath them, Travis saw something that was at odds with the rest of the place. It looked like a little painter’s studio: an easel tucked against the wall, a few spare canvases, and a scattering of oil-paint tubes covered in dust in the corner.
    “What’s that about?” Travis said.
    “Nothing, as far as we know,” Paige said. “Maybe a remnant from whoever owned the place before Pilgrim.”
    They went past it to the foot of the stairs. The circuit-board jungle flowed up the marble steps, woven through the spindles of the railing. The passage through it all was only wide enough for single-file movement. Paige took the lead, Travis just behind her.
    On every floor, half a dozen more of the single-file rabbit tunnels branched out from the one that wound up the stairs. Whatever purpose these runs had served Pilgrim, they served Tangent now. Travis saw that most of the pathways led to the outer walls and then ran along them, allowing access to the windows, several of which had Tangent snipers and spotters in place.
    On the third floor, Paige led the group away from the stairs. Down one of the tunnels. Past three sniper teams. The path turned back in toward the interior, the wilderness of cables and silicon and flickering LEDs. It ended at something like a clearing, a circular space twelve feet across. At its center was a steel box the size of a footlocker. A thick trunk of bound wires descended from the canopy above and fed into the box through a hole in its lid. The lid itself was welded shut.
    Paige stepped aside at the mouth of the clearing, but only enough to let him see past her. She was still blocking him from actually moving out of the tunnel and approaching the steel box.
    “We never go much closer than this,” she said. “Our first inspection of the place showed us the need for caution. There are five boxes like this in the building. We’ve