The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

of it was open, revealing complex circuitry, and admitting the wires that snaked in from every pressure pad in the building. Any disturbance to those pads would trigger this thing.
    “Pilgrim has connections,” Travis said.
    “Pilgrim has connections,” Paige said. Then: “The Russians never had the accuracy with their missiles that we did, so their philosophy leaned toward making the warheads more powerful. This one came from an SS–18. Enriched uranium primary. Tritium secondary. Yield is about five megatons. Enough to turn everything within twenty miles of this spot into vapor.”
    “Now I know why this place unnerves you guys,” Travis said.
    Paige looked at him, and instead of confirmation in her eyes, he saw only more desolation.
    “No you don’t,” she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
    Ten minutes later Travis and Paige were standing at an open window on the eighth floor, one of the few unoccupied by snipers. The rest of the detachment had dispersed throughout the building to reinforce the defenses, either at other windows or at the ground-floor entrances.
    Travis stared out, high above the city and the fog. Nearby building tops rose from the mist like ships in a marina. Deep beneath the surface, streetlights cast diffused circles of bluish light, and here and there, Travis saw the roaming glow of vehicle headlights, and heard the sharp echoes of footsteps or voices, some of them American. Drunken tourists, the only people awake in Zurich at a quarter past three in the morning. The only steady traffic was a modest flow along a primary street a few miles to the west, bisecting the river and climbing away toward the ridges to the north and south. It was the road Travis and the others had come in on, E41.
    Beside him, Paige’s breathing betrayed her anxiety. It reminded him of the fear he’d seen within the first Tangent group in Alaska, when they’d noticed the footprints in the mud. Not cowardice. Real fear. Fear in someone who didn’t scare easily.
    “I really thought we had a chance,” she said. “I thought those inscriptions would tell us what we needed to do, and then however hard it was, we’d do it. I didn’t think we’d get this far and still be at zero.”
    Her eyes roamed back and forth over the city. Like she expected hell to come rolling in at any second. Maybe it would.
    “I don’t even know what to do now,” she said. “That was our only move. Now … we could leave if we wanted to, but it wouldn’t matter. It’s not like any place is safe, if Pilgrim achieves his goal. Staying feels better, like we’re doing something, right? But obviously we’re not. Forty-two snipers in this building, but we won’t slow him by a minute. Not when he has the Whisper. He’ll know what to do.”
    For a long time, neither spoke. In the night around them, Zurich rumbled on idle.
    “Tell me what’s worse than the nuke upstairs,” Travis said.
    She looked at him, almost grateful for something to talk about besides the dead end they’d come to.
    “We don’t think the nuke is the only defense system in this place,” she said. “We don’t even think it’s the main defense.”
    Travis waited for her to explain.
    “The bomb’s purpose is obvious,” she said.
    “No opening the boxes,” Travis said. “No opening the ninth floor.”
    She nodded. “There are even pressure pads embedded in the ceiling on Level Eight that prevent us from cutting through to the ninth floor that way. Same for the exterior walls. And the roof. And the windows on that level. Which are painted from inside. Obviously we’ll never figure out the purpose of this place until we can see into those boxes and that floor, and Pilgrim doesn’t want that, so … there you go. Simple, right?”
    “Right,” Travis said. “But?”
    “But it doesn’t work. The logic of it. It’s like the single hostage problem. If a captor has one hostage, his threats are automatically empty, because he knows that if he kills the hostage, he’ll be left with nothing. I know people take single hostages all the time, but those people are idiots. Pilgrim is as far from an idiot as you get. There’s no way he’d leave this building defended only by something he wouldn’t actually want to use. Something that would destroy the place, when all his ambitions depend on it. Don’t get me wrong. The bomb would go off, if we did any of the things that would trigger it. But Pilgrim would expect us to be careful. And there’s something else