The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

neutralize this building, destroy the weapon before Pilgrim could ever get a chance to use it. We had to try, and we had every reason to make our move as soon as possible. Four hundred thousand people live inside the kill radius of that nuke, and all it would take would be a lightning strike to zap the power for a few seconds, or a good-sized delivery truck crashing into the foundation to give the pressure pads a jolt. What were we supposed to do, tell everyone in Zurich to move?” The regret moistened her eyes now. Like acid. “All for nothing, anyway. We tried it at LHA just like he said. No result.”
    “I guess he could’ve expected you to find his notes, and fly the Whisper there and back when that place got up and running,” Travis said.
    Her eyebrows made a shrug, hard and bitter. “I guess.”
    “He circled it in red, huh?”
    She looked at him. Eyes narrowing now. “Yeah. So what?”
    “Did he circle anything else in the book like that?”
    “No. What’s your point? That he planned it? That far ahead? Circled it just to make us take the bait?”
    “I don’t know,” Travis said. He didn’t.
    “It’s not possible,” Paige said. “He wrote those notes a decade and a half ago, before he ever left Border Town. No one could plan that far out. And why? Why would he plan to lose the Whisper to us, hours before triggering this place, and then recover it four years later?”
    “I don’t know,” Travis said again.
    But something about what she’d told him didn’t fit. There was a problem there; he just couldn’t quite put a name tag on it.
    Paige had lowered the PDA again. Travis indicated it with his eyes, the five lines still on its screen.
    “Mind if I look at those?”
    She handed it to him.
    GRAVITY ABERRATION, INNER NEXUS.
    OPTICAL UNIFICATION TENSOR, PARALLEL UNIFICATION TENSOR.
    BROAD AXIS NULL DRIVER, WORKABLE INFLOW DETOURS TO HARMONIC.
    SYSTEM LEVERAGE, ETHER WASTE, RIGHT ANGLE TRANSFER EGRESSION.
    FREE ELEMENT EXPULSION, DIRECTED FLOW ONTO RADIANT WITH AXIAL RESISTANCE DETERMINED.
    The words meant nothing to him. Or her. Or anyone else, apparently. At the time she’d typed them on the PDA, she’d forwarded the lines to Border Town, where a representative set of the world’s smartest people lived. Fifteen minutes now, and no answers on her phone.
    “I might be the least qualified to say it,” Travis said, “but I think these lines are bullshit. I don’t care how brilliant the guy is, if he was writing Post-its to himself, they’d be clearer than this. If there’s a meaning to these sentences, it’s not literal. It’s something else.”
    “I agree,” Paige said. “So what is it?”
    He could only shrug, focusing on the tiny screen, his expression probably matching hers from a moment earlier.
    And then the lights of Zurich went out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
    Paige was on her phone within seconds, asking someone what the hell was happening. Over the comm unit in his ear, Travis could hear sniper teams on the lower floors speaking to one another, reporting their status. Everyone fine, for now.
    He leaned on the windowsill. The grid immediately around 7 Theaterstrasse had gone out first, and within seconds others had followed in succession, plunging the city into blackness. Now as he watched, successive blocks, leading away up the valley and climbing the ridges on both sides, winked out one after another, until the only lights he could see were the headlights on E41, and a scattering of others on the streets of the darkened city. Almost immediately his eyes began to adjust, and he discerned the fog again, lit not from below but from above, by the half-moon. The whole bank of it, shrouding the city, caught and scattered the silver-blue light and set a contrast for the monolithic shapes of the buildings that rose from it, black and dormant in the night.
    Paige was talking to someone at Border Town who had open lines to the three Berlin detachments stationed around Zurich. None of them were reporting any hostile contact. She finished the call and looked at Travis. The two of them were lit only by the screen of her PDA, which Travis still held, and by the vague glow of LEDs blinking like animal eyes in the jungle of wiring around them. The power to 7 Theaterstrasse hadn’t so much as stuttered. An uninterruptible backup must be one of those rare things that actually lived up to its name.
    “Whatever it is, it’ll happen anytime now,” Paige said. Trying to sound calm. Not