The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

succeeding very well.
    Outside, dim lights began to appear in the windows of the few people awake at this hour. Candles or flashlights.
    “You don’t have to stay here, you know,” Paige said. “You’ve done what we asked you to do. If you want to leave, you can.”
    Travis looked at her for a moment, then stared out over the city again.
    “I know,” he said, and made no move to take her advice.
    At the edge of his vision, he thought he saw her smile. She leaned on the windowsill next to him.
    “When it really gets hopeless,” she said, “there’s one move we can make that Pilgrim probably won’t have anticipated. And even if the Whisper tips him off a few minutes early, there won’t be anything he can do to stop it.”
    The tone of her voice and the deadness in her eyes told Travis what it was.
    “We can set off the nuke,” he said.
    “We can set off the nuke.”
    “I don’t think the locals will appreciate that.”
    “They’ll get over it. In about a thousandth of a second. For the world’s sake, it might be the prudent move.”
    “If Pilgrim’s long-term agenda is bad enough.”
    She breathed a laugh, the sound empty as a waiting coffin. “I’m sure it’s bad enough.”
    Travis thought about the situation. He could accept that she was right, that they were in deep shit, but the logic of it was hard to fit together. Didn’t Pilgrim risk losing all the work he’d put into this building if he attacked it now? Any method of taking out the more than forty snipers stationed at these windows would involve some level of violence, and with it a high likelihood of triggering the pressure pads wired to the nuke.
    But the Whisper would understand that. Would find a way around the problem. Any way. Maybe the attack would be a few canisters of VX gas, lobbed from a launcher two blocks away. Kill everyone in the building and not disturb a microchip. There had to be a thousand ways in, as clever as that, or more so. The Whisper would know them all.
    Someone screamed outside. A man’s voice. Travis saw Paige flinch, even as the scream turned into a drunken laugh, and someone else told the man to shut up, also laughing. The first man kept yelling, asking who’d turned off the fucking lights.
    “It won’t be much longer,” Paige said.
    But it was. More than half an hour passed, and nothing happened. A few ambulances moved about the city, sirens quiet but flashers pulsing through the fog. Travis thought of home-care patients whose medical equipment had failed in the outage. Somewhere to the east, out of sight past the building’s corner, was a bright light source. A building running on a generator. It had to be a hospital; the ambulances came and went from that direction.
    Paige made more calls to Border Town. More calls to the Berlin detachments stationed around Zurich and to the AWACS aircraft circling high above. Four in the morning and all was well. The snipers downstairs continued to call in their status at close intervals. They’d put on FLIR goggles to let them see the shapes of human bodies through the fog, and in low tones they reported the movement of any pedestrian who strayed into the two-block radius around the building.
    “I don’t understand,” Paige said. “What’s Pilgrim waiting for?”
    It was the slingshot feeling again. Each passing minute made it worse.
    Mostly they watched the night, but at times either he, or she, or both of them stared at the lines on the PDA. The consensus from Border Town agreed with Travis: the sentences were gibberish, on the surface.
    At a point when neither had spoken for over a minute, Travis said, “You must have a few guesses, at least.”
    She looked at him in the pale glow of the screen, and offered a smile. “I promise I don’t.”
    “Sorry, not the lines,” he said. “I meant the weapon. In four years, Tangent must’ve come up with a theory or two about what it does. If not by looking at all these wires, then by considering what Pilgrim would have to do to eliminate Tangent. He’d have to compromise the defenses at Border Town, right? Somehow he’d have to do that, from this place, five or six thousand miles away.”
    “We have a few guesses,” she said. “They all hinge on the idea that this building is a transmitter antenna of some kind, possibly directional, that could target Border Town even at this distance. What it does could be any number of things. Maybe it kills people but leaves physical structures intact, like the