The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

effect of a neutron bomb. Or maybe it induces a reaction in specific materials, in a way that would kill Border Town’s defenses for a period of time. That’s one set of possibilities.”
    “Are there others?” Travis said.
    “One other, in particular.”
    “Which is?”
    “That the weapon has nothing to do with taking over Border Town. We only assume that’s his plan because it’s such a logical power grab. Border Town is the biggest asset in the world if he controls it, and the biggest liability in the world if he doesn’t. Plus the Breach itself. Of course he’d want control of that. Logically, it all fits. But who the hell knows? Maybe logic isn’t what’s driving him. So maybe the weapon just does something catastrophic to the whole world. Maybe it kills ninety-nine percent of it, leaving a scattered remnant population that’s easier for him to control.”
    “You sound like you’re leaning toward door number two,” Travis said.
    She looked down into the fog shroud. “There’s evidence for it.”
    He waited for her to go on.
    “We know Pilgrim bought this place in 1995, just a few months after he left Border Town. Strange things started happening in Zurich in the following years, continuing to the present. Suicides have tripled. Domestic violence arrests are up by a factor of four. Certain rare forms of cancer have increased between five-and sevenfold. We only saw all this in retrospect, of course, after we found this place four years ago. It gets more compelling when you pin the locations of all these incidents on a map, and see the distribution around this building. You probably wouldn’t see it if you weren’t looking for it … but when you do see it, you know you’re not imagining it. Seven Theaterstrasse is doing something already. Some little pilot-light version of what it’ll do to the world if Pilgrim gets his way and throws the switch.”
    Travis held her stare a moment, then looked out into the darkness again. Another ambulance flickered silently through the fog on the far side of the river.
    “Could you really bring yourself to trigger the nuke upstairs, if it comes to it?” he said.
    For a long time she didn’t answer, but when she spoke there was nothing hesitant in her tone. “Yes.”
    “In that case,” he said, “I have an idea.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
    “Tell me,” she said.
    “I need to know something first.” He looked around at the mess of wires at their backs, filling the room except for this narrow passage by the window. “All this circuitry and equipment that’s accessible, Tangent’s studied every inch of it, right?”
    “Every connection, every processor, every jumper setting. Everything.”
    “Any of the wires not plugged in?”
    She didn’t follow.
    “I mean, was there some random corner on one of these floors where it looked like the work hadn’t been finished? Wires hanging loose, circuit boards lying around, tools on the floor? Anything like that?”
    She shook her head.
    Travis thought for another moment and said, “He was three hours from activating this place when Tangent showed up in 2005.”
    She nodded.
    “Three hours away because he was three hours from having it finished, right?”
    “That’s always been the assumption, yeah.”
    “The unfinished work wasn’t anywhere in this tangle that we can see, and the five steel boxes were already welded shut, so he must have been done with whatever’s in those. That leaves the ninth floor, behind the closed doors. Three hours’ worth of work left to do, up there.”
    She was nodding again. Tangent had figured this part out long ago. Which he’d assumed.
    “When you took over this building, where did you find the Whisper?”
    “On the seventh floor, in a shielded box.”
    Travis thought it over, putting the sequence of events together in his mind. Trying to see it all from Pilgrim’s point of view, that day when he’d been forced out of here. That thought process—mentally tracking someone’s moves, getting inside a subject’s head—was familiar, like putting his hand into a baseball glove he hadn’t worn in almost two decades. The kind of thing he’d once been good at, in spite of his motivation.
    “All right, it’s May 17, 2005,” he said. “Pilgrim is three hours from finishing the weapon. He’s working on it. He knows Tangent is close, because you’ve nailed some of his people in recent weeks. He obviously doesn’t know Tangent is literally moving in, or else