The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

he’d have left even earlier. Which means he’s not using the Whisper at this moment, or else it would’ve warned him. And it’s plausible enough that he wouldn’t be. I mean, he’s been building this place for ten years, this close to the end he probably knows all by himself what’s left to be done.”
    “Okay,” Paige said.
    “So he’s up there, working on the ninth floor. The Whisper is safe in its box on Level Seven. If he gets the two-minute warning that Tangent’s coming down the street, what does he do?”
    “Apparently he shuts the doors on Level Nine, shoves the pressure pads into the gaps, and flees the building.”
    “So he takes the time to do that,” Travis said. “But he doesn’t stop for a few seconds on the seventh floor, on his way down, to grab the Whisper? The thing that matters more to him than his own senses?”
    “Yeah, we know that doesn’t add up,” Paige said. “Which is why we don’t think he was on the ninth floor when the warning came. We think he was on the first floor, for any of several reasons. The kitchen is down there, along with the only working bathroom.”
    “That makes it even harder to believe,” Travis said.
    For the first time in this discussion, Paige looked uncertain. She waited for him to continue.
    “He’s down on the first floor. He gets the call. Shit, Tangent’s coming. They’re so close, even if he sprints out the door right now, he could still get caught. There’s simply no time to run up seven flights for the Whisper. So he does the hardest thing he’s ever had to do. He leaves the Whisper and he runs.”
    “Right.”
    “So how do the doors on the ninth floor get closed and pressure padded again?”
    She shrugged. “He had to have done it before he came downstairs, as a standard procedure. Must have always done it. Sealed it up whenever he came down, unsealed it when he went back up. He would’ve known how to do that, how to switch off the pressure pads when he wanted to go back in. I’m sure we could figure it out ourselves, with a little trial and error—if ‘error’ didn’t mean vaporizing a city.”
    “But that’s the part that doesn’t work,” Travis said. “Pilgrim rigging the doors just to run downstairs for a minute. Think about it. Ten years of work. Work that’s going to give him the world, or whatever he wants. He’s three hours away from wrapping it up. He’s probably done nothing but work on it for the final few days. Probably hasn’t even slept. Let me guess, in the kitchen downstairs, every cup was coffee stained. Even the ones that weren’t coffee cups.”
    She looked vaguely impressed at that.
    “Amphetamines too, right?” he said. “Not meth. Maybe prescription stuff.”
    Paige nodded. “Dexedrine. Good guess.”
    “Not really. It’s just nothing unusual. I spent three years working vice; it’s not as long as most, but it’s long enough. Long enough to see the same pattern, over and over. Pretty much identical, for all of them.”
    “All of who?”
    “People doing things they’re not supposed to. People whose lives would basically be over if they got caught. People who are in no position to fuck around. A guy like Pilgrim, those last days in this place, that close to getting away with what he was doing, I doubt he’d waste five minutes to go down and make a sandwich. He’d have someone bring it up to him, and he wouldn’t stop working. Whatever he had to go downstairs for that day, it wasn’t going to take long, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to make it take longer by stopping to shut the door and arm the pads, then disarm them again when he came back. Not three hours from the finish line.”
    He could see in Paige’s eyes that neither she nor anyone in Tangent had considered this angle before. Maybe they just hadn’t been under the right pressure. Maybe they hadn’t been in dire enough straits to consider the option Travis was considering right now.
    “But the pads were in the doors,” Paige said. “So what are you saying?”
    “I’m saying he had it rigged so he could go in and out quickly, without having to stop every time. Minutes would’ve been precious at the end. I’m saying the pads on the doors upstairs are decoys. You could open those doors and walk through them, right now if you wanted to.”
    For a moment she said nothing. Just stared at him. Then: “The wires to the pads are live. We checked for current.”
    “Sure,” Travis said. “He’d make it look