The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

alone in the room, door locked, no forced entry.”
    Paige kept her eyes on Travis, shaking her head, either not following his logic or not wanting to.
    “There is no weapon,” Travis said. “Pilgrim just needed Tangent to think there was. He wanted you to show up here four years ago. Wanted you to recover the Whisper.”
    “Why the hell would he want us to take the Whisper from him?” she said.
    “Because it told him to,” Travis said.
    The concept cut the air like a blade. Even the typing on Crawford’s end of the call went quiet; whoever was around the speakerphone on that end was listening, too.
    “What?” Paige said.
    “He mastered it, right?” Travis said. “Learned how to make it tell him anything he needed to know?”
    “That’s what the evidence supports,” Paige said.
    “So he asked it for a plan. A way to eliminate Tangent, get back into Border Town, something like that. Whatever it was, it was hard. Right on the brink of impossible. Any of the obvious ways to do it, you guys have long since thought of, and built defenses against. So whatever plan the Whisper came up with, you’d expect it to be pretty far from obvious. Like a chess move by a supercomputer, something even the best human players can’t make sense of.”
    Her eyes changed. Began to accept the idea, almost unwillingly.
    “I can’t even guess what the plan is,” Travis said. “But there has to be one. This has to be one. He let you guys drive him out of this place, that day in 2005. He let you take the Whisper, knowing he’d get it back. He knew LHA in Japan would go active in four years. Knew you’d found his old notebook, and would risk flying the Whisper there to test his old theory. Really, a human being could almost guess those things. So it’d be child’s play for the Whisper. The real question is, what else could it have guessed? Could it have predicted that once Tangent lost the Whisper to him, you’d send a team here to try to contain this place tonight?”
    Paige thought about it, nodded.
    “Okay,” Travis said. “So then what? Could it assume a desperation move on your part? You said yourself you thought of triggering the nuke, if it came to it. How were you planning to do that?”
    He knew what she would say.
    “I would’ve done exactly what we already did,” Paige said. “I would’ve opened the doors into this room.”
    “Still a move the Whisper could expect. So far, it adds up.”
    “What adds up?”
    “That Aaron Pilgrim meant for a Tangent team to be here tonight. Meant for them to open these doors and trigger the Ares, and end up fighting off a siege by the whole city.”
    “Why?”
    Travis thought about it, but could only shake his head. “I don’t know. Whatever it is, the dominoes are dropping exactly like he wants them to, so far. We’re dead-centered in the trap.”
    He watched her consider it. Watched her hate it as much as she acknowledged it. It wasn’t so much an assessment of their situation as a diagnosis.
    “How the hell we’re supposed to compete against this kind of thinking, I don’t know,” Travis said.
    “I might,” Paige said. She looked around the mostly empty room, then back at him. “We exploit the things the Whisper could’ve never predicted.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like you. Four years ago, or fourteen years ago, whenever Pilgrim got this plan from the Whisper, there’s no way it could’ve known a random hiker would show up at that crash site two days ago. That Ellen Garner would’ve survived and left a note for you to follow. That you’d end up holding the Whisper yourself, and that it would be compelled to tell you how to read this language.”
    He nodded. That much seemed safe enough to believe.
    “Meaning we were never supposed to know these names,” Travis said, indicating the list carved into the floor.
    They were both silent a moment.
    Then Crawford’s voice came over the speaker. “We’re on it. I’ll put someone on each name, dig up everything there is, find whatever thread connects them all to Pilgrim.”
    His last word was cut off by a scream in Travis’s ear, from one of the snipers over the comm system: “Gun!”
    Half a second later, another of them cried out, and then there were two voices shouting that a man was down.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
    Sprinting again. Past the nuke. Down the stairs to Level Eight.
    Miller, on the landing farther down, saw Paige and shouted, “Sixth floor! Hill’s been hit!”
    Travis followed Paige