The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

feet or so.
    It looked like what he’d expected. It looked like a computer lab. Workstations. Wiring schematics spread out on desks. Swivel chairs everywhere. Some kind of makeshift conference table: a line of smaller tables shoved together, surrounded by more chairs.
    But no quantum computer.
    Nothing even close. There were laptops on some of the desks. The Tangent operators turned each one on and saw the familiar onscreen brand logos before the password prompts came up.
    Otherwise, the place was empty of equipment.
    Travis felt as lost as he had at any time since his hike in the Brooks Range had been interrupted. How could it not be there? Why had the Whisper killed all of those people if they didn’t have anything that could affect it?
    Keene’s viewpoint made a last sweep of the room, as he turned to follow his men back up the ladder.
    “Wait,” Travis said.
    The viewpoint halted.
    “What is it?” Keene said.
    “On the wall above the conference table. What is that?”
    Keene looked at it. Moved closer. It was a huge oil painting, abstract, scratches of dark green on a white surface.
    “It’s nothing,” Keene said.
    “It’s everything,” Travis said.
    He looked at the phone’s onscreen menu buttons. One was labeled CAPTURE.
    “Do me a favor,” Travis said. He directed Keene to go closer, until the painting more than filled the phone’s screen, and he captured freeze-frames of its four quadrants. At that resolution it became legible.
    A message from the Whisper. Written in the scratch language. Travis switched back and forth through the screen captures, and read it:
    HELLO, TRAVIS. RIGHT NOW YOU MUST BE SITTING NEAR THE OPEN ELEVATOR SHAFT ABOVE BORDER TOWN, ABOUT NINETY SECONDS BEFORE SUNRISE. I’VE SEEN TO IT THAT AARON PILGRIM DOES NOT REMEMBER PAINTING THIS PIECE, NOR DOES HE REMEMBER SELLING IT TO THE GALLERY THAT ELLIS COOK WOULD ONE DAY VISIT WHILE ON VACATION IN ZURICH WITH HIS DAUGHTER. I’M SORRY TO INFORM YOU THAT THERE IS NO PLUS-TEN-QUBIT QUANTUM COMPUTER INSIDE THIS HOUSE, OR ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, IN JUNE OF 2009. THE ORDER OF THE QUBIT WAS NEVER EVEN CLOSE TO REACHING ITS GOAL. YOU MAY FIND IT GROSSLY INEFFICIENT TO MURDER THIRTY-SEVEN PEOPLE OVER A DECADE AND A HALF, JUST TO GIVE YOU A REASON TO KEEP THE PRESIDENT FROM NUKING BORDER TOWN TWENTY MINUTES AGO, BUT REALLY, IT WAS A PRETTY SIMPLE MOVE FROM MY POINT OF VIEW. AS OF THE MOMENT YOU REACH THE PERIOD AT THE END OF THIS SENTENCE, BORDER TOWN’S SURFACE-TO-AIR DEFENSES WILL COME BACK ONLINE, ELIMINATING THE NUCLEAR OPTION. YOU NOW HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO FOLLOW YOUR FIRST INSTINCT: PUT ON THE TRANSPARENCY SUIT AND MAKE YOUR MOVE AGAINST PILGRIM AND HIS PEOPLE. I’LL MAKE YOU A PROMISE: IF YOU DO IT (YOU WILL) THEN PAIGE CAMPBELL WILL SURVIVE. IN ALL OTHER POSSIBLE FUTURES, SHE DIES JUST OVER ELEVEN MINUTES FROM NOW. I’LL SEE YOU SOON, OLD FRIEND, AND WHEN I DO, YOU’LL FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL REALLY ABOUT. HAVE FUN.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
    Climbing down the shaft ladder with the suit on was tricky. There was a difficulty to grabbing rungs with hands he couldn’t see. He only had to go down two stories. From there he used an override switch to open the B2 elevator doors, and stepped out of the shaft into the hallway. He’d asked Keene for the locations of Defense Control, Security Control, and the Primary Lab. The places where Pilgrim and his men were clustered. Defense Control was on B4. He entered the stairwell and made his way down.
    Through the window in the door he saw four men, all in their twenties, watching a bank of high-definition monitors as if each were showing the last play of the Super Bowl. In fact they were showing the empty desert around the facility. It appeared to be a single large room. No internal hallways leading off out of sight. No blind corners. There was a bathroom, but its door hung open and Travis could see that it was empty. No one else in the room except the headshot bodies of its original occupants: the woman Travis had heard over the speakerphone earlier, and five men.
    Along the wall opposite the monitors, the drywall had been blown out by an explosion, and even the structural steel columns were warped and charred. Between two of the uprights, a spiderweb of delicate wiring and various computer cables—hundreds of each kind—had been attached to the damaged wiring with clamps and adapters. This was the half hour’s work that’d brought Border Town’s defenses back online.
    Travis had