The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

think it would happen that way. It would be nothing so simple. Not after all this. Not after reading the message on Ellis Cook’s painting.
    He was resigned now to whatever fate the Whisper had mapped out for him, and for the world. There was simply no avoiding it. There was only hitting it head-on and finding out what the hell it was.
    He took the nearest guard’s pistol—a .45—and the two spare clips in the man’s pocket, and started for the door.
    Then he stopped. And though no one could see it, he smiled.
    “The elevator is three stories below us,” he said. “The cables are broken, so its brakes against the shaft wall must’ve stopped it.”
    “Yeah,” Paige said, looking toward the sound of his voice.
    “Anyone know how to override them?”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
    Pilgrim stood at the wedged-open shaft doors and stared down into the semi-darkness. Ten feet below, his fat-ass second in command, Jackley, with the help of three others, was making good progress on the blast doors. It was tedious work. The hanging platform—its suspension cables came up through the open doors to anchor blocks bolted into the corridor floor—made a terrible base from which to drill. The harder Jackley pushed the carbide bit against the steel, the more the platform itself moved. To cope with this long-foreseen problem, the others on the platform had two-by-fours that they propped against the shaft wall, opposite the drilling focus. The nearer end of each two-by-four had a flat board tacked onto it, and Jackley braced his back against these as he drilled. It was a tricky solution that required a lot of hands and attention, but it did the job.
    Pilgrim wasn’t stressed about it. In truth, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt stress of any kind. How could he, with the Whisper in his service, leading him all these years to the goal he’d demanded of it?
    Control of Border Town.
    Control of all the powerful things that lay inside the Primary Lab, just beyond the blast doors below. So many of the wonders in there, Tangent had never fully understood. Entities that were obviously built for great and terrible purposes, but which the researchers had never learned how to operate. How to even switch on, in some cases.
    The Whisper would know, though. Once he was in there, he’d have everything he needed.
    Over the years, he’d learned not to question the snaking course it had charted for him. It was a great big thing that he’d asked of it. A thing he’d have never accomplished on his own. So of course the plan would be puzzling to him. Of course it would be elaborate and confusing. That was part of its power. And now it’d worked. He was here because he’d trusted the Whisper and followed its plotted track exactly.
    Even keeping the survivors alive upstairs. Including Chase. Chase, whose importance the Whisper had emphasized above all others. Pilgrim had only vaguely wondered why. Maybe the guy would turn out to be an exceptionally useful subordinate for him, given time enough, and pressure. Who knew? Who cared? If the Whisper wanted him here, that was enough.
    Below, Jackley was using the carbide bit as more of a blade than a drill, cutting a manhole-sized circle into the foot-thick blast door. Now he hooted excitedly, because he’d come back around to where he’d started. The drill bit met the beginning of its own circular track, and the excised plug of steel dropped an inch, settling on the bottom of the widened opening with a heavy thud.
    “Magnet,” Jackley said.
    The man behind him lifted the battery-powered workhorse magnet from the platform and handed it to him. Jackley held the magnet’s base against the steel plug, and switched it on. With a bass hum, it drew itself against the metal hard enough to pull Jackley off balance. Now each man on the platform took hold of the magnet’s broad handle and leaned back, drawing on it.
    “Careful now,” Jackley said. “Closer she gets, the softer we pull.”
    The plug slid outward, two inches, then four, then six. At eight inches it began to tilt, and Jackley stopped the others with a gesture.
    “Pull us away,” he said.
    The others gripped the beams on the shaft wall and pulled the hanging platform back from the blast door, allowing the plug plenty of room to fall without landing on the platform itself. Jackley leaned forward carefully, his stomach braced against the platform’s safety rail, and gave the magnet one last tug.
    The plug tipped out of the