by Patrick Lee
Travis surveyed the surrounding landscape for any sign of police flashers, or the beacon lights of helicopters. He saw nothing. The Homeland Security response must be concentrated on Yuma, fifty miles back east.
They walked into town and a found a motel just off the freeway that didn’t require ID. They got a room with two queen-sized beds. The nightstand clock showed two thirty in the morning. Paige and Bethany took the first bed and Travis took the second. They collapsed fully dressed atop the bedcovers and were asleep within a minute.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Finn had been on the phone for hours. The entire flight back from Yuma and better than ninety minutes in his office. He was standing on his balcony now, staring across D.C. at all the places that’d been on the other ends of his calls. Dark silhouettes of buildings with a few lights on, half an hour before sunrise.
He had one call left to make.
He leaned on the rail. He dialed. Three rings and then a voice answered. “Isaac?”
“Yes,” Finn said. “I’ve spoken with President Currey. I’ve spoken with everyone who matters. We’ve come to an agreement. We’re not happy with it, but there’s no other option in play. Paige Campbell and her friends were in Yuma for several hours, and now they’re long gone. We don’t know what they saw there, and we don’t know who they’re talking to right now. We have most of the big dogs in our camp, but we don’t have everyone, and given time… these people could hurt us. They could pull the whole plan apart.”
He took a breath. Let it out slowly. “We can’t wait as long as we meant to,” he said. “Umbra needs to happen now. Right now.”
He heard a sharp inhalation on the line. “But it’s not ready. Entire segments of the plan—”
“The fundamentals are ready,” Finn said. “In principle it can work. And in one sense we have an advantage now. We have the cylinder. We can go to the final location and see what’s there in 2084. Who knows what we can learn from that.”
“Are you going there now?”
“I’ll stay in D.C. for the next twenty-four hours. I expect Campbell to come back here and try to contact people she hopes she can trust. I doubt she and the others really appreciate the extent of our connections, in which case there’s every chance they’ll trip a wire somewhere.”
There was a long silence on the line. The sound of uncertainty. Reluctance. Acceptance.
“Currey is already getting started on his end,” Finn said. “How long will it take on yours? How long to actually set the plan in motion?”
Another silence. Then: “A day or two. Maybe less. Christ, are we really doing this?”
Finn heard as much excitement as anxiety in the voice.
“Yes, we’re really doing this. None of us would’ve chosen to rush it, but if it’s that or never do it at all…”
“I agree. I’m scared as hell, but I agree.”
“I knew you would. Get started on it right away. I’ll talk to you soon.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, Audra.”
Part III - Arica
Chapter Thirty-Three
Richard Garner woke to his alarm at five in the morning. He exercised for thirty minutes. He showered, dressed in khakis and a gray cotton tennis shirt, and went to his den. Beyond the windows Central Park lay in amber light and long, early shadows, thirty stories below.
He switched on the computer. While the operating system loaded, he left the room and crossed the broad stone hallway to the kitchen. He toasted two slices of wheat bread and poured a glass of orange juice. He took the plate and glass back to the den, sat at the computer, and clicked open his work in progress. The book was still only an outline. It’d begun as a study of Ulysses S. Grant’s time in office, with a focus on the difference between overseeing a war and overseeing a nation, but the research had led elsewhere. Now the book was shaping up into a broader examination of every president who’d held a position of military authority before taking office. An analysis of the pros and cons regarding what that kind of experience brought to a president’s perspective. He wasn’t sure yet on which side he would ultimately come down—whether generals tended to make good presidents or not. The evidence pointed to a number of conclusions, each conditional to time and place and political climate, and he’d only just begun digging through it. He hoped his own military background—he hadn’t made general, but he’d commanded a SEAL team for the bulk of the seventies—would provide him more insight than bias.
It was involving work.
Which he needed right now.
Would almost certainly need for the rest of his life.
He stayed in the den all morning and into the early afternoon. Mostly he sat at the computer, but at times he paced before the windows, looking out over the park and the city.
He took a break at one o’clock. He had a sandwich and a 7UP. He plugged his iPod into the sound system, piped the music through the residence and did some random work around the place. Though he’d been here for two years, some part of him still felt like he hadn’t settled in yet. Like he was still getting used to it. Still getting used to living anywhere on his own.
The residence took up an entire floor of the building, though only two thirds of it made up his own living space. The other third comprised the living and working quarters of the Secret Service detail that guarded him. He played poker with them, most nights.
He quit the chores at four o’clock. Turned off the music. Went back to the den. He opened a heavy box of yellowed, sleeve-protected documents that’d come from the archives of the New York Public Library. The pages were by no means a part of the library’s lending collection. Even as non-circulating reference material they were pretty hard to gain access to. Garner felt a bit of guilt over the privilege his resume afforded him, but not enough to lose sleep over. It was just much easier for the library to send the stuff to him than to have him and his security footprint dropping in every time he needed to verify a quote. Besides, he was an old friend of the place. He’d worked there in his college years. He’d probably walked past this very box a hundred times.
The day was clear and bright, but by five o’clock the sunlight in the room had diminished a bit. He turned on the lamp beside his reading chair. George Washington’s handwriting was hard enough to make out as it was.
At a quarter past five a cool breeze filtered into the room from the hallway. It stirred the papers on the table beside him. It took him two or three seconds to realize that a breeze should be impossible. None of the residence’s windows were open.
For a moment he only stared at the doorway. Tried to make sense of it. There was an intake for the HVAC system just out in the hall. No reason air should be coming out of it, but maybe some kind of maintenance was going on. It was all he could think of.
All he could think of that was benign, anyway. In recent years he’d grown used to considering more threatening scenarios for given situations.
He set aside the page he was reading. He stood, curious but not afraid. He could clap his hands and have six agents with submachine guns coming in through separate access points in quite a bit less than ten seconds. They didn’t normally monitor video feeds of the residence, but any sharp sound above 85 decibels would trip the acoustic alarm and bring them running.
He crossed the room and stepped into the hallway. The main entry was still closed and locked. The kitchen was empty. He turned toward the living room—and flinched.
People.
Three of them.
Right there.
Garner was an instant from shouting to trigger the alarm when he realized he recognized one of them. Paige Campbell.
Tangent.
He felt his fear turn to anger. He advanced on her and the others. It occurred to him only in passing to wonder why all three of them had damp hair and clothing.
“We’re sorry to intrude—” Paige said.
Garner cut her off. “Leave. Right now. However the hell you came—”
Paige
stepped aside, and in the gap between her and the other two, Garner saw where the wind was coming from.
He stopped. His anger faded. He didn’t know what to feel, suddenly. All he could do was stare.
Travis watched Garner’s reaction. The initial anger made sense. The man’s wife had died because of her work with Tangent; he couldn’t have been ecstatic to see them here.
Now as Garner stared at the iris, Travis stepped aside, along with Bethany, to give him an unbroken view.
Garner moved toward it. Started to say something. Stopped.
Then it contracted shut in front of him, and he blinked, confused.
“Sorry,” Bethany said. “Hang on.”
She was holding the cylinder. She looked around for a place to set it. Pointed to a narrow table along the nearest wall, and looked at Garner.
“Is this okay?”
The guy could barely process what the hell she was asking him. He stared at her for a second and then his eyes went back to the spot where the iris had vanished.
Bethany took his silence for a yes. She set the cylinder on the table and found a heavy bookend to brace it with.
Travis glanced at the floor-to-ceiling windows on the south wall, facing down Central Park West toward Midtown. The park itself filled the left half of the view. The right half was full of the varied architecture of the Upper West Side. Travis guessed the buildings ranged in age from a few years to well over a hundred. The day was beautiful, with huge, slow clouds dragging their shadows across the sweep of the city.
Then Bethany switched on the cylinder and the iris appeared again, and Travis saw the other Manhattan. The one they’d been looking at for the past several minutes as they ascended the ruins of Garner’s building.
That version of the borough was in the same condition as D.C. for the most part. The entire island was carpeted with dense boreal forest, from which rose the corroded remains of the city skyline.
What set it apart from D.C.—more so than Travis had imagined until he’d seen it for himself—was simply the scale of the ruins. In D.C. the sixteen-story office building had looked enormous. It would’ve been lost among the ankles of the giants that stood rusting here. The remnants of skyscrapers below Central Park formed a solid visual screen standing eight hundred feet high—higher still in some places. The October wind sighed through it, finding odd angles and rivet holes whichever way it blew. It sounded like a chorus of a million reed flutes, playing soft and low in the dead framework of the city.
All of it lay cold and misty under bruised knots of cloud cover. Each time the wind gusted through the iris it blew a wisp of moisture into the room.
Garner remained where he’d been standing.
“It won’t shut again,” Bethany said. “You can go close to it. You can lean right through.”
He looked at her. Looked at each of them in turn. He managed a nod, and crossed the room to the iris. He stared through. For more than three minutes he said nothing. Then he closed his eyes. He shook his head and lowered it.
“Tell me everything,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-Four
It took just over an hour. They sat around a coffee table in the den and relayed the story in detail. All that had happened. All that they knew. All that they didn’t know.
When they’d finished, Garner sat in silence for a moment.
“You must know something about this, sir,” Bethany said. “If President Currey knows about Umbra, I can’t imagine you don’t.”
“I’ve met Isaac Finn on two or three occasions,” Garner said. “Just brief conversations, each time. I wanted to like him, given the work he’d done. But I didn’t. There was something about him that seemed… contrived, I guess. I had the feeling that the small talk wasn’t really small talk. That it was something else. Like a test. Like it was some kind of psych exam, and my answers meant something to him. I saw it when he spoke to others, too. That was my sense of the man. But I was the outlier. Finn’s made a lot of close friends in Washington over the years. Currey’s one of them. That’s why Currey’s in on Umbra, whatever it is. It’s sure as hell not something you learn about by just having a high enough security clearance. I had the highest kind you can have, and I never heard a thing about it.”
He stood from his chair. Went to the window.
“What I can tell you I didn’t learn as president. I learned it on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, years earlier. And it’s not about Finn. It’s about his wife, before she was his wife. When she was a grad student at MIT named Audra Nash.”
He was quiet a moment, thinking, his back to the room. Travis looked past him out the windows. He could see the evening shadows of the Upper West Side easing across the park.
Garner dropped his hand to a huge globe next to the window, resting in an ornate walnut floor mount. He spun it absently. Travis imagined it was something he did often, an unconscious habit.
“Audra came before the committee behind closed doors, with an unusual request. She wanted clearance to review certain restricted military documents, as part of the research for her doctoral thesis. In exchange, the thesis itself would be classified and available only to certain people. Our people.”
“What was she doing her doctoral work on?” Paige said.
“ELF radio transmissions. Extremely Low Frequency. What we use for communicating with submarines.”
“That doesn’t sound like something an aerospace candidate would be working on,” Paige said.
“It was, in her case. She was researching ways to transmit ELF signals using satellites.”
Paige looked somewhat thrown by that.
Bethany looked floored. Like she could almost laugh. “That’s ridiculous. ELF transmitters are over thirty miles long. How could you put something like that in orbit?”
“And why would you want to, anyway?” Paige said. “ELF has worked fine for half a century, just the way it is.”
Travis could see just enough of Garner’s reflection to make out a vague smile. Then the man finally turned from the window.
“There’s a bit more to it than that,” he said. “Audra wasn’t interested in using it for submarines. She was looking to use it on people.”
None of the vacant expressions in the room changed.
Garner crossed to the big chair before his desk. He swiveled it to face the coffee table and sank into it.
“We started working on ELF in the fifties, when it was becoming obvious that subs were going to play a major role in the Cold War. We built the transmitters in remote places. One well-known site in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Another in northern Canada, not so well known. The technical hurdles to building the damn things were significant. Consider what they had to do: broadcast in all directions with enough signal strength to reach submarines anywhere in the world, hundreds of feet down in conductive saltwater. It’s amazing they worked at all. But even once they did work, there were… other problems. Health effects for personnel that worked and lived close to the transmitters, where the signals were highly concentrated. Cognitive issues in a few rare cases, but the most common problems by far were mood disruptions. Conditions that mimicked the symptoms of bipolar disorder, though with greater severity. Much greater, at times. There were personnel who had to be subdued because they were—for lack of a better word—high. That was how they described it themselves, after the fact. At the other end there was severe depression. There were suicides. Lots of them.”
“We still use ELF,” Bethany said. “Are those problems still going on?”
Garner shook his head. “They got a handle on it within the first decade. Isolated the causes. At high enough doses, certain wavelengths were trouble. Certain distances from the transmitter were trouble, because of harmonics. Like that. The engineers worked around it.” He offered something like a smile, though nothing about it looked happy. “But by then, certain people were thinking about the side effects in very different ways. Thinking about how to enhance them instead of eliminate them.
How to control them. How to use them as weapons in their own right.”
“Christ,” Travis said. But he could already see the obvious appeal of that kind of technology. A tank battle or a naval engagement would be a hell of a lot easier to win if everyone on the other side was suddenly experiencing what felt like a crack high.
“They actually built systems like that?” Paige said.
“They tried. We tried, the Brits tried, Russia tried. Everyone worked out the useful frequencies easily enough. Even found ways to heighten the effects with on-off modulation, or rapid oscillation between frequencies. Scary stuff. Even test subjects, who were well aware of what was happening to them and who were exposed for as little as an hour, had severe reactions. It was a hell of a weapon. Two big problems, though: you couldn’t move it, and you couldn’t point it.” He nodded at Bethany. “Like you said, an ELF transmitter is huge. It’s not some dish you can swivel around toward a target. It’s a straight-line antenna between leads, dozens of miles apart. You basically just have an effective zone around the signal source. So unless you can talk your enemy into lining up right there, nice and neat, there’s not a hell of a lot you can do with a weapon like that. And that was about the extent of it. We kicked it around for a while in the sixties and seventies, looked for ways to make it selective, directional. Probably threw half a billion dollars at it. I’m sure the other guys did the same. But at some point, when you’re not seeing any results, you have to cut your losses. There are better things to spend the defense budget on.”
He glanced out at the city, shrugged with his eyebrows, looked at the three of them again.
“So you might imagine it got our attention when Audra Nash came to us in 1986 and said she had an idea. A way to broadcast ELF using satellites. If it were almost any other person—much less a student—the committee wouldn’t have even taken the meeting. But Miss Nash had some credibility to back up her claim. Her work as a grad student had already influenced the design of next-gen communications satellites. She was smart as hell, and she knew the field better than probably anyone. What she wanted from us was access to the results of all the ELF research over the years, all the raw data from the experiments in directing it, focusing it. We barely had to think about it. First, the data wasn’t all that sensitive. It was just a detailed list of all the things that didn’t work. And all the countries out there who could possibly want to steal it didn’t need to: they already had the same data, based on their own failures. Second, we thought her idea might actually have merit. She was brilliant, she had a track record, and she was coming to this problem with fresh eyes. The concept she had in mind was certainly different enough. We hadn’t tried anything like it in all our efforts.”