by Patrick Lee
Finn leaned in and stared down on him. He had the surviving cylinder tucked under his arm. In the dome light, the man’s eyes looked deeply troubled.
“What’s going to happen to you about an hour from now,” Finn said, “I despise more than anything there is. I wish to hell it could be avoided. But it can’t be, this time. There’s too much at stake. I need to know what you know, and who else you’ve spoken to. So please just cooperate with the interrogators. They’ll know if you’re being truthful. And it’ll be over sooner.”
His eyes stayed on Travis a moment longer.
“I’m sorry,” Finn said. He looked like he meant it. Then he closed the window again, pounded twice on the roof, and walked away.
Travis saw the glow of headlights swing through the side windows as two other vehicles backed out of nearby spaces and took the lead. His own pulled out and followed, and a few minutes later they were on the freeway again.
Chapter Forty-One
Fifty seconds before the first shots hit the motorcade, Travis was thinking about Paige and Bethany. They were all he’d thought of for the past hour. He imagined them trying to find shelter in the unbroken darkness of the ruins. Imagined their uncertainty and confusion when they hadn’t heard any shooting from the top of the building. Imagined their fear now, all this time later, the reality of their situation sinking in as deeply as the cold and the dampness of the October night.
The vehicle slowed and came to a stop. The procession had left the freeway a while earlier. It was traveling through dark countryside now, halting occasionally at what Travis guessed were stop signs at remote intersections. There was no sky glow to indicate a populated area nearby.
The vehicle accelerated again.
Travis thought of Paige touching his face, feeling it. Worried for him. He wondered what she thought of him right now.
Half a minute later—no doubt precisely a half mile on the regimented grid of roads out here—the vehicle slowed again. Travis imagined they were getting close to their destination.
The moment the SUV came to a complete stop, Travis heard something, somewhere ahead in the dark.
It sounded like a playing card in bicycle spokes.
Garner watched it unfold. It took fifteen seconds from start to finish, by which time he was convinced that every man on his Secret Service detail would’ve done just fine in the SEALs.
The six of them advanced on the vehicles, silenced M4 carbines trained on the shattered windows up front. The lead SUV, suddenly absent its driver’s foot on the brake, had coasted across the intersection and veered off the corner into a shallow ditch.
The team took another fifteen seconds to confirm that every hostile was dead—with the help of an extra bullet or two, in some cases.
One of the men, Dyer, called out to Garner. “Clear, sir.”
Garner came forward from the tree cover edging the road. He had his own silenced M4 in hand—a precaution in case things had gone badly, though his men had been adamant that he stay out of the initial attack. Given all he’d asked of them, he’d felt the point was worth conceding.
Two of the men had the big rear door of the last SUV open. They waved Garner over. He arrived to find Travis Chase lying bound on the floor. At the same time he heard the others calling out to report no captives in the remaining vehicles.
One of the agents leaned in with a knife to cut the heavy zip-ties binding Chase’s wrists and ankles.
Garner stood back and stared north along the dark two-lane. He could see the lights of the front gate at Rockport, a mile away. The sentries there couldn’t have heard the suppressed gunshots, but it still wouldn’t be smart to stay here any longer than necessary. The two cars Garner and his men had brought were parked on the shoulder, a hundred yards down the cross street.
Chase sat up in the back of the SUV.
“Paige and Bethany are dead?” Garner said.
Chase shook his head. “Not if we can help it.”
Travis gave Garner the basics as they ran to the cars. Garner cursed softly when he heard Paige and Bethany’s situation.
They reached the vehicles, two black Crown Victorias. Garner pointed Travis to a rear door of the lead car, then rounded the back and climbed in on the opposite side, next to him.
“How’d you convince your guys to go along with this?” Travis said.
“I told them the truth.”
“And they believed it?”
Garner nodded. “Two of them served with Tangent hubs, earlier in their careers. Besides, it was easier for them to swallow than the idea of half a dozen armed men walking into my place without their knowing it.”
Ten seconds later they were cruising away from the attack site at exactly the speed limit.
“Where’s Finn now?” Garner said.
“On a plane. Going somewhere that takes eight hours to get to.”
“Lots of places are eight hours’ flight time from New York,” Garner said. “Central Europe, north Africa, Brazil—”
“He’s not going to any of those,” Travis said. “He’s going to where the flights out of Yuma were going.”
“The Erica flights.”
“You’re saying it right,” Travis said, “but you’re spelling it wrong in your head. Like the rest of us were.”
Travis nodded at the cell phone clipped to Garner’s waist. “Bring up any mapping website. Look at northern Chile.”
Garner drew the phone, switched it on, and pulled up a Mercator map of the world. He zoomed in until the northern portion of Chile filled the little screen. The most prominent city in view was a place on the coast called Arica. It had the Pacific Ocean to its west, and the Atacama Desert to its east.
“Arica flights,” Garner said.
Travis nodded. “We never saw it written down in Yuma. We only heard it in the recording.”
“So the panic move when everything went wrong,” Garner said, “was to gather everyone in Yuma, and then airlift a select few to Arica, Chile?”
“Part of that’s correct,” Travis said. “The gathering and the airlift happened. Hard to say how many they transported to Arica. A hundred flights, stretched out over something like a week, could’ve moved tens of thousands. Maybe they flew more than that. Or less. Those details we can only guess about.”
“So what am I getting wrong?”
“The same thing we all got wrong, from the very start.”
Garner waited.
“We asked ourselves, from the moment we saw the ruins in D.C., what kind of accident could’ve caused the collapse of the world. And when we saw Yuma, we wondered what sort of crisis could’ve compelled people—millions of them—to leave their homes and gather in a place that couldn’t possibly support them all.”
“I’m still asking myself those questions,” Garner said.
“And you’d be asking them for a long time,” Travis said, “because there aren’t any answers to them. They’re the wrong questions.”
“What are the right ones?”
For a moment Travis said nothing. He stared out at the dark woods going by. A few miles ahead he saw the spread-out sodium glow of a subdivision.
“Think of what we know about Isaac Finn,” Travis said. “We know that at one time he was practically a saint. From the moment he was an adult he was putting himself in danger and probably every kind of misery, trying to reduce suffering in the world. We know he thinks way the hell outside the box. He left the Peace Corps and formed his own group, and brought into the fight every resource he could line up. Even things like psych profiling of populations, in an attempt to weed out the worst people and draw together the best. Those with attributes like kindness, concern for others, aversion to violence. We know it turned out to be a lost cause, and by the time Rwanda was in full swing, he’d had enough. He walked away from the whole game. Or seemed to.”
“None of which contradicts the theory we all agreed on earlier,” Garner said. “That Finn and his wife proposed using ELF-based systems to pacify con
flict zones—at least long enough for peacekeepers to stabilize them. And that Finn is still working to realize that goal. And I agree, it’s pretty damn far outside the box.”
“It is,” Travis said, “but I think his real goal is a lot farther out than that, and has been for a very long time. And he’s not doing it alone. They’re still working on it together.”
“They?”
Travis nodded. “Audra faked her death. I heard Finn leave her a voice mail before he caught his flight.”
For the first time Garner looked genuinely surprised. And more open to considering whatever Travis was leading up to.
“You said yourself, sir, the theory of a satellite malfunction doesn’t work. We’d shut them off or shoot them down. There’s no chance at all that they’d be out of control and harming people for a solid month.”
“Right,” Garner said. “So have you figured out what goes wrong?”
“Nothing goes wrong,” Travis said. “We’ve been off track from the beginning, looking for a mistake that doesn’t exist.”
“I’m not following you,” Garner said.
Travis looked at him. “When Finn switched on the cylinder inside his office yesterday, I was standing on the other side of the opening it projected. Just out of his view, but close enough to hear him speak. He stood at the iris, and he looked at the ruins of Washington, D.C., and he said, ‘Jesus, it works.’ ”
“Meaning the cylinder,” Garner said.
“That was what I thought. But I was wrong. I should have known by the way he said it. It wasn’t just surprise in his voice. It was more like reverence. Pride, even. It was the sort of tone you’d hear from Orville Wright if you took him out to LaGuardia on a busy afternoon.”
Travis broke his stare with Garner and looked at the soft lights of the suburb coming up.
“The collapse of the world isn’t a failure of Finn’s plan,” Travis said. “It is his plan. He means for it to happen.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Garner said nothing for the next several seconds.
“I won’t pretend I understand his motivation,” Travis said. “Or the motivation of anyone who goes into a conflict zone and tries to make things better for people. Someone like me doesn’t have the first clue, and never will. But I have to think there’s a burn-out rate like no other. I have to think that for everyone in that line of work, there’s a moment that comes sooner or later when you really understand the size of the problem, and the limits of your own capacity to do anything about it. I’m guessing, but I bet it feels more like a cement truck than a last straw. In Finn’s case, if I’m right about the rest of this, then it was even bigger for him. I think he lost hope in a lot more than just Rwanda. I think he was looking at the whole human picture by the time he walked away from that place. Like he wished he could just end the world and start over. And maybe he’s not the only person who’s ever felt that way, at a low moment, but in Finn’s case there was something that set him apart: he was a pillow away from the one person on Earth who could actually make that happen.”
Something changed in Garner’s expression. Travis saw him working it out.
“Oh, Christ…” Garner said.
“Finn isn’t stupid,” Travis said. “Neither is Audra. They must have known, even before they submitted that paper to the Independent, that using ELF satellites to sedate conflict zones would be politically toxic. But I doubt that was ever their goal, in the first place. I think the paper was only meant to put the subject out there, get people talking about it, especially the kind of power players who’d be interested in the implied technology. The point was just to get the ball rolling so that someone would actually build ELF satellites, because that was the critical piece of the real plan. So when the paper got rejected, and Audra’s father stepped on it, they must’ve decided to get the ball rolling themselves. There would’ve been lots of reasons for Audra to leave Harvard and take the job with Longbow Aerospace. Re-immerse herself in the design field, make industry contacts to go along with Finn’s political ones, that kind of thing. And at some point she got them to agree to build the satellites she wanted, disguised as comm satellites that didn’t work worth a damn. I guess she faked her death so her role in the project would never come under scrutiny. There’d be a lot she’d have to do over the years, and she wouldn’t want to answer questions about any of it.”
Garner was still thinking it all through. Making the connections Travis had made earlier in the suite. But not all of them. He shook his head. Looked at Travis and waited for him to go on.
“You said that the initial uses of ELF in the fifties, just by accident, triggered suicides, and also bouts of euphoria.”
Garner nodded.
“And in the years after that, when governments tried to weaponize the technology, they dialed in on exactly how to create certain responses, and how to vary the intensity.”
“Yes.”
“So a global network of satellites with that capability could paint the whole world in zones ranging from suicidal to dancing in the streets. Anything the controllers wanted.”
“I suppose.”
“All right. Then it works. You could use the technology to herd people. Like livestock. Entire populations, all at the same time.”
Garner’s eyebrows knitted together, like he agreed with the point but didn’t see its significance.
“Imagine it from any random person’s view,” Travis said. “What would it be like on the receiving end of this technology? One day everything’s fine. The next day, you wake up and you don’t even want to move. You’re miserable lying there, but the thought of getting up makes you miserable too. You don’t even know why, but there it is. Every part of it overwhelms you, and you realize there’s nothing on your horizon that makes you happy. Nothing pulling you forward. It’s not like any sadness you’ve ever felt before. It has no cause. It’s just there. But knowing that doesn’t make it go away. You lie there thinking about that, and you start to get scared. You realize you’re having a serious problem, and you think maybe you better go talk to someone about it. Maybe pretty soon, too, because you don’t know what you’ll do to yourself if this keeps up for any length of time. Now imagine you find out, over the coming hours, that it’s not just you. That it’s happening everywhere, to everyone, all at once. Picture it. Make it as real as you can. Think of the public reaction. People would know something was going on, but they would have no idea what. It’d be the strangest damn thing anyone ever saw. It would make the news, obviously, but how would it be covered? What would they say? What the hell would anyone say, except to wonder what was happening to them, and how anyone was going to fix it?”
Garner looked chilled at the idea. His eyes were far away now, seeing his own version of a day like that, the effect bringing cities to a dead stop.
“Imagine it gets worse the next day,” Travis said. “And the day after that. Until you’re ready to just end it. You no longer even care what’s causing it. No one cares. All that matters is how bad it feels. The papers are calling it Bleak December. That’s all they’ve got. A name. Still no real information. Another day, and it’s worse yet, and right then, when you’re thinking in specific detail of how you’re going to end your life, a friend calls and asks if you’re watching the news. You turn it on, and there it is. The one place where this effect simply isn’t happening. Yuma, Arizona. No one knows why, of course. And no one cares, either. What matters is that it’s true. You can see it even in the background of the coverage. You can see people already arriving there from other places, and it’s obvious from their body language that they’re not sad anymore. They’re better than not sad. They’re euphoric.”
In the dim interior of the car, it was impossible to discern Garner’s skin tone, but Travis imagined it’d gone pale.
“Think of Finn’s original plan for conflict zones,” Travis said. “Profile everyone. Weed out the bad. Keep the good. People with just the right attributes for a peaceful society. I think even when h
e’d decided the whole world was the problem, he still thought that idea was the solution. Just on a bigger scale. A global scale.”
Garner looked at his phone again, the map of northern Chile still on the screen. He backed it out and dragged it until both Chile and the United States were visible in the frame. He drew imaginary lines with his fingertip, tracing routes from all over America toward Yuma. And then a single line: Yuma to Arica.
“You’re saying he wants to kill the world except for a few tens of thousands of people,” Garner said, “and then use them as some kind of seed population to start over, in Arica?”
Travis nodded. “We can stay away from what we’d have to guess about; what we already know is enough. We know ELF can be used to move people around en masse. Push and pull them at will. You could empty a city like Arica of its original residents. Draw them off to their own version of Yuma, up or down the coast. You could kill them once they were there. Turn up the signal until the depression is unbearable. Kill the rest of the world too, outside the United States. And within the U.S., we’ve seen for ourselves what happens. Everyone comes to Yuma, with their cars packed full of whatever they think they might need. They’ve already heard something about flights going out of there, and they’d be happy enough to catch one of them, but what they want more than anything is just to reach Yuma itself. Because then the pain will go away.”
Silence came to the car. They were passing through the suburb now, the two-lane bisecting separate reaches of it. Travis saw an overpass far ahead, where 495 crossed the road.
“And how would Finn select the ones he wanted to keep alive?” Garner said. “Would he do that right on-site in Yuma, as people begin to show up?”
Travis shook his head. “He could’ve done that part years in advance. He’d probably have to. He’d need at least some people with critical knowledge. Scientists, tradespeople, doctors. The rest could come from the profiling, which could be conducted over a span of years on people who probably aren’t even aware of it. Finn’s best attempt at choosing good neighbors. That process is probably already finished.”