by Patrick Lee
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 thoug
ht 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.”
“But how could it work at all?” Bethany said. “Just basic physics should make it impossible for a satellite. A transmitter has to be big enough to handle the wavelengths it generates, and ELF waves are huge. Hundreds of miles long.”
Garner nodded. “Her idea was radical. I don’t pretend to have understood it in detail, but essentially it was this: ELF waves occur naturally in the Earth’s atmosphere. The sun radiates them, and lightning strikes produce them, too. It’s all random, of course. All noise, no signal. And even if the frequencies that affect people happen to appear, they’re drowned out in the clutter and nothing happens. Audra Nash believed a satellite, transmitting much shorter wavelengths with the right precision, could cancel out certain frequencies of natural ELF over a given target area. Could allow us to pick and choose which frequencies to cancel out . . . and which to leave intact.” He looked at Bethany. “So you’re right. A satellite can’t broadcast ELF, but in theory it could disrupt it where it naturally occurs, and whittle away everything but the useful ranges. At which point, they would certainly affect people. And it would be precisely targetable. You could influence a few blocks. Or a whole city. Or an area much, much larger than that.”
No one said anything. They waited.
“So we gave her the go-ahead,” Garner said. “Gave her access to everything we had. She dove into it. Lived and breathed it. She came back before the committee six months later. With a blueprint.”
“Did anyone build it?” Paige said.
“Nope.”
Paige looked confused. “Why not?”
“Because it was still a long shot. Even with a good blueprint there’s trial and error, details to hammer out in the prototype. That can be expensive even if you’re modifying a Humvee. For a satellite, tack on a couple zeroes.”
“Come on,” Travis said. “The hubcaps on the stealth bomber probably cost a million apiece. Since when does the Pentagon get sticker shock?”
Garner smiled. “There’s another reason, but it’s even less believable.” He considered how to frame it. “It’s like this. In the early days, when everyone was looking for a straightforward way to weaponize this technology, there was an urgency to figure it out. Get it before the other guys. That makes sense if you think there’s some big, obvious solution out there, the kind that everyone will eventually stumble onto. But Audra’s idea wasn’t like that. It was obscure as hell, based on an overlap of knowledge probably no one but she had. There was a good chance that nobody else in the world would ever come up with it. But they’d be more than happy to copy ours, if we went ahead with the project. You hear people talk about the atomic genie coming out of the bottle in 1945. Like if we didn’t let it out, nobody ever would have. It’s probably not true. Fission’s not exactly an unheard-of concept. But Audra’s satellite design was. And we just thought . . . why do it? Why bring the world into an age defined by something like this? So we sat on it. Locked the design away. Audra understood, though I’m sure she was disappointed. She got out of the design game after that. Went off to Harvard, got her other doctorate in philosophy, got into relief work. Married Finn. I didn’t hear about her again until 1995, when that little dustup happened with the paper those two tried to publish.”
Paige had been looking at the floor. She looked up now. “Did you see a copy of it?”
Garner shook his head. “Shredded and burned before it could make the rounds. I had a pretty good guess what it said, though. Maybe you can guess it, now.”
Travis thought of what they’d just learned. Tried to put it in the context of Finn and Audra’s lives, in 1995—just back from Rwanda, permanently burned out on their life’s work.
“Holy shit,” Travis said. “They wanted to use that kind of satellite technology on places like Rwanda. That’s it, isn’t it? If you had control over how strongly it affected people, you could do that. Target the whole region with some minimal exposure, something that creates the effect of a mild high, euphoria, whatever, just to quiet everything down. Sedate the hell out of the place until—what, a peacekeeping force could go in and get control? The peacekeepers would be affected too, but maybe with the right training to anticipate it . . .”
He trailed off, thinking it over. Considering the implications. He saw Garner nodding.
“My assumption at the time,” Garner said. “Point for point. I’m sure they glossed over the specifics of how it worked—revealing those would be treason—but yes, I imagine they advocated something very close to what you’re talking about.”
Travis looked again at Paige and Bethany. Wondered if they were thinking the same thing he was. He guessed they were.
“It doesn’t actually sound like a bad idea,” Travis said.
Garner offered another smile. “No. It doesn’t. Not if all you did with it was stop genocides. But how long would that last? And think about it from a human-rights perspective. A right-to-privacy perspective. A global superpower using satellites to screw with people’s heads. It’s right out of Orwell. Is it any wonder Audra’s father saw his career flash before his eyes when he heard about it? What politician wants his name within a mile of a thing like that?”
“So that’s it, then,” Paige said. She looked around at each person in the room, as if surprised the answer had dropped so neatly into their laps. “That’s Umbra. This technology must actually exist by now, and in a few months something’s going to go wrong with it. Catastrophically wrong.”
Bethany was nodding. “We know Audra left Harvard in ’ninety-five and went to work for Longbow Aerospace, designing satellites. Somehow that company must have agreed to build her ELF design, and keep the work secret. And even after she died, Finn could’ve kept the project going. Jesus . . . if Umbra happens four months from now, these satellites must be in orbit as we speak. A whole constellation of them, with global coverage like GPS.”
Garner looked thoughtful. “I know about the Longbow satellites in some detail—at least the details the company chose to put forward. The system was supposed to be a low-orbit network for satellite phones, meant to compete with the cellular market in the nineties. As the story went, Audra worked on the project for the last two years of her life. By the time they actually launched the things, in ’ninety-nine, it was a lost cause. Cell phone transmission was getting dirt cheap, and Longbow couldn’t match it. We ended up subsidizing the whole damn thing and using it for some military voice traffic. The sats actually work for that, but only just. Which makes sense, I guess, if their main purpose is something else entirely.”
“All the pieces of this thing fit,” Paige said. “Even the long delay since 1999, when they launched the satellites. Finn’s had to do years of political work on the ground before he can use them. Suppose he wants to demonstrate this technology on a current conflict zone, someplace like Darfur. If it works, it’s proof of concept, and then he can begin publicly arguing for it as policy. But he’d need all kinds of powerful friends on board to actually pull that off. He’d at least need them not standing in his way. If at all possible, he’d want the president on his side.” She looked at Garner. “As you said, no politician would want to be tied to this, especially not early on, when it’s just an untried, terrifying idea. It makes sense that President Currey would make a drastic move to keep it secret. Like the attack on our motorcade.” She nodded, tying it all up in her mind. “This is the answer. Umbra is the plan to finally go live with these satellites, some trial run somewhere, in the next few months. And apparently, it goes pretty fucking badly. Unintended consequences on a global scale, however the hell that would happen. Some critical loss of control, and then . . . then I guess what happened to a few ELF engineers in the fifties happens to the whole damn world, and all that’s left are panic options. How Yuma figures in, I don’t know. Ma
ybe they won’t know, at the time. Maybe it’s nothing but a distraction to give people purpose at the end, keep them from rioting in the streets. Maybe there never were any Erica flights.”
Silence came to the room. Travis listened to the groan of traffic far below, dampened by the heavy glass.
“I’ve been mulling that explanation for the better part of an hour,” Garner said, “as I’ve listened to your story. It seems obvious, and it covers almost everything. But where it breaks, it breaks completely.”
Paige waited for him to go on.
“The failure itself,” Garner said. “I don’t see how it can happen. It’d be one thing if we were talking about a bacterial agent, or a virus, or even a computer worm—something that can get away from you and wreak havoc. But if satellites malfunction, we can shut them down. It’s a few keystrokes and a transmission. It’s easy.”
“Could an error on board the satellites block receipt of the signal?” Paige said. There was a lost-cause note in her voice, like she already agreed with Garner and was just exhausting possibilities.
“I guess,” Garner said. “But we’re talking about dozens of satellites. If there’s a glitch, it’s probably not with all of them. Probably just one. In which case we’d shoot it down. Strap an ASAT missile under an F–15, launch it from seventy or eighty thousand feet up. It’s not easy, but we’ve done it. We could do it again if we had to. If it came to it, we could shoot down every single one of them. Enlist Russia’s and China’s help if it’s a time-critical thing. Give them the satellites’ positions and vectors, sing a few rounds of ‘Kumbaya,’ and start shooting until the job’s done. We’d do it. It wouldn’t take long. Days, not weeks.” He made a face. Almost apologetic. Rested his hands in his lap. “So I still don’t see how Bleak December happens, playing out over a month or more.”