by Patrick Lee
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. Maybe 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."
"But everything else fits," Paige said. "The child's notebook we told you about, in the desert near Yuma. If you saw it for yourself… if you saw what this kid drew… it was just page after page of misery, with no visible cause-"
"I agree it fits," Garner said. "I'm sure these satellites are at the heart of this thing. And clearly someone makes a colossal fuckup somewhere along the line. But I can't for the life of me see what it is."
"Do we even need to know?" Travis said. "We know enough right now to make a move against them. With your connections, sir, there must be channels we can go through."
Garner nodded. "Absolutely. From this point forward we take it slow and deliberate. Start with outsiders Finn would have no reason to be tied to. Figure out who we can trust, from there. Build our support until it's overwhelming and then, yes, we move. It'll work if we're careful. Hell, we've got a few months to play with."
Chapter Thirty-Five
Rudy Dyer was the newest man on the protective detail. He'd been on board only three weeks. By no stretch was he green-he'd served four years with the Foreign Missions Branch and two with the Naval Observatory-but there were aspects of this new role that he was still getting used to. As Secret Service work went, protecting a former president was maybe a tick more relaxed than protecting a sitting one. The job was more relaxed, anyway-the agents weren't.
What Dyer had the hardest time adjusting to was the added familiarity here, between the agents and the focus of their work-Richard Garner. The poker games seemed a little out of line. No protocols were broken, of course-the agents playing the game were always off duty at the time, while the standard minimum of six on-duty agents remained in the watch-room. Still, it wasn't the sort of thing that would've happened in the White House, off-duty or otherwise.
Dyer was getting a feel for it, though. It was just a different fit, that was all. These were still the most professional and disciplined security personnel in the world, and he got on well with them. He got on well with Garner, too. He just didn't plan to sit in on the poker games anytime soon.
It was 6:44 in the evening. Sunlight shone through the west-side windows in long, tinted shafts. The watch-room-actually a good-sized suite of rooms-occupied the southwest quadrant of the building's floor, including the stairs and elevator accesses. From the terminal at his desk, Dyer could cycle through the feeds from every security camera in and around Garner's residence. Protocol allowed for respecting the man's privacy, however, which meant that the residence's interior feeds were set aside in a separate batch and ignored under normal circumstances.
Every fifteen minutes Dyer clicked through all of the other feeds: those covering the corridors, elevators, stairwells, and even a few angles looking across the outer face of the building at this height-even the remote possibility of someone rappelling down from the rooftop had to be allowed for.
Dyer's watched ticked to 6:45.
He opened the camera feeds. Skipped through them with precise keystrokes. Studied each one for exactly three seconds. Corridors clear. Elevators clear. Stairwells clear.
On the third exterior feed, which looked across the east side of the building past the windows of Garner's den, he stopped.
There was a young woman sitting in a chair a few feet in from the windows. Dark hair and eyes. Maybe thirty. Very attractive. Garner himself was just visible at the edge of the frame, sitting at his desk chair. Looking casual. Staring off through the window at nothing.
Who was the woman?
Dyer minimized the feed and clicked open the logbook for the security checkpoint. No one could enter or exit the residence-not even Garner himself-without passing through it and being logged with a time stamp.
There was no entry in the file for anyone coming or going today.
Or yesterday.
The day before that, Garner had logged out to have lunch with the governor in Midtown, and logged back in three hours later, alone.
Dyer quickly skipped through the past five days' entries. Nothing but Garner coming and going by himself.
He minimized the logbook and opened the exterior feed again. The woman was still sitting there.
How the hell had she gotten in without it being noted?
Dyer could think of only one explanation. He hated to believe it. But what else was there?
He looked around. One other agent had a desk in this room. The other four were stationed elsewhere in the suite, the better to rush Garner's residence from multiple angles if the need arose.
The other agent in the room wasn't looking Dyer's way.
Dyer took out his cell phone, set it in its dock next to the terminal and waited for it to sync up. When it did, he captured a single frame of the video feed, clearly showing the woman's face, and sent it to the phone. He took it back out of the dock, then stood and left the room.
He stepped into the bathroom across the hall, turned on the vent fan and the water for masking noise, and dialed a number on his phone. It was answered on the second ring.
"Greer."
"It's Dyer. Do you have a minute?"
"Sure."
Dyer explained about the woman, and sent the image to Greer's phone. He also relayed his hunch. Greer didn't like it any more than he did.
"I find that very, very hard to believe," Greer said.
"I'd prefer another theory myself," Dyer said. "Got one?"
The line was silent for a moment.
"I don't get the motive," Greer said. "Garner's a single man. If he wants to entertain a guest, it's his business. Why would he feel the need to hide it?"
"Maybe she wants to hide it. Maybe she's somebody. Or somebody's wife."
Another silence on the line.
Then Greer said, "If Garner's asking these guys to keep someone out of the logbook, and they're actually doing it, their balls are gonna be hanging from the director's trailer hitch before the week's out."
"Which is why I called you," Dyer said. "I'd rather keep mine hanging where they are."
Greer was quiet again. Dyer could hear a pen or pencil tapping on his desk. A fast, tense rhythm.
"Fuck," Greer said. "All right. Let me run it up to a few guys at the top, and a couple friends at Justice. See if there's a precedent for handling something like this. And I'll see if anyone recognizes her. I'll get back to you."
Chapter Thirty-Six
Garner spent the rest of the evening compiling a list of names, drawn from records on his computer as well as paper documents. He came up with close to a hundred, and then began going through them systematically, using his computer to pull up detailed information on each of them. To Travis they appeared to be mostly military and FBI personnel. Garner made shorthand marks next to some of the names. Others he simply crossed out.
Bethany offered to help. Garner looked puzzled as to what she could do. She rattled off her credentials in about thirty seconds, and he told her to pull up a chair.
Night settled on the city. The skyline lit up in random bits and fragments until the whole thing was blazing. Travis stood at the living-room windows and looked down over the park. From beneath the forested expanses, warm light from footpaths streamed up into the darkness.
Paige came up beside him. They stood there for a while, silent.
"Never been here before," Travis said.
"Beautiful, isn't it?"
He nodded.
"My mom lived here for a long time when I was a kid," Paige said. "That building right over there. The brick one with the blue light on the roof." She pointed across the park. Leaned against him so he could sight down her arm.
He felt her skin against his. After a second she seemed to notice it too. Seemed to notice that he noticed. She didn't say anything, just shifted back to her own balance, putting a few inches between them.
It occurred to him that they hadn't been alone with each other at any point since she'd stepped through the iris from Finn's office yesterday. It'd been the three of them, hardly more than an arm's length from one another, every minute of the way. Until now.
The silence was suddenly harder to take.
"So you spent a lot of time here?" he said.
"Yeah. Every summer. And Thanksgiving or Christmas, every other year, that kind of thing."
"That must've been fun. Hanging out here as a kid."
She shrugged. "I liked it. Plenty to do."
It felt like talking to someone's sister-in-law at a graduation party. Like he didn't know that she liked to sleep on her side, naked, and that she preferred someone's shoulder to a pillow. Like he didn't know what her earlobes tasted like, among other things. Like none of it had ever happened.
It would've been better if it hadn't. The past two years would've been easier. He would've gotten more sleep.
She turned from the window. Met his eyes. Looked away again.