Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

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. T ravis 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.

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.