Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

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."

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.