Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

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." T ravis 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 conflict 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."

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."