by Patrick Lee
She looked down at the table.
“The media gives it a name,” she said. “They call it Bleak December. Whatever it is, it starts on December fourth of this year, and unfolds over the following weeks. We know that Yuma, Arizona, plays a key role in the event. Even a central role. But we don’t know why. The city was mentioned in every article, numerous times, but the context was never intact. We also know that in the weeks before the event there’s a major buildup of petroleum supplies in large metro areas. Gas stations with three or four tanker trucks parked outside as reserve stores. So whatever the event is, apparently people see it coming. Or at least those in power see it coming, and make preparations for some potential crisis. If that sounds vague, it is. There was just so little text to go on. We assumed they wanted the gas for electric generators, if power grids failed, but that was only a guess.”
Bethany turned to Travis. “The cars,” she said.
He nodded. There had to be a connection.
“What cars?” Paige said.
“All the cars in D.C. were gone,” Travis said. “Everyone left at the end, but not in any kind of panic. There was no gridlock, as far as we could see. They left with cool heads.”
Paige stared at the runway and tried to tie that fact in with everything else she knew. Travis watched her eyes. He saw only an echo of his own bafflement. Finally she shook her head.
“Doesn’t make the image any sharper,” she said. “Maybe they wanted the gas to evacuate the cities, but there was nothing in the articles to suggest why they’d need to do that.”
“What did the articles suggest?” Bethany said. “I mean . . . beyond what you were sure of, was there anything in them that offered even a hint of what the hell happened?”
Paige thought about it for a long moment. On the far side of the airport, a 737 accelerated and lifted off.
“We had the sense that it wasn’t a natural phenomenon,” she said at last. “A sense that it was . . . a failure of something. Like a plan. Like a very big, very secret plan, that went very fucking wrong in every possible way. We couldn’t pin down any one passage of text that said so . . . but it was there in general. It was sort of everywhere. And toward the end, the articles were fewer and farther between, and very short, leaving almost no text to go on. And then they just ended. The last thing anyone ever bounced through that satellite was dated December 28. Whatever the hell Bleak December is . . . was . . . will be . . . it takes about twenty-four days from start to finish. And then people stop writing newspaper articles, and correcting satellite orbits. And at some point, apparently, they stop doing everything.”
She stared off. Shook her head. “That’s why we went to the president first. If there was anyone to talk to about secret, dangerous shit that might get out of hand in the next few months, we figured it’d be him. I half expected him to just have the answer for us, once we’d shown him the cylinder and told him what we knew. Like there’d be some high-risk, black-budget program in the Defense Department, just about to go live, and he’d connect the dots just like that. And then he’d shut it down. Simple.”
“Sounds like he did connect the dots,” Travis said. “It’s just the next part that didn’t work out.”
“But why wouldn’t he shut it down?” Bethany said. “Why the hell would he want the world to end?”
“He probably thinks the danger can still be avoided, without stopping whatever this thing is,” Paige said. “I overheard a conversation to that effect last night, tied up in that building in D.C. The project, or whatever it is, is called Umbra. But beyond the name, I still don’t know a damn thing about it.”
For almost a minute nobody spoke. Another airliner rumbled down out of the sky and landed.
“So our best move is to get to Yuma,” Travis said, “and use the cylinder to investigate the ruins there. See what we can learn from it, if it’s such an important place at the end.”
“We were on our way to do that last night,” Paige said, “after we left the White House. Obviously, President Currey didn’t want us to get there.”
“I don’t imagine he’s had a change of heart since then,” Bethany said. “And as of an hour ago, these people know we have our own cylinder.”
Paige nodded. “And since they don’t have to sneak around and take out-of-the-way flights—hell, they could take military flights—they may already be in Yuma with their cylinder by the time we arrive. Even if they burn some time keeping their resources here on the East Coast, waiting for us to make a mistake, we should expect them to be no more than a few hours behind us.”
“And we can assume they outnumber and outgun us by a wide margin,” Travis said.
“Probably wider than we want to think about.”
Travis leaned back in his chair. Stared at the heat shimmers rising from the runway. Breathed a laugh. “What the hell. We’ve gone up against worse.”
He didn’t mention the fact that, strictly speaking, the worse they’d gone up against had won.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The jet was the same type Travis and Bethany had flown in from Atlanta. Its rear four seats faced each other like those of a restaurant booth, without the table. They set their bags in one of them, occupied the other three, and fell asleep within the first five minutes of the flight.
When Travis opened his eyes again, he saw mountains passing below, high and glacier-capped, with vacant desert land to the east and west. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. Paige was still asleep, but Bethany was awake, working on her phone. Travis glanced at the display and saw that she was compiling information on the two names they’d gleaned from the building. One was Isaac Finn, the man whose office Paige had been taken to on the sixteenth floor. The other was the man Travis had dropped from the ninth floor, whose wallet had yielded the name Raymond Muller. Bethany appeared to be amassing a good deal of info on each of them.
Travis stared out the window again. He thought of the cylinder. Thought of the future it opened, with all changes locked out. In a very real way, that meant it wasn’t their future anymore. If they figured out how to stop Umbra, then the world would live on, but the place on the other side of the iris wouldn’t change to reflect that fact. It would never be anything but ghost country, the long echo of some terrible and all-too-human mistake.
He looked at Paige again. Watched her bangs playing on her forehead in the airstream from an A/C nozzle above.
“She’d find you, you know,” Bethany said. She spoke softly, just above the drone of the jet engines.
Travis glanced at her. Waited for her to go on.
“If the world was ending, however it happens,” she said, “if people were evacuating cities, if Tangent was scared enough to seal the Breach . . . if everything was coming undone . . . Paige would find you. She’d do it just to be with you at the end.”
Travis returned his eyes to Paige. He didn’t bother nodding agreement to Bethany; she’d already gone back to work on her phone.
Up front one of the pilots was talking to the tower at Imperial, asking for approach vectors. A few seconds later the engines began to cycle down, and Travis felt the familiar physical illusion of the aircraft coming to a dead stop at altitude.
Paige stirred. She opened her eyes and sat upright, blinking away the sleep.
“What’s special about Yuma?” Travis said. “In our time, I mean. Any military presence? Any classified research going on?”
“We looked into it,” Paige said. “No research labs, as far as we could tell. There are two military sites. One’s a Marine Corps air station. They fly a few Harrier squadrons out of there, run lots of joint exercises, things like that. The other’s the Yuma Proving Ground, out in the Sonoran northeast of the city. The Army tests every kind of ground combat system there. No doubt most of it’s classified stuff, non-line-of-sight cannons, precision-guided artillery, all types of land vehicles and helicopters. But nothing you’d call an existential threat to the world.” She rubbed her eyes. “That’s about it.”
/> Travis nodded.
“It’s dry as hell,” Bethany said. She looked up from her phone. “Friend of mine lived there for two years after college. Yuma’s the driest city in the United States. Couple inches of rain a year, if that.”
“Should work in our favor,” Travis said. “There won’t be nearly as much corrosion of materials as we saw in D.C. We might even find paper that’s still intact, if it’s shut away from the wind and the sun.”
Bethany managed a smile. “Hey, we had to get lucky with something.”
Travis wondered about that. Wondered if it was really luck, or if Yuma’s climate was part of why the place had mattered when the world shut down.
Twenty minutes later they touched down in Imperial, a neat arrangement of neighborhood grids surrounded by miles of irrigated farmland and then more miles of open desert.
They walked out of the terminal into baked air—107 degrees, according to a digital sign over the parking lot.
They rented a Jeep Wrangler with an open top, picked up Interstate 8 at the south end of town, and headed east toward Yuma. Five minutes later they passed the last of the irrigated fields and came into the emptiest landscape Travis had ever seen. At even a glance it was more desolate than the scrublands around Border Town, which was saying something. The highway bore straight ahead through it, just south of dead east. Far ahead were low hills and a line of mountains—some southern range of the Rockies—that lay probably just north of Yuma, forty-some miles away.
Travis was driving. Paige sat in the passenger seat, reassembling the twelve-gauge.
Bethany leaned forward from the backseat, her hair going crazy in the wind. “Want to hear the bios on our two friends in the green building?”
Paige glanced back at her and nodded.
Bethany looked at her phone’s display as she began. “Raymond Muller. Guy on the ninth floor. Forty-two years old. Got his masters in political science from Brown, and in the next two decades he worked for half the power players in D.C.”
“Doing what?” Travis said.
“Connecting them all to one another would be my guess,” Bethany said. “I used to run into people like that in my field. Professional networkers. Matchmakers for senators and representatives and every kind of mega-corporation. A little closer to the vest than lobbyists. Muller worked for an Appropriations Committee chairman, two Ways and Means chairmen, Raytheon, General Dynamics, GE, Intel, FedEx, and Pfizer at one time or another.”
“That’s a lot to cram into twenty years,” Paige said.
“Actually he crammed it into fifteen. His resume goes blank in 2006, right around the time the high-rise on M Street is built. If Muller has any income beyond that point, I can’t find it. It may be that the company has made all his purchases for him these past five years. And that’s it, for him.”
There was a long silence as she pulled up the information on the second man.
“Isaac Finn,” she said. She exhaled, the sound edged with a laugh. “You’re not gonna believe this guy’s background.”
“Try us,” Travis said.
“Relief work.”
Paige turned in her seat. “What?”
“He’s fifty-five. He has no formal education beyond high school. He graduated in 1973 and went straight into the Peace Corps, qualifying for it based on years of charity work in his teens. Stayed in the Corps for ten years, then came back to the States and spent a year rounding up financing to create his own organization, For Good International. At its peak, the group had over five thousand volunteers and paid staff, and an endowment of about seventy million dollars.”
“Are you sure this isn’t a different Isaac Finn?” Paige said.
Bethany double-clicked something on her phone. “Here’s his passport photo.” She handed the phone to Paige.
“That’s him,” Paige said. She stared at it a moment longer. She looked like she was trying to align the new information with what little she’d already known about the man. She gave it up after a few seconds and handed the phone back.
Bethany clicked to the bio information again. Her eyes roamed over it.
“He structured his group—and his approach—based on things he’d learned in the Corps. He’d seen that famines were generally not caused by weather, but by conflict, and the resulting breakdown of infrastructure. So his organization would try to reestablish stability in certain places, strengthen key communities in the hope that others around them would follow suit. He gave it a hell of a try, and he wasn’t shy about using outside-the-box methods. He brought in psychological profilers to study the local leadership within villages, trying to determine which ones were cut out for actual governing, as opposed to just hoarding power. Then Finn would put his financial support behind the good guys, try to steer things onto the right track. He’d even apply that kind of thinking to entire communities. Try to exclude troublemakers, and empower those with certain basic attributes: kindness, concern for others, aversion to violence. Just anything to jump-start stability in enough places, and try to get the broader infrastructure back on its feet. Worth a shot, I guess.”
“Did it work?” Travis said.
“I wouldn’t say so. He tried it for a decade, in every place that seemed to need it. Ethiopia. Yugoslavia. Somalia. Then there was Rwanda. I think that was some kind of breaking point, for him. He was in the country for the first month of the genocide, April of 1994. And then he just left. He handed over control of his organization to those below him, cut all his ties to it, and walked away. For the next several years he didn’t do much. He lived in D.C. Did some consulting, stateside, for humanitarian groups, but not a lot. In the late nineties he stopped doing even that, and as far as public or even private records are concerned, he more or less disappeared at that point. By the end of the decade his name was on no bank accounts, no property, no holdings of any kind. As far as I know, the next place anyone saw it written was on the door of that office on the sixteenth floor. How the hell it ended up there, I don’t know.”
She went silent.
“Anything else?” Travis said.
“Not about Finn. I found something interesting about his wife, but I’m not sure it’s relevant.” She navigated to the information. “Audra Nash Finn. Interesting background. Two doctorates: one in aerospace engineering from MIT, the other from Harvard, in philosophy.”
“I build rockets, therefore I am?” Travis said.
“She didn’t build much of anything for a while. She took a professorship at Harvard teaching philosophy, once she finished that degree. That was 1987. Held that position for quite a few years. Spent her summers abroad, involved in relief work. Met Finn somewhere along the way. Married him in 1990. Continued her teaching work but traveled often to help Finn in his efforts over the next four years. Then, Rwanda. That was the end of Audra’s humanitarian streak too. The following year, summer of 1995, something strange happened. She co-authored an op-ed piece with Finn, and submitted it to the Harvard Independent for publication.”
“What was it about?” Paige said.
“Nobody knows. It was rejected, and apparently before they could submit it elsewhere, certain influential people convinced them to sit on it. Mainly Audra’s father, who was the governor of Massachusetts at the time. I guess he felt the piece was controversial, and could end up in attack ads against him. Everything I learned about this came from the Independent’s rival paper on campus, the Crimson. The staff over there tried like hell to get a copy of the op-ed, or a statement from someone who’d read it, but by then the fan was pretty well caked with shit, and nobody was talking.”
“How bad could the thing have been?” Travis said.
“All the Crimson could pry out of their sources was that it was more than just an op-ed. That it was a proposal paper of some kind. Given that both Audra and Finn had just come away from Rwanda disillusioned to no end, we can guess what the subject was. Maybe not that crisis in particular, but it had to be some kind of policy suggestion about international reli
ef. Some new idea. Maybe a pretty big idea. Whatever it was, it scared the hell out of her father. And to all appearances, that was the last anyone saw of the proposal. Audra resigned her position at Harvard that fall and went to work for Longbow Aerospace designing satellites. Finally decided to use her other degree, I guess. She died in a car accident two years later.”
For the next minute they rode in silence. Travis was sure they were all thinking the same thing.
“The proposal paper could be unrelated to what’s going on now,” he said. “It could be just an interesting dot that doesn’t actually connect. But if it does connect, then that paper was the origin of the plan Finn and his people are hiding now; in which case that proposal was Umbra. Maybe it was just talk back in ’ninety-five, and maybe it was small scale at the time. But if it’s still in play, then it’s become something bigger since then.”
Paige thought it over. “Hard to believe a policy suggestion about refugee relief could lead to the end of the world.”
“What if it’s something that only touches on relief?” Bethany said. “Something involving food supplies, or crop growth in other parts of the world. Maybe Umbra is about genetic engineering of plants. That could go wrong on a large scale, theoretically.”
