Ghost Country tc-2

by Patrick Lee

  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. T wenty 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 relief. 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."

  "But neither of them had a background in genetics," Paige said. "And that kind of work is common now anyway, whatever the risks."

  "We know this much," Travis said. "When you turned on the cylinder for the president, and he saw the ruins of D.C., he knew at a glance that Umbra was responsible. That's why he ordered the hit on the motorcade. But that only makes sense if he was already aware of the plan's potential to go wrong in some big, specific way. That could be the same risk that Audra's father saw, way back when he covered up the op-ed at Harvard. Whatever it was, it spooked him. Him and everyone on staff at the Independent."

  Another long silence settled. The desert wind coursed through the Jeep, arid as blast-furnace exhaust. A few miles further on, Travis heard Bethany shift around in the backseat. He heard the zipper of her backpack open. He glanced and saw her take the cylinder into her lap.

  Then she stood up, holding the thing firmly in one hand and gripping the roll bar with the other. She leaned forward against the bar, braced herself, and leveled the cylinder straight ahead. She pressed the on button.

  The projection cone flared. The iris opened a few feet above and beyond the Jeep's hood. From Travis's position, looking upward at it, he could see only sky on the other side, the same washed-out blue as it was in the present. It made the iris nearly invisible. He wondered for a second if Bethany could feel the air rushing through it, then realized she wouldn't: the airflow through the iris would be no different from the air already surging over the Jeep.

  He turned to ask her if she could see anything, but stopped himself before speaking. Bethany's expression had gone blank, and the color had faded from her face. She stared unblinking at whatever she was seeing through the iris. Then she slowly pivoted, swinging the opening clockwise like a searchlight, gazing through at the landscape beyond. Whatever she was looking at, it was there in every direction.

  "What is it?" Travis said.

  "Stop the Jeep," Bethany said. "Pull over."

  "Why?"

  "Because I found the cars."

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Travis pulled over. The highway was empty in both directions for all the miles they could see.

  Bethany was still standing in the back. She turned around, leaned over and rested the cylinder on the Jeep's compressed soft top behind the backseat. The beam pointed sideways to the Jeep's right. The iris hung fixed in the air at chest level, just beyond the freeway's shoulder.

  Travis got out at the same time as Paige. He was already looking past the Jeep at the iris. Could already see through it. Could already feel his own thoughts going as vacant as Bethany's had. A moment later all three of them were crowded at the opening, looking through. They stared for half a minute without speaking. Then Travis returned to the Jeep, shut it off, and pocketed the keys.

  He took the shotgun from where Paige had left it on the passenger side. He picked up Bethany's backpack, hanging open with the SIG and all the shotgun shells inside it. Then he went to the cylinder and pushed the delayed shutoff button. He waited for the light cone to cut out, and then he secured the cylinder inside the pack. By the time he had it shouldered with the Remington, Paige and Bethany were already through the opening. He followed them. T he desert on the other side looked like a shopping-center parking lot the day after Thanksgiving, except that it had no boundaries. The cars stretched as far as Travis could see in every direction. The visible horizon was five miles out, any way that he faced. The cars extended at least that far.

  They were parked grill-to-grill in double rows, each of which was separated by a lane of space just wide enough to drive down. The lanes branched out from the freeway, which itself remained clear.

  The cars were in perfect condition except for their tires and window seals, which had baked to crumbs over the decades and settled in a thick layer on the desert floor. The wind had leveled the crumbs out but hadn't scattered them. Travis saw why: most of the cars were no more than an inch or two off the ground, sitting on their rims. All of them together would make a hell of a barrier against air currents at the surface.

  The cars' paint jobs were faded and pitted, but not so much that the original colors couldn't be discerned.

  Every kind of personal vehicle was there. Compact cars to SUVs. And they'd come from everywhere. California plates made up at least a third of
them-understandably, given the state's population and short distance from Yuma-but within the first fifty cars he looked at, Travis saw two that were from New York State. He saw Texas and Florida and Pennsylvania, and a dozen others.

  The cars were all empty. No bodies. No belongings. Just cracked and worn and bleached upholsteries that hadn't been sat on in seventy-three years.

  Bethany climbed onto the hood of a Ford Expedition, then onto its roof. She put a hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the sun, and turned a slow circle. She dropped her hand to her side. Looked down at Travis and Paige. Shook her head. Climbed back down.

  "They came here?" she said. "From as far away as D.C. and New York, people emptied out of the big cities and came to Yuma? Why would they do that?"

  Travis felt too thrown to even shrug. He had nothing approaching an answer. He stared over the sea of chrome and faded paint and tried to get a grasp of the numbers involved.

  "A little over three hundred million people in America," he said. "Subtract the ones too young to drive a car, or that live in big cities and don't need one. How many cars would there be, ballpark? Couple hundred million?"

  "Something like that," Paige said.

  "How much space would they take up, arranged like this?" Travis said. "A parking space is about ten by twenty. So two hundred square feet. A square mile should have, what, a little over twenty-five million square feet in it?"

  Bethany took out her phone, switched it on, and opened a calculator function. She pressed the buttons with both thumbs and had the answer in a few seconds.

  "Just under twenty-eight million square feet in a mile," she said. She did another calculation. "Divided by two hundred, that's one hundred forty thousand parking spaces. Cut that by a third to figure in the access lanes, you've got a little over ninety thousand cars every square mile."