The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

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.
    “There’s a bit more to it than that,” he said. “Audra wasn’t interested in using it for submarines. She was looking to use it on people.”
    None of the vacant expressions in the room changed.
    Garner crossed to the big chair before his desk. He swiveled it to face the coffee table and sank into it.
    “We started working on ELF in the fifties, when it was becoming obvious that subs were going to play a major role in the Cold War. We built the transmitters in remote places. One well-known site in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Another in northern Canada, not so well known. The technical hurdles to building the damn things were significant. Consider what they had to do: broadcast in all directions with enough signal strength to reach submarines anywhere in the world, hundreds of feet down in conductive saltwater. It’s amazing they worked at all. But even once they did work, there were… other problems. Health effects for personnel that worked and lived close to the transmitters, where the signals were highly concentrated. Cognitive issues in a few rare cases, but the most common problems by far were mood disruptions. Conditions that mimicked the symptoms of bipolar disorder, though with greater severity. Much greater, at times. There were personnel who had to be subdued because they were—for lack of a better word—high. That was how they described it themselves, after the fact. At the other end there was severe depression. There were suicides. Lots of them.”
    “We still use ELF,” Bethany said. “Are those problems still going on?”
    Garner shook his head. “They got a handle on it within the first decade. Isolated the causes. At high enough doses, certain wavelengths