“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.”