Silence came to the room. Travis listened to the groan of traffic far below, dampened by the heavy glass.
“I’ve been mulling that explanation for the better part of an hour,” Garner said, “as I’ve listened to your story. It seems obvious, and it covers almost everything. But where it breaks, it breaks completely.”
Paige waited for him to go on.
“The failure itself,” Garner said. “I don’t see how it can happen. It’d be one thing if we were talking about a bacterial agent, or a virus, or even a computer worm—something that can get away from you and wreak havoc. But if satellites malfunction, we can shut them down. It’s a few keystrokes and a transmission. It’s easy.”
“Could an error on board the satellites block receipt of the signal?” Paige said. There was a lost-cause note in her voice, like she already agreed with Garner and was just exhausting possibilities.
“I guess,” Garner said. “But we’re talking about dozens of satellites. If there’s a glitch, it’s probably not with all of them. Probably just one. In which case we’d shoot it down. Strap an ASAT missile under an F–15, launch it from seventy or eighty thousand feet up. It’s not easy, but we’ve done it. We could do it again if we had to. If it came to it, we could shoot down every single one of them. Enlist Russia’s and China’s help if it’s a time-critical thing. Give them the satellites’ positions and vectors, sing a few rounds of ‘Kumbaya,’ and start shooting until the job’s done. We’d do it. It wouldn’t take long. Days, not weeks.” He made a face. Almost apologetic. Rested his hands in his lap. “So I still don’t see how Bleak December happens, playing out over a month or more.”
“But everything else fits,” Paige said. “The child’s notebook we told you about, in the desert near Yuma. If you saw it for yourself . . . if you saw what this kid drew . . . it was just page after page of misery, with no visible cause—”
“I agree it fits,” Garner said. “I’m sure these satellites are at the heart of this thing. And clearly someone makes a colossal fuckup somewhere along the line. But I can’t for the life of me see what it is.”
“Do we even need to know?” Travis said. “We know enough right now to make a move against them. With your connections, sir, there must be channels we can go through.”
Garner nodded. “Absolutely. From this point forward we take it slow and deliberate. Start with outsiders Finn would have no reason to be tied to. Figure out who we can trust, from there. Build our support until it’s overwhelming and then, yes, we move. It’ll work if we’re careful. Hell, we’ve got a few months to play with.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Rudy Dyer was the newest man on the protective detail. He’d been on board only three weeks. By no stretch was he green—he’d served four years with the Foreign Missions Branch and two with the Naval Observatory—but there were aspects of this new role that he was still getting used to. As Secret Service work went, protecting a former president was maybe a tick more relaxed than protecting a sitting one. The job was more relaxed, anyway—the agents weren’t.
What Dyer had the hardest time adjusting to was the added familiarity here, between the agents and the focus of their work—Richard Garner. The poker games seemed a little out of line. No protocols were broken, of course—the agents playing the game were always off duty at the time, while the standard minimum of six on-duty agents remained in the watch-room. Still, it wasn’t the sort of thing that would’ve happened in the White House, off-duty or otherwise.
Dyer was getting a feel for it, though. It was just a different fit, that was all. These were still the most professional and disciplined security personnel in the world, and he got on well with them. He got on well with Garner, too. He just didn’t plan to sit in on the poker games anytime soon.
It was 6:44 in the evening. Sunlight shone through the west-side windows in long, tinted shafts. The watch-room—actually a good-sized suite of rooms—occupied the southwest quadrant of the building’s floor, including the stairs and elevator accesses. From the terminal at his desk, Dyer could cycle through the feeds from every security camera in and around Garner’s residence. Protocol allowed for respecting the man’s privacy, however, which meant that the residence’s interior feeds were set aside in a separate batch and ignored under normal circumstances.
Every fifteen minutes Dyer clicked through all of the other feeds: those covering the corridors, elevators, stairwells, and even a few angles looking across the outer face of the building at this height—even the remote possibility of someone rappelling down from the rooftop had to be allowed for.
Dyer’s watched ticked to 6:45.