Silent Frequency

Excerpt

Anatolio stood beneath one of the world’s few functioning medieval astronomical clocks as its chimes rang out across the courtyard of Prague’s Old Town. He lifted his phone and recorded the figurines as they slid into view behind the small windows. Above them, the clock’s intricate dial traced the motion of the Sun and Moon against a ring inscribed with the twelve zodiac signs, a mechanical map of celestial patterns pilgrims and astronomers had watched for centuries. Anatolio barely glanced at the stone and brass around him. He’d grown up in Rome, running in the shadows of the Colosseum and eating gelato beside the Trevi Fountain. He appreciated history, sure, but it was the heavens that held his fascination, the elegant way humanity continued to decode the universe’s endless story. The chiming ended, and the display went quiet just as snowflakes drifted onto the cobblestone pavers. He ambled his way through the narrow streets with the crowd. The baroque and gothic buildings had loomed like stone sentinels for centuries, their dark façades pressing in on the square. But warm white lights beckoned him toward the frivolity of the Christmas market.

He wanted to pick up some gifts for his nephew and hoped the stalls had something that would appeal to a kid who was more interested in video games than interacting with the world around him. Anatolio didn't understand the appeal of disappearing into a virtual world when the surrounding one held so many mysteries left to be explored. Take, for instance, the lecture he presented yesterday at the Astronomical Institute of Charles University, exploring the extreme power sources of the universe, like solar flares and merging black holes. He could have presented an entire semester's worth of material, but the dean had limited him to a three-day guest lecture series for the astrophysics program. However, now work was done, and it was time to play tourist.

He turned a corner and spied a giant spruce in the center of the square. Small booths created a maze of shops that held everything from ornaments to jewelry to truffle oil. Shoppers wove their way between stalls, arms laden with boxes and bags of treasures. The scent of grilled sausages and dumplings made his stomach growl. He'd been walking around the city all day and never ate lunch. His coffee for breakfast was long gone, and a cup of mulled wine sounded delicious.

Anatolio stepped up to a booth with churros. "Jeden prosím."

He handed the salesman the correct amount of koruna, then turned to see what else he could find for a snack. It was far too early for supper, but he needed some fortification to survive shopping in crowds. He was a man much more accustomed to working independently in the labs at CERN than socializing in sizeable crowds. A couple of carts over, he got his wine and found a small table to settle in and people-watch. Languages from around the world drifted toward him on the air, mixing with Czech carolers. Anatolio wished he had a better ear for linguistics, but his brain was more attuned to patterns and anomalies. He stared at the sky and used models to theorize what creations were possible in the infinite vastness of space.

He finished his wine and stood to find a trash bin when the entire area turned black as pitch. Buildings and stalls became hulking shadows. The broadcasted Christmas music was replaced with startled cries. Anatolio took out his phone, but the screen showed there was no signal. No power and no signal? That was weird. Tiny dots appeared in the courtyard as people turned on their phone flashlights and waved them around. It would probably just be a few seconds before the lights came back on. Likely just a fluke power surge or, the worst-case scenario, a blown transmitter nearby.

But as the minutes passed, it seemed like the lights weren't coming back on. Was the outage confined to this sector or more widespread? Only one way to find out. Anatolio made his way with the crowd out of the Christmas market. The streets of Old Town were dark. There were cars parked up and down the road. He spied a couple standing outside their vehicle, shouting and gesturing wildly. Lover's spat? Directionally challenged debate? Anatolio didn't understand what they screamed back and forth to each other, but some communication didn't require word-for-word interpretation for him to get the gist that somebody was in trouble. The tram stop where he'd gotten off was just around the corner. He might as well go back to his hotel if he would not get any shopping done. Unfortunate, but he could always pick up something for his nephew back in Switzerland. There were still a few weeks before Christmas.

He came to the tram stop and frowned. The cars sat about half a block away from the stop, and the driver stood outside surrounded by a crowd. Anatolio jogged toward the tram.

"Nejezdí tramvaj."

The driver kept saying that phrase over and over and shaking his head. Okay, so the tram was not an option. Anatolio looked up at the overhead power lines. So the phone network was down, the building power grid was down, and the trams were down. Did the trams use the same supply as the buildings? He didn't think so. Anatolio wasn't an electrical engineer by any means, but he thought tram systems used DC current and buildings ran on AC current. So whatever took down Old Town took out multiple systems. That was concerning, but not impossible or apocalyptic.

A swath of light bounced off the side of a building, and the sound of a diesel engine resonated down an alley to his right. So not all motorized and electric systems were affected. Not an EMP then. His mind flipped through various scenarios that could play out this way. He needed more data. He needed to get back to his hotel, but it was on the other side of the city, closer to the institute. What was the best way? Taxi? Rideshare? Likely, the Metro was also inoperable. People scurried through the streets. Doors of shops and cafés closed. Walking all the way back to his hotel would take hours, not to mention Anatolio wasn't familiar with the streets of Prague, and not having a cell signal meant GPS was out of commission, so even if he felt up to a long stroll in the dark, he did not know where he was going.

"Vypadáš ztraceně."

Anatolio turned and saw a man about his age, maybe a bit younger, standing beside a motorcycle. One of those big cruisers with an American label. "Parli Italiano?" The guy stared at him. His face made it clear Italian wasn't in his repertoire, and Anatolio knew only a handful of Czech phrases. "English?"

"Ah, yes. English! You look lost?"

"Not lost, but trapped? Can you help me get back to my hotel?"

"Where?"

"Hotel Castle Residence. Na Dlážděnce."

"Sure. Sure. We take bike."

Anatolio climbed onto the bike behind the guy. This was a good plan, or he was about to be taken to some dark alley and become a few organs lighter. He didn't think he was young or pretty enough to be forced into the sex trade, and while he made a comfortable living; Anatolio hardly thought he was a target for ransom. "What's your name?"

"Aleš."

"I'm Anatolio. Thank you for the ride."

"Yeah. I promise not to kill you." He kick-started the motor, and the bike came to life between their legs. He handed Anatolio a helmet. "Hold tight." Just as he pushed it down on his head, Aleš cranked on the throttle, and the bike roared down the street. "Porca troia!" Anatolio shouted.

He couldn't hear anything, but if the way Aleš shook was an indication, then Anatolio suspected the man was laughing at him. Snowflakes continued to dance in the air but didn't build up on the ground, so Aleš zoomed through Old Town at terrifying speeds. They snaked through the dark streets, passing buildings and street signs too fast for him to get a sense of where they were. They shot out of Old Town onto a principal thoroughfare. The Vltava River ran beneath them as they crossed a modern bridge, its inky flat surface broken up only by a boat with warm yellow lights floating on the surface. Just before a tunnel cut into the mountain dead ahead, Aleš turned to the right to continue along the river's edge but on the opposite bank.

They crossed into a new sector of the city, and Anatolio squinted as the city's lights appeared suddenly. He tried to look over his shoulder to see if they'd come back on behind them but didn't want to disrupt the balance of the bike. He wasn't going to lie; part of him let out a sigh of relief that things seemed back to normal. The abrupt and total isolation from technology was more jarring than he had ever anticipated. It was one thing when he took a holiday and purposefully unplugged, but quite another when modern conveniences were ripped away in a heartbeat without explanation. Several minutes later, they pulled through the gates of his hotel, and Aleš slowed the bike as he navigated the long drive. The lights were all on, and Anatolio heard music from what was likely a holiday gathering through the windows of a banquet room on the ground floor.

He braced his hands on Aleš's shoulders and swung his left leg off the bike. Once on solid ground, he removed the helmet and slid his fingers through the longer strands of hair on top of his head. He held out the helmet to his rescuer. "Thank you. Again." Anatolio reached for his wallet. "I can pay you for the ride."

Aleš held up his hand. "No. No. I live not far. Had to come this way. I wouldn't turn down a drink with a handsome man, though. I do love Italian."

Anatolio grinned. "Normally, I would gladly accept your offer but tonight is not good. I must contact my work."

"On a Friday evening?"

"No rest for the wicked, I'm afraid."

"That's what I was hoping for," Aleš said, winking.

Anatolio smiled and stepped backward toward the hotel entrance. The moment Aleš started the bike and turned around to head back down the drive, Anatolio turned and sprinted inside to his room. He had a theory and needed to speak with some of his colleagues at CERN.

Sergio tapped a button on his console, and the call log restarted in his headphones. He closed his eyes. Not to hear better, but to listen harder. As a cryptologic linguist, he didn’t translate words. He listened for patterns. Cadence. Stress. The way meaning shifted when someone was lying, scared, or pretending not to understand what was being said.

Sergio had loved languages his whole life. Growing up in Puerto Rico, English and Spanish braided through his days, and by fourth grade he’d added French to his world for one simple reason: He wanted a new boy from Haiti to stop eating lunch alone. Sergio still remembered the look on Etienne’s face when he finally understood him. That was the moment he knew language wasn’t just sound. It was access. When Sergio finished high school, he knew his best option was the military. Being raised by a single mother, they didn't have the money for him to go to college. As nerve-wracking as leaving the only home he'd known was, his mama encouraged him to use his talent with words to explore the bigger world off the island.

Enlisting in the Marines turned out to be both the hardest and most rewarding decision of his life. Once he survived boot camp, he spent the next eighteen months in training. Initially, at the Defense Language Institute in California, then he was attached to the Marine Corps Detachment at Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas, where they taught him the art of signals intelligence. That was where he'd picked up Russian from a fellow devil dog. At first he thought the tone much darker than the other languages he spoke. There was a harshness because of the guttural consonants, but the endings of words were soft, almost whispered. Combining all that with the almost machine-gun-like style of rapid, clipped speech where sounds blend made it initially difficult. But with practice and by forcing his fellow trainee to use Russian in conversation, Sergio became conversational by the end of his time in Texas. A couple of years later, he was considered to be fluent, and in the twenty years since enlisting, he'd added Korean, Arabic, and Mandarin to his repertoire.

Tonight he was on third shift, listening to a recorded conversation between a suspected Syrian arms dealer and a Russian diplomat. On the surface, they discussed the latest hockey match in Croatia, but Sergio thought there was a whole other conversation lurking in the background. Since Sergio spoke languages in all four MOS categories, his CO often farmed him out for special assignments.

He opened his eyes, and the cold blue light of his monitors stood out against the darkness of the room. When he was on duty, he liked to make his environment as isolated to the task as possible. Made it easier for him to focus and process multiple inputs simultaneously. Across three screens, he had seven languages scrolling and two, sometimes three, whispering through his headset.

He'd been catching bits and pieces of information and subtext from multiple conversations for the past month. It was like a 5000-piece puzzle without the cover of the box to use as a reference. All his data came from different voices, different accents, even different words, but they were all talking about the same thing. He knew it. He just needed to figure out exactly what.

He glanced over at the second monitor that displayed a conversation between two Korean speakers, and he clicked Pause on the Russian conversation and switched the audio signal over to the Koreans. He listened for a few minutes. They sounded stressed, but there was also a level of anticipation.

There was something about the language between these two that was different. He looked at the log to see what the source was. The call was recorded by a Navy Cryptologic Warfare officer who was seconded as a liaison to a Europol counterterror task force. One thing that Sergio requested when officers sent him intel to analyze was that they not provide him with their suspicions. He didn't want to go into the task with any preconceived notions about the subject. These two were using a technical lexicon, but it was still wrapped in a mundane cloak. Then the noise fell away. Three phrases cut clean through the static.

Beam alignment. Synchrotron windows. Calibration ghosts.

Sergio’s spine went cold.

Those weren’t the words of smugglers. Those were the words of physicists.

Now, were these everyday scientists with more brains in their pinkie than Sergio's whole body? Were they working on life-altering research for the good of humanity?

If that were the case, then Commander Broxton probably wouldn't be monitoring them.

Sergio started at the beginning. There were some phrases in Korean that didn't have exact translations into English or, frankly, any of the other languages he spoke, but he could put together the puzzle of this conversation. Sergio was old-school in how he'd write keywords or a phrase that stuck out to him in the conversations he analyzed. Then he'd blend that together with the pragmatic language and nuance subtext impressions to write his report submitted to his commanding officer. He looked down at his notes. The words and phrases stirred something in his memory. There was a familiarity to them, but not a replication.

It was then he remembered a job he had had about three weeks ago. He pulled up his tracking form. There it was. French interaction among two speakers. In his report, he concluded they were discussing an attack. They'd referred to infrastructure disruption but no specifics on method, timing, or motivation. Sergio had recommended continued intelligence gathering. He wasn't sure exactly why he thought these two conversations were connected, but his gut was telling him to dig further. He pulled up the transcript and the recording of the French speakers. While they were fluent, Sergio could tell neither were native to the language.

The first speaker had an accent that was often detected in those from Nordic countries, and the second speaker stumbled over a few words and didn't use colloquial phrases. They kept talking about sending the sector into silence.

Silence. Infrastructure disruption.

Sergio’s fingers froze above the keyboard. Hadn’t there been a report, just weeks ago, about a part of Prague going dark? He did a search and found mention of the outage on a secured database of AAR from the region.

There it was.

A sector of Prague had gone black without explanation. Not just power. Phones. GPS. Everything. There had been some reported panic because air traffic control lost signal with planes in the area and banking systems shut down for fear of a cyberattack. Fortunately, everything resolved within a few hours, but Czechia got tense there for a while.

"So I have Koreans talking about physics, Northern Europeans talking about infrastructure disruption, and a sector of Prague going dark for an unknown reason." Sergio leaned back in his chair. “Yeah,” he muttered. “This just went to the top of the pile.”