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deep.”
    “How far?”
    “A thousand meters, maybe more.”
    It was surprising. McHenry knew that that was beyond the crush depth of most vessels, although specialized vehicles could certainly go that deep. “On the floor?”
    Finley shook his head. “Floor’s at 4,000 meters. The source is at 1,200 at the most.” He turned away from the screen and faced McHenry. “If we switched to active mode – ”
    “No,” McHenry cut him off. He wouldn’t ping the area and reveal their location to every vessel in the vicinity. They were an attack sub, not a science vessel. “Anyone else in the area?”
    “A few small boats on the surface. That’s all,” Finley responded. “Unless there are sleepers – running quiet like us.”
    McHenry was certain the Russians were in the area. They had ears, too. “Get a good recording, and mark our spot.”
    “Sir, an absolute location might be difficult. We’re close to magnetic south, and these currents – ”
    “Give me your best estimate,” McHenry responded.
    In the nine years he’d served as commander of an attack sub, he’d never been given such odd orders. Antarctica as the location was certainly out of the ordinary, but even more so was the objective. They’d been sent to investigate a signal that had been detected by a science vessel. That had occurred more than two months earlier, and the captain of that vessel claimed that a Russian submarine had threatened to sink them. Why hadn’t the incident been investigated earlier? It was unusual for a submarine to surface and scare away little boats. “I’m sure you’ll be getting another shot at this, Finley,” he said.
    It was time to leave the area and get to radio depth. He needed to report their findings to Naval Command.
     

 
    5
    Thursday, 7 May (11:50 a.m. EST – Washington, DC)
     
    Daniel Parsons paced in front of his large office window and gazed into the horizon over the evergreen forest. It calmed his mind, although he knew his brain was always working in the background, making connections his conscious mind was too distracted to find. His stomach grumbled. Lunchtime .
    Spending most of his waking hours there, he appreciated the aesthetically pleasing Space Systems building. The name was a front for a deep-cover CIA complex. The many hundreds of Space Systems personnel were “identity sensitive,” and could not be seen anywhere near the CIA headquarters. It was well known that foreign operatives catalogued everyone going near the Langley facility. This wasn’t a problem for public officials or intelligence analysts who never left the country. However, it was a grave threat to operatives who traveled abroad, especially in the age of face recognition software. It wasn’t a concern for Daniel since he was no longer allowed to leave the country, but he had to remain in deep cover for a different reason – for what was in his brain.
    But it wasn’t just his knowledge of dark secrets that made him unique; it was that he knew truths . Truths had deeper implications than secrets. A truth could be used as a foundation from which to extrapolate conclusions, or origins , with the highest degree of certainty. The things he’d discovered as an Omniscient had profoundly changed his life. The world looked different to him now. More correctly, the world was different from what he had thought it was. Now, even the shadows of clouds passing slowly over the dark green forest carried a different meaning to him. And his questions about the world ran much deeper than those he’d had during the earlier part of his life. There were new truths to be unveiled.
    His research that morning had only whetted his appetite. He’d started more than two weeks ago with what he’d been given: Operation Tabarin . As he’d suspected, it was only the tip of the iceberg. As with every other project he’d been assigned, he was sure that Tabarin would lead to some complicated mess of things that eventually converged to a fundamental