We spent the snowy Saturday playing a Scrabble tournament. After six games, we were tied at three games each. Earlier, we each worked out in the small gym that occupied one of the bedrooms in our apartment. When you have a wife who earns a ton of money it makes for some conveniences. The bonus that Angus McPherson gave Ellen would make for a few more. We were stuck in our apartment, but, typical of Ellen, it was fun. After our workout and Scrabble tournament, we decided to watch old movies that we had saved on the DVR, something we always intended to do but never found the time.
On Sunday, it continued to snow without letting up. After a leisurely breakfast, we read The New York Times on our Kindles because the paper delivery couldn’t make it through the blizzard. I was absorbed in the Sports Section, reading everything about the big game. I took out a calculator, and began computing my own odds.
“Connecting dots, honey?” Ellen asked.
“Can’t help myself, babe. I’ll be ready to take a bet from you shortly.”
“As soon as you see a pattern?”
“There’s always a pattern. Always”
***
We invited a new couple from upstairs to join us for the game. Phil and Marilyn Beaton recently retired from Apple and decided to return to New York City where they grew up.
I’m not a heavy eater, and neither is my slender Ellen, but something about Super Bowl says, “Eat.” Fortunately, the deli down the block was open after the snow was shoveled, and I bought a few bags of wonderful caloric fatty stuff.
Game time was 3 p.m., Mountain Time, or 5 p.m. for us. Phil and Marilyn came down at two and we played a game of Scrabble waiting for the game to start.
“So you folks were supposed to be there,” said Phil. “Bad luck, but we’re happy you wanted to share the day with us. Marilyn has an old saying, and I’m beginning to think it’s true over the years – everything happens for a reason.”
We played a second game of Scrabble before the game. Phil and Marilyn are 49ers fans, and Ellen and I like either the Giants or the Jets. None of those teams was in the Super Bowl so our interest in the actual game was somewhat casual. At 4:30 I clicked on the TV. I hate all the repetitious blabbing that goes on before a game, but I figured we’d check out the last minute pregame chatter.
“Although the record snowfall in the Northeast has stopped some fans from coming, it appears that most made their plans early based on the weather forecast, and we have an almost full capacity crowd of 63,400 at the University of Arizona Stadium here in Glendale.”
“Most Northerners made their plans early,” I said. “That’s what we should have done.”
“Hey, Ellen, where would our seats have been?” The TV was showing views of different sections of the stadium.
Ellen got up and walked over to the television.
“Right there,” said Ellen, pointing to the TV, “under the control booth on the fifty-yard line. Great seats, but hey, we have a good view from here.”
The phone rang. It was Imam Mike.
“Rick, where are you?”
“Stuck in New York, Mike. We were supposed to be at the Super Bowl, but our flight was cancelled. What’s up, Mike.”
“This morning I heard all kinds of chatter about a bomb going off over the heads of the ‘infidel Bellamys.’ Something about a roof falling onto your seats. Stay put, my friend. I’ll call you if I hear anything else.”
I didn’t want to spoil the day, so I didn’t announce what Imam Mike had just told me. What the hell could it be? I thought. We watched the coin toss for the kickoff. It was heads, and the New England Patriots chose to receive. The Seattle Seahawks will kick off into a slight wind.
We heard a loud rasp and the screen went blank.
“Damn,” I said, “there must be an electric outage.”
“But the lights are still on,” Ellen said.
Ellen clicked to another channel. An ashen-faced reporter was babbling on about something as he clenched his ear bud with his right hand.
“There’s been an explosion at the Super Bowl,” he said, holding his earpiece. “We have little to go on at this point, but it seems that the control booth at mid-field has exploded and fallen to the seats below.”
Ellen walked over to the couch and sat next to me. We looked into each other’s eyes, remembering that just a few weeks ago we thought we’d never see each other again. She pressed her face next to mine and said in a choking voice, “The control booth fell on top of the section where we were supposed to be sitting. Rick, we’re alive.”
I switched the remote back to NBC, the network that was broadcasting the game. The scene was from the NBC studio in New York. From what we’d just heard, we were sure the broadcasters on site in Arizona were dead.
“Information is just coming in now,” said Sam Powell, a new anchorman for the network. The poor guy [AB39]was choking back sobs, the kind of sobs you hear from somebody who just lost a bunch of friends.
“We have a report, which we haven’t yet verified, that a small private jet slammed into the control booth just minutes ago. According to a person on the scene, the plane must have carried a large bomb because the explosion was so great. The plane hit the booth dead center, destroying it and causing the remnants to collapse onto the seats below.”
Ellen and I looked at each other as he said that – the seats below – our seats.
The camera view panned out, apparently taken from the Goodyear Blimp over the stadium.
“Oh Dear God,” said Powell, doing his best to control his emotions. “From the air it appears that a large part of the stadium has been destroyed. That had to be one gigantic bomb. We’re not going for any close ups folks. The view is likely to be pretty gruesome.”
My cell phone rang. It was Buster. I had called him the day before to let him know we weren’t going to the game.
“Holy shit, Rick. It was those two homegrown scumbags that we traced to the flying school in Phoenix, Tony Lombardo and George Rendell. I just got confirmation from the owner that they flew a jet from the adjacent airport this afternoon. Imam Mike from Brooklyn tipped me off. We had them, but they got us first. Oh, and they also had some help from inside the stadium. It looks like there were a bunch of dumpsters filled with explosives behind the control booth.”
I told Buster about the phone call I had just gotten from Mike.
I was too numbed to think about security clearances and “need to know,” so after I got off the phone I simply announced to Ellen and our friends what Buster had just told me. I also told them what Imam Mike told me.
“Wasn’t Muhammad Atta on a watch list of suspects before 9/11?” asked Phil Beaton.
“Yes,” I said. “What these people are doing is turning our society inside out. Pretty soon people are going to start to clamor for locking people up first and asking question later. We knew who these guys were. We had them on our radar.”
The tension in our apartment was almost painful. I was happy that our friends from upstairs were with us.
“President Reynolds said it recently, folks,” said anchorman Sam Powell. “World
War III has begun, and we’ve just witnessed another battle, a battle like all of the ones we’ve seen since the attacks of 10/15, a battle that we weren’t prepared for.”
When he said that I just put my face in my hands.
“Hey, Rick,” said Phil Beaton, trying to be helpful. “You just told us that you had those guys in your crosshairs. Don’t blame yourself. All you can do is continue to look for clues and try to head off trouble when you can. You can’t just go in with guns blazing and kill suspects. That’s not what this country’s all about. Hey, let’s look at the one positive thing this afternoon. You and Ellen are alive.”
I walked over to the window. The snow was still falling and the streetlights below created a beautiful scene as the sun began to set, a peaceful scene. Peace? That’s a word I love, a word that we seldom hear. Ellen walked up next to me and put her arm around my waist. Phil and Marilyn cor
rectly judged that we needed a couple of minutes alone. Ellen looked up into my eyes.
“When will this end, Rick?”
“End? I don’t think that’s part of the pattern.”
THE END
About the Author
I'm the author of The Gray Ship (Coddington Press 2013), book one of The Time Magnet series. It's a story of time travel, romance, and a nuclear warship that finds itself in the Civil War. The Thanksgiving Gang is the sequel, A Time of Fear is Book Three in the series. The Skies of Time, is Book Four in the series
This book, The Shadows of Terror is the first book in The Patterns Series.
I have also published five nonfiction books: Justice in America: How it Works—How it Fails. (Coddington Press, 2011); The APT Principle — The Business Plan That You Carry in Your Head. (Coddington Press, 2012); Boating Basics, the Boattalk Book of Boating Tips( Coddington Press, 2013); How to Create More Time (Coddington Press, 2014). I'm a lawyer and a veteran of the United States Navy. I live in Long Island, New York with my wife Lynda.
Please make sure you don’t miss out on my forthcoming books.
Visit my website, www.morancom.com and click on the “subscribe and get updates button.”
I hope you enjoyed The Shadows of Terror. If you did, please consider leaving a review on amazon.com.
The Scent of Revenge is the next book in The Patterns Series.
The world is at war – World War III
FBI Agent Rick Bellamy and his wife Ellen are in the middle of a sinister terror plot.
Someone is attacking young prominent women, inflicting a horrible disease.
Nobody knows its origin, nobody knows how to stop it, nobody knows how to cure it.
Rick Bellamy and a team of scientists want to go on offense. But how?
Will the lives of the women be changed forever? When will the attacks stop?
Coming in June 2015, on Amazon.
* * *
[AB1]Ok, after our discussion about intended tense, I’m going back through the first few chapters here and making adjustments to past tense. However, I’m leaving his brief introduction of himself here in present tense. I’ll flag the point where I’m going to switch him to past tense farther down the page.
[AB2]You know Rick Bellamy is the lead singer of Muse, right? Hugely famous. There’s nothing in the world wrong with your main character having a famous counterpart. I just wanted to make sure you were aware.
[AB3]This is still past tense, even though it’s an introduction. The problem with leaving it as present tense in a past tense story is two-fold.
1) If we make too many switches between tenses, the reader will have trouble following what is a current thought and what is part of the story that has already happened. A confused reader will not continue reading.
2) We don’t know at what point in the future Rick is telling this story from. If you decide to add books to this series, you most likely want your characters to grow. If you put the description of Barbara in present tense, you’re stuck with her always and forever being the director, being 60, being a real professional. You can’t age her or switch her job or kill her off in a future book. You’re severely limiting yourself or risking a discrepancy.
So I’m keeping everything consistently past tense. At the time when this particular story was happening, she was the director, and she was 60. Who knows what will happen to her from there. You then have options to change her at any point in time.
[AB4]I’ve changed capitalization a couple of times, so I just wanted to give you the reason so you’re not left wondering about the method to my madness. A title that is part of a name is capitalized. The title by itself is not.
Obama is the president.
I saw on the news that President Obama was recently in Hawaii.
Same rules with agent.
[AB5]I’m intentionally leaving this present tense as an aside explanation of terrorists.
[AB6]I wasn’t sure where the dialogue ended and picked up with Rick addressing the reader. I picked here. But if I’m wrong, we’ll need to take off this quote and put them at the beginnings of the subsequent paragraphs until the end.
[AB7]Intentionally present tense. Aside.
[AB8]Did you intentionally change tense here? Is she beginning by telling them Al-Qaeda is changing and then reminiscing about how they were prior? I’m going to reword slightly with this goal in mind, but see what you think. As it is, it’s a bit confusing with the tense change.
[AB9]I think the following paragraph is still Rick talking. So I’m removing the end quote to denote the same speaker for both. If this is Zeke instead, the end quote should be added back in and something should be put in the following paragraph to denote Zeke is speaking.
[AB10]You have this name spelled sometimes with Mc and sometimes with Mac. The score was overwhelmingly in favor of Mac, so I’m changing the Mc instances for consistency.
[AB11]Who is Ike? Should this be Zeke? Or is this a new, previously unintroduced character?
[AB12]Is this dialogue? Is the reporter saying these out loud? If so, they should have dialogue quotes. If not, you might want to change the last sentence of the previous paragraph that says he’s talking.
[AB13]Aggravated assault is generally defined as assault with a deadly weapon. Unless she’s highly trained in martial arts or something where she has to classify her body parts as deadly weapons, this wouldn’t apply. It would most likely just be assault.
[AB14]Here you switched back to present tense. I’m rewording just a bit to get you back to the intended past tense.
[AB15]I changed this to his whole name. In this one introduction, he was actually introduced as three different names. This reduces it to just his formal name and what he likes to be called, which are normal components of any introduction.
[AB16]Are you sure you want to change a first person perspective in the middle of the book? There’s no rule against it, it’s just a rare stylistic choice.
I am, however, switching everything over to past tense as we discussed.
[AB17]11/13 is not more than a month after 10/15. So either this needs to say almost a month or the date itself needs to change.
I’m also rewording slightly to make sense when changing to past tense.
[AB18]Same as the previous. Should this be three? Three of them just made comments with suggestions. This seems to suggest he’s calling one of them less than excellent.
[AB19]I’m assuming this is still Buster talking. So I took the quotes off of the previous paragraph’s dialogue to indicate that we’re not changing speakers here.
[AB20]There have only been fifteen bombers up to this point. Should this be fifteen, or is he including others in this? If it is intentionally 18, I suggest adding something else in to clarify the number 18.
[AB21]It’s not more than a month after 10/15. The date here is 11/14, one day shy of a month. This should be reworded slightly. OR you can change the date by a couple of days.
[AB22]Starting here, you’ve switched from a first person perspective to a third person perspective. The problem with that is, if the book is currently being told from Rick and Ellen’s perspectives, they would have no inside knowledge of what the jihads were discussing. Third person, however, gives you the freedom to see the story from anyone’s perspective.
It’s the switching between first and third person perspectives that’s a bid substandard. Generally a book is from a particular perspective (first or third) consistently throughout.
So, in actuality, you’ve had three differing perspectives thus far with several switches. You had Rick’s first person perspective, then switched to Ellen’s first person perspective, then back to Rick’s first person, now an omnipotent third person perspective.
You might consider picking one and sticking with it. If you choose first person, these scenes that Rick nor Ellen would know about would have to go.
[AB23]I’m removing the ending quote here to indicate Phil is continuing to talk in the
next paragraph. I will do this for all upcoming paragraphs until Phil is through speaking.
[AB24]Same comment here as previous ones about the same speaker.
[AB25]Is this something Shepard is saying as well? If so, the end quote on the previous paragraph should be deleted and beginning and ending quotes should be added to this statement.
If not, I think this statement should be taken out. It doesn’t seem to fit at all if it’s not still the newscaster speaking.
[AB26]I’m confused by this statement. There are 4 crew total. They are all 4 Italian. But 1 is American and 1 is German. Something needs to change. They can’t all 4 be Italian if 2 of them are a different nationality. Either there needs to be 6 crew members (and you need to specify the other 2 jobs) or only 2 of them can be Italian, or take out American and German from the nav and FE descriptions.
[AB27]I took out now. It was redundant after the previous sentence ending with immediately.
[AB28]This was its name in the previous instances. So I’m changing this and the subsequent instance to match.
[AB29]One of the downsides to first person past tense is that you’re taking away some of the suspense. Ellen is telling this from a future date, so your readers already know she survived. It’s just something to consider. If you were telling the story from third person past tense, you’d leave yourself more opportunities and keep your readers in more suspense.
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