He felt her arms and chest relax under his own. She let go of the sides of the table and draped her weary arms around his shoulders, still sobbing. Brian waited for a moment, then stood up, glaring at the doctor. “Pretty poor choice of words.”
“I’m so sorry,” the doctor apologized, genuinely mortified. “Most patients find it humorous.”
“Are we done here?” Brian replied coldly.
“There’s no need to—“
“Are we done?”
“Certainly. Let’s get a 4-D view of that snapshot; it’s the latest thing, and the results are stunning,” he said, touching the console. “Perhaps that will put your wife’s mind at ease. We’ll naturally be running more blood tests, but so far as I can see, everything here is completely normal. You have two lovely little girls. I’ll leave the two of you alone for a moment. Again, my apologies.”
Still fuming, Brian watched the doctor exit the room. He looked at the new image on the monitor. “Wow,” he said softly, his calm returning. He looked down at Melissa. She was still catching her breath, but her eyes were open, looking up at him. “I’ll understand if you decide not to,” he said, “but you should look at this 4-D. What a wonder.”
Melissa closed her eyes, steadying herself, and then turned her head. She stared at the two faces on the screen, tightly huddled together side-by-side, so delicate, so detailed, so … human.
“Thank God,” she whispered, and closed her eyes.
12
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
—Helen Keller
“Mr. Carter, could we have a word with you, please?”
Brian glanced over his shoulder, then put the stack of books he was carrying into the library cart. Instinctively he plucked the two books from the row facing the wrong way and corrected the disorder before turning around.
“Who are you?” he asked politely, not offering a handshake.
“My name is Graham Neff,” the speaker answered. “This is my friend, Doug Malone. We’re from out of town.”
Brian eyed them suspiciously. Neff was about six feet tall, a few inches shorter than he was, and lighter, but trim and athletic. Brian guessed he was in his forties. The other man was short and stocky, a balding fireplug of about sixty with a bushy, gray-white mustache that needed some grooming. Brian had been in North Dakota for almost four months now, and this was the first time anyone outside the college library staff where he volunteered had introduced themselves to him. Given the disturbing surprise at the coffee shop less than a week ago, he couldn’t assume this overture was a casual synchronicity.
“Now’s really not a good time,” he answered. “I have a lot to do.”
“You can do it tomorrow,” Neff replied. “You get off work in less than five minutes. We’ve been waiting. We know you volunteer here a couple days a week.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Brian replied, more annoyed than flustered. “I have to pick up my wife. Sorry.”
“Your wife’s class just started,” Malone said quietly. “We know her schedule, too. We’ll be done before she’s finished.”
“Okay. Let me be honest, then,” Brian said. “I’m not in the mood.”
“I appreciate your candor,” Neff said, becoming serious. He glanced around to make sure they had no audience, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “I have no doubt you mean what you’ve said, Dr. Scott.” He watched Brian’s expression carefully. Brian made no move and said nothing.
“We don’t mean any harm,” Neff continued. “We know who you are, and that’s why we’re here. We need information.”
“My name is Brian Carter, and unless I’m mistaken, you know where I live. Whoever this Dr. Scott is, he isn’t me.” Brian moved to walk away, but Malone grabbed him by the arm. His grip was firm but not menacing. Brian’s eyes flashed with anger, but he stayed under control. In his periphery he noticed they had drawn the attention of some students sitting at a nearby table.
“I should tell you,” Malone added as he released Brian’s arm, “that I followed you and your wife to the coffee shop last Friday night and caught the end of your conversation—the one about the Antarctic discovery.”
“And just how did you do that?”
“One of these,” Malone said, reaching into his pocket and producing what looked like an iPhone. “A portable listening device. It has a pretty sophisticated antennae. All I need to do is point it—”
“At whoever you feel like spying on. Nice.”
“We aren’t a threat,” Neff explained. “Would Malone tell you he’s been trailing you if we wanted trouble? Would we meet you in a public place if we had any intention of exposing you or your wife?”
“Maybe you’re just trying to be clever.”
“This is hardly clever,” Neff said with a forced smile, hoping to convince onlookers that the conversation was a friendly one.
“Who are you guys? Let’s see some ID.”
“Let’s go upstairs to the board room after you’re done with your shift,” Neff suggested. “We’ll tell you what we can.”
“The board room is locked and off limits to patrons. You don’t just walk in there.”
“You do if you have the key,” Neff replied. He produced a set of keys from his coat pocket and flipped his way to a distinctively shaped silver key. Brian recognized it. He couldn’t conceal his confounded expression.
“Graham’s on the college’s Board of Trustees,” Malone explained, anticipating Brian’s question. “He paid for the remodel in there, too.”
Brian clocked out, grabbed his coat and his backpack from behind the desk, and went upstairs with the two strangers, dismayed by the brief exchange. He had hardly felt secure in their circumstances, but now it seemed as though the façade he and Melissa had been so careful to erect was crumbling right before his eyes. Neff opened the door and gestured for the other two to enter. He locked the door behind them. They took off their coats and took seats at one end of a long, polished mahogany table.
“So who are you?” Brian demanded.
“That’s a bit more difficult to explain than you might imagine, Dr. Scott,” Neff replied thoughtfully, folding his hands. “We can’t actually tell you much about ourselves and what we do.”
“Hardly seems like a fair exchange.”
“I know, but we can only speak in generalities. The one thing I can be up front about is that we need your help.”
“My help? If you guys have been following me around, you know I’m unemployed at the moment. I come here a couple days to week to volunteer in order to beat the boredom. I can’t tell you anything you’d need to know except where the restrooms are.”
“Actually,” Malone droned though a knowing stare, “based on what I heard last Friday night, I’d say you volunteer here to be close to your wife. It’s a good idea.”
“Thanks, dad.”
Malone’s cheeks flushed red. “Being a wise guy isn’t going to help you or us. We know you’re either going to be at home or here—especially since the job you thought you had dried up this morning.”
Brian couldn’t hide his surprise, but his shocked expression quickly turned angry. “I’m guessing the police won’t believe me when I tell them my phone is being tapped by Wilford Brimley, but I’ll give it a try.”
“You’re good at pushing buttons, aren’t—”
“Take it easy, Doug,” Neff intervened. “He’s doing what we’d do. He’s exposed.” He turned to Brian. “We haven’t tapped your phone. We followed you this morning when you stopped by the real estate office, then went in and talked to them after you left.”
“Are you the good cop?” Brian asked, smirking.
“Let me explain how we found you,” Neff continued, ignoring Brian’s sarcasm. He reached into his coat and took out a folded mass of paper. Brian could
see it was a map of the United States. Neff spread it out on the table and turned it in Brian’s direction.
“Here’s Fargo, roughly our location. The five circles on the map are the places you drove to in order to upload your material to the Internet. They were all locations with secured Wi-Fi—hotels, libraries, coffee shops. You didn’t store your content in the cloud; you had it on a flash. You created anonymous email addresses and free FTP programs with trial subscriptions to upload the information to a list of three or four UFO and conspiracy forums each time—and never the same ones, I might add. Some of my associates frequent a couple of the forums you used, which is where we first saw your stuff.”
He looked at Brian, who returned his gaze and said nothing.
“The content was so compelling that we took an interest,” Malone explained, now composed. “But we had no idea who you were or where you lived. Sure, we could find the locations where the upload occurred through the IP addresses, but that was about it. You did a good job of covering your tracks. The places where you got online had no relationship. When we drew lines between them, we could see there was no logical center—the locations were not equidistant from any one point, so we couldn’t assume you were in the center.
“We therefore had no guess as to your point of origin. You never used any names, geographical points of interest, dates—nothing. You didn’t even space the uploads in any consistent chronology. There are no cellphones traceable to your name or your wife’s name. That takes some research.”
“Is there a point to this?”
“We value secrecy in what we do as well,” Neff explained. “Malone’s just trying to tell you he admires the thought you put into this.”
“Whatever,” Brian said wistfully.
“The content only drew our interest because of other information we have,” Neff added, “information that has a lot of resonance with what you were saying—about how all this UFO stuff is a façade for something much bigger and more sinister, how there’s an evil intelligence using the idea as part of a fascist agenda.”
“If you guys want to recruit me for some cult, the conversation is over.”
“You misunderstand,” said Neff. “We’re involved with … a range of international business interests. The world is moving rapidly in very dark directions, toward a collective tyranny. We operate alongside, hidden in plain sight.”
“Oh, everything’s clear now.”
“Let me try to explain.” Neff paused as he searched for words.
“We can see hell from here,” Malone offered bluntly. “But when the power-hungry set up their utopian Gulag on earth, they’ll need the masses to believe in the cause. We think you’re onto something that’ll make people believe that when their leaders enslave the planet and need to eliminate the riff-raff, they’ll be doing what’s best for humanity. We could only see bits of it before; there was no narrative logic. You’re framing things in a way that makes sense—but we need you to help us think through it in detail and plan accordingly.”
“Plan accordingly? Are you guys some sort of militia group?”
“No.”
“Mercenaries? NSA refugees? Pinkerton dropouts?”
“No, no, and no. We’re not paramilitary and don’t work for any government agency.”
“I’m done guessing. Who are you?”
“I can only give you our names—and they’re our real names.”
“Sure. Look, I’m not your guy. Besides, you already have my thoughts.”
“We suspect that what you posted is the tip of the iceberg—especially after discovering who you really are and where your real expertise lies. Once we knew that, we made it a point to find you. We’re in serious need of a scholar with your training.”
Brian looked at the table, tapping it nervously. He longed for the anonymity he had held the last few months.
“I know it’s easy for us to say,” Neff said, “but you shouldn’t be alarmed that we found you.”
“You’re right—that’s easy for you to say.”
“We understand you have something very real to fear,” Malone cut in, continuing Neff’s thought, “though we don’t know what it is—and we don’t need to know. But you shouldn’t think you were easy to find. You’re not vulnerable so long as you keep doing what you’re doing. We wouldn’t have found you if it weren’t for an unbelievable … coincidence.”
“Such as?”
“One of our associates had read through your forum material a dozen times when she became convinced she’d seen your writing before,” Neff explained.
“I’ve never written anything like what I’ve been posting.”
“We know. We’re talking about unconscious patterns in your writing. We have someone in our group trained in cryptography. Part of her training was in forensic linguistics. She thought she recognized some of your syntax patterns—how you use prepositions and conjunctions, that sort of thing. It has nothing to do with vocabulary and subject matter. The focus is on the words that always get used in writing—the little ones.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all,” Malone assured him. “She sent off samples of both your Internet material and some pages of what she suspected would linguistically align with it to a friend of hers who is an expert in a field called authorship attribution. When her friend’s data came back, we had solid matches between your Internet material and the item our associate had read before—your dissertation. Her guess that the authors were the same was correct. That gave us a name.”
“Then we plugged ‘Brian Scott’ into some journal databases,” Neff continued, “and found that you had published an article about whether Christianity could cope with an extraterrestrial reality. There was no way that was random. We looked for more, but that was the only published item we could find that bore your name other than your dissertation.”
“I haven’t exactly been prolific.”
“We actually found a couple of other things you wrote, but—”
“I haven’t published anything else.”
“The other material wasn’t published. Our web searches turned up two audio files, a sermon and a Bible lesson you gave in graduate school at some sort of student meeting. We downloaded them and had them transcribed. Haven’t you ever searched the Web for yourself?”
“I’m not a narcissist, and I never uploaded anything like that.”
“Someone did. People do that when they like something. Personally, I found the material fascinating. At any rate, we gave the published article to our authorship expert to run another set of tests, and that produced another confirmation match.”
“Okay, so that gave you my identity, but how did you find my address? I’ve never had a job in my field or anything remotely related to it. How did you pull that one off?”
“We had our web-security expert look for your name and degree at any addresses with the domain name ‘edu.’ We tried church websites next. We spent over a week on it but always hit a dead.”
“Then we made an educated guess,” Malone added. “One of our associates figured that someone with a PhD in Hebrew and Semitic languages would always stay interested in their field. They’d want to keep up with the latest books—”
“And buy them with the money he wasn’t earning?”
“Like I said, it was a guess,” Malone said defensively. “Besides, she was right.”
“We thought we might have to hack into Amazon’s purchasing traffic,” Neff began, “but—”
“Hack into Amazon? Are you kidding? That’s illegal.”
“It is,” he conceded, “but we have the personnel and equipment to do that sort of thing. But we didn’t have to. We found a good low-tech solution.”
“What was that?”
“We made a list of publishers that specialize in your fields of expertise, especially the languages you’re into. It wasn’t long.”
“Go on,” Brian said, annoyed at the slight.
“We called them up and pretended to be
you, convinced them you couldn’t remember if you had put in the correct address for an order. Some places wanted credit-card information, but we finally found one who felt he was going the extra mile in customer service by just answering the question. It only took an hour.”
“International businessmen, huh?”
“I should tell you, though,” Neff continued, “that we don’t know much of anything about your wife.”
“And we aren’t prying,” followed Malone. “We’re interested in you, not her.”
“That’s right. The point of all this, Dr. Scott, is that no one is going to find you unless they happen to have read what you’ve published before and think about it like a forensic computational linguist and hit some pretty wild guesses. That’s a pretty rare set of circumstances.”
“Is this where I breathe a big sigh of relief?”
“Please give our proposal some consideration. We’ll pay you fifty thousand dollars for a week or two of your time.”
“The only currency I’m interested in is security—especially for my wife. If you can’t give us that, I’ll have to start collecting cardboard boxes for another move.”
Malone looked at Neff. “Told you so.”
13
I imagine the only reason would have been concern for broadening awareness of its existence.
—Dr. Sydney Gottlieb, Chief, Medical Staff, Technical Services Division of the CIA (1950s–1960s), remarking on why the details of the use of LSD on unwitting mind-control subjects under Project MK-ULTRA was kept secret from other CIA personnel
“The prisoner’s in here, sir,” said the MP, saluting as he opened the door.
The senior officer returned the salute and entered the room. His bright blue eyes scanned the small cell. Aside from the prisoner seated on the edge of her cot, the cell held only a sink and a commode. There were no windows. The walls were painted a dull gray that matched the linoleum on the floor.
“That’s all. Take your post,” he ordered. The MP closed the door behind him and took a position a few feet away in the hall.
The Portent Page 5