The Portent

by Michael S. Heiser

  “Why now?” she raged through her tears.

  Malcolm reached forward and put his hand on her shoulder. “You’re gonna be all right. He’s not God.”

  Malone had put down the binoculars, his attention drawn to the exchange. He glanced at his watch, then quickly grabbed his phone and began texting furiously. Malcolm watched closely as the mustachioed man deftly alternated between several apps and fired off three or four texts in succession. “Mind if I ask what you’re sending Neff?” he asked.

  “It’s his ticket out of there. Some instructions—including where we parked.”

  “There’s no way they’re done questioning him,” Malcolm said doubtfully. “You know that somebody is going to mention the missing witnesses.”

  “And the fat, balding guy with the mustache,” Malone added, but he didn’t laugh. “Don’t worry. They won’t have a choice but to let him go.”

  Malcolm eyed him dubiously.

  “If you’re bored, you can keep an eye on things and tell me if you see anything interesting.” Malone handed him the binoculars.

  Malcolm held the field glasses up to his own spectacles and adjusted the lenses. He scanned the crowd, which was still as thick as before, only now it was dotted with a few more squad cars and emergency personnel. He held his breath as he searched for the face none of them wanted to see.

  “A couple of cops just came out,” Malcolm narrated. “They’re headed down the street in opposite directions.”

  “They’re looking for us, naturally,” Malone replied stoically.

  “There he is,” Malcolm said.

  “The Colonel?” Malone asked.

  “No, no. It’s Neff. He’s talking to one of the officers taking notes. Now they’re shaking hands.… He’s on his way.”

  “Never in doubt,” Malone replied. The two men made eye contact. A wave of comprehension swept through Malcolm as he returned the binoculars. He’d been had.

  “Nicely played,” he whispered.

  Malone looked down at his phone and texted another message. “It’s what we do.”

  31

  Choices are the hinges of destiny.

  —Pythagoras

  “So the girl was completely normal until you two guys walked up to the table?” Neff asked, startled by what he was hearing.

  “Totally,” answered Malcolm. “We engaged her a bit, and then she seemed to just go into a trance.”

  “And the numbers and letters—they don’t mean anything to any of you?” Neff continued to drive, being careful to stay within the speed limit.

  “I have no idea what the point was,” Brian said, choosing his words carefully.

  “What do you think?” Neff asked Malone, who had migrated to the front passenger seat after they’d pulled out.

  “I think you already know.”

  “You mean what Fern’s going to say.”

  “Yep.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Who’s Fern?” Brian asked.

  “Before we go down that path,” Neff said, speaking again to the passengers, momentarily deflecting the question, “I need to ask if any of you knew whether Becky had any unusual marks on her body—maybe a tattoo? I didn’t do any checking in there. Had I known what happened, I’d have made a point of it.”

  “Come to think of it,” Melissa recollected, “she did. She had a tattoo on her neck. It wasn’t unusual, though. It was an infinity symbol. You see them a lot.”

  Neff looked uneasily at Malone, whose expression seemed to shout “I told you s.”

  “Fern’s gonna hit the roof.”

  “Again—who’s Fern?” Brian asked, more impatiently this time. “And could you guys tell us what you think is going on?”

  “Fern is my wife,” said Malone. “She studies this sort of thing.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  Malone remained silent, watching the road. He caught Neff looking at him in the rearview mirror. “Fern used to be a psychologist,” Malone finally said. “We met in 1977. She was fresh out of law school and paging for a federal judge in DC. I was a hippie.”

  He paused, gauging the incredulous expression on Brian’s face. “Hard to believe, I know. Anyway, we met at a protest. It was the last place in the world she’d ever expected to meet her husband—or to be, for that matter. But then again, she never expected to look at her father and see an enemy of the state, either. Her dad worked in the CIA for a man named Richard Helms.” He turned his head toward Dee. “Given your field of expertise, Dr. Harper, I suspect you know who Richard Helms was?”

  Dee eyed him cautiously. “Yes.”

  “And do you know what happened in 1977? Or maybe 1973 will ring a bell.”

  Dee hesitated a moment, as though remembering something unpleasant. “I do.”

  “How about the rest of you?”

  They shook their heads.

  “Richard Helms was the Director of the CIA,” Dee elaborated. “In 1973 he ordered that all government files associated with MK-ULTRA be destroyed, which they were—at least most of them.”

  “Right,” Malone confirmed. “MK-ULTRA was one of the CIA projects aimed at what’s popularly known as mind control—programming people for intelligence and military applications.”

  Brian looked at Dee, eyebrows raised in recognition, then at the others. No one offered any comment.

  Malone turned and continued, eyeing them carefully. “What Helms did became widespread knowledge in 1977 when the Senate investigated MK-ULTRA as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request that turned up 20,000 pages of documents that had been missed in his purge. Fern’s father sided with his boss on the issue. It destroyed her whole world—what the country was supposed to stand for, the man she thought her father was. It was a crisis of conscience, to say the least. She became obsessed with the investigation and wound up going into psychology.”

  “So your wife is going to think Becky was programmed?” Melissa asked.

  “Absolutely. I’d bet my wife knows more about these research programs than just about anyone, except for the criminals who were and still are directly engaged in it. It’s something of a crusade with her. Becky’s behavior is textbook programming, and the tattoo is significant. People who have been subjected to the sort of trauma or drugs involved in this ‘research’ are often marked for identification. The infinity symbol is one of the more common ones.”

  He scanned their faces again. The silence was punctuated only by the hum of traffic. “I’m just dying to know why you all look like you’ve heard this sort of stuff before.”

  Brian spoke up. “Let’s just say we’re familiar with people like Sidney Gottlieb and MK-ULTRA.” He turned to Melissa. “We just can’t seem to get away from Operation PAPERCLIP, can we?”

  “Did you hear that, Graham?” Malone asked, turning in Neff’s direction.

  “I did,” he answered. He put on his turn signal and turned into a dimly-lit parking area for what appeared to be some sort of sports complex.

  “Why are we stopping?” Brian asked.

  “It’s time we had a heart-to-heart chat.” Neff turned off the lights but let the car idle. “It’s time to be honest.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He means you need to come clean,” Malone said. “There’s no way all of this is coincidental. We come to nowhere, North Dakota, to talk to some biblical scholar trying to hide his identity while putting conspiratorial UFO stuff on the Internet that we know isn’t crazy. That guy turns out to be married to a woman who got hired with Neff’s money at the college where he’s a board member.

  “Then we bring Dr. Harper and Dr. Bradley along to Father Benedict’s funeral, and that same couple just happens to know them—which is really odd since none of us, Father Fitzgerald included, knew either Malcolm or Dee from Adam and Eve. They only appeared on the radar after Father Fitzgerald became concerned about Father Benedict—who the same North Dakota couple also turns out to know.”

  “And now,” he continued
, pointing at Brian, “a girl kills herself in public at the orders of some psychopath, and all four of you think it’s the same guy—some Colonel. The four of you did more than meet this past summer. It took everything we could muster to get Malcolm and Dee out of wherever they were. I suspect that’s the same place you two were.”

  “We really don’t believe in coincidences,” Neff added, smirking.

  “I think you’re making some assumptions there,” Brian protested.

  “Brian, forget it, man,” Malcolm butted in. “They know. I slipped while we were waiting for Neff. I blew it.”

  Brian looked at him and sighed.

  “We have some decisions to make,” Neff went on, not waiting for more argument, “and they can’t wait. As I see it, if the police solicit information from the public about what happened tonight, or if some do-good citizen tells them they saw either of you at the scene, and someone knows your names, you’d be lucky to last a week before this Colonel catches up to you. As it stands now, you have a small window of time to act. The fact that the guy didn’t show up at the scene tells me he was content to let the police get the information he needed. Then he’d move in, assert federal authority, and have all the information necessary to find you himself. He didn’t get that, but the net’s getting smaller.”

  “How do we even know you’re not part of all this, just settin’ us up?” Dee shot back angrily.

  “Come on, Dee,” Malcolm groaned.

  “Well how did he get out of there so fast? How did he pull that off? And we still don’t know just how he pulled strings to get us out. Why? Because he won’t tell us.”

  Neff closed his eyes and shook his head. “This needs to stop. I can see that this fellow has all of you on edge, but you’ve got to start thinking clearly—and trusting us. We’ll tell you everything, but we can’t get sidetracked now. As for tonight, we’re trained for situations like this, and we rely on that training. As frightening as it all was, it wasn’t difficult to navigate—at least to this point. But we’re running out of time.”

  “Graham and I went into the café ahead of you for a reason,” Malone explained. “Given what’s happened over the last few days and all the odd convergences of the last few months, we felt that caution was justified. We checked out the building to see if it had security cameras, which it didn’t. That was a plus since it would help prevent you from being identified if anything were to happen in there. We felt safe with the location, so we went in. After we were settled, I took a restroom break to confirm the place had a rear entrance.”

  “We’re trained to sit separately so that we can always pretend we don’t know each other if a scenario develops,” Neff explained. “It’s easier to reveal a relationship later than deny one. That came in handy tonight. We were able to assume control of the situation. We each have several aliases, complete with the best fake IDs that money can buy. We use them when they’re needed.”

  “While you folks were talking,” Malone continued, “we were busy checking out the area surrounding the building on our phones. We look for hotels, streets, hospitals, and other landmarks. We know how to use that information to manipulate circumstances or get out of situations like tonight.”

  “I’ll ask it again,” Melissa said in amazement, “who are you people?”

  “You know who we are,” Neff said. “This sort of thing needs to be second nature for what we do. The woman you saw at the border, Nili, is a former Mossad agent. She trains us, and she knows spycraft exceedingly well.”

  “So what did you text Neff to get him out of the building?” Malcolm asked.

  “Malone sent me the location of the car, the nearest hospital, and the name of a hotel between the café and that hospital. They were all less than a half mile from each other. Once I got the message, I told the officer that I was a surgeon from the west coast who was in North Dakota to conduct a heart and lung transplant. I told him I’d just stepped out for some coffee while I waited for the call.”

  “And you told him the text message was the transplant alert,” Malcolm reasoned.

  “Precisely. I told the officer that I was staying at a hotel two blocks away and was on call at the hospital—it’s a surgical center—on the other side of the hotel. Without that information, he’d be suspicious that an out-of-towner didn’t have a car or would have offered me a ride to a place I had no intention of going. I gave him bogus contact information, then I jogged away in the correct direction—knowing Malone had stationed the car along that route.”

  “Pretty impressive,” Brian said.

  “Was all that necessary?” Malcolm asked. “Police can’t legally compel you to give them information as a witness. People walk away or clam up all the time in those situations.”

  “That’s true, but once I inserted myself into the incident, I had to come up with something believable. If you all hadn’t been directly involved, we’d have just walked out of the café and been done with it. I had to know what happened. It’s a good thing I did. One of you probably would have felt obligated to give the police your contact information. I think it’s pretty clear this Colonel would have gotten that information in short order and used it. He basically programmed this girl to kill herself in an attempt to find you.”

  “Did anyone else on the scene report that they saw what had happened?”

  “I heard a few folks sharing what they saw. It’s a clear suicide, and of course the ballistics will back that up, so I’m not worried about any of us being the subject of any manhunt. The law enforcement officials I know wouldn’t bother with the time and effort it would take in an open and shut case. My concern is different, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Come tomorrow or Monday, your faces could be in the news. I assume the Colonel will read the papers and watch the news.”

  “I thought you said the café had no cameras?” Melissa said, alarmed at the possibility.

  “It didn’t, but there’s always a chance that someone could have snapped a photo with their phone, or some camera outside on the street could have caught your image. And if that’s the case, someone—maybe someone from your sleepy little town who came to Fargo tonight for Christmas shopping—might recognize either of you if the police ask the public for more information. There’s no way to be sure that won’t happen.”

  “And so,” Neff continued, “we’d be very wise to be out of North Dakota in less than twenty-four hours. Our plane’s here in Fargo. We can drive back to your place and collect some belongings—laptops, some books, clothing, whatever you can box in a few minutes. Then we need to get back here and take off.”

  “But I can’t just leave the school hanging,” Melissa protested, disconcerted. “I have responsibilities—and a job I need to keep.”

  “I’ll tell President Fitzgerald what’s going on. He’ll want things to play out like you’re on sabbatical—maybe you’re spending time with family, or some such scenario. You’ll be able to communicate with him securely through our methods. We’ll do everything we can to keep the disruption minimal for the school, but I don’t expect you’ll ever be able to return. I’ll let him know. He’ll understand.”

  “Shouldn’t we worry about airport security?” Brian asked.

  “That won’t be a problem.”

  “How’s that?”

  “We’re our own security. One of the companies I own is a private flight security firm. It’s fully registered with the FAA and TSA. We’re the owners and credentialed experts. If we say you belong on our plane, you belong.”

  “You guys are unbelievable,” Malcolm said, a smile finally breaking through.

  “We put a lot of careful thought into all these kinds of things before we ever decided to devote ourselves to our cause,” Malone informed them. “We spent a couple years laying the groundwork for what we do. But no amount of preparation is foolproof. Something unforeseen can always happen—like tonight. We need to leave.”

  “And leaving forces us to make a decision about where
to take you,” Neff said.

  “Meaning?” asked Dee.

  “We’ve never taken outsiders to our headquarters. We use safe houses for people we help. Those would only be adequate in the short term in this situation. My gut tells me we need something more secure.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a good idea,” Brian confessed. “You’d be putting yourself at a terrible risk.”

  “We take risks all the time.”

  “I think it’s a safe conclusion that you’ve never run into anyone with the clout and resources of Colonel Ferguson. He’s NSA and Above Top Secret.”

  “Hmpf,” Malone grunted. “You get more interesting with every conversation.”

  “I’m not going to pretend to know this guy or how much of a threat he is,” Neff said, “but we’re still a step ahead of him. We’ll put all our cards on the table. But we need you to promise that you’ll tell us your real story. We need to know exactly what we’re dealing with.”

  “We also need permission from home,” Malone interjected.

  “Permission?” Melissa asked.

  “We don’t make any decisions this big without unanimous consent from our whole team,” Malone explained, pulling his phone from his coat pocket. “I’ll call Miqlat,” he said to Neff, who nodded. Malone turned back toward the front of the car to dial.

  “So what’s it going to be?” Neff asked. “Are we done playing charades?”

  The four friends looked at each other.

  “Dee and I don’t have anywhere to go anyway,” said Malcolm. “I just assumed you guys would put us somewhere at some point.”

  “We had plans for that, but taking you to our nerve center wasn’t in the picture until now.”

  “Any place where the Colonel isn’t is home enough for me,” Dee deadpanned.

  “We’re in then,” Malcolm continued. “But we can’t very well give you the full picture without Brian and Melissa being on board.”

  “Understood. So what about you two?”

  Brian looked at Melissa apprehensively. He didn’t see a realistic alternative, but the thought of surrendering their carefully crafted world paralyzed him. He could tell she was struggling, too.