by George Noory
“You think it’s a joke to believe in intelligent life other than what you’ve personally experienced. But you have to have your head stuck in the sand if you don’t look up and ask yourself what else is out there.”
“Is that what you do—look up to see what else is up there? What do you believe in?”
He instantly tensed. It was too much, too deep into him to explain to this woman what he believed and what happened to him to shape his beliefs, but felt she deserved an answer. As much as he would reveal.
“There are some questions that have perplexed mankind since time immemorial. I think in some sense most women and men have asked the questions in one form or another.”
“You mean, who are we, where did we come from, where are we going?”
“Yes, those are eternal questions, but the world we experience is many times the size of the one that our ancestors did. We are bombarded with global events every time we go on the Internet, turn on the TV or radio or pick up a newspaper. At the same time our space telescopes look back billions of years, back to the beginning of time and the universe. We’re now sure that we are not alone in the universe, so I’ve added some more questions to those that people have asked over the ages: Who are they? What do they want? What will they do with us?”
“You’re absolutely certain there is a they?”
“Of course I am. I think most people also realize that there is life beyond our own planet. And we believers have a strange bedfellow: the Vatican is already developing doctrine that includes extraterrestrials as part of God’s creation. The Church is hedging its bets because it’s pretty much a given there is something out there and it is either already here or is coming.”
“I hear true belief in your voice, not just preaching about it, or an intellectual analysis of the existence of extraterrestrials. It sounds like you’re angry about the notion we could have had visitors from another planet.”
“Perhaps what you heard in my voice was fear about what type makes first contact.”
“Gets there first? Like a contest?”
“Like a contest. It’s a sure bet that if extraterrestrials find us before we do them, they will have vastly superior technology. And that translates into superior weapons.”
“Muskets against arrows like we did with the Indians?”
“The history of progress has been the conquest of civilizations that were technologically inferior to the conquerors. Iron ruled stone, steel cut iron, city destroying atomic bombs beat bunker-busting bombs. We’re now to the point where we can fry the entire planet with the rotting, decaying, leftover nukes from the Cold War but our weapons may be child’s play compared to those of an entity that has traveled light-years to get to us.”
“Why do you think they will come as conquerors? Maybe they’ll be enlightened, far advanced culturally and will help us barbarians who are polluting our planet with our human and manufacturing excretion.”
“That’s a possibility. But why are they hiding if that’s the case? Why do they keep their presence a secret and treat humans like guinea pigs? If they are so far advanced morally and intellectually, why don’t they come into the light and help us share the wonders of the universe? You hear about people coming to the aid of other people, even dolphins coming to the aid of people. Have you ever heard about aliens saving a falling plane or sinking ship?”
“Maybe in a movie. Sorry, not trying to be facetious.”
Greg said, “Some people believe that we have been visited by both good and evil aliens and that the war in heaven related in the Revelation will be an apocalyptic battle between them.”
She gave him a quizzical look. “Do you lay awake nights thinking about this stuff?”
31
“Doesn’t everybody?” He gave her a smile. “Just kidding, but it’s a part of my life.”
“Is that why you host a paranormal show? It’s in your blood? Part of your soul to find answers for those eternal questions?”
Bull’s-eye. She had struck a chord. He was a seeker, searching for answers. The quest had consumed him and affected every aspect of his being—including his personal life.
“Right now the answer I’m looking for is who framed me.”
“One last question. Do you believe in God?”
“One last answer. I believe everyone is entitled to hold their own beliefs and keep them private if they want. And that’s what I do. But I will share this with you—the world and its occupants are too wondrously incredible to have come about by accident in some soupy primal sea.”
They walked without talking. Trying to get his head around everything that had come down, he tuned out the action of Muscle Beach. He realized there was a more serious danger than getting arrested. People were getting murdered.
Greg said, “Rohan was murdered in a way that would have made it look like suicide if me and a kid on a skateboard hadn’t been around. It’s a sure thing that Ethan was murdered in a similar way. The suicide dive from high up would be too much of a coincidence. Mond and your NRO are looking for the wrong people. I didn’t kill them and neither of us is capable of throwing men out windows.”
“Thanks. I appreciate the confidence. So we have to avoid getting murdered while we hunt for the file.”
“You make it sound like a joke.”
She shook her head. “It’s no joke, I just don’t know how to handle it or what to do about it. I can’t go to the police for protection because I’ll be locked up for the rest of my life. The only option is to find the file Ethan stole, copied, whatever he did with it.”
“Why do you think we have to find the file?”
“It’s the only negotiating wedge we have to get the feds off of our backs and to take care of whoever is killing the people involved. Aren’t you thinking the same thing?” she asked.
He was. He didn’t have what Ethan stole and whoever did was covering their tracks and leaving Greg as the fall guy. Or were so intent upon getting back the file that they were leaving a trail of murder behind them.
He saw something in the sky and thought it was an airplane. She followed his look and said, “A drone.”
“We need to get undercover.”
They went into a store that sold T-shirts and caps with Venice style. Inside, they separated and looked around. After a couple of minutes he stepped outside. The drone was not in sight.
He stepped back in and came up behind Ali while she was looking at a rack of T-shirts.
“Ali.”
She didn’t react.
“Ali?”
She spun around. “Sorry. I was, uh, thinking.”
“I thought for a moment you didn’t know your own name. It’s gone.”
They walked outside, checking the sky again before they went on.
“We should start with Ethan,” Greg said. “Mond has probably already put Ethan’s entire life history under a microscope but there’s always hope when the government is involved that bureaucratic morass will stifle whatever they’re trying to accomplish. And that people won’t tell things to cops that they might tell to Ethan’s friends. Ethan has a mother somewhere. He mentioned her during a show. Claims she listens to my broadcast. We can start with a cold call on her. If we let her know we’re coming, Mond would probably be waiting for us.”
“Good idea. Ethan told me she lives in El Segundo, down by the airport, and works at LAX. His father’s out of the picture, divorced. I think Ethan lived with her off and on. She wasn’t tolerant of his drug habit.”
“But there are a couple things we need to do first. Your little red car is too easy to spot, your phone might be tracked already. I know someone who might help us out, up in Topanga Canyon. He dropped under the radar a long time ago.”
“Topanga Canyon. That’s out in the Valley?”
“The road goes from Woodland Hills in the Valley to the coast between Pacific Palisades and Malibu. Usually forty-five minutes from here, but light-years away when you figure the odds of us making it in an unusual red conv
ertible without getting spotted.”
“How are we going to do it?”
“We’re going to make it up as we go.”
32
“Run the woman driving the car through HumanID,” Mond said.
Human Identification at a Distance, HumanID, was used to identify people through their facial features and/or gait even at a considerable distance. It was the most highly sophisticated facial recognition program available, an advanced form of identification using biometrics.
Biometrics using a person’s unique physical or behavioral characteristics had been used by police to identify criminals for more than a century. Fingerprints and voice patterns were examples. A widely used method of biometrics to identify criminals prior to universal use of fingerprints was Bertillonage, a form of anthropometry, the measurement of individual physical characteristics of people—size of their nose, distance between eyes, length of fingers, fingernails and dozens of other possibilities. Precise measurements of a standard list of body parts were taken of criminals and the information stored. When a person was arrested and their true identity was in question, measurements taken of the arrestee were compared to those in the database.
HumanID was infinitely quicker and more thorough than nineteenth-century anthropometry, but it was essentially the same thing with exceptions: the modern method had incredible speed and accuracy and most important, was not restricted to criminals who had already been arrested. Instead a vast database of the facial features of Americans was being compiled, with a goal of having the features of every single person in the country in it so anyone, anywhere, at any time could be identified.
The government had already gathered a large percentage of Americans in the database by scanning in driver’s license pictures, passports, mug shots, military IDs and every other conceivable source.
The system was more sophisticated over that being used by local police, not only analyzing visible features, but using multispectral infrared technology to identify people even by their body language.
It was Mond’s favorite program. Being able to identify most people most of the time by just running their pictures through the HumanID database gave him a sense of power over them.
He wasn’t moved by criticism that the program was an invasion of privacy nor that private companies would soon offer facial recognition programs by pulling tens of millions of pictures off the Web. Buy an app and you could take a shot of the good-looking woman or man sitting across the room in a restaurant or bar. Not just getting their name, but incredible amounts of information exposed via the Internet, from where they lived and worked to where they played and banked.
The concept would create a handy weapon for criminals and perverts, not to mention how much a person’s credit score might fit into whether they would be asked out for a date or avoided like the plague.
Novak leaned back from her console. “Sir, she’s wearing a cap and the vertical angle of the satellite image doesn’t show enough of the side of the woman’s face to make an identification.”
Mond pursed his brow. “Nowell went out the back. She might have joined him there. We don’t have a satellite or drone image, but check the cameras on the street. There may be an apartment building or business with a camera.”
“Got it.” Novak displayed a video of Greg Nowell and the woman driving the red Mini Cooper convertible. Nowell leaned over to talk to her for a moment and then got into the car and they left.
“I ran HumanID on the woman,” Novak said. “No results.”
33
As they walked with the ocean on their left, Ali asked, “Should we be figuring out how to get to Topanga Canyon?”
“I already have. With a bit of luck, there will be a guy on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade who can provide transportation.”
“Instead of getting the car, you think we should get a bus to Santa Monica?”
“That’s the Santa Monica Pier just ahead. We have to get to the Third Street Promenade. It’s not far from the pier.”
They had been closing in on Santa Monica since they started walking on the boardwalk.
Greg said, “We would have been on street and bus cameras if that’s the way we came.” He gestured at the businesses along the walkway. “Probably cameras here, too, right?”
“Right. CCTV, but most of them transmitting to a security firm who in turn can be tuned into by government agencies in case of emergency. But there are lots of people around. Until they find the car parked and empty, I think they would focus on locating the car on a freeway getting out of town.” She nodded ahead. “Don’t smile, you’re on candid camera.”
A camera was posted on a light post ahead.
“They can’t check everyone who comes through here,” Greg said.
“Actually, they can. It just takes a while. And like I said, they’re probably focusing on the car. I borrowed the car so it should take them a while to identify it and me as the driver.”
He felt as if he were being watched like an ant in the glass-plated ant farm an uncle gave him for Christmas when he was a child.
A sense of familiarity about the events shattering his life stayed with him. Not déjà vu, which would be a feeling that he had experienced being on the run from the authorities before or that there was something familiar about the woman. Rather it was a feeling that what he was going through now was expected—and with it an electrified, almost breathless tension; a feeling of walls closing in on him like a torture chamber in a slasher movie, of running from demons that had haunted him for decades.
He wasn’t as shocked or surprised or completely devastated as he should be and would be if he had found himself entangled in a criminal enterprise. Like so many of his callers who saw the world through different eyes than most people, seeing layers of deceit and hidden agendas, the events that had exploded his world were not unexpected. Like an evangelical practitioner who would see the sudden appearance of heavenly fire and brimstone as prophetic, the fires raging in his own life were not unexpected.
They left the beach-side path and walked to the Third Street Promenade. He wondered how many cameras from ATM machines, traffic cams and store security were pointed at him along the way. He had heard from callers that the federal authorities were roping in the images from the hundreds of thousands of cameras picking up street images across the entire country.
How long would it take them to use facial recognition hardware to find his location? It took seconds on television shows.
They turned onto the promenade, a pedestrian street with shops, cafés, bars, movies, street entertainment and some panhandling homeless. It was his favorite Westside night spot in good weather because he and a date could just mosey along, catching the street acts and window shopping, picking up dinner at a sidewalk café followed by a movie.
Greg liked the funky, casual atmospheres of the Promenade, Westwood, West Hollywood and Old Pasadena, having been-there, done-that with the restaurants and lounges to “be seen” on Sunset and Melrose. Those in places usually only lasted less than a year before the people to be seen moved on to another place where the prices were outrageous, the food presentations were works of art and the taste was mediocre.
He led Ali to a cowboy plucking out a tune on a guitar and wailing “The Streets of Laredo.”
As I walked out in the streets of Laredo
As I walked out in Laredo one day
I spied a poor cowboy wrapped in white linen
Wrapped up in white linen as cold as the clay
“I can see by your outfit that you are a cowboy”
These words he did say as I boldly walked by
“Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story
I’m shot in the breast and I know I must die”
His handwritten sign on the ground leaning against his guitar case said he was homeless and would play for food, fire or shelter. But his expensive faded blue jeans, snakeskin belt with a silver buckle of a cowboy on a bucking bronco, polished handmade poi
nted-toe brown cowboy boots with wiggly patterns up the sides and red silk cowboy shirt with pearl buttons and white embroidered floral on the front and cuffs made him look like a successful accountant who just wasn’t into looking like what he advertised.
“Hank used to be a water resources administrator,” Greg said. “He lost his job when he turned whistleblower on my show, exposing the fact that the high level of drugs making their way into our water supply was not being revealed. There are even hormones that can affect a person’s sexuality. He claims it’s making men grow larger breasts.”
“Some women wouldn’t complain about that. How does the stuff get into the water?”
“Flushed down toilets and recycled or leeched. Most waste water is reprocessed to be used keeping the sewer system flowing, but as potable water gets outstripped by water demands, especially during droughts, some of it ends up diverted to our taps.”
“Good reason to drink bottled water.”
“Plastic water containers aren’t biodegradable. Better to drink wine and beer. I helped him get a lawyer after he was fired. He settled for more money than Midas. He picked up the cowboy garb and drawl after he got the money.”
“Why does he play for peanuts?”
“Fulfilling a dream of being an entertainer? Celebrity status is an epidemic mind-set in L.A.”
As soon as the dying cowboy in the song was dead and buried, Hank greeted Greg, who in turn introduced him to Ali.
“I need a big favor,” Greg said. “I need to borrow a car. I can’t tell you why and you don’t want to know why.”
“You’re right about that. I learned a long time ago that curiosity is what gets me into so damn much trouble.” Hank eyed them. “You both look pretty grim. Some of that talk you do at night got the kettle boiling over?”