“A helicopter,” he said in more pronounced tones this time. “Just like you said, Ian. A helicopter. The way the globe was removed.”
In fact, the crew was only left with a wide indentation in the ground to survey after they arrived in Watchung.
“It took local authorities…who was it, by the way?” Knight asked, and glanced at Ballantine and Cornelia.
Ballantine shrugged. “Yeah, good point. The cops? The forest service?”
Cornelia, on the other hand, was already tapping away on the screen of her iPad. “State police, I believe.”
“The immense stone globe,” Knight continued narrating, “could only be removed from this secluded spot by a helicopter. While there are access roads into the reservation, this spot is so remote, so hilly, so dense with trees and forest vegetation, that it could only be reached on foot or horseback from the reservation stables three miles to the north of here. When the globe was finally removed, it took a helicopter to get the job done.” Knight paused, looked around for dramatic effect, then glanced at Matt’s camera. “Our investigation’s just beginning here, but I’d be willing to bet on a number of things. One: There were plenty of people who heard and saw that helicopter removing the globe. Two: Not so many people saw any kind of aircraft around here two nights ago.”
“Nice one,” Matt said, and panned his camera around for more footage of the rest of the group walking around the globe’s indentation in the ground.
“Do we know where the globe was taken?”
Cornelia’s fingers were sliding around the iPad before he finished the sentence. “To Rutgers University. Over in New Brunswick. Earth and Planetary Sciences Department. I think we’ll need to look for a guy named Alvin Spangler. Professor of Geology.”
Knight said, “Rutgers is not far from here.”
2.
“Technically, the globe is made of granite,” Alvin Spangler explained in quick, clipped tones. “It weighs exactly twenty tons. A circumference of fifteen feet. And, to answer your first question, yes, it does appear to be a perfect sphere. How could it have been created? No reason to suspect anything other than the usual cutting and sculpting methods. Diamond wire saws, hydraulic drilling, water jets. They could have been—most likely were—used to create this thing.”
“These things,” Ballantine said before Knight could have.
Spangler’s gaze shifted back and forth between them. The professor made little attempt to disguise his taut, impatient dislike for his guests. Although he’d allowed Knight and the Confirmation group to bring their cameras into the Wright-Rieman building of the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, neither the scientist nor the rest of his staff hid their animosity from Knight and his team.
“Right, these things,” Spangler said with a frustrated sigh. “From what you’re describing, the sphere in California sounds like it’s an exact duplicate of the one we found here.”
“Where is the globe that was found in Watchung?” Knight decided to press on with the questions. He had dealt with Spangler’s sort of hostility before. The team was on a time budget right now, and Knight didn’t particularly feel like trying to win the officious scientist over to their side, to make him realize the groundbreaking importance of uncovering the origins of the giant globe. Knight had, after all, spent years dealing with the Spanglers of academia. As long as the man was willing to give them an interview and the information they needed, Knight really couldn’t give any less of a shit about Spangler’s feelings.
“It’s at our Core Repository building,” Spangler said. “About two miles from here.”
Rutgers University’s New Brunswick campus was, Knight knew, a collection of four campuses situated in two towns on the two sides of the Raritan River in central New Jersey. The science departments are located on the Busch campus on the northern, Piscataway side of the river. The Livingston campus, originally added to the university in the 1960s, incorporating the old Fort Kilmer Army barracks and storage facilities, lies just East of Busch, bordering the town of Highland Park.
Spangler paused. Knight thought the man looked like he was carefully weighing his next words.
“I’m told,” Spangler said at length, “that if you can make it brief, we can let you shoot some footage of the globe if you’d like.”
“That would be great,” Knight said.
“Yes,” Spangler replied slowly, with another one of those condescending sighs. “It’s a nice warehouse we’ve got there. I think it would be very…let’s just say photogenic.”
“Really?” asked Cornelia. Knight could hear her trying to make the question sound upbeat and friendly. “How so?”
“We have a lot of wooden crates there,” replied Spangler, as unctuous as ever. “It will look a lot like the big warehouse in Indiana Jones.”
Just then Knight would have been willing to sacrifice anything for the chance to punch Spangler in the stomach. Instead, he turned to Tony. “All right, I think we’re good in here.”
He also noted a moment’s eye contact with Ballantine. The ex-cop nodded at him ever so slightly.
“Matt,” Ballantine said, “how about you guys get some footage of the grounds outside? And…uh, let’s start getting the SUV ready for the ride over to the other campus.”
As Ballantine, Matt, Tony, Cornelia, and Melinda decamped, Knight stepped closer to Spangler. “Have you guys been given a lot of hard time by the local media?”
Knight had merely gotten the word from Jerry that an interview with the Rutgers geologists had been set up. Whoever had made the decision to let the Confirmation team in here, it wasn’t Spangler. Knight could imagine him vociferously objecting. Spangler had probably sputtered something angry and self-righteous about the trivialization of scientific research. The fact was, Knight often admitted, that the news media were for the most part laughably ill-versed in science, medicine, or the world of research and academia. One merely had to listen to the absurd oversimplifications of health and dietary medicine on the nightly news when trying to lose ten pounds to realize that most of what reporters said about science was complete bullshit born of ignorance. But the granite globe matter had nothing to do with life and death science. Alvin Spangler was merely enjoying the chance to let his ego run wild, throw a bitchy-fit, and dress it up as his defense of scholarly integrity. Of course, school bureaucracies being what they were, and the thirst of said bureaucrats for good PR and media coverage, an “idealist” like Spangler was quickly overruled. Someone above him must have decided that it was good to have the Rutgers University Earth and Planetary Sciences Department get referenced in the local and—possibly—national news, not to mention a new television series.
Spangler appeared to be weighing his words before speaking, but not for long. “We’ve been getting inundated with ridiculous questions fit for a cheap supermarket tabloid. I was asked about whether or not there were UFO sightings over Watchung. So, sure, I was nonplussed for a moment by a question like that. UFOs? Have they lost their minds? But then I read the stories coming out of California.”
“Of the Mount Shasta ghost-light sightings?”
Spangler shook his head derisively. “Ghost lights…. For God’s sake, what a load of garbage.”
“It might sound odd, sure,” Knight said, ever so conscious that he keep his tone well-controlled and neutral for now. “But we did find another one of those globes.”
“You found one,” Spangler said with a contemptuous sneer. “And isn’t that good for your new TV show…Doctor?”
“Aren’t you even curious what’s behind this? Two identical twenty-ton objects like this showing up in remote locations. On opposite sides of the country. Within days of each other.”
“As far as my expertise matters, these are giant pieces of granite someone shaped into perfect globes and planted in two forests. Period. Why they did it, I have no clue. But, as I said, I’m a geologist. I
tell you what the object is. I tell you how it can be made. By whom and for what reason is not my concern.” Spangler paused and took an angry breath. “However, let me also add that what does concern me—personally, totally on a subjective level—is the sort of absurd irrational speculation that’s already cropping up. UFOs and ghost lights and aliens and nonsense like that. The sort of idiocy the media likes to glom onto and run with for days and weeks on end.”
“You have to admit, Doctor—”
“No!” Sangler snapped. “I do not have to admit that we need to keep an open mind about any of that pseudo-scientific tabloid horseshit! Those globes could have been carved with existing technologies. There is nothing mysterious or supernatural about any of it.”
“I was about to talk about the placement of the globes.”
“In those remote locations? Please! Just like the globe, it might take time to figure it out and get it done, but it’s not impossible.”
“Don’t you think it would have taken an incredible number of people to—?”
“Sure, it would have!” Spangler nearly growled at Knight. In fact, Knight could have sworn there was a raspy, barely perceptible animal growl to the geologist’s voice. How could such rage build up in this man, Knight marveled, over a couple of simple questions? Sure, not innocuous questions. Perhaps provocative even. But such rage….
Except, Knight realized, it might not have been rage in Spangler’s voice at all. But perhaps something else….
“It would have been an incredibly hard and expensive and time-consuming exercise,” Spangler continued fuming. “But that does not give anyone the justification to jump to the conclusion of aliens or ghosts or—”
“I’m not jumping to any conclusions.”
“Isn’t that what would make your TV show more successful?”
“Believe it or not, Doctor, what would make my show the most successful would be to actually solve this puzzle and come up with some real answers.”
As Knight spoke, he couldn’t help but notice how he took a couple of steps closer to Spangler. But Spangler, in turn, started backing away. Knight liked that just fine.
“Oh, would it now?” Spangler shot back with a jagged, unsteady cackle. “Forgive me if I don’t believe you.”
“What’s your problem, huh? That you didn’t want to appear in front of the cameras and—who was it? Your dean? The school’s PR people?—someone forced you to do it? But whether you believe it or not, and whatever all the other investigative shows’ve led you to believe, we really do want to put this whole phenomenon under real, complete, rigorous scientific examination. We didn’t need to come here. We could be running around out there speculating and jumping to conclusions already.”
“You got some footage and you got your quotes, all right? And you can shoot videos of the Core Repository and compare it to Indiana Jones and Area 51. And you can tell everyone….” Spangler paused suddenly, stared at Knight for a protracted moment, and stabbed an index finger in his direction. “…And you can tell yourself that you’re doing something that amounts to real science. And then your producers and editors’ll go ahead and cut and manipulate all your videos to give the superstitious and paranoid and fantasy-prone nuts and rubes and conspiracy theory yahoos exactly what they want to see. So, I’m sorry, Doctor Knight, if I sound like the ivory tower elitist who’s dismissing the popular media. But what you’re doing—despite what you want to make yourself believe—is not science and not the search for the truth. It’s a perversion of science and a betrayal of the truth. And by lending your name to this reality TV circus, you’re betraying everything and everyone in your own field. You’ve sold your scholarly credentials to the highest bidder. Frankly, I find it disgusting and disgraceful. So if you don’t mind, please leave my lab. I’m quite busy.”
Knight backed away from Spangler, studied the frenzied look in the man’s eyes for another moment, then turned and left.
He had been right, Knight realized as he exited the Wright-Rieman building. It hadn’t been anger in Spangler’s eyes after all. It was something much more disturbing.
It was fear.
3.
“What an asshat!” Lacy said, and shook her head.
Knight glanced toward the farthest seats in the back of the Chevy Suburban they were driving back to the Heldrich Hotel in New Brunswick. Tony and Matt had, just as he hoped, stowed their camera equipment in the cargo bay of the big SUV. He knew the two men had to have realized it was wise not to record this conversation. For all the Confirmation viewers would know when they got a chance to see the edited final cut of the adventures of Jerry Peretti’s merry band, the intrepid investigators had just gotten valuable tips for solving the granite-globe mystery from Rutgers University’s friendly geologists.
“I think he’s just scared,” Knight said simply. He was still trying to figure out Alvin Spangler’s strange, hysterical behavior back at the lab.
“What?” Cornelia asked. “Of the globe? The thing that made the globe?”
Knight strained his back and neck, twisting further around to make eye contact with Cornelia. She was sitting next to Lacy. Luckily, the massive, tank-like Suburban was big enough to carry their entire crew.
“No,” he said. “The fact that he can’t explain the globe and he knows it. He’s going through the motions. The whole boilerplate logical explanations. But I think he knows it’s about something else.”
“And that’s scaring him?” asked Lacy.
Ballantine, driving the SUV, spoke up this time. “Dogma’s a powerful thing. Especially since he’s hitched his wagon to skepticism and scientific explanations. Dogma and ego.”
“Aren’t they good?” Cornelia quickly replied. “I mean at least to a point? Come on, Rick! A cop like you has to be in favor of those rational explanations.”
“It’s not just ego,” Knight corrected them both.
“Oh yeah?” Lacy asked.
“Yeah. And I think I know where he’s coming from…because I’ve felt like that a million times myself.”
Ballantine gave him a quick, surprised sideways glance. “You thought you had the world all figured out? Then realized you were way off the mark?”
“That’s probably the best way of putting it.”
“You were as skeptical as all your asshat critics, right?” Lacy asked. “And then...where was it? Your research in Haiti made you reconsider?”
Knight almost had to bite the side of his mouth to keep from laughing. Lacy was reciting part of the copy from his press-kit biography. He loved her indignation over the asshat critics. Thank God for those wonderful, unyielding asshat skeptics! he almost yelled. He had said those words many times over the years himself. But now it was so endearing to listen to Lacy and her childishly naïve, dialectical thinking. This wonderfully simple-thinking girl couldn’t quite imagine that if people like Alvin Spangler, the people who attacked his books, and the zealots who pressured Bakersfield State University to deny his promotion application time and again didn’t exist, he would probably have invented them. He would have had to hire these pompous, closed-minded gas-bags and pay them off to criticize him, to personally instruct them to petition college libraries to pull his books off their shelves. Knight had been denied a promotion to full professor three times…and the rejections had helped him cement his reputation as a “maverick” scientist, made his books bestsellers, and earned him enough money in advances, royalties, and speaking fees to live in a community as wealthy and insular as Watchung.
“Listen,” he said at length. “There’s no way you grow up in a toilet like Newark after your old man runs out on you and your mother and not be a bit skeptical. Know what I’m saying?” When he glanced at Lacy, he saw her pretty face cloud over with unease and something akin to embarrassment. “Not to make this the Dan Knight, Sad Soul Show or anything, but I never really had much time to try and put stock in the ex
istence of invisible forces that had to be obeyed and placated, because if you didn’t say the right words or ate the wrong food on the Sabbath, the magical being got angry.”
On the streets of Newark, Danny O’Malley had been level-headed, cunning, and intelligent enough to survive and thrive as Dan Knight, then smart enough to see when he was hurtling headlong into a dead-end life, and to get out the moment he might have prospered as a newly-minted trigger-man for a street gang. But in all of his decisions, from the car thefts and the burglaries to the heroin-dealing and the small-time pimping to the moment he decided to walk away from cutting the throat of the shooter of a best friend, Knight’s decisions had been motivated by clear, quickly crystalizing logic.
Ever since Jack O’Malley, his shiftless, habitually unemployed bum of a father, left to pick up the family’s welfare check and never came home, Dan’s life had become a chess game. At stake was his day-to-day survival, and his decisions were made by spur-of-the-moment reflexes about effects and causes, the repercussions of actions taken and not taken. He recalled his decision to drop his father’s name after Jack O’Malley disappeared and it was obvious he would never come back. Dan was twelve at the time and left alone with his mother. She had been sixteen when she got knocked up by O’Malley, and her parents kicked her out of the house. The daughter of Hungarian immigrants living in Cleveland, her maiden name had been Ildiko Huszar. The English translation of Huszar was “knight,” and that, on the streets of Newark, Dan had decided, sounded more bad-ass than O’Malley. Being as bad-ass as possible in that time and place was the only key to survival. Cementing that reputation with purse-snatching, heroin-dealing, and busting a school security guard’s knee to hell with a brick—eventually to hook up with the neighborhood’s toughest gang—had all been the most logical decisions given the time, the place, and the circumstances. Knight never felt the hands of fate, or higher powers, spirits, gods, or demons guiding his actions. It had always been logic. It had been logical to be a thief, a con-man, and a drug dealer when that was what it took to keep from starving. It had been logical to become a thug, to strike first, to crush would-be assailants in a world ruled by thugs, in a world divided among predators and victims.
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