Once again, a grim silence hung in the air.
Until Rick cleared his throat and looked up from his laptop. “There are a lot of people who seem to think so.”
“Not Sarah’s father,” Cornelia said, noticing how her words only came out as a near whisper.
“I know,” said Rick. “But there was a guy interviewed by the Chronicle who called this globe the ‘engine of destiny.’”
“Jesus,” Lacy said. “How fucking ridiculous is that?”
“You know,” Rick said, “along with Colonel Robinson, we’ll have to talk to people like that as well.”
“Well,” said Melinda slowly, ruefully, “whatever these globes are, they are the engines of something. Even if we don’t like what they’re doing.”
“Right,” Ian said. “We might not, but plenty of people do.”
“Until they get smashed by one of these things?” Cornelia asked, her words coming out sharper than she had intended.
“Yeah, well, I think that’s the point of the problem,” Rick said. “What kind of a purpose is behind this whole thing if it puts one murdering scumbag gangster in jail, kills another one, and wrecks the lives of dozens of people in the process?”
“I think we’re going to have a lot of fantastic opportunities to record some heated debates,” Ian added.
“But if something like this happens again,” Tony asked, “how heated do you think the debates will get?”
“Ask the Astounding Pike,” Knight replied.
6.
A professional keeps doing her job, Cornelia told herself, and let her interviewee speak, as much as she found most of what he had to say tasteless and absurd.
“First of all, you need to understand that there are no coincidences,” Bill Canyon insisted.
As he paused, Cornelia thought there was a strange, pedantic sort of a glint in his eyes. He looked like a teacher satisfied with himself when a student looked like she might have been understanding the point of a lesson at last.
Then again, the glint could just as well have been a momentary trick of the morning’s sunlight. They were conducting the interview with a quintessentially San Francisco backdrop. Sitting at the Crissy Field waterfront park of the Presidio, the Golden Gate Bridge loomed behind them.
“Coincidences belong in fairy tales,” Canyon said. “Coincidences are part of the propaganda designed to blind you from the truth in front of you.”
Canyon had the sort of youthful, clean-shaven, guileless look of someone who should have been selling Bibles door to door.
Bill Canyon ran the Apocalyptic Times blog and hosted the Millennium Survival biweekly podcast. The former insurance agent and one-time coast guard reservist had burgeoned as an online broadcaster and independent documentary producer since 2003. According to Cornelia’s research, Canyon had gotten very effective mileage out of his coast guard experience, regularly billing himself as a “military-industrial-complex insider” who was answering the call of his conscience and blowing the whistle on the “power elite’s knowledge of the coming apocalypse.” Canyon had been one of the first people on the September-11-was-an-inside-job bandwagon. He had also produced DVDs about the existence of an interdimensional portal under Denver International Airport, along with his podcast series about the Freemasonic shadow government’s knowledge of the 2012 apocalypse. Although no apocalypse materialized in 2012, Canyon’s cottage industry of paranoia was affected not in the least bit. In a four-part “research monograph” on his blog, he explained that December 21, 2012, was not an overt apocalypse, but merely the start of a “sinister new age of darkness.”
Cornelia’s mind reeled not so much from what Canyon said, but by the bright-eyed, earnest way he said it. “So you believe this granite globe rolling down Powell Street, injuring dozens of people, causing tens of thousands of dollar in damage, was merely a plot to kill one person?”
“Absolutely.”
“That hardly seems efficient.”
“I’m just saying that the perfect way of killing someone is to make it look as much like an accident as possible.”
“But you’re suggesting the real target is—”
“Colonel Garret Robinson. They were sending him a message.”
“About what?”
“That he should keep his mouth shut about the globes.”
“Why not just kill Colonel Robinson himself?”
“Because he’s probably important for some reason to the successful completion of the conspiracy’s end game.”
“You realize, Mr. Canyon, that people would still have problems accepting what you’re saying. That somehow it doesn’t seem to make sense that—”
“Oh, sure. They have been conditioned to think that way. I understand.”
“Your critics would say, ‘if you want to kill Sarah Robinson to send her father a message, why not do it in an easier way?’ Something that doesn’t involve rolling a twenty-ton boulder down a busy street and hoping it hits the right person.”
There was an infuriating little grin on Canyon’s face now. He looked like he was being asked an embarrassingly obvious question, something so simple that he was given no choice but to make his interviewer look like a fool. “The murderers never had the slightest doubt that boulder would hit Sarah Robinson.”
“How do you know this?” Cornelia snapped, even though she could hear from Canyon’s inflection he had more to add to the story. But she couldn’t help it. Could this man really be that cool, that confident, or just dangerously insane enough to sit in front of a camera and recite the most staggering line of absurdity without even trying to offer a single shred of evidence to back anything up? “Can you understand what bothers me, what would bother skeptics so much about what you’re saying? Just how do you know? Can you prove any of this?”
“We’ve known for decades that the government, that world governments, an interconnected cabal of insiders, have had access to secret technology that defies anything we have been taught about physics and the very laws of nature.”
“Have we, Mr. Canyon? We’ve known this? Who exactly do you mean? Where is your evidence for any of the claims you’re making?”
“Insiders, whistleblowers, people who have been leaking information about the government’s experiments on weather control, mind control, anti-gravity technology, interdimensional travel, and even time travel.”
“You mean your network of conspiracy theorists believes that it has been getting reliable—?”
Now Canyon shook his head, his calm demeanor only slightly rankled. “We prefer alternate history to conspiracy theorist. Conspiracy theorist has taken on such a negative connotation.”
“But who are these sources?” Cornelia pressed.
“Well, I discuss them on my podcast—”
“You never identify them, correct?” Cornelia cut in once again. It had never been her style to badger interviewees, but trying to get a straight answer out of Canyon was starting to feel like an attempt at handling a drop of liquid mercury.
“I can’t identify them,” Canyon said matter of factly. “But I can assure you that I trust them, and I know they have access to the highest levels and their information is absolutely reliable.”
“But you do understand why we remain skeptical about the veracity of these sources.”
“Sure, I understand skepticism,” Canyon said. “And skeptics have long been dismissing everything outside of the ordinary—things like the UFO sightings, cryptids like Bigfoot and the Chupacabra sightings, flying humanoids—as being nothing but lies and hoaxes and mass hallucination. But the fact is that we now have twenty-ton granite globes showing up all over the world, virtually every day, and no one can explain them. Can we seriously look at what happened on Powell Street and say it was a mass delusion? Did a mass delusion kill two people and injure all those—how many people were there?—injure all those o
ther people and wreck those cars and that cable car?”
Cornelia didn’t reply immediately because she now felt the distinct sensation of Canyon having kicked her ass with that comment. He was, she knew, mostly right. She still thought the government conspiracy he was peddling was nonsense, but the fact of the matter was that no skeptical argument held water either. The world had spiraled into the Twilight Zone, and perhaps an X-Files-type government conspiracy explanation was as good as any.
“Well,” she said at length, “if you think the government is behind this—”
“I think a shadow world government is behind this,” Canyon cut in this time.
Cornelia heard something harder in his voice now. He must have noticed that she had hesitated, been left without a self-assured retort to his claim. “First of all, if this shadow world-cabal you believe exists is creating and placing all these globes all over the world, then what is their purpose?”
“Cornelia,” Canyon said, and paused to look her square in the eyes. His knitted eyebrows made him appear to be worried, but the sound of his voice came across as patronizing. “I have several theories, and they all make me very nervous.”
“What theories?”
“I think these globes might be symbolic. I think they’re sending us a message. I think they’re saying, ‘Make no mistake about it. The world is ours, and we’re making a move to consolidate a hold on the entire planet.’”
“You think we’re about to face some kind of a takeover?”
“I absolutely believe it.”
“And what else do you believe about the nature of the globes?”
“I think that the technology used to create them will be turned on the world.”
“What kind of technology do you think created this?”
“Any number of things the global cabal has been developing for decades, if not centuries,” Canyon replied with a weird, eager glint in his eyes.
But the first thing Cornelia thought about was how much footage they were bound to get before this interview was over. It seemed like every sentence to roll off Canyon’s tongue was packed with so much unverifiable, over the top nonsense that it couldn’t be allowed to go unchallenged. Just how in the hell, her mind screamed, could this global cabal have been working on their super high-tech granite-carving interdimensional technology without anyone finding out?
“It could involve invisibility cloaks, small black hole and singularity-generating technology, anti-gravity and dark-matter technology, time travel even!”
7.
“So what do you think?” Rick asked after taking a sip of his coffee.
“I think it’s bullshit,” Cornelia replied without hesitation.
She glanced at her watch, wondering if they were going to get the clearance to proceed to their next interview at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Dr. Marcus Gunderson, a professor of engineering, had agreed to speak with them today, except his school was now swarming with police. Someone had phoned in a bomb threat early that morning, and now no one was allowed in or out of the university. Gunderson, unfortunately, had already been in his office when the campus lockdown began.
According to the news, word was filtering out that the professor himself might have been the cause of the bomb scare. It wasn’t confirmed, but Gunderson had given several interviews about the need to approach the globe phenomenon from a more reasonable and scientific perspective. The point of view, in fact, was what had caught Jerry’s eye and what made him want to get the professor on the record. Gunderson conceded that the world was facing a series of events that were beyond the current abilities of science to explain. He had often used the phrase “inadequate scientific measurement devices,” Cornelia recalled from the online editions of the San Francisco Chronicle. Rather than latch on to preconceived beliefs in supernatural forces, angelic manifestations, or demonic signs, Gunderson was asking for the patient, detached, objective scientific process to offer some sort of empirical accounting for the globes. On the feedback forum of the Chronicle’s online page, someone calling himself “Anunnaki Rebel” suggested that “Gunderson and the other tools of the scientific REPRESSIVE!!! regime that wants to stand by and see us enslaved by a coming ARMY of off-world CYBORG WARRIORS!!! should be put on a raft and floated out into the middle of the ocean and left to die of thirst and rot for SELLING OUT HUMANITY.” Annunaki Rebel, Cornelia wondered, might have been a kindred spirit of the people who beat the Astounding Pike into a bloody mess. Perhaps when beatings no longer sufficed in the effort to save the world, bombs might be the next important step.
“Which part?” Rick asked, snapping Cornelia out of her musings.
“Huh?” Her sleep last night must have been more restless than she recalled. Plus, they had been up at the crack of dawn to prepare for the interview with Bill Canyon. Maybe Rick had the right idea with the coffee all along. She had been content to sit on the park bench and wait until Melinda, Matt, and Tony packed the gear away. Ian and Knight had originally decamped to get everyone who asked some coffee.
“I said which part of Canyon’s story is the biggest load of bullshit,” Rick repeated. He sat next to her on the bench. “The supernatural part or the conspiracies?”
A sudden trace of the morning breeze swept the aroma of his coffee toward Cornelia.
“I see your point,” she replied at length. Although she knew it would be a tough question to answer.
“Something….”
“Something supernatural is making these things.”
Rick nodded slowly. “And that globe showing up in the middle of the city the way it did just seals the deal, doesn’t it?”
Every time she attempted to try and draw the implications of what was happening all around her to their natural conclusions, Cornelia felt the most uncomfortable jolts of adrenaline. She had felt it a lot the previous night, during and right after their discussion of Powell Street and the Hong Kong crime connection. It was adrenaline inspired by fear and dread.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s not from around here. But which one of the theories explains it?”
Rick sipped his coffee before replying, “Exactly. What if we find out that the number of cars hit by the globe is the square root of the distance between Bill Clinton’s forehead and his chin?”
Cornelia found herself smiling, despite another one of those adrenaline surges. “And that proves it was an inside job orchestrated by a brotherhood of space vampires from Area 51?”
“Whatever it is, it’s excellent theater, if nothing else.”
“You think?”
Rick raised an eyebrow under a rueful little glance. “It’s profitable theater.”
“How many people do you think are writing books about Area 51 aliens carving these globes?”
“Probably the biggest publishers in New York are fighting over every book with a globe explanation.”
He was probably right, Cornelia thought. “No doubt about it.”
“No, I don’t think there is. It’s very profitable theater for everyone.” He paused and glanced at her.
Cornelia knew what he was about to say next.
“Including us,” he tagged on, not disappointing her. “But I am sorry about what happened to your friend.”
“Thanks,” Cornelia said slowly. “But you’re right. It is all good—and profitable—theater now…giving air to every crazy speculation.”
Rick shrugged with a distant look in his eyes. “That’s all everyone’s got.” Then he glanced at Cornelia again. “Like you told Sarah. One idea is as good as the next.”
He was right, she realized. Perhaps the thin line between sensationalism and reason had now disappeared. “And we have a journalistic obligation to get all the ideas out there?”
Rick chuckled. “Journalists? Is that what we are? But yeah, whatever we are, it should be our job to, you know….”
>
Cornelia recalled old theories from journalism school. “Let the marketplace of ideas thrive?”
“Marketplace of ideas, yeah.” Rick gave her an easy grin and nod. “I like that—you should coin that phrase.”
Cornelia wasn’t sure if he was joking or not, but she couldn’t help but realize why he was such a perfect choice for all the shows his agent tried to cast him in. His lack of theatrical training and performing background accented his natural likability. Rick didn’t affect charisma, he just had it.
After they both chuckled, in a more somber tone Rick added, “But it’s all good enough to get you back in the spotlight. To get your career back.”
Cornelia felt something she would have called a different type of adrenaline surge. This wasn’t motivated by fear, but by the anger she had long worked on suppressing for the sake of her health and sanity. It was the adrenaline surge of resentment, of helplessness, of the rage she felt for being robbed of her reporting career.
“I’ve thought about that a lot,” she said evenly.
“You should,” Rick said. “You should take advantage of all this to take back what belongs to you.”
If only it didn’t involve Sarah, she thought. “Well, it made me feel lousy back there in the hospital yesterday. Like some kind of a mercenary.”
“Hey, the colonel has a story to tell. He wants to talk to you. And do you think that piece of crap who got you fired back in Florida’s getting the kind of access we are? Jerry’s making the play for a possible network deal. Did you hear about that? Get what material we have on the air right away. Either that or turn this whole thing into a theatrical documentary. Let those bastards back in Tampa get a load of that.”
The bastards in Tampa were probably trying to mine every angle of the Homestead globe story, Cornelia guessed. They certainly didn’t have the opportunity for the kind of exposure and nationwide distribution she had now.
For a moment, though, Cornelia allowed herself to indulge in recognizing another type of adrenaline rush she was feeling. It had been triggered by Rick’s words, and it filled her with pleasure. After her breakup with real-estate-agent Barry a year ago, it was so good to hear Rick being so supportive of her career. Although she had long dreaded the idea of being involved in a romantic relationship with a coworker, Rick’s words made her reevaluate the concept of karma.
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