Jerry didn’t reply immediately. Cornelia saw the spiking anger in him beaming from his eyes. “We have to stay cool,” he replied. “It’s not the money.”
“What was that about a network deal in the works?” Rick cut in.
Jerry cleared his throat. “OK. Like I said, it’s not the money. ABC sounds like they really want to make this happen. But the airport’s likely to be jammed with people too—”
“Not like the Bay Bridge,” Ian cut in this time.
Cornelia saw him looking at his tablet intently.
“People don’t just want to get out of San Francisco,” Jerry pressed back. “They want to leave the state. California’s the only state that’s gotten three globes. No concentration of globes like this anywhere else in the world.”
“I heard that just about as many people are trying to get in,” Tony said.
“I doubt that,” Jerry replied.
“No joke,” Lacy said. “I heard that the entire new age crowd of North America’s flocking to Cali. For realz, guys.”
“New age crowd?” Melinda asked.
Of course, it makes sense, Cornelia thought.
“Like those people in Mount Shasta City,” Ian mumbled, still studying something important-looking on his tablet. “They think California’s gonna be the epicenter of the Harmonic Convergence or the Age of Aquarius or some hippie acid-trip like that. I don’t know…the UFOs with the Space Brothers will land at Haight-Ashbury or something….” Then his head snapped up. “OK, ladies and gents. We’ve got issues. The Bay Bridge’s out of commission. Massive accident. Ain’t nobody going nowhere on that one. In or out.”
“Oh, good one,” Cornelia found herself thinking out loud now. “That means….”
“All right, I get it,” Jerry said.
“That we better fly out?” Lacy asked tartly.
“That we better fly,” Jerry shot back. “After we get this Kwan guy’s story. But get ready for a good time at the airport. You think it will be easy trying to get out?”
“Most people are probably going as far as they can,” Lacy countered.
“Right,” said Cornelia. “We only need a commuter flight north to Solano County and Travis.”
“Wish us luck,” Jerry said grudgingly.
“So in the meantime,” Rick said, “What’s Kwan’s story supposed to be all about?”
2.
“I knew the globe was coming,” David Kwan said.
It was the embarrassed look on his face that told Cornelia they had not made a mistake agreeing to talk to this man. When he gave his wife, Marjorie, a sideways, barely perceptible look of annoyance, Cornelia surmised that he would not have reached out to the Confirmation team would it not have been for his wife’s prompting.
Cornelia had been sure until now that opening the Confirmation web page to invitations of anecdotes from globe experiencers had been a bad idea. She had told Jerry as much, but his was the final decision. It would be like opening a floodgate, she had told him, to every unbalanced lunatic in the world. They would drown in crazy, she had said.
Of course, she had been right.
Until David Kwan.
Cornelia still marveled at how Kwan had been found among the hundreds of emails from every conspiracy theorist, psychic medium, crystal-gazing new ager, everyone who claimed to have been told about the globes by aliens during an abduction experience, by angels, by Jesus Christ, by the spirits of Tibetan ascendant masters, by ghosts, JFK, Elvis, Michael Jackson’s disembodied voice, and by renegade Freemasons.
Maybe Rick was right, she mused. Jerry probably had a collection of unpaid interns back in L.A. doing all the work. One particularly motivated college student must have come across Kwan’s email. So now they sat on the deck behind the banker’s house, surrounding him and his wife with lights and camera angles set up to catch the best of the orange-blue twilight horizon.
“I thought I was having a stroke at first,” Kwan said, his gaze darting back and forth between Cornelia and Rick.
With Knight away at Travis, Cornelia and Rick pulled duty in front of the cameras.
“No, actually,” Kwan added, “not at first. At first I thought it was my ear drums.” He paused and glanced at his wife for a fleeting moment. Cornelia thought she saw Marjorie Kwan give him a barely noticeable nod of encouragement. “It was only when it started getting louder,” David Kwan went on. “The ringing, I mean. OK, so that was the start of it. When I knew I was experiencing something strange. I had this…something I could best describe as a ringing in my ear. On and off, you know.”
“Was this like a ringing?” Rick suddenly spoke up. “Or were your ears ringing?”
“Like a ringing,” Kwan said after a moment’s hesitation. “Not a clear ringing. That’s what I told my doctor. It was more like…. It’s hard to describe. Like a hum all around you. You feel like you’re in the middle of some giant vibration. Like you’re inside a giant engine. And I could feel it in my ears more than anything.”
“So he went to the doctor,” Marjorie Kwan added.
“Yes. Yes, I did,” her husband confirmed. “At first I thought it was my ear drums. So he checked it and he finds nothing. Nice, huh? Absolutely nothing wrong with my ears. Well, I wasn’t suffering any hearing loss. But then that damn hum would come and go. But I had no other ear canal related problems. No infection. No loss of balance. Nothing.”
“And then the possibility of a stroke came up?” Cornelia asked.
David nodded with a rueful look. “Just the thought scared the hell out of me. Or worse yet, the possibility of a tumor.”
Cornelia noticed the dark, tense look crossing Marjorie’s face, and she could feel for what these people must have been through.
“So anyway, they had me undergo an MRI scan. Nothing. Didn’t know if I should be relieved or scared. I didn’t have a brain tumor or a stroke. But then the hum, the ringing, the whole thing would come back. What the hell was wrong with me? I thought I was losing my mind.”
“Your doctors implied as much,” Marjorie said bitterly. “Of course they won’t say, ‘well, we have no idea what’s going on here and we have no clue what’s wrong with you.’ So they tell him he has a psychosomatic illness….”
“That I should see a psychiatrist.”
Marjorie rolled her eyes in disgust. Cornelia couldn’t blame her.
“The day the globe showed up, I was willing to see anyone!” David said. “It felt like a jackhammer was in my mouth.”
“Whoa!” Rick exclaimed.
Cornelia noticed him shaking his head. “Exactly,” she said. “So what did you do?”
“I had to take the day off from work, for one. Now mind you, the hum, as strong as it was, wasn’t there non-stop. It came and went. Like in cycles.”
“How long between the cycles?” Rick asked.
“Uhm…about an hour or so. I don’t know. Maybe an hour. I didn’t try to time it. Hell, I could barely think straight enough for that. But anyway, I called in sick. I couldn’t deal with the office. But I needed to get out of the house. I just had this need to be on the move. It’s weird, I know. I guess if I was doing something, it felt like I was trying to take control of some part of this. Yeah, look, I know how crazy this sounds.”
“No, not at all,” Cornelia replied, but cringed inwardly at almost the moment the words came out of her mouth. She realized how patronizing it sounded.
“So eventually I agreed to do lunch with this friend of mine, John Nicholson, who works on Powell Street. At a law firm.” David paused with a shrug and something of an embarrassed look. “Yeah, you know, he tells me that if there’s something really seriously wrong with me and none of these doctors can diagnose it, then I could have a case going….” He paused again with another shrug. “I wasn’t seriously considering it. I just needed something to do. But anyway, the thing is that
we were going to do lunch, right? So he mentions several places we could go to. Except the weirdest thing happens. I remembered a flier we once got to this new seafood place on California Avenue. It’s right nearby. Close to John’s office. So I just…I just know we have to go there. To that particular spot. And I don’t know why. I mean, I don’t even know how the hell I even remembered that restaurant.”
“On California Street,” Rick said coolly.
David gave him a knowing look. “Yeah. Where the globe shows up. And on the way there, as John and I are talking, the hum in my head is building up. I’m starting to really seriously consider a couple of malpractice suits at that point. What the hell do they mean there’s nothing wrong with me? But all the while, California Street is drawing me like a magnet.”
“But did you see anything?” Cornelia asked.
David shook his head. “No. Nothing. We were in the restaurant when it happened. I can’t explain it. My head was ringing like a bastard, but no, I didn’t see it. Why it didn’t make me go out in the street, watch it appear, I don’t know.” After pausing and giving both Cornelia and Rick very intense, pointed stares, he said, “It was the globe. That’s what caused the hum. I know it now. I’m sure of it. It all went away after the globe appeared. After it rolled down Powell. I heard, I felt, nothing since.”
3.
“Eunice Stevens didn’t say anything about a buzz,” Rick said from behind the wheel. “Or a hum. Or anything like that.”
Although his tone was still controlled, Cornelia’s gaze kept wandering back to his fingers tapping away on the steering wheel in a fast, angry rhythm.
But she, too, was close to doing that any moment now. Sitting in the front passenger seat, she kept feeling the temptation to rest a hand on the dashboard and start drumming her fingers furiously. The SUV’s slow crawl south along the 280 was starting to stretch her own nerves taut now. Their trip from David Kwan’s house to San Francisco International should have taken no more than about fifteen minutes, but they had been on the road for close to an hour now, and were nowhere close to the airport. Their only stroke of luck had come when they were able to gas up the SUV at a Shell station without any serious lines to sit through.
“That’s true,” she replied. “But Kwan said it came to an end right after the globe appeared. I think he’s right.”
“Yeah. The two’ve gotta be connected somehow,” Lacy said.
“But how?” Melinda asked.
“I don’t know,” Lacy replied. “Those things are…different. I don’t know. Alien.”
Ian Durfy, searching for something on his tablet yet again, called out “Alien? Really?” without taking his eyes from the screen.
“Look,” Lacy said. “What I mean is they’re not from around here….”
Rick chuckled now, not exactly with a derisive inflection, but…with a derisive feel nevertheless. “That’s just a little too broad, don’t you think?”
“I agree,” Melinda said. “We have to be a little more methodical here.”
“Methodical,” Lacy said, drawing out the word and winking toward Tony, who was cradling his camera in his lap, trying to cover as much of the conversation as he could. “I like that.”
Tony laughed in return, winking at Melinda. “You and the Doc hang out a lot, right?”
Melinda scowled at him. “Yeah, because this show needs some IQ points, too. Right, Jerry?”
But Jerry, just like on the trip to David Kwan’s house, was back on his phone, tapping out text after text. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “Uh, I agree with Melinda.”
“See, I told you so,” she said with a goodly tinge of mock indignation.
“Well, you and Doc Knight need to form a theory now,” Matt taunted from behind his own camera.
Their banter, however, didn’t help Cornelia’s agitation. “OK, so this is going to be a comedy show?” She hoped to catch Jerry’s eye, but their producer’s attention was still riveted to his phone.
“Well, Jerry?” she asked.
“Don’t mind me,” he said absently. “I’m still trying to get a hold of ABC.”
“If we just come up with a major break in the case, I don’t think we need to worry too much about one network or another,” she replied.
“If we come up with a major break,” Rick answered instead.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Melinda said before Cornelia could reply.
“What else can explain Kwan’s hum?” Matt added quickly.
Cornelia was glad to hear it. “Sure.”
“And that’s what I’m saying,” Lacy also interjected.
“Right,” said Tony. “Even his doctors couldn’t explain it.”
“Except,” said Rick, “we still need to remember Eunice Stevens. Until now she was the closest to a globe’s appearance. And she said nothing about hums and vibrations.”
Except for California Street, Cornelia wanted to yell out loud. “But that’s technically not true,” she said with what she felt was a very sensible tone instead.
“What do you mean?” asked Matt.
Cornelia looked at him, then looked into the lens of his camera. “That the block all around the Powell and California intersection was full of people. Along with David Kwan.”
Rick nodded calmly. “OK, so they might have been closer. And do you think they all heard something?”
“All right…you have a point. We don’t know if anyone heard anything. But we can’t discount what Kwan told us.”
“Do you really want to complicate this whole thing?” Lacy asked.
“Why not?” Melinda said, sarcasm well in place. “It’s getting a little too dull for my taste.”
After a beat, Lacy said, “What if only some people can hear it and not others? How’s that for a theory?” Her tone, Cornelia thought, was surprisingly serious, considering the tense jocularity that had been possessing the group the slower and slower their commute got.
But what she said made perfect sense, Cornelia realized. “So it doesn’t matter how close Eunice Stevens was to the Mount Shasta globe.”
“Now that’s a good point if I ever heard one,” Rick conceded.
“And I’m on it!” Ian spoke up from the back of the SUV.
Cornelia looked in his direction. “Say what?”
“Stories of the other globe appearances. Any mention of anything about a hum, a noise, a vibration.”
4.
“In plain English,” Knight’s voice came through the SUV’s speakers, “what they’re saying is we’ve been fired. The military no longer wants to do business with the show.”
“We’ve been fired?” Jerry yelled, and for a moment Cornelia thought he would spring from his seat and lunge toward the F-150’s overhead microphone. “We’ve been fired?” he yelled again, actually rising over the thunder of a jetliner passing low overhead and descending toward one of San Francisco International’s runways. Given the fact that most of the SUV’s windows had been shot out and they were next to the airport now, the volume of Jerry’s tantrum was impressive. “You mean we, the team here. Us! Not you obviously, Doctor.” When he sank back into his seat to plow his fingers through his hair in exasperation, Cornelia thought he was through. Except then his body tensed again, as if his seat had secretly been rigged as an electric chair and someone just blasted some near-lethal voltage through his body. “What the fuck?” he screamed, yet conveyed only powerlessness. “Fuck! Goddamn it!”
“OK, look, Jerry…,” Knight’s unperturbed voice came through the speaker.
“And what are you doing up there?” Jerry cut him off. “Come on! You’re in the middle of it. So why aren’t you fighting for the rest of the team?”
Before Knight could reply, Cornelia spoke up, trying to sound likewise sensible and low key. Yelling would serve no purpose here. “I don’t understand. Why are they keeping you up
there?”
“Yeah,” Knight replied with an odd sort of nonchalance now. And Cornelia wondered if he was trying to antagonize Jerry this time. “Well, they haven’t thrown me off the base because they think I can help them.”
“You can help them?” Jerry snapped.
The peevishness in those words, the condescension, Cornelia thought, was not the right way to go. As she had learned since Knight had been added to this team, the biggest egos in show business paled in comparison to the egos of academia. Knight enjoyed needling Jerry every time the producer tried to let it be known that he was the true alpha male of the group.
“Jerry, you need to control yourself,” Knight said, and now Cornelia could have sworn she could hear the smirk on his face. “All right? We all need to be constructive here. The fellowship has to hold.”
Cornelia could see Jerry’s chest heaving. She wondered what he was about to yell back at the professor. Instead, he merely said, “We must have an entire team to document this professionally.”
Cornelia guessed that that must have taken an epic amount of self control for Jerry. At the same time, she was frustrated by his solipsistic remark. If anyone would have wanted to mock the stereotype of Hollywood self-importance, they couldn’t have come up with a better line than that. As much of an egomaniac as he might have been, Cornelia also thought Jerry was quite bright. Trying to spar with Knight when the old man had the upper hand was a dumb thing to do. If Knight wanted to, he could make sure this instant that Confirmation would never get anywhere near government inside-information again.
“Yes, Jerry,” Knight said, “they seem to be under the impression that a doctorate in anthropology might be more important right now than having produced Terror from the Fifth Dimension.”
Jerry was predictably nonplussed by that, his chest heaving again and veins rising along his forehead. But Cornelia was happy to see that common sense prevailed in the producer and he kept his mouth shut.
“All right?” Knight’s voice came through the speakers again. But this time the attitude, Cornelia thought, might have been dialed down just a notch. Knight had gotten his shot in, had scored a good hit into Jerry’s ego, the proper testosterone hierarchy had been established, and now it was time to do serious business. “So calm down, Jerry. I’m trying to help you. I am trying to talk them into letting you stay a part of the media team documenting all this. But maybe you can help out by—”
Confirmation Page 17