Confirmation

by Barna William Donovan

  Rick turned the radio off upon the opening bars of the AC/DC song.

  As his gaze swept the hotel room, he ran his fingers through his hair, rubbed his eyes, and fingered the tender spot on the left side of his jaw. It was a reminder of a punch courtesy of Cornelia yesterday afternoon.

  The fight in the helicopter yesterday was more akin to a wrestling match, with the gunman—since identified as Maury Wexler, a contributor to a local conspiracy web page—refusing to give up his weapon, trying his best to blow Rick away, or shoot the car-wreck victim strapped onto a stretcher on the helicopter, or, failing either of those options, to kill a pilot. Wexler managed no more than the minimal damage a couple of elbow jabs to Rick’s stomach and chest could deliver. But after Wexler departed from the helicopter following a shove from Rick a moment before Wexler would have been able to shoot one of the pilots, Rick thought the last threat of physical assault had been neutralized. The helicopter returned to its landing pad, to be greeted by most of the globe team and, taking point on the pad, Cornelia. Before saying anything, though, she clocked him on the jaw.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” she had shouted over the racket of the helicopter. “Huh? Are you mentally deranged?”

  Still high on adrenaline, Rick had almost burst out laughing. “Remember what we said at Travis?” was all he could reply, noting how Cornelia was balling her fists again.

  “About not just sitting by and doing nothing?” Cornelia had yelled. “Getting yourself killed is not an acceptable alternative!”

  Before she could hit him again, Rick had made his move, seizing her by both shoulders and embracing her in a long, deep kiss.

  By the time they had finished, the helicopter’s engines had powered down. While the rotor blades continued their revolutions overhead, their speed decreasing with each turn, it was quiet enough for them to notice some of the laugher, hoots, catcalls, and applause from the people on the platform.

  “What a start to the morning, huh?” Rick heard Cornelia’s voice at last and noticed her lithe, naked form step out of the shadows on the far side of the room. She held a can of soda in her hand, something she must have retrieved from the ridiculously overpriced mini refrigerator.

  Studying all the lines of her stunningly beautiful body, Rick had already tried to push any thoughts of the globes out of his mind. He wanted to care about none of it for as long as he could.

  “It’s the perfect start to the day,” he said as she arrived at the bed and stood over him. He ran his left hand over her thigh, up her buttocks, then caressing her stomach, sliding his fingertips down, questing between her legs.

  The pop of the soda can opening cracked across the silent room. After taking a sip, Cornelia offered him the drink.

  “A caffeine and sugar rush for some energy?” she whispered.

  “Naw,” Rick replied, slipping his hand to the small of her back and pulling her closer still. “I’ve got plenty of energy.”

  Cornelia reached down and tossed the sheet off him. “Good,” she said, and straddled him quickly and smoothly.

  He had, of course, reacted long before she was on top of him, and now their rhythm, their passion, their breathing and pounding heartbeats had them become as one again….as they had the previous evening, just after leaving King’s Medical Center and after Cornelia decided to give up on trying to punch him again. Except for the two of them, an oddly uniform and apocalyptic group-think had bonded all of the members of the globe-study team together. From the soldiers to Kristine Murakami and her doctors, the Confirmation group and the rest of the network TV press corps, a consensus had emerged that the globe phenomenon had just thrown the world into the very final and soon to be very short countdown to something utterly cataclysmic. Doc Knight had especially creeped Rick out. His warning about the dangers of the globes, and the even greater dangers of the “witless, brain dead, new age assholes getting ready to march all of us down the throat of the wolf at the door” made Knight sound like he would now have been at home with Lindsay and the Reconstructionists. Rick needed to get away from all that, needed to have those people out of his life as completely as he could, even if it was only for a few hours. Cornelia felt the same way.

  “It’s like a different group of people came out of that hospital,” Cornelia had said yesterday afternoon.

  That was when she and Rick had been allowed to ride in one of the SUVs without anyone else tagging along. It was after they had left the Honolulu Police Department’s Waikiki substation. The police, naturally, wanted statements on every moment of the attack at the medical center, except the military and the local FBI office were able to wave “national security” around vigorously enough to get everyone released within an hour and on their way back to Hickam.

  “And I can’t even stand being around them right now,” Rick had replied. With a quick couple of turns through traffic, he had lost the rest of the procession heading back to the air base and drove up to the valet parking lot of the nearest and largest hotel he could find on Waikiki Beach.

  As high-strung and paranoid as the rest of the team had gotten, Rick was glad to see that they were still willing to leave him and Cornelia alone for at least one night. The SUV had, of course, its GPS device and could be tracked anywhere. Since they were on an island, how far would they be able to go? But no calls, no hassles came after Rick and Cornelia had decided to strike out on their own.

  They wound up at the Ilikai Hotel on Ala Moana Boulevard and booked an ocean-view room for the night. One of the hotel’s claims to fame, they had been told, was the fact that its penthouse balcony had been zoomed in upon during the opening credits of both the old and new versions of the Hawaii Five-0 TV show, introducing main character Steve McGarrett. By the time Rick and Cornelia stood on their own balcony, the sun had almost completely set, leaving the horizon a darkening indigo against the black silhouette of Diamond Head volcano a few miles away, and leaving them to marvel at the brilliant city lights of Waikiki below.

  Oddly enough, it felt as if neither of them had ever seen a city nightscape as captivating as this before in their lives.

  But not only had the sun risen now, not only had that idiotic morning talk show on the radio forced another globe development into Rick and Cornelia’s blissful, lovemaking solitude, but now the room’s telephone blared to life with its harsh electronic jangle.

  And it refused to stop.

  From within the depths of the pleasure created by their entangled, perspiration-slickened, overheated bodies, Rick tried to will the phone into silence.

  “Someone’s refusing to go away,” Cornelia whispered into his ear.

  “I’m going to kill whoever that is,” he moaned in reply.

  “You need to find out who it is first,” Cornelia said, and kissed him on the cheek.

  “A little lower,” Rick teased in reply.

  “What?”

  “Where you hit me yesterday. It still hurts.”

  Cornelia playfully bit him there instead. “Get the phone!”

  “Yeah? Ballantine,” he growled into the receiver at length.

  “Mr. Ballantine,” a woman from the front desk addressed him. “There is a call for you from a couple of gentlemen here in the lobby. They say it’s extremely urgent and related to the…,” the woman cleared her throat, “the work you are doing with the air force. They say they’re here on behalf of Senator Brandon Markwell.”

  2.

  On their short drive over from the Ilikai Hotel, Rick had told Cornelia that perhaps they had read Senator Brandon Markwell all wrong. Whoever would elect to stay at the much smaller Moana Surfrider, the oldest hotel on Oahu, dwarfed by the enormous modernity of steel and glass edifices of all the new hotels crowding Waikiki, could not have been all that bad.

  “A preference for a historic building over the flash and size of these new hotels speaks to character,” Rick had said, watchi
ng for some signs of agreement on Cornelia’s face but not really finding any.

  That was just before they were told that the senator and his wife were not actually staying in the historic section of the Moana Surfrider. Located on Kalakaua Avenue, a five-minute drive from the Ilikai, the Moana consisted of three segments. The central building was the oldest part of the hotel, originally constructed in 1901. Since then, however, the establishment had been expanded with the Tower and Diamond wings added on to its west and east sides. The modern architecture tagged on to the hotel proper’s Hawaiian Gothic style looked wildly incongruous. Of the two additions, the Tower, where the Markwells now resided, had the hotel’s most extravagant lodging, the Penthouse Ocean Suite. This sort of instinctive and very public gravitation toward the ostentatious, the flashy, and the overpriced kept building Markwell’s reputation as someone incapable of keeping controversy at bay.

  When criticized by a Carson City newspaper for a trip to New York where he tallied hotel and entertainment bills in excess of three hundred thousand dollars, Markwell had started off on the right foot in deflecting the bad press by claiming he would pick up the tab for the various Broadway plays he’d attended and treated his massive entourage of staffers to. However, when offering to spend “no more than a dime” over the travel budget allotted to each member of the Senate, he made headlines by tagging on the quip, “I don’t understand why anyone would think I would bankrupt the treasury or anything. My wife and I have more money than even any grandchildren we might ever have could ever spend. I can more than pay my way where the law requires that I do.”

  The press, political bloggers, and both Republicans and Democrats pounced on him, accusing him of everything from “fleecing the American people for even using a single dime of public money for any sort of travel if he and his wife are so rich, while so many American families are struggling to stay afloat,” to “fostering a cultural atmosphere of waste and overconsumption,” and “showing an open disdain for the traditional family by hinting that he and his wife might not have children.” Markwell’s own response to the controversy was the reminder of both his and his wife’s working class roots. He had worked his way through college holding down two jobs, he reminded, before his eventual success in the dot-com boom of the nineties. His wife had likewise struggled at one point as a none-too-successful child actress before her sudden prosperity as the producer of a series of low-budget, direct-to-video slasher films. Then he added the somewhat boilerplate declaration that, “I am very proud of the fact that my wife and I have been successful, and I devote all my energies to public service to make sure that the American dream and the same success is within the reach of all Americans.” But the Nevada press also pointed out that Markwell’s pro-environment rhetoric and voting record quickly increased in the wake of his “New York-gate.” “At least Senator Bling knows how to keep his friends close and happy,” The Las Vegas Sun remarked after the controversy.

  “Mr. Ballantine. Ms. Oxenburg,” Brandon Markwell’s mellifluous tones greeted Rick and Cornelia as they were ushered toward the Penthouse Ocean Suite’s balcony. “I’m so glad we are able to meet.” While politicians of the media age were all impeccably trained for public speaking, Markwell’s voice was somewhere on the level of a star radio announcer or voice-over artist.

  The senator was waiting for them in the living room, a glass of what might have been either water or vodka in one hand and an enthusiastic—yet not really insincerely so—bearing. In a pair of white silk slacks, a blue and white Hawaiian shirt, and crisp white loafers, he looked more like the sort of leisurely celebrities whose company he enjoyed so much rather than a legislator about to delve into the government’s response to a world-wide crisis in the making. Physically, however, Markwell looked exactly like the man every political handler and P.R. professional would ever dream of. At fifty-two years old, he looked like a former college track athlete or baseball player who was still in the same fighting shape he was over a quarter of a century ago. His trim, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted athletic physique, along with his impeccably coifed salt-and-pepper hair and handsome face, made Rick think of a man in a low-testosterone-treatment commercial explaining how his new regimen of wonder drugs gave him the energy and stamina of a man half his age in the boardroom and the bedroom.

  “Our pleasure, Senator,” Rick replied after Cornelia said “hello.” “Have you already met with the team at Hickam?”

  “No. Since you were in the neighborhood, I thought we should meet first. And, by the way, this is my wife.”

  Glancing in the direction of the room the senator pointed to, Rick, almost on cue, heard the clicks of a pair of high heels upon tiles as Devon Markwell entered. The nearly robotically timed entrance reminded Rick of every quip and one-liner he’d ever read about the “android couple” and the “nip-and-tuck couple” from Las Vegas. Standing about five feet eight or nine inches tall, Markwell’s wife looked like a former model who might have been put through a marine corps boot camp by a drill instructor with an obsession for weight training. Devon Markwell didn’t so much as walk or move as she flexed. Outfitted in a tight, short white skirt and sleeveless light grey shirt, she was a stunning, angular specimen of muscle and sinew.

  “Thank you for joining us,” she said, and shook hands with both Rick and Cornelia.

  Devon’s attractive yet enigmatic smile, with lips that were slightly turned down in a perpetual pout and a strong-chinned face, framed by her very light blonde hair cut in a pageboy, reminded Rick of the “icy blondes” favored by Alfred Hitchcock in so many of his films. Although Devon had the similar light complexion Cornelia had, there was a natural warmness and an inviting glow that seemed to emanate from Cornelia. Devon Markwell made an instant impression of hard formidability.

  “Would you like anything to drink, by the way?” she asked. “It’s early in the morning. Any coffee, maybe?”

  “Thank you,” Cornelia said.

  “Excellent!” Devon replied before Rick could say anything.

  “Sure,” he added a beat later.

  Before Devon left the room, Rick noticed how her gaze seemed to linger on Cornelia for a moment.

  “Senator,” Rick said to break the silence that hung over the room as Markwell’s wife sashayed out. “Were you just staying down on the Big Island?”

  “Yes,” Markwell said with a toothy, campaign-trail smile, “and hopefully I’ll get to go back, too. There’s a former eighties hair-band drummer vacationing there, and I’d like the chance to win back some money he took from me on the golf course. But, first of all, let’s set down some ground rules, all right? It’s Brandon and Devon.”

  Cornelia nodded and smiled.

  “Sure,” Rick seconded. “But I’m curious. Why us?”

  “Come on,” Markwell replied. “Let’s go out on the balcony.” But as Rick and Cornelia complied, he said, “It’s because you two were in the thick of things, Rick.”

  “Unfortunately,” Rick said as they took seats around a circular, glass-topped table.

  “Hell of a thing it was, jumping into that helicopter,” Devon’s voice sounded off before her husband could say anything.

  She joined them with a very pleasant smile, but not coffee, and took a seat between Markwell and Cornelia.

  Room service, Rick surmised, would be serving them shortly.

  “Well,” he said, in answer to Devon’s comment, “that guy was going to take that chopper hostage. Now that’s bad enough in my book, but that was a medevac bird. Someone needed to get to that hospital right away.”

  “You’re a hero, Rick,” Markwell said with a firm, appreciative nod.

  “It was instinct,” Rick said, and rubbed his jaw where Cornelia had hit him.

  She sent a little mock scowl his way when he glanced at her. “It was reckless,” she said.

  “Heroes often are,” Markwell said with proud smile. “But this is what I
would like to ask you: What is your impression of people like those attackers?”

  “Other than those two trying to kill us, I didn’t get much of a chance to form an impression.”

  Markwell didn’t reply. Suddenly, Rick noticed his hail-fellow-well-met mask slipped. Markwell’s brown eyes seemed to bore right into him, commanding him to try his best to form an impression and answer the question. The impression Rick did form on the spot, in turn, was of Markwell himself. The man’s oddball, hedonist image seemed to be concealing something very tough and, most importantly, smart about him.

  “They were obviously disturbed,” Rick said, “and there are probably a lot more of them out there. These are the moon-landing-was-a-hoax people. The 9/11-was-an-inside-job people. Osama bin Laden is still alive and the theme song of Mr. Ed reveals Satanic messages when you play it backward. They make up their minds about what they want to believe and selectively interpret the world to fit those beliefs.”

  “Interesting,” Markwell said evenly and with an appreciative nod. “People with all kinds of strong religious and spiritual beliefs do the same.”

  True enough, Rick thought, but said, “Except the Catholics or Buddhists or Orthodox Jews aren’t trying to shoot up hospitals. For that matter, neither are the believers of most mainstream religions. You know, I kind of liked that stuff the spokesman from the Vatican Observatory said a couple of days ago.”

  But now he also wondered what it was that separated people like Lindsay from Murray Wexler and his redheaded buddy, who’d tried to slash Lacy and got his arm broken for his effort.

  “But we’ve been talking to people like the two at the hospital since this whole thing began,” said Cornelia. “We talked to one back in San Francisco. He thinks the government made the globes with time travel technology—”

  There was a faint audible ring from the suite’s front door, and a minute later one of the Markwells’ aides glanced through the balcony door. “Room service,” he said simply, and Markwell gave him an easy nod.