“Exactly,” Rick said.
But Knight still appeared to be committed to standing his ground. “Somebody out there,” he said as portentously as he probably could muster, “is no doubt putting that car bomb together right now. People like Moloy and Wexler are off-the-rail psychos. They don’t need anyone pushing them any further.”
Rick noticed Brubaker massaging his right temple. “Perhaps a point can be made for prudence. For now at least.”
“How about prudence and identification?” asked Robinson. “Can we have these lunatics under some kind of surveillance?”
“I guess we can try,” Brubaker said.
There was a long beat of silence in the room.
At length, Murakami asked, “And the next item on the agenda?”
All eyes gravitated toward her.
“Maybe,” she said, “we should make sure we don’t lose our globe sensitives. Does Senator Bling have any suggestions for that one?”
This time, all gazes drifted to Rick and Cornelia.
“Not really,” Rick had to reply.
“I say we keep track of them,” Rutkowski said with a stiff nod.
“I agree,” Robinson replied quickly.
“Why?” Brubaker asked, looking at Murakami now.
“Because they’re still our only connection to this phenomenon,” she said.
“So now we should bring them all in, Doctor?” Rutkowski asked, not hiding his surprise over her change of heart from a day ago.
“Yes!” Murakami said strongly. “Now we should. Because now we know for sure they could bolt, go into hiding.”
Knight shook his head slowly, but Rick noticed how he was drumming his fingers violently on the conference desk.
“Now I think it’s pointless,” Knight said, and paused. He swept his gaze around the room, as if challenging everybody to make eye contact. “Look, folks, whatever’s doing this just said ‘Fuck you’ to us. That’s exactly what all the globe sensitivity was. It just sent us a message with its middle finger. It says, ‘I’m in charge and not you. You can’t figure me out. You can’t predict what I’m about to do, so don’t even try.’ This sensitivity cluster here in Hawaii, all the other ones in the world…. Meaningless!”
“But David Kwan felt it and the globe appeared in San Francisco,” said Murakami.
Garret Robinson shook his head on the screen overhead. “No,” his grim voice came from the speakers embedded in the walls, “Doctor Knight is correct. All these sensitives, they were like radar chaff. You throw out false signals to hide the real one.”
Murakami’s eyes drifted off to some point on the surface of the table unseen by anyone else. “Oh, God,” she said at length. “Of course. That makes sense. David Kwan might be the real thing, and there might be other real sensitives out there.”
“Except,” Robinson completed the thought, “no one’s going to pay attention to anyone else again who hears sounds and buzzes.”
“Well,” Knight began, with a sound to his voice that was an unpleasant kind of a cross between self-satisfaction and disgust, “depending on where in the world you are, you better keep your mouth shut if you think you’re hearing any hums or vibrations. An experiencer in Ghana got stoned to death because they thought his hearing of the hums was a sign of witchcraft. Nice, huh?”
Murakami pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head. “This is spiraling out of control.”
“And there’s nothing we can do to control it,” Knight said. “Except to prepare—and given the state of the world we’re living in, I don’t know how that’s going to work—to prepare for whatever comes next.”
“What do you think is coming next?” Graham asked.
“Nothing good. A takeover. Total control. A demand for total obedience. I’m telling you all, this will get a lot worse. And like I’ve been saying before, then something, whatever made all these globes, will make itself known and it will demand that we worship it.”
There was a comparison Rick just had to bring up for Knight now. “You know, Doc, my ex-wife would probably agree with you right now. Except she’d call it the Antichrist.”
Knight gave him a sharp look. “There is no such thing as the Antichrist…but she probably has the right idea.”
So here’s someone else going through a perfect one-eighty switch along with Murakami, Rick thought. The incident at the hospital must have done a real number on him.
“I agree,” Robinson’s voice came through the speakers. “This is a threat.”
“And the nuts are already flocking to the Philippines,” Knight said, “They want to commune with the globe spirits ushering in the new age. Idiots!”
“Was there a buzz in the Philippines?” Cornelia asked.
“Probably not,” Brubaker said, and shrugged.
And now Rick noticed Cornelia looking at him, attempting to make eye contact.
“By the way,” he said at length, knowing full well where the line of conversation he was about to open up would lead, “how about we add another item to the agenda?”
“What’s that?” Brubaker asked.
“This story out of Nebraska….”
5.
Rick’s eyes took in the expanse of the stunningly beautiful stretch of beach, sand, and surf, a brilliant cloudless sky overhead. It was the sight millions of people paid a lot of money to visit or yearned to visit at least once in their lives. He watched the beachgoers all around, the crowds that appeared to be unconcerned with the madness metastasizing out of control all around the world. He wondered about why they all looked so calm. Had they all dreamed of, planned for, saved for this trip to Hawaii for such a long time that now they refused to let the globe stories dominating every form of mass media bother them? However they were dealing with it all and managing to look as carefree as they did, Rick envied them. He wanted to be one of them right now.
“You know,” he said, and turned to Cornelia as they walked in the water along the edge of the beach. “I like it out here enough that I might not want to go back to the base again.”
“You want to quit?” she asked. “After what you said back in California? What are you going to do then?”
Rick simply shrugged.
“Jerry’s not going to be too happy,” Cornelia said. “Neither will your agent.”
“Everything we’re doing…and I’m not just talking about us, the show. I mean them. Robinson, Rutkowski, Murakami. This entire circus. It’s all pointless. We’re running around in circles here. Knight was actually correct. You know that? He was right. The globe-maker just told us to go fuck ourselves. Coming out here was a waste of time.”
“Look, Rick, I was annoyed too that they’re not taking the Nebraska kid seriously,” Cornelia said with a calm, agreeable tone.
“Self-important fools!”
“That they are. But look—”
“Do you know what I’m gonna do?” Rick felt himself blurt out. As much as he wanted Cornelia to calm him down, as much as he wanted to blow off steam by coming out to this beach, it still wasn’t working. “Huh? Do you know what I’m gonna do?”
“What?”
“I’m gonna take the senator up on his offer. I want to fly down to the Big Island, play a round of golf, and watch his magician friend put on a show.”
Even before the last words left his mouth, Rick noticed Cornelia’s eyes cloud over.
“If I were you,” she said at length, “I’d watch my back around your new BFFs, Brandon and Devon. I think those two people only take part in whatever they can personally profit from.”
“Yeah, well, so far they’ve said more things that make sense that anyone on this little globe-hunting study group of ours. Can you believe what Brubaker and Knight and Rutkowski are proposing back on the base right now? They want to hunt down anyone writing anything about conspiracy theories. They
want to put the island under martial law.”
Cornelia nodded with a distant, thoughtful look in her eyes. “Yeah, that’s a little extreme. I agree.”
“And Doc Knight? I mean, holy shit! I think he’s lost his mind. He really is worse than Lindsay now.”
Cornelia chuckled at that with a quick nod. “You might be right there too.”
“So yeah, what Markwell said about civil liberties…hell yeah. He’s right. Forget the hookers and the bling and all that B.S. He’s actually the sanest person here.”
Cornelia shook her head and looked away from Rick. Her expression was more akin to disappointment with him now, rather than anger.
So Rick quickly said, “Look, what really matters is that I’ve just heard the U.S. government’s top-flight globe investigators say crazier things than Markwell ever has in his life.”
After a beat, Cornelia said, “All right, Rick, maybe that’s true. But I think there’s still some advantage to staying here a little longer.”
This time, though, there was something else in her voice. Something tense and nervous. There were bigger things to worry about, she seemed to concede with her tone alone, than the odd private lives of the Senator and Mrs. Markwell.
“What’s that?” Rick asked.
“If things go bad, being with the military might be the safest place.”
“If things go bad, it’s probably because they will make it go bad,” Rick said, almost immediately realizing that he had missed Cornelia’s meaning.
“Or maybe not.”
“What?” he asked her worries dawning on him. “You think aliens will attack?”
“I don’t know,” Cornelia said strongly. “OK, Rick? I don’t know what could go wrong. But we’re not just dealing with human stupidity. There’s something out there….”
Rick took a heavy breath before replying. It had felt good to rant until now, but he couldn’t ignore Cornelia’s fears. And she did have point. “I know—”
Before he could say anything more, he felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. He quickly fished it out and glanced at its screen. Oh, crap….
“What is it?” Cornelia asked.
“A text from Jerry. He says to check the news. There’s fighting in the Philippines.”
6.
Cornelia had told him that she felt ridiculous, but Rick thought that was still better than feeling chafed and uncomfortable. Since a second text from Jerry said they had less than fifteen minutes to get back on the base if they wanted to remain a part of the globe-hunt team before the installation would be locked down, they sprinted out of the water, up the sand, and to their SUV as fast as they could. Rick had made the mistake of sticking his wet, sand-covered feet back in his sneakers, whereas Cornelia remained barefoot. Now, walking toward the base’s command center with shoes full of sand—the cuffs of his jeans still rolled up to look ridiculous as well—it felt as if someone was trying to take his skin off by making him wear stockings made of abrasive-paper. Padding along the corridors barefoot might have been embarrassing Cornelia, but she should have been appreciating the comfortable choice she’d made.
So I guess I couldn’t leave it all behind after all, Rick thought as they entered another chaotic command center. Cornelia called my bluff.
“State Department’s telling all Americans to stay away from the Philippines.” Sam Rutkowski got them caught up on the news immediately. “And they’re putting all our military bases in the Pacific on alert. Some terror cell out there....” He paused, looking like he was grappling for a name as Kristine Murakami appeared behind him. “What the hell’s their name?”
“Abu Sayyaf,” she answered immediately. “They’re active in—”
Rutkowski cut her off, though. “Yeah, in the same general location the globe showed up.”
“Southern areas of the country,” Murakami forcefully inserted the information.
“Where a group of these spirit-power new age nitwits go stumbling into,” Rutkowski said, with the expression of someone who had just bitten into a rotten piece of meat. “Remember when some Iranian cleric said this whole thing was about Satan’s plan to exterminate Islam?”
“Don’t tell me,” Rick replied. “These Abu Sayyaf people are big fanboys of his, right?”
“How’d you guess?”
“Newsbreak, ladies and gentlemen,” Frederick Graham exclaimed as he strode over. “Reports are coming in about a hotel bombing in Manila.”
“Hotel?” Cornelia gasped.
“Look at that,” Murakami said with the same stunned, breathy voice, and pointed at one of the command center’s larger screens.
It was showing a lot of shaky-cam images from some type of a newscast. A rapid-fire edit of flames shooting out of the windows of a tall building, a billowing wall of smoke enveloping the establishment, running people, dazed people milling around, and frantic paramedics and various first-responders moving bloodied and soot covered bodies filled the screen.
“They’re waiting to confirm which hotel it was,” Graham said. “Big one, though. Fancy. A lot of Americans. They’re also promising to shoot down American aircraft next. There will be a press conference from the White House soon.”
Rick felt Cornelia next to him. “I think a trip to Nebraska’s pretty much not happening right now,” she quietly said into his ear.
“Yeah,” he muttered and started backing away from Murakami, Rutkowski, and Graham, who were paying no attention to either him or Cornelia anyway. “Unless we go to Plan B and ask for some outside help.”
“Help?” Cornelia asked. “From who?”
“My new BFFs.”
7.
U.S. PREPARES FOR HOSTILITIES AT HOME AND ABROAD
By Trevor McSweeney, The Washington Post
In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the Philippine islands, the United States is experiencing a state of heightened alert not seen since the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. As warships deploy to the Philippines, many in the U.S. are preparing for the worst.
In an effort to boost security on U.S. military installations in the Philippines, the Pacific Fleet’s Carrier Strike Group Nine deployed its flagship aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, along with the guided missile cruisers USS Chancellorsville and USS Cape St. George to Manila.
“Our objective is the security of military bases and personnel that might be targets for further attacks,” explained Rear Admiral Connor F. Stevens, Commander of the Pacific Fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor Naval Base in Hawaii. “Should the situation on the islands change, we are prepared to support the evacuation of civilians and aid in assisting counterterrorist efforts.”
Many Americans, however, have been left unsettled by the violence in the Pacific because of the added unknown of the globe phenomenon.
“Everything until now we could understand, you know?” said Neil Horton, a software engineer from Bethesda, Maryland. “The political situations, the religious situations until now were something we knew about. We understood…I guess we understood as well as [you can] what was behind 9/11, behind everything going on in the Middle East. However, this whole globe situation just keeps changing every day.”
Horton also added that he has been taking special precautions protecting his family.
“I was never the survivalist and gun-type person until now,” he said. “But now I’m ready to move my family out of the city and to start stocking up on everything we need stay safe…to have enough to eat in case of any type of an emergency, and to protect ourselves. It’s just the unknown. It’s not knowing anything that’s so terrifying.”
Despite the gun control debate heating up once more, sporting goods stores and gun stores have reported record sales of firearms and ammunition.
“The next threat could come from anywhere,” said Louise McClaren, a single mother of three children ages six to
fourteen in Lawton, Oklahoma, who purchased two shotguns and a handgun following reports of the hospital attack in Honolulu. “I mean, I could not believe that craziness in Hawaii. What if some disturbed person comes and attacks you because of something you said about a globe? So I’m going to do whatever it takes to defend my children. You can believe anything you want about globes or aliens or whatever, but you will stay away from my family.”
A commission of mayors, however, issued a statement that the best defense against any globe-related threat on U.S. soil is to keep a level head and stay calm.
“Aside from one accident, no globe has hurt a person,” said Senator Brandon Markwell, who was vacationing in Hawaii at the time of the King’s Hospital shooting in Honolulu and who supports the mayors. “Only people driven to violence out of fear and unfounded panic have hurt others. At this point we need to heed the words of President Roosevelt. All we have to fear is fear itself.”
Chapter 10
Secret Conference
Dan Knight sat in the conference room again, doors closed and locked, two Navy SEALS outside and making sure no one could enter. Except this time he was alone. He was looking at Garret Robinson on the teleconferencing screen ahead of him, trying to read the man’s face, trying to interpret his intentions. Was Robinson, he wondered, acting as a grieving father in the decisions he made, the course of action he was recommending to the Pentagon? Had he been converted to a new way of seeing things by his “saved” son? Or was he what he had always been and acting for the same reasons; a military man convinced that what they were about to do was the best possible tactical move?
But it didn’t matter, Knight decided, because it was the right thing to do. What the Pentagon was about to embark on was the only chance the world had of surviving what lay ahead.
“Peretti wants to stay put,” he told Robinson. “He thinks this is where the action is, and he wants to be where the rest of the media are.”
Robinson nodded. “Good. It’s best to keep him out of it.”
“All right, I understand what the next step has to be, but you need to give me details now. What exactly will it be?”
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