by Mark Wandrey
After circling the North Meadow he reached a cluster of marked cruisers and a gathering of uniformed officers. As he walked closer, he could see in the back door of one of the units a thirty-something black man with dreadlocks and a haunted look on his face.
“Morning gents,” he said as he approached, “what do we have here?”
“How ya doing, Lieutenant? First unit on the scene nabbed this perp; figured he might have something to do with all this. That unit is in with the feds and hasn’t come out. They left this character with us and we don’t know what to do with him.”
“What’s the collar for?”
“Nothing that we can tell,” said another officer. “Ran his rap sheet and he’s got a long page. Mostly possession, snatch and grab, one count of GTO, that’s about it. I can’t see this character being involved in anything that would bring Uncle Sam down here in force.”
“What does he have to say about this?” Harper asked.
“Nothing, he just talks to himself, smiles like a lunatic and laughs.”
“Really? Let’s see him then.” The uniformed officers lead Harper to the man sitting half out of the back seat of a police car. He wasn’t cuffed; he’d already been searched and had no history of violence. As Harper approached, the perp looked up and smiled.
“Greetings on this most special day, officer!”
“Sure, soon as the brass shows up he’s Mr. Talkative!” laughed one of the uniforms.
“Greetings to you sir, I’d like to ask you a couple questions.”
“Go right ahead.”
Harper had to smile at the man’s unusual demeanor. “What happened last night?”
“One of the Angels of God came to Earth.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes! It brought forth a shining Portal for us to travel to Heaven!”
“And what part of the Bible is that from?” The man looked confused, glancing around like he was searching for something missing from his mind.
“I don’t know; I wasn’t religious until tonight. Hell, I don’t even think this is in the Bible, but it has to do with God.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because I saw an angel!”
“Really? Can you describe this angel?”
“Sure, it looks like one of those creatures from mythology, you know? The ones that are half horse and half man?”
“You mean a centaur?”
“Yah man! A centaur, I was trying to remember what they was called. Who woulda’ thunk that angels were centaurs?”
“So what makes a centaur an angel?” Harper asked.
“When they are real, for one thing. And when they bring a Portal to Heaven, for the other.”
“What Portal are you talking about?” The man turned and looked in the direction of the fed’s cordon with a big smile.
“I saw the angel create the Portal from a column of stone, it inserted a glowing rod and made it flow like water. Then it removed the rod, walked through the Portal and returned to Heaven! But it will be back, I’m certain!”
“Why?”
“Because of the writings on the Portal! This world is doomed, you know. The Day of Judgment is coming, and that Portal is our only escape to Heaven!”
Harper stood from where he had been crouching and looked in the direction of the North Meadow. The feds had erected a wall of corrugated aluminum and ringed the area with high power mercury vapor lights. Men and vehicles buzzed around the area with furious activity. Some deep part of him wanted desperately to know what was inside that meadow. Then he looked down at the seemingly insane perp, a smile growing across his face. “You got a really good look at this Portal, uhm, what was your name?”
“My name is Victor. And I think I am one of the new prophets of God!”
“Victor, Prophet Victor,” he said with a small placating smile, “can you describe this Portal well enough so that a sketch artist can draw it? How about the ‘angel’?”
“I could draw the Portal myself, but they would need to help with the symbols and designs. I have an excellent memory. I was going to be a lawyer before my father was killed. We lost everything, but now God is giving me another chance.”
Victor continued going on about God and beginning to sound more like a televangelist by the moment.
“Get on the horn and see if we can get a sketch artist over here to talk to Prophet Victor,” Harper told a uniformed officer. The man nodded and went to his unit while Victor puffed up at being called a prophet.
Suddenly a helicopter roared over their heads and slowed to land in the meadow. A temporary helipad had already been constructed by the FBI. Harper was all but certain he saw the unmistakable NASA logo on the tail of the helicopter as it shot by. “What the heck is going on here?”
“This is just bullshit!” Mindy cried in despair, pointing and rolling her eyes. “I mean look, there’s the Little Dipper! They could at least have made an attempt!”
“Dearest, it’s an episode of Star Trek Enterprise,” Jake said from the couch next to her.
“But it’s supposed to be on a world hundreds of light years from Earth, and look at the sky! They didn’t even try to change the constellations!” Jake sighed and got up to get some popcorn, leaving his girlfriend grumbling to herself. People had accused her of ruining perfectly good sci-fi by nitpicking, but she had always said that if you spend millions in special effects the least you could do was to spend a little more and alter the star patterns. “Now the movie Stargate at least made an attempt!” she yelled at his departing figure.
“Yes, dear,” was his patronizing reply as he rifled through the fridge. She looked askance in his direction and turned back to the TV.
“That Scott Bakula, what a hunk,” she said under her breath.
“I heard that.”
Mindy chuckled and went back to watching the show.
A short time later the show was over and Jake was reaching for the remote to go channel surfing when an announcement came on the television. “Tonight at ten, a special development in New York City where police and the Federal Government have cordoned off part of Central Park.”
Jake raised the remote to change the channel.
“No, wait!” Mindy said and sat up to get a better view. It was a short teaser of the later news broadcast and only showed a couple seconds of a reporter standing outside a police cordon. Snarled traffic circled the park, and a long distance shot followed of the meadow in question taken from the roof of a building. The last shot was probably from the far edge of the park and didn’t show a lot more than a circle of lights, trailers and blurry figures moving around. A metallic wall had been erected around the center of the meadow obscuring the lights’ focal point. Some of the video was shot during the night, and some in the day.
“Why do they need all those lights in daylight?” Jake wondered aloud “This must be recent, the sun is still up.”
“Probably so they can get close-up detailed imagery. You know, how they use lights to film movies during the day?”
“Oh, sure, that makes sense.” The long distance view panned across the scene for a second before switching to the commentator who wrapped the teaser.
“What was that, just before they cut?” Jake asked.
“What, I didn’t see anything?” Mindy complained and snatched the remote from him. Like most men, he was the remote king of the household so it took her a minute to find the button she was looking for. Accessing the scrolling memory, she backed up the live program and replayed the last ten seconds. Finding what she wanted, Mindy froze the frame and zoomed in. The view was fuzzier now, but the logo on the side of one of the trailers was unmistakably that of NASA.
“What would NASA be doing there?” Jake said, speaking the question she had been thinking. After a moment she let it go forward to the present time and some moronic sitcom was now airing.
“Can we check out this broadcast when it comes on in an hour?”
“Sure,” he said, a little curious
himself. An hour later they switched back to the expected newscast from a show on crocodiles they’d been enjoying. The news broadcast was mostly the same boring stuff, about people dying, being robbed, suing over petty or ridiculous things, and seven kids being born in Peru to one woman. When they finally got to the story they were interested in there was precious little more to offer. The distance shots were longer, and there were a few ‘man on the street’ interviews, but no real information. The story ended with a New York anchorman summarizing what was known.
“At some time this morning, NYPD uniformed units encountered something highly unusual. They did not provide any detail and only requested backup and as they stated, ‘better call the FBI too; I think this is above our heads.’ NYPD arrived on the scene at approximately the same time as the FBI and the Federal Government agents quickly took control of the situation. The initial responding NYPD officers are being detained and we assume questioned at this time. There is no more information and so far inquiries to our government at all levels are going unanswered. This is Todd Bakerson reporting from-”
She snapped off the TV with a stab on the power button and sat staring at the screen. It took her a moment before she realized Jake had asked her a question several times. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“I said, do you know what this is all about?”
“Not a clue, I just spotted the NASA truck there and wanted to know more.”
“I bet some satellite crashed in the park and they’re all over it. Could be a Chinese satellite or old Soviet sputnik. That would draw this kind of attention.”
“Unlikely. New York is too far north for most satellites to have come down. Their orbits more closely parallel that of our shuttles we launch from southern Florida. This is something bigger. Besides, if it were just a satellite they wouldn’t have gone to all the effort of concealing the site. Where are the witnesses? If a ten pound meteor were to crash in the middle of the Pacific at midnight there would be a dozen witnesses all clamoring to talk about it on the air.” She gestured at the TV as she spoke. “Not one person they interviewed said they’d seen anything. Damn peculiar in a city that size.”
“What, you think it’s little green men?” He turned his head away, regretting the comment the moment it had left his lips, but she didn’t say a word. She’d heard what he said but was still looking at the blank screen and thinking. Thinking about the life she had left behind, thinking about a brief signal coming from a lonely star cluster that had ended that life, and also thinking about what Jake had just said.
Lt. Harper carried two Styrofoam containers while cradling a couple steaming cups of patented 14th precinct java to the room where Victor sat working with a police sketch artist. The former street punk, drug user, and petty thief smiled brilliantly at him and the food he was bringing. He wondered if they had somehow pulled the wrong rap sheet. He put one of the Styrofoam containers and coffee in front of Victor and took a seat nearby. “Thanks so much, Lt. Harper!” Victor said with a big smile and opened the container. The corned beef sandwich and potato chips were cheap from the precinct cafeteria but Victor acted like it was gourmet food.
The sketch artist had two computers working with quick and sure movements of a stylus. “Lieutenant, I’m not sure if this is a legitimate use of my time.”
“Don’t worry about it, Jennifer; I’ll sign the voucher on this one.” She shrugged and went back to work. The last six hours, Victor had continued to recite, verbatim, detailed descriptions of symbols and designs he had seen on the Portal in the North Meadow. One of her computers was building a comprehensive three-dimensional representation of this Portal as Victor had seen it; the other was the individual symbols that were being described at that moment. Harper didn’t know why he was going to this much effort to indulge a newly born street prophet. He just knew there was more to this than met the eye, and he was going to see it through.
“You know,” Jennifer said without looking up, “regardless of what voucher you’re willing to sign, we’re still going to both catch shit on this. This guy hasn’t even been booked yet.” Harper looked at her then at Victor. The rules were quite specific, and the repercussions for ignoring them were equally dangerous. You had eight hours to book a suspect or release them. That time was just about up.
“She’s right, you know,” he told Victor, who had disposed of his sandwich and was stuffing the potato chips in his mouth with a contented grin. “We’re going to have to let you go.”
“I want to finish this,” Victor said, gesturing at the computer display of the Portal rotating on the other computer.
“What can we book you on? Vagrancy in the park last night, that only gets you a misdemeanor. We don’t even write a ticket for that anymore.”
“What about this?” Victor asked, reaching into a pocket. A friend sewed a special pouch into the lining of his sweats and it had saved him from all kinds of trouble. Out of the hidden pocket he produced the crack rocks he’d scored last night. Victor had run straight into the North Meadow trying to save those little pieces of crystallized cocaine from other predators but now he happily dropped them on the table without another thought of wanting to use drugs ever again.
Harper stared at the rocks in amazement, both that he would give them up and that he was providing them a means to book him. “We’ll call it minor possession,” Harper said and casually swept one of the rocks into the garbage can, then bagged the second one, “Mark you as a plea of guilty and I’ll e-mail a request that the judge suspend the sentence with time served.” He consulted his booking computer, held it up to snap Victor’s image and prints. The computer accessed the precinct’s network, uploaded the data and provided him with an arraignment date, three days from now. “Judge Hollypepper, with an arraignment three days from now. I’ll have a word with him, we should have no problem.”
“Three days till I’m released? That should be just about perfect.”
“We only need a few more hours to finish these sketches,” the artist said.
“I need time to think, to put all this together.” Victor glanced at the garbage can where the last remnant of his former life lay. “I need to finish getting my body as clean as the Angel of God has made my mind.”
“You know this could all be some big hoax,” Harper said to the man.
“It could be a hoax, but it isn’t.”
“How do you know?”
Victor pointed to his eyes. “I was there, remember?”
“Right. Well, I have to report back to duty. Don’t want to have to explain how I blew my whole shift on a minor drug bust.”
“Lt. Harper, thanks.”
“What did I do?”
“You’ve helped guide my revelation. I’ve had an epiphany here. Until you showed up I was sitting in that police car trying to decide what had happened, and how to get out of there. Regardless, thanks.” They shook hands and Victor went back to working with the artist. The image was nearing completion, amazing Victor with the details of his own memory. “When I finish this, can I have a disk of it?”
“I don’t see why not,” Jennifer said as she worked with details of his description. “It’s not like this is a crime scene composite. The feds are acting strange, but they haven’t said squat to us.” Victor nodded and began to think about the design she was working on, pressing his mind to remember every intricate detail.
“Hey, can you help me make an image of the angel I saw?”
She looked up with a raised eyebrow at him. “Not trying to make me your first convert are you?”
“I don’t think I want to make any converts, officer. But I want an image of the Lord’s agent while it’s still fresh in my mind.”
“Sure Victor, no problem. But let’s finish this Portal thing first.” He smiled and started talking again.
Forty-five minutes waiting in a crowded La Guardia terminal while a helicopter was made available had a precipitous decline in Mark Volant’s sense of humor. Washington D.C. was his home and rarely d
id he set foot from the seat of power. The last time had been nine years ago for a vacation with his wife. She’d divorced him six months after. The fact that his marriage had been a shambles and on the verge of collapse for years never entered his mind. Instead he associated that week of fun in the sun on Miami beaches with the bitter disappointment to follow, and had never taken another day off.
The job of operating an intelligence sector took an average of eleven hours in Volant’s day. The routines of life and watching news took the rest of his day. This morning he had just arrived at his office to find none other than the director of NSA waiting in Volant’s office chair.
“Director, what a surprise!” he said sarcastically.
“There are lots of surprises this morning. Have you been watching the news?” Volant narrowed his eyes, wondering what he had missed. As he placed his briefcase and coat on a chair he went over the morning’s news in his mind. There was really nothing remarkable, certainly nothing that would warrant an unexpected visit from his boss. Furthermore, there had been nothing of note in his morning intelligence brief which he’d scanned as his driver took him to work.
“Certainly, but I don’t remember anything interesting. Looks like the Indians are getting ready to launch another satellite, but we’ve been expecting that for a year.”
“I’m talking about something much closer.” Volant looked openly confused for a moment, then he remembered a report last night about something in New York City.
“You mean New York? Some sort of local disturbance in Central Park. I heard a snippet that an agent was preparing a briefing based on the local FBI office-”
“I went around the FBI,” the director said with a knowing smirk and tossed a folder across Volant's desk toward him. On the cover was the unmistakable NASA logo. “They’ve found something there we need to know more about.”
“And this is worth diverting section assets?”