by Blake Banner
Her eyebrows rode up her forehead and her jaw sagged just a little. “Son of a gun!”
“The problem,” he went on, “is not whether a comparatively feeble instrument is capable of capturing the signal. The problem is interference. Which is why during the day, or in the heart of Manhattan, you will not capture that same photon.”
I nodded. “I understand. So what happened on Macomb Mountain?”
We heard a noise outside the door. I rose and opened it and Jasmine came in carrying a tray with a coffee pot, a jug of milk, sugar, and four cups. She set the tray down and began to serve us coffee. I sat again and looked at Kirkpatrick, who was watching his wife intently. I said, “What happened, Mr. Kirkpatrick?”
His eyes swiveled back to me and he said, savagely, “Jasmine received a brain to brain communication from the Visitors.”
FIVE
A lot of thoughts flashed through my mind in that moment. I logged them and watched Jasmine with interest as she sat next to Dehan and sipped her coffee. I wondered if he would let her tell her own story, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t, and he didn’t.
“We had a radio which we had adapted to transmit and receive signals on a very wide range of frequencies. We also had visual scanners which were capable of picking up both high and low frequencies of light beyond the visual range in the night sky. Macomb Mountain, where we were, near the peak, affords a spectacular view of the heavens, and we were able to see and pick up a number of phenomena. A lot of it was suggestive, some of it was highly suggestive, none of it was conclusive.”
Dehan failed to suppress a sigh. “Could you tell us about…”
“I’m coming to that! It was about two in the morning. The fire had started to burn low and a number of people had withdrawn to their tents. There were half a dozen of us who were still talking about what we had seen: lights moving across the sky, doing right-angle turns, turning back on themselves at speeds of several thousand miles an hour…” He dismissed these things with a wave of his hand. “The usual stuff.”
I asked, “Who remained after the others had retired?”
He sighed. “Uh… Danny—he was inexhaustible, and deeply committed—Dixon, Rafael, Paul, Jane, and myself.”
Jasmine spoke for the first time. Her voice was small, but, like her eyes, it carried a strength that suggested stubbornness, even obstinacy. She said, “I was also there, Donald. That is how you know I went into the trance.”
He stared hard at his pipe for a moment. I could see his jaw muscle going. “Clearly,” he said at last. “Jasmine was also there. She had been sitting in her sleeping bag. At about ten past two, she lay down. At about twelve minutes past, she began to tremble, moving her arms and her feet up and down in jerky movements. Then she began to speak. I remember it vividly. At first she made inarticulate noises, mainly vowels, but then she suddenly spoke, and said, ‘We have chosen you for communication. Jasmine is our channel for the simplicity of her mind. Daniel is our actor for his energy. He will spread our message. Donald is the rock on which we build. Dixon, Paul, Jane, you shall make paths for others to tread.’”
He stopped abruptly. I became aware of an old grandfather clock against one wall. Its ticking seemed surprisingly loud. Through the front window, I saw a woman talking silently to a postman. The midday light seemed to glare through the net curtains.
Jasmine said, “That is not all the message said.”
Dehan turned to her and studied her for a moment. “What else did it say?”
She looked at her husband and I was astonished to see real affection in her face. He scowled down at his pipe. She gazed at him, smiling while she spoke.
“I believe Donald saved my life that night. Because the message went on, ‘Daniel and Jasmine, follow the path to the glade now, for direct contact, to meet with us.’” She turned to Dehan. “But Donald would not let me go. The glade was half a mile away, through the forest. He forbade it. I think if we had gone, they would have killed us both, as they later killed Danny.”
“So did Danny go?”
She shook her head. “No, Donald stopped us. He knew it was not safe. Danny said if Donald didn’t want us to go, he would not go.”
I scratched my chin, turning the events over in my mind, trying to visualize them. I asked her, “What was it like?”
She frowned at the carpet, like she was wondering where the voice had come from.
I said, “Receiving the message: what was it like? What did it feel like?”
She looked at Donald, who ignored her. Finally, she turned to me and said, “It was strange. It was as though my own thoughts had taken on a life of their own. As though invisible hands were moving my thoughts. And then, when I began to speak, it was as though my own will had been cancelled, and my mouth was speaking on its own. I had no control over what it was saying.”
“You were not aware of the presence of thoughts in your mind that were not your own?”
The thought seemed to be something new to her. She frowned and after a moment shook her head. “No, nothing like that.”
I nodded. “This was Friday night?”
Kirkpatrick nodded and stood. “That was Friday night. Early Saturday morning we returned.” He walked over to a bookcase located behind my back and returned with two paperbacks. He handed one to me and one to Dehan. “Heaven’s Fire. Everything is recounted there faithfully from the notes I took at the time. I don’t think there is much more we can tell you.”
I took it and examined it. The dedication read, This book is dedicated to my friend and colleague, Daniel Brown, whose destiny it was to spread the message.
“Thank you. There is just one more thing. I believe there was a party on Saturday…”
He snorted. “Hardly. We were all tired. We had a few drinks, discussed what had happened—or not happened—Paul and Dixon were a little disgruntled I think, that I had forbidden Jasmine from going to the glade. Everybody went home. That was it.”
Dehan said, “Except that Danny next showed up in Soundview Park, dead.”
He knocked the smoldering ash from his pipe into his ashtray. “Quite so. I can only say that I am glad, whatever the others may say, that I stopped Jasmine from going.” He shook his head and gestured at the two paperbacks. “Everything else is in your books. I suggest you read them, and if you have any more questions after that, you are welcome to phone me, make an appointment, and come and see me.”
I studied his face a moment. He met my eye. I nodded and turned to Dehan, making a question with my face. She shook her head and said, “I have no more questions.”
“Then we shall leave you to your work.” I stood. “Thank you for your time and for the books. You have been very helpful.” I turned to his wife. “Jasmine.”
She looked at the floor and Kirkpatrick rose and led us to the front door. There I stopped and said, “Paul Estevez and Jane Harrison. Have you got contact information for them?”
He pulled a pen from his pocket and made a note on the back of one of his own business cards. “We lost touch with Jane. This is Paul’s address and phone number. He’s not far, up Sound View Avenue. He runs some form of martial arts school. He’s become a little disillusioned, like all of us I suppose.” He hesitated a moment, then said, “The day after tomorrow, there’s a small conference at the Marriott, on Bassett Avenue, near the hospital. There will be a hundred people or so, perhaps a little less. We have a very distinguished speaker coming. He’ll be discussing the intentions of the Visitors, whether they are friendly or hostile, whether they have killed before. You may be interested.” He reached over to a small table by an umbrella stand and picked up a couple of leaflets. “Come along as my guests.”
We thanked him again and he let us out into the early afternoon glare. As we strolled down toward Gildersleeve Avenue, on our way back to the Maravillas Grill, I thrust my hands deep into my pockets, took a deep breath, and asked, “Impressions? Thoughts?”
She stared up at the perfect blue sky. “It’s not
the distance stopping me from seeing the stars, but the interference.” She matched my sigh with one of her own. “I don’t know, Stone. He is a very believable witness. So is she. If they were telling me any other story, I would be inclined to believe them.” She shrugged. “Maybe I am just a narrow-minded, bigoted cop, but it’s going to take a lot more than their testimony to convince me that Danny Brown was shot by an alien with a ray gun.”
I didn’t answer and we walked on in silence. The street was empty and quiet, but for the lazy, midday song of the birds in the nearby park and the buzz of an occasional bee. After a while she added, “I’ll say this though. I am pretty sure that they believe their testimony.”
I looked at her and thought about it. “You may be right.”
She ignored me and went on, “They go up to this very remote place, at night. They are surrounded by…” She shook her head, “What is it, six million acres of dense forest. The daily bread of these people is the X-Files, Close Encounters, Roswell and the infinite number of books that have been written on the subject of UFOs, aliens and the Men in Black. They see, or persuade themselves that they have seen, the strange phenomena in the sky and then they sit around the camp fire and start talking, building themselves up into a state of high suggestibility. Right?”
“OK.”
We turned into Gildersleeve and started walking toward White Plains Road. Dehan shrugged, half nodding and half apologizing for what she was about to say. “Now, Jasmine is very sweet and nice, but she is also servile and obedient and, let’s be honest, Stone, a bit simple. I’m not saying she’s stupid, but she isn’t exactly a soaring intellect either.”
“Granted. On both counts.”
“So some deep unconscious desire kicks in and she puts herself into a trance.” She stopped dead, turned to face me and poked he in the chest with her finger. “Listen! She has an internal conflict. She has been conditioned since she was a kid to be servile and obedient to her father. But she also has a craving, a need, to be special for him. She knows that Kirkpatrick admires Danny, so her unconscious mind creates a fantasy, which she plays out as a trance induced by the aliens, who have selected her and Danny to be their chosen messengers, while her husband is elevated to the position of patriarch—the rock on which they build. Which is a direct borrowing from the Bible, by the way.”
I stared at her. “Wow, that is pretty deep, Dehan. It would take some confirming, but my gut says you may be onto something. It rings true. Even if you are assuming a lot and also straying out of our field a little.”
She shrugged and turned and we carried on walking. “Screw fields. We go where we need to go, right? But what it doesn’t do is get us any closer to who did kill Danny.”
“Perhaps.”
“What do you mean, perhaps?”
“I am being cryptic. It is my prerogative as Holmes to your Watson.”
“Screw you, Sherlock. You know I’m right.”
We rounded the corner into White Plains and started toward the fork in the road. I could see my Jaguar parked facing us and allowed myself a moment of sentimental pleasure. It was a magnificent beast in an elegant, understated burgundy, a Mark II from 1964, with 210 bhp. It was beautiful, both elegant and powerful, the way a car should be. But, it struck me, it was not the power or the elegance that I loved, but the simplicity. It was old-fashioned, mechanical, simple.
Dehan took hold of my arm, “Like you, my friend,” she said, and I realized I had been thinking aloud.
I gave a small, humorless laugh. “Like Stewart said, this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Perhaps Jennifer Cuevas was right. Perhaps I do belong to a bygone age. Perhaps I have lost my relevance. Perhaps, Dehan, we are entering an age when aliens murder humans. Perhaps the race riots of the future will be between humans and aliens, and the hated color will not be black or brown or white, but green.”
She was silent for a while, then she smiled fondly at me and asked, “Do you know what my father would have called you?”
“A dreamer? A visionary? A man ahead of his time?”
She shook her head. “Uh-uh, a schmuck.”
I unlocked the door, not with a button but with a key, climbed into the leather seat behind the wooden wheel, and shoved that same key in the ignition. I turned that key and gunned the engine, and sat for a moment listening to the satisfying rumble, visualizing Danny, standing on that grassy knoll, looking out over the vast, dark East River, watching those lights flashing in the sky, with those lasers shooting down at him out of the sky, out of the dark clouds and the rain. Did I believe it? I turned to Dehan.
“Fire from Heaven. Three hundred years ago, they would have said it was an angel or a demon that had struck him down.”
She nodded. “A different age. A different kind of myth.”
I nodded back. “Or a different kind of explanation.”
SIX
Dehan dialed, waited a moment, and said, “Paul Estevez…? Good afternoon, this is Detective Carmen Dehan of the NYPD. I was wondering if you could spare some time to see us this afternoon…? Yeah, it’s about Danny Brown… Uh-huh, a long time, I know. We could come to you. We can be there in twenty minutes… Thank you. Appreciate it.” She hung up. “He can give us half an hour before his first class.”
“Good.”
I put the beast in gear, pulled out into the traffic, and headed up Sound View Avenue at a slow cruise. Dehan checked her watch. “What do you say, we talk to Paul, pick up some groceries, and head on back…” She looked at me sidelong with a stupid sheepish grin on her face and started laughing.
It was contagious. I laughed back. “What?”
She turned and looked out the window, pinching the bridge of her nose and still laughing. “I dunno, Stone. It’s stupid. It’s just…”
“What, Dehan? Say it.”
“I was going to say, ‘head home’. It just sounds so weird to me.”
“You don’t like it? You know my house is your home. Mi casa es tu casa, right?”
She blushed like a teenager. “Yeah, I know. No, I do like it. It’s good. It just feels weird.”
I was still smiling. “So we get some groceries and go home…”
She spent the next minute laughing like a fifteen year-old and she finally said, “Yeah… and we go through everything over a glass of wine or two.”
I nodded. “What, and we don’t put in an appearance at the station today?”
She shrugged. “What for?”
“When was the last time you were at the station?”
“What are you, my boss now?” She was still smiling but there was an edge to her voice.
“You know I’m not. I’m just curious. In all the time I’ve known you, you have never once not set foot in the station.”
She shrugged. “So what? Back then I was trying to prove something.”
I eyed her sidelong for a bit and she stared straight ahead, with her face concealed behind her shades.
Finally, I said, “Can I tell you what I think?”
“No.”
“I think you are worried about how Mo and Maria—and the whole damn precinct—is going to react if they find out we are…”
I gestured, searching for the word. She turned and stared at me, repressing what seemed to be involuntary, nervous laughter. “Don’t tell me the great John Stone is suddenly lost for words! Find out we are what?”
I shook my head, feeling oddly embarrassed. “Sixty-five million years ago, when I was young and the dinosaurs walked the Earth, people like me would have said, ‘an item’, ‘going out’, ‘a couple’, or even ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’. But nowadays terms like that can be a minefield.”
“Bullshit.” She said it without anger. “You just don’t know what to call us. Don’t worry, I don’t either.” She shrugged. “Maybe that’s why I don’t want to…”
I nodded. “I hear you.”
She frowned, suddenly anxious. “I didn’t offend you? I didn’t mean…”
I smiled and tr
ied to look like I meant it. “Of course not. It’s cool. We’re learning as we go. Groceries and review… at home.”
She grinned. “Cool.”
“But tomorrow we go back to the desk. Or the inspector is going to want to know why. And so are Mo and his pals. The longer we leave it, the worse it gets.”
Paul’s gym was on the corner of Randall and Rosedale, in a rundown shopping mall by the gardens there. We were ten minutes early but we found him in a small office in his dojo, dressed in his dobok, sitting behind a desk under a Korean flag. He was going through his books and stood and smiled as we walked in. He pulled up a couple of chairs for us. And as we sat he glanced at the clock on the wall.
“I don’t mean to be discourteous, but my class starts in forty minutes. I am always drumming into my pupils the need to be punctual, and also the importance of commitment. So…” He spread his hands. “I must be as good as my word. This kind of thing is really important in this kind of neighborhood.”
I agreed and told him so with my face. “If there were more teachers with that kind of attitude, we would probably be out of a job. I doubt we’ll keep you that long, Mr. Estevez. We just want to ask you a couple of questions about Danny.”
He leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, and shook his head. “I don’t know what I can tell you. You spoke to Don? He’s said just about everything there is to say about it.”
Dehan said, “You believe, like him, that Danny was killed by an extraterrestrial?”
He shrugged. “I know it sounds crazy, but any other explanation is even crazier. Plus…” He shrugged and shook his head again. “You had to be there, man.”
I said, “You were there on the Friday night…”