Proof Through the Night

by Lt. Colonel Toby Quirk

  “Requiring the homeschoolers to register with local school boards has been somewhat effective. We have installed solid Directorate servants as gatekeepers who impose bureaucratic barriers that frustrate homeschool parents. Andrew has my target list of these obstructionists.

  “Now, on the issue of terminating Andrew: I can’t honestly judge him without seeing him. I’ve never met the man. I have to delay my vote.”

  “All right,” said Akebe. “Let’s take our vote with Romano recused and Frances holding off for more information. I yield my chair to Romano.”

  Romano began, “The issue before us tonight is whether to keep Andrew on as our operations officer, with the sole duty to execute our directives to prune out those independent thinkers who are impeding our progress toward the new American excellence.

  “All those in favor of keeping Andrew Johansen in his position say ‘aye.’”

  Randal Sanford, “Aye.”

  Donald Snow, “Aye.”

  “All those opposed say ‘nay.’”

  Akebe Cheron, “Nay.”

  Olivia Kingston, “Nay”

  “Frances?” said Romano.

  “I’m sorry to hold up this very important decision, but before I can cast my vote I must meet with the man. I intend to go directly from here to Missouri to interview Andrew and view his operations center. I will notify the board of my vote afterwards.”

  Romano said, “Well with that delay in place, we will table this discussion and I yield the chair back to you, Akebe. Looks like Andrew will live to work at least a little longer.”

  Akebe spewed out a sigh of frustration. “We’re deadlocked. I was hoping we could dispense with this matter quickly, but I suppose we’ll have to live with Frances’ deliberations.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the board, we are being opposed by a fly in the ointment. It is a force that has found a way to thwart our noble efforts to change the face of America into a land free of dissent and obstructionist thinking. We will find the source of this force and eliminate it. In the meantime we will continue to control every institution, every organization, indeed every human being in this country. We will right this floundering nation and set it on a new path of greatness under the control of our brilliant minds.

  “We are the last remnant of great American patriots. Stand tall, my brothers and sisters, in the battle for the new American excellence.

  “This meeting is adjourned. Please enjoy your stay on Medusa for as long as you desire, then return to your posts refreshed and renewed.”

  The board finished their meal and repaired to the ship’s auditorium to watch the German film, Goodbye Lenin!, then to their plush staterooms.

  A few minutes past midnight there was a soft knock at Akebe’s door. He opened it and welcomed the stately Olivia Kingston into his bedroom.

  Henry’s nervous nature compelled him to create lists and calendars, budgets and charts, so when tomorrow broke every eventuality was covered: enough food, gas, money, time, the right clothing, equipment, supplies, everything. But not here. Not at Cielavista.

  For the thousandth time Henry constructed a calm veneer over the fire building in the left hemisphere of his brain as he observed his wife pour her affection on his grandmother-in-law.

  From the kitchen, Henry called to his wife, “Sandy, honey, would you come in here for a sec?”

  “What is it?” said Sandy. She could feel the tension radiating from Mister Neatness.

  “Not a big thing, just thought I’d tell you. See this butter container?”

  Sandy indeed saw the square plastic tub that contained a butterlike substance—supposed to be healthier than the real stuff made with cow’s milk. She recoiled from the heat of Henry’s anger, and she braced herself for the ambush she knew awaited in Henry’s literal mind. “Yes, what about it?”

  “Okay; see, this side of the butter tub is obviously the front. And when the lid is on the container, the printing on the lid should be properly aligned with the printing on the front of the tub, right?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Henry. There’s no right way to put the lid on the butter as long as it’s seated properly. It’s a square, so whichever way you put it on, the lid fits.”

  “Well, maybe, darling. But the way this product comes in the store, the lettering on the lid is aligned with the front, so if it’s worth putting the lid on the container, it’s worth doing right. I mean it doesn’t take a few seconds to make sure the printing is readable from the front and the top now, does it?” said Henry.

  “Here’s another thought,” said Sandy. “Let’s say I remove the lid like this and place it on the counter right next to the tub with the lettering facing front. And I dip two fingers into the butter and gob it on your shirt like this? How ‘bout that?”

  Henry made no effort to remove the big glob of butter from his immaculate white golf shirt. He just glared at his mischievous wife and let the hot rage build up in his head.

  Sandy backed quickly out of the kitchen, smiling.

  “Not funny,” he said.

  Henry changed his shirt, cleaned up the kitchen, and put everything away, including the butter with the lid properly secured on the tub.

  “I’m going to walk my rounds,” said Henry. “Meanwhile, dear Gabriella, how about coming up with some guidance for me to keep the bad guys from the gates.”

  Henry heard Gabriella whisper to Sandy, “I’m afraid you’ve upset your husband again.”

  He refilled his wineglass, left the cottage, and strode through the yard toward the stone mansion at the center of Villa Cielavista.

  In the soft twilight drifting into the dining room, Sandy said, “Nonina, sometimes I don’t know whether to admire you or have you committed.”

  She draped her arm softly over her grandmother’s bony shoulders.

  “You eat three bites of dinner, take a sip of the vino, and walk out to your rock. You stay out there on the point until after midnight and then you sleep a couple hours. Then you nibble a slice of black toast, sip your espresso, and out you go to your ledge to pray and wage war in the heavens. Yet you are stronger than any of us. How do you do it, my love?”

  Gabriella feathered her calloused hand over Sandy’s arm. “You are the one to be admired, my daughter. I thank my God for you. You and that obsessive Henry of yours. You take care of everything.”

  Dusk was approaching the shoreline, dissolving the joyfully brilliant sky into a chalky amber-grey. Gabriella rose from her coffee and biscotti at the dining room table and turned again to the big bay window.

  “What?” Sandy asked, recognizing the power radiating from Gabriella’s body when she was “seeing.”

  “Get your laptop, dear.”

  Sandy went upstairs to her room, returned to the dining room, sat down at the table, and waited for her grandmother to turn around. Sandy closed her eyes. A strange silky warmth brushed over her mind. She felt Gabriella sit down beside her.

  “See if there’s a news alert about an attempted murder on a chief justice,” the old lady said with a wave of her boney fingers toward the computer.

  Sandy glanced at Gabriella’s face then at her screen, tapped some keys, and the CNN website came up.

  The headline read, U.S. Takes Cuba Off State-Sponsored Terrorism List. The women waited a few seconds. A red banner coursed across the top of the page: News Alert: Chief Justice Escapes Attempt On His Life.

  Sandy clicked on the banner and a brief paragraph gave scant details of the incident.

  Supreme Court Chief Justice Allen Scales was the target of a sniper attack this afternoon at his home in McLean, Virginia. Justice Scales was getting into his car in the driveway of his home in the secluded neighborhood of Colony Estates when three rounds struck the car’s driver-side window, inches away from Scale’s head. The elderly judge miraculously escaped being struck down by the sniper. More details of this story to follow.

  “Snipers don’t miss,” said Sandy. “What did you do?”

&n
bsp; “I’ve been doing this for over eighty years, and every incident amazes me.

  “The Spirit prompted me to create a wall of energy in the path of the bullets between the sniper’s rifle and his target. Evidently this mass of vibrating ions slightly deformed each projectile, causing them to deviate from the victim in the sniper’s crosshairs.”

  “Why wouldn’t you just eliminate the murderer?”

  Gabriella turned her face to her granddaughter and she looked into her eyes. “My precious Sandy. Did you feel anything in your soul a few minutes ago?”

  Sandy took a deep breath, inhaling some of Gabriella’s fragrance and aura. “Yes, Nonina.”

  “Soon you will be inheriting this spiritual gift, and then you will understand those mysteries that you cannot understand.

  “Our enemy is getting better at masking their brutal plans. I’ll be on my rock, dear. Our heavenly helpers have arrived. Have a peaceful evening.”

  Gabriella kissed her granddaughter on the forehead and walked softly through the french doors and down her path to the granite ledge on the water.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  This majestic thirty-acre rock, covered with manicured forests and gardens, comforted Henry’s engineer mind. He had studied how the natural footings of granite were permanently embedded in the bowels of the earth. A masterpiece of hydrogeology, the massive outcropping stood impenetrable to the relentless crashing waves that battered its bulwarks. The solid landmass provided Henry a counterbalance to Gabriella’s unpredictability and the chaotic lifestyle she spawned.

  He approximated Gabriella’s age at over one hundred and five. She was Sandy’s grandmother and Sandy was fifty two. Add about twenty-five years for each generation and the old lady had to have been born just after nineteen-hundred. And she could be a lot older, given the fact that some of those Sicilian families had a dozen children, and she talked about some of her younger brothers and sisters. Her history and her origin were shrouded in mystery and murky legends.

  From where he stood at the edge of the lawn behind the cottage, Henry looked down and watched Gabriella descend the ledges on the cliff like a teenage gymnast. Despite his animosity for her, he was fascinated by the old lady’s physical ability to climb down the natural uneven rock stairway. She ended her descent at a shelf of rock, split in two by a deep crevice that she had to jump across to get to her meditation spot. Henry was amazed watching her take two graceful running steps and leap over the wide gap with her tiny right foot outstretched and her left leg trailing, until she landed down softly on the opposite ledge. He knew it was there, on that one rock, that his grandmother-in-law waged her invisible war with the wealthy elitists who systematically targeted and destroyed mindful men and women whose noble character and curious minds posed a threat to their insidious stratagems.

  Henry’s anger dissipated as he sipped his Burgundy and strolled through the herb garden taking in the fragrances of basil, mint, and thyme. He looked up at the tops of the blue spruce trees inexplicably waving to him against the sky without a breeze to disturb their branches. He dismissed what he saw as just one more curious fluke he had no desire to explain.

  The angel assigned to protect Henry stopped shaking the treetop and watched his reaction.

  Henry was thinking back to the summer of 1985. He and Sandy were both twenty-three.

  Henry had found himself breezing through all his coursework at Northeastern University in Boston and the job they assigned him as part of the university’s work-study program. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Boston Office, hired him for twenty hours a week during the school year and full-time during semester breaks.

  “Give him a brush on the cheek,” Michael said to Tobias. Tobias turned to the archangel and smiled. He floated down through the spruce branches and fluttered his invisible fingers across Henry’s face.

  Henry wasn’t startled. He absently flicked his hand at the feeling and chuckled to himself.

  Henry was recalling when he joined the understaffed engineering division of the Boston branch of the FBI. He soon realized that this division occupied the lowest priority in the budget.

  Tobias, drifting above Henry’s head, hummed a few bars of Henry’s favorite song, “Up Where We Belong.” Henry found himself softly singing the lyrics.

  Unfazed by the spiritual interruption, Henry continued his reverie, remembering his impression of the engineering division chief, Shirley Devens. She could serve as the poster child for all that’s wrong with federal employees. Rarely moving her ponderous body from her chair, she ruled her nearly-irrelevant division of the Boston FBI office with astonishing incompetence and an iron fist.

  Tobias tried something else. He rose aloft above the towering spruce trees that bordered the herb garden and spoke Henry’s name. “Henry.”

  Henry calmly looked around but dismissed what he thought he heard, too deeply involved with his memories.

  Within a few weeks at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Henry realized that as long as he arrived on time and stayed until 5:00 p.m., he could do pretty much whatever he wanted, so he explored the Bureau’s databases with the fervor of a zealous monk. Eventually he purchased three high-capacity hard drives and downloaded the information on them so he could study them at home.

  “Having fun on the computer?” Mrs. Deven’s gravelly voice inquired from her corner cubicle through the cloth and metal partition to Henry’s work station next to hers.

  “Just learning what I can, ma’am,” Henry said, suppressing his familiar bursts of anger.

  “How ‘bout delivering these reports to the director’s office?” she said.

  “Right away,” he responded and quickly logged out of his internet search and stepped into her cube.

  “These?” he picked up an inner-office envelope.

  “Yeah, time sheets and a bunch of forms we have to fill out weekly. Hurry up.”

  Henry navigated the maze of alleys through government-grey cubicle partitions on the fifth floor of the O’Neil Federal Building on his way to the director’s office. He walked by the agents’ area. Henry had little use for the Neanderthals who investigated federal crimes and chased down criminals. He knew they perceived him as a paper-pushing pansy of a clerk.

  He heard snickering and a crusty voice call, “Hey, Wussy.”

  Henry’s trigger went off in the deep recesses of his brain. A torrent of epinephrine gushed through his nervous system. He controlled it and he kept on walking, keenly aware of the drumming in his head and the churning in his gut. He was sweating and red-faced when he delivered the forms to the director’s secretary’s desk.

  “Thank you,” the young woman said without looking up.

  On Henry’s way back through the maze, Billy McCarthy stood leaning against the pillar of his cubicle, his coffee mug handle looped in his trigger finger. “How ya doin’, Wuss?”

  A blinding white light flashed inside Henry’s eyes and he found himself on the floor straddling over Billy, whose nose was surging blood. Billy’s service pistol was in Henry’s hand, cocked and aimed at Billy’s terrified bloody face.

  “Keep your weapons holstered,” Henry heard himself say to the agents who had rushed to the ruckus, “or this little incident will get a lot more serious.” His voice was calm, his words measured.

  “We’re cool,” the senior agent said. “This moment has already been forgotten. Let’s just get back to our jobs, okay?”

  Henry hopped up, stepped back from the trembling field agent who was trying to grovel to his feet. He set the Beretta pistol on safe, popped out the magazine, and racked the slide back, ejecting the nine-millimeter round from the chamber. He handed the pistol, magazine, and bullet to Luis Valencia, the senior agent, and walked back through the maze to the engineering division.

  No one ever mentioned the tussle again. Billy McCarthy decided to request a transfer to the Phoenix, Arizona, office for his wife’s health.

  In the thirty years since that episode, Henry experienced hundreds of
raging bouts, some violent, some loud, all hurtful to others and himself. His wife Sandy was the most frequent target of his outbursts. But as he aged the ferocity of his fits diminished, but the frequency increased.

  Tobias decided he had bothered Henry enough for one night and returned to the angelic base. Michael said, “Tobias, Henry belongs to you. Respond to his every request.”

  Mrs. Devens offered Henry a full-time job in her department after one of her three engineers got promoted a few months before Henry graduated. Henry accepted her offer. Not only did it pay him enough to rent a small apartment in Danvers, own a used Honda, and have some discretionary income to eat out and support his fishing addiction, but he also enjoyed the luxury of not having to do any real work.

  Then he met Sandy.

  When the Massachusetts weather permitted, Henry’s Saturday routine included a big breakfast at Candee’s Kitchen in Gloucester after a morning of fishing from 4:00 to 7:00 a.m.

  One May Saturday morning, Henry ordered his usual breakfast—a thick slab of ham, home-fried potatoes, buttered toast, four fried eggs, overeasy, and a bottomless cup of black coffee—listed on Candee’s menu as the “Hungry Helmsman.” Halfway through his pile of greasy food and halfway through a scathing article in the Boston Herald by sports writer Joe Gordon hotly criticizing Red Sox manager Ralph Houk for keeping Rainey in the game after allowing three runs in the fifth, Henry noticed this tall, striking brunette at the takeout counter. She wore a faded blue man’s dress shirt, loose khaki pants, and a confident, unselfconscious attitude. Her smile and cheery conversation with Candee over the counter cast something pleasant and intense at Henry’s heart. The careless outfit couldn’t conceal what Henry saw—a gorgeous figure, a beautiful face, and a vivacious countenance.