For seven consecutive Saturdays, Henry studied this compelling woman dressed in the same indifferent clothes as she picked up her order at Candee’s counter. Henry carried her image around in his memory all week from Saturday to Saturday. On the seventh Saturday, Henry finally felt noticed. Looking up over the top edge of his Boston Herald, he briefly met the gaze of the lovely brunette in the loose shirt and baggy khakis. Henry nodded. She held his gaze for a few meaningful seconds, enough to communicate interest. Then out she marched with a quick look back over her broad, square shoulder, a look that stirred Henry in the gut—a look that offered promise.
The next Saturday Henry decided to sit on the old wooden bench outside Candee’s by the takeout counter. Sandy arrived on schedule in her beat-up El Camino and he said, “Hello.”
“Hi,” Sandy said. “Seen you around here. You a fisherman?”
That started it.
In the months that Henry got to know Sandy, he became more and more fascinated with her life. She lived with her ancient grandmother on a secluded stretch of cliff overlooking Magnolia Bay, a few miles south of Gloucester. When he drove there to meet her for their first date, he was struck, not by any display of extravagance because at Cielavista there was no such display, but by a deep stirring in his spirit. Never before had Henry been aware of such a sensation—couldn’t figure out what was going on inside himself.
Henry arrived late at Cielavista, having missed Woodlawn Avenue, the hard-to-notice road from Gloucester to Magnolia—no signpost. Couldn’t find Shore Drive, the unpaved lane off Woodlawn Avenue that swept through the thick woods along the coast—frustrating. Henry missed it twice because it was hidden by brush and overhanging branches. Eventually he found the narrow dirt road through the woods, dark even at high noon. He urged his Honda slowly over several miles of bumps and ruts.
The estate first announced its presence on the left side of the lane with a high wrought iron fence, interrupted by a series of fieldstone pillars every fifty feet. The fence ran for over a mile. Henry was thinking, How big is this place? Talk about secluded from the outside world.
Then the wide, unguarded gate, supported by huge fieldstone pillars on each side, gave way to a peastone driveway that wound through a manicured wood—still no view of any buildings. Henry’s fears and uncertainties were somehow assuaged by a strange, calming spirit that hovered over the property.
Finally, after what seemed like miles, an imposing granite mansion appeared down the hill before him through the trees. Surrounded by meticulously pruned hedges and fastidiously trimmed gardens, the three-story colonial-style manse gave Henry the impression of a grand, yet comfortable castle. He stopped his car on the high ground overlooking the stately home to absorb the effect this property was having on him. Not a hint of intimidation—just safety and security.
Behind and to the right of the big house was a substantial stucco bungalow, then the Atlantic Ocean, then the distant horizon and then the sky. The grounds around the two buildings were laid out in a careful array of lawns, gardens, fruit orchards, and wispy fields of high grass.
The tires of Henry’s Honda crunched to a stop near the portico of the mansion. Sandy skipped across the grass to Henry’s car, pulled open the passenger-side door, and sat beside him. Evidently she decided to upgrade her wardrobe today from the familiar faded outfit to a light-green V-neck jersey and black cotton slacks.
“You look nice,” Henry managed.
“Thanks. Pull around to our house in back. How are you, Henry?” She smiled at him.
“Sorry I’m late,” Henry said. “I felt like I was on a scavenger hunt trying to find this place. You could have a war here and no one would even hear it.”
She looked over at him and their eyes met. Henry noticed a touch of extra color on her lips and her dark hair was nicely arranged today. Having her seated so close to him made him pleasantly nervous.
“You look a bit flustered, Henry. You okay?” she asked.
He guided the Honda around the driveway toward the smaller house near the cliff.
“Heh, heh, heh,” chuckled Henry. “This may not be the right way to say it, but you ever go fishing?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“And that feeling right when you get a strike and you know the fish is hooked, that rush of excitement?”
“Henry, you’re such a romantic. I’m getting some of that too,” she said, laughing. “Which one of us is the fish?”
As they approached the bungalow, she said, “Yeah, pull in right here. Good.” And she hopped out and waited for Henry at the foot of the steps leading up to the porch.
“Grandma and I live here. Come on in,” she said and walked through the screen door ahead of Henry. He let the door clack behind him against the wood frame and he followed Sandy through the foyer into the living room.
“Grandma’s praying out on her rock. We’re alone so you can kiss me,” she said, turning to him with a grin.
So he did.
On their next date, Henry took Sandy out on his thirty-foot fishing boat past the horizon and he dropped anchor in a calm, flat sea. He fired up the gas grill and put on the flounder he’d just caught and cleaned, unfolded a stainless steel table and spread a linen cloth over it, lit a candle in a hurricane lamp, set the table with silver, china, and crystal, poured champagne, and sat across from his girlfriend.
“Tell me about your life,” he said.
Sandy sipped the champagne and nibbled on a cracker covered with caviar and said, “I suppose I should start with my grandmother, okay?”
Henry nodded. Twilight in the eastern sky was giving way to Vega, the evening star.
“My grandmother, Gabriella Quartarone, spent her first ten years in Aci Trezza, Sicily. She lived in one of the homes in the seaside villa of her great uncle, Don Giovanni Quartarone, the padrino of one of the most prosperous and influential families in Catania Province. Don Giovanni’s father and uncles had built a wide network of enterprises from their small fishing fleet, to a pair of cargo vessels to an ever-expanding global merchant marine fleet, eventually adding several international banks and steel plants to their corporate empire.”
Henry served the flounder a la Moutarde with home-fried red potatoes and onions, mixed vegetables, and baguettes. He refilled the champagne glasses and set water bottles on the table. “Hope you like flounder,” he said.
“If you’re trying to impress a girl, you might be getting there,” said Sandy. “Mind if I say a quick blessing?”
“Fine.”
“Lord, thank you for all you provide. Bless this meal with your grace. Amen.”
“Okay,” said Henry, “where were you?”
Sandy savored a bite of the fish and closed her eyes for a few seconds. “Man, this is really good. Let’s see.
“When Gabriella was born there were thirty-six people living at the family villa in Sicily, all famiglia estesa. Her mother died of smallpox two years after Gabriella’s birth, so her aunt Maria assumed responsibility for her upbringing.
“Some of Maria’s family moved to the United States in the early nineteen hundreds and set up a trading company in Gloucester, and purchased what is now Cielavista, our villa on Magnolia Bay. They had amassed enough money to maintain the property into perpetuity. Gabriella became the sole owner of Cielavista by outliving the rest of her extended family. As you have noticed, Gabriella and I live in the cottage near the cliff. She gave the big stone house over to her landscaper, Carlos Santiago, and his extended family. So now it’s just me and my grandma in the cottage and her adopted family in the mansion.”
CHAPTER FIVE
A friendly shout from the driveway interrupted Henry’s reverie. It was Carlos Santiago, the head groundskeeper and patriarch of the clan who lived in the stone mansion.
“Hola, Senior Henri. Como se va?” Carlos’s body wasn’t much bigger than a twelve-year-old boy’s—tight, compact, and lithe. But his brown, leathery face and long, white mane of hair affirmed the great-grandfathe
r’s true age. He drove his golf cart to Henry and said, “Hop in, chief.”
Henry smiled at his good friend. “Can’t join you tonight, Carlos. I have to come up with a security scheme for Gabriella. She’s concerned that there may be a threat against us. But hey, tomorrow night let’s get together. I’m gonna need your help, okay?”
“Fine with me. See you mañana.” Before he drove away he said, “How do you like your new body guard?”
Henry gave Carlos a curious scowl, “What’re you talking about?”
“Oh, I guess you haven’t met him yet. No problemo,” and he waved and drove into the pine grove beyond the herb garden.
Henry spent the next six hours on his home computer connected to the FBI database. First he reviewed the latest updates of his colleagues at PEAR— Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research. Then he combed the criminal database, locating the incident file on the North Little Rock explosion.
“There’s gotta be a way,” Henry said to his computer, “to block our enemy from getting a fix on our location here at Cielavista.”
“Do you know who I am?” asked Frances O’Donnelly. She had driven directly without sleep from southern California to the Directorate’s operations center in central Missouri.
“Yep,” said Andrew Johansen as he remained riveted to the project on his computer.
Frances wavered between scolding Andrew like a naughty child or lording over him like the powerful boss that she was. Before she could decide, he got up and left the room.
Unsettled, Frances could only stand there in Andrew’s operations center and wait for him to return. It was the first time that she or any of the directors had come to inspect this bunker, buried deep in the limestone caves of the Gasconade River. She looked around. It was a one-man control room with three huge HD screens on the back wall, two crescent-shaped terraces of computer screens, and at the center of the concentric arcs was Andrew’s semicircular console with controls for every computer and screen.
Frances studied the screens on the upper terrace labeled Alpha through Foxtrot. She recognized the names of the Directorate’s six operational squads. On the next lower level was an array of screens with spreadsheets, calendars, lists, diagrams, bank account balances, and maps. The sharp executive quickly comprehended the meaning of all the displays, but she couldn’t grasp how to operate the control console on the first level. The longer she studied the content on all the screens, the more she understood the intellectual power this young man possessed.
After thirty minutes, Andrew returned from somewhere in the dark recesses of the cave with his face buried in a subway sandwich wrapped in paper. He looked up with mayonnaise all over his cheeks and he took his seat in the black carbon-fiber swivel chair—the only seat in the ops center.
“Look,” Andrew started right in. “As you probably know, I’m a high functioning sociopath—certified if you want to see my medical records. Being so born has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the advantages is that I couldn’t give half a crap about you and your pompous position. Another advantage is that, since I have nearly zero emotions, you can’t really bother me with the authority you’re going to try to impose here. One more is that if you have anything to offer that isn’t totally worthless, I can quickly evaluate it and see if I can use it. So, Frances, what are you here for? Get on with it.”
“What are the disadvantages?”
“Nobody likes me.”
“Okay, Andrew, the board wants to know why you can’t successfully accomplish a mission.”
Without rancor or disrespect, the young operations officer replied, “Somebody or something has invaded my system, and they’re pretty darn good at it.”
“What do you know so far?” she asked, now that the lines of communication had been established.
“You know how this works, right? We use advanced psychokinesis to manipulate two groups of people: seers and operators. We instruct the seers to identify the location of our targets and perform deep reconnaissance, then we alert one of the operational squads to support and conduct the attack. We select an unsuspecting loner, manipulate his mind and, with the help of the squad, he follows our orders and accomplishes the pruning mission.”
“Yeah, I understand the process, so what’s going wrong?”
“Not sure, but I’m getting close. There’s a computer somewhere that logged on to the same website at the exact same time I was logged on to it.”
“What site?” Frances asked.
Andrew finished chomping on his sandwich and he wiped off his face with his sleeve. He reached in the pocket of his faded black tee shirt and pulled out a pack of Trident Gum. He unwrapped a stick and popped it in his mouth and dropped the wrapper on the floor.
“Want a piece?” he offered.
Frances took the pack and pulled out a piece of gum for herself. They sat there in silence for a few minutes chewing and staring at each other, engaged in some tribal ritual like smoking a peace pipe.
“What site?” she asked again.
Andrew clicked the space bar and the website for PEAR—Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research—appeared on screen. Frances quickly understood the essence of what she was reading.
She read aloud, “They study the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes, and develop complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality.”
“Yeah,” said Andrew. “The forces of consciousness they’ve been studying are similar to our advanced psychokinesis powers that generate human motivations over long distances. My point is that someone somewhere is visiting the same site. I programed my computer number seven to conduct a search to locate this computer. It may take some time. I’m not one hundred percent sure on this, but I think whoever he is—that’s the monkey wrench in the works.”
“Akebe prefers ‘fly in the ointment.’ He thinks it’s more biblical,” Frances said.
No response from Andrew as he stared into the screen directly over his keyboard on the first elevated crescent. He kept clicking the keys, leaning closer and closer toward the screen. Frances’ gaze alternated between the screen and the operations officer.
“Geez, this guy’s good,” Andrew said with a touch of the emotion he claimed he did not possess.
“Look at this,” Andrew pointed with his greasy, unshaven chin to the big HD screen high up on the back wall. Frances looked up to the screen depicting a world map on Mercator projection. Hundreds of arching red lines connecting hundreds of red dots crisscrossed the world map.
“Our fly is very carefully covering his whereabouts,” Andrew stated. “How many dots do you count?”
“Eight hundred, twenty-seven,” Frances answered quickly.
Andrew turned to her with a look of fresh respect. “Yep,” he affirmed.
Frances continued, “And these are the proxy servers our ‘fly’ is using to mask his location. How many layers of camouflage is he using?”
Andrew’s fingers flew over his keyboard, his bulging eyes fixated on the big screen, his jaws jack-hammering on his gum. “Eleven. This is the outer layer, then his countermeasure program makes those locations look like they are linked to another matrix of locations, here, see?” And a maze of green lines replaced the red. “Four hundred-fifty-six dots on this layer. I’m gonna try something different, wait.”
“Where you going now?” Frances asked. “How about the Little Rock, Arkansas, highway network?”
Without looking up from the screen in front of him, Andrew said, “Yup.”
And again the big screen displayed the maze of red lines showing the “computer” that logged onto the same FBI highway site that Andrew had hacked into when planning the Sherwood, Arkansas, attack on Doctor Stone.
After another minute of seemingly random, frantic keystrokes and gum chomping, Andrew turned his swivel chair to face Frances who was squatting on her haunches next to him, watching the code
he was typing with full comprehension. For the first time in his life he experienced a twinge of collegiality, but he didn’t know what it was.
“You see what I see?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “He didn’t hack into the FBI system. He has official access. That will condense your algorithm. So we must wait for computer number seven to find this FBI agent, right?”
“Yup.”
“What’s our next target?” she asked.
Andrew considered the question. Why he would even think about including anyone in his plans was beyond him. Then he wondered if he himself was being manipulated by the same forces he used on his subjects.
Dismissing that notion, he replied, “A little community college in Rosemont, Oregon. Our seers have identified two mindful thinkers there that need to be pruned out, a teacher named Martha Freeman and an Army veteran named Chris Mintz. We have a shooter under our control, who will make it look like an anti-Christian rampage. He will ask the roomful of students what their religion is and shoot them.
“I’m also rescheduling Anna Stone for elimination. Probably next month.”
Frances kept a mental notepad in her head. She recorded two items to track: 1. Locate and destroy the fly in the ointment, and 2. Increase offensive operations against targets.
“Sounds good, Andrew, keep me posted. I’m off to Sherwood, Arkansas, to visit your last failure.” She turned into the dark passageway leading out to the daylight and over her shoulder she said, “You might think about getting another chair in there.”
Andrew’s head was burrowed back in his computer. “I told you I don’t give a crap about you.”
“Thanks for the gum,” she said, smiling as she exited his tomblike ops center.
Frances climbed up the winding limestone stairs to the cave’s opening on a remote ledge overlooking the Gasconade River. On the path to the parking lot by Highway 305, she called in her deciding vote to Chairman Cheron.
CHAPTER SIX
That evening, at the same time that Gabriella made her graceful leap across the crevice onto that one flat table of rock where her psychokinesis energy was magnified a thousandfold, Frances O’Donnelly drove a rented Chevy Impala from the executive air terminal in Little Rock, Arkansas, toward Sherwood where Doctor Anna Stone was finishing up her day at Abundant Health Chiropractic. Frances’ Learjet had made the trip from the Kansas City Airport to Little Rock in less than an hour.
Proof Through the Night Page 4